Well, some people have mentioned that I should have 'guest speakers' on here to give the place some variation, so here's my first one. He's a rather bright man from Württemberg, Germany, who shows a lot of promise.
So without further ado, my first guest speaker; let's have a round of applause for Albert Einstein!
***
Religion and Science
The following excerpt was published in The World as I See It (1999).
by Albert Einstein
Everything that the human race has done and thought is concerned with the satisfaction of felt needs and the assuagement of pain. One has to keep this constantly in mind if one wishes to understand spiritual movements and their development. Feeling and desire are the motive forces behind all human endeavour and human creation, in however exalted a guise the latter may present itself to us. Now what are the feelings and needs that have led men to religious thought and belief in the widest sense of the words? A little consideration will suffice to show us that the most varying emotions preside over the birth of religious thought and experience. With primitive man it is above all fear that evokes religious notions—fear of hunger, wild beasts, sickness, death. Since at this stage of existence understanding of causal connexions is usually poorly developed, the human mind creates for itself more or less analogous beings on whose wills and actions these fearful happenings depend. One's object now is to secure the favour of these beings by carrying out actions and offering sacrifices which, according to the tradition handed down from generation to generation, propitiate them or make them well disposed towards a mortal.
I am speaking now of the religion of fear. This, though not created, is in an important degree stabilized by the formation of a special priestly caste which sets up as a mediator between the people and the beings they fear, and erects a hegemony on this basis. In many cases the leader or ruler whose position depends on other factors, or a privileged class, combines priestly functions with its secular authority in order to make the latter more secure; or the political rulers and the priestly caste make common cause in their own interests.
The social feelings are another source of the crystallization of religion. Fathers and mothers and the leaders of larger human communities are mortal and fallible. The desire for guidance, love, and support prompts men to form the social or moral conception of God. This is the God of Providence who protects, disposes, rewards, and punishes, the God who, according to the width of the believer's outlook, loves and cherishes the life of the tribe or of the human race, or even life as such, the comforter in sorrow and unsatisfied longing, who preserves the souls of the dead. This is the social or moral conception of God.
The Jewish scriptures admirably illustrate the development from the religion of fear to moral religion, which is continued in the New Testament. The religions of all civilized peoples, especially the peoples of the Orient, are primarily moral religions. The development from a religion of fear to moral religion is a great step in a nation's life. That primitive religions are based entirely on fear and the religions of civilized peoples purely on morality is a prejudice against which we must be on our guard. The truth is that they are all intermediate types, with this reservation, that on the higher levels of social life the religion of morality predominates.
Common to all these types is the anthropomorphic character of their conception of God. Only individuals of exceptional endowments and exceptionally high-minded communities, as a general rule, get in any real sense beyond this level. But there is a third state of religious experience which belongs to all of them, even though it is rarely found in a pure form, and which I will call cosmic religious feeling. It is very difficult to explain this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it, especially as there is no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it.
The individual feels the nothingness of human desires and aims and the sublimity and marvellous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought. He looks upon individual existence as a sort of prison and wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole. The beginnings of cosmic religious feeling already appear in earlier stages of development—e.g., in many of the Psalms of David and in some of the Prophets. Buddhism, as we have learnt from the wonderful writings of Schopenhauer especially, contains a much stronger element of it.
The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no God conceived in man's image; so that there can be no Church whose central teachings are based on it. Hence it is precisely among the heretics of every age that we find men who were filled with the highest kind of religious feeling and were in many cases regarded by their contemporaries as Atheists, sometimes also as saints. Looked at in this light, men like Democritus, Francis of Assisi, and Spinoza are closely akin to one another.
