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  • AADD Moderators: swilow | Vagabond696

Bluelight Harm Minimisation? Why not Prevention

Quote - JamesLee
'I pray that for your sakes when you are older in age your quality of life is still good and you are not inflicted with a medical complication affiliated with drugs use. My thoughts are with you all'.
Am I the only one that finds it insulting when people pray for them? I (and we) didn’t ask for your help, opinion or worries, but you are more than willing to give us all three of them. What a good Christian you must be. I hope this compassionate act of love for your fellow human beings gets you one step closer to eternal happiness in the afterlife.
(insert obligatory Homer Simpson reference - In case you cant tell I was being sarcastic :)
Personally I think organised religion is one of the main reasons that drugs are illegal today. Organised religion, even though its power is declining, is still a dominating force in the world we live in. How many politicians running the governments of the world are religious? I cant give a cite but I’m sure a huge percentage of them claim to be (and I’m sure 99% of those who claim to be are hypocrites). It’s in the politicians best interests to be God loving and support organised religion in public because of the negative backlash they would get from a high percentage of voters if they ever talked negative about it. This gives organised religion a lot of political clout and is maybe a reason why so much negative and falsified information is brought into the public spotlight about drugs.
But what would organised religion have against drugs? Well drugs (to me) are the natural enemy of organised religion (while alcohol is it’s friend in my opinion). Drugs have made me think about life, religion, the universe and God in ways that I would never have done before I started using drugs. They have made me question everything I have ever been told about God and religion. They have helped me believe in myself, and know that I can’t rely on any external force to help or guide me through life, only the power I have inside me can do that. They have helped me understand more about myself, and therefore more about human nature. To put it simply they have helped me grow as a person.
I can see how an organised religion might be scared of substances such as these. They can offer spiritual growth in a pill without having to give up the pleasures of sin J (ever noticed how the seven deadly sins are all natural human desires and emotions? Religion makes you feel guilty for being human). One doesn’t need to give money to an organisation for redemption and forgiveness for being human. Instead one gives money to a dealer and enjoys the pleasures of being human. Instead of going to Church on Sundays to be made to feel sinful one can spend time recovering with great friends, good music and interesting conversation (and a few bongs as well J). The way I see it drug use is a threat to all organised religion stands for.
This in a way is why I think alcohol is socially accepted while drugs are not. Human beings need an intoxicant of some kind to try and unwind from the pressures of life, and alcohol seemed to fit that bill perfectly for organised religion. When you are drunk you cant think in any logical or rational way and that is the reason why it’s used. Religion is not logical, it relies on blind faith, and it’s easier having blind faith when you are blind drunk. Being drunk doesn’t open your mind, but rather the exact opposite. I have always thought of alcohol as a dumbing drug, a poison to give to the masses to stupify and control them.
Actually someone once referred to religion as the 'opiate for the masses'. If that’s the case then alcohol is the catalyst that makes the numbing of the mind happen quicker.
I’m not necessarily saying drug use is fully incompatible with organised religion, but it is incompatible with religion the way it is now. Negative information about drugs will continue to be publicised and drugs portrayed as evil in the media while drug use continues to be a threat to organised religion. Drugs will never ever go away, but I can only hope that organised religion and the likes of JamesLee do.
 
