I've been sick that last couple days. So that pretty much means I've been playing a lot of World of Warcraft, watching documentaries, and reading books.
World of Warcraft is pretty much the only computer game I play anymore. Right now I'm playing my 60 troll priest on the Kalecgos realm, his name is Rustynail. I'm in the Art of War guild, and we're an end game raiding guild, doing Zul'Gurub, Molten Core, and the Ruins of Ahn'Qiraj. We're currently focusing on downing Ragnaros (got him to less than 30%) and seeing how far we can get in the Ruins of Ahn'Qiraj.
Anyways, yesterday I was invited to a horde raid group that was going to kill Lethon, the toughest of the world dragons. Took us 3 attempts, but we got him down. A couple of alliance showed up, but they didn't do much.



I also got some time to read more of The Hiram Key. It's getting pretty good now. Right now its talking about how the name Jesus Christ is actually the greek version of the man's name. His actual name would have been something like Yeshua, or Joshua. The word "christ" is actually the green translation of the hebrew word "messiah", which means "king of the jews". The jews at the time of Jesus were awaiting a messiah, because they wanted a jewish king that would liberate them from Roman rule.
Where this gets interesting is when you come across Jesus Christ being tried before Pontius Pilate. Remember when Pilate came before the people and asked them who should be released, Jesus Christ, or the murderer Barabbas? Well it turns out that in greek, Barabbas translates into "son of the father", and that Barabbas had a first name: Jesus. So Pilate had actually brought two men named Jesus before the crowd. One of them was viewed as the messiah, or liberator of the jews -- and the other was the son of the father, or son of god (abba meaning god). Pretty wierd stuff.

I also started reading Stephen Mitchell's version of Gilgamesh. The Epic of Gilgamesh was written over 4000 years ago, 500 years before the bible. It tells the story of Gilgamesh, the 5th king of Uruk (Babylon). In the story, Gilgamesh is portrayed as 66% deity and 33% human, standing 16 feet tall, and being the strongest of all men. However, his people begin to complain to the god Anu that Gilgamesh is becoming tyrannical, and so Anu comes up with a plan. Anu tells the god Aruru to create a new man, a man that will be Gilgamesh's twin. So Aruru creates Enkidu, a naked wild man who is super strong, 16 feet tall, and lives and runs with the animals. One day a young trapper comes across Enkidu and goes to tell his father about what he saw. His father tells him to go to Uruk and tell Gilgamesh about this wild man, and he will know what to do. So the young trapper goes to Uruk and speaks to Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh tells him to speak to Shamhat at the Temple of Ishtar. Shamhat is a temple priestess, who will seduce Enkidu and prove to the animals around him that he is not one of them. So the trapper and Shamhat go to find Enkidu, and when they do, Shamhat seduces him in front of all of the animals (they go at it for 7 days straight). Afterwards, all of the animals leave Enkidu because they no longer view him as one of them. Shamhat takes Enkidu and cleans him up a bit (gives him cloths, cuts his hair, gives him bread and beer) and then takes him to meet Gilgamesh. When the two meet, they wrestle around for a few minutes and when Gilgamesh has Enkidu pinned down, Enkidu tells him that he wishes to become friends with Gilgamesh. Because the two have so much respect for each other, they quickly become best of friends.

I'm at the part now where Gilgamesh wants to go hunt down the monster Humbaba that lives in the Cedar Forest. Enkidu warns him against doing so, because Humbaba was placed there by the god Enlil to protect the forest. But because Gilgamesh wants so badly to make a name for himself, he pressures the elders of the city to bless his journey, and convinces Enkidu to help him. We'll see what happens next.

So this series of blogs will be about stuff that I'm currently learning about or interested in. I watch a lot of weird documentaries and read strange books and because hardly anyone I know has a clue what I'm talking about half of the time, I figured I'd start a blog to document things. I like short introductions so that’s it, I'm going to start now:

What I Watched Last Night

The Power of Nightmares - I watched the second part of this three-part series. To sum it up, it’s about Neoconservatives and Fundamentalist Islam. Personally, I haven't made up my mind about which of the two scares me more.

