Iran the worlds luny bin…

The last couple of days have been a bit surreal, Iran is a deeply fucked up place, let me highlight just how strange a society founded on superstitious folklore from the iron ages can be.

Firstly i risk being arrested for this posting, not because i harm anyone or anything like that. I risk being arrested for referring to the Koran from a factual perspective.  Additionally this might be seen as criticism of the Iranian regime which carries the death penalty (i kid you not).

The Koran, like the bible and all the other so called “holy” fairytale books are nothing but fictional  stories from a time when people where literary ravaged by their own superstitions and endless ignorance.

Now Iran isnt unique in ruling by fairytale.  Europe did this during the dark ages, and other fucked up countries like Afghanistan, UAE, Israel, Pakistan and many other countries still do this today.

Basing your rules on imaginary fiction is of course bound to create some oddities. Like receiving bamboo lashes for chewing gum (Indonesia) or like here in Iran. Stoning a woman to death for being raped. She was after all unfaithful to her husband while a gang of thugs brutalized her at gunpoint, so clearly she deserves to die….

In the last few days the people most opposed to  reform and change in Irans society has been run over by Hassan Khomeini, the grandson of this lunatic asylums founder Ayatolla Khomeini.

Hassan used to be firmly entrenched in the conservative wing of Irans leadership but he has now migrated over to the liberal side.

Not that that has any real meaning for someone from the west, the conservative and liberal side can often be separated by as little as 5 in stead of 8 lashes as punishment for some imaginary thought crime.

The only reason why it carries any sort of relevance is because Iran is becoming more and more militarized, and as the military power grows the Imams power erodes. Basically what Hassan, himself an imam, wants to achieve is to keep political power firmly entrenched in religious hands.

The mullah regime is just ridiculous, they pretend to have some sort of democratic process with elections, but the sitting mullas basically vet or pre-qualify the candidates prior to allowing them to run for office.  (Run for office, just sounds ridiculous when considering this lunacy.)

One example, that one of the student we talked to told me just cracked me up.  Last “election” Ali Eshraghi, also a descendant of the ayatollah, was excluded after the mullas investigated if he kept to the proscribed praying schedule, whether he combed his beard, which is illegal (i kid you not).  And whether his wife kept within the parameters for proper clothing for Iranian women.

This country is totally insane, its ridiculous in the extreme, they are so focused on internal control and naval gazing that i dont know why the rest of the world considers them a threat.

These guys couldn’t arrange sex in a brothel, let alone organize any form of coordinated military activity. The only way they could pose a threat, is if they got their hands on nuclear weapons. And if they did, they are just as likely to blow themselves up because some a woman masturbated, and therefor they had to level the entire city to prevent such sinful activities from spreading.

The only light on the horizon is the ayatollahs third grandchild Hussein Khomeini, even though he is educated as a priest he has broken with Irans brutal and oppressive customs.  He still wears a black turban, that i think is supposed to symbolize he is a direct descendant from the founder of the religion Muhammed (imagine how fucking full of yourself you have to be to believe that)

Anyways he has openly gone out in support for the invasion of Iraq and he has even suggested that the current regime in Iran cannot be removed without American help.

He was even imprisoned for publicly speaking out against the death penalty for criticizing the regime.

After the Iraq invasion he moved there and is on record saying “it was a pleasure to breathe the free air” he returned recently and is suspected to be alive only because his grandmother (the ayatollahs wife) is protecting him.

Anyways thats todays report from this freak show tomorrow we plan to go visit the poor and what passes for Irans red light district. (that schould be interesting)

Prostitution and drugs in Qom

A  few days ago we arrived with our security guards in Qom, its a city in Iran that sees very few foreigners.

We come to see the real cost of religious rule,  and Qom truly highlights these costs, we chose this city since its apparently has the highest number of  Shi’a scholarships in the world. 50,000 seminarians in the city from 70 countries apparently.

They claim that most of the seminaries teach their students modern social sciences and western thought as well as traditional religious studies.

Now we arrived and with a simple idea   “lets have a looks’i shall we?”

Now i wont go into the generic lunacy of Iran like the fact that they still export the same things they did before the Islamic revolution etc.  I planned to look at the reality on the ground, how do ordinary people live from high society to the middle class to the poor.

I am trying to go into this with an open mind, i must admit that its not easy for me, but i will do my best.

Yesterday we met with some students from upper class families.

