Adam Qadmon

Challenging Christian Hegemony

2010-02-27T15:12:00.000-08:00

http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2010/02/26/challenging-christian-hegemony/

Tikkun Daily at 3:15 pm
February 26, 2010 REPLIES: 7
By Be Scofield, Crossposted from Tikkun Daily

“You’re either with us or against us.” – from Matthew 12:30

“Language is the perfect instrument of empire.”- Antonia De Nebrija

I recommend checking out the latest booklet from Paul Kivel called “The Language of Dominant Christianity” (available as a downloadable PDF for only $3.50 or as a book for $4.95.) It is a short (85 page) A-Z dictionary of common vocabulary words in the English language that reveal how Christianity has influenced our thinking. In addition to defining a comprehensive list of words (64 pages) Kivel provides a section on “word groups” and points out how certain terms are found within our criminal/legal system, notions of morality, racial understandings, educational ideals and political ideology. And in the first part Kivel provides the context of why it is important to analyze and examine the Christian roots of our language.

This booklet is one part of Kivel’s latest project to name Christian dominance as one of the many systems of oppression. Kivel is a well respected violence prevention educator who wrote “Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Social Justice” among many other books on oppression. If you haven’t heard of him or want to know more about Paul’s work including his videos and interviews you can visit his website.

And in the spirit of my post last week where I pointed out how atheists are studying to be religious leaders at Starr King I want to emphasize that there are Christians who are equally concerned about Christian hegemony and are dedicating time and resources to ending it.

Paul Kivel describes Christian hegemony:

From www.christianhegemony.org

I define Christian hegemony as the everyday, pervasive, and systematic set of Christian values and beliefs, individuals and institutions that dominate all aspects of our society through the social, political, economic, and cultural power they wield. Nothing is unaffected by Christian hegemony (whether we are Christian or not) including our personal beliefs and values, our relationships to other people and to the natural environment, and our economic, political, education, health care, criminal/legal, housing, and other social systems.

Christian hegemony as a system of domination is complex, shifting, and operates through the agency of individuals, families, church communities, denominations, parachurch organizations, civil institutions, and through decisions made by members of the ruling class and power elite.

Christian hegemony benefits all Christians, all those raised Christian, and those passing as Christian. However the concentration of power, wealth, and privilege under Christian hegemony accumulates to the ruling class and the predominantly white male Christian power elite that serve its interests. All people who are not Christian, as well as most people who are, experience social, political, and economic exploitation, violence, cultural appropriation, marginalization, alienation and constant vulnerability from the dominance of Christian power and values in our society.

Christian hegemony operates on several levels. At one level is the internalization of dominant western Christian beliefs and values by individuals in our society. Another level is the power that individual preachers, ministers and priests have on people’s lives. Particular churches and some Christian denominations wield very significant political and economic power in our country. There is a vast network of parachurch organizations, general tax-supported non-profits such as hospitals, broadcasting networks, publishing houses, lobbying groups, and organizations like Focus on the Family, Prison Fellowship, The Family, World Mission, and thousands of others which wield influence in particular spheres of U.S. society and throughout the world. Another level of Christian dominance is within the power elite, the network of 7-10,000 predominantly white Christian men who control the largest and most powerful social, political, economic, and cultural institutions in the country. And finally there is the level which provides the foundation for all the others-the long and deep legacy of Christian ideas, values, practices, policies, icons, and texts that have been produced within dominant western Christianity over the centuries. That legacy continues to shape our language, culture, beliefs, and values and to frame public and foreign policy decisions.

Christian dominance has become so invisible that its manifestations appear to be secular, i.e. not religious. In this context, the phrase “secular Christian dominance” might be most appropriate, Christian hegemony under the guise of secularism. Of course, there are many forms of Christian fundamentalism which are anything but secular. Often fundamentalists want to create some kind of theocratic state. But the more mainstream, everyday way that dominant Christian values and institutions influence our lives and communities is less evident, although no less significant and certainly not limited to fundamentalists.

Matrix Info

2010-02-27T14:29:00.000-08:00

http://montalk.net/matrix

Matrix Intro

What is the Matrix? School or prison, depending on your chosen perspective. On the one hand, it is a hyperdimensional teaching system accelerating your rate of spiritual evolution by providing you with catalytic experiences in response to your thoughts, emotions, and spiritual composition. On the other hand, many of these experiences manifest as predatory forces preying upon your weaknesses. Of course, the only way to prevent being manipulated by these forces is to discover, integrate, and transform your weaknesses into strengths, thereby indirectly accomplishing the higher purpose of the Matrix which is to help you transcend it. Nevertheless, these hyperdimensional predatory forces possess freewill and have their own agenda, which is to expand their power base and sustain themselves by feeding upon humanity’s emotional energies as well as keeping anyone from becoming aware enough to add destabilizing influences to the spiritual prison/farm they are running here on earth. The sum total of their hyperdimensional manipulation system can be termed the “Matrix Control System” – a school of hard knocks that weakens the spiritually weak and strengthens the spiritually strong, in accordance with their choice to be victims or warriors.

Hyperdimensional Predators:

Beyond the human level of evolution are several levels occupied by more sophisticated forms of life, including hostile beings with the ability to transcend space and linear time, read thoughts, manipulate emotions, puppeteer unaware individuals, and project themselves in and out of our physical reality.
They require emotional/etheric/vital energy to sustain themselves; mankind has long been their primary food source. They feed upon energies that are in resonance with their own soul vibrations: negative emotions, psychological suffering, and perverted sexual energies. Being greedy as they are, rather than just harvesting naturally occurring energies emitted by those who have freely chosen to engage in lower vibrational behavior, these predators seek to induce ignorance, suffering, and perversion in as many people as possible to maximize their energy harvest. While this isn’t technically a freewill violation (because they can only amplify what latent negative tendencies we already have within us), their forceful milking of energy via the Matrix Control System does constitute an imbalance because it encourages ignorance and slavery instead of awareness and freedom.
Suppression of Awareness:

Because hostile hyperdimensional forces have a vested interest in the Matrix Control System, they go to extraordinary lengths to suppress any destabilizing factors that could disrupt their food supply. Anyone who starts the process of waking up and regaining personal power and freedom is immediately targeted. The targeting aims to put him back to sleep, render him powerless, or make him lose faith in continuing his path.

When a personal impulse toward freedom occurs, an equal and opposite impulse is set into motion, attracting to the target various negatively synchronistic opportunities to engage in lowering experiences to offset his impulse toward freedom. These include situations that aim to induce fear, distraction, suffering, doubt, depression, indulgence in lower impulses, and self-serving behavior. Sometimes this phenomenon arises naturally from the law of inertia, other times there is active amplification of this counter-impulse by negative hyperdimensional forces to disarm the threat before he gains more power.

Other methods of suppression include sabotaging and distracting a targeted individual via people around him who are open to direct manipulation. Anyone who fails to be fully conscious in the present moment can be a puppet for as long as their attention is elsewhere. Lapses of attention are enough for a subconsciosly implanted impulses to result in regrettable words or actions. The majority of people in this world place no priority on awareness or attentiveness, and instead live life in a semi-conscious dream state that makes them very prone to being pawns of the Matrix Control System. Some are born with insufficient levels of individualized consciousness to ever experience a lucid moment, and it is these who form the primary class of Matrix agents, the rest of functioning as agents only part of the time when we fail to watch ourselves. Due to the great quantity of asleep people in the population, the Matrix Control System has no problem finding chesspieces to maneuver into place around a targeted individual.

The Bigger Picture:

While we may not be the source of injustices against us, we are the cause of it. The Matrix, even with its level of imbalance and corruption by those freewill entities who have overstepped their place in nature as catalytic firespitters, is nevertheless still a learning program entirely responsive to our own ignorance and weaknesses. It may be a predator’s choice to attack, but it is our choice to accept the attack and succumb to it. The Matrix Control System can only throw us by the elements within us that correspond to its low vibratory nature. Attacks serve to identify our own weaknesses, thus providing focus for where to take the next step on one’s path of spiritual awakening.

Realm Dynamics

2010-02-27T14:25:00.000-08:00

http://montalk.net/matrix/112/realm-dynamics

Realm Dynamics
montalk.net » 17 June 05
Version 0.2 :: June 30th 2005 :: montalk@montalk.net :: Download PDF

[The principles of Realm Dynamics were inspired by the Cassiopaeans, expanded by the Nexus Seven, refined through numerous discussions with friends, and confirmed by experience.]

Introduction

An ancient hermetic axiom states that everything is mind, everything vibrates. Since each living thing is uniquely conscious, each living thing carries a unique vibratory signature. The soul broadcasts a rich spectrum of vibrations, which through the principle of resonance attracts a corresponding spectrum of experiences. Souls of a common frequency share common realms of experience and tend to cross paths in life.

This is the study of realm dynamics, how vibrations influence experience, and how experience influences vibration. The simplicity of correspondence between soul vibration and personal experience betrays the astounding nature of its implications. For instance, realm dynamics explains how our daily experiences are the end effects of hyperdimensional processes, why people with victim or predator mentalities attract each other, how dissonance between individuals attracts synchronistic triggers for confrontation, how learning a lesson ahead of time prevents it from manifesting as experience, why a pure heart protects one from danger, and how personal parting of ways and the upcoming Shift are different degrees of precisely the same phenomenon.

Vibration

When we speak of vibration, we are really talking about waves with amplitude, frequency, and phase. Amplitude is the strength, frequency the rapidity of fluctuation, and phase the alignment or timing of a wave. For a wave to exist and propagate there must be a source and medium, that which generates vibration and that which carries it outward. For instance, a guitar string initiates vibrations that travel through air in the form of alternating peaks and troughs in air pressure.

Soul vibrations are no less tangible than sound waves, though their nature and medium of propagation are more exotic. They employ the same medium through which light and radio waves travel but are made of potential waves rather than electromagnetic waves. This means the soul vibratory field (also known as the aura) consists of fields and waves far subtler than electric or magnetic fields, which is why conventional instruments cannot detect the aura. Nevertheless this field is rife with patterned energy and information — the very stuff of thought and emotion.

Realm dynamics is essentially about quantum physics, or at least how quantum principles allow consciousness to interface with physical reality. Quantum physics calculates probable futures and consciousness selects which one to experience. But whereas conventional science says quantum effects are limited to the subatomic scale, here we acknowledge that perhaps quantum phenomena are just as active in the macroscopic world and actually drive the progression of our experiences.

Because quantum processes determine not only what we perceive but also through what we perceive, we are largely unaware of their influence. The situation is similar to swimmers floating down a river at equal speed, each swimmer relatively stationary to the other; by looking only at each other they may conclude they are in still water, that motion in the water is only evident if they look down and observe the tiny eddies swirling about. Conventional science only looks downward and fails to realize that a massive quantum current is what moves us through time. But how exactly does consciousness manifest experience?

The Fractal Hologram

At each moment in time our universe is but one slice of a complex web of infinite possibilities that is unchanging and eternal. Technically this multiverse may be termed the “state vector” or “wave function” of reality. It is a fractal hologram that zooms forever into the future. The fractal itself does not change, it is only our mind that moves through and thereby generates for itself the illusion of space and time. To understand this process, one must understand how holograms work.

Holograms encode information by recording the interference pattern between two waves of common frequency, one wave being uniform in consistency and the other having its phase altered by the information to be encoded.

The traditional way of making a hologram goes as follows: a laser beam is split in two, one half shining onto photographic film and the other bouncing off an object before shining onto the film. What is recorded on the film is an interference pattern between these two beams, encoding the topography of the object. After the film is developed, the same laser illuminating it will be modulated in phase and intensity by the pattern and will reproduce the encoded information, projecting from it a visual replica of the object. The nature of the image projected forth from a hologram depends on the angle, intensity, and frequency (color) of the laser.

Frequency determines what information may be accessed. If the hologram is recorded with a red laser, a green laser will fail to elicit an image. Multiple images can be encoded into a hologram, each called forth by a corresponding laser color.

The angle and region of illumination decides what particular information from the range available is selected for projection. In the case of holographic film, the projected image rotates with a rotation in the laser’s angle of incidence, or changes to a different image if the laser shines upon a part of the film upon which was recorded a different object. Angle and position are both types of phases, so it is phase that selects from a given range what image to bring forth.

Lastly, intensity of illumination (amplitude of the wave) determines the degree of fidelity in the projected image. The greater the amplitude, the more accurate and complete the decoded information.

The holographic process has metaphysical parallels. The mind of the Creator corresponds to the laser source, archetypes correspond to the objects recorded, and the matrix of existence corresponds to the photographic film. It follows that we as individual units of consciousness are the illuminating laser. The laser’s color is the frequency of our emotions, its phase our thought patterns, and its amplitude our level of intent.

Just as laser color determines the layer of accessible holographic information, so does our emotional nature determine the archetypal range of accessible experience. Of this range, our thoughts determine the particular phase angle from which this archetype is experienced. And the strength of our intent determines how accurately and vividly it manifests.

This is no metaphor; the universe is indeed holographic. But it is also fractal as briefly mentioned. A fractal is infinitely complex and allows inward or outward zooming without limit. Each zoom level inward is a subset of all previous zooms. In our current state, we are zooming into the fractal and perceiving this motion as progress into the future. And naturally the future is a subset of all previous probable futures, though in truth time is illusory because all levels of the fractal exist simultaneously. Once again, this fractal is holographic; we illuminate portions of it in accordance with our emotional nature, thoughts, and intent.

Realms

But our emotional nature is complex and the frequencies comprising it are numerous. Therefore our consciousness vibrates with a spectrum of frequencies and consequently accesses from the hologram a spectrum of experiential archetypes. Each person has a unique vibratory spectrum, though different individuals may share certain frequencies. This spectrum identifies not only soul composition but also one’s unique learning path in life. Our temperament reflects our soul nature and determines the realm of our experiences.

Realms are the personal worlds we inhabit, our sphere of influence, range of perception, and region of activity. They are specific areas of the hologram we illuminate in accordance with our vibratory spectrum, our being, our essence.

Every individual projects and occupies a unique but not necessarily independent realm; some frequencies are more or less shared and account for consensual realities and mutual experiences. Realms can therefore intersect, supercede, or be subsets of other realms.

Realms as Themes of Experience

The inhabitants of two intersecting realms inevitably cross paths and exchange lessons. These lessons are of an archetypal nature determined by what part of the hologram both realms commonly access.

When one realm is the subset of another, those occupying the greater realm will fully understand and perceive those of the more limited realm but not vice versa. The difference may be small between teacher and student or adult and child, or great between man and animal or hyperdimensional being and man. Small differences account for differences in level of understanding while large differences between realms give rise to differences of perception. This simply means one has a vibratory spectrum that includes and surpasses another.

Sometimes two realms are independent, sharing few but the most fundamental of frequencies. For instance, two people may share the lowest frequencies placing them on the same physical plane but their difference in life path will make each an insignificant character in the life of the other. They may cross paths but only in a superficial manner. And if they are forced to interact or communicate, there is bound to be mutual misunderstanding and lack of interest at best and aversion or confrontation at worst. When the difference between realms is extreme, beings of each realm may not even physically perceive each other.

Realms are somewhat like movie scripts, each person being the star of his script but all scripts including others as major, minor, or background characters. The greater the congruence between two realms, the more important the role played by each character in the other’s script. The importance of a character is not determined by how frequently we interact with them, but how meaningfully we do so. We may cross paths with a background character every day, perhaps a neighbor or coworker and they leave no more than a fading impression on our souls. Others we may meet only once in life during an experience so meaningful that it marks us for life.

Perceptual Limitations

Realms also signify the boundary of our perception. Sometimes we cannot see the point another is trying to make, or else we cannot understand why they do what they do, which indicates our realm does not extend into certain regions of the hologram they are familiar with. So on a mundane level, realms delineate what you can identify with and notice.

On a more significant level realms define what you have the ability to perceive; it is possible for another being to be so far outside your realm that you cannot even perceive them and vice versa. This is for beings whose realms are mutually independent.

As for beings occupying realms of which yours is a tiny subset, hyperdimensional beings for instance, they are normally outside your range of perception but can choose to manifest visibly by projecting their consciousness into a narrow band of vibration that matches yours. This concept is easy to grasp if you consider the mundane interpretation of “realm”. When you encounter someone whose realm is a subset of yours, say a small child who has yet to learn the lessons you have already learned, you can choose to simplify your language and communicate on their level. Often this requires using metaphors they can comprehend. Likewise hyperdimensional entities wrap themselves in visual forms that we can comprehend. These visual forms are alternate expressions of their vibratory archetypes just as metaphors are alternate expressions of meaning.

Probable Futures

[If physics gives you a headache, please skip ahead to “Metaphysics of Realm Dynamics”]

Quantum physics defines a wave function as a probability field. When specified as an equation it can give information about the probability that a subatomic particle, say an electron, will be in a certain position or state of energy when measured. Wave functions can be thought of as a cloud of possibilities from which only one possibility manifests when observed. It is one small region of the universal hologram from which one angle of information is projected. Quantum wave functions are the physical basis of “realms” and realms define the reach of our personal wave functions.

Unlike electrons we are incredibly complex and the wave function of our being is far richer in composition than that of any subatomic particle. Nevertheless the principles of quantum physics are just as valid for us in the macroscopic realm as for electrons in the subatomic realm. On the macroscopic scale these quantum principles manifest as the principles of realm dynamics.

Phase Selection

When a subatomic particle is measured in the lab, its wave function locks phase with the instrument’s wave function. Whoever reads the instrument locks phase with its wave function and in the end the observed particle, instrument, and observer all occupy the same reality by having zero phase difference between them. This phase is a physical quantity and is commonly called “geometric phase” or “berry’s phase” or “aharonov-bohm phase” (different names for the same phase in different situations). This phase is nothing more than the physical alignment of the wave function. To repeat, for two things to occupy the same reality and interact causally with each other they must have zero phase difference between them.

In realm dynamics the situation is a bit more complex. Geometric phase says nothing about the characteristics of consciousness. For that we need esoteric phase. Mathematically speaking, while the geometric phase is real, the esoteric phase is imaginary. Metaphysically speaking, while the geometric phase is a material property, esoteric phase is purely a conscious property. Geometric and esoteric phase are but the real and imaginary components of a “quaternion” phase characterizing the alignment of both mental and material wave functions.

To understand the role of esoteric and geometric phases in context of the holographic principle, recall how the image projected from an optical hologram depends on the angle of the laser, its frequency, and where on the hologram this laser shines.

The geometric phase of quantum physics is simply the angle of illumination. It is only important after the frequency and illumination region have already been selected. Just as selecting the laser angle determines the viewing angle of the final image, so does selecting the geometric phase precipitate one observable state from a wave function.

What about the region of illumination and frequency of the laser? These would correspond to the esoteric phase. Thoughts, emotion, and intent shape the esoteric phase to determine which part of the hologram is illuminated; this specifies one’s realm. Geometric phase then selects what tangible experiences manifest from the given range of probable futures. For the mind to experience a specific probable future, it must achieve both esoteric and geometric phase lock.

Together, geometric and esoteric phase determine where we are located on the universal holographic fractal at any moment in time. Our realm is therefore a wave function that extends from this location spherically outward into all directions of space, time, and dimension.

Electromagnetism and the Aura

Geometric phase is sensitive to sub-electromagnetic fields, known as potential fields. These are the building blocks of electric and magnetic fields and are comparatively simpler in structure. Whereas magnetic fields are analogous to a bundle of water vortices, the potential fields are more like water currents. By uncurling a magnetic field one can generate a plain potential field capable of shifting the geometric phase of an electron, for instance. Technology exists to create such fields and allow the manipulation of geometric phase.

Esoteric phase can only be modulated by superpotential fields, which are even simpler in structure than potential fields. Whereas potential fields are like water currents, superpotential fields represent the water itself. Only two things are capable of generating and manipulating such fields: consciousness and certain hyperdimensional technologies.

Conscious beings radiate potential and superpotential fields containing various patterns, vibrations, and intensities paralleling the laser’s region of illumination, frequency, and brightness. This sub-electromagnetic field extends spherically outward into the universal hologram, illuminating regions within physical, temporal, and dimensional proximity. This glowing cocoon defines one’s realm.

The portion of this multidimensional field intersecting our physical plane is known as the aura. The aura is a combination of potential and superpotential fields emitted by living entities and serving as an interface matrix between the originating consciousness and the external environment. Standard instruments cannot detect it because the fields comprising the aura are structurally simpler than electromagnetic fields. Specialized technology is needed, some of which has been patented and the rest restricted for use by advanced military and alien factions.

The aura is a resonance field that encodes which region of the hologram is accessible for phase lock and what experiences are therefore attracted. To a limited extent the aura maps one’s wave function and realm. It drops off linearly with distance, causing realms to often be physically localized. This is why the vibe of a person or place becomes noticeable only when one is sufficiently close.

But because the aura is only the physical, albeit subtle, component of one’s total vibratory field and the rest being in imaginary space, realms may also extend through mind-space and drop off with degree of conscious proximity. Two people far beyond the reach of each other’s auric range may still share realms through mental and emotional proximity. Long distance relationships or internet discussion forums are examples.

To summarize, one could say that the aura is a sub-electromagnetic field that attracts themes of experience but does not explicitly select which particular experience manifests. The latter is left to personal choice and circumstance. Archetypal elements within consciousness become symbolic patterns in the aura that resonate and attract corresponding experiences from the universal hologram.

Metaphysics of Realm Dynamics

With the physics of realm dynamics behind us, we are ready to examine the metaphysics. As explained, consciousness generates a field that resonates and attracts meaningful experience. But what is meaningful to one person may be old news to another. Hence your soul vibrations outline your emotional learning path — what sequence of experiences are meaningful and have enough emotional charge to catalyze your spiritual growth.

Emotions as we know them are surrogate motivators. This means they push us into doing what is beyond our normal motivation to do. Without emotion, we do what is only within our understanding and programming to do. That is our natural state of being, our realm at equilibrium.

When we are happy, we smile and become more animated than usual and our realm momentarily extends slightly along that direction. When we are angry, we may throw insults or objects and our realm boundary likewise deforms to reflect and reinforce those actions and their consequences.

So emotions alter realm boundaries by momentary illuminating new regions of the hologram. They also influence what realms we occupy. As Bringers of the Dawn states, emotions can carry us into other dimensions. Moving to a different realm state may be simple as changing your attitude and thereby accessing a happier sequence of experiences or as profound as shifting out of this reality into a higher density. When the laser switches color, it brings out parts of the hologram previously inaccessible.

Spiritual growth is the never-ending expansion of one’s realm to encompass deeper and wider aspects of the hologram, to increase the vibrancy and strength of one’s being. This involves enriching and expanding one’s vibratory spectrum and raising the intensity of illumination. The richer the spectrum, the closer it moves toward white light containing all colors, meaning the closer consciousness arrives to unifying with the hologram and the Source that recorded it.

When we are in need of a lesson our vibratory spectrum is lacking certain frequencies; the aura is devoid of a particular pattern. If our vibratory spectrum is missing a component, there is nothing within us to repel through dissonance the corresponding component in the hologram. And so we essentially allow into manifestation that which we most need to experience.

Stated another way, at equilibrium our realm boundary contains missing areas into which fit corresponding probable futures. These probable futures contain significant experiences whose emotional component is sufficient to fuel the expansion of our realm boundary and fill the gap. Once a lesson is learned, the new equilibrium state no longer invites those types of experiences because the gap is filled, but failing to learn the lesson leaves the gap a bit wider than before. This is why failing to learn a lesson the first time causes it to repeat in various forms of escalating severity.

Different people can learn the same lesson in different ways because each individual has a unique emotional learning path. What experiences are significant to one may be incomprehensible or unnecessarily harsh to another. How the lesson archetype manifests as experience depends on the emotional responsiveness of the individual in question. Some learn better with compassion and joy, others with fear and pain — whatever is the most efficient surrogate motivator. Each emotion has a certain frequency (an oscillation in the esoteric phase) and like the laser accessing a particular holographic layer according to its frequency, people with different temperaments have access to different layers of the hologram and thereby attract different probable futures for any given lesson archetype.

Thus it is temperament that most significantly influences the nature of one’s personal experiences. Temperament is merely one’s life attitude and emotional climate, the spectrum of frequencies at which the soul in its current state can naturally resonate. It measures our response-ability to learning opportunities. We can place temperament on a scale with programmed reactivity on the lower end and conscious activity on the higher end.

Temperaments that are neurotic, paranoid, worried, fearful, angry or hostile are implicitly reactive. The associated soul resonance spectrum is centered around the lower frequencies, near that of physical matter. Matter is perfectly reactive and deterministic; for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. People with low vibratory frequencies are highly reactive and at the mercy of external influences.

Temperaments that are calm, observant, and discerning are active rather than reactive because awareness and freewill predicate responses to experience. The associated soul resonance frequencies are higher on the scale, closer to that of pure consciousness. In contrast to reactions, actions are nondeterministic for they follow from true choice rather than the predetermined effect of some cause.

The scale from absolute reactivity to absolute activity is bounded by matter on the lowest end and infinite consciousness on the highest end. We as individuals are somewhere in between, our location determined by our chosen emotional learning path. Therefore our soul vibratory spectrum measures where we stand on the grand cycle of spiritual evolution.

Individuals who tread the path of reactivity require relatively abrasive catalysts to get them moving. But because every learning experience offers choice in how to proceed, there is always the opportunity to climb the frequency scale and become more conscious and less reactive, which in turn makes life experiences less abrasive.

Collective Choices and Lessons

When people gather into mutual physical or mental proximity their vibratory fields sum to produce a collective field resonating strongly at frequencies shared among them. Gaps in this field invite collective lessons and experiences. This collective field is self-reinforcing because it exerts repulsion upon anyone or anything whose spectrum is dissonant with the collective frequency. For instance, people entering the field will either be repelled or attracted depending on how closely their aural profiles match that of the collective.

Cities and neighborhoods are examples of physical groups generating a collective field whose intensity falls off with physical distance. Getting too close to an area with vibrations strongly dissonant to one’s own may evoke feelings of uneasiness, suffocation, or panic; entering areas with resonant vibrations will invite feelings of comfort and vitality.

Sometimes people move to a particular place because it provides the necessary probable futures that catalyze personal evolution. But once those catalysts are exhausted, the realm boundary gaps formerly inviting those experiences become filled in and cause dissonance. This dissonance automatically evokes from the hologram varied catalysts for separation. In other words, when it is time for someone to move to a more fruitful area, improbable events manifest to force relocation.

When dissonance is weak between individual and group, repulsion may manifest as emotional uneasiness or apathy; when strong, friction may ignite emotional fire through negative experiences that catalyze the severing of physical or mental interaction between dissonant elements.

Frequency Wars

Beneath the threshold of ordinary awareness, “frequency wars” take place between groups competing over the same physical or mental environment. When subtle, these battles take place not with confrontation so much as the establishment of dominant frequencies that overwhelm and subconsciously repel the opposing side. Because amplitude of vibration is the deciding factor, a few individuals with low but strong vibrations can overrun a larger group with higher but weaker vibrations, or at least damp their frequencies and thus drag them down.

Internet message boards are examples of mental groups whose collective fields diminish with mental distance. As discussed earlier, mental distance implies that the less one invests emotional energy and mental focus upon a particular nonphysical group like a forum, the less one feels its collective field. For instance, it takes only a few highly “negative” or fragmented individuals to join and infect a message board if the membership is unaware and weak in vibration. They need not be violent or hostile, just firmly and loudly anchored in their low vibrations. Other members may interpret growing feelings of emotional apathy or uneasiness as their own and withdraw their energies from the collective field out of lack of enthusiasm, thus allowing a low vibration to dominate and repel all present and future members of positive inclination. And if dissonance is particularly strong, visible confrontation will erupt and force the expulsion of individuals dissonant with the dominant vibrations of the collective field.

But these are just microcosmic reflections, or subset realm dynamics, of a bigger frequency war taking place between the hyperdimensional forces of oppression and liberation. Hyperdimensional beings are beyond linear time and what is for us a range of probable futures, presents, and pasts is simultaneously their native territory. They possess greater degrees of freedom than we do in navigating the hologram.

Hyperdimensional Wars

Physical wars use physical force to gain advances in physical territory. But a hyperdimensional war is fought on a hyperdimensional battlefield extending forwards and backwards in time and sideways through parallel dimensions. Our soul vibrations and the realm we choose to occupy determine which probable futures we access, or alternately, which hyperdimensional territory we connect with and thereby reinforce. The hyperdimensional war is largely fought through us, through the frequencies we choose to hold.

For any lesson archetype a variety of experiences are viable for learning. The lower frequency paths attract cruder experiences than the higher frequency paths. For example, an individual or collective lesson about independence may require the pain of enslavement for the lower path while victory over tyranny may suffice for the higher paths. Only the first is advantageous to tyranny. Therefore the hyperdimensional forces of oppression have a crucial interest in lowering the frequency of those they wish to enslave so that the enslaved attract subjugation as their preferred mode of learning.

This is why hostile forces often seem to respect freewill — they require that targets be within a certain frequency bandwidth resonant to their own before they can lock on and manipulate in a causal manner. Remember that phase lock is necessary for two things to causally interact, for the hyperdimensional subtleties of realm dynamics to evaporate and leave only the physical laws of cause and effect. By resonating within their frequency spectrum, you enter their hyperdimensional territory and they acquire the ability to physically overpower you.

Realm Dynamics of Abductions

Abductions are a good example. There are countless individuals, myself included, who have been targeted for elimination. The question is why the abductors do not simply kill their targets. Sometimes they do, but only because sometimes they can.

Individuals occupying a low soul frequency vibration such as military personnel or the extremely paranoid are sufficiently within the proper vibratory spectrum to get abducted and mutilated or consumed. The same may be said for individuals whose auras are weak, as is the case with chronic drug abusers. Also, the auras of young children are not fully formed because the soul has not fully seated into the body, so their realms are far easier to penetrate than those of adults. Abductions take place most frequently during childhood when the mind is both malleable and realm easily breeched, allowing the opportune installation of mind programming systems.

As mentioned, the lowest soul frequency is that which keeps us connected to the physical plane and causally interacting with each other. Abductions employ hyperdimensional teleportation technology that momentarily removes one from the physical plane. This presents certain problems for the abductors, namely that the most viable avenue for phase lock must be momentarily abandoned. This severs the thread of causality that would otherwise provide a clear line of continuity between the individual’s incarnative choice to submit to the laws of physicality and its ultimate consequence at the hands of the abductors.

Manipulation must therefore occur through more subtle openings in the realm boundary, through the individual’s various spiritual, psychological, and emotional vulnerabilities. Thus the preferred method of manipulation is mind programming. At a higher level the individual allows exploitation of his weaknesses because there is always a marginal chance for the learning of a lesson and patching of the weakness. For instance, mind programming is allowed only because the individual can, through self-control and self-observation, become more focused and conscious should he or she choose to be active rather than reactive. Every experience attracted can move one up or down the frequency scale depending on how one chooses to perceive and utilize these experiences. It is unfortunate, however, that many abductees do succumb and at some level choose the path of further manipulation and even death.

It is dangerous getting within physical proximity of an underground base because one is then close enough to be physically abducted without use of teleportation. The thread of causality stays intact and affords the abductors greater freedom in handling the target. In more fortunate cases the individual has enough residual acausal defenses to stave off the worst consequences, but much more can be done during such abductions than through more standard procedures involving teleportation over great distances. These opportunities are frequently used to install new “hardware” and “software,” perhaps implants and subconscious coding systems providing for remote programming so that future abductions are not necessary. The military/government factions are keen on this technology. It allows them to send programming signals to remote targets anytime, anywhere. It is not uncommon for abductees to be hypnotically programmed to travel to a dangerous location where they may be physically abducted. So despite realm limitations, hostile forces are adept at leveraging their resources.

Negative Attractors

The degree to which negative hyperdimensional forces manifest tangibly in one’s life varies with resonance. Some people are more in tune with low frequency vibrations and experience the presence of negative entities far more objectively than those whose vibrations are primarily elsewhere in the spectrum; the latter encounter hostile forces far more subjectively, fleetingly, and ambiguously.

The greatest attractors of alien-related phenomena are fear, paranoia, jumpiness, and obsession. These are lower frequency characteristics that make one reactive, easily predictable, and thus easily controllable. Abductees who experience the most indubitable variety of encounters with hostile entities are often neurotic, obsessed, fearful, and/or paranoid.

One could argue that having objective experiences of a horrifying nature would make one neurotic, but such experiences are merely the end result of a vicious cycle of frequency attracting experience and experience biasing one’s frequency. At each turn of the cycle there is choice to regain control over one’s emotions and reactivity through the practice of nonchalance, calmness, and a positive attitude.

But some abductees are resistant, enjoy feeling “chosen”, and are not in favor of ending their alien encounters. Or perhaps they simply cannot escape suffering the karmic consequences of choices made in this life or previous ones, such as making a pact with the dark side. The causal thread established by such a pact is difficult but not impossible to cut; doing so involves renouncing past agreements and raising one’s frequency and awareness.

Realm Depressors

Consistently maintaining a high soul frequency is absolutely essential for staying out of trouble. But this takes effort because we are immersed in ambient fields that can bias our own. Some of these fields are astrological in origin and fluctuate with the various lunar and planetary cycles. Other examples include the collective fields generated by physical or mental gatherings of individuals.

If these fields are sufficiently strong they can entrain the soul vibrations of those within their reach. For instance, the moon generates an extremely strong low frequency field within a few days of new or full, and this negatively biases the temperaments of people vulnerable to its influence. Reactivity rises and lessons of a highly abrasive emotional nature tend to increase around such times.

Not all these biasing fields are natural. Some can be technologically generated via fluctuating potential and superpotential fields. For instance, it may be possible for microwave towers to triangulate standing electromagnetic waves whose magnetic and electric field components cancel, leaving only an oscillating potential field capable of suppressing the aura and exacerbating emotional sensitivity. The conductive grid formed by chemtrails can also create vibrating potential fields that suppress the mental and emotional balance as well as the auric integrity populations irradiated. Sometimes it is not necessary to use such advanced methods…often cruder methods for manipulating thought and emotions are employed that simply throw neurochemical and hormonal levels off balance.

Nevertheless, it is important to remember that soul frequency can temporarily drop when overpowered by ambient sub-electromagnetic fields, such as when one is within the mental or physical proximity of a low frequency source. Of course it is possible to rebuff such influences if one is sufficiently aware, vitalized, and centered. When the ambient low frequency fields amplify, it feels like someone has turned up the “gravity” and more strength is needed to stay upright and balanced. It is possible during such times to mentally connect with a higher frequency realm and thereby remain centered. This requires an inward meditation and contemplation of higher ideals and archetypes.

Other sources of frequency depressors include thunderstorms, direct psychic skirmishes between hyperdimensional factions, physical proximity to their crafts, psychic attacks, and the immediate presence of demonic astral entities or negative thoughtforms.

Psychic attacks require that an entity use intent to get within mental proximity of a target and unleash a barrage of low frequency energy. This attempts to overpower the target’s own field and achieve phase lock, after which causal forms of damage (as specified through visualization) may proceed.

Thunderstorms are physical reflections of the tension and release associated with realm dissonance and separation, thus the classic association between emotional tempests and atmospheric types. Preceding such storms, low frequency energy fields intensify. (Wilhelm Reich called this energy “deadly orgone.”)

Often this archetype of conflict extends into the hyperdimensional realms and correlates with battles taking place in other dimensions whose effects spill into our realm; thus our personal experiences often reflect “battles between the gods”. Interestingly, whether we succumb to lower frequencies or choose to “weather the storm” may affect the outcome of such hyperdimensional skirmishes. For one realm to influence another requires some level of mutual entanglement.

Some clouds reflect the presence of hyperdimensional ships hovering just beyond the dimensional veil. These clouds tend to be geometric in shape. Cloudships belonging to dark entities radiate an intense low frequency field that can induce feelings of doom or aggression in the population below and odd defensive behavior in animals. The darker the energy, the more foreboding the cloud and violent the storms that precipitate. Such ships tend to gather near critical points on the timeline where reality is most easily influenced to their advantage. By getting close enough to the place and time of an “interesting” region of the hologram, dark entities can more accurately read the local probable future trajectories and calculate what manipulations are necessary to ensure the most devastating probable future. In the case of human disasters, this assists the greatest harvesting of lifeforce energy.

Energy

Causal interactions involve exchanges of energy. For two realms to exchange energy they must share some degree of resonance. The weaker the resonance, the more energy is needed for entities of one realm to directly affect those of another. Negative entities are usually not in full resonance with their targets and are therefore limited in what they can directly do to them. However, with additional energy they can compensate for weak resonance and impact realms otherwise beyond their influence.

This energy is known as loosh, identically the lifeforce energy harvested from human suffering, the emotional energy expended in the learning of lessons, and the psychic energy expelled through prayer and ritual. For every frequency of vibration, the soul may emit loosh at that frequency. A comparison may be drawn to laser energy of a particular color. Entities with low soul frequencies consume energy of a low frequency.

Not only does loosh fuel the expansion and crossing of realm boundaries as discussed earlier in context of learning lessons and surrogate motivators, but it allows negative entities to more strongly manifest in the realms of their targets. Loosh is a commodity in higher realms because it is the very fuel of transdimensional navigation and conquest.

Energy harvested from one region can be rerouted to another. For example, a natural disaster in one part of the world may provide negative entities with sufficient energy to penetrate the realms of targets elsewhere. Other sources of energy include occult and religious rituals. Sunday worship provides “mass” amounts of energy and affords negative forces easier attack opportunities on Sunday than other days of the week. The moon plays an important part in energy harvesting by depressing global frequencies twice a month and initiating a veritable feeding frenzy for negative entities; this is what Gurdjieff meant by mankind being food for the moon.

Realm Breech

The ultimate objective of any hyperdimensional ambush is realm breech, the penetration through a realm boundary. Like a syringe breaking through skin, realm breech allows direct injection of disruptive influences into the target realm. This operation consists of three steps: stalking, baiting, and bridging.

Stalking is the act of reading the weaknesses of a target and moving into position to exploit those weaknesses. This is achieved either through remote monitoring or direct sampling of the auric field. Methods of remote monitoring include remote viewing and data gathered through neural implants.

Remote viewing requires that the observer be within mental proximity of the target and have sufficient frequency bandwidth to access a good portion of the target’s probable futures. Hostile aliens and their subordinate human military factions occupy a narrow bandwidth and must use psychically talented abductees possessing greater bandwidth to remote view a wider range of probable futures. Such abductees may either be teleported into an underground base or under hypnotic trance dictate information about assigned targets, or if implanted with remote mind programming technology they may be utilized as such while asleep in their beds.

Direct sampling of the auric field necessitates both physical proximity and a stimulated emission of vibratory energy. For instance, black helicopters outfitted with frequency sampling equipment may hover loudly near the target in order to induce a fear/panic reaction that stimulates the soul into giving off a measurable vibratory response. At the very least this provides an immediate readout of one’s vulnerabilities, and at most it pushes one into deeper fear and paranoia that puts one further into their vibratory territory. The aura can also be sampled when a target interacts face-to-face with certain implanted individuals.

Once vulnerabilities are ascertained, the target may be programmed accordingly and baited into dropping his or her frequency, committing self-sabotage, and attracting through realm boundary gaps a disruptive variety of learning lessons. Overreaction to these disruptive experiences may further drop frequency and allow for a more intensive round of programming and baiting. Through this process the programmers can run a careless target into the ground.

A common form of realm baiting involves strangeness for the sake of strangeness, weird experiences that have no point other than to arouse obsessive intrigue in the target. For the unfortunate recipients, curiosity leads nowhere but further into the trap. That these inexplicable or mysterious experiences are real is undeniable, however they are often decoys void of deeper significance. Trying to find that deeper meaning is simply opening the door to more of the same, and in this way life can get strange indeed and madness is not an uncommon result. Every drop in frequency drops another bridge across the castle moat.

Synchronicity

According to Jung, synchronicities are meaningful coincidences. They function as waking dream symbols and communicate the presence of something significant beneath the threshold of conscious awareness. Synchronicities tend to appear during hyperdimensional activity or prior to emotionally charged events and expansions in awareness. In general, they are precursors to either realm expansion or realm breech.

Moving realm boundaries generate shockwaves that radiate spherically into the surrounding holographic region. An emotional experience several hours in the future may send shockwaves backward in time, which upon impacting the present realm induces vibrations that resonate and attract corresponding synchronicities. These meaningful coincidences share the same archetypal basis as the emotional event having generated the shockwave; the wave shares the frequency of its source. Thus synchronicities often precede learning experiences and carry a symbolic nature that reflects the nature of the impending event.