Most (if not all) neoconservatives are students of Straussism. Basically, Leo Strauss taught that liberalism would be the downfall of our society, because it leads to a state of value-free aimlessness and hedonism. He stated that it is impossible for men to be good leaders while being completely truthful with the people that they are leading, and so good leaders would have to lie to the people in order to meet the needs of society (deja vu: "noble lies" referred to by Plato). He also taught that society needs clearly defined "good guys" and "bad guys" in order to keep people united against a common enemy. Strauss himself believed that religion is a deceiving myth, but taught that religion could be used as a tool to unite a country and put power into the hands of its leaders.

Since the 1970's, politicians have studied the beliefs of Strauss, and many have come to agree with much of what he said. This has given rise to the "neoconservative", or "neocon". Neocons have a very aggressive view of foreign policy. They are constantly looking for a bad guy to pit themselves against. They quite often mix religion with politics in order to create fervor amongst the people, bringing them together to fight against this terrible bad guy. And as we have seen in recent years, the spread of neoconservativism has given rise to the use of noble lies.

Now in my opinion, many of the defining beliefs of neoconservatives can be used to describe 99% of ALL politicians. The neocons aren't the only ones using noble lies to further their agenda. They aren't the only ones using religion to unite the people. They just happen to be using these tools the most, and are using them in new and more aggressive ways. However, one can see the results of a neoconservative viewpoint by looking at what has happened over the course of the last few years under the George Bush administration. Many prominent members of his administration are neoconservatives who have been waiting for a president like Bush to come to power for years. People such as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz are strong neoconservatives who are using the beliefs of Leo Strauss to mold the future of America. Many neoconservatives are also members, founders, or supporters of companies such as The Project for a New American Century (or PNAC), which are basically large think-tanks (with a neoconservative slant on politics) designed to build a plan for ensuring Americas future and military dominance into the 21st century. This primarily involves changing the phrase "kill your enemies before they kill you" into "kill your enemies before they become your enemies".

The documentary also delves into the history of the rise of Radical Islamic Fundamentalism. Going back to the 1940's, it reviews the story of Sayyid Qutb, an Islamic Egyptian intellectual who moved from Egypt to the United States for a few years, in order to study its education system. What he saw when he came here (materialism, poverty, racism, sexual promiscuity, lack of respect, and a religious system actively participating in these things) convinced him that America had become corrupted and weak. He eventually went back to Egypt in order to prevent the spread of this corruption to his own country. After joining the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and viewing President Nasser's cozy relationship with the United States (and the influx of Americanism into Egypt that resulted), he took a more radical stance against Nasser's secular government. After a failed assassination attempt on Nasser, many members of the Muslim Brotherhood, including Qutb, were arrested and tortured in prison. It was in prison that Qutb became even more radical in his thinking, writing two books and founding the idea of modern Jahiliyya (Jahiliyya refers to the state of mankind before the spread of Islam). Qutb believed that the secular government and people of Egypt had lost sight of the truth of Islam, and had become corrupted and ignorant. By this logic, all countries in the middle east that were ruled by a non-Islamic government were not Islamic, and that based on the Koran, Muslims were obligated to rise up against such a government.

After being released from prison, Qutb was again arrested 8 months later and charged with treason for his plot to overthrow the secular government in Egypt. Shortly after being found guilty, he was executed. However, his idea of an Islamic vanguard overthrowing the secular government had already taken root, especially in a fellow Muslim named Ayman al-Zawahiri.

al-Zawahiri was also a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. By 1979, having completed his medical degree at Cairo, he had become the leader of the more radical Islamic Jihad, and played a major role in the assassination of Anwar Sadat, president of Egypt. In the 1980's, al-Zawahiri went to Afghanistan to help the mujahideen resistance against the Soviets, and it was here that he met up with Osama bin Laden. The two would eventually become the leaders of an even more radical Islamic movement, called al-Qaeda.