How can cosmic religious feeling be communicated from one person to another, if it can give rise to no definite notion of a God and no theology? In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are capable of it. We thus arrive at a conception of the relation of science to religion very different from the usual one. When one views the matter historically one is inclined to look upon science and religion as irreconcilable antagonists, and for a very obvious reason. The man who is thoroughly convinced of the universal operation of the law of causation cannot for a moment entertain the idea of a being who interferes in the course of events—that is, if he takes the hypothesis of causality really seriously. He has no use for the religion of fear and equally little for social or moral religion. A God who rewards and punishes is inconceivable to him for the simple reason that a man's actions are determined by necessity, external and internal, so that in God's eyes he cannot be responsible, any more than an inanimate object is responsible for the motions it goes through. Hence science has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behaviour should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear and punishment and hope of reward after death.
It is therefore easy to see why the Churches have always fought science and persecuted its devotees. On the other hand, I maintain that cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest incitement to scientific research. Only those who realize the immense efforts and, above all, the devotion which pioneer work in theoretical science demands, can grasp the strength of the emotion out of which alone such work, remote as it is from the immediate realities of life, can issue. What a deep conviction of the rationality of the universe and what a yearning to understand, were it but a feeble reflection of the mind revealed in this world, Kepler and Newton must have had to enable them to spend years of solitary labour in disentangling the principles of celestial mechanics!
Those whose acquaintance with scientific research is derived chiefly from its practical results easily develop a completely false notion of the mentality of the men who, surrounded by a sceptical world, have shown the way to those like-minded with themselves, scattered through the earth and the centuries. Only one who has devoted his life to similar ends can have a vivid realization of what has inspired these men and given them the strength to remain true to their purpose in spite of countless failures. It is cosmic religious feeling that gives a man strength of this sort. A contemporary has said, not unjustly, that in this materialistic age of ours the serious scientific workers are the only profoundly religious people.
You will hardly find one among the profounder sort of scientific minds without a peculiar religious feeling of his own. But it is different from the religion of the naive man. For the latter God is a being from whose care one hopes to benefit and whose punishment one fears; a sublimation of a feeling similar to that of a child for its father, a being to whom one stands to some extent in a personal relation, however deeply it may be tinged with awe.
But the scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation. The future, to him, is every whit as necessary and determined as the past. There is nothing divine about morality, it is a purely human affair. His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection. This feeling is the guiding principle of his life and work, in so far as he succeeds in keeping himself from the shackles of selfish desire. It is beyond question closely akin to that which has possessed the religious geniuses of all ages.
***
Now, a lot of people have insisted that Einstein was a religious man. As you can see above, Einstein was religious in the traditional sense of the word like I am an Egyptian Princess. His 'religion' was more akin to feelings of awe at the grandeur of nature and the immensity of the universe, and had little or nothing to do with any deity as such.
I find this excerpt useful in examining his views on the subject, especially the part about the 'religion of fear.' It would appear that Mr. Einstein would not approve of Pascal's Wager and those who believe due to that threat to their 'eternal life,' nor would he approve of what I call 'coercive morality,' or the fact that much of the Christian moral system is based in fear and threat.
So Christians, can we finally *stop* claiming that Einstein believed in God or 'got religion' in his later years? This is a blatant lie, an attempt to claim him for one of your own, to lend credibility to a belief system that doesn't have any. It's transparent and childish and silly. So basically, cut it out. If your religion cannot stand without lies, then what kind of a religion is it anyhow? Jesus Christ, if He is indeed real and not a myth, does not need your lies. In fact, I doubt very much that they would please Him at all, if He's anything like the 'press releases.'
Friday, June 18, 2010
Thursday, May 20, 2010
PASTOR DISASTER
"The fatal trait of the times is the divorce between religion and morality."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
***
Yesterday I got my Google News Alerts in my email inbox. One of the terms that I have an alert set for is the word “Pastor,” mostly for my own amusement. Each day I invariably get about ten articles in that email, and invariably at least a few are about some pastor somewhere that committed an ‘immoral’ act that has gotten him into trouble.
Yesterday it was four out of ten articles. Five actually, but two were about the same (Newark) pastor molesting girls. Three is about average.