In fact, any perturbation in the realm boundary will inevitably generate precursor synchronicities that give information about the source of disturbance. A looming realm breech, for instance, will be preceded by foreboding synchronicities such as omens or the sighting of certain warning numbers. Because the archetype filters through a symbolic lexicon before manifesting, the same warning may manifest differently for different people depending on what symbols they find meaningful. Some symbols are more universal than others. Interpreting them should be handled no differently than interpreting dream symbols.

Discontinuities

When numerous people share the same environment, their collective field attracts a coordinated set of experiences. This means one probable future manifests for all that somehow accommodates the learning requirements of each individual. The greater the dissonance between individuals contributing to a collective field, the more contorted and improbable this future must be to smooth out any discontinuities.

Reality can get strange when one’s vibratory spectrum is significantly out of synch with that of the environment. Consider people who are either temporarily or chronically obsessive and paranoid about alien abductions, government monitoring, or the matrix control system. For reasons already explained, they may attract blatant forms of harassment and a plethora of unusual paranormal phenomena most people cannot fathom much less believe. What if they enter a collective realm whose vibratory spectrum is very different from their own, say someplace public with lots of average people requiring relatively mundane experience? Then reality will contort to accommodate both realms, though sometimes without much success when uncanny glitches indicate cracks in the illusion. Instead of seeing aliens or demonic entities in public, which would surely scare the hell out of everyone else as well, their experiences of monitoring and harassment will come through elements that seem ordinary to ordinary people. This way both can have their realm and live it too. They may hear a random person mumble cryptic phrases a bit too uncanny to be mere coincidence, they may notice people watching and following them, they may encounter harassers whose eyes indicate the momentary presence of a demonic being. But to everyone else these vehicles of harassment seem like ordinary characters: the homeless man by the gas station seemingly asking someone for change, the group of diners near engaging in a bit of people-watching, the guy serving coffee getting a bit cranky at some customer.

Schizophrenia aside, these disturbing experiences are very real and can be logged as objective evidence, though attempting to do so often negates their ability to manifest. Objective proof is that which can bring the experiences of one realm forcibly into another, bypassing the learning process and violating freewill.

But improbable experiences need not be negative. One can have a high frequency and attract experiences that are strangely positive with things just working out. Something as simple as getting nothing but green lights all the way to a destination is significant to the one experiencing it, but to all others just another car went by. If the discontinuity is extreme, one meets the strangest positive synchronicities and helpful characters.

Prime Numbers as Archetypal Realms

Another way to understand how realms coordinate is to think in terms of numbers. Since frequency is but a number, we can assign a unique number to any unique realm to represent the wavelength of its fundamental vibration.

Recall that phase lock is necessary for entities of one realm to interact with those of another – waves can only lock into alignment if they match up, even if only periodically. This periodic interval is simply the least common multiple of their various wavelengths. The least common multiple of several realm numbers represents the number of their collective realm. Through this collective realm, subsets can enter into mutual phase lock because they all “fit” into its number. For instance, realms 2 and 3 fit perfectly into collective realm 6. Realms 7, 9, and 11 fit perfectly into collective realm 693.

Higher realm numbers indicate lower probability and less harmony, greater discontinuity and contortion. How this meshes with strange experiences brought on by frequency discontinuities is illustrated as follows: consider a collective field formed by individuals in realms 2, 4, and 5. The collective field is 20, quite an ordinary number. Then let’s say someone with realm 53 enters. The collective field jumps to 1060 to accommodate all, indicating quite a high level of improbability and strangeness. This simply means that a far less probable future is attracted when there is abrasion between vibrations. It also illustrates why dissonance between individuals brings about improbable scenarios of confrontation and separation.

Notice that some numbers fit into others. Realm 13 fits into realm 39 for instance. Qualitatively speaking, this says that the latter is a subset of the first. Individuals in realm 13 can enter realm 39 but not vice versa. To illustrate, we in the third dimension may occupy realm 39 while hyperdimensional beings are native to realm 13 — they can choose to phase lock with us if they so desire, or remain beyond our range of perception. Lower realm number means shorter wavelength and higher frequency.

The realm number of physical existence itself must be astronomically large due to the participation of unfathomable varieties of conscious life. This of course means the vibration of physicality has the longest wavelength and the lowest frequency. Physical existence is the ultimate subset of all realms. It is the arena through which beings can choose to engage in mutual causal interaction. The collective realm of all consciousness in this universe may be large, but it is not infinite. So the frequency of physicality is infinitesimal but not identically zero, hence the existence of zero point energy.

Prime numbers (1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, etc…) are only divisible by 1 and themselves. Obviously, realms with prime number wavelengths are the most fundamental realms. They are the primary ones, all other realms are subordinate subsets. Prime numbers therefore relate to the “eigen frequencies” of Creation. Each prime number represents a single universal archetype whose harmonic multiples generate the various realms and probable futures associated with that archetype. For instance, if 3 is the fundamental realm of joy, then realms 3, 6, 9, 12, etc… are realms where joy is the fundamental keynote of vibration, though each realm encompasses a different expression of joy that gets more distorted with higher realm numbers.

The above is simplified. Realistically speaking, we as individuals have a spectrum of frequencies and thus a spectrum of realm numbers defining our personal realm. Prime number components represent lessons we have fully mastered, while non-prime components are those we have yet to learn. Learning is cyclical, each archetype revisited with greater clarity and accuracy than before.

The grand cycle of spiritual evolution starts with the highest realm number and converges upon the lowest. Lowest prime is the Creator. Highest prime is the demiurge Ormethion who stirs at the threshold of oblivion. Realm 1 vibrates with the archetype of infinite love; it is home of the Prime Creator. It is the primary realm; all others are subsets. Just as 1 divides into all, so does the Creator preside over all.

The Shift

The world is now experiencing a parting of ways between sectors of the population no longer resonating with each other. It is a realm split, a cleaving of collective fields into several smaller ones.

Experiential catalysts are pushing people off the fence, forcing them to discover who they truly are and what they stand for. Their soul vibrations are purifying and intensifying, bringing a retreat from the superfluous and a return to destiny.

What was once an emulsified mixture of diverse realms is separating into layers, and when the cup tilts it will be the lowest density layers that spill down the drain. The polarization phenomenon begins with mutual disinterest between individuals of uncommon paths. There may be confrontation and separation, or circumstance may simply bring a gentle parting of ways. But as time goes on and people gather into their most harmonious collective realms, the chasm between these realms will run so deep that eventually even the collective sharing of perception and experience will be severed. The learning requirements of each collective realm may become so mutually contradictory that they can no longer share the same space, the same timeline, the same density. This would entail a timeline split, each major realm following a different trajectory into the future that best accommodates the collective learning needs of its inhabitants. What tilts the cup remains to be seen.

Frequency Anchors

Of course not all is predestined. There are chaotic factors left to freewill. Some hyperdimensional forces aware of the impending shift are counting on mass frequency suppression to lock mankind into a probable future where these forces reap maximum energy harvest and retain control, whether in this density or the next. This may involve anything from mass loss of life to genetic assimilation and spiritual enslavement. A collective choice to elect such a scenario would acquiesce sufficient freewill to give such forces free reign to rewrite history in order to expand and solidify control in the present and future. To an extent this has already occurred and the world as we know it today is the end result of the most recent timeline revision. And yet time marches on and the “final” future is still open.

This brings us to what we as individuals can do. The wiser sources say we should simply be ourselves, remember who we are and radiate the essence of our soul. Indeed, we are frequency anchors. The vibration we hold determines the realm we establish, and our realm contributes to the collective realm. There are frequencies of suppression and frequencies of liberation. By exultantly living from your heart you not only set an example for others, you also help lift the heaviness of the local and global collective realm. Nothing lifts gravity like levity and love. This assists those who would otherwise be subconsciously crushed by the prevailing low frequency fields. It is commendable to take action and do something when called, but in the meantime simply hanging onto your center is enough. This sets you on the high path beyond the reach and sight of darker elements and clears the path for others to come with you. Keep your poise through the turbulence and cling tightly onto your mast when the sirens beckon you overboard. Shine as a lighthouse amidst the fog.

Resources

For additional information on realm dynamics, please read The 33 Arks of Soul Resonance by the Nexus Seven and research the Cassiopaean Transcripts regarding the terms “realm”, “FRV”, “frequency resonance vibration”, “frequency of light”, and “frequency resonance envelope”.

Change Log

v0.2 – June 30, 2005: added paragraph on “strangeness for the sake of strangeness” in the section Realm Breech.

SPIRITUAL HUNGER - Our Quest for Psycho-Spiritual Freedom - Part Two

2010-02-27T13:38:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/SPIRITUAL-HUNGER--Our-Que-by-Mariangela-Pino-La-100207-53.html

February 12, 2010
By Mariangela Pino Landau
Our Quest for Psycho-spiritual Freedom,
Authentic Sacredness & Profound Connection

Part Two

Installment two in this seven-part article series will address the pervasive spiritual hunger in our world by making a case for the necessity of unveiling fundamental truths about the design and framework of our current Earth existence.

To uncover the veiled truths and obtain answers to questions like is there something wrong with the way in which current Earth existence is designed Let's reference the film, The Matrix, written and directed by Larry and Andy Wachowski and work with it as a modern myth.

We have many misconceptions about myths, mostly because they have been demeaned and labeled as fables or fairy tales, when in actuality myths are the product of revelation. We tend to regard revelation as something achieved from arduous study. However, it is most often the fruit of an openhearted contemplative desire to uncover truth. Furthermore, myths work with information that is encoded. The codes come in the form of symbols, metaphors, and allegories. In many ways, an allegory is an extended metaphor in which objects, persons and actions in the narrative are equated with underlying moral, social, religious or political significance and characters are often personifications of abstract ideas, like charity, greed or envy. Myths are parables and parables are stories containing profound teachings with two meanings, a literal meaning and a symbolic meaning. Myths therefore deliver implicit messages. Because it is our right and responsibility to decipher encoded messages, the study of myths is a search for information.

Let's consider that The Matrix is an encoded myth or parable, the product of revelation describing indispensible, rudimentary truths about the design and framework of our Earth existence. The word "matrix" is synonymous with a surrounding substance or prevailing conditions of a milieu.

The basic premise of The Matrix is that the world is not objectively real but rather a computer simulation or virtual reality (the matrix), a complex virtual reality wired into human minds by a species of artificial intelligence (aka/machines). The species, who emerged victorious over humans after fighting a war for generations that virtually destroyed the world, have taken over and done two things: they have used human's technological expertise to create a computer simulation and have bred humans for use as fuel. Millions of humans sleep within pods attached to vast, complex structures while their bio-energy is drained to fuel the machine world. While asleep, the virtual reality (the matrix) is inputted into the minds of humans to keep them occupied. Morpheus (whose name means from Merriam-Webster "the God of Dreams') describes what took place - "they built a prison out of our past, wired it to our brains and turned us into slaves."

Morpheus is a member of a small colony of humans who have managed to survive and remain independent from the machines in a location below Earth's surface, called Zion. Their prophecy includes a messiah ("the One") who will aid in their triumph over the matrix, restoring human dominion to the world. A woman named Trinity leads the foretold messiah, an extremely talented computer hacker named Neo (an anagram for "the One"), to Morpheus who is convinced that Neo is "the One". As part of an invitation to extract Neo from his enslaved existence, Morpheus offers Neo two options: the red pill or the blue pill. The choice of pills illustrates our right to choose between truth and illusion or ignorance. The red pill will answer the question "what is the matrix?", a question that can be answered only by removing Neo from it. On the contrary, the blue pill will ensure that his life or illusion of life will go on as before. As Neo reaches for the red pill, Morpheus warns him "remember, all I'm offering is the truth. Nothing more." Once extracted, Neo awakens to the real world, a ravaged wasteland where most of humanity is held captive by the machines that live off their bio-energy and imprison their minds. "The Matrix is everywhere," Morpheus informs Neo. "It's all around us, even here in this room. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth."

The species or machines have the capacity to shape shift, inhabiting physical form as sinister agents. As a rebel against the machines, Neo must return to the Matrix and confront the agents who are devoted to obliterating the entire human rebellion. Neo's training for his return to the Matrix is a type of technical/digital meditation. Just as meditative practices are intended to transform one's perception and experience of reality, the software utilized in Neo's training produces a transformation of his mind. However, Morpheus and his team can only give Neo tools to embrace his identity and fulfill his destiny. He must complete his own rite of passage for himself.

One of the rebel group members eventually betrays Morpheus and Neo to the machine agents, resulting in Morpheus' capture. Neo rescues Morpheus, battles the virtual agents, is killed and resurrected and is finally able to conquer the Matrix. His final words - "I know you're real proud of this world you've built, the way it works, all the nice little rules and such, but I've got some bad news"I've decided to make a few changes" are a warning to the entity controlling the Matrix.

The choice between the red and blue pill entreats us to grapple with the question: is truth worth pursuing? Taking the red pill represents the risk and discomfort that comes with freedom. Why should we choose to pursue truth, particularly if we either believe we already know the truth or we are doing well under the current system? Besides, by accepting what we are told, our experience of life can seem easier. In addition, there is a social pressure in nearly all cultures on Earth to fit in, and for many, questioning the status quo bears the danger of ostracism and persecution. Furthermore, how do we know that the status quo is not the truth? Within the system of the matrix, one has a path to follow and this removes much of the risk and discomfort experienced by a trailblazer.

Why go anywhere else when the matrix will provide us with everything? Why risk our current beliefs for the promise of truth even if it brings freedom? The red pill is an unknown quantity, and although we are told that it can help us uncover the truth, by taking it we risk trading our reality for something we've never experienced. In the film, Morpheus says to Neo, "you have to understand that many people are not ready to be unplugged, and many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it."

If the arguments for the blue pill are so numerous and compelling, why take the red pill? First of all, because not risking the freedom that truth brings is tantamount to mere existence, and mere existence reduces humans to the level of useful objects divorced from their true purpose. Secondly, questioning our selves and our experiences is fundamental to the human condition. Children ask a seemingly never-ending stream of questions from early age, and it is only with education and socialization that many stop asking questions.

I believe that in the undercurrent, beneath either fleeting change or quotients of change that almost satisfy; below the temporary gratification garnered from the voluminous quantities of information this spiritual renaissance constantly delivers; beneath the excitement and hope accompanying the history of sixty years of paranormal experiences; under the waves of repeated opportunities for rapid spiritual awakening that we ride in expectant seeking, our hunger for a clear, resounding experience of truth, for unadorned and unambiguous seeds of unequivocal new beginnings drives us to courageously uncover and face whatever has been shrouded in a conspiratorial mystery so that, at last, we might be released, liberated and infused with glory.

I believe that we, the ordinary people, are ready to take extraordinary steps in the direction of re-examining the condition of our current Earth reality. I believe we are ready to accept that we are living in a matrix and most of us, like nearly all the humans in the film, don't know it. We are the unwittingly compliant servants of forces we want to pretend do not exist.

Although our world is not in literal danger of being taken over by sentient machines, this myth beseechingly challenges us to ask how are we programmed? What aspects of our reality are artificially constructed? In what ways are we enslaved within a conceptual prison? For example, aren't we raised/programmed to like certain things and dislike others? Aren't we prodded and manipulated, from early childhood, not only to define ourselves according to our material wealth, the products we own, the sports we watch, the things we've accomplished, the "influential' circles within which we travel, but also to become addicted to these forms of materialistic capitalism? Multi-national corporate and political structures rule our lives by assuring us that they have it under control and that as long as we follow the right path (their path), think the right thoughts and buy the right products, we'll be rewarded. These powers turn our innate desire to belong to something into a twisted campaign to propagandize and promote products that enslave us. This is evident in the popular phrase used by businesses - "think outside the box". Here again, the powers pose a deceptively encouraging offer to escape the control of the matrix. However, those in control are clever. By offering us the illusion of freedom, they use our desire to break out as a way to actually keep us inside. The matrix is apparent also in the illusion that we have a choice in who is governing us. The Democratic and Republican parties are so similar that choosing between them amounts to no real choice at all, exemplifying an essential element of the matrix metaphor "Give people the illusion of self-determination and they will remain under control."

For many of us, it might feel relatively easy to accept that the matrix governs the design and framework of Earth's political and social systems, economic constructs and most religious doctrines. For some of us, it might feel relatively easy to accept that the matrix also exists in our New Age spiritual systems. But what if the matrix governs the larger context? What if the matrix exists in all dimensions emanating from the Earth? What if the Source, the creative wellspring at the center of all that is, needs us not only to re-examine the condition of our current Earth reality and accept that we are living in a matrix, but also to consider that there are multi-dimensional beings who designed and maintain a larger matrix, whose intent is to keep us ignorant, distracted and divided as a way of hindering both our individual and collective spiritual evolution? What if?

I am neither suggesting that we toss out all the tenets of our current spiritual systems nor that we completely abandon our current spiritual practices. I am, however, challenging us to take the red pill so that we might uncover more and more threads in the tapestry of truth. Considering unveiled truths doesn't invalidate our previous quests, diminish our discoveries or reduce to folly the time we've invested in them. Every step we've taken and every truth we've uncovered until now has carved pathways to greater receptivity and more profound revelation.

Throughout human existence most who have questioned and inquired have been ordinary people who have been motivated to open their consciousness because they genuinely yearned to explore uncommon knowledge about their origins and to re-examine reality as they knew it. It is not true that only a select few with exceptional, advanced perception have the ability to decipher and interpret spiritual complexities. From long before the dawn of recorded history, our yearning for answers to such questions as who are we, how and by whom were we created, why are we here, what lies beyond the material world, why is there so much suffering and what occurs when we die, has prevailed. Now, more than at any other time, we are being summoned to take the red pill so that we might be released from any and all conspiratorial shrouds in order to sow the seeds of unequivocal new beginnings.

Let's conclude with words of Frances Moore Lappé from Time for Progressives to Grow Up:

We've lived so long under the spell of hierarchy--from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses--that only recently have we awakened to see not only that "regular" citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high."

2010 All Rights Reserved

SPIRITUAL HUNGER Our Quest for Psycho-Spiritual Freedom - Part One

2010-02-27T13:37:00.001-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/SPIRITUAL-HUNGER-Our-Ques-by-Mariangela-Pino-La-100207-931.html

February 10, 2010
By Mariangela Pino Landau
Part One

This seven-part article series will address the pervasive spiritual hunger in our world, offer avenues for assuaging that ache, and outline steps to take toward psycho-spiritual freedom, authentic sacredness and profound connection. Several parts will include insights about theories, prophecies and predictions associated with the 12/21/2012 date. However, prior to addressing the popular topic of 12/21/2012, it is imperative that we first examine the design and framework of our current earth reality. For it is from within this framework that all theories, prophecies and predictions emerge.

We are in the midst of a spiritual renaissance. This reawakening includes the instantaneous availability of voluminous quantities of information through various media vehicles. Over the past sixty years, ordinary people have reported paranormal experiences with unparalleled frequency and inquisitive fervor. These accounts describe such phenomena as repeated intuitive hunches, ESP, astral projection, flashes of light, near-death and out-of-body experiences, angelic visitations and interventions, incidences of spontaneous automatic writing and channeling, UFO sightings, unprompted past-life recall, the appearance of crop circles, spirit photography, glimpses of intricate worlds, telekinesis, telepathy, etc.

Since the Harmonic Convergence of 1987, metaphysics has indeed gone mainstream and doorways have opened that invite us to reevaluate our previous perspectives on the nature of divinity, our origins, purpose and power. We have been riding waves of repeated opportunities for rapid spiritual awakening.

Nevertheless, we hunger for a clear, resounding experience of truth and a palpable, visceral connection to our authentic selves and all of creation. Some of us are stuck in seas of emotional paralysis; some wander in deserts of spiritual bewilderment; some are engulfed in overwhelm generated from an imbalanced focus on material acquisitions; and others are inundated by the grip of alienation shaped by distorted versions of power and success.

With so many conditions shaping our conscious minds cultural norms, ethnic origins, language and symbol systems, religious traditions and practices, stages of emotional development and integration as well as the range of any individual's level of trust, openness and belief - where do we go for relief, revelation and deliverance? Religions encourage us to supplicate ourselves to please lords and gods, to appeal for what we want, atone for our sins, and plead for forgiveness. Some self-help systems weave spiritual tenets, business principles, motivational speaking techniques with aspects of quantum physics for the purpose of equipping people with the tools needed to increase their accomplishments and attract to them the life they desire, while a number of new age philosophies promote enduring our circumstances because of their misrepresentation of karmic debt or earth school lessons.

Meanwhile, our hunger for truth, freedom, sacredness and connection disturbs and drives us. Many of us intuit that substantial aspects of core truths about humanity are shrouded in some kind of conspiratorial mystery and are, therefore, unavailable to us.

As part of our experience of earth life, each of us has uttered - in whispers of despair or groans of anguish - one or more of these searching questions: Where did I come from? What is my purpose? Who is my creator? What is the nature of divinity? What are the origins of our current earth reality? What do I believe? Whom do I trust? How can I recognize threads of truth? Some of us have mused as to why there is a veil that shrouds our conscious knowing and dilutes our desire for self-sourcing and co-creative spiritual freedom?

There are fables passed down that speak of the time in our mother's wombs when the veil doesn't exist and during which we remember all the wisdom of the universe. But many of these tales end by narrating that at birth our Guardian Angel gives us a sharp blow that causes us to forget everything we've learned!

So, somehow, we arrive in an incarnational experience unable to remember the truth about our celestial origin and clueless about what we came here to do. In short, we are programmed to forget. After eons of forgetting, we believe it is our nature to forget. We forget to the extent that we forget that we've forgotten.

Among the questions that most need asking include - Who designed this scenario and why? Who is invested in us entering our 3-D incarnational Earth experience having forgotten the truth about our origins, stripped of our essence raiments? With the designer of this scenario at the helm, our sense about our true nature is reduced to a dim light haphazardly flickering as we journey though duress-dominated wastelands, governed by invisible Being(s) to whom we are taught to defer. The veil is not as mysterious as it is portrayed; rather it is a function of diminished perception born of an imprinted belief in our unworthiness. These factors, coupled with the portrayal of God as either a religious relic or a spiritual senior officer, have left us spiritually impoverished.

Clearly, a paradigm shift is upon us. My use of the term "paradigm" is synonymous with an established way of being according to traditional standards, patterns or precedents that one follows. Paradigm shifts are characterized by leaps in understanding and expansions in consciousness, whereby profound evolutionary changes take place. Paradigm shifts have occurred in civilizations like Pangaea, Lemuria, Atlantis, Sumeria, Egypt, the Indus Valley, Peru, Chaco Canyon, etc.

All paradigm shifts challenge us to awaken to the fact that there is a difference between belief and truth and to overthrow previous assumptions that don't contribute to evolution. And all paradigm shifts are evidence that assumptions can be overthrown. In fact, history verifies that what once seemed impossible not only found its way into the mainstream, but also acquired impeccable credentials. We've become accustomed to feeling anxious and rigid in the face of change and therefore we tend to hold onto familiar beliefs. But familiar beliefs reinforce the repetition of patterns, and this paradigm shift summons us to accept that we cannot afford to remain stuck in repetitious patterns. Because of this directive, the first place to go in our quest to satiate our hunger for psycho-spiritual freedom, authentic sacredness and profound connection is truth.

Truth is revelation and deliverance. However, in order to reveal truth, we must first be willing to accept that fundamental information about the design and framework of our current Earth existence is veiled. In part two, to uncover the veiled truths about this design and framework and obtain answers to questions such as is there something wrong with the way in which current Earth existence is designed, I will reference the film, The Matrix, written and directed by Larry and Andy Wachowski and work with it as a modern myth. In part three of this series, I will address the question - who designed the current Earth reality scenario and why.

Unveiling truth is our right and our responsibility. The truth will deliver us; to be delivered is to be released, liberated and infused with glory. And glory means to rise.

Energy Orbs

2010-02-18T12:23:00.001-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfzWbYZuY7w&feature=related

Recently at the ashram the phenomenon of Energy Orbs has become more and more visable.These beautiful representations of planetary energy are becoming manifest in response to the ever-growing level...

Christians Helped Bring Down Rome, Fundamentalists Helping to Bring Down America

2010-02-17T13:44:00.001-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Christians-Helped-Bring-Do-by-Grant-Lawrence-100214-620.html

February 16, 2010
By Grant Lawrence

A recent article by Harvey Wasserman, "Our Founders Were NOT Fundamentalists" that appeared in OpEd News got me to thinking.

The same people who tout that the American Founding Fathers were Fundamentalist Christians are also the same ones that make the erroneous argument that the Roman Empire fell because it wasn't Christian enough.

But in reality, the Roman Empire fell for a variety of reasons, including over expansion and inflation, deepening wealth disparity and societal division, political incompetence, invasions, and a greater acceptance of Christianity.

That's right, one of the reasons Rome fell was because of its adoption of Christianity.

So we can see that the American empire is facing a lot of these same problems today. But one thing that won't save America is Christianity, or at least it didn't save the Roman Empire.

According to Edward Gibbon in "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire"

....Edward Gibbon famously placed the blame on a loss of civic virtue among the Roman citizens. They gradually entrusted the role of defending the Empire to barbarian mercenaries who eventually turned on them. Gibbon considered that Christianity had contributed to this, making the populace less interested in the worldly here-and-now and more willing to wait for the rewards of heaven. "The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight," he wrote. "In discussing Barbarism and Christianity I have actually been discussing the Fall of Rome....." Source: Wikipedia.

We see this same mentality today. When Fundamentalist Christians in America are faced with overwhelming political and economic crisis and the possibility of environmental destruction they immediately get a glassy and wide eyed look and start praising the rapture.

A recent article reported that Americans are now getting ready for the End of the World. So instead of Americans getting busy making real change to make a real difference, they excitedly prepare for the end. (See The Book of Revelation: Bad News for Those Waiting for End Times)

I know we have all experienced it. The Fundamentalists start talking about God's Judgment and End Times with a great big smile on their faces as they contemplate the final 'hell fire' punishment of nearly everyone but them.

Unbelievably, Fundamentalist Christians do an equivalent of putting their heads in the sand by turning their thoughts to a fictional Judgment Day Armageddon. They block any rational thought on the subject and any meaningful action to help bring about real societal solutions. In reality, Fundamentalists of today, just like the Christians of the Roman Empire, are helping to bring about the end of the American Empire by engaging in fictional denials.

So, perhaps it was a good thing that Christianity helped bring about the decline and eventual end of the Roman Empire. It was a pretty lousy Empire that did a lot of subjugating and brutalizing. Perhaps it will also be a good thing that Fundamentalist Christians of today help bring about the end of the American Empire.

Still, I like the idea of people rationally thinking about societal problems and then setting about to work for just and humane solutions. It seems to me we can help transform the American Empire into a working Republic that promotes democratic ideals and practices democratic economics and social principles.

Or we can choose to get all glassy and wide eyed and think about the tremendous suffering people are going to have to face for being ignorant, selfish, and greedy.

But God will not be the one to bring down the hell and damnation on America. Unfortunately, Americans are going to do that to themselves by closing their minds to the reality of what is and by not taking rational steps to what should be.

Exact replica of the 3rd Temple is being built to train Priests/Rabbis in Jerusalem

2010-02-16T14:08:00.000-08:00

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/203054-Exact-replica-of-the-3rd-Temple-is-being-built-to-train-Priests-Rabbis-in-Jerusalem

Israeli National News
Sun, 24 Jan 2010 02:08 EST

Jews in the town of Mitzpe Yericho are taking practical steps to prepare for the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem, by preparing descendents of Cohanim (priests) and Levites for service. At the Mitzpe Yericho school, Temple priest hopefuls learn exactly how to conduct the daily Temple service and offer the required sacrifices.

"Today is really a historical event for the Jewish people, organizer Levi Chazan said as another part of the school was completed. It is the beginning of the work for the Third Temple.

The school will include an exact replica of the Temple. The latest addition to the replica was the area in which priests offered wine and water libations. The water offering was traditionally given on the Sukkot holiday, which was celebrated last week.

Festivities accompanied the completion of another step in the school's construction. Among those present was Baruch Marzel, long-time Land of Israel activist and parliamentary aide to MK Michael Ben-Ari. The timing of the work on the school is particularly appropriate due to recent Muslim riots against Jewish visits to the Temple Mount, Marzel said.

Selective Brain Damage Modulates Human Spirituality

2010-02-12T10:58:00.000-08:00

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/178869.php

Cathleen Genova
Medical News Today
Thu, 11 Feb 2010

New research provides fascinating insight into brain changes that might underlie alterations in spiritual and religious attitudes. The study, published by Cell Press in the February 11 issue of the journal Neuron, explores the neural basis of spirituality by studying patients before and after surgery to remove a brain tumor.

Although it is well established that all behaviors and experiences, spiritual or otherwise, must originate in the brain, true empirical exploration of the neural underpinnings of spirituality has been challenging. However, recent advances in neuroscience have started to make the complex mental processes associated with religion and spirituality more accessible.

"Neuroimaging studies have linked activity within a large network in the brain that connects the frontal, parietal, and temporal cortexes with spiritual experiences, but information on the causative link between such a network and spirituality is lacking," explains lead study author, Dr. Cosimo Urgesi from the University of Udine in Italy.

Dr. Urgesi and colleagues were interested in making a direct link between brain activity and spirituality. They focused specifically on the personality trait called self-transcendence (ST), which is thought to be a measure of spiritual feeling, thinking, and behaviors in humans. ST reflects a decreased sense of self and an ability to identify one's self as an integral part of the universe as a whole.

The researchers combined analysis of ST scores obtained from brain tumor patients before and after they had surgery to remove their tumor, with advanced techniques for mapping the exact location of the brain lesions after surgery. "This approach allowed us to explore the possible changes of ST induced by specific brain lesions and the causative role played by frontal, temporal, and parietal structures in supporting interindividual differences in ST," says researcher Dr. Franco Fabbro from the University of Udine.

The group found that selective damage to the left and right posterior parietal regions induced a specific increase in ST. "Our symptom-lesion mapping study is the first demonstration of a causative link between brain functioning and ST," offers Dr. Urgesi. "Damage to posterior parietal areas induced unusually fast changes of a stable personality dimension related to transcendental self-referential awareness. Thus, dysfunctional parietal neural activity may underpin altered spiritual and religious attitudes and behaviors."

These results may even lead to new strategies for treating some forms of mental illness. "If a stable personality trait like ST can undergo fast changes as a consequence of brain lesions, it would indicate that at least some personality dimensions may be modified by influencing neural activity in specific areas," suggests Dr. Salvatore M. Aglioti from Sapienza University of Rome. "Perhaps novel approaches aimed at modulating neural activity might ultimately pave the way to new treatments of personality disorders."

The researchers include Cosimo Urgesi, Universita' di Udine, Udine, Italy, Istituto di Ricovero e Cura a Carattere Scientifico Eugenio Medea, Pordenone, Italy; Salvatore M. Aglioti, Sapienza Universita' di Roma, Roma, Italy, Istituto di Ricovero e Cura a Carattere Scientifico Fondazione S. Lucia, Roma, Italy; Miran Skrap, Azienda Ospedaliero-Universitaria Santa Maria della Misericordia, Udine, Italy; and Franco Fabbro, Universita' di Udine, Udine, Italy, Istituto di Ricovero e Cura a Carattere Scientifico Eugenio Medea, Pordenone, Italy.

The Weird World of Occult America -- How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation

2010-02-01T17:31:00.000-08:00

The Weird World of Occult America -- How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation
By Alexander Zaitchik, Killing the Buddha
January 28, 2010
http://www.alternet.org/story/145468/

If witch-burning Puritans are the original jocks of American history, then the mystics surrounding Johannes Kelpius are the first goths. While the rest of the British colonies were still dutifully worshipping their angry Christian god, Kelpius and his followers—who fled Austria to settle in Philadelphia during the late seventeenth-century—busied themselves with astrology, alchemy, Kabbalah, and other “dark arts” with tangled roots in the Italian Renaissance, the Rosicrucian Enlightenment, and various (often fabricated) antiquities. We meet Kelpius early in Mitch Horowitz’s Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation, an uneven but always interesting account of 400 years of New World Strange. Among the several misconceptions Horowitz seeks to dispel, the most foundational is the idea that Colonial America provided shelter only for persecuted Christian sects. Almost from the beginning, North America was also home to a fair number of those who, like Kelpius, had more arcane spiritual interests.

Horowitz never claims that these beliefs were as formative an influence as Christianity in the making of America, but after finishing his book, one can’t help but wonder if maybe Ouija boards don’t belong next to King James in every motel room. Horowitz ably chronicles how occult traditions have, over the centuries, deeply and consistently influenced the American mainstream—sometimes entering the mainstream themselves in the process. Many of the figures that populate Horowitz’s narrative will be unknown to the uninitiated, but their impact is illustrated by the frequent appearance of more familiar names. Mormonism’s founder Joseph Smith, after a childhood in the Hudson Valley’s famously heterodox “Burnt-over District,” was at the time of his death studying Hebrew and Kabbalah. Henry Ford was a fan of the New Thought leader Ralph Waldo Trine, and he often gave visitors copies of Trine’s In Tune With the Infinite. Frederick Douglass left open the possibility that a magic “hoodoo” root (not to be confused with “voodoo”) helped him secure victory against a cruel slave master.

One of the more surprising vignettes involves Henry Wallace, the New Deal figure best remembered today for his doomed third-party challenge to Harry Truman in 1948. As Horowitz shows, it wasn’t Wallace’s alleged ties to Communists that brought a premature end to his political career; it was his relationship with a shadowy Theosophist “guru” named Nicholas Roerich.

As often as not in Horowitz’s history, mysticism meant money. Occult America offers numerous examples of hucksters popularizing esoteric ideas to make a buck. Almost all did so by preaching variations on the profoundly American idea of “the power of positive thinking” (or, in the first formulation, “the power of affirmative thought”). It first came to prominence in Jacksonian America, when a Maine clockmaker named Phineas P. Quimby came to believe he had cured his tuberculosis simply by refusing to believe in it. Quimby’s insight, combined with the ideas of Mesmerists and Swedenborgians, gave birth to the movement known as New Thought. Almost a century later, an Idaho druggist named Frank Robinson would build on New Thought premises to found and grow the world’s eighth largest religion, Psychiana, largely by selling memberships (with a money-back guarantee) through mail-order magazine ads. Robinson’s paying adherents received lesson plans that mixed mind-healing, prayer, and good old-fashioned Emersonian self-reliance. Ernest Holmes would employ a similar model to build the still-extant Church of Religious Science. By the mid-twentieth-century, New Thought had been further mainstreamed and repackaged for mass consumption in the form of best-selling books by Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill, and—most famously—Norman Vincent Peale.

Among the forgotten stories Horowitz tells is the role the occult played in the progressive social movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The most famous nineteenth-century Theosophists, Spiritualists, and trance mediums preached a radically democratic view of religion, society, and individual empowerment that crossed barriers of gender, religion, and race. Many were active in the fight for women’s rights, the abolition of slavery, and desegregation. “Spiritualism has inaugurated the era of woman,” declared the Spiritualist suffragette Mary Fenn Love in 1853. Twenty years later, a trance medium named Victoria Woodhull became the nation’s first female presidential candidate, nominated by a coalition of suffragists, abolitionists, and religious free thinkers who counted a wide array of occultists in their number.

Horowitz believes that this historical partnership between the occult and progressive politics has been consistent up to the present. He convincingly knocks down the trendy idea that the Third Reich was an occult phenomenon. “However tantalizing some may find it to conceive of Hitler as a practitioner of black magic,” Horowitz writes, “it is fantasy.” It turns out Hitler had no more patience for ancient Vedic philosophy or Aryan mysticism than he did for Marxism. He just thought the Indian symbol of karma and rebirth looked good on uniforms.

If Occult America is hurt by anything, it is its own ambition. By trying to cover the grand sweep of American history in less than 300 pages, the book is inevitably dense and busy with characters, movements, and ideas constantly being introduced, sketched, and pulled away. There is a good reason that Catherine Albanese’s far more comprehensive work, A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion—which is changing the way scholars tell the history of American religion—runs nearly 650 pages. Without much of a chronological or thematic structure, Occult America often reads more like an encyclopedia than a narrative. (But an encyclopedia that’s missing a few pages: Where’s Wilhelm Reich? Robert Anton Wilson? L. Ron Hubbard?) Horowitz’s account of the Ouija board is fascinating, as is the story of Gandhi’s early involvement with Theosophy. But the book would have benefited from a shorter timeframe or a tighter thematic focus.

Because he is busy covering so much ground, Horowitz never really pauses to ask or explore the larger questions behind his history. Why have Americans been continually drawn to and inspired by this unruly family of philosophies? Why did Spiritualism sweep America, and then the globe, in the nineteenth century? As a veteran and respected voice for esoteric ideas, Horowitz understands their appeal better than most. But in Occult America, he settles for too little.

These ideas and movements have existed and continue to thrive, he writes, for the same reason as any religion: because they provide people with “some of the most moving and deeply affecting experiences of their lives.” It is an answer that is as simple as it is unassailable.

Have aeons of natural selection hardwired human beings to be religious?

2010-01-06T12:30:00.000-08:00

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/the_new_revelation/

Denyse O'Leary | Thursday, 31 December 2009
The new revelation

Have aeons of natural selection hardwired human beings to be religious?

The recent spate of articles and books purporting to explain religion without the idea that God exists and communicates with man has produced some interesting specimens. In an article under the intriguing title of "Satan, the great motivator", journalist Michael Fitzgerald reports that: "A pair of Harvard researchers recently examined 40 years of data from dozens of countries, trying to sort out the economic impact of religious beliefs or practices. They found that religion has a measurable effect on developing economies -- and the most powerful influence relates to how strongly people believe in hell."

Most likely, belief in hell correlates with the idea that one's actions matter in the long run. Fitzgerald outlines research on how religion aids social development, principally by creating greater levels of public trust. We learn, for example, that ultra-Orthodox Jews dominate New York’s diamond trade "because of levels of trust based on religion."

However, this leaves two important questions unanswered. In a religiously divided and intolerant society, religious-based trust covers only "true believers" -- those of a different religion are often treated with distrust and hostility. This is hardly a recipe for social development, or even social peace. In North America, religion increases trust because of the historically high level of tolerance as well as commitment.

For example, the millions who shop at the immensely popular discount chain WalMart probably don't know that in 1991 (the year before his death) founder Sam Walton gave $6 million, including an endowment of $3 million for annual awards to new church developments, to share the Christian faith. They would not have minded if Walton were an Orthodox Jew sending the money to Israeli hospitals or a devout Muslim helping to fund the travelling Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit. This is not due merely to heedless consumerism among the chain's predominantly lower middle class customers. Rather, their level of intergroup trust is high. Indeed, intergroup trust in North America is so high that it is sometimes abused, as when the nineteen 9/11 terrorists took advantage of the fact that most Americans did not distrust Muslims as such.

The other nagging question is, should we pursue religion for the sake of prosperity? You never read that in the Bible, quite the opposite. "Be on your guard against all kinds of greed," Christ said. "A man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions." If people want religion for prosperity, wouldn't it be organized hypocrisy, propped up by fear of hell? People who have a loving relationship with God do not fear hell.

Meanwhile, in the New York Times, Nicholas Wade has tried to reconcile people of faith to the claim that they are "hard-wired" to believe because Darwin's natural selection favours belief. Wade, a science reporter for The New York Times and the author of The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures, writes,

That religious behavior was favored by natural selection neither proves nor disproves the existence of gods. For believers, if one accepts that evolution has shaped the human body, why not the mind too? What evolution has done is to endow people with a genetic predisposition to learn the religion of their community, just as they are predisposed to learn its language. With both religion and language, it is culture, not genetics, that then supplies the content of what is learned.

In other words, it was genetic predisposition and culture, not revelation. Wade comforts his religious readers with the fact that some Darwinists entertain the idea of "group selection" -- long denounced by the majority of Darwinists, who favour the "selfish gene". If so, group cultural practices might favour a religious group:

... group selection has recently gained two powerful champions, the biologists David Sloan Wilson and Edward O. Wilson, who argued that two special circumstances in recent human evolution would have given group selection much more of an edge than usual. One is the highly egalitarian nature of hunter-gatherer societies, which makes everyone behave alike and gives individual altruists a better chance of passing on their genes. The other is intense warfare between groups, which enhances group-level selection in favor of community-benefiting behaviors such as altruism and religion.