^^^^^
You should read "Doors of Perception", particularaly the latter part of the essay - Aldous Huxley has some very interesting things to say about drugs and religion... :)
Here are some of the more interesting paragraphs, but to get a better picture you should read the lot in context - an online version of the full text can be found here:
The modern churches, with some exceptions among the Protestant denominations, tolerate alcohol; but even the most tolerant have made no attempt to convert the drug to Christianity, or to sacramentalize its use. The pious drinker is forced to take his religion in one compartment, his religion-surrogate in another. And perhaps this is inevitable. Drinking cannot be sacramentalized except in religions which set no store on decorum. The worship of Dionysos or the Celtic god of beer was a loud and disorderly affair. The rites of Christianity are incompatible with even religious drunkenness. This does no harm to the distillers, but is very bad for Christianity. Countless persons desire self-transcendence and would be glad to find it in church. But, alas, "the hungry sheep look up and are not fed." They take part in rites, they listen to sermons, they repeat prayers; but their thirst remains unassuaged. Disappointed, they turn to the bottle. For a time at least and in a kind of way, it works. Church may still be attended; but it is no more than the Musical Bank of Butler's Erewhon. God may still be acknowledged; but He is God only on the verbal level, only in a strictly Pickwickian sense. The effective object of worship is the bottle and the sole religious experience is that state of uninhibited and belligerent euphoria which follows the ingestion of the third cocktail.
We see, then, that Christianity and alcohol do not and cannot mix. Christianity and mescalin seem to be much more compatible. This has been demonstrated by many tribes of Indians, from Texas to as far north as Wisconsin. Among these tribes are to be found groups affiliated with the Native American Church, a sect whose principal rite is a kind of Early Christian agape, or love feast, where slices of peyote take the place of the sacramental bread and wine. These Native Americans regard the cactus as God's special gift to the Indians, and equate its effects with the workings of the divine Spirit.
Professor J. S. Slotkin, one of the very few white men ever to have participated in the rites of a Peyotist congregation, says of his fellow worshipers that they are "certainly not stupefied or drunk.... They never get out of rhythm or fumble their words, as a drunken or stupefied man would do.... They are all quiet, courteous and considerate of one another. I have never been in any white man's house of worship where there is either so much religious feeling or decorum." And what, we may ask, are these devout and well-behaved Peyotists experiencing? Not the mild sense of virtue which sustains the average Sunday churchgoer through ninety minutes of boredom. Not even those high feelings, inspired by thoughts of the Creator and the Redeemer, the Judge and the Comforter, which animate the pious. For these Native Americans, religious experience is something more direct and illuminating, more spontaneous, less the homemade product of the superficial, self-conscious mind. Sometimes (according to the reports collected by Dr. Slotkin) they see visions, which may be of Christ Himself. Sometimes they hear the voice of the Great Spirit. Sometimes they become aware of the presence of God and of those personal shortcomings which must be corrected if they are to do His will. The practical consequences of these chemical openings of doors into the Other World seem to be wholly good. Dr. Slotkin reports that habitual Peyotists are on the whole more industrious, more temperate (many of them abstain altogether from alcohol), more Peaceable than non-Peyotists. A tree with such satisfactory fruits cannot be condemned out of hand as evil.
In sacramentalizing the use of peyote, the Indians of the Native American Church have done something which is at once psychologically sound and historically respectable. In the early centuries of Christianity many pagan rites and festivals were baptized, so to say, and made to serve the purposes of the Church. These jollifications were not particularly edifying; but they assuaged a certain psychological hunger and, instead of trying to suppress them, the earlier missionaries had the sense to accept them for what they were, soul-satisfying expressions of fundamental urges, and to incorporate them into the fabric of the new religion. What the Native Americans have done is essentially similar. They have taken a pagan custom (a custom, incidentally, far more elevating and enlightening than most of the rather brutish carousals and mummeries adopted from European paganism) and given it a Christian significance.
Though but recently introduced into the northern United States, peyote-eating and the religion based upon it have become important symbols of the red man's right to spiritual independence. Some Indians have reacted to white supremacy by becoming Americanized, others by retreating into traditional Indianism. But some have tried to make the best of both worlds, indeed of all the worlds--the best of Indianism, the best of Christianity, and the best of those Other Worlds of transcendental experience, where the soul knows itself as unconditioned and of like nature with the divine. Hence the Native American Church. In it two great appetites of the soul-- the urge to independence and self-determination and the urge to self-transcendence-were fused with, and in- terpreted in the light of, a third--the urge to worship, to justify the ways of God to man, to explain the universe by means of a coherent theology.
Lo, the poor Indian, whose untutored mind
Clothes him in front, but leaves him bare behind.
But actually it is we, the rich and highly educated whites, who have left ourselves bare behind. We cover our anterior nakedness with some philosophy-Christian, Marxian, Freudo-Physicalist-but abaft we remain uncovered, at the mercy of all the winds of circumstance. The poor Indian, on the other hand, has had the wit to protect his rear by supplementing the fig leaf of a theology with the breechclout of transcendental experience.
I am not so foolish as to equate what happens under the influence of mescalin or of any other drug, prepared or in the future preparable, with the realization of the end and ultimate purpose of human life: Enlightenment, the Beatific Vision. All I am suggesting is that the mescalin experience is what Catholic theologians call "a gratuitous grace," not necessary to salvation but potentially helpful and to be accepted thankfully, if made available. To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and the inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large--this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intel- lectual. For the intellectual is by definition the man for whom, in Goethe's phrase, "the word is essentially fruitful." He is the man who feels that "what we perceive by the eye is foreign to us as such and need not impress us deeply." And yet, though himself an intellectual and one of the supreme masters of language, Goethe did not always agree with his own evaluation of the word. "We talk," he wrote in middle life, "far too much. We should talk less and draw more. I personally should like to renounce speech altogether and, like organic Nature, com- municate everything I have to say in sketches. That fig tree, this little snake, the cocoon on my window sill quietly awaiting its future-all these are momentous signatures. A person able to decipher their meaning properly would soon be able to dispense with the written or the spoken word altogether. The more I think of it, there is something futile, mediocre, even (I am tempted to say) foppish about speech. By contrast, how the gravity of Nature and her silence startle you, when you stand face to face with her, undistracted, before a barren ridge or in the desolation of the ancient hills." We can never dispense with language and the other symbol systems; for it is by means of them, and only by their means, that we have raised ourselves above the brutes, to the level of human beings. But we can easily become the victims as well as the beneficiaries of these systems. We must learn how to handle words effectively; but at the same time we must preserve and, if necessary, intensify our ability to look at the world directly and not through that half opaque medium of concepts, which distorts every given fact into the all too familiar likeness of some generic label or explanatory abstraction.
[ 10 October 2002: Message edited by: Pleonastic ]
Click to expand...
 
