Well, let me tell you a story. Sobek, dear beloved Father, has been trying in vain to get me into heavy metal for years. It’s never been my thing, or so I thought, so I figured He’d stopped pestering me about it because He had accepted He’d never win me over.

Apparently not. -_-

Now, this story requires some past history, so bear with me. I have this weird instinct where I just *know* if I’ll like a certain band or artist, usually just from hearing a few songs. This instinct has rarely been wrong, so I tend to listen to it when it calls.

Enter silverchair and The Prodigy. I first fell in love with these bands when I was a wee teenager. It was that instinct again, see? But mother was not a fan of this sort of music, and I’m a nice sort of kid, so I didn’t rock the boat. My time would come. And when I did begin buying their albums years later in my 20s? Lo, I did fall in love with them. My instinct was right.

Now, enter Black Sabbath. This requires a little more explanation. I’ve had a flirtation with this band for years. YEARS, people. Now, maybe it was my Christian upbringing, maybe it was because mother would not have approved at all, but I always kept Sabbath at a distance. That instinct of mine was there, but I always said no. Even though Ozzy Osbourne is fucking adorable, I still said no. I think part of me was slightly afraid at how much I would like it, as if it was my ‘dark side’ or something.

Now, enter rage and The Chaser guest progamming for NYE 2007. What did I get out of that epic experience? I fell in love with ELO, of course. And Pink Floyd to a certain extent. It aged my music collection certainly. (In an unrelated note, I also fell in love with of Montreal and The Decemberists, but that’s another story.)

ELO are actually a terrible enabler. The effect they’ve had on my music collection is rather significant, and there are some people I would never have bothered listening to otherwise. Also, Roy Wood? Fucking nuts, and also fucking awesome. <3 …It’s an ‘epic hair’ and a ‘boys in make-up’ thing. XD

(Also, the impact ELO has had on my writing is rather extraordinary and should be discussed at length elsewhere.)

Now, enter rage again their ‘rage gets hairy’ special. Now, I like a bloke with long hair, as I’ve mentioned, bonus points for leather and/or chest pr0n. So, naturally, it’s quite a good special. Twisted Sister come onto my radar and I like what I see and hear. Twisted Sister, of course, have come onto my radar in the past from my love of No Doubt.

I have also recently fallen in love with Led Zeppelin, and not just because of Go! and other assorted coincidences.

I feel there are more than three coincidences here and I ought to have twigged this was leading to some sort of clue-by four. But, of course, I’m somewhat dense to these sorts of things, so naturally, I was left slightly without warning.

Now, when I happened across a charming blog that offered bootlegs recently, and happened to offer ELO bootlegs to boot, well, I couldn’t resist, so I downloaded them. I was not looking for said bootlegs, but I found them. Now, I happened to scroll down to see what other bands they had, and lo, there was Led Zep and Black Sabbath.

How does ELO link to Black Sabbath? Well, quite easily. You see, I remembered from reading Bev Bevan’s blog that he had toured with Black Sabbath in 1983 (which I will point out is the year I was born? XD). (Listening to his radio show for months has also been awesomefuntimes and has kinda made me fall in love with other artists, but that’s another story.) This piece of knowledge had always intrigued me because going from ELO to Black Sabbath sounds so… weirdly awesome, so I checked to see if there were any Sabbath bootlegs from that particular tour. There were. I downloaded them both. I discovered my instinct had been right. Again. XD

Now, the ABC has been showing this ‘Seven Ages of Rock’ series of late. Well done, it’s an awesome series. Cue tonight’s show. Topic? Heavy metal.

So they start with Sabbath, of course, move to Judas Priest and Motley Crue and in between all this I’m hit across the head with a combination of epic hair, leather, and fucking awesome guitar. The whole Birmingham thing doesn’t help either. Cue my instinct popping up and suggesting I might rather like Sabbath and Judas Priest and Motley Crue, if I bothered to listen to them properly.

Now, earlier in the afternoon, I had written a rather pr0ny piece of fiction involving an anthropomorphised Foxtel seducing the fuck out of Charles Firth in a rather kinky and awesome fashion.

After watching ‘Seven Ages of Rock’ tonight, I feel pretty much like Charles did after Foxtel was done with him: like I’d been seduced by a rather enchanting Dom in leather who had left me rather exhausted and desperate for more by the time he was done with me.

Cue Sobek, that smarmy croc God of mine, smirking contentedly. Yes, crocodiles have an infinite amount of patience. He was just waiting for the right moment. I believe He has won this round fair and square.

Okay, I surrender, already, happy now?

Humans are stupid creatures who will pick petty fights amongst themselves for no reason at all. Religion turns people into sheep, no matter which one it is. I’m tired of it all. I want out.

