Timeline photos
The Slave Morality of Christianity. Nietzsche has a very famous theory called "Master and Slave Morality". Master morality creates its own values and stands beyond good and evil; slave morality values kindness, humility, and sympathy. The master transcends the mediocrity of the common person. He saw Christianity as embodying the worst in slave morality, a joyless religion that denies the value of life, the body, instinct, the passions, and beauty. He saw it as a faith that denied itself this life for a non-existent life to come. Ultimately, belief such as this is decadent and mad. As I considered this theory, my mind flooded with all the Christian missionaries that have gone into "savage" cultures for the last 2000 years to wipe away their pagan values of passion, war, lust, desire, greed, happiness for the docile cow of Christian submissiveness. It's a true tragedy, especially when you think about how Christian governments have empowered this Christian missionary passivity, not because they really believe in Jesus... but rather to use it as a form of mind-numbing brainwashing to make these cultures so much easier to dominate, assimilate and colonize. Send the missionaries into a society for 50 years and then you'll be able to walk all over these people in the name of Jesus. This is what we did to the Pagan Vikings. They robbed us of our gold and silver and we robbed them of their entire identity. And then in the 20th Century we modified the plan in post World War II occupied-Japan. General MacArthur censored the media and suppressed certain political ideas. And in exchange, he gave them Coca-Cola and American Music. It worked just as good as Christianity, if not better. And look at them now. They were on par with being the bravest fighters humanity has ever seen. And now they are the culture of Pokémon. Mission Accomplished. I tell you this so that I make it very clear what I’m saying when I advocate for a Christian mentality. I know what I'm asking. A Christian morality is a passivization of the mind, body and spirit. I agree. I can't see it as anything other than that. But Buddhism is very similar. They will tell you that the only reason you suffer is because you desire something you don't currently have. Give up the desire and you will give up your suffering. In "Man's Search for Meaning" Viktor Frankl writes "In some ways suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice." The suffering is not a byproduct of a bad situation. The ENTIRE situation is bad. Suffering becomes the lesson. Suffering is the meaning. We suffer so we can empathize and find compassion for all others who suffer. We don't suffer to remind us that we need to end suffering. That's impossible. Suffering never ends. We suffer to remind us of how we are all suffering. And so the answer to suffering is not rage and war. The answer to suffering is love and acceptance of ourselves and all those around us. We are here to help the person next to us feel heard and understood and liked and loved and forgiven because we know how much it hurts to live this life. I am moving into a phase where I have all but given up trying to change the system. The system never changes. It always rapes, pillages, raids and steals from the weak. It always does that. And if we finally manage to somehow scrape a few rights into the hands of one oppressed people, that's only because the system has allowed that to happen because they found some other group to exploit and oppress. Nindō (忍道, literally meaning: Ninja Way) is a personal rule that each shinobi lives by. It is their way of ninja life, their motto, belief, or "dream". If you feel like your Nindo Way is to fight the system in a way that is meaningful to you, by all means, do it. Maybe you will have better luck fundamentally changing the system than most have. But today my Nindo Way is to just be a friend to all the people here on Earth that are having a hard time of it. (Which is all of them.)