Well, David Sloan Wilson is an atheist and Edward O. Wilson wavers between atheism and deism -- in the meantime, he patronizes people of faith by inventing theories about how religion evolved: "Humans have an innate tendency to form religious belief. It has a lot of beneficial influences. It helps people adjust to their mortality and it binds communities tightly together . . . to have evolved such a powerful tendency and to hold it unto death, that looks like a biological adaptation."

It looks like he is the diplomatic wing, operating by suavity rather than stridency. But it is hard not to notice the arrogance and condescension these people feel for those who have come to the rational conclusion that God exists, based on the fine tuning of the universe, the design of life, and their own encounters with God, to say nothing of changed lives.

E.O. Wilson has been trying to find "common ground" with Christians in recent years. But what common ground does Wilson hope for? To him, there is no revelation, and faith does not arise from an encounter with God. Rather, we have an "innate tendency" to form beliefs -- just as a squirrel has an innate tendency to gather nuts in the fall and a spider has an innate tendency to eat her mate. Based on recent events in many nations, people of faith might better focus on maintaining or introducing freedom of thought, conscience, and belief. There is no common ground with evolutionary psychologists.

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

This Week in God

2009-12-28T17:03:00.000-08:00

This Week in God
By Steve Benen, Washington Monthly
Posted on December 26, 2009, Printed on December 28, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/144812/

In the last TWIG edition until the new year, the God Machine took note of E.J. Dionne Jr.'s column this week on the ways in which religion and politics didn't cause as big a stir as in previous years.

It is 2009's quiet story -- quiet because it's about what didn't happen, which can be as important as what did.

In this highly partisan year, we did not see a sharpening of the battles over religion and culture.

Yes, we continued to fight over gay marriage, and arguments about abortion were a feature of the health-care debate. But what's more striking is that other issues -- notably economics and the role of government -- trumped culture and religion in the public square. The culture wars went into recession along with the economy.

The most important transformation occurred on the right end of politics. For now, the loudest and most activist sections of the conservative cause are not its religious voices but the mostly secular, anti-government tea party activists.

It's important not to overstate the case. Clearly, the religious right still exists, and conservative activists still rely on matters of faith to deny gay Americans basic civil rights and to restrict American women's reproductive rights. Sen. Ben Nelson's (D-Neb.) often incoherent demands about indirect abortion funding very nearly killed health care reform.

But overall, Dionne's analysis sounds right. The U.S. embrace of the culture war becomes more notable when the country is in otherwise fine shape. That hasn't been the case for several years, and as a result, even Republicans are shifting their attention away from a religio-political agenda. Note, when GOP leaders started a rebranding effort, they ignored culture-war issues entirely, and when Republicans talk about trying to retake Congress, it's not because they intend to work on school prayer and Ten Commandments displays. The religious right's threats no longer seem to scare GOP leaders as they once did, giving the movement less influence.

It prompted Dionne to conclude that "the cultural and religious conflicts that have persisted were debated at a lower volume" this year. God bless us, everyone, indeed.

Also from the God Machine this week:

* A woman jumped a barrier and knocked down Pope Benedict XVI before he delivered his traditional Christmas Day greetings, raising a new round of questions about the Vatican's security procedures.

* Former President Jimmy Carter hopes to make amends with the Jewish community, and issued an apology this week. "We must not permit criticisms for improvement to stigmatize Israel," Carter said in the letter. "As I would have noted at Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, but which is appropriate at any time of the year, I offer an Al Het [a prayer said on Yom Kippur] for any words or deeds of mine that may have done so."

* Former Sen. John Danforth (R) of Missouri, who is also an ordained Episcopal priest, has created a new Center on Religion & Politics at Washington University. "Chancellor Mark Wrighton said the center, which will open in January, would seek to deepen the academic understanding of the connections between religion and politics and encourage civil discourse in which people 'in a respectful society' can hold different views."

* And I was pleased to see that L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican's newspaper, considers "The Simpsons" acceptable entertainment. "Homer finds in God his last refuge, even though he sometimes gets His name sensationally wrong," L'Osservatore said. "But these are just minor mistakes, after all, the two know each other well."

Jesus Hated War -- Why Do Christians Love It So Much?

2009-12-28T17:01:00.000-08:00

Jesus Hated War -- Why Do Christians Love It So Much?
By Gary G. Kohls, Consortium News
December 28, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/144818/

When Gulf War I ended (during George Bush the Elder’s presidency), General Norman Schwartzkopf, the field commander, triumphantly proclaimed, “God must have been on our side!”

Such statements aren’t unusual for glory-seeking dictators, kings, princes, presidents and generals, regardless of what religion justified their particular war, but I cringed when I heard this self-professed Christian warrior claim God’s blessings on the war that made him famous.

In his memoir, It Doesn’t Take A Hero, Schwartzkopf claimed that he kept a Bible at his bedside throughout the war.

I cringed knowing that, according to the biblical Jesus, God is never on the side of the victors. The God of love that Jesus revealed was on the side of the victims, the oppressed, the starving, the sick, the naked, the meek who were victimized by unjust power.

Jesus’s God would not be on the side of the war-makers, but on the side of the peacemakers, the compassionate and long-suffering ones who work to prevent killing and to relieve the suffering of the victims of war.

I cringed when I heard Schwartzkopf claim God’s blessings on the carnage that he helped orchestrate because similar claims have been used to rationalize killing throughout history, from ancient times to some of the darkest days of the modern era.

As the German Nazis went about their systematic purging of any and all leftist or anti-fascist groups – Jews, socialists, homosexuals, liberals, communists, trade unionists and conscientious objectors to war – they insisted that God was on their side, too.

Adolf Hitler claimed that he was doing God’s will. German soldiers, both in WWI and WWII, went into battle with the words “Gott Mit Uns” (God With Us) inscribed on their belt buckles.

Invoking “Gott Mit Uns” didn’t work just on the uneducated, brain-washable and obedient citizens and conscripted soldiers of Germany. The slogan also convinced most of the educated Protestant and Catholic clergymen to comfortably proclaim from their pulpits that Hitler’s wars were endorsed by the Christian God, and therefore every military action could be justified and carried out without guilt.

Most Germans wanted to believe that Hitler’s wars had to be fought for some higher purpose, a master plan that they trusted would benefit them all by creating “Lebensraum” (living space), which would mean security for the pure Aryan race.

Aggression as Defensive

In the Nazis’ up-is-down world, the propagandists convinced average Germans that Hitler’s wars were purely defensive (“the sword has been forced into our hands”). The terrorizing of foreigners in a neighboring country, in order to steal their land, was the patriotic thing to do.

Convincing the German public to engage in murder for the state took a lot of diligent work from Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment.

Goebbels had to persuade the Germans that their neighbor’s land and oil and mineral resources could legitimately be taken by any means necessary in order to realize the Fuhrer’s dream of the “Thousand-year Reich,” where perpetual peace for the privileged German people would finally be realized.

The “collateral damage” done to the innocent civilian-victims of Europe and the Soviet Union, was felt to be unavoidable, and the “disappearances” of the non-Aryan “Untermenschen," mentioned above, was orchestrated with conscienceless bureaucratic efficiency.

Bishops, priests and pastors, most of whom had taken an oath of allegiance to Hitler, told their parishioners that it was their Christian duty to join the military and fight and kill for the Fuhrer.

Resentment also played an important role in the swastika-waving terror. Most of the street-fighting militias loyal to the Nazi party’s politics were WWI veterans who had been rendered unemployable by years of horrific trench warfare experiences.

They were justifiably angry about their joblessness, poverty, physical disabilities, mental ill health, traumatic brain injuries, hunger, all worsened by the hyperinflation and impoverishment that go hand in hand with the huge costs of having standing armies and fighting perpetual wars.

Many of these unemployed veterans rushed to join the militia groups for the food, shelter and camaraderie, perhaps not realizing that they were helping to create the chaos that would destroy the liberal democratic Weimar republic, an action that would lead the world into another world war that would ultimately turn out to be suicidal for Germany.

Most German churches cooperated with, or at least did not vocally oppose, Hitler’s agenda. Pastors cheered the Fuhrer from swastika-draped pulpits or they stood by silently as the concentration camps and prisons filled with those suspected by the Gestapo of not being supportive of the regime.

All efforts to resist came too late, for the people who objected to the dictatorship were leaderless and unschooled in any nonviolent resistance actions. They had no Gandhi or Martin Luther King and were totally unprepared to act en masse.

Blessed Wars

Though Hitler’s Nazi regime represented an exceptional form of horror in the industrialized slaughter committed during the Holocaust and related mass killings, it must be acknowledged that other countries, including the United States, have undertaken actions that have destroyed other populations and cultures, often with the blessings of religious leaders.

In the last two decades, the two Bush administrations mounted wars in the Persian Gulf region that had the consent (or acquiescence) of the majority of U.S. church leaders, with prayers from Billy Graham in the White House the night before the invasions began.

Virtually all Christian evangelical, conservative and many mainstream church leaders and their congregations were active supporters of the Bush wars.

Only four American Catholic bishops voted in opposition to Bush the Elder’s Gulf War I (at an annual conference of U.S. Catholic bishops). In Gulf War II, Pope John Paul II declared that the war was contrary to the teachings of Jesus, but most American Catholic leaders and parishioners ignored the pontiff’s warnings and supported the war. Most American Protestants did the same.

Yet, General Schwartzkopf and both Presidents Bush are in “good” company when it comes to believing that God is on their side in war. All U.S. presidents and presidential candidates in recent memory, even President Obama, end their speeches with “May God Bless the United States of America,” the equivalent of the German military’s “Gott Mit Uns.”

My Veterans for Peace friends are of the opinion that modern war amounts to legally sanctioned, highly organized mass murder and that basic training is psychological rape with serious, often permanent consequences for everybody involved: the victims, bystanders and maybe especially the soldiers.

And today, the killing is not just done by soldiers on the ground who can see the “whites of their eyes.” War is now often done from a safe distance by the high-tech “soldiering” of high-altitude bombing, supersonic jet fighters, long-range missiles (many of them computer-guided from unmanned drones), and radioactive DU armor-piercing ordnance that will continue killing for many centuries into the future.

The victims of this kind of lopsided modern warfare (for which the human targets have no defense) regard these tactics as cowardly acts.

Bureaucracies of Death

These days, wars are started and perpetuated by a huge conglomeration of war profiteers: corporations (and their lobbyists), government bureaucracies (that obediently follow orders from above), the handlers of pro-war politicians and the financial underwriters of their campaigns, the ruling class, and the Department of War/Defense which has, as job # 1, the planning and orchestrating of current and future military conflicts, whether originating from real, imaginary or invented threats.

A major unasked question is “what should be the role of religion (specifically Christianity) in the starting and perpetuation of politically motivated wars?”

If war-makers mix religion and politics by invoking God’s blessings on the cannons and the cannon fodder, shouldn’t the churches, which are supposed to be the consciences of the nation, apply core Christian ethical principles to the war question and refuse to cooperate with the slaughter of fellow children of God?

Sadly, for the past 1,700 years, Christian churches have not done so. They have largely failed in their moral obligation to teach and live the Golden Rule and the Sermon on the Mount.

One only has to read the gruesome history of the many “holy wars” and atrocities committed in the history of Christendom, including the Crusades, the Inquisitions, the wars of the Reformation and counter-Reformation, the various genocides including the Nazi Holocaust.

While the churches have played key roles in the promotion and cover-ups of these brutalities, the churches have not been alone. Whitewashes and excuses have often come from politicians, pundits, “embedded” journalists and co-opted history-writers, especially the authors of high school textbooks.

Recall how, when military spokesmen try to explain away the deaths of non-combatants in these wars, they invoke the term “collateral damage” (the euphemism for the unintended killing and maiming of innocents in wartime) and quickly dismiss those deaths by spouting the unconvincing phrase that Schwartzkopf and all other apologists for war use: “we regret the loss of innocent life.”

And they piously mouth these equally insincere words: “our thoughts and prayers are with the families of the victims.” The same rote phraseology too often comes from the lips of religious leaders.

Christ’s Teachings

How can the legalized mass slaughter of war, often progressing to the point of genocide, be a part of a Christian tradition that started out with a small group of inspired, oppressed and impoverished peasants who were trying to live by the highly ethical, nonviolent teachings of their pacifist leader?

Interestingly, the active pacifism of the early Christian church did prove to be successful – and even practical. During the first few centuries of Christianity, enmity and eye-for-an-eye retaliation were rejected. The Golden Rule and the refusal to kill the enemy were actually taught in the church.

Gospel non-violence was the norm, so the professed enemies of those communities of faith were not provoked to retaliation because there was nothing against which to retaliate. Rather, enemies were befriended, prayed for, fed, nourished and embraced as neighbors – potential friends who needed understanding and mercy.

The church survived the persecutions of those early years and thrived, largely because of its commitment to the nonviolence of Jesus. It was not until the church was co-opted by the Emperor Constantine in the early 4th Century that power and wealth changed the priorities of church leaders.

Today however, it is obvious that the vast majority of professed Christians have been misled, intentionally or unintentionally, into believing that they can immerse themselves in un-Christ-like realities like war and killing and somehow still be following the gentle Jesus.

Today, American Christianity is at risk of going the way of the pro-war “Christianity” of pre-Nazi and Nazi Germany, which may in the long run discredit the faith much the way Christianity lost credibility among many Germans because their churches and church leaders facilitated those destructive wars.

The vast majority of Germans before World War II were baptized members of a Christian church, but since WWII ended church membership has fallen sharply and the number of Germans attending weekly worship services is now estimated to be in the single digits.

The psychological and spiritual wounding of the soldiers and their families in the two world wars stripped the German churches of their moral standing.

Those PTSD-afflicted ex-church-going combat veterans who lost their faith in the wars, along with their traumatized families, found out much too late that they had not been warned by the very institutions that theoretically should have courageously and faithfully taken on the heavy responsibility to teach private and public morality.

Many Germans who survived the wars felt betrayed by their churches and therefore had no inclination to try to reclaim their lost faith. The churches sank toward irrelevancy.

The world would have been far better off if the Christian leaders of the world had been faithful to the ethical teachings of the gospels and quit making blasphemous appeals to God on behalf of war, whether with those “Gott Mit Uns” belt buckles or the “God Bless America” political sloganeering.

The Old Testament and the War Crime in Gaza

2009-12-23T14:41:00.000-08:00

http://www.gilad.co.uk/writings/the-old-testament-and-the-war-crime-in-gaza-by-gilad-atzmon.html

The Old Testament and the War Crime in Gaza
Gilad Atzmon
GiladAtzmon.html
Thu, 08 Jan 2009 12:12 EST

To mark one year to the Israeli Christmas Massacre I re-post a text I wrote in early January 2009.

"You will chase your enemies, and they shall fall by the sword before you. Five of you shall chase a hundred, and a hundred of you shall put ten thousand to flight; your enemies shall fall by the sword before you."Leviticus, Chapter 26, verses 7-9

"When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations...then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them and show them no mercy."Deuteronomy 7:1-2,

"...do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them...as the Lord your God has commanded you..." Deuteronomy 20:16

There is not much doubt amongst Biblical scholars that the Hebrew Bible contains some highly charged non-ethical suggestions, some of which are no less than a call for a genocide. Biblical scholar Raymund Schwagerhas found in the Old Testament 600 passages of explicit violence, 1000 descriptive verses of God's own violent actions of punishment, 100 passages where God expressly commands others to kill people. Apparently, violence is the most often mentioned activity in the Hebrew Bible.

As devastating as it may be, the Hebrew Bible saturation with violence and extermination of others may throw some light over the horrifying genocide conducted in Gaza by the Jewish state. In broad daylight, the IDF was using the most lethal methods against civilians as if their main objective is to 'destroy' the Gazans while showing 'no mercy' whatsoever.

Interestingly enough, Israel regards itself as a secular state. Ehud Barak is not exactly a qualified Rabbi and Tzipi Livni is not a Rabbi's wife. Accordingly, we are entitled to assume that it isn't actually Judaism per se that directly transforms Israeli politicians and military leaders into war criminals. Moreover, early Zionists believed that within a national home Jews would become 'people like all other people', i.e., civilised and ethical.

In that very respect, Israeli reality is pretty peculiar. The Hebraic secular Jews may have managed to drop their God, most of them do not follow Judaic law, they are largely secular, and yet 94% of them interpret their Jewish identity as a genocidal mission. They have successfully managed to transform the Bible from being a spiritual text into a bloodsoaked land registry. They are there, in Zion i.e., Palestine, to invade the land and to lock up, starve and destroy its indigenous habitants.

Accordingly, it seems as if the artillery commanders and IAF pilots that erased northern Gaza were following Deuteronomy 20:16 they indeed did ".. not leave alive anything that breathes." And yet, one question is left open. Why should a secular commander follow Deuteronomy verses or any other Biblical text?

Some very few sporadic Jewish voices within the left are insisting upon telling us that Jewishness is not necessarily inherently murderous. I tend to believe them that they themselves consider their words as genuine and truthful. But then one may wonder, what is it that makes the Jewish state brutal with no comparison?

The truth of the matter is actually pretty sad. As far as we can see, Zionism is the only secular ideological and political Jewish collective around and as it happens, it has proved once again that it is genocidal to the bone. As far as genocide is concerned the difference between Judaism and Zionism can be illustrated as follows: while the Judaic Biblical context is soaked with genocidal references, usually in the name of God, within the Zionist context, Jews are killing Palestinians in the name of themselves i.e., the 'Jewish people'. This is indeed the ultimate success of the Zionist revolution. It taught the Jews to believe in themselves. To believe in the Jewish state. 'The Israeli' is Israel's God.

Accordingly, the Israeli kills in the name of 'his or her security', in the name of 'his or her democracy'. The Israelis destroy in the name of 'their war against terror' and in the name the 'their America'. Seemingly, in the Jewish state, the Hebraic subject reverts to mass killing as soon as he finds a 'name' to associate with.This doesn't really leave us too much room for speculation. The Jewish state is the ultimate threat to humanity and our notion of humanism.

Christianity, Islam and humanism came along with an attempt to amend Jewish tribal fundamentalism and to replace it with universal ethics. Enlightenment, liberalism and emancipation allowed Jews to redeem themselves from their ancient tribal supremacist traits. Since the mid 19th century, many Jews had been breaking out of their cultural and tribal chain. Tragically enough, Zionism managed to pull many Jews back in.

Currently, Israel and Zionism are the only collective voice available for Jews. The merciless offensive against the Palestinian civilian population does not leave any room for doubt. Israel is the gravest danger to world peace. Clearly the nations made a tragic mistake in 1947 giving an emerging volatile racially orientated identity an opportunity to set itself into a national state. However, the nations' duty now is to peacefully dismantle that state before it is too late. We must do it before the Jewish state and its forceful lobbies around the world manage to pull us all into a global war in the 'name' of one banal populist ideology or another (democracy, war against terror, cultural clash and so on). We have to wake up now before our one and only planet is transformed into a bursting boil of hatred.

The Objects of Our Devotion: Spiritual-Need Marketing

2009-12-18T15:06:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Objects-of-Our-Devotio-by-Judith-Acosta-091217-229.html

December 17, 2009
The Objects of Our Devotion: Spiritual-Need Marketing
By Judith Acosta

"I totally don't know what it means. But I want it." Jessica Simpson

A survey was just conducted to gauge the religious and spiritual propensities of Americans. As one might have guessed without having spent all the money and time, we are a fairly religious country. Diversely so, but religious nonetheless. The vast majority of Americans believe in a Supreme Being or higher power whom they call God.

So where did the road bend and twist? When did Americans go from a devotion to God to a devotion to things? In advertising circles, which is essentially the crank shaft of our economy, it is a truism that the American is a demanding consumer. "Give us what we want," is the credo. But it appears that what they want is a product. We have gone from one nation under God to one nation under Wal-Mart. We worry about extending youth and bodily life instead of considering the importance of making our limited time here meaningful. And the worst part as I see it and the point of this article is that we have come to believe that meaning and having are, if not entirely equal, then at least run parallel. This is a profound and pervasive delusion that is also both simultaneously destructive and systematically distracting. So much so that corporations have put their billions into marketing campaigns that specifically target and capitalize on these delusions.

The delusions are:

1) The product can save me.

2) The product has meaning and therefore can give my life meaning.

3) The product can help me belong to a tribe.

4) The product or service or brand can make me lovable.

Of course, none of the products on the market today and none of the products anyonecan possibly conceive of will ever meet the deeper needs of a human being (which are distinguished from basic needs such as food, shelter, clean air and clean water) because those deeper needs are for love, belonging, and meaning. Who in their right mind would consciously believe that a pair of shoes or a car or a skin cream could ever do that? Yet, we buy and behave as if we did believe it.

Naturally, the marketing experts know this. They reach into our hearts to pull on the strings of our deepest longings so that we buy what they have to sell, knowing it will never satisfy those longings, secretly happy in that knowledge because it means we'll have to keep buying, scooping up more and more in a fruitless search for salvation that can never, ever come from this world. Ever.

I am not a theologian. I'm a psychotherapist near Albuquerque, NM. But I think this is idolatry in the purest sense of the word. In watching and treating people who suffer from profound anxiety, ennui and depression, I have come to the conclusion that God did not forbid idolatry because He was petty or needy. An Omnipotent Being does not need our worship or devotion. He prohibited idolatry because it is, in fact, delusional, and it will make us miserable. It will never satisfy us or make us happy in the way He wants us to be deeply happy, which could never be accomplished with a short shot of dope. If my assumption is true, then what we are missing is not just happiness but a contentedness and emotional sure-footedness that is bone-deep and fills us with joy on each inhalation. What we are accepting in exchange for this soul satisfaction is a house full of gadgets we have no time to use, closets full of designer labels and lives littered with broken relationships.

But we keep saying "no" to joy and "yes" to stuff. It is more than ironic. It is befuddling and tragic. But it is true and made possible by an exceedingly savvy and complex understanding of human nature in marketing executives who keep leading us into their stores and away from the Promised Land. I would like to make clear, here, that I do not believe that devotion to God and a healthy economy are mutually exclusive. I think an economy based on deception and delusion, however, is.

How do they do it? There are principles that apply almost universally in board rooms around the world. Marketing a new product is approached in just about the same way whether the group is meeting in Tokyo or New York.

Become the atmosphere: This is a phrase used to describe the infusion of brand recognition into our culture, to surround people with "Nike," for instance, so that when they think they need new sneakers, the first thing they'll think of is that brand. It has unfortunately become increasingly difficult to take command over the general economic "atmosphere" because of the quantity of clutter in the environment. There are so many products and so many messages, we are surrounded by such a huge amount of information that the task for marketing managers and creative directors is now much more sophisticated and complex.

One woman in the documentary, The Persuaders, said "Consumers are like roaches. You spray them and spray them and spray them." Eventually, she explained, they become inured so you have to do something radically different to make them roll over.

Advertisers are shameless creatures. I know this not only because of their general reputation but because I worked as a copywriter. They are willing to do almost anything to break through the clutter of advertising and product promotion that they themselves created, fabricate any plausible untruth to attract our attention, take advantage of any scandal so long as it shocks and sells. That is the bottom line.

Create a culture of need: This is market-ese for inventing a culture around a product, an image that not only creates a pseudo-need, but promises a new way to meet it. That brand new ailment restless leg syndrome is a perfect example of that. Who in human history has not experienced some restlessness due to stress, lack of exercise, too much exercise or overtiredness? It is a newly identified "syndrome" that people are easily convinced is a real disease that they must have because they're restless, too, and now they must convince their doctors to prescribe the only drug that actually treats this new condition. And so it goes.

Give products texture and life: By imbuing ordinary toiletries and household products with emotional energy (happiness, softness, kindness, sexuality, sensuality, friendliness, availability, etc") the advertisers are able to make that product resonate with people's emotional lives and secret needs. What differentiates one product from another now is not for the most part quality or some massive technical advantage. How much difference is there between high-end hiking boots or between a pair of jeans made by Levi's and one made by Wrangler's? Besides the occasional issue of fit, it is hugely emotional. It's not what the product does. It's what it means and by extension what it says about us to the world.

Create a culture of fear: The media (news, editorial and advertising) has been promoting viral fear for many years, both subtly and overtly. We are told to be afraid of attack, mega-volcanoes, being unattractive, body odor, illness, death, asteroids, wrinkles and social rejection (to name but a few). If we are sufficiently afraid and are presented with a possible solution, a way to banish the demons of anxiety and self-doubt, we'll buy it. Many of us become so afraid we are willing to put ourselves into irreversible debt to deflect it. And the thing we are most afraid of not belonging, being shunned, being seen as inferior or unworthy is precisely that which they are best at manipulating by making the product an extension of the self, thereby giving the illusion of value to a fragile and porous self that must continually seek out external buttresses to give it cohesion.

I used to think this use of fear to send us careening into retail stores was a manifestation of abject sociopathy, that the conscious manipulation of viral fear was intentional, malicious and controllable. But the other day I realized something that literally made me run into the other room for my pen and paper (yes, I still use them). These advertisers and marketers honestly can't help themselves any more than they can help selling fear because they're fearful. They are as much a product of the culture they created as everyone and everything else. (This reminds me of something I wrote in The Worst is Over: Be careful what you say. You're listening.) They sell fear because that's what they buy. Advertisers can't stop spreading viral fear because, in one marketer's words, they're terrified of being eaten alive by the competition. It doesn't get more limbic than that, does it?

Market to the American soul: It might amuse you to know that marketers actually use the term "Pseudo-spiritual marketing." What does this mean? Here are some terrific examples of spiritual marketing strategies and creative concepts that were illuminated in the documentary, The Persuaders. Nike: mystical transcendence through sports and sports attire. Starbucks: community similar to the one we see in the show, Cheers, not home and not work, yet sympathetic, warm and companionable. Benetton: diversity and cheerful coexistence. When they sit around a table banging out strategies and campaign slogans, they use expressions like "making a spiritual bond with a product" and "channeling the inner brand." The brand becomes the church and the product the icon.

Give the product an IMAGE: This means that campaigns will skillfully and persuasively present the product as more than it is. It's not a bitter tasting drink, it's a social lubricant. It's not a just a washer/dryer, it's a part of your real sophisticated yet practical self. It's not just a car, it's an integral demonstration of your personal narrative, which may translate thus: I drive a Hummer, therefore I am"And I am successful, tough, yet refined. A complex being, I am, I am. Such a complex being I am. The product is no longer a product but redefined as mystery, as intimacy, as meaning, as cult, as success, as comfort, as our due.

Facilitate entitlement, no matter what a person's financial means: Offer loans, no pre-payment options, leases with hidden clauses, no interest deals for three years, no payments for two years. Make it easier than it should be to buy luxury items for which they have no real need and make the consumer feel they not only need the product, but that it is their right to have it. If a product is identified with the "self" then it we don't have far to go to feel fear about not having that product.

Entitled to be Happy: The Pursuit of the Ridiculous.

One of the most significant of the American pathologies is our confusion over the American creed. We have taken "pursuit of happiness" to mean the right to "be" happy. Since Romanticism's debut on the American intellectual game board and the Utopian notion that perfection is possible here on this earth, we have been entranced with a false sense of mortal power and, subsequent to that, of entitlement. If we can have it, then shouldn't we? Because we've additionally confused products with self and having with happiness, we find ourselves in the mess we are now in. We are so entitled and so afraid of not getting that to which we believe we're entitled we go into debt to get it. Or we steal. Or we sue.

There is an expression that goes something like, "that which you gaze upon, you become." This is certainly true in motorcycling, where it is understood at least in racing circles that you (and your bike) go where your eyes are pointed. I remember many years being warned by a friend, "If you ever see me go down, keep your eyes on the road and pull over slowly. Don't let yourself watch an accident." I never forgot that and have applied it to all areas of my life. What we see all day at the supermarket checkout, on packaging, on television, on cable and in movies is fame, beauty and money. A study was done with young people to find out what was most important to them and they reported the results we should have expected and hardly needed to go to all that trouble studying: fame, beauty and money.

There are two problems as I see it:

1) Americans don't just want what they see, they covet it. As a result they feel they should have it, that it is their right to have it and if they don't have it then something is vitally wrong with them. Their fear, once again, is that someone will find out they are "less than" ( less than perfect, less than expected, less than beautiful, successful or sexy) and that they will then be shunned, chased out of the pack and left for dead.

2) It has become an iconic need, a substitute for meaning, God and love.

We are saturated with more distraction than any other creature in history. We are surrounded by more cures, more opportunities, more checkouts and more choices than ever before. We are told that this, that or the other thing is the answer we've been waiting for. Until the next one comes along. But instead of answering our questions or satisfying our needs, all that they have succeeded in getting us to do is avoid the first and most important question of all: What does it mean and why do we want it? I sincerely doubt that Nike has anything to offer on that score.

God's Divine Sperm? Lib Church Shakes Up Story of Jesus' Birth

2009-12-18T10:20:00.000-08:00

By Tana Ganeva, AlterNet
Posted on December 17, 2009, Printed on December 18, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/www.alternet.org/144643/

A progressive New Zealand Church wants you to know that not all Christians are lame. To that end, they've put up a billboard displaying a post-coital Mary gazing longingly at the sky (that's where God lives), while Joseph lays next to her looking dejected. It reads "Poor Joseph. God was a tough act to follow."

The purpose of the billboard, according to St. Matthew's website , is to highlight the absurdity of literal Biblical interpretation. "The Christmas billboard outside St Matthew-in-the-City lampoons literalism and invites people to think again about what a miracle is. Is the miracle a male God sending forth his divine sperm, or is the miracle that God is and always has been among the poor?" writes Vicar Glynn Cardy.

Here's some more really nice, smart stuff from Cardy:

The Christmas billboard on a local fundamentalist church sums up this thesis. It reads: “Jesus born 2 die 4 u!” His birth was just an h’orderve before the main Calvary course.

No doubt on Christmas Eve when papers print the messages of Church leaders a few of them will serve up this fundamentalist thesis wrapped in a nice story.

Progressive Christianity believes the Christmas stories are fictitious accounts designed to introduce the radical nature of the adult Jesus. They contrast the Lord and Saviour Caesar with the anomaly of a new ‘lord’ and ‘saviour’ born illegitimate in a squalid barn. At Bethlehem low-life shepherds and heathen travelers are welcome while the powerful and the priests aren’t. The stories introduce the topsy-turvy way of God, where the outsiders are invited in and the insiders ushered out.

Progressive Christianity doesn’t overlook Jesus’ life and rush to his death. Rather it sees the radical hospitality he offered to the poor, the despised, women, children, and the sick, and says: ‘this is the essence of God’. His death was a consequence of the offensive nature of that hospitality and his resurrection a symbolic vindication.

The site describes some of the tenets of progressive Christianity. Here's an interesting one:

Invite all people to participate in our community and worship life without insisting that they become like us in order to be acceptable (including (including but not limited to):

o believers and agnostics,
o conventional Christians and questioning sceptics,
o women and men,
o those of all sexual orientations and gender identities,
o those of all races and cultures,
o those of all classes and abilities,
o those who hope for a better world and those who have lost hope

Pay attention creationists! And Catholic Church! And U.S. Evengelicals! And some of the really bitchy atheists that spit on all forms of religious belief!

God is Running Short of Cash, I Got an Idea

2009-12-16T10:19:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/God-is-Running-Short-of-Ca-by-Grant-Lawrence-091214-464.html

December 15, 2009
God is Running Short of Cash, I Got an Idea
By Grant Lawrence

...The fallout from the pledge pinch already is being felt. United Methodist bishops volunteered for pay cuts. The Episcopalians, Roman Catholics and Conservative and Reform Jews have had congregations fall behind in their payments, resulting in job cuts. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) dropped a radio program that had been on the air since 1947.....Source: Star Tribune.com
It looks as if the churches are cash strapped. Evidently they need more faith in the power of God to generate money.

But I get a little confused.

How can God help the churches get money when he always needs money for himself.

Churches are always telling us that it is the Lord's money, but he never seems to have enough.

I don't know. It seems to me if the Lord has all the money along with being all powerful, all knowing, and all everything then he shouldn't need for anything.

But the Lord is always wanting what little money we have. He always promises that if we just dig deep and give him 10% and up of our income, he will make things happen for us. The Lord will come through for us. I guess it is kind of like an IOU. We give him the money and he will pay us later 10 or even a hundred fold.

I got an idea.

Suppose all of the churches got together and gave each other all of the money they have. God will really like their faith and will surely give the churches 10 or even a 100 times more than what they give each other. Soon the cash strapped churches will be rolling in money just by giving each other what they have.

This simple act of Churches giving to God all that they have will surely be richly rewarded. It is like the Churches will be demonstrating to the world that they really believe in what they preach.

But you might be arguing that Churches giving to each other is just God transferring money from one pocket to the other. It isn't really giving God anything more than he already has.

Well, that is a good point. But if God has all the money anyway then why should he be upset if the churches show some great big faith in their own preaching by giving their money to other Churches? I am sure God will come through for the Church. He wouldn't hose the elect.

But that's another thing.

Even after we give God our money, he doesn't come through a lot of times. God talks a good game about giving us what we want if we just give him some cash. But, he likes to hold out a lot.

Now I am not calling God a liar or saying that he isn't all powerful, but I am just wondering.

I guess no one understands the workings of the Lord, especially when it comes to money.

Many Americans haunted by ghosts, look to astrology

2009-12-13T11:38:00.001-08:00

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20091210/lf_nm_life/us_usa_religion

Many Americans haunted by ghosts, look to astrology
By Ed Stoddard
Thu Dec 10, 9:23 am ET

DALLAS (Reuters Life!) – Although most Americans are Christian and many are devout it hasn't stopped some members of the flock from believing in astrology, reincarnation or the ability of trees to trap spiritual energy.

A poll by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life shows a surprising number of U.S. adults claim to have had supernatural experiences such as ghost sightings or hold beliefs associated with the New Age movement or Eastern religions.

And some of them claim allegiance to more traditional faiths such as Catholicism or evangelical Protestantism.

"American religious folks hold a variety of views and there is overlap among their beliefs and practices. Many do not fit into simple boxes," said Pew researcher Alan Cooperman.

The poll released on Wednesday showed that three-in-ten Americans say they have felt in touch with a dead person and 18 percent say they have seen or been in the presence of a ghost.

Other Pew surveys have shown that relatively few Americans would identify an Eastern religion or New Age spirituality as their core faith. But about a quarter of those surveyed say they believe in aspects of Eastern religions.

Nearly 25 percent said they believed in reincarnation and 23 percent said yoga was a spiritual practice. Twenty six percent said they believed "spiritual energy" could be found in objects such as trees.

A quarter said they believed in astrology, while 16 percent of U.S. adults think that an "evil eye" exists or that some people can cast curses or spells on others. Among black Protestants the evil eye figure is 32 percent.

The number of Americans who profess a belief in astrology is about the same as the number who claim to be Roman Catholic. Nearly 30 percent of Catholics surveyed said they believed in astrology. Among Catholics who attended church each week the figure was 16 percent.

Much of this would be jarring to -- among others -- many evangelical Protestants, who account for one in four adult Americans and take their Bible very seriously.

Still, 13 percent of white evangelicals profess a belief in astrology and about 10 percent accepted the possibility of reincarnation. Although the percentages are lower than in other groups, they are high enough to curl the hair of a Southern Baptist preacher.

Researchers said they were careful to stress that reincarnation meant being reborn again and again in this world and did not refer to, say, the resurrection of Christ.

Evangelicals, who place a heavy emphasis on spiritual conversions, are much more likely than most Americans to have had "a religious or mystical experience -- that is, a moment of religious or spiritual awakening," according to the poll.

About half of Americans claim to have had such an experience but among white evangelicals the number is 70 percent and for black Protestants it is 71 percent.

The nationwide survey of around 4,000 adults was conducted in August. Interviews were done in English and Spanish.

The origins of human religious behavior,Organized religion & magical thinking:Part IV

2009-12-11T13:02:00.000-08:00

I don't agree with this article but am posting it for others to think upon it.

http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-origins-of-human-relig-by-Abbas-Sadeghian-P-091210-45.html

December 10, 2009
The origins of human religious behavior,Organized religion & magical thinking:Part IV
By Abbas Sadeghian, Ph.D.

In dealing with the issue of religion one is always faced with the fact that there is a significant difference between a religion, teachings of it's' prophet, and the organized activity of that religion.

Transformation of social movements to institution

Since any critical reference to a religion is potentially offensive, it is considered good manners to avoid talking about religion or politics. It is quite obvious that if the masses of society do not get involved in political discussions, political activity becomes limited to those with power and money, whom do not necessarily have the best interest of the masses at heart. The same concept applies to organized religion.

One can make the argument that since the religious drive is instinctual, we should leave it to individual members of the society to apply their faith to their lives at their own discretions. However, in reality religions do not function that way and in every religion there is a lot of room for organized religion to gain momentum and power. The potential repressive power of religions could become so strong that it could cause massive and irreversible harm to society. Examples of runaway power of religion can be seen in most corners of the world. However, the grotesque forms of it are seen in countries of the Middle East and Africa. Even in a country as advanced and educated as the USA, a Mormon or a member of a religious cult has a better chance of getting elected to any office than an atheist.

If we assume that human religious behavior has organic causes, then we can assume that we would not need a church or a mosque to be religious. This is similar to the fact that going to restaurants is a way of eating and having a good time, while we know that we do not need to have restaurants to fulfill our need for food. Humans are as capable of cooking on their own, as they are able to worship on their own. In other words, if we are going to be religious anyway, and the source of the religiosity is within our own brain, why do we have to have prophets, temples, shrines, and the continuous struggle between religion and state?

The source or root of organized religion is almost identical in all religions. Religions usually begin as a movement. They are ideas which stand up against established governments and their accepted faith. They defy wealth, power, and regulations of the organized faith. Although every new religion has a prophet, either the prophet himself, or one of his followers pulls out a sword against the rich and the king and the chief clergy. If they are successful, there will be an Islam or Christianity. If they are not successful, they are usually devoured by bigger religions. With time religions have a tendency to lose their intensity and defiance. Religions become more conservative and turn into an institution. When religions are changed from a movement to institutions, they lose their beauty and the ability to provide assistance to the members. They begin to interfere with affairs of the state. Since they have an insatiable appetite for members and temples; they provoke the kings to use their military might to capture new territories and save new members. Within a short time the concept of "institution of a religion" turns into the "organization of a religion". Gradually, the original revolutionary idea turns into a large organization, which is expensive to run and hard to tame. Throughout the human history there have been many types of organized religion. The power of organized religion is a significant factor in that society. Although, periodically organized religion has had some minor benefits for a society; it is usually a severe drain on the resources of that society. As a rule, the function of a temple is not to be a charity society. The function of a temple is to protect and preserve that given faith. The maintenance expenses of organized religions are probably only second to the expenses of the armed forces of the world. Throughout human history, the best of the human brain and treasures have been wasted on organized religion. The most vivid example of these wasteful behaviors is the murderous practice of making the pyramids of Egypt. Hundreds of thousands of slaves, building a totally useless structure, to make sure that the body of the pharaoh is protected. Considering the fact that grave robbers were able to get to most of these pyramids, speaks volumes about the efficiency of pyramids. Perhaps the only manmade object on planet Earth more useless, and more expensive than the pyramids, is the Sphinx. That odd looking statue was supposed to protect the pyramids. As if pyramids need any protection? Ironically, when it came to the devilish behavior of grave robbers, Sphinx couldn't do anything neither. If the practice of organized religion was limited to making places of worship to gratify the inner drive of religious people, then it would have been reasonably tolerable. However, those buildings, shrines, or temples are utilized to educate clergymen.

Clergymen:

All religions have a group of experts in that religion, whose job is to persuade the followers of that faith to practice certain behaviors and pay their hard, earned money to the temple. This is to ensure that they go to a garden in the skies that has never been seen. In order to be able to sell such a tall tale to millions of people, one cannot be a crook or a charlatan, he must really believe in what he is saying. It is the sincerity in the belief, which causes the followers to take the clergy so serious and to follow their lead. The majority of the clergymen of the world are well educated and intelligent, which makes it very difficult to keep them away from politics. They have been quite successful in imposing theocracy on many countries throughout history. Countries which have lived under theocracy, and tasted the brutal methods employed by religions, have a tendency to be less religious. The highest numbers of atheists in the world are in South Korea and France, about 20 percent. Countries like Italy have more atheists than countries like the U.S. Although, since Renaissance in 15th century, there has been a significant attempt to push the gene of the clergy back to it's' place. They do have a tendency to survive, and modify the faith, in order to adapt to the needs of the time. For example, although it is strongly advised not to modify the writings of the Bible; when referring to creation, we clearly see that a reference to "one day" has been changed to "one period". Before Darwin's teachings of 19th century, all Bibles would refer to days one through seven, as a regular day, from sunrise to sunset. While the Bibles which are printed in the last 50 years, mostly refer to a day, as a period. This minor modification makes it possible to defend the idea of creation, against the scientific facts of evolution.

