Montmartre stands above Paris as a place where myth, blood, and vision converge. Once sacred ground, later a crucible of revolution and bohemian life, it became the stage for Les Nabis—artists who rejected imitation in favor of color, symbol, and inner meaning. Their work marked a turning point, where art no longer reflected the world, but reimagined it.
Let’s stop pretending this is just about belief. A loud strain of modern evangelical Christianity claims ownership of morality itself—as if ethics began with Moses and vanished without their God. But morality predates pulpits: it emerged wherever humans needed to coexist without collapse. When this movement fuses faith to political power, the result isn't righteousness—it's control. Legislating belief, dictating bodies, justifying violence (clinic bombings, doctor killings, harassment) under "divine orders." Scandals aren't glitches: Southern Baptist cover-ups, Catholic abuse patterns, "family values" politicians' hypocrisy reveal what happens when authority trumps accountability. Selective morality polices sex and gender while sidelining real harm—healthcare, housing, dignity. True ethics evolve through empathy and consequence. Systems claiming divine immunity entrench damage and call it holy.
You’ve heard it: without God, morality collapses into chaos. But history tells a different story. Long before Christianity, ancient civilizations—from Mesopotamia’s codes to Egypt’s Ma’at and Greek philosophy—crafted ethical systems rooted in fairness, harm avoidance, and social survival. Across continents, humans converged on shared norms: don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t exploit. These weren’t divine revelations but emergent human solutions, refined by empathy, reason, and experience. Morality evolves—confronting outdated controls on sexuality, slavery, and power—proving it’s a living project, not a fixed decree. In a world of interpretation and consequence, the real question isn’t divine absence, but our shared responsibility to keep building better ways to live together.
Reality may be less a thing than a description. From Plato’s cave to neuroscience and artificial intelligence, language, symbols, and the brain shape the world humans believe they see.
Love is tender and fierce, playful and ecstatic, protective and ruthless. It shapes survival, morality, and creativity while subjugating all other emotions—anger, grief, joy, longing—to its service. Love casts out fear, inspires courage, and moves humans to awe, action, and joy. It is the ultimate power, grounding the spirit in meaning, wonder, and transcendence.
So here we sit, folks, in the spring of this foul year of somebody else’s Lord 2026, watching the planet’s biggest playground bullies kick the living shit out of each other. The title says it all: Shitty Neighbors. Because that’s what nations have become: venal, power-drunk leviathans gnawing on their neighbors’ bones …armed to the teeth with high tech death, tactical nukes and grudges.