Apparently the post revolutionary upper classes consisted of some of the same elements as the old elite,  having retained at least part of their wealth.  Many of them have emigrated to other countries taking their resources with them, since political power was moved from skilled resourceful people to clerics where religious expertise and piety became the major criteria for belonging to the political elite.

On first reflection even though Iran is bad i am surprised it isnt even worse considering that their country is guided by ancient fables and fairy tales.

Now my talks with the upper class explains why this country manages to exist at all, the answer is money and this money comes from oil.

No one i talked to had any illusions that if they ran out of oil the country would turn itself inside out, probably drenched in blood and violence.

Now the clerics are smart enough to know that the economic elites well being is vital for their survival, thus they get special treatment, corruption is extreme and public works like roads etc are handed out to the economic elite.

Thus they scratch each others back keeping themselves on the gravy train in a sea of poverty and suffering.

Most upper class people where sent abroad to the vest to study and they lived although not in public Western lives, they smoke pot, drink, party prostitution and teens are having copious amounts of pre marrital sex.

They knew they where living a lie but they dont care as long as their privileged lifestyle is secured by the dictatorial clerical rulers.

They took great pride in just having to make a phone call if the religious police bothered them for example and they would be left alone.

I think in Iran you can pretty much rule out equality before the law, in fact rule out any form of equality at all.

The women we talked to spoke of how they dreamed of settling in the vest where they could go wherever they wanted without being chaperoned by a male relative and they all dreamed of not having to cover up in public.

One girl cried for almost an hour when she saw a stoning being broadcast on tv while recalling how much she missed her time studying in france, where she could do and say whetever she wanted.

The brutality of this society is frightening, life isnt worth anything, i am left speechless, i just cannot describe what it feels like to see someone berried to their neck being stoned to death  by a mob.

My wife got sick from the entire experience and she wants to go home. … i dont know yet. I will spend a few days contemplating what we to do next…

We have arrived in a fucked up religious country

We arrived in Iran today, the first thing i noticed was the foul stench from a burst sever pipe outside the airport.

The first thing we did was go to the Norwegian consulate and register, we told him what we where planning to do and gave him our itinerary. We also agreed upon daily call inns, so if we didn’t call one day he would immediately start investigating where we where and if we where ok.

The Council thought we where completely insane, and they recommended we hire some proper security. After listening to his pitch on the dangers of a ridiculous legal system, religious fanatics and the very real threat of kidnapping we promptly agreed.

He arranged it all for us with a company he knew and we now have 2 gigantic bodyguards.

I suspect they are former soldiers from the french foreign legion, i have known people that have served with them before and they all have this way about them. They are a the sort of people that you instinctively know not to fuck with under any circumstances.

Dont get me wrong they are polite and pleasant enough, but you just know these guys are hard as hell. Its not the obvious scars and such its the way they  look at people, its this patient look like “you can say and do anything you want but if i consider you a threat, i will kill you in less than a heartbeat! and its not going to cost me a single calorie. “

I look forward to getting to know them, unlike the council  they had no reaction at all to our plans, they simply asked “when do you want to get going?”

I will call them Bib and Bob in the blog they asked me not to use their names, and i will respect that.

Bib and Bob had some simple rules for us as well:

1. My wife had to cover her hair when out in public.
2. Always carry my passport and our wedding certificate.
3. If we run into the police or the religious police we close our mouth and they do the talking.
4. if they give us direct orders, we follow them immediately without question.

My wife is if anything even more apprehensive now, but it really goes to show. If religion had anything good in it Iran would be a virtual paradise not the foul, hellish, stinking cesspool of injustice, violence and hatred we have arrived in.

Going to a fucked up religious country!

I am now at charles degull and on my way to the united Arab emirates to fly on to Iran, the wife is a bit apprehensive since the religious police apparently whip people for (perceived) crimes against the Koran.

I am a bit apprehensive to since i know i will just blurt out what i mean at any given time, i have never been able to sugar coat my opinions and that can have quite harsh consequences in fucked up religious countries.

I will see if i can blog during my trip from internet cafes and such, i better be careful,,,, these places are totally fucked up.

I am going around the world

I have been challenged to take another trip, this time we will go to all the luny places like IRAN Afganistan and other wonderful religious places.

Ever wounder why some people still proclaim good is good (like praying in american schools) and still the worlds most religious places are horrible cessspools of violence hatred and ignorance.

Well anyways i will be back in 3 months if all goes according to plan.