I’ve always been a bit individualistic like that, I think. I don’t like being told what to believe, and I can’t stand to be around people who refuse to question their faith, or refuse to rock the boat. It’s not on. Use your fucking minds. God, Netjer, whatever, gave you a bright fucking mind and as much free will as you can cope with. Why must you give it all away and let someone else dictate what you believe?The longer I hang around in the Pagan community, the more I see the same things happening there. They just follow blindly. You’d think they’d have more sense, since they usually come from Christianity with complaints about being told what to believe, but apparently, that doesn’t count when it comes to Pagan faiths, because they’re totally different and so much better anyway.

Please. Tell someone who cares.

This is why I can’t bear to be a part of any religious group. I hate being told what to believe, and I will not be preached to. I have my own beliefs. They’re sufficiently eclectic that I just don’t fit into one place. So excuse me for being different. And it’s not even that my beliefs clash with everyone else’s. It’s more that while my path might converge and run parallel with some groups more than with others, they never meet, nor should they be obliged to.

I don’t even know if the Bawy year is responsible for this sudden influx of agnosticism or  not, or whether it’s just me being weird again. I think I need to be away from Kemetic Orthodoxy (KO) for a while. I need that freedom to work myself out and whether I can abide being affiliated with them again. I meant to do so a while ago, but never got around to it. Perhaps now is the time to step back from my shemsu vows.

Actually no. I’ve changed my mind. I think what I need to do is pull back and work out what being a shemsu actually means for me, not try and be something I’m not. As much as I want to pull back from KO, and I have thought about it for over a year now, I’ve never done anything about it. I think a part of my soul really does want to be KO, so now I have to work out what shemsu means for me, not what it means for everyone else.

A friend and ex-KO once asked me what it means to be a shemsu, and I couldn’t answer her then. I think I need to find an answer to this. Maybe then I’ll feel better about where I am.

Because I embrace many beliefs that aren’t KO and don’t strictly belong to one single other faith system. I am eclectic like that. I embrace bits of discordianism, bits of warrior spirituality, a few things I swiped from Isobelle Carmody, and other things relating to the country I live in. I’m a mongrel of a person. I’ve picked up a few things from learning about Indigenous beliefs as well, especially things relating to country.

I suppose I’m also tired of the politics within specific groups. There is a pressure to conform even if there’s no thing to conform to. The more you’re obsessed with Egypt, the better you are spiritually. Which is utter bullshit to me.

This isn’t one of my better worded essays. More a late-night rant I need to get off my chest. Maybe I’ll collect this into a better worded thing later, but right now, I need to get these words out. So deal with this semi-coherent rant. I need to sleep before I go to work tomorrow.

Now, I’m not saying countries shouldn’t wish to develop their own economies and become better off. I just think we’ve lost sight of all those social aspects of life in the race to become hideously wealthy.

Think about it.

The main issues of the campaign are job- or money-related. We’ve got WorkChoices to contend with, flame wars about union bosses, Rudd and Howard trying to convince us they know how to run the economy best… The issues of health and education are less prominent. All the talk of hospitals seems to be tied in with their funding. Education is all about preparing you for working life. The Government’s handing out tax cuts to just about everyone.

It’s all about money and work.

Is this what we’ve become? Is this really all that matters to us anymore? What happened to community? What happened to people caring about the society we live in and the people themselves? When did we become so fucking selfish?

I want a campaign on social issues, on things that matter, not just how much money Howard can bribe us with. I want us to start caring about each other again, to stop being so terrified of each other, to want to learn for learning’s sake, not just because you have to to further your career. I want less emphasis on the economy and more on the people.

The social well-being of the people should be a government’s main priority. They are there to look after the country and the people. Managing the economy is part of that, sure, but it is not the only job.

At the moment, we have two leaders who are willing to support blatant discrimination against same-sex couples in legislation. If the Liberals want to run a scare campaign about Labor union bosses, then if Labor had any spine at all, they’d run a campaign on all the right-wing Christian organisations and big business influences behind some of our Federal Ministers! That I find far more scary than union bosses.

I hate Howard’s rhetoric on unions, how he seems to say he’s all for unions when WorkChoices is aimed at getting rid of them altogether. The people are much stronger as a group. This is why unions work and are important in workplaces. I doubt Howard would even care if all the unions disappeared overnight. I think he’d laugh with glee because he’s got what he wanted. We all become human machines, working far too many hours for not enough pay in a bid to keep Howard’s Economy booming.

Boom times do not last. It’s going to end some time, probably when we run out of things to dig up. What happens then? Have we even bothered investing some of the funds for a rainy day when things aren’t as strong? This is what the Government should be doing. They should be investing in our future to ensure that we can still survive when things get tougher. We should be investing in humanity, to better ourselves spiritually, socially, mentally, reconnecting with each other again. We should not be wasting $34 billion on election campaign tax cuts that ultimately do more harm than good.