One of those rare occasions when organized religion has been a source of help, rather than hindrance, is with the case of the Amish community and their vast web of churches. Even though the practice of being Amish is badly primitive, and defies any logic; the existence of the Amish church has protected the Amish people during the last 100 years. The Amish people were terribly mistreated and taken advantage of during the latter part of the 19th and early 20th century in Europe and Russia. Their intelligent behavior of immigrating to the United States; buying land and growing crops, was quite effective in getting them out of harms' way. Additionally, the concept of donating the earnings of one

Days' worth of work, a week, to the community fund, has helped them to receive proper medical care; and to build strong enough of a lobby, to not have to go to combat during the war as conscientious objectors. The Amish lifestyle, although very primitive, is quite similar to the socialist system that many intellectuals of the world are striving for.

God's spokesmen:

Unfortunately, the intensity of human emotions regarding their faith is so strong, that it is next to impossible to hold a reasonable discussion regarding people who are referred to as prophets of god. If a person is a little inquisitive, he probably would have a few legitimate questions regarding the issue of prophets of god. The simple question is that, "Why does god need spokesmen, after all, he is the creator of the universe, with such tremendous power and unlimited creativity; why does he need human beings to transfer his message? If we assume that our hypothesis of religion as an innate drive; then the issue of the prophets changes entirely. The prophets would not be god's spokesmen; rather, they are people who think that they are messengers of god. And, they think that there is a problem associated with the mechanism of religiosity, which has caused them to make such grandiose claims. In one case, "Muhammad" the prophet of Islam, I was able to render a diagnosis and provide the support for the notion that he suffered from complex partial seizures. In the case of older prophets, the documentation is sketchy and unreliable. The more recent ones are easier to read, but they do not have such a following, to make it necessary to spend years of research to figure out. However, if we broaden our scope, and look at the common denominator among them; we can see some similarities, which might be able to answer some of our questions. The main prerequisite to be able to claim that one is a prophet, is the ability to perform miracles. Although, the biggest miracle is the fact that there are people who still believe that there is such a thing called a miracle.

What is a miracle?

Miracles are supposed to be the ability to conduct behaviors that other humans can not do. The prophets can wish things to happen that others can not (turning a staff into a snake). In the case of Muhammad, he claimed that the Quran is his miracle, that no one else could write such an eloquent book. This lays the ground work for Shakespeare (in English), and Firdausi (in Persian), and Garcia Lorca in Spanish, to make similar claims.

(1)The idea of miracles is quite similar to the consepts of magical thinking, in clinical psychology. Magical thinking refers to "causal reasoning that often includes such ideas as the ability of the mind to affect the physical world, and correlation mistaken for causation"; for example, in most religions there is a belief that religious leaders, prophets, and saints, have a tendency not to decay after they die. Many of these intact bodies could be found in Europe and Asia (Saint Bernadette in France). However, when their bodies are checked properly, we easily detect different embalming methods. Ironically; the bodies of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, who are founders of communism, and are all renound atheists, are totally intact and have been on public display for decades. In the practice of psychology, magical thinking is specifically used in the differential diagnosis of patients that suffer from Schizotypal personality disorder. The other common denominators among prophets are:

(2) Hearing the gods messages, teachings, and orders (auditory hallucinations)

(3) Seeing things that other people cannot see (visual hallucinations)

(4) Strong sense of mission, and the belief that the person is the only one who has the truth at hand (delusions of Grandeur)

(5)The first contacts with god are made at younger ages, mostly before 30 (genetic nature of the illness).

If we take all these characteristics and put them in the diagnostic criteria of mental disorders, we can quickly come up with schizophrenia and its' different variations. Those mental health professionals who have worked in state hospitals are quite familiar with a high number of schizophrenic patients, who claim to be god or a prophet of god, and stop these claims once they receive the antipsychotic medications. The main exceptions to schizophrenic prophets are those suffering from seizure disorder. In my book, Sword and Seizure; we were able to show how Mohammed's seizure disorder caused him to believe he is a messenger of God, and founded a faith which includes 25% of the population of earth. More astonishing of this phenomenon, is the behavior of the devout followers of polytheist religions. For example, if we were in India, we could observe people who would go to a grocery store, buy a can of cow urine, and wash their face with it as well as have a few sips. Considering the fact that at least one billion people on planet Earth believe in Hinduism, one wonders what makes a person believe in such an irrational behavior. Each one of these behaviors, drinking the cow's urine, worshipping statues, building pyramids, and believing in after life, are different forms of magical thinking.

Web searches for religious topics on the rise

2009-12-09T16:28:00.001-08:00

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-12/ps-wsf120709.php

Web searches for religious topics on the rise
A'ndrea Elyse Messer
Penn State
Mon, 07 Dec 2009 20:24 EST

Religion is not just for churches, synagogues or mosques anymore -- it's a topic that is being actively searched for online, according to researchers at Penn State.

The researchers examined how people use search engines to locate religious information online. They analyzed more than 5.5 million searches collected from three Web search engines between 1997 and 2005 to investigate attributes of religious searching on the Web.

The religious landscape within the United States has been described as increasingly secularized and factionalized. However, Jim Jansen, associate professor, information sciences and technology and his colleagues, Andrea Tapia, assistant professor, information sciences and technology and Amanda Spink, professor, Queensland University of Technology, Australia, found from looking at religious Web searching behaviors that no evidence of secularization exists, and that religious and religious-related interests held steady and were generally mainstream.

They also found that the results dispelled the stereotype that religious people are not as accustomed to technology as non-religious people.

"Our results showed that people searching for these religious topics were just as tactically skilled as the general Web population," said Jansen. "This actually fits well with the historical use of technology by religious groups and organizations."

There was a general increase in religious searching over time, which may be due to the advancement in technology, increased availability of religious content online and a change in the Web population.

"In the days of the earlier data sets, there were limited topics online," Jansen said. "As the Internet and Web became more main stream, a cornucopia of topics emerged -- religion was one."

Jansen also evaluated how well search engines delivered relevant content in response to religious queries, finding that the search engines preformed poorly.

"I don't believe it is an intentional bias on the part of the search engines," he said. "It is probably due to the localized nature of many religious Web sites. Small businesses face similar issues in trying to get ranked within the search engines."

Power of prayer flunks an unusual test

2009-12-07T16:15:00.000-08:00

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12082681/

Power of prayer flunks an unusual test
Large study had Christians pray for heart-surgery patients
The Associated Press
March 30, 2006

NEW YORK - In the largest study of its kind, researchers found that having people pray for heart bypass surgery patients had no effect on their recovery. In fact, patients who knew they were being prayed for had a slightly higher rate of complications.

Researchers emphasized that their work can't address whether God exists or answers prayers made on another's behalf. The study can only look for an effect from prayers offered as part of the research, they said.

They also said they had no explanation for the higher complication rate in patients who knew they were being prayed for, in comparison to patients who only knew it was possible prayers were being said for them.

Critics said the question of God's reaction to prayers simply can't be explored by scientific study.

The work, which followed about 1,800 patients at six medical centers, was financed by the Templeton Foundation, which supports research into science and religion. It will appear in the American Heart Journal.

Dr. Herbert Benson of Harvard Medical School and other scientists tested the effect of having three Christian groups pray for particular patients, starting the night before surgery and continuing for two weeks. The volunteers prayed for "a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications" for specific patients, for whom they were given the first name and first initial of the last name.

The patients, meanwhile, were split into three groups of about 600 apiece: those who knew they were being prayed for, those who were prayed for but only knew it was a possibility, and those who weren't prayed for but were told it was a possibility.

The researchers didn't ask patients or their families and friends to alter any plans they had for prayer, saying such a step would have been unethical and impractical.

The study looked for any complications within 30 days of the surgery. Results showed no effect of prayer on complication-free recovery. But 59 percent of the patients who knew they were being prayed for developed a complication, versus 52 percent of those who were told it was just a possibility.

Dr. Harold G. Koenig, director of the Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health at the Duke University Medical Center, who didn't take part in the study, said the results didn't surprise him.

"There are no scientific grounds to expect a result and there are no real theological grounds to expect a result either," he said. "There is no god in either the Christian, Jewish or Moslem scriptures that can be constrained to the point that they can be predicted."

Within the Christian tradition, God would be expected to be concerned with a person's eternal salvation, he said, and "why would God change his plans for a particular person just because they're in a research study?"

Science, he said, "is not designed to study the supernatural."

Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: Manufacturing belief

2009-12-06T11:41:00.000-08:00

http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2007/05/15/lewis_wolpert/

Manufacturing belief
The origin of religion is in our heads, explains developmental biologist Lewis Wolpert. First we figured out how to make tools, then created a supernatural being.
By Steve Paulson

May. 15, 2007 | In Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass," Alice tells the White Queen that she cannot believe in impossible things. But the Queen says Alice simply hasn't had enough practice. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." That human penchant for belief -- or perhaps gullibility -- is what inspired biologist Lewis Wolpert to write a book about the evolutionary origins of belief called "Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast."

Wolpert is an eminent developmental biologist at University College London. Like fellow British scientist Richard Dawkins, he's an outspoken atheist with a knack for saying outrageous things. Unlike Dawkins, Wolpert has no desire to abolish religion. In fact, he thinks religious belief can provide great comfort and points to medical studies showing that the faithful tend to suffer less stress and anxiety than nonbelievers. In Wolpert's view, religion has given believers an evolutionary advantage, even though it's based on a grand illusion.

He has a theory for why religion first took root. He thinks human brains evolved to become "belief engines." Once our ancient ancestors understood cause and effect, they figured out how to manipulate the natural world. In essence, toolmaking made us human. Similarly, early hominids felt compelled to find causes for life's great mysteries, including illness and death. They came to believe in unseen gods and spirits.

Wolpert sees human credulity all around him -- not just religious faith but all sorts of modern superstitions. His book targets astrology, psychics, homeopathy and acupuncture. Wolpert has participated in public debates with maverick scientist Rupert Sheldrake about telepathy and other paranormal experiences. He dismisses Sheldrake's theory -- that "morphic fields" can transmit thoughts through space and time -- as nonsense.

There's no doubt that Wolpert is a provocateur, but unlike some other prominent atheists, he doesn't come across as a bitter enemy of religion. In conversation, his pronouncements are often punctuated by laughter and mock horror. I spoke with Wolpert by phone about the origins of religion, his doubts about telepathy and acupuncture, and why the debate over religion is so personal for him.

Can you explain the "belief engine" in the human brain?

What makes us different from all other animals is that we have causal beliefs about the physical world. I know that if I throw this glass at the window, it's probably going to break. Children have this understanding at a very early age. Animals, on the other hand, have a very poor understanding of cause and effect in the physical world. My argument is that causal understanding gave rise to toolmaking; that was the evolutionary advantage. It's toolmaking that's really driven human evolution. This is not widely accepted, I'm afraid, but there's no question about it. It's tools that really made us human. They may even have given rise to language.

But there is evidence that some animals have a very primitive form of toolmaking.

There's no question that certain apes are at the edge of causal understanding and they do make some very simple tools. Chimpanzees can break a nut with a stone. They can also take a stick and peel it to get ants out of a tree. But it's still very primitive. Curiously, some crows show remarkable toolmaking, using sticks to get things out of bottles. But on the whole, it's primitive compared to us.

And I suppose the radically new thing our ancestors did was to put two objects together -- for instance, a piece of stone on a wooden handle.

Precisely. You can't do that without having a concept of cause and effect. And once you had that concept, you wanted to understand the causes of other things that mattered in your life, like illness. That's the origin of religion. The most obvious causes were those things caused by humans, so people imagined there was some sort of god with human characteristics. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of different gods in different societies.

So once you have an understanding of cause and effect, then ignorance is no longer tolerable? You want to explain everything.

Exactly. You know, we cannot tolerate not knowing the causes of things that affect our lives. If you go to the doctor when you're ill, the one thing you can't stand is the doctor saying he or she has no idea what's wrong with you. And when they do diagnose you, I'm prepared to bet that on your way home, you'll tell yourself a story as to why you got ill.

But which came first: understanding cause and effect or learning to make tools?

They went together, but you cannot make complex tools without a concept of cause and effect. You must remember that no animal has a basket. If they go away from water, they can't take any water with them. They can't carry things. However, we're driven by interacting with our environment and looking for causes that affect our lives.

Are you saying our brains are hard-wired for belief?

Our brains are absolutely hard-wired for causal belief. And I think they're a bit soft-wired for religious and mystical belief. Those people who had religious beliefs did better than those who did not, and they were selected for.

Why did they do better?

They were less anxious. They also had someone to pray to. In general, religious people are somewhat healthier than people who don't have religious beliefs.

Haven't studies shown that religious believers tend to be more optimistic, and that they're less prone to strokes and high blood pressure?

Yes, exactly. Therefore, evolution will select them.

So religion gives us a sense of purpose and meaning, even though in your view it's totally an illusion.

Yes, many people would find it very hard to live without religion. But there is no meaning, I regret to tell you. [Laughs] We don't understand where the universe came from. But to say God made it, well, you want to say, who made God?

To say there's no meaning is a pretty depressing assessment, isn't it?

No, why should there be a meaning? I mean, we want a cause as to why we're here, but I'm afraid there isn't one. I don't find it depressing at all. I think it's remarkable that evolution has brought us into being. We're only here for one purpose, from an evolutionary point of view, and that's to reproduce.

You write that you were once quite a religious child yourself. When did you turn away from religion?

I came from quite a conventional Jewish family -- not Orthodox, but conventional -- in South Africa. I had to say my prayers every night. And I used to pray to God to help me in various things but found it didn't help. So I stopped being religious.

Your son became a fundamentalist Christian after a difficult late adolescence. Is he still an evangelical Christian?

No, he's not. The church he was in broke up. He's still a believer, but he doesn't go to church.

Does his faith bother you?

No. I found that religion was helping him a great deal. It gave him someone to pray to. He became a member of a church where they could discuss their problems. And I think the idea that he would eventually go to heaven gave him a great deal of encouragement.

Has your son read the chapter on religion in your book? It's rather dismissive of religion.

He knows I'm dismissive of it. In fact, I just spoke to him last night on the telephone and asked him, "Did I ever try to dissuade you from being religious?" He said, "No, you never did." I wouldn't agree with him, but I never tried to dissuade him not to be.

Do you find yourself wondering about ultimate meaning? Does that matter in your life?

Never. Ultimate meaning has no meaning in my life. I sound a bit shallow, but I think it's actually quite deep not to be bothered by that sort of thing.

You call David Hume your "hero philosopher." Why do you like him so much?

First of all, I don't like any other philosopher. I think philosophers are terribly clever but have absolutely nothing useful to say whatsoever. I avoid philosophy like mad. But David Hume does say such interesting and important things. He's very good on religion, for example. I like him for that.

Well, he didn't like religion.

No, it's not that he didn't like religion. If you take miracles, for example, there's a lovely quote from David Hume that you shouldn't believe in any miracle unless the evidence is so strong that it would be miraculous not to believe in it.

There are various competing theories about the origins of religion. One is the idea that religion evolved because it helped bind people together in social groups. Essentially, it acted like social glue. Why don't you think that's right?

I don't think it's wrong. There is some evidence that religion does lead to a community with shared views. But you have to ask, Why does religion deal so much with cause and effect? That comes from causal beliefs.

What about Daniel Dennett's idea that religion is a kind of "meme" -- an idea that has infected human cultures and keeps on spreading?

If you could tell me what a meme is, and how useful it is, I'd be very grateful. [Laughs] Please don't misunderstand, I'm a great admirer of Richard Dawkins [who developed the concept of memes]. But what are memes? How do you decide whether something is a meme or not? And what you really want to understand is, how is it passed on and why does it persist? This is never discussed. So for Daniel Dennett -- who's a philosopher, after all -- to get involved with memes, the moment he does that, I just stop reading him.

Virtually all these theories draw on evolutionary psychology. But I wonder if we're losing the flavor of religious experience, the willingness to live in mystery, embrace imagination and intuition.

Sometimes I've thought it must be quite nice to believe in religion. I'm getting quite old. The idea that I might go to heaven -- of course, there's also the possibility, in my case, that I would go to hell -- is quite an attractive one. Unfortunately, I don't believe that for a single second. I mean, the evidence for God is simply nonexistent.

Isn't there more to religion than belief in supernatural beings?

Certainly not.

But many theologians and scholars, such as historian Karen Armstrong, say religion at its root is not really about a set of beliefs. It's more about how to live your life and being compassionate in the world.

Well, many people who are atheists can behave quite well. That doesn't make us religious. No, it doesn't work like that at all.

I grant that. But do you really think religion comes down to belief in the supernatural?

When I talk about religion, I'm talking about belief in the supernatural. In Western society, we're talking about God. I don't believe you can be religious without having some concept of a god.

What about William James? He talked about religion as experience more than belief.

I think "The Varieties of Religious Experience" is one of the best books written about belief. Nothing has really changed since he wrote it a hundred years ago. He did point out that many people become religious because they had a religious experience. And that fits with my idea that we're partly wired to have religious beliefs. If you take the active component of a magic mushroom and give it to a group of people, quite a few of them will have mystical, almost religious, beliefs. It must mean the circuits are there which are turned on by the drug.

So it all comes down to the chemicals that are firing in the brain?

I'm afraid so. Your neural circuits, yes.

What about paranormal experiences like telepathy or life after death? Are those bogus?

Yes. All bogus. I have a very close friend, an artist, who claims to have seen three ghosts. She knew they were ghosts because they didn't have legs, and they told her things about the house she was staying in that she didn't know before. Yes, she had strange experiences. It doesn't mean they were ghosts. And I don't believe telepathy. Rupert Sheldrake, who's an old friend of mine, is a strong promoter of telepathy and things like that. I'm afraid the evidence just isn't there.

Rupert Sheldrake is a biochemist who used to teach at the University of Cambridge.

Oh, he was a very clever plant cell biologist.

He's done various controlled experiments trying to figure out whether people know who's going to phone them, or whether dogs know when their owners are coming home. You're saying none of that is legitimate science?

It's legitimate, but I'm unimpressed by all of it.

Let's talk about one of his experiments. He did a controlled study of what he calls "telephone telepathy." People were asked to give four phone numbers of friends. The callers were chosen randomly and then asked to guess who was calling. The statistical probability was that 25 percent of the guesses would be right. Sheldrake said the responses were more like 45 percent.

I'd like to see someone else do the experiment and have it confirmed. Remember what David Hume said? In order to believe in miraculous things, the evidence should be so miraculous that you could not but believe it. You can't just do one experiment like that on such an extraordinary thing like telepathy. Telepathy goes against everything we know about neurophysiology and physics. If telepathy exists, it would be a miracle. That's why I go back to Hume. The evidence has to be overwhelming.

Listen, almost everybody has a strange, non-normal experience once a year. Many, many people have these. If you take the right drugs, you can have them on order. People taking LSD had the most extraordinary experiences. Those experiences were real, but they had nothing to do with the real world.

Well, telepathy goes against the understanding that the mind is totally the product of the neural processes within the brain, which is certainly the dominant thinking among neuroscientists.

You also have to transmit that message over distances into somebody else's mind. That's just nonsense.

What if there are forces out there -- perhaps energy fields, as Sheldrake would say -- that we just haven't discovered yet?

[Laughs] OK, when he discovers them, he'll let us know. I'm saying you really have to have good evidence. And there isn't any.

When my grandfather was 16 years old, he heard an odd sound, looked up and saw the photograph of his grandfather knocking on the wall in the living room. This was so unusual that he checked the time it happened. Later that day, his family got a telegram saying that his grandfather had died at precisely that time. Is that just coincidence?

Well, that is remarkable and I don't have an explanation. I'm afraid it probably is coincidence. But it does sound as if it's some sort of telepathic experience. And we all have that. You're thinking of someone and suddenly they phone you. You haven't spoken to them for six months and suddenly the phone rings and there they are. OK, I don't have a good explanation for that. But to think that there's some message going across is just most unlikely.

Unlikely yes, but doesn't this get at the limits of science?

No, it's not the limits of science. You've got to find experiments that will really show it. Science can't rely on anecdotes, on single, one-off experiences like this. You've got to find some way of testing them. Maybe the way Rupert Sheldrake goes about it is the right way to do it. But it has to be done extremely carefully, and single anecdotes tell you nothing.

You have written about alternative medicine and are highly skeptical of various healing practices, including energy healing and even acupuncture, which is now used quite widely in the West.

Yes, I know it's used. It's quite tricky because the placebo effect can really confuse these results very significantly. So if you believe the treatment is going to work, you've got a much higher chance that it's going to work. But there's just no evidence for the idea of energy fields, which acupuncturists use for deciding where to put the needles.

But there are thousands of years of experiential evidence going back to ancient China.

But nothing to do with energy. Energy is a well-defined concept. And I'm terribly sorry, no physiologist has ever detected any of these energy fields.

Maybe the scientific instruments that we have at our disposal just can't detect anything about qi.

Sorry. When they invented qi, how in the hell did they know what an energy field was? They hardly had a concept of energy. I mean, if you go back and look at their evidence, I'm afraid it was a nice set of ideas, but I'm terribly sorry, evidence matters. And that's what causal beliefs are really about. If we believe that something has a particular cause, we should be looking for the evidence.

Many people say they've been helped by acupuncture. Are you saying the placebo effect is the only explanation?

I have no idea why it works. But it's extremely unlikely that it's got anything to do with those energy fields. It could be largely due to the placebo effect. And homeopathy, where there are no molecules in the liquid that you take, is even more bizarre. And many people believe in homeopathic medicine.

Do you have any superstitions yourself?

[Laughs] I touch wood occasionally, I'm ashamed to say. And I don't ever like to say that I'm really happy because I think the gods may not like it.

Are you joking? Or is there some little part of you that really believes this?

I suppose this is part of the soft-wiring for mysticism. There's a lovely story -- I've forgotten the physicist -- who had a horseshoe over his door. He said it didn't do him any harm, but might do him some good.

Pascal's wager, right? You decide you're better off believing in God, even though the existence of God seems unlikely.

[Laughs] No, I don't go as far as that, but I am a little superstitious, yes. A tiny bit.

If you look into your crystal ball, do you think we will always have religion? Or will reason win out at some point?

I believe we will always have religion. Churchgoing has declined in England, but the number of people who believe in God is still quite high. And in America, it's very high. And you just have to look at the Muslim world. It's very strong there. I'd be very surprised if it disappeared.

So the project of Richard Dawkins -- basically, to try to turn us all into atheists -- is just a pipe dream?

I believe it to be a pipe dream. The idea that you could persuade people not to be religious is in my view a hopeless aim. It comes from people's personal experience, rather than logical arguments.

But isn't this what you're doing in your book, arguing for the virtues of reason over religious belief?

Not at all. I'm trying to understand what determines religious belief. I'm not trying to convert people out of religion. Not for a moment. But if they then want to impose some of their religious beliefs onto other people -- for example, in relation to abortion or not using contraceptives -- then I ask them to look at the evidence. I ask them to be much more careful about their beliefs.

Fundamentalism Fails, On Both Sides

2009-12-06T11:21:00.000-08:00

http://www.templeton-cambridge.org/fellows/showarticle.php?article=150

October 23, 2005
Fundamentalism Fails, On Both Sides
by John Timpane

It's the end of absolutes for both religion and materialist unbelief.

Neither has the knockout card, the open-and-shut, slam-dunk, airtight case.

And that should knock both of them back a step.

Each has something to say to the other, indeed the same thing: "Give up your fundamentalism—it's toxic, and it's hurting you."
Healthful words now, when evolution and intelligent design are being debated in Dover, Pa.

Both belief and unbelief may be much qualified in the coming decades. In a trend already 50 years old, belief increasingly may get hauled out of church, as believers feel less and less need for an institutional lens through which to believe.

Materialism (sometimes called "naturalism," sometimes "rationalism") is the belief that all that exists is the visible, concrete universe of matter. That's it—nothing else, no spirit realm, no divinities, no afterlife. There is a fine, august tradition behind materialist unbelief. But—especially in the minds of some who believe they are representing or defending science—it has taken on a dismissive energy. In years to come, materialism may actually benefit from admitting it's just a guess, more like other beliefs than most materialists admit.

At least, such are my conclusions after participating in the Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships in Science and Religion. This summer, 10 journalists attended seminars for two weeks at Cambridge University in England, went home for five weeks to prepare presentations, and returned for a last week of seminars, presentations, debate, English ale, and amazement at our chance to study God and science in 15th-century splendor.

Many stars joined us: evolutionary biologists Richard Dawkins and Simon Conway Morris; cosmologists John D. Barrow, Owen Gingerich, and Paul Davies; theologians Russell Stannard, Nancey Murphy, and Ronald Cole-Turner. They gave brilliant talks, argued with one another, with us, and with the cosmos; challenged us to stretch our minds and write better about science, religion, and the interface (if there is one!) between the two.

All my friends want to know: So who won?

Nobody. And that should temper all those who think their team already has.

Despite the trial in Dover, the current American conflict is not between "science" and "religion." It is, to quote Karen Armstrong, author of A History of God and other books, a conflict between tightly defined subsets: "those who adhere to the scientific theory of evolution and those who believe that the biblical story of the six-day creation is literally true." As she points out, this boils down to "a struggle between two religions." The culprit on both sides in this American standoff is the mental habit of fundamentalism itself. And it could well hobble both sides.

Book-based religious fundamentalism will, I suspect, gravely wound the cause of religion. It holds sway today among about 20 percent of Americans, but that's only now. In many minds, the underhandedness and the coercive truculence of religious fundamentalist rhetoric confirm that religion is bad. It gives individuals no choice, nowhere to go, no way to grow. That's why, when science enlarges our view of the cosmos, one often hears fundamentalist yelps.

The current uprising may be a harbinger of the death of religion for many people. We'll continue to be a believing people, but more and more of us will do our believing out of doors.

Religious fundamentalism got beat up good at the Templetons, especially by religious people. Fraser Watts, who teaches theology and science at Cambridge and is co-director of the fellowship program, said: "I am a follower of Christ, not the Bible, and if I'm forced to make a choice, which I hope I am not, I will choose Christ."

But religion is not the only fundamentalism in the room. Let us now turn to the other bad boys: the fundamentalist materialists.

Some say, "I believe in science. Evidence. Empirical demonstration. What I can see. And that's it."

But many materialists don't stop there. Fighting hard, against religion and other forms of "ignorance," they claim their view is scientific. When, strictly speaking, it is not. It strains the proper bounds of science to enlist it for these purposes, and most honest scientists will say so.

Rightly does biologist Kenneth R. Miller (who testified against intelligent design in the Dover trial) complain of materialists who go "well beyond any reasonable scientific conclusions that might emerge from evolutionary biology."

Miller cites biologist William Provine, who wrote: "Modern science directly implies that there are no inherent moral or ethical laws, no absolute guiding principles for human society. … We must conclude that when we die, we die, and that is the end of us."

Science doesn't imply anything about morality, ethics, or afterlifes. It just doesn't go there. But Provine sure wants it to, and then vaults to "must conclude."

Materialists often idealize science. They speak of science, not as it is, but as they wish it were. They pretend science is a unitary practice with a stable, complete, sufficient view of the cosmos. They pretend—beyond the capacity of logic—that you can draw hard and fast definitions between what is science and what is not.

I heard many such pretenses at the Templetons, and you cannot know how irritating that is.

Scientific practice bypasses what can be seen, tested, or demonstrated all the time. The structure of the benzene ring came to
August KekulÃ¨ not through an experiment, but through a dream. No one has ever seen such a string, but many physicists now have high hopes for "string theory" (in which the structure of the universe is made up of resonating submicroscopic strings). Cosmology relies on arguments based on what cannot be seen (dark matter) to explain what can.
Sometimes that works, sometimes not. Science is a search for what works—and sometimes that's empirical, and often it's not. It often proceeds through undirected play. Thank you, Yale neurobiologist Robert Wyman, for saying so: "You get curious about something and you mess around. That's what science is in the beginning; you mess around."

It's amazing how angry people get when you say such things. That doesn't make science any more wonderful, its triumphs any less spectacular.

Some people just insist on a purity that science does not have and never did. Such insistence hurts them, their babes-in-the-woods politics, and any chance of discussion. They should drop it, acknowledge the humanity of their endeavor, and listen.
Materialism is a good guess. A very intelligent good guess.

It was none other than zoologist Richard Dawkins, an eminent nonbeliever, who told us that materialism can't really close the argument against God. So even he knows it. I wonder how many other materialists would admit the same.

The high point of the Templetons, for me, came after a stellar presentation by cosmologist John D. Barrow, including an explanation of multiverse theory, which argues that our universe is not alone but is only one of about 10550 universes.

Dawkins raised his hand and, after praising what he had just heard, asked why anyone would want to look for divine characteristics in the universe.

To which Barrow replied: "For the same reason that somebody might not want to."

A throwaway line? No: the single most honest, most incisive thing I heard at Cambridge. Barrow spoke the thing neither institutionalized belief nor institutionalized unbelief will admit—the great scandal—that neither side can close the deal, leaving it to you and me. There are wonderful reasons to believe—and not to believe. Go out, look around, keep your mind and senses wide open, and decide for yourself; for nothing—no book, no experiment, no theory, no minister in his smoke and vestments—can make up your mind for you. It's just you and the cosmos within and without.

And throughout this lifelong quest, if ever you feel your mind hardening—don't let it happen. That's how belief and unbelief got into this mess in the first place.

How your brain creates God

2009-12-06T10:43:00.000-08:00

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126941.700-born-believers-how-your-brain-creates-god.html

February 4, 2009
Born Believers
How your brain creates God
by Michael Brooks

What would you say if a group of scientists attempted to explain to you why humans enjoy music, art, and literature? You might concede that they could shed some light on the issue, but that any purely scientific explanation is going to be woefully paltry because the question extends far, far beyond science’s proper purview.

That’s the same attitude we should take towards this article which, as New Scientist triumphantly proclaims, tells us “How your brain creates God” (How’s that for a shot across the bow?)

The article proposes to explain, through evolutionary psychology, why humans have a propensity towards belief in the supernatural.

The scientists quoted propose that the human mind’s ability to abstractly conceive of other minds that work like ours is an evolutionary advantage, because it allows you to do things such as plan ahead, form complex social groups, and avoid unseen enemies. A byproduct of this, they think, is the tendency to “create” these abstract minds everywhere, from imaginary friends on up to God himself. They conclude that belief in the supernatural is a built-in aspect of human nature because of its presence in even very young children in all cultures, to the disappointment of some atheists who want religion to be a mere social construct which can be defeated in time. It is a two-edged sword, though: atheists think that some bits of evidence on the material side explain the supernatural away, while believers are wary (rightfully) of attempts to reduce belief to mere materially determined events.

The major flaw in this explanation, though, is that like the art example it’s only a very narrow part of the picture. In wandering from explanations of the natural world into explanations of the mind, science leaves its proper territory behind, unless one holds the philosophical (non-scientific) opinion that there is no non-natural aspect to the human mind — no soul. If that’s what the scientists think, fine, but they should admit that they are bring prior philosophical assumptions into their scientific work.

In addition to the mind’s ability to create images of other minds, another aspect of the belief in God, the scientists state, is the human mind’s tendency to look for cause-and-effect relationships. It is in investigating this aspect that we find the most glaring example of intruding scientific thought where it does not belong:

When Deborah Kelemen of the University of Arizona in Tucson asked 7 and 8-year-old children questions about inanimate objects and animals, she found that most believed they were created for a specific purpose. Pointy rocks are there for animals to scratch themselves on. Birds exist “to make nice music”, while rivers exist so boats have something to float on. “It was extraordinary to hear children saying that things like mountains and clouds were ‘for’ a purpose and appearing highly resistant to any counter-suggestion,” says Kelemen.

The authors think that this shows the human mind has a natural tendency to look for design where, they pointedly state, there is none. But once again, Keleman and her associates have brought in their unscientific assumptions into the situation. Keleman is only surprised because she somehow expected the children to think scientifically, which the children weren’t. Scientific thought is not the only method of knowing, but scientists get so used to it that they sometimes can’t think otherwise. Who’s to say that the clouds and the mountains aren’t for a purpose? Sure, there is no scientific purpose, but did Keleman tell the children they were only allowed to use scientific thought when answering the question? To conclude that the children imagine design where there is none is a flawed conclusion from this study; it just means they can find design where Keleman can’t.

People find purpose in many aspects of creation, even in simple beauty. It’s not scientific purpose, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there. (As an aside, I’ve often wondered what evolutionary psychologists make of the human tendency to find the most sublime beauty in the most hostile of environments — barren mountains, stormy oceans, plunging waterfalls, etc. I’m sure there’s some “reasonable” evolutionary explanation, most likely something about attraction to novelty. That must be it.)

The New Scientist piece concludes with an example of the tired suggestion that atheists are smarter and more courageous than believers:

Religious belief is the “path of least resistance”, says Boyer, while disbelief requires effort.

Got that? Thomas Aquinas wrote the Summa because he didn’t want to expend any effort. Now you know.

God, He's Moody

2009-12-06T10:32:00.000-08:00

http://www.salon.com/env/atoms_eden/2009/06/24/evolution_of_god/

June 24, 2009
God, He's Moody
In an interview with something to offend everyone, Robert Wright explains why religion has given us a fickle deity.
by Steve Paulson

Robert Wright has carved out a distinct niche in American journalism. While his essays range freely across the political landscape -- from foreign policy to technology -- it's his meaty, book-length forays into evolutionary psychology and the sweep of history that have set him apart. Now his latest book goes after bigger game: God Almighty.

Actually, "The Evolution of God" never grapples with the most basic religious question -- the existence of God. Instead it charts the twists and turns of how God's personality has kept changing over the centuries, and specifically, how the rough-and-tumble politics of the ancient Middle East shaped the Abrahamic religions. The book is filled with richly observed details about the Bible and the Quran, though Wright wears his learning lightly as he guides us through several thousand years of religious history.

There's something to offend just about everyone in this book. Wright recounts in harrowing detail how the early Israelites, who'd been conquered and humiliated by the Babylonians, invoked Yahweh to wreak vengeance on their enemies. This is no God for the faint of heart! And he's no gentler on Christianity. Wright's Jesus is not the prophet of peace and love but a sometimes mean-spirited apocalyptic preacher obsessed with the approaching End Times. Islam's founder, Muhammad, comes across as much a warrior as a prophet, bent on annihilating his enemies when they cross him.

Despite all this religious mayhem, the book also shows a gentler side of the Abrahamic religions, especially when they manage to find common cause with their heathen neighbors and rival monotheists.

At first, "The Evolution of God" reads like another atheistic tract exposing the seamier side of religion. But then I came to Wright's account of the "moral imagination" and his surprising conclusion: He may not believe in God, but Wright thinks humanity is marching -- however wobbly -- toward moral truth.

In our interview, we talked about the bloody history of monotheism, what a mature religion would look like, and Wright's own spiritual awakening at a meditation retreat.

At the very beginning of your book, you describe yourself as a materialist. This raises an interesting question: Can a materialist really explain the history of religion?

I tend to explain things in terms of material causes. So when I see God changing moods, as he does a lot in the Bible and the Quran, I ask, what was going on politically or economically that might explain why the people who wrote this scripture were inclined to depict God as being in a bad mood or a good mood? Sometimes God is advocating horrific things, like annihilating nearby peoples, or sometimes he's very compassionate and loving. So I wanted to figure out why the mood fluctuates. I do think the answers lie in the facts on the ground. And that's what I mean by being a materialist.

What do you mean by the facts on the ground?

My basic premise is that when a religious group sees itself as having something to gain through peaceful interaction with another group of people, including a different religion, it will find a basis for tolerance in its scriptures and religion. When groups see each other as being in a non-zero sum relationship -- there's a possibility of a win-win outcome if they play their cards right, or a lose-lose outcome if they don't -- then they tend to warm up to one another. By contrast, if people see themselves in a zero-sum relationship with another group of people -- they can only win if the other group loses -- that brings out the intolerance and the dark side of religion. You see that in the world today. A lot of Palestinians and Israelis think they're playing a win-lose game. They think their interests are opposed and inversely correlated. In the long run, I think they're wrong. They're either both going to win or both going to lose.

And you're saying these attitudes keep fluctuating back and forth over the history of religion. It's not just a gradual movement from less tolerance to more tolerance.

There hasn't been any smooth progression toward tolerance in any of the religions. If you look at the way human beings treated each other 10,000 years ago, it was not uncommon for members of one hunter-gatherer tribe to consider strangers as subhuman and worthy of death. I try to show that all the Abrahamic religions -- Judaism, Christianity and Islam -- are capable of making great moral progress by extending compassion across national and ethnic and religious bounds. But there has not been any kind of smooth progression.

Do you think religions share certain core principles?

Not many. People in the modern world, certainly in America, think of religion as being largely about prescribing moral behavior. But religion wasn't originally about that at all. To judge by hunter-gatherer religions, religion was not fundamentally about morality before the invention of agriculture. It was trying to figure out why bad things happen and increasing the frequency with which good things happen. Why do you sometimes get earthquakes, storms, disease and get slaughtered? But then sometimes you get nice weather, abundant game and you get to do the slaughtering. Those were the religious questions in the beginning.

And bad things happened because the gods were against you or certain spirits had it out for you?

Yes, you had done something to offend a god or spirit. However, it was not originally a moral lapse. That's an idea you see as societies get more complex. When you have a small group of hunter-gatherers, a robust moral system is not a big challenge.

Everyone knows everybody, so it's hard to conceal anything you steal. If you mess with somebody too much, there will be payback. Moral regulation is not a big problem in a simple society. But as society got more complex with the invention of agriculture and writing, morality did become a challenge. Religion filled that gap.

But it's easier to explain why bad things happen in these older religions. You can attribute it to an angry spirit. It's harder to explain evil if there's an all-powerful, all-loving God.

The problem of evil is a product of modern religion. If you believe in an omnipotent and infinitely good God, then evil is a problem. If God is really good -- and can do anything He or She wants -- why do innocent people suffer? If you've got a religion in which the gods are not especially good in the first place, or they're not omnipotent, then evil is not a problem.

Why did monotheism first develop?

My explanation for Abrahamic monotheism is different from the standard one. I believe it emerged later than most people think -- in the 6th century BCE, when Israelite elites were exiled by the Babylonians who conquered them. The spirit of monotheism was originally a lot less sunny and benign than people claim. Morally, it got better, but at its birth, monotheism was fundamentally about retribution.

Israel was a small nation in a bad neighborhood that got kicked around. This culminated in the exile, which was humiliating. It dispossessed the Israelites. It's not crazy to compare the mind-set of the Israelites then to the mind-set of today's Palestinians, who feel humiliated and dispossessed. This kind of mind-set brings out the belligerence in a religion. You see that in the Book of Isaiah, thought to be written by so-called Second Isaiah. These are the earliest scriptures in the Bible that are clearly monotheistic. You get the sense that monotheism is about punishing the various nations that have persecuted Israel.

So you see a connection between the political power of a people and the god they believed in?

In ancient times, there was always a close association between politics and gods. The victor of a war was always the nation whose god beat the other god. But the specific political dynamic that monotheism reflected at its birth was Israel's desire to punish other nations by denying the very existence of their gods, and also envisioning a day when Israel's god, Yahweh, would actually subjugate those nations.

Does Yahweh become a tool for Israelite kings to consolidate power?

You see that especially with King Josiah. Israel was polytheistic for a lot longer than most people think. A lot of things factored into its movement toward monotheism. One was a king who wanted to eliminate domestic political rivals. Those political rivals would have claimed access to various gods other than Yahweh, so King Josiah wanted to eliminate them. He killed some of them and also made it illegal to worship their gods. That gets you to the brink of monotheism. I think the exile pushes you over. You have a very belligerent, exclusive monotheism, whose very purpose is to exclude other nations from this privileged circle of God's most favored people.