Being spiritual, and shitt…. a tale from Tibet

I have been gone for almost a year.  A friend of mine challenged me about my skepticism against all things supernatural and religion in particular, He said that if i went to India and Tibet and saw how peaceful and good Hindus and Buddhists where i would change my mind and see that religion was good for humanity and so on,  yadidada ad infinitum, the usual bullshit.

Luckily i have the means, so i took him up on it.  In return if i didn’t change my mind, he would have to switch to my side. Ie: militant anti-religion’ism.

Firstly let me point out that my trip was excellent, we smoked a lot of weed, had a lot of great sex, partied like it was 1999 and in general had a jolly good old time.

For over 3 months i staid with monks  in a monastery in Tibet, i ate like them, worked the fields, slept like them, trained like them, and did a lot of meditation. (their beds really suck by the way)

As far as religions are concerned Buddhism is more like a benign tumor compared to the aggressive virulent cancer that is for instance Islam or Christianity.

Its founded on  what the Buddhists call “Four Noble Truths”. They are the truth of suffering, the truth of the cause of suffering, the truth of the end of suffering, and the truth of the path that leads to the end of suffering. More simply put, suffering exists; it has a cause; it has an end; and it has a cause to bring about its end.
The notion of suffering as i understand it is not intended to convey a negative world view, but rather, a pragmatic perspective that deals with the world as it is, and attempts to rectify it. The concept of pleasure is not denied, but acknowledged as fleeting. Pursuit of pleasure can only continue what is ultimately an unquenchable thirst. The same logic belies an understanding of happiness. In the end, only aging, sickness, and death are certain and unavoidable. They also believe in reincarnation, and that is just so indescribably stupid that i wont bother getting into it.

Just like all other religions, Buddhism tries to take the our wonderfully complex relationships and the interwoven messy world we live in and reduce it to a few grossly inadequate simplifications.

I guess i experienced spirituality during the monastery stay, but to connect the feeling of well being you can achieve through meditation with some kind of super being in the sky is betraying the entire experience.

now for the first week i couldn’t get into the zone when meditating, i think this is because i was still full of proteins vitamins and minerals from a good western diet, and it took about a week of eating nothing but vegetables and rice before my body was weakened enough for my mind to enter a sort of transient state.  At least i think it is the food because after a visit to the nearest town where i gobbled down a burger, fries and copious amounts of coke i was unable to reach this transient state again for a few days.

The combination of  little sleap,  hard work  (and i mean these monks work their butt off for ten hours a day) inadequate food without proper nutriments and the body can slip into a sort of peaceful restive state. Almost like what you feel when you smoke pot, except you don’t suffer the short term memory loss. The combination sleep deprivation, exhaustion and starvation probably alters the brain chemistry and gives a sense of content and pease.

It really pissed me off when, in my eyes this profound experience was utterly betrayed by linking it to pointless superstitious mumbo jumbo.

Why not let the experience be good for the sake of the experience? why the fuck  do you have to go and soil the experience by dragging it through the filthy cesspool of superstitious religious bullshit?

Anyways, i had many long discussions with the monks, and i would say Buddhisms only redeeming feature is its willingness to be criticized without automatically rejecting any criticism with reference to some historical “supposed” absolute truth.

So even though i became very good friends with many of them,  during my entire stay i vehemently opposed all the ridiculous dogma,  the strange thing is that the monks respected me mainly because of this, and i was impressed with the way they would approach me for my opinion on issues they themselves struggled with.

I guess they where not used to question the written word in their beliefs, they instead had a tradition of excusing or adopting, some times shoehorning the written word into something that could be reflected in reality.  Sort of the same way Islamic scholars try to interpret that the Koran is describing modern scientific discoveries.

Anyways they seamed to enjoy their new way of interpreting their world view via me, and i respect that.

This of course also created friction between the older and younger monks since the older the monks where the less they wanted to change or adjust their world view, they where less  interested in going outside their familiar little cocoon of absolute knowledge.

I guess you could say that my trip was a spiritual one and it really illustrated how much religion cheapens our experience of self and our voyage through this fantastic and wonderful world on the journey that is our life.

Religion undoubtedly prevents us from really experiencing the true wonders of our world, it replaces all the amazing stuff with simple cheap lies, pointless superstition and prevents us from reaching our full potential….

The end result is that i oppose religion much, much, much, more than i ever did. After my stay with the supposedly holy people.