Month: October 2022

Freedom of Religion is Freedom from Religion

On By Norbert HauptIn Political, Religion4 Comments

In the interview of Mike Pence on the Kudlow show yesterday, Mike Pence made a truly frightening statement.

Mind you, before he got there he railed on about gas (and energy prices) being 60% higher than when he left office, and his answer is for the United States to become “energy independent.” No word about a major war in Ukraine that resulted in a global upset of the energy market. Does he really believe that starting up drilling again in Alaska, on federal lands, and offshore, would solve that problem? Does he really think we’re that stupid?

But I digress. He said that the “radical left” wants to keep God out of our lives. Hell yes they do, and I guess I am now also a “radical leftist” due to that attitude.

If you don’t want to watch the whole video (some of it is very painful to watch) you can scroll to 10:30 to listen to Kudlow’s introduction to the religious section, and at 11:10 Pence says it:

“The radical left believes that the freedom of religion is the freedom from religion.”

This is truly frightening to me.

Does that mean he thinks the government should have the right to push religion on me?

Which religion?

Jehovah’s Witnesses? Southern Baptism? Catholicism? Methodism? Mormonism? Islam? Hinduism?

Do I have the right to push any of these on him?

What his statement says to me is that he actually believes the government should be able to push religion on us. They could make is wear hijabs, or turbans, or yarmulkes. They could force us to waste our times attending their services. They could decide what we can eat and can’t eat.

Maybe he should go to live in Iran and see how that is working out for them.

Freedom of religion to me has always meant that the Hindus and Jews and Christians and Mormons and Muslims all get to do their thing, build their temples, proselytize, knock on my door to try to get me to join them, raise money, tithe people who want to pay, pray, and make excuses for systemic societal failures because “God works in mysterious ways.”

Just leave me alone, please!

Book Review: The Power – by Naomi Alderman

On By Norbert HauptIn Books, Two StarsLeave a comment

The Power is a what-if book.

Stephen King is a master of what-if books.

For instance, his novel Under the Dome is based on this premise: What if a bubble-like, transparent, but completely impenetrable dome a few miles across suddenly was placed over a New England town? Nobody gets in, nobody gets out. What would happen? Then King builds an entire novel around this unlikely, impossible and ridiculous assumption.

In King’s novel The Stand, he speculates that a human-made deadly virus accidentally gets out and kills 99.9999 percent of the population. Only a handful individuals survive. That’s the what-if scenario. Then a novel of well over a thousand pages follows, building an entire world based on that premise.

Stephenson also likes to write what-if novels. Seveneves starts: THE MOON BLEW UP WITHOUT WARNING AND FOR NO APPARENT reason. What would happen if that actually occurred?

The Power is a what-if book. What if women all of a sudden had an electrostatic power that they could use just by touching something or someone? What if a woman could touch a person’s hand and inflict an electric tingle, or a shock that would cause severe pain, or an immense jolt that would even kill a person? If women had that power, would there still be rape? How would society change?

This novel follows a handful of diverse characters, including a young Nigerian man, the daughter of a London organized crime boss, and abused orphan in Florida, an ambitious politician, and many others. The story develops as the world discovers this new reality, and society goes through massive changes.

Those changes are not pretty.

Movie Review – The Woman King (2022)

On By Norbert HauptIn Four Stars, MoviesLeave a comment

I like a movie best when it makes me think, and even more, when it makes me research afterwards.

In Smithsonian Magazine, I found an article about the Agojie, which starts out with this paragraph:

At its height in the 1840s, the West African kingdom of Dahomey boasted an army so fierce that its enemies spoke of its “prodigious bravery.” This 6,000-strong force, known as the Agojie, raided villages under cover of darkness, took captives and slashed off resisters’ heads to return to their king as trophies of war. Through these actions, the Agoije established Dahomey’s preeminence over neighboring kingdoms and became known by European visitors as “Amazons” due to their similarities to the warrior women of Greek myth.

Dahomey was a kingdom on the south coast of West Africa, approximately in the southwest area of today’s Nigeria. Throughout its history, starting in the 1600s, the kingdom was instrumental in its role of supplying slaves to European and later American slave traders.

The Woman King is inspired by true events in the 1825 timeframe. The female warriors of the Dahomey kingdon were called the Agojie. They were highly trained, fierce and skilled warriors. The army of women numbered in the thousands and essentially ruled the entire area for centuries.

The Woman King depicts the life of General Nanisca (Viola Davis). She leads her army with an iron will, as she trains the next generation of recruits. While the historical background is real, the individual stories are fictional. Yet, the plot is highly emotional and gripping, and it presented me with a view into the lives of Africans during the period of colonization by the Europeans and the exploitation of the black people. I usually thought about slaves being captured in Africa by traders and hauled across the sea. This movie shows that it was way more complicated than I ever realized, and how the African nations were complicit in the destruction of their own social fabric. You cannot sell your own people to the  world as slaves and maintain a thriving nation at home.

The movie tells a powerful story and it puts things for Dahomey into a much better light than the realities of history actually were. Read the article in the Smithsonian I quoted above for rich detail, about the country, its kings, and the Agojie.

The fighting scenes are extensive, brutal and graphic. There were many times when I had to close my eyes. While there is a lot of death and destruction, it is never shown as graphic blood and gore. It just makes your imagination create it.

Viola Davis has won many acting awards, including an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in Fences which I predicted when I wrote my review in January 2017. Let me make another prediction: She’ll win the Oscar for best leading actress for The Woman King.