King Josiah comes off rather badly in your book. He's hugely influential in the development of monotheism, but also a brutal tyrant who tried to wipe out people with competing religious beliefs.

He was an authoritarian. By the standards of the day, maybe not an unusually harsh one. Politics were pretty rough and tumble in those days. He was a nationalist, populist authoritarian -- maybe a little bit like Hugo Chavez. It was a rejection of cosmopolitanism and internationalism. By our standards, King Josiah was a bad guy. He kills a bunch of priests who had the misfortune of not focusing their devotion exclusively on Yahweh. He cleans out the temple.

For people who claim that Israel was monotheistic from the get-go and its flirtations with polytheism were rare aberrations, it's interesting that the Jerusalem temple, according to the Bible's account, had all these other gods being worshiped in it. Asherah was in the temple. She seemed to be a consort or wife of Yahweh. And there were vessels devoted to Baal, the reviled Canaanite god. So Israel was fundamentally polytheistic at this point. Then King Josiah goes on a rampage as he tries to consolidate his own power by wiping out the other gods.

However, after the exile, monotheism evolves into something much more laudable and inclusive. Now the exiles have returned to Jerusalem and Israel is in a secure neighborhood. It's part of the Persian empire and so are its neighbors. So you see a much sunnier side of God, with expressions of tolerance and compassion toward other nations. This shows that monotheism isn't intrinsically good or bad. It depends on the circumstances in which it finds itself.

This gets pretty confusing for today's religious believer. There's a vengeful God in some of these early books of the Old Testament -- a God who at times says you need to wipe out people with different religious beliefs. But within this same sacred text, you can also read about a very compassionate God.

You're right, the contrasts are extreme. At one point in the Hebrew Bible, God is saying, "I want you to annihilate nearby peoples who worship the wrong gods." He says do not leave anything alive that breathes -- not livestock, women or children.

Then other times you have Israelites not only tolerating a neighbor who worships another god but using that other god to validate their desire for tolerance. So they'll say to the Ammonites, "Look, you've got your god, Chemosh. He gave you your land. We've got our god, Yahweh, who gave us our land. Can't we just get along?"

You see this kind of vacillation in the Bible and also in the Quran. In both cases, it's a question of whether people think they can gain through peaceful interaction with other people. That's also the challenge in the modern world. Barack Obama gets this. So long as Israeli settlements are expanding, you're not going to convince Palestinians that they're playing anything other than a zero-sum game with the Israelis. Obama understands it's partly a question of perception. Muslims who feel disrespected -- whether or not they really are -- will fuel religious extremism.

Let's skip ahead to the next great monotheistic religion. Why did Christianity take root?

The doctrines we associate with Christianity probably took root a little later than most people think. There's reason to doubt that Jesus is the source of the stuff we consider most laudable in Christianity: universal, transnational, transethnic love. I think that is a product of people like the Apostle Paul, who, after the crucifixion, carried the Jesus movement into the Roman Empire.

Paul wanted to build a network of churches. He was a true believer, but he went about this in a very pragmatic, businesslike way. In many ways, the church served as a networking service. That was part of its appeal. The network of Christian churches made it easier for merchants to travel from city to city in the Roman empire and do business.

Paul also made some good strategic choices. There were followers of Jesus who dictated that any non-Jews who became part of the Jesus movement had to be circumcised. Adult men had to be circumcised to join the church. This was before modern anesthesia, so you can see this would be a disincentive. Paul said no, and they don't have to follow the dietary laws either.

They also developed an attractive doctrine of an afterlife. The Roman empire was in a way waiting for a church to dominate it. The more Christians there were, the more valuable it was to join that network. When Christianity reached critical mass, then its dominance of the Roman Empire became almost inevitable.

So later Christians, Paul among others, really institutionalized Christianity. What about the historical Jesus? What do we know about him?

It's popular to say he said the good stuff and not the less good stuff. I think it's the opposite.

He's typically seen as the great prophet of peace and love.

Yeah. But the fact is, the Sermon on the Mount, which is a beautiful thing, does not appear in Mark, which was the first written gospel. And these views are not attributed to Jesus in the letters of Paul, which are the earliest post-crucifixion documents we have. You see Paul develop a doctrine of universal love, but he's not, by and large, attributing this stuff to Jesus. So, too, with "love your enemies." Paul says something like love your enemies, but he doesn't say Jesus said it. It's only in later gospels that this stuff gets attributed to Jesus. This will seem dispiriting to some people to hear that Jesus wasn't the great guy we thought he was. But to me, it's actually more inspiring to think that the doctrines of transnational, transethnic love were products of a multinational, imperial platform. Throughout human history, as social organization grows beyond ethnic bounds, it comes to encompass diverse ethnicities and nations. And if it develops doctrines that bring us closer to moral truth, like universal love, that is encouraging. I think you see it in all three religions.

If Jesus was not the prophet of love and tolerance that he's commonly thought to be, what kind of person was he?

I think he was your typical Jewish apocalyptic preacher. I'm not the first to say that. Bart Ehrman makes these kinds of arguments, and it goes back to Albert Schweitzer. Jesus was preaching that the kingdom of God was about to come. He didn't mean in heaven. He meant God's going to come down and straighten things out on Earth. And he had the biases that you'd expect a Jewish apocalyptic preacher to have. He doesn't seem to have been all that enthusiastic about non-Jews. There's one episode where a woman who's not from Israel wants him to use his healing powers on her daughter. He's pretty mean and basically says, no, we don't serve dogs here. He compares her to a dog. In the later gospels, that conversation unfolds so you can interpret it as a lesson in the value of faith. But in the earliest treatment, in Mark, it's an ugly story. It's only because she accepts her inferior status that Jesus says, OK, I will heal your daughter.

But wasn't Jesus revolutionary because he made no distinctions between social classes? The poor were just as worthy as the rich.

It's certainly plausible that his following included poor people. But I don't think it extended beyond ethnic bounds. And I don't think it was that original. In the Hebrew Bible, you see a number of prophets who were crying out for justice on behalf of the poor. So it wasn't new that someone would have a constituency that includes the dispossessed. I'm sure in many ways Jesus was a laudable person. But I think more good things are attributed to him than really bear weight.

So you are distinguishing between Jesus and Christ -- Jesus the flesh and blood historical figure as opposed to how he was later represented as Christ, the son of God.

That's right. There's no evidence that Jesus thought he should be equated with God. He may have thought he was a messiah, but "messiah" in those days didn't mean what it's come to mean to Christians. It meant a powerful figure who leads his people to victory, perhaps a successful revolt against the Romans. But Christ as we think of Christ -- the son of God -- that's something that emerges in the later gospels and reaches its climax in John, which is the last of the four Gospels to be written.

So the story of what Jesus represents in theology did not take shape during his lifetime.

Do you see Islam as essentially an offshoot of the Judeo-Christian tradition or as something fundamentally new?

Muhammad was trying to create a synthetic religion, drawing on the existing traditions of Judaism and Christianity. He says very nice things in the Quran about Christians and Jesus, though he can't quite accept the idea that Jesus was the son of God.

He also made great overtures toward Jews. He established a fast that was essentially Yom Kippur. The ban on eating pork probably comes as a reflection of Judaism. There's every indication that he hoped to play a successful non-zero-sum game with Christians and Jews and draw them into a larger religion. He insisted that his God was their God. But it didn't work out.

Apparently, not that many Jews bought into his mission.

In the standard telling, once Muhammad was ruling the city of Medina and he'd become a statesman as well as a prophet, some Jewish tribes betrayed him and were collaborating with the enemy. So there was a very violent falling out. And he expelled Jewish tribes and in one case killed the adult males. But there's no doubt that the origins of Islam are rooted in the existing traditions of Christianity and Judaism.

You make the point that the Quran is a different kind of sacred text than the Bible. It was probably written over the course of two decades, while the stories collected in the Bible were written over centuries. That's why the Bible is such a diverse document.

We think of the Bible as a book, but in ancient times it would have been thought of as a library. There were books written by lots of different people, including a lot of cosmopolitan elites. You also see elements of Greek philosophy. The Quran is just one guy talking. In the Muslim view, he's mediating the word of God. He's not especially cosmopolitan. He is, according to Islamic tradition, illiterate. So it's not surprising that the Quran didn't have the intellectual diversity and, in some cases, the philosophical depth that you find in the Bible. I do think he was actually a very modern thinker. Muhammad's argument for why you should be devoted exclusively to this one God is very modern.

Do you think it's been harder for today's Muslims to accept liberal interpretations of the Quran because it's linked so directly to Muhammad, while the Bible isn't so closely associated with Moses or Jesus?

Yes, and also because Muhammad spent a certain amount of his career as a politician and a military leader. There are parts of the Quran that are a military manual, which advocate killing the enemy. Of course, the Bible has these things too, but they're a smaller portion of the overall Bible. But when you look at that part of the Quran, it's much more subtle than a lot of people think.

Take the famous verse "Kill the infidels wherever you find them." Actually, it's a mistranslation. It's "Kill the polytheists." So it probably wouldn't include Christians and Jews. If you look at the verse in context, it seems that he exempts those polytheists who are on the side of the Muslims in this particular war. So all that passage says is "Kill the people who are enemies in this war." It's not fundamentally about religion. In this case and others, it complies with my basic argument: When people see themselves in a non-zero-sum relationship with other people, they will be tolerant of them and of their religion. Muhammad probably exemplifies that better than any single figure in ancient Abrahamic history.

Your book focuses on the Abrahamic religions. But aren't Eastern religions like Buddhism and Hinduism actually more open to the idea that other religions can also be the path to truth and salvation?

Yes, it's not uncommon in Asia for somebody to be a little bit of a Buddhist and a little bit of a Taoist. It's certainly possible for religion to be non-exclusive. Parts of Buddhism are exemplary. In some ways it was the earliest religion to recognize the fundamental problem of being human. The challenge is to change the already existing character of a religion. The world is not full of Buddhists. And even Buddhist monks have gone on rampages. There is no religion that is always a religion of peace. But in Buddhism, you're seeing some very interesting developments. The Western, quasi-secular Buddhism is an interesting adaptation to a scientific age because it makes relatively few claims about the supernatural.

You've written a secular history of how religion has been used by various political movements to consolidate power. But you're ignoring the power of personal spiritual experience -- what some people would call revelation. Can you explain religion without acknowledging the importance of actual religious experience?

I do think religious experience has played an important part in religion. I think the Apostle Paul felt genuinely inspired. I myself have had profound experiences that could be characterized as religious. I certainly had some when I was young and a believing Christian. And I've had some since then. I did a one-week silent meditation retreat and had very profound experiences.

What kinds of experiences?

As the week wore on, the walls between me and other people and the rest of reality broke down a little. I became much less judgmental. I remember at one point looking at a weed and thinking, I can't believe I've been killing weeds because they're as pretty as anything else. Who put this label on weeds? And that's just a metaphor for what was changing in my consciousness.

It was completely profound by the end of the week. Of course, a week later it wore off and I was a jerk again. But I think it was a movement toward moral truth. The truth is that I'm not special, and you're not special.

That is the key adaptation that religions have to make in the modern world -- to make people appreciate the moral value of people in circumstances very different from their own. That is a move toward moral truth. It's a fascinating feature of the world we live in that as technology expands the realm of social organization, its coherence and integrity depends on moral progress.

There is another way to understand religion. Certain influential people have intense and profound spiritual experiences, which are later codified and turned into systems of belief for their followers. Do you accept this distinction between spiritual experience and organized religion?

I'm against the idea that there was a golden age of spiritual experience, but then at some point organized religion corrupted everything. I try to show that shamans are as political as anyone and were as self-serving as modern religious leaders. At the same time, there are valid spiritual experiences. I've had them.

But you don't acknowledge that there's anything transcendent about spiritual experience -- any communication with a deeper, alternative reality.

No, I do think the experience I had at that meditation retreat was transcendent. It removed me from the ordinary trappings of mundane consciousness. There is a moral axis to the universe. If we don't make moral progress, chaos ensues. If only in that sense, we are tethered to a moral axis. It raises legitimate questions as to whether the whole system was in fact set up by some being, something you could call a divinity.

It's really interesting to hear you say there's moral truth. That's not the kind of thing we usually hear from someone who calls himself a materialist.

Maybe not, but materialism has gotten a bad name. You can be a materialist and still believe that some larger purpose is unfolding through the history of life on this planet. And you can think of the source of that purpose -- however hard it is to conceive of that source -- in favorable terms. You can use the term "divine," if you want. I do believe there's evidence of some larger purpose unfolding; you'd think religious people would like that. On the other hand, I take a very skeptical view of the claims to special revelation that religions make. You would think my account of religious history would be to the liking of atheists and agnostics.

So we can believe there's an underlying moral truth without believing in God.

The phrase that philosophers use is "moral realism." Do you think morality is in some sense a real thing out there? It's a very elusive question. What I feel sure of is that there's a moral axis to the universe, a moral order, without believing in God.

Are you also saying we can be religious without believing in God?

By some definitions, yes. It's hard to find a definition of religion that encompasses everything we call religion. The definition I like comes from William James. He said, "Religious belief consists of the belief that there is an unseen order and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting to that order." In that sense, you can be religious without believing in God. In that sense, I'm religious. On the God question, I'm not sure. But I can call myself religious and have a fully scientific worldview.

You write, "Religion needs to mature more if the world is going to survive in good shape -- and for that matter, if religion is going to hold the respect of intellectually critical people." How does it need to mature?

You can't believe the Earth was created 6,000 years ago. There's a whole list of things that are not compatible with modern science.

That's obvious. But some people would also say the idea of a personal God does not square with the scientific worldview today.

It's not a logical impossibility that there's a personal God out there. It's not even quite impossible that God intervenes when the scientists are not measuring stuff, when nobody's watching. But if you're going to have a religion that's broadly reconcilable with a scientific worldview and going to win acceptance among intellectual elites, then it's not going to involve an interventionist God. There are certainly people who find tremendous reassurance and guidance from religions that don't involve a god of any kind, and here I'm thinking about secular Buddhism.

Or you have a Christian theologian like Paul Tillich who tried to get away from an anthropomorphic God. He talked about God as "the ground of being."

Of course, he got accused of sugarcoating what was in fact something like agnosticism or atheism. It's easier to get reassurance by thinking there's some powerful being looking out for you than for something called "the ground of being." But for my money, if you're interested in hanging on to some kind of religious worldview that's viable in the modern world, you have to make that effort. I haven't tried to work out any detailed program here. It's something I'd like to think about in the future.

At the end of your book, you say the great divide in modern thinking is between people who think there is some divine source of meaning -- a higher purpose in the universe -- and those people who don't. Is this different than the usual dichotomy between believers and atheists?

It's a little different. I'm trying to get members of the different Abrahamic religions to realize that if they want to have an enemy, there's a bigger one than each other. I don't want them to declare jihad on atheists, but it might be good for them to realize, in the modern intellectual battle, they all have something in common: not only a specific Abrahamic God, but belief in a transcendent source of meaning. And I'd like to add that there are a lot of other people who don't subscribe to your notion of God, maybe not to any notion of God, who do believe in a transcendent source of meaning and a larger purpose that's unfolding.

As opposed to the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg, who famously said, "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless."

I think he's wrong. But it's not surprising. Physicists don't think much about the animate world. So he probably hasn't given a lot of thought to the human condition and the direction of human history. But I'd say even the realm of physics -- just the weirdness of quantum physics -- should instill in all of us a little humility. It should make us aware that human consciousness, designed by natural selection to do really mundane things, is clearly not capable of grasping some ultimate things that are probably out there.

Hey Religious Believers, Where's Your Evidence?

2009-12-04T06:55:00.000-08:00

Hey Religious Believers, Where's Your Evidence?
By Greta Christina, AlterNet
December 4, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/144354/

What evidence do religious believers have for their beliefs?

And when they're asked what evidence they have, how do believers respond?

In my conversations with religious believers, I'll often ask, "Why do you think God or the supernatural exists? What makes you think this is true? What evidence do you have for this belief?" Partly I'm just curious; I want to know why people believe what they do. Plus, I think it's a valid question: it's certainly one I'd ask about any other claim or opinion. And if I'm wrong about my atheism -- if there's good evidence for religion that I haven't seen yet -- I want to know. I'm game. Show me the money.

But when I ask these questions, I almost never get a straight answer.

What I typically get is a startling assortment of conversational gambits deflecting the question.

I get excuses for why believers shouldn't have to provide evidence. Vague references to other people who supposedly have evidence, without actually pointing to said evidence. Irrelevant tirades about mean atheists. Venomous anger at how disrespectful and intolerant I am to even ask the question.

Today, I want to chronicle some of these conversational gambits and point out their logical flaws. I want to point out the fiendishly clever ways that they armor religion against the expectation -- a completely reasonable expectation, an expectation we have about every other kind of claim -- that it back itself up with evidence.

And I want to talk about why believers resort to them.

Whatever You Do, Don't Show Me the Money

We begin the parade of deflective gambits with this:

The spiritual realm is beyond this physical one -- we shouldn't expect to see evidence of it.

Yeah. See, here's the problem with that.

The problem is that religion makes claims about this world. The physical one, the one we live in. It claims that God sets events into motion; that guardian angels protect us; that our consciousness is animated by an immaterial soul; etc.

So if there really were a non-physical world affecting this physical one, we should be able to observe those effects. Even if we can't observe the causes directly.

My favorite analogy for this is gravity. When Isaac Newton developed his laws of motion, he had no clue what gravity was. For all he knew, gravity was caused by demons inside every physical object, all pulling at each other by magic. He tried for years to figure it out, and eventually gave up.

But even though he had no idea what gravity was, he was able to observe its effects. He was able to describe the laws of motion that govern those effects: laws that to this day make startlingly accurate predictions about the behavior of objects. He wasn't able to see or even understand the cause -- but he was able to observe and describe the effects.

I could give a zillion other examples. We can't see subatomic particles directly, either. Magnetic fields. Black holes. But we can observe their effects. We can make accurate predictions about them. We know they're there.

If there really is a non-physical, spiritual world affecting the physical one... why can't we come to an understanding about the nature of that world, and how it affects this one? Why, after thousands of years of religious belief, are we still no closer to an understanding of the spiritual realm than we ever were? Why do religious beliefs still all boil down to a difference of opinion?

The obvious answer: Because the spiritual realm doesn't exist. Because the spiritual realm is a human construct: invented by human minds that are strongly biased to see intention and pattern even where none exist, and to believe what they already believe or want to believe.

Believers only fall back on this "the spiritual is beyond the physical, so we shouldn't expect evidence of it" trope because there isn't good evidence. This argument isn't really an argument. It doesn't support the claims of religion. It merely serves to armor religion against the expectation that it support its claims.

Religious experiences are inherently irrational -- beyond questions of reason or evidence.

Why should that be?

I've heard this argument a thousand times. And nobody making it has ever been able to explain to me: Why should that be?

Religion is a hypothesis about the world. It's not a subjective personal experience, like, "I passionately love this woman and want to marry her." It's not a personal instinct or judgment call, like, "I think my life will be better if I quit my job and move to San Francisco." It's not a personal aesthetic opinion, like, "Radiohead is the greatest band of this decade." It's a hypothesis about the world -- the real, external, non-subjective world. It's an attempt to explain how the world works, and why it is the way it is.

So why should it be beyond reason or evidence?

Unreason and emotion, personal instinct and flashes of insight are all important. Our lives would be flat without them, and they can tell us important truths. But they tell us important truths about ourselves. When it comes to finding out what is and is not true about the real, external, non-subjective world, these methods are far too flawed, far too biased, to blindly trust as the sole foundation of our understanding. Instinct and intuition can give us ideas about the world -- but we have to then rigorously test those ideas and make sure they're consistent with the evidence. History is full of scientists getting brilliant ideas in flashes of intuition -- but it's also full of scientists getting flashes of intuition that turned out to be balderdash.

The careful gathering of evidence, and the rigorously rational analysis of that evidence, has shown itself time and again to be the best method we have of understanding the world. It's biased and flawed too, of course, as are all human endeavors. But compared to casual observation, personal intuition, and each individual's biased analysis of what seems to make sense to them, it's much, much better.

And every time religious claims have been carefully evaluated by a rigorous scientific method, they've collapsed like a house of cards.

The only reason believers fall back on this "religious experience is inherently irrational, beyond reason or evidence" trope is that reason and evidence don't back up their beliefs. This trope isn't an argument. It doesn't support the claims of religion. It merely serves to armor religion against the expectation that it support its claims.

Religion can't be proved or disproved with 100 percent certainty. Therefore, it's a question of personal faith, not subject to reason or evidence.

Here we have a classic case of special pleading.

Almost nothing can be proved or disproved with 100 percent certainty. And proving with 100 percent certainty that something doesn't exist is virtually impossible.

Which is why we don't apply that standard to any other kind of claim.

We don't say, "Well, you can't prove with 100 percent certainty that the Earth orbits the Sun -- it could be a mass hallucination caused by a mischievous imp -- so we should give up on deciding whether it's probably true, and call it a matter of personal belief."

With every other kind of claim, we accept a standard of reasonable plausibility. With every other kind of hypothesis, we accept that if there's no good evidence supporting it, and there's a fair amount of evidence contradicting it, and it's shot through with logical flaws and internal inconsistencies, and similar claims have never turned out to be right.... then unless that situation changes, those are good enough reasons to reject it.

Only religion gets the "If you can't disprove it with 100 percent certainty, it's reasonable to believe it" standard.

Why?

When asked, "What evidence do you have that this is true?" how is it reasonable for believers to reply, "You can't absolutely prove that it isn't"? How is that even an argument? How does it support the claims of religion? How does it do anything but armor religion against the expectation that it support its claims?

It's disrespectful and intolerant to tell people their religious beliefs are wrong.

And we have more special pleading.

In a reasonably free, reasonably democratic society, we don't call it intolerant to criticize ideas. We criticize ideas all the time. Political ideas. Artistic ideas. Scientific ideas. Ideas about relationships, money, music, food, philosophy, sports, cute cats. If we think other people have a mistaken idea about the world, we think it's reasonable and fair, admirable even, to try to persuade them out of it. We might think it's bad manners at the dinner table, but in public forums, in the marketplace of ideas, we think it's just ducky.

Only religion gets a free ride.

In the marketplace of ideas, only religion gets a free ride in an armored tank. Only religion gets to sell its wares behind a curtain. Only religion gets to make promises about its wares that it never, ever has to keep. And when people hand out flyers in the marketplace saying, "These guys are selling hot air, the Emperor has no clothes, here's all the reasons why our wares are better," only with religion do people scowl disapprovingly at the disrespectful, bigoted intolerance.

Religion is a hypothesis about the world. It is entirely reasonable to treat it like any other hypothesis... and to point out the ways that it's logically flawed, inconsistent with itself, and entirely unsupported by any good evidence.

"You have no right to make your case" is an argument people make when they don't have a case themselves. It's not even an argument. It's the deflection of an argument. It doesn't support the claims of religion. It merely armors religion against the expectation that it support its claims.

There are wonderful advanced modern theological arguments for God. I just can't tell you what they are.

Many believers accuse atheists of arguing against the most simplistic, most outdated forms of belief; of ignoring the wonderful world of modern theology and its advanced understanding of God.

And yet, they do this without ever actually explaining what that advanced understanding is, or what the arguments and apologetics and evidence for it are. The promise of a truly good modern argument for God is dangled in front of us like a carrot in front of a donkey.

It's hooey.

I've actually read a fair amount of modern theology. I'm not a theology scholar, but I got a B.A. in religion, and I've read a fair amount since then.

And I am repeatedly struck by how weak and sloppy modern theology is. It either redefines God out of existence, defining him so abstractly he might as well not exist, or it amounts to one of the many excuses listed here, excuses for why this powerful being with a pervasive effect on the world somehow has no solid evidence of his existence. (Or else it's the same old bad arguments we've seen for hundreds of years -- First Cause, the Argument from Design, Pascal's Freaking Wager -- dressed up in po-mo academia-speak.)

But more to the point:

You can't just point to the existence of modern theology and say, "Look! Modern theology! It's new and improved! With 30 percent more reason than medieval theology! It says so right on the box!" You have to actually, you know, tell us what that theology says. And then you have to tell us why you think it's right.

If you can't, then that's not an argument. It doesn't support the claims of religion. It merely armors religion against the expectation that it support its claims.

Atheists are close-minded, closing themselves off to realms of experience beyond this mere mortal coil.

This one kind of ticks me off.

As a rule, atheists are the ones saying, "I don't see any good evidence for God...but show me some good evidence, and I'll change my mind." And believers are the ones saying, "Nothing you say could possibly convince me God is not real -- that's what it means to have faith." Believers are the ones with all these defense mechanisms I'm writing about; all these elaborate excuses for hanging onto a worldview that's not supported by one piece of good, solid evidence.

So how is it, exactly, that atheists are the close-minded ones?

Having an open mind doesn't mean thinking all possibilities are equally likely. It means being willing to consider new ideas if the evidence supports them. And it means being willing to give up old ideas if the evidence is against them.

So to any believer who thinks atheists are close-minded, I want to ask you this:

What would convince you that you were mistaken?

Most atheists can answer that question. We can tell you what we'd accept as evidence for God. Atheists are open to the possibility that there might be a supernatural world. In fact, most atheists once believed in that world. We just don't believe it anymore. We are provisionally rejecting it for lack of evidence. If we see better evidence, we'll change our minds.

What about you?

Are you open to the possibility that you might be mistaken? Are you open to the possibility that there is no God, and that the physical world is all there is? Is your God hypothesis falsifiable? Is there any possible evidence that would change your mind?

And if not -- then on what basis are you accusing atheists of being close-minded?

This "atheists are closed off to the spiritual world" trope is clearly not an argument. It merely reiterates the very claim being discussed -- the claim that there's a supernatural world to be open to -- without offering any evidence for it. It doesn't support the claims of religion. It merely armors religion against the expectation that it support its claims.

If They Had The Money, They'd Show It

Finally.

I would like to point out this:

If religious believers had good evidence for their beliefs, they'd be giving it.

When something even vaguely resembling solid evidence for religion appears, believers are all over it. The Shroud of Turin. The Virgin Mary on a cinnamon bun. That ridiculous prayer "study" supposedly showing that sick people who were prayed for did better... until the study was blasted into shrapnel, and the researchers were shown to be dishonest at best and frauds at worst, and subsequent studies that were actually done right showed absolutely no such thing.

More commonly, believers frequently trot out the old standby forms of religious "evidence": personal intuition (translated: our biased and flawed tendency to believe what we already believe or what we want to believe), and religious authorities and texts (translated: someone else's biased and flawed intuition, passed off as fact). Even in the era of evolution, even when we know in great detail how the complexity of life came into being, many believers -- including moderate, non-creationist believers -- often point to the apparent "design" of life as evidence of God. And any number of coincidences, twists of fate, supposedly miraculous medical cures, and other happy and unhappy accidents -- the kind we'd have every reason to expect in a physical, cause-and-effect world -- will be readily chalked up to spiritual forces or the hand of God.

Believers -- many believers, anyway -- are hungry for solid, non-subjective, real-world evidence for their beliefs. But in the absence of that evidence, and in the presence of positive evidence and arguments countering their beliefs, they'll resort to slippery, contorted, elaborately constructed excuses for why the expectation of evidence for religion isn't fair.

And as I look at these excuses, I think I see why.

Religion is like a paper castle that's formidably protected -- with moats and walls, trap doors and vats of boiling oil, attack dogs and armed guards patrolling around the clock.

The armor has to be first-rate.

Because the structure itself can't stand on its own.

The Secret History of Our Time: The Pope and Satan, War and the Anti-Christ, Revelations and the Last Days

2009-11-27T05:55:00.001-08:00

http://www.richardccook.com/2009/11/25/the-secret-history-of-our-time-the-pope-and-satan-war-and-the-anti-christ-revelations-and-the-last-days/

The Secret History of Our Time: The Pope and Satan, War and the Anti-Christ, Revelations and the Last Days

Author’s Note: In order to come up with an accurate understanding of today’s world crisis it is necessary to start looking at it from the spiritual dimension. This essay attempts to do so, using sources acquired during many years of study.

By the latter half of the 19th century, say at the time of the great Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1893, many visionaries saw mankind poised to enter a Golden Age of peace, prosperity, innovation, and progress. The reason, of course, was the Industrial Revolution, especially the relatively recent harnessing of electricity and what that could mean in terms of bringing the benefits of science and technology to bear on raising standards of living and improving the health, longevity, and culture of the masses. Most promising was the possibility that all the new ways of harnessing the hidden forces of nature could allow everyone the leisure to enjoy life, not just the privileged few.

We know that it did not work out that way. Along with skyscrapers, the telephone, airplanes, and automobiles came the horrors of the 20th century, with its wars, revolutions, genocides, and pestilences. There also came the exploitation of the earth and its resources, especially petroleum, for the enrichment of wealthy minorities in the most heavily-armed nations and the development of arsenals of weapons eventually capable of wiping all life off the planet.

Today we seem to be in a late stage of these tragedies, with the U.S. military poised to complete the armed conquest of the earth through a continuous series of assaults against the nations of the Middle East followed by even bigger targets.

It is obvious that the ultimate enemies are Russia and possibly China, both nuclear powers growing in economic strength. (See “Former Soviet States: Battleground for Global Domination” by Rick Rozoff, Global Research, November 23, 2009.) What precisely is to be gained by the American policy of world military supremacy no one seems to be able to define very clearly.
The leaders of America seem to think it is good and righteous to be able to say to every other nation of the world: “We will rule over you or destroy you.” But I would like to suggest that there is no difference in an ethical sense between this and the highwayman’s command to “Stand and deliver.”

If an individual person projected such attitudes, he would be treated as a dangerous psychopath, perhaps even criminally deranged. Some might even suggest the person was under the influence of an evil force, especially if he had no real need for other people’s property, being already the richest inhabitant of the neighborhood. Those with a religious bent might say he was possessed.
I would agree with this judgment. I would say further that the only way truly to understand the history of our time would be to postulate a metaphysical approach, where the forces of good and evil come into play.

Let us begin to seek an explanation by referring to a little-known incident that is said to have taken place within the Catholic Church.

During the late 19th century, the Church, led by Pope Leo XIII, the third longest-serving pontiff in history, attempted to bring Roman Catholicism up-to-date with respect to the rapid development of science and technology by humanizing and moderating the excesses of industrial capitalism. Pope Leo also favored peace among nations, along with fairness for all economic classes.

Pope Leo’s famous encyclical, entitled Rerum Novarum (Of New Things), published in 1891, marked the founding of the modern Catholic social justice movement while rejecting extreme collectivist economic doctrines. According to Wikipedia, “It supported the rights of labor to form unions, rejected communism and unrestricted capitalism, while affirming the right to private property.”

But at the time Pope Leo published Rerum Novarum, he had already experienced a vision of things to come of an entirely different and deeply disturbing nature. As described in the Catholic on-line Michael Journal:

“Exactly 33 years to the day prior to the great Miracle of the Sun in Fatima, that is, on October 13, 1884, Pope Leo XIII had a remarkable vision. When the aged Pontiff had finished celebrating Mass in his private Vatican Chapel, attended by a few Cardinals and members of the Vatican staff, he suddenly stopped at the foot of the altar. He stood there for about 10 minutes, as if in a trance, his face ashen white. Then, going immediately from the Chapel to his office, he composed [a] prayer to St. Michael, with instructions it be said after all Low Masses everywhere.

“When asked what had happened, he explained that, as he was about to leave the foot of the altar, he suddenly heard voices – two voices, one kind and gentle, the other guttural and harsh. They seemed to come from near the tabernacle. As he listened, he heard the following conversation:

“The guttural voice, the voice of Satan in his pride, boasted to Our Lord: ‘I can destroy your Church.’

“The gentle voice of Our Lord: ‘You can? Then go ahead and do so.’

“Satan: ‘To do so, I need more time and more power.’

“Our Lord: ‘How much time? How much power?’

“Satan: ‘75 to 100 years, and a greater power over those who will give themselves over to my service.’
“
Our Lord: ‘You have the time, you will have the power. Do with them what you will.’

“The prayer Pope Leo XIII decreed be said at the end of Low Mass was: ‘Saint Michael, the Archangel, defend us in battle; be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray, and do thou, O prince of the heavenly host, by the power of God, thrust into Hell, Satan and all the other evil spirits, who prowl throughout the world, seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.’ Pope Leo’s vision, of course, is strikingly similar to the power granted Satan by God in the Book of Job.

The 75-100 years of Satanic power Pope Leo foresaw through his vision would, at its greatest extent, take the world through the year 1984, halfway through the Ronald Reagan presidency in the U.S. It would have encompassed World Wars I and II, the Great Depression, and the Cold War. It would have included the assassinations of U.S. Presidents William McKinley and John F. Kennedy, along with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy.

Little did Pope Leo know that during these terrible times the Church he served would also largely fall under the sway of the Enemy, along with all the mainstream Protestant churches, the independent evangelical churches, and most of the other religious and civil institutions of the so-called civilized world. All would abandon to a large extent their apostolic calling through compromises with modern forces of economic exploitation and military power.

But even if the reign of Satan ended in the mid-1980s, the momentum would have continued, encompassing the start of the current phase of worldwide warfare, beginning with the attacks on Nicaragua, Grenada, Angola, Panama, and Iraq during the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush presidencies, along with the fall of the Soviet Union resulting from U.S. economic warfare in the 1980s and early 1990s. Then in the late 1990s came the destruction of Yugoslavia by U.S. bombing, followed in 2001 by 9/11 and today’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

By the turn of the 20th century, the Satanic clouds were indeed gathering. By 1900, a conspiracy consisting of various European elite groups such as the Illuminati, Freemasons, and Zionists, had begun to take over the world through control of the British Empire. Their vehicle was Cecil Rhodes’ Round Table, financed by theft of the gold and diamond-rich South African provinces from the Dutch Boers. To secure their loot, the British locked up the Boers in the world’s first concentration camps.

One of Rhodes’s objectives, as stated in a series of wills starting in 1877, was “the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British Empire.”[1] Rhodes’ chief executor was his fellow Freemason, Lord Nathan Rothschild.

The Masonic lodges of England and France were particular hotbeds of imperialist political agitation.

These groups, which I’ll refer to simply as the Illuminati, using a term common today,[2] moved swiftly to seize control of the U.S. as the 20th century unfolded, succeeding in 1913 through passage by the U.S. Congress of the Federal Reserve Act. Also in 1913 Congress approved the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution, authorizing the federal income tax that would be needed to pay interest on the large national debt which the Federal Reserve System was intended to generate. As had been done with Great Britain and the Bank of England, the financial system was to be collateralized by mortgaging America’s future through the nation’s tax system.[3]

The method by which the Illuminati gained financial power was usury, or the collection of compound interest on lending, a practice the medieval Church had outlawed. But by the 20th century, the Church had begun to define usury as “excess” interest of which they themselves enjoyed substantial profits through the massive investments of the Vatican Bank.

To illustrate the diabolical nature of usury, economist Michael Hudson, in an article entitled “The Mathematical Economics of Compound Rates of Interest: A Four-Thousand Year Overview, Part I,”[4] cites a book written in 1902 by German economist Michael Flürscheim, entitled A Clue to the Economic Labyrinth.

Flürscheim drew a strong distinction between the ability of physical capital invested in scientific production to create goods of value and the manner by which finance capital expropriates the resulting wealth through interest-bearing debt.
Hudson elaborates:

“To illustrate this point, [Flürscheim] composed the following allegory to illustrate the dynamic at work:
“Many ages after man was driven from Paradise and told by the Lord ‘to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow, mercy began to prevail. A loving angel was sent down by the Great Master, charged with the task of lightening the burden. The angel’s name was Spirit of Invention. He began his work by teaching man to make useful tools,’ to tame animals, mobilize water power, air and wind power, fire and steam power to drive machinery.

“’It seemed that at last the golden era had come of which men had dreamed for ages past, without ever hoping to attain it, without trouble, with almost no exertion, except that of wealth for the satisfaction of wants which, in former times, even the richest did not know or dream of.’ But ‘that envious spirit, that fallen angel, Satan, who once before, in the shape of the serpent, had driven man from Paradise by seducing him to sin,’ was jealous and angry that his own empire would soon be over forever.

“Among the follies of man, one little imp, called Interest, managed to attract Satan’s attention. ‘”What is the matter with you, Interest?” he asked the saucy imp. “You don’t seem to be so dejected as your comrades are?”‘

“‘Why should I be dejected, master?’ replied the spirit, ‘Am I not one of your favorite soldiers? Haven’t I always been victorious under your august guidance?’”

“But Satan answered sadly, ‘Alas, You are no match for the Spirit of Invention.’ The imp, however, volunteered to demonstrate his prowess in a duel.

“‘You little imp! Fight the powerful angel who is defeating all my army?’ laughed Satan.”

“‘Yes, I alone; provided, of course, you allow my son, Compound Interest, to help me.’” He explained with regard to the goblins of technology, that “Instead of their being a source of blessing to mankind, I shall make them the producers of untold misery – worse than ever man suffered from thy hands.” So, “Satan let him have his way. The battle of giants began.”

“In the beginning the angel laughed, for, though twenty squares were passed, no noticeable diminution of his forces was perceptible. Demon Interest said nothing, but attended to business, quietly doubling his army on every succeeding square. At the thirtieth square the angel ceased to laugh, and soon saw he was lost.

“‘I despised you, little fellow,’ he signed despairingly, ‘and I am punished for my vanity. I see there is no use fighting against you. Demon Interest is more powerful than the Spirit of Invention. I am your slave. Command your servant!’

“‘I am the only servant of my great master,’ dryly replied the demon. ‘Here I see him coming. He will give you his orders.’

“And Satan gave his orders. He commanded that the angel was to continue in his work with all his troops, which were to be increased with all possible exertion, so that humanity – which did not know the nature of the antagonist it had to fight against – would always keep in fresh hope of final success when the new troops were forthcoming. But as fast as they appeared, Demon Interest was to send forth a larger army to capture the new forces, to enslave them, and – instead of their benefiting man – make them increase the slave-chains which weigh him down.

“To the surprise of the king [whose kingdom was being destroyed], this series of doublings “produced an amount larger than the treasures of his whole kingdom could buy. It is this kind of chess-game which capital is continually playing with labor.” The remarkable growth of compound interest would “soon swallow products, capital, the earth and even the workers.”

Here ends the parable, one which contains deep metaphysical truths, for compound interest embodies a power of nature comparable to nuclear energy. When the Illuminati took over the U.S. through the Federal Reserve System, Satan now had at his disposal, through banking, what was becoming the most powerful economy on earth. There followed World War I, by which an alliance among the British crown, that nation’s aristocratic classes, American bankers, Freemasonry, and international Zionism exploited the flower of youth of Europe and America as cannon fodder in order to destroy four great empires. Three of the empires were Christian: the German and the Austro-Hungarian, both largely Roman Catholic,[5] and the Russian, whose religion was Orthodox Christian. The fourth was Islamic: the Ottoman.

America was stampeded into the war by the banker-owned press, even though President Woodrow Wilson treacherously ran for reelection in 1916 on the campaign slogan, “He kept us out of war.” However, the Democratic Party that nominated Wilson in 1912 and again in 1916 had become heavily infiltrated with both Zionist and socialist influences, the latter deriving in part from the Socialist Labor Party founded in New York in 1876. This party was the second oldest socialist political organization in the world, being founded only four years after the Communist International made New York City its world headquarters.
It was the socialists and Masons who were the biggest boosters of Wilson’s entry into the war. In France, World War I was a project run virtually single-handedly by the Paris Grand Orient Lodge. Nowhere on earth did hatred of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Catholicism overflow with such venom as in the French Third Republic.

During World War I, the British government issued the Balfour Declaration in favor of the founding of a Zionist state in Palestine. This eventually became the nation of Israel. Many British Jews who had become assimilated within British society opposed Zionism, as they believed it grew out of a ghetto mentality that would prevent Jews anywhere in the world from living at peace with their neighbors. Their misgivings were prophetic.

The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia was also financed by the Illuminati, led by the American Schiff, Warburg, Morgan, Mellon, Carnegie, and Rockefeller interests. The headquarters for their funding of the Bolsheviks was in the same building as the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.[6] After the Russian Czar abdicated in 1917, Trotsky, who was in exile in New York, traveled at Illuminati expense with a contingent of communist followers to Russia to help Lenin overthrow the provisional government.