As the two worked together, their ideas became more and more radical. After the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan in the 1980's, al-Zawahiri and bin Laden began to include ANY government supporters in their Islamic Jihad. From their viewpoint, if you had anything to do with a secular government, you were no longer practicing true Islam, and could therefore be killed. They believed that this would cause the population to rise up and install an Islamic based system of power. However, this failed to happen. Becoming even more radical, al-Zawahiri and bin Laden suggested that because the citizens of the country had failed to rise up against the secular government, they too were no longer practicing true Islam, and could therefore be killed. However, after many incidents of mass killings, the majority of Islamic people had a negative view of al-Qaeda, and this forced al-Zawahiri and bin Laden to hide out in their base in Afghanistan. It was here where they developed their new plan for the future of Islam, their new Jihad. They announced that they would go after the root of the corruption and ignorance, the United States itself. On February 23rd, 1998, bin Laden and al-Zawahiri issued a joint fatwa titled "World Islamic Front Against Jews and Crusaders", which basically expanded their Islamic Jihad to include countries on a global scale.

The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center gave neoconservatives exactly what they were looking for -- the ultimate bad guy. They have used radical Islamic fundamentalism to tighten their power over America, and have portrayed themselves as the good guys, who have to clean up the messes of the world. It is most likely that the United States wishes to use this power to preemptively strike nations of the world which they consider to be threats to their national security. By replacing the governments of these countries with Democratic based systems, they believe that they can spread US control into many different areas of the world, while creating a secure global environment.

Now, I haven't finished watching the entire series yet (I have one more to watch tonight), but the two parts that I have watched have been very eye-opening. This isn't the sort of thing that you see reported on by news agencies. I realize that this is a very hot topic, and people have many different viewpoints on it. Some people believe that terrorism is a real threat to our way of life, while others believe that terrorism has been blown out of proportion by the United States for the purpose of gaining more control and power over their people.

For America, it seems very clear that the current United States government seems hell-bent at asserting its dominance over the nations of the world in a desperate attempt to spread Democracy unto nations it feels require it. For many Muslims, it may seem that al-Qaeda and other radical terrorist groups are hell-bent upon asserting their dominance upon the world scene, and spreading Islam to as many people as possible. The two sides are not really all that different. They both just wish to have their own ideologies spread to as many nations as possible. America loves Democracy and Fundamentalist Islam loves Islam. The question I have asked myself many times is who really is the enemy here? It's easy to blame Fundamentalist Islam, because each day we are barraged with images and reports of them blowing up buildings and cars and killing innocent people. Because many of us cannot physically go to the Middle East and get firsthand knowledge of the situation ourselves, we must accept what is reported to us by the media. Of course the media is going to be skewed to our Capitalist viewpoint. That is the nature of the beast. There's no way that the American media is going to focus the attention of their reports on how many innocent Muslims have been killed by the United States. Even when the occasional report does come out about questionable behavior of American troops and American politicians, the stories are short and always seem to vaporize quickly.

My point is that those of us in North America have had our views of America and Islam skewed consciously and unconsciously by the media and United States government, and its time that we wake up and take a look at what is really going on. Their may be times when force is needed, but it seems that force is being used as a first defense these days. Feel free to agree with me or not.

What I Read Last Night

The Hiram Key - I really have no idea what it’s about yet as I just started reading it. So far, threes lots of stuff about Freemasonry. I'm expecting that it will get into something about the lost secrets of freemasonry, seeing as Hiram Abif was supposedly the master constructor of King Solomon's temple and was killed because he knew some secret.

The Complete Works of Josephus - I'm currently working on the first book, Jewish Antiquities. Quite an interesting read, but it takes awhile. I suspect it will probably take me about 2 years to finish this book because it is the complete works, and I'm going through it line by line and doing all sorts of research about every little thing. I'm also using my bible as a reference to see what similarities there are between them and what is different. So far, I'm at the section after the great flood where Noah's sons begin spreading amongst the lands and populating them. Lots of names and places to remember. It’s interesting how each of Noah's sons and each of their sons basically resulted in certain regions of Asia, Eastern Europe, and Africa being populated by certain ethic groups, some of which continue to exist in the same regions even today.
I'm not sure if I actually believe a lot of the stuff that's talked about (it might all be Jewish myths), but its still cool to read about.

I also got my new issue of National Geographic in the mail the other day but haven't had time to read it yet.