Martial Arts Messiah

I am abandoning the "Martial Arts Messiah" moniker, because it offends some people who I am trying to reach with my message on martial arts, aka "my gospel of sparring."

I recently watched "The Messiah" on Netflix. I was surprised by the similarities I noticed between the personality of their maybe-messianic-maybe-not character and what I suspect The Lord's personality might be like. And that's just it, some of these people object to the Martial Arts Messiah moniker on religious grounds, and I never set out to attack anyone's religious beliefs (especially not ones that so closely mirror my own.)

So many people on facebook are into Aikido because of the founder's post-pacifist ideology, that it is difficult to critique the biggest problems in that infamous martial art (lack of sparring) without attacking their own personal spiritual beliefs. Also on facebook, there seems to be a lot of people who should know better promoting Kumite Point Fighting aka Olympic Karate. The problem is that Kumite Point Fighting at least as bad as Aikido Randori. Both are non-sparring practices used to replace free sparring. But what I found was criticizing Olympic Karate was attacking a belief system.

Olympic Karate defenders and Aikidoka alike really like Warrior codes like Bushido. While on one hand some of them have criticized religion in general or specific religions as a form of social mind control, on the other hand the Warrior codes they embrace were specifically just exactly that: rules to keep warriors in line so that the powers that be would not be threatened by them. And you see this the most in Japanese based martial arts: the Bushido code's first and foremost purpose was to swear loyalty to the Daimyo, who had in turn sworn loyalty to the Shogun. That's not patriotism, that's keeping everyone in line, the worst case scenario of religion.

Here's what I think: when a person doesn't have organized religion, martial arts fills that void very quickly, especially when it is rooted in Japanese martial arts originally intended to teach imperial values to youth, or to spurn personal improvement in youth, as was the case in Karate, Aikido, and Judo... and the art closest to Judo as Judo was originally is BJJ. I think that when you have "personal development" ranked, especially by a colored belt system, it very quickly turns into a belief system if there is no other belief system in place already.

A critic or two or several suggested on the Bullshido.net forums that I was trying to "save" martial arts that were beyond repair, at least one suggested I was trying to be a savior or messiah to wayward martial arts. I thought that was somewhat accurate, and came up with this hilarious placard to use as my portrait on Bullshido.net if I some day ever got to the required 1000 posts to use it:

I don't like to make posts void of meaning or content. Since 2004, I have less than 600 posts on Bullshido.net. To pick up that pace, I had two parts to my plan:

1. Complete my current troll campaign, which is based on exploring the holes in MMA and other problems for martial arts consumers in this era of MMA.
2. Take on an effort to clean up Bullshido.net etiquette. I have made a few "tell us how you really feel" comments on there where I started in this direction, but I figured I could get a LOT of posts on it in a short amount of time.

But then I missed my Muay Thai class last Saturday before my Kali class. The day before I had worked on yet another redundant blog post off and on for a 12 hour period of time, and if I had done something less time consuming, I would have made the Muay Thai class. I don't have time for arguing with narrow minded zealots on the internet anymore, nor is it what I set out to do in the first place.