Bolshevism was the work of the Russian Jewish intelligentsia who killed over twenty million Russian Christians in their obliteration of the Czarist empire. This is a travesty the Holocaust “industry” never mentions. During the Russian Civil War Trotsky was commander of the million-man Red Army. He explained his philosophy as a leader of men in his Autobiography:
An army cannot be built without reprisals. Masses of men cannot be led to death unless the army command has the death-penalty in its arsenal. So long as those malicious tailless apes that are so proud of their technical achievements—the animals that we call men—will build armies and wage wars, the command will always be obliged to place the soldiers between the possible death in the front and the inevitable one in the rear.[7]

Although the Western bankers wanted control over the Soviet Union’s banking system and the Rockefellers desired dominance over the Baku oil fields, Stalin, after coming to power when Lenin died and Trotsky lay ill, largely pursued an independent course. Double-crossing the Illuminati by establishing “socialism in one country,” rather than promoting the worldwide revolution Trotsky demanded, Stalin proved too hard a nut to crack. Trotsky, whose real name was Lev Bronstein, was assassinated by a Stalin agent in Mexico in 1940.

So the Illuminati, working through the Zionist financiers, brought on the Great Depression through a contraction of credit starting in 1929, then arranged for the rise of Hitler in Germany. The idea was to let Stalin and Hitler destroy each other. The plan for U.S. entrance into the World War II met with resistance from American patriots like Charles Lindbergh, but the Illuminati, with President Franklin Roosevelt’s connivance, manipulated the U.S. into war against Germany, Italy, and Japan anyway.[8] FDR now found “Uncle Joe” Stalin his ally, along with British arch-imperialist Winston Churchill of Great Britain.

During World War II the Zionists actually helped Hitler bring about the Jewish Holocaust in order to create sympathy for the foundation of the state of Israel. We now know the astounding facts that the Zionists conspired with England to block the escape routes of Jews who wanted to flee Europe and even helped the Nazis police the concentration camp system.[9]

Again the point is made that the Illuminati created both communism and fascism. The two are mirror images of each other, just different names for the all-powerful State run by a self-appointed elite with a single goal: power.

After World War II, the Illuminati created the nation of Israel in 1948 through a terrorist assault by the Zionists on Palestine. Meanwhile, Jewish scientists had developed the A-bombs that President Harry Truman dropped on Japan.

The Illuminati next used the tremendous post-war power of the U.S. national security state in order to create the Cold War to fend off the Soviet Union, whose power had multiplied through Stalin’s victory over Germany and the huge sacrifice of Russian lives this victory required. They killed the Kennedy brothers in the 1960s and have produced the last 30 years of world conflict, leading to the 9/11 false-flag attacks in New York and Washington and today’s phony “War on Terror.”

A decade earlier, the Illuminati took command of Russia after the “fall” of the Soviet Union in 1991. During the decade of the 1990s, under Russian Freemason Boris Yeltsin and the Jewish-Russian “oligarchs,” that nation was looted of its financial and resource wealth.

The plan may have included not only dismemberment of the Soviet Union but of Russia itself. According to a book published in Russian by Oleg Platonov entitled Russia’s Crown of Thorns- Secret History of Freemasonry” 1731-1996 (1996), the biggest part of Siberia was even to have been handed over to the United States.[11]

But the plan has evidently been thwarted by a resurgence of Russian nationalism. While Yeltsin handed on his authority to Vladimir Putin in a surprise move in 1999, Putin, as did Stalin in the 1920s, has now begun to restore the independence and economic power that were stolen from Russia during Yeltsin’s misrule.

In fact, the failure of the Illuminati to fulfill their longstanding dream of completely destroying Russia is probably the most significant geopolitical fact of the last half-century. As a result, the homeland of Orthodox Christianity still exists,[12] and nuclear-tipped Russian missiles remain aimed at all the major Western cities, where the Illuminati elite reside, as well as at Israel.

The U.S. has retaliated by expanding the membership of NATO to include Poland and the Baltic republics, staging “color revolutions” to take over former Soviet republics like Ukraine and Georgia, and trying to gain as allies the former Central Asian republics like Kazakhstan. Russia is increasingly portrayed in the Illuminati press, as was the Soviet Union during the Cold War, as the enemy of world peace. But with Russia moving closer to the European Union and becoming a major supplier of natural gas and oil, the world balance of power may have decisively tipped from the Western Hemisphere back to Eurasia.

The new battleground appears to be Iran, the last Middle Eastern nation not completely under Illuminati control. The continued demonization of Iran by media outlets like the Washington Post and New York Times is clearly intended to prepare the ground for a much larger Asian war that would likely be accompanied by totalitarian repression in every nation of the world. And the run-up to world genocide through planned programs of famine, pestilence, epidemics, and de-industrialization via the global warming scare, would be the seeming accompaniment. At the same time, there seems to be a glimmer of realization that an attack on Iran by the U.S. and/or Israel, could be suicidal for both in the long run, especially if it leads to world war against Russia, China, and maybe even India.

Whatever the outcome, what is evident is that we are continuing to witness the workings of Satanic evil on a worldwide scale. Even if, according to Pope Leo’s vision, Satan’s reign has come to an end, as stated earlier, the momentum continues.
The focal point of Satanism on earth today is the U.S. military-industrial-intelligence complex, with its allies in Britain, Israel, and the other NATO nations.

This complex is a death cult engaged in torture, assassinations, mind control, destruction of nations and peoples, and confiscation of all the resources of the earth. Among its roots is Nazism, which itself was a Satanic cult that was incorporated into the American CIA after World War II when a host of Nazi mass murderers were spirited into the U.S. from Germany to form the core of Western intelligence operations against the Soviet Union. The CIA was run by members of Yale University’s Skull and Bones, itself an Illuminati death cult said to have been founded by white Protestant males with money from New England’s Chinese opium trade in the early 19th century.

Today the Illuminati cult intends to complete its conquest of earth, destroy much of the useless human population, enslave the rest, and likely enjoy itself to the end of time in drugged debauchery, just as its leaders among the elitist class already do on a regular basis. Planning among the cult for World War III is well-advanced, even though Russia thwarted the earlier plans for it to be dissolved during the events of the 1990s.

The cult is doubtless frightened because it knows that Russia possesses enough nukes to obliterate all major Western elite strongholds and will do so if pushed too far. Nevertheless they will be moving out soon because they know time is no longer on their side. There are indeed plans to impose martial law within the U.S. and other Western nations and lock up all those perceived as still capable of independent thinking. According to one of my informants:

“I’m a retired Correctional Officer….. I was recently talking to a friend of mine named M- who still works at the prison I was at prior to my retirement. M- told me of a recent conversation he had with an officer at this same prison who is also in the National Guard. The officer told M- that they (the National Guard) were presently training to put people in ‘Re-education Camps.’ I asked M- if he was sure that was the term the officer used? M- said he was absolutely certain that the guard used the term Re-education Camps.”

At this stage of the discussion it is fair to ask whether there is anything else going on that might provide a counterweight to the ruination of the world and mankind. If there is a God, what is He doing to right the wrongs that have been done? If there are people of wisdom who are supposed to be guarding and protecting humanity, where are they?

And where are the angelic forces, the beneficent spirits, some embodiment of decency and goodness? For the believers in our midst, where are the saviors of mankind? Where is Jesus Christ when we need Him? Where is Mohammed? Buddha? Vishnu? Are they nowhere to be found in mankind’s darkest hour?

Let us call these forces of goodness and light the influence of esotericism. Some claim that all esoteric influences are evil and Satanic and that the Illuminati itself has esoteric origins.

This is profoundly false. There have been threads of hidden teachings throughout human history that have continuously led individuals to the highest realization. These influences have produced all genuine world religions. They produced the Mysteries of ancient times. They were at the core of different spiritual teachings during European history, including those of the Knights Templars, the Rosicrucians, and the Renaissance schools of art and philosophy.

But teachings degenerate over time, and unscrupulous people get hold of them and try to use them for selfish purposes. The result is black magic, sorcery, even devil worship. The Illuminati are a black magic cult. So is Skull and Bones. So were the Nazis. So are the CIA, the Mossad, MI6, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg Group, the Tavistock Institute, and many other organizations that try to use power or wealth or knowledge or related means for the control or destruction of others.

An intense form of black magic is practiced by the mainstream media through use of psychological manipulation for purposes of propaganda or commercialism. In fact the entire Western ruling elite is a black magic death cult with its own perverted rites of initiation. As indicated earlier, what characterizes these people above all is their universal addiction to drugs and sexual promiscuity or perversion.

But genuine esotericism has also been at work in the world. One form of endeavor has been through the transfer of the hidden knowledge of man’s spiritual evolution from centers in the East that have been overrun by war or revolution to individuals, groups, and secret schools in the West.

This happened when Russia was destroyed by the Bolshevik Revolution. The esoteric spark was carried to Paris and London respectively by the Caucasian-Greek spiritual master G.I. Gurdjieff (1866-1949) and his Russian pupil P.D. Ouspensky (1878-1947).

In the 1920s the Indian Sufi master Hazrat Inayat Khan (1882-1927) and his brother Musharaff Khan (1895-1967) brought the secrets of Sufism to America and Europe, founding a school that continues today. British journalist Paul Bruton (1898-1981) spent years in remote places of Egypt and India and wrote a series of books on his discoveries, including accounts of the famed Indian master Ramana Maharshi (1879-1950).

In the line of yoga, Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902) came to America in the early years of the 20th century to teach Vedanta. He was followed by Swami Yogananda (1893-1952), author of the celebrated Autobiography of a Yogi, who founded the Self-Realization Fellowship in California.

There were others. In the 1960s, followers of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (1918-2008), the Beatles’ guru, brought Transcendental Meditation to the West. The Kriya Yoga movement of Swami Muktananda (1908-1982) put down roots in upstate New York. Another great India master who influenced many Westerners was Papa Ramdas (1884-1963). Others were Sri Anirvan (1896-1978), Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950), Krishnamurti (1895-1986), and Meher Baba (1894-1969) More recently the female Indian masters Karunamayi, Amachi, and Mother Mira have founded movements in the West, as has the famous yogic meditation master Shivabalayogi.

When the Chinese took over Tibet most of the Tibetan lamas fled to India and the West, including the Dalai Lama, the Gwalya Karmapa , Chögyam Trungpa (1939-1987), and many others. Tibetan Buddhism has transformed the consciousness of the West in many profound ways.

The list could go on. Other streams of thought and practice have been Zen, Chinese Taoism, and the hidden teachings of many groups of native peoples in North and South America, Australia, Africa, Asia, and even within Europe among the Celtic and Nordic peoples. And within the Christian tradition there have been spiritual masters emerging as well, such as Joel Goldsmith (1892-1964) in the U.S., Padre Pio (1887-1968) in Italy, Eckhart Tolle (1948-) of Germany, who teaches in the U.S. and Canada, and Mother Teresa (1910-1997). Another important esoteric teacher was Austrian Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925).
I have been told that work is also ongoing on the astral plane. One powerful individual, for instance, has been hard at work with astral entities to stop the American plan of conquest.

Has all this happened by design? The answer, undoubtedly, is yes. No one in the world today who sincerely seeks inspiration or instruction on finding the path to the Higher Self and God can fail to encounter it. “Seek and ye shall find,” has never been more true.

And yet a person must persist and eventually find truth in his own heart, mind, and soul, because that is where God truly resides. If the travesties of the 20th century have demonstrated one thing, it is that God is not to be found in the world, at least the world that we see on TV and in the actions of its celebrities and leaders. No one out there is going to help us.

All help, rather, is to be found within. Then, once found, it is up to us to put it into action through our courageous efforts to
help others as we encounter them in daily life.

As stated in Matthew 25: 31-46 (King James Version):
“When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory:
“And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats:
“And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.
“Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world:
“For I was an hungered, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in:
“Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.
“Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungered, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink?
“When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee?
“Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?
“And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
“Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels:
“For I was an hungered, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink:
“I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.”
“Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungered, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee?
“Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.
“And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.”

The importance of these words in human history cannot be exaggerated. For 2,000 years they have been the standard by which nations, churches, rulers, economic systems, and political creeds have been measured. It was these sentiments that created modern civilization, imposed some semblance of decency on public and private life, and made it possible to walk down the streets of most parts of the world in peace and safety.

“These conditions have been disappearing over the last century. If we look at the theft of trillions of dollars by the rulers of Wall Street over the last decade, along with the relentlessness and viciousness of the U.S. war machine and the disgusting violence and filth of modern mass culture, we can feel the impact of how far man has fallen.

To repeat an earlier theme, it’s happened, above all, by the replacement of the values found in the New Testament and other religious scriptures by the Satanic banking system that exploits and destroys humanity through application of interest-bearing debt. And this has taken place, not because of any power inherent in falsehood and error but by the acquiescence of humanity itself to its own enslavement.

Let us now turn to what has been said about the “Last Days,” the “End Times,” and the “Apocalypse.” Many people today have a deep sense of dread that things cannot go on as they are. This may be one reason those with the means to do so are hoarding as much of value as they can lay their hands on. They want to be safe. The collective unconscious is clearly fearing a final calamity, as evidenced by films such as 2012. Is some great battle between good and evil about to take place? Is the earth to be either transformed and/or destroyed?

There has been, for instance, an enormous amount of discussion and speculation among various Christian denominations about the prophecies in the Book of Revelations. I think that virtually all of what is being said is merely conjecture, often used by the commenter to bolster his own sense of being among the elite that is supposedly going to come through the predicted tribulation unscathed.

At the same time, my own sense is that we are indeed in the Last Days. While I cannot prove it, I believe the Anti-Christ of legend exists and has been on earth working his evil will for the last 40 years. I believe it is he who is behind the final battle now being prepared by the U.S. military and its remaining perceived enemies. I believe the U.S. military is working directly for the Anti-Christ. But I do not believe it is necessary for me to name that person. I will say, however, that he is not Jewish.
For an interpretation of the Last Days I turn to another great spiritual master, one little known in the U.S. but who taught prominently in France for 40 years. This is a man named Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov (1900-1986). He was a Bulgarian Christian, Slavic by race, and, according to his personal testimony, heir to an ancient line of spiritual teaching that is descended directly from St. John of Patmos, author of the Book of Revelations. I never met him but visited one of his disciples in Connecticut in a house where he stayed during his only visit to America. The honorific title Omraam comes from the time he visited India and received initiation from the half-legendary Babaji.[13]

Aïvanhov wrote no books, though his teachings are voluminous. All existing accounts consist of transcripts from his lectures. One such volume is entitled The Book of Revelations: A Commentary (Editions Prosveta: 1991). The book is 190 pages long and virtually impossible to summarize. So I will quote a few passages in the remainder of this essay, urging readers to get hold of the book and read it if you can find a copy. I believe it is one of the most important books in existence in relation to the events of today.

First, let me point out that according to Aïvanhov, The Book of Revelations was given to St. John on Patmos by that mysterious figure in Biblical lore known as Melchizedek. Identified as the King of Salem, Melchizedek appears in the Book of Genesis to Abram (before he became Abraham) and bestows on him the bread and wine that foreshadow the communion elements given much later by Jesus to his disciples at the Last Supper.

This is what Aïvanhov says about Melchizedek:
“Of all God’s representatives it is Melchizedek who has the most important role to play on earth. All decisions and instructions concerning the destiny of mankind come from him. All the high Initiates received their instruction from him: Hermes Trismegistus was an aspect of Melchizedek and Orpheus, Moses, Pythagoras, Buddha, and Zoroaster—all the greatest Initiates were taught by him: even Jesus. It was Melchizedek who sent the three Magi, as representatives of his kingdom, to bow down before Jesus, because Jesus was the incarnation of the Christ-principle, of the Word made flesh…. Jesus, therefore, received instruction from Melchizedek. St. Paul states this very clearly when he explains that Jesus belonged to the order of Melchizedek: ‘So also Christ did not glorify himself to become High Priest, but it was He (God) who said to him: “You are My Son. Today I have begotten you….You are a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek.”‘…Melchizedek, who reigns over the destiny of the world, is an aspect of Christ, the Cosmic Principle. This is what St. Paul means when he says that he was ‘made like the Son of God.’ There must always be, somewhere on earth, a divine fire whose flames are never extinguished, and this is precisely the task of Melchizedek: to keep this fire alive. He is this fire and all those who are ready to do so can light their own flame from his.”

We can see from these passages that no matter what evil may befall the earth, God, through Melchizedek, is watching, biding his time, and available to those who are seeking safety and salvation. God has not abandoned the world. The Anti-Christ may appear to be all-powerful, but it is not so. Certainly it is a time for testing. We may not see why God is putting the world through such agony. But the situation is still under control.[14]

Another passage from Revelations Aïvanhov interprets as follows:
“Indeed, the Devil is about to throw some of you in prison, that you may be tested, and you will have tribulation…. Be faithful unto death, and I will give you the crown of life.”

Aïvanhov himself was imprisoned by the French during World War II. He was from Bulgaria, which was allied with Germany, and was falsely accused of being a Nazi along with other crimes. He was acquitted, released, and retained as pupils many people he had met in prison.

Aïvanhov speaks of acquiring a heavenly name as a sign of initiation:
“Every man and woman has a name that was given to them by their parents when they were born but, more often than not, this name does not mean much. The name a person receives from Heavenly entities, however, corresponds exactly to what he is: it is a faithful expression of his deepest reality. And, in truth, only he can really know it, for it is an integral part of that reality.”
So we should all strive to live in such a way that we may receive our heavenly name. We do this, according to The Book of Revelations, by “overcoming.” Aïvanhov says:

“The Spirit also says, ‘To him who overcomes I will grant to sit with Me on My throne, as I also overcame and sat down with My Father on His Throne.’ There is no throne other than that of Leo [sign of the Lion], on which is seated the Sun, Christ. Symbolically speaking, Christ is the Sun, the heart that pours out its blood—its love—into the universe. And this means, therefore, that he who overcomes hatred and death (inner coldness) will reign on the throne of God.”
Much has been said by commentators in reference to the calamities of modern times represented by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. This is what Aïvanhov says:

“The four horses with the four Horsemen on their backs are a symbol of the cataclysms ordained by the four great Angels of the elements on high, for these Angels are so powerful that the merest sign from them sets in motion other forces which devastate the face of the earth. Why can’t human beings understand that everything they do entails certain consequences and that they cannot continue to transgress the laws of nature and interfere with the work of the elements with impunity? By their actions and, also, by their thoughts and feelings and their anarchical attitude, they exasperate the forces of nature and, in the long run, these forces react and move to restore order. Nature is not something inert and insensate, and human being don’t have the right to do whatever they please with her; when they exceed the bounds of what she is prepared to put up with, she retaliates.”

No doubt this passage includes abuse of the laws of nature by the military and intelligence agencies in developing every more powerful and terrible weapons of mass destruction, as well as through inflicting pain and degradation on their fellow human beings by means of torture, propaganda, psy ops, etc. “God is not mocked,” and retribution is sure to come. But in the end, when the dust settles, love is certain to win out. Aïvanhov says:

“Christ is the Divine Lamb, the spirit of love that attracts, draws together and sustains all things. And it is He, this spirit of love, that is the bedrock and foundation of creation; it is He that sacrificed himself so that the matter of creation should be impregnated with the divine fluid of his blood. It is He that is the unifying bond, the link, the cement that ensures the cohesion of the universe, that binds together all the atoms, molecules, and ‘letters’ of this immense Book. Everywhere, in the stones of the earth and the stars in the sky, it is this love that holds the structure together. Love is the most powerful force in the universe and this is why love alone is worthy to read the secrets of the universe.”

Aïvanhov speaks of women and their supreme role:
“Never forget that the Kingdom of God on earth can only be brought into being by women, for only woman possesses the matter needed to embody it. What a lot of mental attitudes still need to be changed!”

Hearkening back to the start of this essay which cited Pope Leo’s vision, following is the passage in Revelations 12:7-10 that speaks of the war in heaven:

“And war broke out in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon and his angels fought, but they did not prevail, nor was a place found for them in heaven any longer. So the great dragon was cast out, that serpent of old, called the Devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world; he was cast to the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.”
Commenting on this all-important passage, so relevant to events today, Aïvanhov says:

“There have always been men in the world who have had the courage to throw themselves into a struggle to the death against the dragon but, to this day, none have vanquished it, for this battle is not the province of human beings: they have neither the stature, nor the breadth of vision, neither the power nor the methods required to defeat the dragon. Only a Heavenly entity, the Archangel Michael, is capable of conquering the dragon….When the time comes, the Archangel Michael will rise up and, with the help of his army of angels of light, will conquer the dragon and bring about the victory that human beings have never ceased asking the Creator for. This is why we should ally ourselves with him and ask him to protect us and allow us to work with him in order to strengthen his victory. Light will triumph over darkness: this has been foretold and it will be so. Why not have a share in that triumph by dedicating your energies to light, goodness, and brotherhood every day?”

Aïvanhov also talks at length about “the new heaven and the new earth” and the Heavenly City, the celestial Jerusalem. But I will leave most of that to the reader’s own discovery. Let me close this summary with the following prophetic words:
“Mankind will never entirely disappear. Don’t worry about it: human beings are very tough; they can survive anything! On the other hand, there are certainly going to be all kinds of cataclysms and upheavals; we are truly at the end of an era. This is why you have to get ready to enter the new heaven and walk on the new earth.”

So what exactly lies ahead and when will it happen? Well, I am not a prophet and have no specific predictions to offer. But it seems obvious that it makes no sense to look to the larger society or to a government under the control of the criminally insane for assistance. It is time for people to help themselves, and, since I began to study these things 40 years ago, it has meant to me the formation of groups that can develop their skills enough to be self-sufficient.

But such groups must have a spiritual foundation. They must seek their inspiration in prayer, meditation, and consensus decision making. Otherwise, they will be subject to domination by those who seek power, control, or their own survival before that of others. I believe the best places to seek guidance are through the scriptures of the world’s great religions.

As Joel Goldsmith has said, what the world needs now is not a new religion but a sense of inner peace, calmness, and healing. Like Aïvanhov, I do not believe God intends to wipe humanity from the face of the earth. But clearly there will be great tribulation. It’s time to prepare. Let’s do so expeditiously but cheerfully using the tools at hand.

In the meantime, I believe that people can find safety from the worst of collapsing conditions simply by turning away from the materialistic viewpoint. Materialism derives from what metaphysics calls “carnal mind.” This is seen in the allegory found in yoga teachings where a person sees a rope on the ground and recoils in horror because he thinks it’s a snake. Another name for it, used by Goldsmith, is “universal hypnotism,” of which our interpretation of the world we are convinced we live in is composed. It’s this “carnal mind” or “universal hypnotism” that defines Satan as found in the allegory of the Garden of Eden. Returning to the 1884 vision of Pope Leo XIII, an interpretation is that, for whatever reasons, mankind was about to be subjected to an intense period of materialistic thinking.

The Fall of Man is therefore defined as the dualistic state of consciousness where God is seen as separate from material creation. Man in his foolishness believes in the material creation, fears it (i.e., sees it as a snake), and thinks he can use it for selfish ends, whereas in his original innocence he already has God-given dominion over all creation but only as he exercises it through love as God’s good steward. In dualistic consciousness, the outer world is seen as having power apart from God. This is the fundamental delusion. In reality, only God, as divine consciousness, has power. But man, as having that spark as well, can allow God’s presence and power to be expressed through him.

It’s now time, perhaps, to regain this sense of innocence, love, and stewardship. For guidance, see especially Joel Goldsmith’s book, The Thunder of Silence. In deep meditation, these truths are realized. Freedom in God-realization is seen as man’s natural condition to which we now must return.

© Copyright 2009 by Richard C. Cook
[1] Prof. Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment.
[2] See especially Henry Makow, The Illuminati: The Cult that Hijacked the World (Silas Green, 2008).
[3] Later the U.S. government’s gold supply at Fort Knox was also mortgaged to cover public debt held by the Federal Reserve. Its value has been held at the 1972 price of $42 an ounce which vastly reduces its worth if the government ever has to redeem it for payment of debts. It’s as though, if a person had to sell his house in 2009, the government would only allow him to collect what it was worth in 1972.
[4] See http://michael-hudson.com/.
[5] Germany, of course, also had a large Protestant population.
[6] Eustace Mullin, The World Order.
[7] Wikipedia. This may be compared to the statement attributed to Henry Kissinger that, “Military men are dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns for foreign policy.”
[8] Future U.S. Senator Prescott Bush, father and grandfather of presidents, was one of the Wall Street tycoons financing the rise of Nazi Germany from his position as partner in the firm of Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. BBH is the oldest privately-owned bank in America. An interesting historical site is its building at 1531 Walnut Street in Philadelphia. BBH began as a merchant banking firm in Liverpool and opened its first U.S. branch in Philadelphia in 1818.
[9] Makow, op.cit.
[11] See http://www.henrymakow.com/oleg_platonovs_freemasonry_in.html.
[12] In the book cited above Platonov notes that “[The] Russian Orthodox Church always condemned Freemasonry as a form of Satanism.” Platonov continues: “Freemasons have always been the evil enemy of humanity, still more dangerous as they tried to cover-up their criminal activities with a veil of deceitful arguments about spiritual growth and charity. Yet awful crimes committed by Freemasons put them outside of law.”
[13] Babaji is named as the guru of Yogananda’s teacher Lahiri Mahasaya in Yogananda’s book Autobiography of a Yogi.
[14] There is a teaching within Sufism that the reason for the population explosion and the huge number of people who seem to die without hope is so that millions of disembodied spirits who have been trapped in the psychic realm can escape and return to the cycles of physical incarnation. According to this teaching, this is the true identity of the djinn of Islamic lore.

Is Belief in God Hurting America?

2009-11-25T11:12:00.001-08:00

Is Belief in God Hurting America?
By David Villano, Miller-McCune.com
November 25, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/144174/

From Dostoyevsky to right-wing commentator Ann Coulter we are warned of the perils of godlessness. "If there is no God," Dostoyevsky wrote, "everything is permitted." Coulter routinely attributes our nation's most intractable troubles to the moral vacuum of atheism.

But a growing body of research in what one sociologist describes as the "emerging field of secularity" is challenging long-held assumptions about the relationship of religion and effective governance.

In a paper posted recently on the online journal Evolutionary Psychology, independent researcher Gregory S. Paul reports a strong correlation within First World democracies between socioeconomic well-being and secularity. In short, prosperity is highest in societies where religion is practiced least.

Using existing data, Paul combined 25 indicators of societal and economic stability — things like crime, suicide, drug use, incarceration, unemployment, income, abortion and public corruption — to score each country using what he calls the "successful societies scale." He also scored countries on their degree of religiosity, as determined by such measures as church attendance, belief in a creator deity and acceptance of Bible literalism.

Comparing the two scores, he found, with little exception, that the least religious countries enjoyed the most prosperity. Of particular note, the U.S. holds the distinction of most religious and least prosperous among the 17 countries included in the study, ranking last in 14 of the 25 socioeconomic measures.

Paul is quick to point out that his study reveals correlation, not causation. Which came first — prosperity or secularity — is unclear, but Paul ventures a guess. While it's possible that good governance and socioeconomic health are byproducts of a secular society, more likely, he speculates, people are inclined to drop their attachment to religion once they feel distanced from the insecurities and burdens of life.

"Popular religion," Paul proposes, "is a coping mechanism for the anxieties of a dysfunctional social and economic environment." Paul, who was criticized, mostly on statistical grounds, for a similar study published in 2005, says his new findings lend support to the belief that mass acceptance of popular religion is determined more by environmental influences and less by selective, evolutionary forces, as scholars and philosophers have long debated.

In other words, we're not hardwired for religion.

Paul also believes his study helps refute the controversial notion that the moral foundation of religious doctrine is a requisite for any high-functioning society - what he dubs the "moral-creator hypothesis."

Phil Zuckerman, a sociologist at Pitzer College whose research looks at the link between religion and societal health within the developed world, agrees with that assertion. "The important thing we're seeing here is that progressive, highly functional societies can answer their problems within a framework of secularity. That's a big deal, and we should be blasting that message out loud," he contends.

Zuckerman says the findings are consistent with his own data, collected for his 2008 book Society Without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment — a portrait of secular society in Denmark and Sweden — and his forthcoming Faith No More: How and Why People Reject Religion.

Scandinavian countries, in particular, have achieved high levels of economic strength and social stability, and yet the influence of religion there is in steep decline, perhaps the lowest in recoded history. Coincidence or not, those countries also rank among the world's happiest populations. In The Netherlands' Erasmus University Rotterdam's annual World Database of Happiness the same Northern European countries that score low in religiosity rank high in reported levels of happiness. (The U.S ranked 27th).

What's their secret? Zuckerman believe it lies in the historically strong sense of community — perhaps a survival response to long, harsh winters - that transcends religious life in these northern climates. Social well-being, economic strength (and happiness) are products of community interaction, not faith, Zuckerman conjectures.

If that's true — and other researchers, such as influential Yale psychologist Paul Bloom, are touting the idea that mass religion's greatest value lies in the web of personal interaction it weaves — then societies that reject religion may suffer if strong secular institutions are not in place to maintain community bonds and foster positive civic associations. Social interactions both inside and outside church structure, Bloom recently wrote, is far more beneficial than "a belief in constant surveillance by a higher power."

Indeed, researchers in a variety of other studies are targeting the positive effects of church-based social interaction. One study published earlier this year in the Journal of Happiness Studies concluded that the quality and depth of personal relationships has a far greater effect on children's happiness than does religious practice itself — church attendance, prayer, meditation. In many American communities, organized religion is the principal conduit to those kinds of close relationships, as well as to civic action and problem-solving.

Zuckerman warns against hasty emulation of the Danes and Swedes. "We can't just say that secularity is good for society and religion is bad," he warns. "And nor can we say the opposite. The connections are very complex."

Paul is less compromising, characterizing organized religion, particularly the conservative Christian brand widely practiced in the U.S., as societal anathema, conspiring against real progress.

In his paper, Paul writes of an "antagonistic relationship between better socioeconomic conditions and intense popular faith" derived from fear that greater prosperity will loosen the grip of religion. That antagonism, though subtle, is evident in the debate over health care, he argues, noting the intense opposition of such groups as the Christian Coalition to universal coverage and other progressive, European-style fixes.

"These groups have a lot to lose in these kinds of debates. When you adopt progressive policy reforms," Paul says, "in the long run, religion is bound to be road kill."

Paul, 54, lives in Baltimore and is not affiliated with any university or think tank. He is largely self-taught. He has published three respected books on paleontology, claiming naming rights to a handful of species, and he earns a living as an artist and illustrator of prehistoric creatures. He migrated to the field of secular studies to wage a kind of scholarly assault on the right-wing fundamentalists who challenge both the evolutionary assumptions of paleontology and, it follows, his livelihood.

He isn't shy about promoting progressive policy reforms and is quick to blame the Christian right for a range of societal dysfunctions. (A recent study published in the journal Reproductive Health found that states whose residents have more conservative religious beliefs have higher rates of teenagers giving birth).

Yet in spite of his findings, and his secularist agenda, Paul stops short of proposing measures to suppress the role and influence of religion in America. Why? It's already happening, he insists. Although we remain largely a nation of believers, our faith and commitment are slipping. Religious affiliation, church attendance and belief in God are all in slow decline in the U.S. A recent Gallup poll found that two-thirds of adults believe the influence of religion in American life is waning, up from 50 percent just four years ago.

As these trends continue, he believes, policymaking will more effectively address the true needs of society, rather than the dogma of religious idealism. "People need to know that society without religion is not a bad thing," Paul says. "And we're seeing this in other countries. We don't need religion to have a thriving, prosperous nation."

David Villano is an award-winning, Miami-based journalist who has contributed to dozens of publications, including The Miami Herald, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Newsweek, Mother Jones and the Columbia Journalism Review.

God Has Left the Building...

2009-11-24T13:16:00.000-08:00

http://www.opednews.com/articles/God-Has-Left-the-Building-by-Sheila-Samples-091123-454.html

November 23, 2009
God Has Left the Building...
By Sheila Samples

If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you,
you have schizophrenia.~~Thomas S. Szasz, The Second Sin

Several months ago, CNN published the results of a couple of disturbing polls about Americans and their religious beliefs. The first found that more Americans are rejecting religion and thus, according to CNN, America is becoming "less Christian." The second, a Pew survey of only 742 mostly white evangelical Protestants, revealed that more than six in 10 of them believe that torture is often or sometimes justified.

More than six in 10? What this says about those claiming to be God's own is that perhaps they should use their Bibles for more than "thumping." Because not one in 10 -- not one in 10 thousand -- not one in 10 million -- Christians believes that torture can ever be justified. Ever.

Anyone who has paid attention to the growing number of evangelical zealots over the past couple of decades must be aware that there is a growing chasm between Religion and Christianity. Today, the term, "religious Christians" is nothing if not oxymoronic. It seems when folks become apocalyptic frothing-at-the-mouth religious, they ultimately stray from the light and life of Christianity, while descending deeper into the darkness and death of Religion.

Because, all religion is politics. CNN quoted Mark Silk of Trinity College, who said, "In the 1990s, it really sunk in on the American public generally that there was a long-lasting 'religious right' connected to a political party, and that turned a lot of people the other way." Silk cited the obvious link between the Republican Party and groups such as the Moral Majority and Focus on the Family.

Tony Perkins, the right-wing evangelical president of the Family Research Council, told CNN not to worry. He said people will return to their faith in droves; that soon, the decline will ease and religion will be an even greater part of people's lives. The good news, according to Perkins, is, "As the economy goes downward, I think people are going to be driven to religion." (emphasis added)

Yes, as more Americans lose their jobs, their homes, their very reasons for living, those like Perkins see them as Manchurian congregations -- flocks driven to religion like cattle -- bawling, shuffling, pushing, milling around with tags in their ears, looking for a leader. Even now, they can be seen in mammoth mega-churches, some with arms raised -- fists clutching at dead air -- others writhing in the aisles, moaning, begging for some "sign" from their rigidly religious God. Perhaps their panic stems from the instinctive knowledge that God, unable to get a word in edgewise, has left the building.

The conservative religious right is a frightening political force driven in its efforts to divide and conquer by greed, an insatiable lust for power, and an ideology of hate. Its members, unable to drag God down to their level, have no qualms about elevating themselves to what they perceive as His level. They succeed in controlling the flock because fear -- especially fear of God -- is a great motivator. They use God not only as a weapon against millions who stand between them and their goals of replacing democracy with theocracy and of controlling the worlds resources and its people -- but as a divine justification for the destruction they leave in their wake.

No one was more adept at giving God credit for his killing fields than former president George W. Bush, who openly bragged that God had hired him to remove evil from the face of the earth. "I trust God speaks through me," Bush said in 2004. "Without that, I couldn't do my job." And, even before that, in 2003, Bush tried to round up a "coalition of the willing" for his Iraq slaughter on God's behalf. According to Charleston Gazette editor James A. Haught, Bush told then French President Jacques Chirac that "Iraq must be invaded to thwart Gog and Magog, the Bible's satanic agents of the Apocalypse." Haught wrote...

"Chirac recounts that the American leader appealed to their “common faith” (Christianity) and told him: “Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East"The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled"This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people's enemies before a New Age begins."

But some presidents, such as Lyndon Johnson, were not so magnanimous. God got the blame, not the credit, for the Vietman atrocity. Ronnie Dugger, in his book, "The Politician: The Life and Times of Lyndon Johnson," writes that Johnson told Austrian ambassador Ernst Lemberter in 1966 that the Holy Ghost regularly visited him..."He comes to me about 2 o'clock in the morning," Johnson said, "--when I have to give word to the boys, and I get the word from God whether to bomb or not."

Now, you don't have to be a Christian to reject the right-wing bull hockey that the God who appeared in a blinding flash of light and spoke to Paul on the road to Damascus has sunk to the evangelical depths where He emits not even a glimmer as He bends our presidents' ears on who to slaughter, urges televangelist Pat Robertson to ask a woman about her sex life, and is still deciding if He wants Michelle Bachman or Sarah Palin to be president.

Christians should be lauded for rejecting modern-day Religion. When the God they are taught to love is either credited -- or blamed -- for all hell on earth; when they search in vain for Jesus, and finally find Him, hanging out in a secretive townhouse on Washington's C Street with the greedy, war-mongering gang who refer to themselves as "The Family," it's time to take a second look at the direction in which this nation is hurtling.

For years, conservative right-wingers have hidden out in the C Street "church," where they are free to conduct all manner of fraud and to carry on adulterous affairs. People who have sold their souls; who have no sense of morality, and who use God as a Trojan Horse to hide their political manipulations to replace both Democrats and Democracy are quite mad, you know. Right-wing evangelicals and neocon operatives are consumed with religious hate, not Christian love. Their modus operandi is, as Weekly Standard operative William Kristol said, "go for the kill."

And, those who are familiar with Kristol know he wasn't referring just to health care. Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition protege, the now disgraced Ralph Reed, dubbed in 1995 by Time magazine as "the right hand of God," was a master at evangelical politics, which he said was like Viet Cong-style guerrilla warfare. Reed said, "I want to be invisible. I do guerrilla warfare. I paint my face and travel at night. You don't know it's over until you're in a body bag. You don't know until election night."

Anyone doubting the viciousness with which Reed would "go for the kill" should have a talk with Vietnam War hero and amputee Max Cleland, who not only found himself crammed into a body bag on election night 2002, thanks to Ralph Reed, but was in there with Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

But Reed and others are tyros when it comes to those most likely to cause Christians to reject religion -- those whom CNN failed to mention who incite violence by preaching sermons laced with politics, religion, racism -- and hate. Those like Tempe, Arizona's Steven Anderson, who has no college degree nor formal Bible training, but is qualified to preach because he "has memorized almost half of the New Testament." Anderson started his own church -- Faithful Word Baptist -- in 2005 on Christmas Day. A firey right-wing preacher, he's against homosexuality, liberalism -- and President Barack Obama.

In August, Anderson gave a breathtakingly vile speech entitled, "Why I Hate Obama," in which he said about President Obama, among many other things...
"Obama is a madman in control of this country."
"Obama is NOT my president."
"Obama mocks the Bible."
"Obama is a socialist devil murderer."
"I hope he dies and goes to hell."
"God looks down and says, 'Man -- I HATE that guy!'"
Anderson, and those like him, epitomize the breach between Religion and Christianity. The religious believe that God belongs to them. Christians know that they belong to God. It's that simple. Thus, CNN polls notwithstanding, America cannot become "less Christian" as a result of members of the flock jerking the tags from their ears -- and rejecting modern-day religion.

A RACKETEERNG INFLUENCED CORRUPT ORGANIZATION FRONTED BY A CHURCH IS SUBJECT TO PROSECUTION UNDER (RICO)

2009-11-23T11:45:00.000-08:00

Most religion is a racket that that is guilty of many crimes (against humanity and against the Spirit) with the premiere crime being extortion (if you don't believe, give money, sacrifice or if you Grow a Soul you will go to hell).

http://www.opednews.com/articles/A-RACKETEERNG-INFLUENCED-C-by-Douglas-A-Wallace-091120-492.html

November 21, 2009
A RACKETEERNG INFLUENCED CORRUPT ORGANIZATION FRONTED BY A CHURCH IS SUBJECT TO PROSECUTION UNDER (RICO)
By Douglas A. Wallace

As a lawyer, years ago I attempted to legally define religion. To my surprise I learned that because of the Separation clause of the First Amendment, courts in the United States have refused to legally define religion. Therefore there is no legal definition of religion.

Thus the separation clause which states that “ Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” is itself under constitutional law too vague to be enforceable.

Subsequently, Federal and state courts adopted the separation clause as a restriction upon their review of issues which may be tainted with claims of “Religion”. As a result, injuries have been judicially allowed to be inflicted upon citizens of the United States with no recourse or recompense at law or in equity.

The only way to define religion is by the elimination of certain activities generally considered to be non-religious in nature. In that regard, activities of business, crime or politics reduces a claim of “religion” or “religious” activity to such things as worship (with no definition), prayer (beseeching an indefinable Deity), Mass (“religious” gathering), doing good works, living a “religious” life, administering “religious” thought practice and its exercise.

Any activities clearly outside the scope of those indefinable activities are clearly not protected by the separation clause imposed upon the congress by the constitution or unjustly adopted as a restriction upon the courts.

For example, murder of a member of any religious organization is not protected nor is the orchestrated murder of any non member of any church for purposes of protecting the security or image of that church.

When such activities are discovered it becomes incumbent upon States, federal authorities and courts to separate the non religious activity from the protected “religious” activity.