Here are the articles that were notable:
PASTOR OF AURORA CHURCH BILKED THREE OUT OF 475K
LONGVIEW PASTOR GUILTY OF SEX CHARGES
A NEWARK PASTOR ACCUSED OF KIDNAPPING AND SEXUAL ASSAULT
PASTOR SENTENCED TO FIFTEENYEARS PROBATION FOR MOLESTING YOUNG RELATIVE YEARS AGO
I see this sort of thing every day, in my news alerts and on television. It would seem that there is more to it than just random chance. After all, being a pastor brings with it moral responsibility, or so it is advertised. A pastor is a leader of the people, with a congregation that looks up to him. It is a position of moral leadership requiring people of high moral fiber, so one would assume that morally they would be superior as a group. Not so. If pastors as a group were actually more moral than average, this would be reflected in reality by them not being in the news so often for moral turpitude. So for some reason, a group of people that is supposed to be more moral than average, is clearly less moral than average. For some reason the position is attractive to the morally flawed.
My question is this: Since everyone knows what being a pastor is and what it entails, is there anything in this description that would attract a morally defective person to become one?
What type of person would be attracted to a position of moral leadership, a position where one is looked up to by many people and thought of as possessing a sterling character just because he is in that position?
Yes, of course, such a position would attract the type of person that was morally flawed, simply because in such a position they can masquerade as someone of impeccable character with little effort. They know instinctively that most congregations are on the whole rather gullible and are essentially only looking for the good and not the evil in their leaders, so by becoming a pastor or priest or church leader, or even just loudly proclaiming themself a good and faithful Christian with all the trappings, they can pretend to being that which they already believe (or perhaps hope) that they are: a moral person destined to go to heaven. Someone that is loved by all, holy and revered and respected, and thereby superior to others simply on the merits of that. Also, being a leader of any sort puts them above the congregents as well, even though they share the same faith, so the most self-centered of the believers will rise to the top like cream.
It's like Purina Ego Chow. Irresistable.
In Christianity in general, homosexuality is deplored, so if you happen to be gay and in a Christian family or church, you are intensely ashamed of it. Basically the Christian position is ‘if you are gay, pray it away.’ Of course at the end of all that, you’ll still be gay, jut deeper in denial about it. You’ll even pretend to yourself that you’re not. You’ll do anything to escape the truth about yourself. You might say to yourself for instance “I am not a gay person; I am a straight person because I can successfully resist my lust for another man…’ I’ve heard that one several times coming from Christians so it can’t be an anomaly. Of course the same holds true for being heterosexually lustful and unfaithful to your wife. These people who believe themselves to be truly righteous, who must be seen as righteous, simply cannot accept the fact that they are not, that they are just normal human beings with lusts and desires. Or in many cases, such as the pederasts, an abnormal human being with abnormal lusts and desires.
Becoming a priest or pastor or church leader or even just being very public about your Christianity is an excellent way to hide your darkness from the world. Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer, was caught when he used his church’s computer to create a floppy disk message to the police. He was hiding for years, by being a leader of his congregation. For the truly evil man always looks for ways to masquerade as good, and what better place than a church?
We also see this phenomenon on a lesser arc with politicians who claim to be devout Christians just to throw off the dogs of morality, as it were. How often do those who speak out the loudest against some form of moral flaw later proven guilty of that precise failing? On and on, over and over again, we see them fall one by one. Mark Foley, Ted Haggard, Larry Craig, George Rekers… The list goes on and on.
It makes so much sense, common sense, that a person with a huge moral failing (or just the belief that they have one, such as being gay) would be attracted to a position whereby they can pretend that they do not have it and be believed. Religion provides such an escape since it encourages blind belief, even tries to make it into a good thing by re-naming it 'faith,' so the people will believe in the pastor without looking too closely at him. It's their nature.
Of course, not to harp on it too much, but this is all traceable back to the flawed Christian moral system itself, based in coercion and not in empathy. We’re all victims of it, even those of us that are not religious. It permeates the very fabric of our society. It’s inescapable. Most of us were at the minimum raised by parents steeped in it, so most of us have memories of the incredible unfairness present in the Christian home. “Because I said so” and “Do as I say, not as I do” and “do it or else” are not ways of successfully bringing up a child in this world, unless one is aiming at bringing up a hypocrite.