What sort of society have we created? Is it really healthy? Or are we all too afraid to admit it has problems?

Just this week, President Bush welcomed the Dalai Lama in a way that Howard was too cowardly to do. If Bush has done one thing that’s worth remembering in his 8 years in office, I will remember that, because it was a disgrace that Howard was too afraid of upsetting China to meet with him. Once again, the economy was an issue. China buys our coal, therefore we shouldn’t piss them off, because then they’ll take their money away. It’s all about the fucking money!

Gah! We do not bow to China! We should not bow to any sovereign country, not even the USA or the UK. We are a strong nation. Why must we run around like a lapdog and try and placate all the Big World Leaders™ in a bid to convince them we’re allies and friends and they should let us play with them? It’s sickening. It’s degrading. It makes us look pathetic.

Our lack of care for our fellow humans is clear from our continued flouncing of UN Charters we’ve signed on to. You can’t just pick and choose which UN Charters to take on board and which to dismiss. You sign on to it, you abide by it. No exceptions. We should not be selling our uranium to India either. We should not be selling uranium to any country that hasn’t signed up for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Hell, we shouldn’t be selling uranium full stop.

We need to stop caring about The Market and focus back on the people. If you rule a bunch of sheep, you are nothing more than a dictator. The politics of fear lead down this path. We should all be afraid of where it might take us.

Now, whilst I’m not opposed to religion itself per se, I do object to religion being used to manipulate people and attain such power and influence that they can distort our democratic society into hatred and racism.

I will not tolerate a theocracy, no matter which religion is behind it.I might be a marginal “weirdo” of society, but that doesn’t make me any less an Australian citizen than “normal” people. I’m a decent human being who doesn’t do drugs, believes in the truth, and I have my own set of faith-based and non-faith-based values and morals by which I live my life. I have compassion for those not as fortunate as I. I believe human rights should be fought for, valued and protected, not abused “in the national interest.”

Should a Christian theocracy ever take over this country, I’d probably end up ostracised, dead or as a refugee somewhere else. The kind of Christians pushing for a theocracy are not the sort that would ever tolerate me as a human being.

And, see, it’s been a movement on an evolutionary time scale. No big upheavals, take overs, coups or anything like that. They use words, they manipulate, they disguise themselves to infiltrate their targets. They’re sneaky bastards, they are. They always use doublespeak. They say one thing and mean something else.

They slowly erode our defences and weasel their way in, taking little by little so that we don’t notice what they’ve nicked. Everything can be justified as being “in the national interest”, whatever that is. National security is all important. Nothing stands in the way of defending our borders, not even boatloads of poor refugees fleeing countries much worse than ours, seeking compassion and a new life and getting razor wire instead.

It’s disgusting. This country disgusts me. It saddens me that, should nothing change any time soon, if I end up falling in love with a girl, I may never be able to marry her in the country of my birth. That “marriage is between a man and a woman” has been enshrined in law frightens me. It’s just another example of “Christian” values infiltrating legislation and becoming law.

Why is it we see no problem with Christian teachings becoming law, but abhor the strict Muslim sharia law or even, is there a Jewish one too? Religious law being enshrined into federal law and in doing so imposing those beliefs on the entire population stinks and is, to me, a bad corruption of democracy, which some of these Christian nutters want to replace with theocracy.

I see no distinction between fundamentalist Christians and fundamentalist Muslims, who are meant to be “the enemy”. That more moderate Christians aren’t as dismissive of these fundamentalist Christians as they should be scares me. I would love to see moderate liberal Christians standing up and saying, “These people are not what Christianity is about. Christianity is a religion of peace,” and rejecting the Religious Right’s nutcase views. But I very much doubt that will happen any time soon.

I know it sounds paranoid to say this, but it does feel like everyone’s too scared to speak out and dissent, which a democracy gives them the right to do. DO. NOT. STAY. SILENT. Do not let free voices be silenced and our country led astray. Dear Netjer, let some sense be injected into those in power.

I do not blame the Australian people for succumbing to this and letting it happen. It isn’t their fault. They (mostly) didn’t ask for this. It’s a small select group of Christians that have done this, and they are the Christians I hate, as much as it pains me to say so, because I don’t hate lightly.

Okay, maybe ‘hate’ is the wrong word.

I don’t like what they’re doing and what they stand for. But I can’t keep silent. It’s too hard to stay silent any longer. Someone needs to wake up the nation and bring them back to their senses. I feel like a doomsday guy, walking around the streets of the city with a sandwich board on, crying out that the end of democracy is nigh, and all the while, I’m dismissed as a nutter and ignored.

Don’t you know what’s being done to this country? Wake the fuck up! Wake up from your materialistic slumber and live again!

*sighs*

I’ve been hanging with Discordians too much. I’m beginning to think they’re the only sane people left in the world. :/