In doing this, appropriate state and federal prosecutorial officers are required to make a conscious separation of activities of any given church into at least two activities which would be “religious” and racketeering.

Thus, the church, its officers, and any participating members in any definable racketeering become liable and vulnerable to criminal prosecution.

As an example, if the Pope ordered the death of any individual, he would be transformed into a “religious” criminal. The same goes for the head(s) of any religious organization otherwise protected by the separation clause.

Most crimes have a statutory limit on prosecution for a certain period based upon the crime committed.

In the case of murder or conspiracy to commit murder, there is no statutory time limit between the murder and/or conspiracy and time of prosecution. Murder is a heinous crime outlawed by most civilized governments, therefore whenever it is discovered, prosecution is ripe no matter how cold or stale is the discovering of the crime.

As to the issue of a church being prosecuted for criminal conspiracy to commit murder or any other crime a prosecutor would likely be branded as a persecutor not a prosecutor.

Of course as all any attorneys will agree, not all crimes are prosecuted. It has become the privilege of prosecutors to have a discretionary right of determining whether to prosecute or not.

To that end the congress has passed laws known as the RICO Statute or Racketeering Influenced Corrupt Organization(s) statute which gives private prosecutorial rights to any individual who may have been a target of the alleged RICO offenses conspired by an otherwise “religious” entity. Since the crime of murder or conspiracy to commit murder has no statute of limitations

There would be no statute limiting the time to seek such recourse.

Another novel approach would be to seek intervention of the Treasury Department as against the offending church to strip its 501(C)(3) tax exempt status due to its involvement in an alleged crime committed under the RICO statutes, which would deprive it of its rights as a “religion.”

Since the writer was targeted as an individual by the RICO aspect of the Mormon Church some 31 years ago, he has commenced the preliminary civil prosecutorial function of RICO by writing a letter to Doug Shulman, Commissioner of the IRS for an investigation into allegations contained in that letter which would deprive the Mormon Church of its prized tax exempt status. See public diary posted on Opednews November 3, 2009. http://www.opednews.com/populum/diarymanage.php?submit=view&did=14836

In that letter I suggested that I would abide the event until January 1, 2010 at which time I would likely seek legal recourse. So I await the results of the letter.

The Prosperity Gospel: Did Christianity Cause the Crash?

2009-11-19T15:43:00.001-08:00

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200912/rosin-prosperity-gospel

The Prosperity Gospel: Did Christianity Cause the Crash?
Hanna Rosin
The Atlantic
Wed, 18 Nov 2009 11:58 EST

America's mainstream religious denominations used to teach the faithful that they would be rewarded in the afterlife. But over the past generation, a different strain of Christian faith has proliferated - one that promises to make believers rich in the here and now. Known as the prosperity gospel, and claiming tens of millions of adherents, it fosters risk-taking and intense material optimism. It pumped air into the housing bubble. And one year into the worst downturn since the Depression, it's still going strong.

Like the ambitions of many immigrants who attend services there, Casa del Padre's success can be measured by upgrades in real estate. The mostly Latino church, in Charlottesville, Virginia, has moved from the pastor's basement, where it was founded in 2001, to a rented warehouse across the street from a small mercado five years later, to a middle-class suburban street last year, where the pastor now rents space from a lovely old Baptist church that can't otherwise fill its pews. Every Sunday, the parishioners drive slowly into the parking lot, never parking on the sidewalk or grass - "because Americanos don't do that," one told me - and file quietly into church. Some drive newly leased SUVs, others old work trucks with paint buckets still in the bed. The pastor, Fernando Garay, arrives last and parks in front, his dark-blue Mercedes Benz always freshly washed, the hubcaps polished enough to reflect his wingtips.

It can be hard to get used to how much Garay talks about money in church, one loyal parishioner, Billy Gonzales, told me one recent Sunday on the steps out front. Back in Mexico, Gonzales's pastor talked only about "Jesus and heaven and being good." But Garay talks about jobs and houses and making good money, which eventually came to make sense to Gonzales: money is "really important," and besides, "we love the money in Jesus Christ's name! Jesus loved money too!" That Sunday, Garay was preaching a variation on his usual theme, about how prosperity and abundance unerringly find true believers. "It doesn't matter what country you're from, what degree you have, or what money you have in the bank," Garay said. "You don't have to say, 'God, bless my business. Bless my bank account.' The blessings will come! The blessings are looking for you! God will take care of you. God will not let you be without a house!"

Pastor Garay, 48, is short and stocky, with thick black hair combed back. In his off hours, he looks like a contented tourist, in his printed Hawaiian shirts or bright guayaberas. But he preaches with a ferocity that taps into his youth as a cocaine dealer with a knife in his back pocket. "Fight the attack of the devil on my finances! Fight him! We declare financial blessings! Financial miracles this week, NOW NOW NOW!" he preached that Sunday. "More work! Better work! The best finances!" Gonzales shook and paced as the pastor spoke, eventually leaving his wife and three kids in the family section to join the single men toward the front, many of whom were jumping, raising their Bibles, and weeping. On the altar sat some anointing oils, alongside the keys to the Mercedes Benz.

© The Atlantic

Later, D'andry Then, a trim, pretty real-estate agent and one of the church founders, stood up to give her testimony. Business had not been good of late, and "you know, Monday I have to pay this, and Tuesday I have to pay that." Then, just that morning, "Jesus gave me $1,000." She didn't explain whether the gift came in the form of a real-estate commission or a tax refund or a stuffed envelope left at her door. The story hung somewhere between metaphor and a literal image of barefoot Jesus handing her a pile of cash. No one in the church seemed the least bit surprised by the story, and certainly no one expressed doubt. "If you have financial pressure on you, and you don't know where the next payment is coming from, don't pay any attention to that!" she continued. "Don't get discouraged! Jesus is the answer."

America's churches always reflect shifts in the broader culture, and Casa del Padre is no exception. The message that Jesus blesses believers with riches first showed up in the postwar years, at a time when Americans began to believe that greater comfort could be accessible to everyone, not just the landed class. But it really took off during the boom years of the 1990s, and has continued to spread ever since. This stitched-together, homegrown theology, known as the prosperity gospel, is not a clearly defined denomination, but a strain of belief that runs through the Pentecostal Church and a surprising number of mainstream evangelical churches, with varying degrees of intensity. In Garay's church, God is the "Owner of All the Silver and Gold," and with enough faith, any believer can access the inheritance. Money is not the dull stuff of hourly wages and bank-account statements, but a magical substance that comes as a gift from above. Even in these hard times, it is discouraged, in such churches, to fall into despair about the things you cannot afford. "Instead of saying 'I'm poor,' say 'I'm rich,'" Garay's wife, Hazael, told me one day. "The word of God will manifest itself in reality."

Many explanations have been offered for the housing bubble and subsequent crash: interest rates were too low; regulation failed; rising real-estate prices induced a sort of temporary insanity in America's middle class. But there is one explanation that speaks to a lasting and fundamental shift in American culture - a shift in the American conception of divine Providence and its relationship to wealth.

In his book Something for Nothing, Jackson Lears describes two starkly different manifestations of the American dream, each intertwined with religious faith. The traditional Protestant hero is a self-made man. He is disciplined and hardworking, and believes that his "success comes through careful cultivation of (implicitly Protestant) virtues in cooperation with a Providential plan." The hero of the second American narrative is a kind of gambling man - a "speculative confidence man," Lears calls him, who prefers "risky ventures in real estate," and a more "fluid, mobile democracy." The self-made man imagines a coherent universe where earthly rewards match merits. The confidence man lives in a culture of chance, with "grace as a kind of spiritual luck, a free gift from God." The Gilded Age launched the myth of the self-made man, as the Rockefellers and other powerful men in the pews connected their wealth to their own virtue. In these boom-and-crash years, the more reckless alter ego dominates. In his book, Lears quotes a reverend named Jeffrey Black, who sounds remarkably like Garay: "The whole hope of a human being is that somehow, in spite of the things I've done wrong, there will be an episode when grace and fate shower down on me and an unearned blessing will come to me - that I'll be the one."

I had come to Charlottesville to learn more about this second strain of the American dream - one that's been ascendant for a generation or more. I wanted to try to piece together the connection between the gospel and today's economic reality, and to see whether "prosperity" could possibly still seem enticing, or even plausible, in this distinctly unprosperous moment. (Very much so, as it turns out.) Charlottesville may not be the heartland of the prosperity gospel, which is most prevalent in the Sun Belt - where many of the country's foreclosure hot spots also lie. And Garay preaches an unusually pure version of the gospel. Still, the particulars of both Garay and his congregation are revealing.

Among Latinos the prosperity gospel has been spreading rapidly. In a recent Pew survey, 73 percent of all religious Latinos in the United States agreed with the statement: "God will grant financial success to all believers who have enough faith." For a generation of poor and striving Latino immigrants, the gospel seems to offer a road map to affluence and modern living. Garay's church is comprised mostly of first-generation immigrants. More than others I've visited, it echoes back a highly distilled, unself-conscious version of the current thinking on what it means to live the American dream.

One other thing makes Garay's church a compelling case study. From 2001 to 2007, while he was building his church, Garay was also a loan officer at two different mortgage companies. He was hired explicitly to reach out to the city's growing Latino community, and Latinos, as it happened, were disproportionately likely to take out the sort of risky loans that later led to so many foreclosures. To many of his parishioners, Garay was not just a spiritual adviser, but a financial one as well.

Many of the terms and concepts used by prosperity preachers today date back to Oral Roberts, a poor farmer's son turned Pentecostal preacher. Garay grew up watching Roberts on television and considers him a hero; he hopes to send all three of his children to Oral Roberts University, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In the late 1940s, Roberts claimed his Bible flipped open to the Third Epistle of John, verse 2: "Beloved, I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health. Even as thy soul prospereth." Soon Roberts developed his famous concept of seed faith, still popular today. If people would donate money to his ministry, a "seed" offered to God, he'd say, then God would multiply it a hundredfold. Eventually, Roberts retreated into a life that revolved around private jets and country clubs.

Roberts's fame had faded by the late 1980s, and prosperity preaching briefly imploded soon after. We all remember Tammy Faye Bakker and her mascara tears, along with her husband, Jim, and his various scandals. They took their place in a procession of slick, showy faith healers on Christian television who ultimately succumbed to earthly temptation.

But since that time, the movement has made itself over, moving out of the fringe and into the upwardly mobile megachurch class. In the past decade, it has produced about a dozen celebrity pastors, who show up at White House events, on secular radio, and as guests on major TV talk shows. Kirbyjon Caldwell, a Methodist megapastor in Houston and a purveyor of the prosperity gospel, gave the benediction at both of George W. Bush's inaugurals. Instead of shiny robes or gaudy jewelry, these preachers wear Italian suits and modest wedding bands. Instead of screaming and sweating, they smile broadly and speak in soothing, therapeutic terms. But their message is essentially the same. "Every day, you're going to live that abundant life!" preaches Joel Osteen, a best-selling author, the nation's most popular TV preacher, and the pastor of Lakewood Church, in Houston, the country's largest church by far.

Among mainstream, nondenominational megachurches, where much of American religious life takes place, "prosperity is proliferating" rapidly, says Kate Bowler, a doctoral candidate at Duke University and an expert in the gospel. Few, if any, of these churches have prosperity in their title or mission statement, but Bowler has analyzed their sermons and teachings. Of the nation's 12 largest churches, she says, three are prosperity - Osteen's, which dwarfs all the other megachurches; Tommy Barnett's, in Phoenix; and T. D. Jakes's, in Dallas. In second-tier churches - those with about 5,000 members - the prosperity gospel dominates. Overall, Bowler classifies 50 of the largest 260 churches in the U.S. as prosperity. The doctrine has become popular with Americans of every background and ethnicity; overall, Pew found that 66 percent of all Pentecostals and 43 percent of "other Christians" - a category comprising roughly half of all respondents - believe that wealth will be granted to the faithful. It's an upbeat theology, argues Barbara Ehrenreich in her new book, Bright-Sided, that has much in common with the kind of "positive thinking" that has come to dominate America's boardrooms and, indeed, its entire culture.

On the cover of his 4 million-copy best seller from 2004, Your Best Life Now, Joel Osteen looks like a recent college grad who just got hired by Goldman Sachs and can't believe his good luck. His hair is full, his teeth are bright, his suit is polished but not flashy; he looks like a guy who would more likely shake your hand than cast out your demons. Osteen took over his father's church in 1999. He had little preaching experience, although he'd managed the television ministry for years. The church grew quickly, as Osteen packaged himself to appeal to the broadest audience possible. In his books and sermons, Osteen quotes very little scripture, opting instead to tell uplifting personal anecdotes. He avoids controversy, and rarely appears on Christian TV. In a popular YouTube clip, he declines to confirm Larry King's suggestion that only those who believe in Jesus will go to heaven.

Osteen is often derided as Christianity Lite, but he is more like Positivity Extreme. "Cast down anything negative, any thought that brings fear, worry, doubt, or unbelief," he urges. "Your attitude should be: 'I refuse to go backward. I am going forward with God. I am going to be the person he wants me to be. I'm going to fulfill my destiny.'" Telling yourself you are poor, or broke, or stuck in a dead-end job is a form of sin and "invites more negativity into your life," he writes. Instead, you have to "program your mind for success," wake up every morning and tell yourself, "God is guiding and directing my steps." The advice is exactly like the message of The Secret, or any number of American self-help blockbusters that edge toward magical thinking, except that the religious context adds another dimension.

Your Best Life Now, which has fueled a TV show that Osteen claims is now seen in 200 million homes worldwide, opens with a story of a man on vacation in Hawaii. He was "a good man who had achieved a modest measure of success, but he was coasting along, thinking that he'd already reached his limits." While sightseeing, he and his wife admired a gorgeous house on a hill. "I can't even imagine living in a place like that," he said. For this bit of self-deprecation and modesty, Osteen pities the man: "His own thoughts and attitudes," he writes, "were condemning him to mediocrity," or what is known in the gospel as the "defeated life."

A few pages later comes the corrective, the model of a "victor" and not a "victim." Osteen and his wife, Victoria, are walking around their neighborhood in Houston when they pass a beautiful house being built. "Most of the other homes around us were one-story, ranch-style homes that were forty to fifty years old, but this house was a large two-story home, with high ceilings and oversized windows," he writes. "It was a lovely, inspiring place." Victoria desperately wanted a house "just like it," but Joel was worried about how stretched they already were. "Thinking of our bank account and my income at the time, it seemed impossible to me," he writes. But this, of course, is an example of ungodly, negative thinking. With her unwavering faith, Victoria wouldn't let it drop. Soon she convinced Joel and then he, too, started to believe that "God could bring it to pass." There is no explanation of how they came to own such a house - whether Osteen worked hard to grow his ministry or got rich from his TV show or received an inheritance from his father's estate. In this story they are standing in for an average middle-class couple who set their sights on a bigger house and believed, despite all the financial evidence, that God would bestow it upon them, like a gift. And he did.

Theologically, the prosperity gospel has always infuriated many mainstream evangelical pastors. Rick Warren, whose book The Purpose Driven Life outsold Osteen's, told Time, "This idea that God wants everybody to be wealthy? There is a word for that: baloney. It's creating a false idol. You don't measure your self-worth by your net worth. I can show you millions of faithful followers of Christ who live in poverty. Why isn't everyone in the church a millionaire?" In 2005, a group of African American pastors met to denounce prosperity megapreachers for promoting a Jesus who is more like a "cosmic bellhop," as one pastor put it, than the engaged Jesus of the civil-rights era who looked after the poor.

More recently, critics have begun to argue that the prosperity gospel, echoed in churches across the country, might have played a part in the economic collapse. In 2008, in the online magazine Religion Dispatches, Jonathan Walton, a professor of religious studies at the University of California at Riverside, warned:
Narratives of how "God blessed me with my first house despite my credit" were common ... Sermons declaring "It's your season of overflow" supplanted messages of economic sobriety and disinterested sacrifice. Yet as folks were testifying about "what God can do," little attention was paid to a predatory subprime-mortgage industry, relaxed credit standards, or the dangers of using one's home equity as an ATM.
In 2004, Walton was researching a book about black televangelists. "I would hear consistent testimonies about how 'once I was renting and now God let me own my own home,' or 'I was afraid of the loan officer, but God directed him to ignore my bad credit and blessed me with my first home,'" he says. "This trope was so common in these churches that I just became immune to it. Only later did I connect it to this disaster."

Demographically, the growth of the prosperity gospel tracks fairly closely to the pattern of foreclosure hot spots. Both spread in two particular kinds of communities - the exurban middle class and the urban poor. Many newer prosperity churches popped up around fringe suburban developments built in the 1990s and 2000s, says Walton. These are precisely the kinds of neighborhoods that have been decimated by foreclosures, according to Eric Halperin, of the Center for Responsible Lending.

Zooming out a bit, Kate Bowler found that most new prosperity-gospel churches were built along the Sun Belt, particularly in California, Florida, and Arizona - all areas that were hard-hit by the mortgage crisis. Bowler, who, like Walton, was researching a book, spent a lot of time attending the "financial empowerment" seminars that are common at prosperity churches. Advisers would pay lip service to "sound financial practices," she recalls, but overall they would send the opposite message: posters advertising the seminars featured big houses in the background, and the parking spots closest to the church were reserved for luxury cars.

Nationally, the prosperity gospel has spread exponentially among African American and Latino congregations. This is also the other distinct pattern of foreclosures. "Hyper-segregated" urban communities were the worst off, says Halperin. Reliable data on foreclosures by race are not publicly available, but mortgages are tracked by both race and loan type, and subprime loans have tended to correspond to foreclosures. During the boom, roughly 40 percent of all loans going to Latinos nationwide were subprime loans; Latinos and African Americans were 28 percent and 37 percent more likely, respectively, to receive a higher-rate subprime loan than whites.

In June, the Supreme Court ruled that state attorneys general had the authority to sue national banks for predatory lending. Even before that ruling, at least 17 lawsuits accusing various banks of treating racial minorities unfairly were already under way. (Bank of America's Countrywide division - one of the companies Garay worked for - had earlier agreed to pay $8.4 billion in a multistate settlement.) One theme emerging in these suits is how banks teamed up with pastors to win over new customers for subprime loans.

Beth Jacobson is a star witness for the City of Baltimore's recent suit against Wells Fargo. Jacobson was a top loan officer in the bank's subprime division for nine years, closing as much as $55 million worth of loans a year. Like many subprime-loan officers, Jacobson had no bank experience before working for Wells Fargo. The subprime officers were drawn from "an utterly different background" than the professional bankers, she told me. She had been running a small paralegal business; her co-workers had been car salespeople, or had worked in telemarketing. They were prized for their ability to hustle on the ground and "look you in the eye when they shook your hand," she surmised. As a reward for good performance, the bank would sometimes send a Hummer limo to pick up Jacobson for a celebration, she said. She'd arrive at a bar and find all her co-workers drunk and her boss "doing body shots off a waitress."

The idea of reaching out to churches took off quickly, Jacobson recalls. The branch managers figured pastors had a lot of influence with their parishioners and could give the loan officers credibility and new customers. Jacobson remembers a conference call where sales managers discussed the new strategy. The plan was to send officers to guest-speak at church-sponsored "wealth-building seminars" like the ones Bowler attended, and dazzle the participants with the possibility of a new house. They would tell pastors that for every person who took out a mortgage, $350 would be donated to the church, or to a charity of the parishioner's choice. "They wouldn't say, 'Hey, Mr. Minister. We want to give your people a bunch of subprime loans," Jacobson told me. "They would say, 'Your congregants will be homeowners! They will be able to live the American dream!'"

Garay often tells his life story from the pulpit, as an inspiration to the many immigrants in his church, some legal, some not. He grew up an outsider - a citizen by birth, but living a marginal existence in a diverse, working-class neighborhood in Flushing, Queens. His mother left when he was 8, and he was raised mostly by two older brothers; he spent most of his time on the street. "I ate jars of peanut butter for dinner," he says. The story of how he became a Christian begins in 1989, when he was 28 years old, and involves a large sum of money. He'd been selling drugs in Miami, then started using, and owed some dealers $30,000 that he didn't have, and they were going to kill him. He was on his mattress one night, in despair, when a picture of Jesus up on his wall "winked at me." Soon after, he became a born-again Christian, and he told everyone about it. The dealers, he says, then went away. He doesn't offer much explanation; he just says, "They were after me. They were going to kill me. And then they just backed off." He credits Jesus.

Garay tried many churches, but they all felt alien and "dead" to him. "That's not me, sitting quietly and saying 'Thank you, God.'" Finally he came upon a Pentecostal prosperity church, much like the one he leads now. The church was full of miracles and real emotion, which drew him in, but it also offered practical benefits. The pastor pointed out Bible passages that referred to finances in specific terms, giving him images of wealth he could almost reach out and touch: "Give, and it shall be given to you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over" - a passage that's now often read at Garay's church during tithing time.

"Then it started happening. It started happening!" He enrolled in a community college and began selling roses from buckets in the backseat of his Honda ("no AC, no radio"). In no time, as he tells it, he had worked himself up to roses in plastic straws, laid neatly across the backseat of his Cadillac, with no water sloshing on the white leather. With this story, Garay hopes to convince his followers that God has a bounty for them, but that to get it they have to take the first step of faith. One analogy he likes to use is a box of gifts in heaven; if you never reach up to get it, then it won't come down to you. It's a curious mix of active (a step of faith) and passive ("It started happening!").

In Garay's testimony, his life proceeds that way: part hard work, part miracle. He applied himself, eventually got married, and had children. One day, for no reason, he quit his job as a social worker counseling addicted juvenile delinquents. "I almost hit him with a frying pan," Hazael, his wife, jokes. But the very same day, his mother-in-law walked into the house and said the bank was looking for a bilingual loan officer. He had no experience and had never used a computer. Yet he got the job and within a year was earning six figures. How did that happen? How did it all come together so neatly, one door opening the moment another had closed? When I asked him that, he smiled and pointed up at the sky.

Garay is like a father figure to his parishioners; I met a few who had named their children after him or his wife. Parishioners told me stories about his coming with them to their court hearings, showing them how to buy a phone card or find a good school for their children or, for the more entrepreneurial, invest in a small business. Oral Roberts's seed-faith concept is the source of much suspicion about prosperity churches; pastors, including Garay, ask their parishioners to give 10 percent of their income to the church. But to Garay, seed faith is the church's central tenet. The tithe, he says, is tangible proof that a believer has taken the first step toward God. It is the spiritual equivalent of spending three years selling flowers door-to-door. He often tells what's known as Jesus' parable of the three servants, from Matthew. A lord gives three of his servants money. Two invest the money and double their profit, and a third hides his in the ground. When the master returns, he declares the third "wicked and lazy" and a "worthless slave," and casts him into the "outer darkness." "To receive God's bounty, you cannot hide your head in the sand," Garay preaches. "You have to take a leap of faith."

I asked Garay why his parishioner Billy Gonzales, who earns barely $25,000 and has no money to fix his car, should donate 10 percent of his income. "Because it gives him a new mentality. It teaches him that money can breed more money, that you can have money in your pocket on Saturday morning even though you got paid Friday night. People who support the church week after week have a dedication. Those who just give $5 or $10 here and there, you'll hear them have the same problems week after week." Jackson Lears would add another explanation: tithing is like the moment the gambler lays his money down on the table - it "promises at least a fleeting opportunity to contact a realm where hope is alive," he writes. Without it, there's only the dull regularity of $2,000 a month and a dead car.

During the boom years, Apostle Garay, as he is known in church, was brasher than he is now. He spoke in very specific terms during church services, promising that a $100 offering would yield a $10,000 return: "This is not my promise. It is God's promise, and he will make it happen!" he would say.

While it sounds absurd, this kind of message can have a positive influence, according to Tony Tian-Ren Lin, a researcher at the University of Virginia who has made a close study of Latino prosperity gospel congregations over the years. These churches typically take in people who had "been basically dropped into the world from pretty primitive settings" - small towns in Latin America with no electricity or running water and very little educational opportunity. In their new congregation, their pastor slowly walks them through life in the U.S., both inside and outside of church, until they become more confident. "In Mexico, nobody ever told them they could do anything," says Lin, who was himself raised in Argentina. He finds the message at prosperity churches to be quintessentially American. "They are taught they can do absolutely anything, and it's God's will. They become part of the elect, the chosen. They get swept up in the manifest destiny, this idea that God has lifted Americans above everyone else."

At Casa del Padre, the celebration of consumer culture is quite visible, along with a sense of boundless opportunity. The people in the church, for instance, tend to have very expensive cell phones - never the free ones that come with a calling plan, nor the sort that can be bought cheaply at a convenience store. "They start wanting what's considered the best and the most technologically advanced in this country," Lin says. Garay's church, it seems to me, teaches them that they deserve these things, so they go about getting them, with few resources and infinite adaptability. Before the crash, one group of young men got a $12,000 loan to start a landscaping company; another man bought a $270,000 house. One of the church's Bible-study leaders, who'd grown up in a remote village in Mexico with an abusive, alcoholic father, had become a very successful contractor by the height of the boom, managing 30 men on multiple jobs and winning contracts to paint luxury subdivisions in the exurbs.

The tenets of the prosperity gospel, and the practical advice that pastors often give their parishioners, help immigrants learn "not just how to survive but how to thrive; not just live paycheck to paycheck but handle money - manage complicated payrolls, invest in equipment," Lin told me. Along the way, they become assimilated. "While they're trying to be closer to God, instead they become American," he says, from their optimism and entrepreneurialism to the very nature of their dreams.

These days, Garay's message is more subdued than it was at the height of the boom, but not substantially different. In a sermon on Father's Day, he did not make specific claims of financial returns on investments but instead spoke vaguely about how his congregation's prospects were "good and going to get better." After church, I asked Garay about how the gospel was holding up in the recession. It was a hot summer day, and although he had just finished one of his feverish two-hour sermons, he seemed energized rather than drained. "Look," he said, and rounded his hands as if to indicate a protective shield. "The recession has not hit my church." He reminded me that when he had asked how many people were out of work, only four people out of about 100 there had raised their hands. But in a church where failure is seen as a kind of sin, it seems credulous at best to expect an honest response to that question. I later met at least one person - Billy Gonzales's younger brother - who didn't have a job but hadn't raised his hand, because he thought he'd "have one lined up soon."

Garay describes the recession as God's judgment - for abortion, taking prayer out of school, bikinis on television, "Desperate Housewives, whatever." But God is also giving us a two-year window to repent, he says. He calculates that we've had five years of extreme plenty and now the clock is running out, based on the biblical story of Joseph and the great famine - seven years of plenty followed by seven years of a failed harvest. If we don't repent, we will experience "misery like we have never known it." These days, if any parishioners or fellow pastors ask Garay for investment advice, he tells them to wait two years before making a move.

Like much of Garay's advice, this recommendation is partly grounded in economic reality, and partly drawn from mystical notions about a biblical calendar. "I'm very real," he once told me. "If you want to eat at Red Lobster, you better have a Red Lobster paycheck, and enough left over to pay your electric bill. But I've also seen miracles of God." Later, during one of our talks over coffee, his wife echoed the sentiment. "If you can't afford a house, you shouldn't buy it," Hazael said, when I asked whether the prosperity gospel might push people to take irresponsible risks. "But if the Lord is telling you to 'take that first step and I will provide,' then you have to believe."

I asked Garay many times about a connection between the mortgage crisis and the gospel, but he does not really see one. From everything he says about his time as a loan officer, it seems he was involved in the kinds of subprime loans that led to so many foreclosures. He was hired in Countrywide's emerging-markets division, which meant he was expected to target the growing Latino community in the area. Like Beth Jacobson, he had no previous experience, but was valued for his connections and hustle. He makes astute criticisms of the risky loans but, like many former loan officers, he does so with a curious sense of distance, as if he had been just a cog in the machine. Loans got "too easy," he says. "Mortgages would be $1,500 a month, and that was all [the loan applicants] made in a month," he recalls, "but they figured they would rent the basement." He says sometimes he told people the loans were going to kill them, but they would plead, "Please help me, please. I want a house." Because he was becoming an increasingly prominent pastor at the time, many people who came to see him assumed he was the president of the bank and could protect them, he recalls.

Garay says as far as he knows no one in his church defaulted. But at a bare minimum, some of his parishioners have run into intense financial difficulties, sometimes defaulting soon after leaving the congregation. The man who'd bought the $270,000 house threw a huge housewarming party and invited everyone from church. He gave a weepy testimony about the house God had given him, passing around the title for all to see. At the time, he was working as a handyman, putting up drywall, painting, roofing, and doing other odd jobs. Within three months he had three families living in the three-bedroom house, and he still could not keep up with the payments. After five months, he went into foreclosure and ducked out of the country. Tony Lin is careful - and of course correct - to say that neither immigrants nor Latinos caused the crash; adherents of every stripe exhibited the same sort of magical thinking about finances, as did millions of nonbelievers. Still, he recalls, "I wasn't very surprised when the whole subprime-mortgage thing blew up. I'm sure a loan officer never said, 'God wants you to have a house.' But you've already been taught that. Now here comes the loan officer saying, 'Sign here, and this house will be yours.' It feels like a gift from God. It's the perfect fuel for the crisis."

The guys who'd started the landscaping company also fared badly. They had a pretty good spring and summer in 2007, their first year of operation, and then business started to fall off. In church they kept giving positive testimonies, bragging about their success. But by October, they'd begun selling off their equipment; eventually they lost the business and had to go into hiding. The most interesting part of the story is the epilogue. One of the partners in the group, whom I'll call Luis, eventually moved to Richmond, and an acquaintance from Casa del Padre told me that he'd recently run into him there. Luis hadn't been embittered by the experience; he blamed the disaster on the fact that he'd started working on Sundays instead of going to church. Luis asked the man to come visit with some of the parishioners of his new church, to confirm that he had once been a great success. As they talked, he seemed happy and positive. "He wasn't angry that things didn't work out. He wasn't angry at God. He looked back at those days and thought, 'I can still have everything. Look what God gave me. That was a time when I had it all.'"

By many measures, Billy Gonzales does not have it all. He lives with his wife and three children in a tiny apartment on the back side of a development at the edge of town, where people hang out on the stoop until all hours. He works 45 minutes away and his car has been broken down for three months, and he does not have any money to fix it. Every day at work he is faced with a vision of what he does not have. He works for a man who just built a $4 million house - one of four the man owns. Gonzales's job is to make sure every wine glass, garden statue, and book is dusted and in its proper place. Yet when I talked to Gonzales he was like a child hearing the ice-cream truck, or a man newly in love. "I'm crazy! Just crazy," he said, meaning crazy for the Lord, and giving little jumps out of his chair.

I visited Gonzales one evening after he'd had a long day at work; his brother had given him a ride home. Gonzales has a wide, earnest face that can look like a child's or, if he is tired, like an old man's. He sat in his favorite squeaky leather chair with his Bible in one hand and a soccer ball at his feet. The sofas in the tiny living room are actually backseats ripped out of cars, with cushions thrown on them. He got the cushions from a man he once shared a trailer with, and they turned out to be infested with cockroaches. As we talked, the roaches crawled across the floor or on the sofas. Gonzales apologized but did not pay them much attention.

He told me he feels pity for his employer. He assumes the man must have been close to God at one point, or at least his family must have been, "because the rich are closer to God." But now the man has lost his way. He laughs when Gonzales talks to him about Jesus, and he wastes his money, buying $500 birdhouses and hiring Gonzales to clean them.

Gonzales was once lost too. He came from a big family in Guatemala so poor "that the poor people would call us poor." For a while after he came to the U.S., he sent money home, but then like many of his friends he lost the rhythm of work. Instead, he was snorting cocaine and getting drunk four nights a week. "I hated Americans. I hated them," he said, and I had trouble believing him, given his now-innocent, open demeanor. He says that back then, he spent most of his days fantasizing about killing his brother-in-law, whom he hated for no reason he can remember. His conversion came two years ago, in the form of a sudden vision like Garay's. One night, in a drugged-out haze, he saw a polished, shimmery stone. He later realized it was a jewel, one of the many treasures in God's vast storehouse, destined for him. Eventually he made his way to Garay, whom he now calls his father.

When I mentioned Gonzales to Garay, the pastor praised him as a model congregant. Indeed, by any standard Gonzales is an admirable man. He is 24, married, works hard, and limits his extracurricular activities to Bible study and soccer. It took me a few visits to realize that two of the three small children in the house are not his. He married a woman with two sons and takes care of them. They call him Papa and he reads to them at night and speaks to them gently, exactly the way he speaks to his own baby son. He has every reason to be frustrated with his circumstances, but I never once saw him express anything but delight. The gospel obviously grounds Gonzales in a very concrete way. But I can also see how, one day, it might send him floating into the air.

"I want to buy a house," he confessed to me one evening this summer. It turned out his lease was almost up, and he needed to move in the fall. "Not a small one but a really huge one, a nice one. With six bedrooms and a kitchen and living room. I know, it's crazy! But nothing is impossible! God, you saved my life," he said, no longer speaking to me. "You saved my life, and now you will give me a gift. Now I'm crazy!" Last I heard, he and Garay were house-hunting together.

A year or so after the crash, there are signs of a new sobriety - higher savings rates, for example, and a reduction in conspicuous spending. But it's hard to imagine Americans reverting to frugality the way, say, the Japanese did during the "lost decade" after their economy crashed. If by stereotype the Japanese are savers, then Americans are consumers, and ever hopeful. Already, countless "entrepreneurs" are finding a silver lining in the mortgage crisis, buying up foreclosed lots - often sight unseen, based on Web listings alone - in desolate parts of Cleveland and Phoenix and other places where abandoned houses can sometimes be had for a few thousand dollars or less. The buyers pay these bargain-basement prices eagerly, in the belief that the houses must be great deals, when they are just as likely to be overtaken by mold, or have every one of their doors and windows missing and the roof caving in. In America there is always a next play, another opportunity, an "unearned blessing" that can make up for a lifetime of disappointment.

It is not all that surprising that the prosperity gospel persists despite its obvious failure to pay off. Much of popular religion these days is characterized by a vast gap between aspirations and reality. Few of Sarah Palin's religious compatriots were shocked by her messy family life, because they've grown used to the paradoxes; some of the most socially conservative evangelical churches also have extremely high rates of teenage pregnancies, out-of-wedlock births, and divorce. As Garay likes to say, "What you have is nothing compared to what you will have." The unpleasant reality - an inadequate paycheck, a pregnant daughter, a recession - is invisible. It's your ability to see beyond such things, your willing blindness to even the most hopeless-seeming circumstances, that makes you a certain kind of modern Christian, and a 21st-century American.

There is the kind of hope that President Obama talks about, and that Clinton did before him - steady, uplifting, assured. And there is Garay's kind of hope, which perhaps for many people better reflects the reality of their lives. Garay's is a faith that, for all its seeming confidence, hints at desperation, at circumstances gone so far wrong that they can only be made right by a sudden, unexpected jackpot.

Once, I asked Garay how you would know for certain if God had told you to buy a house, and he answered like a roulette dealer. "Ten Christians will say that God told them to buy a house. In nine of the cases, it will go bad. The 10th one is the real Christian." And the other nine? "For them, there's always another house."

Nobel Laureate Slams the Bible, Calls It "A Catalogue of Cruelties"

2009-11-19T12:02:00.000-08:00

Cruelty belongs in the arena of psychopathy. I've said it over and over that the bible in general is psychopathic and written for a basically psychopathic god!

By Mario de Queiroz, IPS News
November 19, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143685/

LISBON, Oct 21 (IPS) - After a nearly two-decade truce, Portuguese Nobel literature laureate José Saramago has returned to the charge against the Catholic Church. This time his target is the Bible itself, which he describes as "a manual of bad morals," and a "catalogue of cruelties and of the worst of human nature."

"About the holy book, I tend to say: read the Bible and you'll lose your faith," said the first, and so far only, Portuguese-language writer to receive the Nobel Literature Prize, which he won in 1998.

In a meeting with the press Wednesday, Saramago repeated the ideas he expressed at an event Sunday in the northern Portuguese town of Penafiel, held to launch his latest book, "Cain", which retells the story of Adam and Eve's first-born son in a light-hearted, irreverent tone.

According to Saramago, there is nothing "divine" in the Bible. And although "Cain" has offended the Church, it won't offend Catholics, he said, because "they don't read the Bible."

It took "a thousand years and dozens of generations" to write the Bible, which depicts a "cruel, spiteful, vengeful, jealous and unbearable God," said the writer, who recommended people not to trust "the God depicted in the Bible."

He said he would not have to settle accounts with God, because "the human brain is a great creator of absurd notions, and God is the most absurd one of all."

Catholic Church officials lashed out at the writer's statements, especially when he said that "without the Bible, we would be different, probably better, people," and that he could not understand how the Bible became a "spiritual guide, when it's so full of horrors, incest, betrayals and slaughter."

"I'm not looking for controversy, but I have a few convictions and I say certain things. None of this is free: Cain has kept me company for many years," Saramago responded to a question from IPS.

Writing this book "was an exercise in freedom for me," said the polemical, provocative writer, who at the age of 86 maintains his rebelliousness intact – the same rebelliousness he showed when he joined the Communist Party, which was driven underground by Portugal's 1926-1974 dictatorship, in 1969.

Saramago has ruffled many feathers over the years. He made Israel furious when he compared the Israeli military campaign in the besieged Palestinian West Bank to Auschwitz, and irritated Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi when he described him as "this thing, this illness, this virus (that) threatens to become the cause of the moral death of the country of Verdi" and could "end up corroding the veins and destroying the heart of one of Europe’s richest cultures."

He also had a few choice words for Pope Benedict XVI, saying "Ratzinger has the nerve to invoke God to reinforce his universal neo-medievalism."

In addition, he distanced himself from the Communists when he said Cuba "has lost my confidence, damaged my hopes, cheated my dreams."

Another of his provocative ideas, expressed in one of his books, is that Portugal and Spain will one day merge into a united Iberia.

The 181-page Cain, which he wrote in four months and which hit the bookshelves simultaneously in Portuguese, Spanish and Catalonian on Monday, is according to Saramago, "an insurrection, an exhortation for everyone to dare to look for what is on the other side of things," aimed at getting readers to think and reflect, because "we are manipulated all the time. We have to fight against that."

His latest work also aims subtle barbs at contemporary issues, like the global economic crisis and its effect on unemployment, the rights of gays and lesbians, and the accumulation of wealth "in the name of the Lord."

In 1991, with the publication of "The Gospel According to Jesus Christ", Saramago infuriated the Church, which was backed in the row by the conservative government of then prime minister (and current president) Aníbal Cavaco Silva, which ended up vetoing the book's presentation for the European Literary Prize on the argument that it was offensive to Catholics.

The book portrays Jesus Christ as a fallible, rebellious young man and hints at a more intimate relationship with Mary Magdalene.

At the time, the Portuguese government drew broad criticism from democrats within and outside Portugal for its censorship.

In response to the censorship, Saramago moved in symbolic–self exile to Spain's Canary Islands, where he still lives today.

In the current controversy, which would appear to be far from over, the spokesman for Portugal's bishops' conference, Jesuit priest Manuel Morujão, said the whole thing was a "publicity stunt" mounted by the writer to drive up sales of Cain, which he said he had not read because "it is not one of my priorities."

Morujão said the "offensive" terms used by Saramago to refer to the Bible "hurt the feelings of millions of Catholics around the world." He also said the author "does not have sufficient knowledge" of the Bible to write about it.

A higher-level Catholic authority, Bishop Manuel Clemente of Oporto, Portugal's second-largest city, urged the author to "be more careful and better informed" when writing about Biblical events.

Saramago responded by saying he was surprised by "the superficiality of the gentlemen of the Church, who did not read the book, but with unusual speed began to spread opinions and dismissive insults about it and its author."

Father Morujão "said reading Cain is not one of his priorities. His frankness is appreciated, but it's still strange when a spokesman does not know what he is talking about."

"In terms of a lack of intellectual rigor, you could not ask for worse," said the writer.

At the same time, Saramago said it is not against God that he is writing, "because he does not exist," but that his stance is against religions, "because they do not, and have never, helped bring people together."

In the writer's view, "God only exists in our minds."

His book points out that in the Old Testament, Cain killed his younger brother Abel in a fit of jealousy after God preferred his brother's sacrifice of sheep to his.

"None of that happened, it's obvious that they're myths invented by man, just like God, a creation of men. All I do is lift up the stones and show the reality hidden beneath them," said Saramago.