^^ Possibly one of the best books i've ever read. I have the paperback copy ;)
Read "Heaven & Hell" as well, that is also excellent....
 
Aldous Huxley was/is a genius. I also own the paperback copy of The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell (the copy I have has both works in the same book). Reading his works it’s easy to see that he was one of the greatest thinkers of his time, certainly of the 20th century. If all drug users were as intelligent and articulate as him I don’t think we would get such a bad wrap as we do, oh well. You have to respect a man who died tripping, that’s as hardcore as drug use goes in my opinion. I wonder what he thought? I wonder what it felt like. I’ve read that LSD has been given to terminal patients and by taking it they have became more accepting of the fact that they will die. Interesting stuff :)
I couldn’t agree more to what Aldous Huxley says about drug use and Christianity being complimentary to one another as shown in the example of the Native American’s use of peyote in the Native American Church. As I said in my post it can happen, just not they way Christianity is now. The Church still hasn't budged on their ideology though; it was the Native Americans who modified their religion to fit Christianity and not the other way round.
The Good Friday study done in 1962 by Walter Pahnke using psilocybin is a good example of how drugs and religion can definitely compliment each other in the right situation. Definitely worth a read, as is Rick Doblin's long-term follow up to this study.
To keep along with the drugs and religion/Aldous Huxley topic it was fascinating to see in his novel Brave New World how he used the drug Soma (not the amanita muscaria mushroom, actually I don’t think they describe exactly what Soma is) as an actual religion for the people. No doubt the idea cam from the actual use of Soma in the Hindu's Rig Veda but the way he used that idea in describing a utopian society was brilliant.
 
Understanding that this thread has turned into an Aldous Huxley book report ;) (think i need to do some reading)
After reading this thread i would just like to put out a thanks to everybody involved in bluelight :) especially the mods and admin (nice replies) I like most bluelighters were into the scene before finding this site. For myself it was a god send!
It has given me the opportunity to educate myself, and inversly others on some of the things involved in the rave scene. True you can never always know what is in what we eat or know exactly what it does to us, but it is only through bluelight that i know this.
At least bluelight has made me aware of what is known and more importantly... what isn't. I have evaluated the risks and made an informed decision for myself. Some still might say that is not good enough but as i was in the scene anyway it is much better than believing what some schmuk who has never tried to learn tells me!
I have been horified at times by statements from friends of mine that have been in the scene much longer than me, in this environment ignorance is your worst enemy.
I myself have never ended up in a bad situation while out. Is it because i am invincible and everybody is just weak? Not a chance, its because sites like bluelight have informed and educated me.
So yes there is always a risk, but education has helped me keep it to a minimum.
Cheers bluelighters!
(sorry spelling/grammer nazi's, me no right good :) )
 
JamesLee, you sound like my Dad.
Thanks for praying for my soul, cause I am to busy having fun to do that.
(BTW, the fighting for the Church has killed more people than Drugs ever has!!)
[ 11 October 2002: Message edited by: Russ ]
 
Don't eat chocolate because it's full of fat and sugar.
Moo I say.
I thought this would be appropiate...
I used to do drugs, but I'll tell you something honestly
about drugs, honestly, and I know it's not a very popular idea, you
don't hear it very often anymore, but it is the truth: I had a great
time doing drugs. Sorry. Never murdered anyone, never robbed anyone,
never raped anyone, never beat anyone, never lost a job, a car, a
house, a wife or kids, laughed my ass off, and went about my day.
Click to expand...
 
Does anyone else notice that JamesLee has disappeared?
At least try to back up your arguements and answer your critics.... maybe we will repect you a little more if you do
mc
 
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