Friday, September 14, 2012

Nikolas Schreck Facebook Page

Nikolas Schreck now has an official Facebook page, which will feature regular updates on his work related to writing, music, and spiritual matters.

Nikolas Schreck is best known as the front man/ vocalist for the band Radio Werewolf, as well as the author of the recent work The Manson File, Myth and Reality of an Outlaw Shaman, as well as its 1988 counterpart, coupled with the film "Charles Manson Superstar".

His other work includes several more books, contributions to various magazines and literary journals dealing with spirituality, beat culture, and the occult, as well as his activities within tantric Buddhism as a spiritual guide. His wife, Zeena Schreck, is also active in this field, as well as within art, photography, and as an author in her own right.


Friday, September 7, 2012

America tightens its Bible Belt

Jesus Land in red, USA in other colors.


The bible belt is a vast stretch of wasteland reaching from the Atlantic ocean to just past the border of Texas and New Mexico, a primitive land of rusty pickup trucks, bluegrass music, and severe punishment for minorities.

In recent years though this land of sour milk and killer honey bees has been losing steam, as other religious groups, and political persuasions, begin to make inroads into the vast kingdom of Jesus Land.

On one front, New Mexico, which 50 years ago was about half consumed by bible belt fundamentalism, has gone blue, and only a thin strip of land on its border with Texas is even disputed territory now, with hispanic immigration bringing in liberal Catholicism there.

The hispanic Catholics are slowly moving north into Texas, and in a few decades it could theoretically become a swing state.

Florida also has a large number of more liberal immigrants which in the last decade has stripped most of its southern half of bible belt status.

Even Virginia, once a homeland of KKK members and incest has recently swung to become a more moderate territory.


Religioisity is curiously inversely related to state academic achievement.


 
As the bible belt slowly thins, marginal locations bordering it are slowly warming up to civil rights, racial equality, marriage equality, women's rights, and voting for people who aren't members of the Ku Klux Klan. It will be a proud day indeed when the bible belt inevitably disappears altogether as extreme evangelism loses more and more power, as it has been slowly dying since the early 1980s.