He said Cain is a book written "against any and all religions," because throughout history, "all religions, without exception, have done humanity more bad than good."

Visão magazine's review of the book describes it is an ironic, provocative and irreverent work which, despite the humour in some parts, points to injustices, cruelties, limitations of free will and incongruities in the book of Genesis.

In Saramago's book, Cain travels through time, witnessing events like the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the Great Flood and the construction of Noah's Ark, the fall of Jericho, and the conflict between God and Satan. He also keeps Abraham from stabbing his son Isaac.

Saramago concludes: "Yes, reader, that's what it really says. The Lord ordered Abraham to sacrifice his own son, as casually as someone asking for a glass of water when they're thirsty…The logical, natural or simply human thing would have been for Abraham to tell the Lord to go to hell.

The Top One Reason Religion Is Harmful

2009-11-19T12:00:00.000-08:00

By Greta Christina, AlterNet
Posted on November 13, 2009, Printed on November 19, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143912/

So what is it about religion -- exactly -- that's so harmful?

I've argued many times that religion is not only mistaken, but does more harm than good. But why do I think that is?

Sure, I can make a list of specific harms religion has done, from here to Texas. I've done exactly that. But that's not enough to make my case. I could make long lists of harms done by plenty of human institutions: medicine, education, democracy. That doesn't make them inherently malevolent.

Why is religion special -- and specially troubling? What makes religion different from any other ideology, community, system of morality, hypothesis about how the world works? And why does that difference makes it uniquely prone to cause damage?

The debates about religion usually come in two types: "is religion accurate or mistaken," and "is religion helpful or harmful." And ever since I put together my best "mistaken" arguments, my Top Ten Reasons I Don't Believe in God, I've been trying to wrap up my "harmful" arguments in a similar nutshell.

But I'm realizing that I don't have ten arguments for why religion is harmful. I don't even have 57,842 arguments.

I have one.

I'm realizing that everything I've ever written about religion's harm boils down to one thing.

It's this: Religion is ultimately dependent on belief in invisible beings, inaudible voices, intangible entities, undetectable forces, and events and judgments that happen after we die.

It therefore has no reality check.

And it is therefore uniquely armored against criticism, questioning, and self- correction. It is uniquely armored against anything that might stop it from spinning into extreme absurdity, extreme denial of reality ... and extreme, grotesque immorality.

(I can hear the chorus already. "But not all religion is like that! Not all believers are crazy extremists! Some religions adapt to new evidence and changing social mores! It's not fair to criticize all religion just because some believers do bad things!" I hear you. I'll get to that at the end, after I make my case.)

The Proof Is Not in the Pudding

The thing that uniquely defines religion, the thing that sets it apart from every other ideology or hypothesis or social network, is the belief in unverifiable supernatural entities. Of course it has other elements -- community, charity, philosophy, inspiration for art, etc. But those things exist in the secular world, too. They're not specific to religion. The thing that uniquely defines religion is belief in supernatural entities. Without that belief, it's not religion.

And with that belief, the capacity for religion to do harm gets cranked up to an alarmingly high level -- because there's no reality check.

Any other ideology or philosophy or hypothesis about the world is eventually expected to pony up. It's expected to prove itself true and/or useful, or else correct itself, or else fall by the wayside. With religion, that is emphatically not the case. Because religion is a belief in the invisible and unknowable -- and it's therefore never expected to prove that it's right, or even show good evidence for why it's right -- its capacity to do harm can spin into the stratosphere.

Let me make a comparison to show my point. Let's compare religious belief with political ideology. After all, religion isn't the only belief that's armored against criticism, questioning, and self- correction. Religion isn't the only belief that leads people to ignore evidence in favor of their settled opinion. And contrary to the popular atheist saying, religion is not the only belief that inspires good people to do evil things. Political ideology can do all that quite nicely. People have committed horrors to perpetuate Communism: an ideology many of those people sincerely believed was best. And horrors were committed by Americans in the last Bush administration ... in the name of democracy and freedom.

But even the most stubborn political ideology will eventually crumble in the face of it, you know, not working. People can only be told for so long that under Communism everyone will eat strawberries and cream, or that in an unrestricted free market the rising tide will lift all boats. A political ideology makes promises about this life, this world. If the strawberries and cream and rising boats aren't forthcoming, eventually people notice. (The 2008 election was evidence of that.) People can excuse and rationalize a political ideology for a long time ... but ultimately, the proof is in the pudding.

Religion is different.

With religion, the proof is emphatically not in the pudding. With religion, the proof comes from invisible beings, inaudible voices. The proof comes from prophets and religious leaders, who supposedly hear these voices and are happy to tell the rest of us what they say. It comes from religious texts, written ages ago by prophets and religious leaders, ditto. It comes from feelings in people's hearts that, conveniently, tell them what they already believe or want to believe. And the proof comes in the afterlife, after people die and can't come back to tell us about it. Every single claim made by religion comes from people: not from sources out in the world that other people can verify, but from the insides of people's heads.

So with religion, even if God's rules and promises aren't working out, followers still follow them ... because the ultimate judge and judgment are invisible. There is no pudding, no proof -- and no expectation that there should be any. And there is therefore no reality check, no self-correction, when religion starts to go to the bad place.

In fact, with many religions, that idea that you should expect to eat the pudding is blasphemy. A major part of many religious doctrines is that trusting the tenets of your faith without evidence is not only acceptable, but a positive virtue. ("Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe." -- John 20:29)

In other words: The belief in invisible beings, undetectable forces, and events that happen after we die, provides a uniquely effective armor against the valid criticism, questioning, and deflation of ideas and institutions that do serious harm.

And religion builds on this armor with layer after layer. Among these insulating layers: The idea that letting go of religious doubts is a liberating act of love. The idea that skepticism and questioning are the same as cynicism, nihilism, and despair. The idea that religion operates in a different realm from the everyday world, and it's unfair to hold it to normal standards of evidence. The idea that criticizing religion is inherently rude and intolerant. The "Shut up, that's why" arguments so commonly marshaled against atheists: arguments meant not to address questions about religion, but to silence them. When coupled with the fact that the core belief is by definition unverifiable, these layers armor religion even more effectively against valid questions ... thus undermining our ability to see when it's become comically absurd, or wildly implausible, or grotesquely immoral. Or all three.

I want to give some specific examples of how this armor works. I want to talk about some of the most common -- and most harmful -- ways that religion causes harm. And I want to show how the invisible, unprovable, "don't show me the money" nature of religion either causes that harm or makes it worse.

The Armor of God

Inspiring political oppression.

Religious extremists -- whether the Taliban in the Islamic world or the Christian Right here in the States -- don't care about separation of church and state. They don't care about democracy. They don't care about respecting other people's right to live differently from them. In very extreme cases, they don't care about law, or basic principles of morality, or even human life.

None of this matters to them. What matters is making God's will happen. In their mind, God created everything that exists... and therefore, God's will trumps everything.

And since God's will is invisible, inaudible, and entirely unverifiable, there's no reality check on this dreadful path. There's no reality check saying that their actions are having a terrible effect in the world around them. The world around them is, quite literally, irrelevant. The next world is what matters. And since there's no way to conclusively demonstrate what will and won't get you a good place in that world, or whether that world even exists... the sky's the limit. There's no way to test the assertion that God wants women to wear burqas and have clitoridectomies... or that God wants us to ban same-sex marriage and teach children dangerous lies about sex. The reality check is absent. The brake lines of morality have been cut.

Perpetuating political oppression.

The unverifiability of religion leads to political oppression in another way. It makes religious leaders and organizations uniquely powerful in the political arena -- because their followers are typically taught from a young age to implicitly believe whatever their religious leaders say. They are taught that their religious leaders have superior virtue, with a hotline to God and his all-perfect morality. Indeed, they've been taught that trusting their religious leaders is a great virtue, and that asking them to support their claims with evidence is a grave insult: not only to the leaders, but to the entire faith, and even to God himself.

Here's a specific example of this one.

In the United States, when same-sex marriage has been up for popular vote, it has, as of this writing, never, ever won. It has been consistently defeated at the ballot box, even when a well-organized, well-funded campaign has been behind it. It has been consistently defeated at the ballot box largely because the full force of several organized religions, especially the Catholic and Mormon churches, have been marshaled against it. It has been defeated because these churches have been willing to tell grotesque, shameless lies about the effects of same-sex marriage -- from "churches will be forced to perform weddings they oppose" to "kids will be taught explicit gay sex in public school."

And it has been defeated because the followers of these churches implicitly trust their leaders. When faced with a newspaper editorial saying, "Same-sex marriage won't affect public education" -- and their beloved priest saying, "Same-sex marriage means your children will be taught about gay oral sex in third grade" -- they believe their priest.

Even though their priest is lying through his teeth.

And because religion has no reality check, it is extraordinarily difficult to counter its flat-out lies... because ultimately, its claims rest on an unverifiable belief in an invisible God, who has yet to appear on CNN stating his political views. And when you combine this lack of reality check with the unquestioning trust in religious leaders, you have a recipe for religion to have grossly disproportionate power in the political arena. A power that is uniquely armored against questions about what really works to improve life and alleviate suffering and create justice in this world -- the questions that politics are supposed to be about.

Succumbing to political oppression.

In the same way that religion's unverifiability means there's no check on oppressing other people, it means there's no check on people accepting their oppression. At the hands of religion, or anything else.

If people believe they'll be rewarded with infinite bliss in the afterlife -- and there's no way to prove whether or not that's true -- people will let themselves be martyrs to their faith, to an appalling degree. More commonly, if people believe in infinite bliss in the afterlife, they'll be more willing to accept an appalling degree of oppression and injustice in this life. From anybody. Oddly, this is often framed as a plus -- "Religion gives people hope in hardship" -- but I fail to see how encouraging oppressed people to suck it up until they get pie in the sky is a good thing. For the oppressed, anyway. Why it's good for the oppressors is crystal clear.

Again: Because it's a belief in invisible beings and events and judgments that happen after people die, religion short-circuits our reality checks. Including the reality check that looks at how we're being treated and says, "This is bullshit."

Justification for violence and war.

Ditto.

But more so.

In the same way that religion drowns out the reality check saying that oppression and injustice is wrong, it drowns out the reality check saying that hurting and killing people is wrong.

And the untestable belief in the afterlife is the biggest obstacle to this reality check. If you believe in a perfect eternal afterlife... then who cares about pain and death in this world? Compared with the eternal bliss/ torture of Heaven or Hell, pain and death in this world is a stubbed toe. Isn't carrying out God's will more important than a stubbed toe?

Kill them all. Let God sort it out.

Vulnerability to fraud.

When people are taught that believing things without proof or evidence makes you a good person, they become far more vulnerable to fraud, manipulation, and deception.

Not just from religious figures. Not just from phony faith healers and prosperity gospel preachers and authors of bestselling psychic self-help books. (Although them, too.)

From everybody. From every Ponzi schemer and Nigerian email scammer and shady purveyor of Florida real estate.

When people are taught to let go of difficult questions and trust whatever religious authorities tell them; that it's better to trust their feelings than their critical thinking skills; that evidence and reason are less important than faith; that "doubter" is a synonym for "sinner"... they become vulnerable to every cheater, chiseler, swindler, con artist, and late night infomercial huckster who's lucky enough to cross their gullible paths. The idea that belief without evidence is a virtue doesn't just inspire people to trust their religious leaders blindly. It inspires people to trust anybody blindly. Including people who are trying to rob them blind.

Quashing science and education.

Do I even need to explain this one? Do I need to explain how the untestability of religion -- and the idea that untestability is a positive virtue -- undercuts science and education?

Not just in a general, "making people value science and education less" way -- but in specific, practical, harmful ways? Hamstringing stem cell research? Forcing abstinence-only sex education on kids? Teaching creationism in public schools?

When religion teaches that believing in the invisible is more important than understanding the perceivable... that personal faith is more important than critical thinking... that letting go of questions is a liberating act of love and trust... that believing things with no evidence is not only okay but a positive virtue... that unfalsifiable hypotheses are just ducky... that what God supposedly says about the world is more real what's in the world itself...

Do I need to explain this any further? Do I need to explain how the "Facts take a back seat to faith" trope hammers science and education into the ground?

Terrorizing children.

And again, we come to the matter of priorities.

If we prioritized this life, we would never terrorize children by telling them they'll be tortured in fire forever if they don't obey our rules. We would never tell them to imagine putting their hands in a fire, to imagine the crackling and burning and screaming pain... and then to imagine doing that for a minute. An hour. A day. A lifetime. Eternity.

Not unless we were horribly abusive.

But when people think the next life is more important than this one -- when people think the infinite burning and torture is really going to happen if their children don't obey God's word -- they'll gladly give their children nightmarish visions of pain and torture, dispensed by the Fatherly God who supposedly created them and loves them. They'll do it without a second thought. When people prioritize their belief in an afterlife that, by definition, is impossible to prove or disprove, they effectively cut the reality check begging them to not terrorize and emotionally abuse their own children.

Teaching children about hell is child abuse. Nothing but the unverifiable promise of permanent bliss or torture in the afterlife would make loving, decent, non-abusive parents inflict it on their children.

I could go on, and on, and on. I could talk about justification for bigotry. The quashing of medicine and public health. Individual abuses by religious leaders: financial, and sexual, and otherwise. But I think you get the idea.

Yes, Even Moderate Religion Still Does Harm

Now, many believers will argue that the harm done by religion isn't religion's fault. Many will point out all the wars, bigotry, fraud, oppression, quashing of science and medicine, and terrorizing of children done for reasons other than religion. And many will argue that, even when this stuff is done in the name of religion, it isn't really inspired by religion at all. It's inspired by greed, fear, selfishness, the hunger for power, the desire for control... all the things that lead people to do evil.

And they'll have a point. I'm not saying that religion is the root of all evil. I'm not arguing that a world without religion would be a blissful Utopia where everyone holds hands and chocolate flows in the streets. (And then we all die, because the chocolate is drowning us and we can't swim because we're holding hands.) I don't know of any atheist who'd argue that. I know that the impulses driving evil are deeply rooted in human nature, and religion is far from the only thing to inspire it.

I'm saying that religion provides a uniquely stubborn justification for evil. I'm saying that religion is uniquely armored against criticism, questioning, and self-correction... and that this armor protects it against the reality checks that act, to a limited degree and in the long run, to keep evil in check. I'm saying that religion takes the human impulses to evil, and cuts the brake line, and sends them careening down a hill and into the center of town.

Yes -- even moderate religion. Not to nearly the same degree as extreme religion, of course. If all religion were moderate, ecumenical, separate from government, supportive of science, and accepting of non-belief... well, atheists would still disagree with it, but most of us wouldn't much care.

But moderate religion still does harm. It still encourages people to believe in invisible beings, inaudible voices, intangible entities, undetectable forces, and events and judgments that happen after we die. And therefore, it still disables reality checks... making people more vulnerable to oppression, fraud, and abuse.

What's more, moderate religion is in the minority. The oppressive, intolerant, reality-denying forms of religion are far more common, and far better at perpetuating themselves. And moderate religion gives these ugly forms credibility. It gives credibility to the idea that believing in things there's no reason to believe is valid, and actually virtuous. It gives credibility to the idea that invisible worlds are real, more real and important than the visible one. It gives credibility to the idea that our seriously biased personal intuition is more trustworthy than logic or verifiable evidence. It gives credibility to the idea that religious beliefs, alone among all other ideas, should be beyond criticism; that the very act of questioning religion is inherently intolerant. (It also, I've found, has a distinct tendency to get hostile and decidedly un-moderate towards non-believers when questioned even a little.)

Without religion, we would still have community. Charity. Social responsibility. Philosophy. Ethics. Comfort. Solace. Art. In countries where less than half the population believes in God, these qualities and activities are all flourishing. In fact, they're flourishing a lot more than they are in countries with high rates of religious belief.

We don't need religion to have any of these things.

And we'd be better off without it.

The Vatican Joins the Search for Alien Life

2009-11-13T10:19:00.000-08:00

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/6536400/The-Vatican-joins-the-search-for-alien-life.html

The Vatican Joins the Search for Alien Life
Tom Chivers
The Telegraph
Tue, 10 Nov 2009 10:20 EST

The Vatican has joined the search for alien life

The Vatican's Pontifical Academy of Sciences is holding its first ever conference on alien life, the discovery of which would have profound implications for the Catholic Church.

The Pontifical Academy of Sciences is holding a conference on astrobiology, the study of life beyond Earth, with scientists and religious leaders gathering in Rome this week.

For centuries, theologians have argued over what the existence of life elsewhere in the universe would mean for the Church: at least since Giordano Bruno, an Italian monk, was put to death by the Inquisition in 1600 for claiming that other worlds exist.

Among other things, extremely alien-looking aliens would be hard to fit with the idea that God "made man in his own image".

Furthermore, Jesus Christ's role as saviour would be confused: would other worlds have their own, tentacled Christ-figures, or would Earth's Christ be universal?

However, just as the Church eventually made accommodations after Copernicus and Galileo showed that the Earth was not the centre of the universe, and when it belatedly accepted the truth of Darwin's theory of evolution, Catholic leaders say that alien life can be aligned with the Bible's teachings.

Father Jose Funes, a Jesuit astronomer at the Vatican Observatory and one of the organisers of the conference, said: "As a multiplicity of creatures exists on Earth, so there could be other beings, also intelligent, created by God.

"This does not conflict with our faith, because we cannot put limits on the creative freedom of God."

Not everyone agrees. Paul Davies, a theoretical physicist and author of The Goldilocks Enigma, told The Washington Post that the threat to Christianity is "being downplayed" by Church leaders. He said: "I think the discovery of a second genesis would be of enormous spiritual significance.

"The real threat would come from the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence, because if there are beings elsewhere in the universe, then Christians, they're in this horrible bind.

"They believe that God became incarnate in the form of Jesus Christ in order to save humankind, not dolphins or chimpanzees or little green men on other planets."

The Academy conference will include presentations from scientists - by no means all of them Christians - on the discovery of planets outside our solar system, the geological record of early life on Earth, how life might have started on Earth, and whether "alien" life of a different biochemistry to our own might exist here without our knowing, among many other things.

Out of your head: Leaving the body behind

2009-11-12T12:53:00.000-08:00

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427291.100-out-of-your-head-leaving-the-body-behind.html?full=true&print=true

Out of your head: Leaving the body behind
13 October 2009 by Anil Ananthaswamy

THE young man woke feeling dizzy. He got up and turned around, only to see himself still lying in bed. He shouted at his sleeping body, shook it, and jumped on it. The next thing he knew he was lying down again, but now seeing himself standing by the bed and shaking his sleeping body. Stricken with fear, he jumped out of the window. His room was on the third floor. He was found later, badly injured.

What this 21-year-old had just experienced was an out-of-body experience, one of the most peculiar states of consciousness. It was probably triggered by his epilepsy (Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry, vol 57, p 838). "He didn't want to commit suicide," says Peter Brugger, the young man's neuropsychologist at University Hospital Zurich in Switzerland. "He jumped to find a match between body and self. He must have been having a seizure."

In the 15 years since that dramatic incident, Brugger and others have come a long way towards understanding out-of-body experiences. They have narrowed down the cause to malfunctions in a specific brain area and are now working out how these lead to the almost supernatural experience of leaving your own body and observing it from afar. They are also using out-of-body experiences to tackle a long-standing problem: how we create and maintain a sense of self.

Dramatised to great effect by such authors as Dostoevsky, Wilde, de Maupassant and Poe - some of whom wrote from first-hand knowledge - out-of-body experiences are usually associated with epilepsy, migraines, strokes, brain tumours, drug use and even near-death experiences. It is clear, though, that people with no obvious neurological disorders can have an out-of-body experience. By some estimates, about 5 per cent of healthy people have one at some point in their lives.

People without any obvious neurological disorder can have an out-of-body experience
So what exactly is an out-of-body experience? A definition has recently emerged that involves a set of increasingly bizarre perceptions. The least severe of these is a doppelgänger experience: you sense the presence of or see a person you know to be yourself, though you remain rooted in your own body. This often progresses to stage 2, where your sense of self moves back and forth between your real body and your doppelgänger. This was what Brugger's young patient experienced. Finally, your self leaves your body altogether and observes it from outside, often an elevated position such as the ceiling. "This split is the most striking feature of an out-of-body experience," says Olaf Blanke, a neurologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne.

Surprisingly pleasant

Some out-of-body experiences involve just one of these stages; some all three, in progression. Bizarrely, many people who have one report it as a pleasant experience. So what could be going on in the brain to create such a seemingly impossible sensation?

The first substantial clues came in 2002, when Blanke's team stumbled across a way to induce a full-blown out-of-body experience. They were performing exploratory brain surgery on a 43-year-old woman with severe epilepsy to determine which part of her brain to remove in order to cure her. When they stimulated a region near the back of the brain called the temporoparietal junction (TPJ), the woman reported that she was floating above her own body and looking down on herself.

This makes some kind of neurological sense. The TPJ processes visual and touch signals, balance and spatial information from the inner ear, and the proprioceptive sensations from joints, tendons and muscles that tell us where our body parts are in relation to one another. Its job is to meld these together to create a feeling of embodiment: a sense of where your body is, and where it ends and the rest of the world begins. Blanke and colleagues hypothesised that out-of-body experiences arise when, for whatever reason, the TPJ fails to do this properly (Nature, vol 419, p 269).

More evidence later emerged that a malfunctioning TPJ was at the heart of the out-of-body experience. In 2007, for example, Dirk De Ridder of University Hospital Antwerp in Belgium was trying to help a 63-year-old man with intractable tinnitus. In a last-ditch attempt to silence the ringing in his ears, Ridder's team implanted electrodes near the patient's TPJ. It did not cure his tinnitus, but it did lead to him experiencing something close to an out-of-body experience: he would feel his self shift about 50 centimetres behind and to the left of his body. The feeling would last more than 15 seconds, long enough to carry out PET scans of his brain. Sure enough, the team found that the TPJ was activated during the experiences.

Insights from neurological disorders or brain surgery can only take you so far, however, not least because cases are rare. Larger-scale studies are required, and to achieve this Blanke and others have used a technique called "own-body transformation tasks" to force the brain to do things that it seemingly does during an out-of-body experience. In these experiments, subjects are shown a sequence of brief glimpses of cartoon figures wearing a glove on one hand. Some of the figures face the subject, others have their back turned (see diagram). The task is to imagine yourself in the position of the cartoon figure in order to work out which hand the glove is on. To do this, you may have to mentally rotate you own body as one image succeeds another. As volunteers performed these tasks, the researchers mapped their brain activity with an EEG and found that the TPJ was activated when the volunteers imagined themselves in a position different from their actual orientation - an out-of-body position.

The team also zapped the TPJ with transcranial magnetic stimulation, a non-invasive technique that can temporarily disable parts of the brain. With a disrupted TPJ, volunteers took significantly longer to do the own-body transformation task (The Journal of Neuroscience, vol 25, p 550).

Other brain regions have been implicated too, including ones close to the TPJ. The emerging consensus is that when these regions are working well, we feel at one with our body. But disrupt them, and our sense of embodiment can float away.

This does not, however, explain the most striking feature of out-of-body experiences. "It's a great puzzle why people, from their out-of-body locations, visualise not only their bodies but things around them, such as other people," says Brugger. "Where does this information come from?"

One line of evidence comes from the condition known as sleep paralysis, in which healthy people find their body immobilised as in sleep despite being conscious (see "The twilight zone"). In a survey of nearly 12,000 people who had experienced sleep paralysis, Allan Cheyne of the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, found that many reported sensations similar to out-of-body experiences. These included floating out of their body and turning back to look at it.

Cheyne suggests that this might be the result of conflicts of information in the brain. During sleep paralysis, it is possible to enter a REM-like state in which you dream of moving or flying. Under these circumstances you are conscious of a sensation of movement, yet your brain is aware that your body cannot move. In an attempt to resolve this sensory conflict, the brain cuts the sense of self loose (Cortex, vol 45, p 201). "It resolves by splitting the self from its body," says Cheyne. "The self seems to go with the movement and the body gets left behind." Perhaps similar sensory conflicts cause classic out-of-body experiences.

The brain resolves sensory conflict by splitting the self from the body. The body gets left behind
Brugger, meanwhile, has a suggestion for how someone might see things even though their eyes are shut, based on one of his patients who reported an out-of-body experience. According to this patient's father, who was sitting by the bedside, he had his eyes closed. Yet he later reported seeing, from a perspective above his bed, his father going to the bathroom, returning with a wet towel and towelling his forehead.

The patient presumably heard his father walk to the bathroom and run some water, and must have felt the wet towel on his head. Brugger speculates that his brain converted those stimuli into a visual image, not unlike what happens in synaesthesia. This still does not, however, explain the external vantage point. "It's not clear how the brain constructs that," says cognitive philosopher Thomas Metzinger of the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany.

Metzinger does have a suggestion. Imagine an episode from a recent holiday. Do you visualise it from a first-person perspective, or from a third-person perspective with yourself in the scene? Surprisingly, most of us do the latter. "In encoding visual memories, the brain already uses an external perspective," says Metzinger. "We don't know much about why and how, but if something is extracted from such a database [during an out-of-body experience], there may be material for seeing oneself from the outside."

Whatever the mechanism, the study of out-of-body experiences promises to help answer a profound question in neuroscience and philosophy: how does self-consciousness emerge? It's abundantly clear to us that we have a sense of self that resides, most of the time, in our bodies. Yet it is also clear from out-of-body experiences that the sense of self can seemingly detach from your physical body. So how are the self and the body related?

To address that question, Metzinger has teamed up with Blanke and his colleagues in an experiment that induces an out-of-body experience in healthy volunteers. They film each volunteer from behind and project the image into a head-mounted display worn by the volunteer so that they see an image of themselves standing about 2 metres in front. The experimenters then stroke the volunteer's back - which the volunteers see being done to their virtual self. This creates sensory conflict, and many reported feeling their sense of self migrating out of their physical bodies and towards the virtual one (Science, vol 317, p 1096).

To Metzinger, these experiments demonstrate that self-consciousness begins with the feeling of owning a body, but there is more to self-consciousness than the mere feelings of embodiment. "Selfhood has many components," says Metzinger. "We are trying to fill them in, building block by building block. This is just the beginning."

Is Blind Faith in God and the Bible a Modern Invention?

2009-11-10T11:08:00.001-08:00

Is Blind Faith in God and the Bible a Modern Invention?
By Devilstower, Daily Kos
November 10, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/143844/

If you open Karen Armstrong's new book, The Case for God, expecting to find a list of mysterious cures, scientific curiosities, or certified miracles all pointing toward the physical presence of a divine influence in the world, you will be sorely disappointed. Armstrong has no interest in, and is in fact completely antithetical to, trying to prove God's existence. Despite this, her book is positioned -- both in marketing and from its opening pages -- as a direct challenge to books like Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, Sam Harris' Letter to a Christian Nation, and Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. How can you make a defense of God if you've no interest in the existence of God? Quite well, actually, and if you do it as sharply as Armstrong, you can make hundreds of pages of what is basically theological analysis both entertaining and informative.

Armstrong argues for an idea very similar to the "non-overlapping magisteria" that were put forward by evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould (and in fact, Gould gets several nice mentions in The Case for God). She refers frequently to the idea that, in the past, people tended to break arguments into two groups for which she uses the Greek terms logos and mythos. Logos reflects practical, immediate reasoning -- how do we build that aqueduct, what can we make from this wood, which crop would grow best in that field? Mythos is more aimed at the why -- what does it mean that my friend has died, how can I recapture the joy I felt in a moment of pure experience, how can I find meaning and peace among the world's noise and violence? This sort of approach could easily fall into a gooey cheer for "being spiritual," but Armstrong is not talking about having a nice little breathing session now and then. She focuses on the 3000 year history of monotheism and the great effort that was put into building flexible, thoughtful religions, on how those religions continue to have a meaningful role in the life of millions, and how the recent history of those religions has led to unfortunate developments that are unique over those three millennia.

No civilization of the past thought it could get by without logos. Pyramids were built with extensive use of mathematics and the most advanced technology of the time. The same could be said of the Acropolis and of medieval cathedrals. When we see those past societies as ignorant and driven out of unreasoning "myths" it's because we are the oddities of history. Having acquired so much new data to feed logos over such a short time, we've become completely centered in scientific reasoning and entirely dismissive of mythos -- perversely, that's even true when we talk about fundamentalist religion. We look back on some ritual of the past and dismiss it as mindless following of tradition and superstition. You don't need to plant at midnight, or sacrifice a lamb, or ferry a statue around the town to satisfy some some dumb animal-headed deity. We search for the hint of reasoning that might be behind these rituals, and discount the idea that they served to establish meaning in lives that were just as busy, joyful, tragic, and brief as our own. We've turned "myth" into another word for fantasy, or lie. In doing so:

We lost the art of interpreting the old tales of gods walking the earth, dead men striding out of tombs, or seas parting miraculously. We began to understand concepts such as faith, revelation, myth, mystery, and dogma in a way that would have been very surprising to our ancestors.
In particular, the concept of faith comes in for a close examination. We understand faith today as a kind of blind acceptance -- like Indiana Jones stepping off into space in his quest for the Holy Grail. Religious people cheer this kind of "faith" and many Christians tout this as the one and only qualification to be among Christ's chosen. But that's not what the word translated as "faith" meant in Biblical times. It's not even what it meant when the Bible was first translated into English.

The term used in most New Testament texts (the Greek word pistis) meant something closer to loyalty or commitment, than unreasoning belief. When Jesus chastised his followers for their lack of faith, or commended a non-Jew for having faith, he wasn't talking about some unspoken creed. He certainly wasn't praising them for seeing that he was divine. He was talking about follow-through, about living up to ideas of selflessness and humbleness. Even the word "belief" has changed from a Middle English sense of "prize" to our modern idea of "accept at face value." Imagine how different every Christian creed would sound today if we replace "believe in" with "value" and "have faith in" with "commit myself to."

Unquestioning acceptance doesn't figure into the vigorous ethical and theological debates that ran through street conversations and popular songs of previous centuries, and Armstrong sees it as an invention of modern religion. Unable to separate logos and mythos, and trying to view everything through a lens of the logos-based society in which they live, fundamentalists reacted not by rediscovering the transcendent ideas of the past, but by inventing something new. Instead of science and religion, they tried to build a scientific religion in which every aspect of the world must conform to a literal interpretation of scripture (one that ignores the inherent, and quite intentional, contradictions built into that text). Blind acceptance had to be inserted into the mix because only blind acceptance allows stepping around the wreck trying to force mythos to conform to logos makes of both. If you look for reviews of Amrstrong's book, you'll find that that the harshest reviews are not from the general "secular" press, but from fundamentalists. "Demon inspired" is one of the milder phrases you'll encounter if you make a search for reactions from Christian fundamentalists.

Though the heart of the book is a lengthy examination of theology that starts with the paintings of Neolithic caves and ends with twenty-first century philosophers, don't get the impression that Armstrong asserts that the meaning of religion can be found in a text -- whether that text is the Bible, the Torah, or her own book. The Case for God might as well be called The Case for ReligiousPractice. And by practice she doesn't mean doing something once, she means doing it over, and over, and over -- like practicing piano -- until you discover the passion at the end of all that rote, mechanical repetition.

Religion... was not primarily something that people thought, but something they did. It's truth was acquired by practical action. It is no use imagining that you will be able to drive a car if you simply read the manual or study the rules of the road. You cannot learn to dance, paint, or cook by perusing text or recipes. The rules of a board game sound obscure, unnecessarily complicated, and dull until you start to play, when everything falls into place. There are some things that can be learned only by constant, dedicated practice, but you find that you achieve something that seemed initially impossible. Instead of sinking to the bottom of the pool, you can float, you may learn to jump higher and with more grace than seems humanly possible, or to sing with unearthly beauty. You do not always understand how you achieved these feats, because your mind directs your body in a way that bypasses conscious logical deliberation, but somehow you learn to transcend your original capabilities. Some of these activities bring indescribable joy. A musician can lose herself in her music, a dancer becomes inseparable from the dance, and a skier feels entirely at one with himself and the external world as he speeds down the slope. It is a satisfaction that goes deeper than merely "feeling good." It is what the Greeks called ekstatis, which means a stepping outside the norm. Religion is a practical discipline that teaches us to discover new capacities of mind and heart. ... It is no use magisterially weighing up the teachings of religion to judge their truth of falsehood before embarking on a religious way of life. You will discover their truth -- or lack of it -- only if you translate those doctrines into ritual or ethical action. Like any skill, religion requires perseverance, hard work, and discipline.
Not only does Armstrong see the blind acceptance of doctrine as an impediment to religious practice, she discounts the idea that religious beliefs can have any value unless they are placed into a framework of daily practice, commitment, and ethical action.

If you're waiting for her to stop explaining where the fundamentalists went wrong and start her case against "Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens," you're going to be disappointed again -- because Armstrong seems them as both as flip sides of the same coin.

Like all religious fundamentalists, the new athesists believe that they alone are in possession of the truth; like Christian fundamentalists they read scripture in an entirely literal manner and seem to never have heard of the long tradition of allegoric or Talmudic interpretation... Harris seems to imagine that biblical inspiration means that the Bible was actually "written by God." Hitchens assumes that faith is entirely dependent on a literal reading of the Bible, and that, for example, the discrepancies in the gospel infancy narratives prove the falseness of Christianity: "Either the gospels are in some sense literal truth, or the whole thing is a fraud and perhaps a moral one at that." Like Protestant fundamentalists, Dawkins has a simplistic view of the moral teaching of the Bible, taking it for granted that its chief purpose is to issue clear rules of conduct and provide us with "role models," which, not surprisingly, he finds lamentably inadequate. He also presumes that since the Bible claims to be inspired by God it must also provide scientific information. Dawkins' only point of disagreement with the Protestant fundamentalists is that he finds the Bible unreliable about science while they do not.
Armstrong is not worried about the claim that God can't be found in science. Which is, in fact, a very old claim.

In fact, the new atheists are not radical enough. Jewish, Christian, and Muslim theologians have insisted for centuries that God does not exist and that there is "nothing" out there...
Her concern is that the Hitchens, Harris, Dawkins camp concern themselves only with tackling a theology that is itself "decidedly unorthodox" and limited -- they want to knock down a sickly child and then proclaim they've won the heavyweight title.

By taking on fundamentalism at both ends of the scale, Armstrong has assured that her book will draw the ire of both camps. In the process she's written a book that's fascinating, packed with information about the history of religion and philosophy, and illuminating when it shows the paths we followed to end up where we find ourselves today (from a political point of view, it's very instructive to look at the origins of modern Christian fundamentalism and in particular to look at how mainstream Protestantism fanned the flames of a dying fundamentalist movement by heaping on ridicule). If nothing else, The Case for God is a terrific reference -- and a splendid bit of long form argument. If you've read any of Karen Armstrong's books in the past -- including her biography of the Buddha, or her personal account of losing faith as a young novitiate -- you'll find some of the same points repeated here, but in new historical contexts. If you haven't read her works before... well, she warns you right in the introduction that this isn't exactly light reading. If you don't want to face detailed descriptions of theological conflicts and the development of religious frameworks, turn back now.

Whether anyone will find that argument convincing, in a world that's increasingly divided into extremes, is difficult to say. But at least it should inspire some good conversations.

With Just A Thought

2009-11-08T15:11:00.000-08:00

This is a Comment for this blog from my *Best Friend* Judyth Vary Baker. Because it was so long, blogger wouldn't take it so I'm posting it here!

With Just A Thought
Judyth Vary Baker

The writer may assume that the universe is largely empty. That what we see is all we get. It does seem that way. But the universe is chock-full, not empty-of what we cannot sense. We know there is a black fabric, so to speak, interstitially existing. We don't know what myriads of beings speed through us,smetimes pausing: nor of how many dimensions we are split across.

Maybe it's beter that we are so sensor-limited. Certainly, human experience does have its difficlties -- spewing out religions and belief systems that can be laughable. Dangerous. Wicked. Worthless. Attempts to make sense of what some understand as utter chaos.

But even chaos theory tells us that events can occur in clusters. Cluster theory and string theory cooperate logically in our thoughts, helping us make a bit of sense out of what seems essentially inane. Human experience is what convinces many to cling to what they've been taught. Why not? It's familiar. It answers questions needing answers. We like answers. We don't like a vacuum. Humans attempt to detect patterns that make sense to them. Even if there aren't any patterns: then they will structure events. Therefore, since so much human thought is simplistic, it's easy to dismiss human experience as not valuable, rather than invauable, for it's what brought these people to conclusions that produce rounds of insane myths and weird, often bloody rituals -- and so on. But I tend to respect the reports I get, over the period of human history, that reveal so much aout our limitations and our courage, our frailties and human-ness, because these reports emerge from other sensory systems than my own, and help verify and validate my own set of experiences, thoughts, and sense of being.

My science teacher could not smell: he didn't have the ability. That didn't mean that odors didn't exist --scents -- though never a part of his experience. He was forced to acknowledge their existence, owever, because the maority of people around him had that experience. He understood that smells existed, because if he didn't bathe, his famly knew it. Food had a very different meaning for him. His associations with food included heat, texture, and a very limited sense of taste, because olfactory sensations comprise so much of what we consider 'taste.'

I cannot, therfore, utterly discount the instinctive, gut feelings and 'beliefs' so many people have -- their belief in a soul or spirit -- or that the earth has a spirit, or that there might be a God. I find no personal reasons to 'believe' what so many others do, but I have a profound respect for why people have developed this set of tools to cope with an unforgiving and often senseless world. Coping, itself, is a survival mechanism based on many things.

Many people, when they lose their ability to cope, can no longer find a reason to exist, or a universal ear to listen-- they no longer can "smell" their primeval roots and believe their existence is nothing but a chemical reaction -- such people, who lose hope, can lose the will to live. Now comes the hard part-- why do we have a will to live? WHY should it matter, to keep these chemical reactions going? Are our mitochondria that powerful an evolutonary influence, that they drive us to keep breathing and wanting to breathe, to forage, to supply those little denizens in our cells with the fuel they collectively need? THEY have a will to 'live' -- don't they? or are we haunted by our inner cellular machinery, driving us on? Just because we can describe something -- such as the physics involving a rainbow-- doesn't mean that the rainbow is not beautiful. All weepy-silly about beauty and so on -- right? My value system is not yours: I find beauty in simply being alive. I find joy in existence, even when I suffer (and I do). I've seen much death in my life, and yet, balancing that, thrill with the birth of a star, or the bloom of a flower. Worthless, slly, right? But when I see how my words and gentleness affect others, an inner peace also blooms. This experience tells me that something bigger than life exists. certainly bigger than my little spark of life.

Consider love. I've known all kinds of 'love' --but that which affects me most is unconditional love, with no concern about its return. I had that with a great man for a brief but spectacular time. I've had it from a mere dog, my constant companion for over 13 years. And that's where hman experience becomes powerful and sustaining and meaningful: nobody can tell me that the love I feel will die when I die, or that the love that filled me will have nowhere to go when I say adieu to this mortal coil. Love pulsates through the universe. I know it: I've felt it.I allow it to pass through me t everyone possible. And that's an engine, a force, an experience, that transcends religions or senses or beliefs. And I can feel it. When you know you have it, too, nothing can remove it. Love elevates the psyche and creates the soul. That may sound naive and childish, absurd, mere treacle. But I sense a power that comes from outside what we consider the universe. It is holy, in the highest sense. it is injected into our being when we yield to it. It's a power that is endless. Stars burst into being because of it. Perhaps we exist because a shaft of love traversed time and exploded into matter. Of course not, you'll say. How silly, you'll say. But maybe you were born without a sense of smell. Or without something else that words cannot describe. Maybe I was born with what you've been missing, and my deep joy is to offer it to you, without end. Go to hell, woman! I can hear it now... absurd platitudes, what a dolt! I've seen so much evil, experienced it across my life, and bear the scars of ill-use from my fellow human beings. But it seems to make no difference, because I've seen across the valley, I've heard choruses of joy across the millenia, I've walked across the room and entered Paradise with a thought.

With just a thought.

Once formed, it cannot expire, though it may only reverberate in tis earthly realm for an instant. And with thought comes the opportunity to reach other thoughts. To touch what cannot be smelled, seen or considered. What I do know, without any doubt, is that I am not alone in the universe -- because I have reached out into the emptiness and not found it wanting. Because others reached out to me. Because I love. And because I have been loved.