They are however, almost exactly direct quotes of the Christian God in the Bible. This is God’s parenting style. How blind are we as a people that we cannot see that what we’ve been taught to believe is the ne plus ultra of moral systems, is in reality a totally defective sham that actually leads us down the path of iniquity, all the while believing that it’s the path of righteousness?
The blindness is due to the selfsame Christian religion, in that it actively discourages people from educating themselves in the ways of the world and only sees fit to teach them about an ancient text riddled with huge flaws. If the people weren’t blinded, they’d be able to see what they are falling for, and the religion simply can’t be having any of that.
***
Here’s an excerpt from a different book. Oddly this one is a metaphysical text on Kaballah:
“The evil within one’s self usually poses as the good as well. It has truly been said that ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions.’ –The paving stones are more often the good intentions we carry out than those we do not.
The human mind is capable of incredible subtlety in the dodging of the facing of its own iniquity, though if one is very self-observant one can sometimes detect the qlippoth (demons) within through the manifestation within one’s self of any strong irrational dislike. The hidden maggots of one’s own soul are usually projected in righteous indignation upon others. The beam in another’s eye is usually the reflection of the mote in one’s own. (…)”
-Gareth Knight, ‘A Precise Guide to Qabalistic Symbolism’
I see a lot of truth in that quote.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
***
Yesterday I got my Google News Alerts in my email inbox. One of the terms that I have an alert set for is the word “Pastor,” mostly for my own amusement. Each day I invariably get about ten articles in that email, and invariably at least a few are about some pastor somewhere that committed an ‘immoral’ act that has gotten him into trouble.
Yesterday it was four out of ten articles. Five actually, but two were about the same (Newark) pastor molesting girls. Three is about average.
Here are the articles that were notable:
PASTOR OF AURORA CHURCH BILKED THREE OUT OF 475K
LONGVIEW PASTOR GUILTY OF SEX CHARGES
A NEWARK PASTOR ACCUSED OF KIDNAPPING AND SEXUAL ASSAULT
PASTOR SENTENCED TO FIFTEENYEARS PROBATION FOR MOLESTING YOUNG RELATIVE YEARS AGO
I see this sort of thing every day, in my news alerts and on television. It would seem that there is more to it than just random chance. After all, being a pastor brings with it moral responsibility, or so it is advertised. A pastor is a leader of the people, with a congregation that looks up to him. It is a position of moral leadership requiring people of high moral fiber, so one would assume that morally they would be superior as a group. Not so. If pastors as a group were actually more moral than average, this would be reflected in reality by them not being in the news so often for moral turpitude. So for some reason, a group of people that is supposed to be more moral than average, is clearly less moral than average. For some reason the position is attractive to the morally flawed.
My question is this: Since everyone knows what being a pastor is and what it entails, is there anything in this description that would attract a morally defective person to become one?
What type of person would be attracted to a position of moral leadership, a position where one is looked up to by many people and thought of as possessing a sterling character just because he is in that position?
Yes, of course, such a position would attract the type of person that was morally flawed, simply because in such a position they can masquerade as someone of impeccable character with little effort. They know instinctively that most congregations are on the whole rather gullible and are essentially only looking for the good and not the evil in their leaders, so by becoming a pastor or priest or church leader, or even just loudly proclaiming themself a good and faithful Christian with all the trappings, they can pretend to being that which they already believe (or perhaps hope) that they are: a moral person destined to go to heaven. Someone that is loved by all, holy and revered and respected, and thereby superior to others simply on the merits of that. Also, being a leader of any sort puts them above the congregents as well, even though they share the same faith, so the most self-centered of the believers will rise to the top like cream.
It's like Purina Ego Chow. Irresistable.
In Christianity in general, homosexuality is deplored, so if you happen to be gay and in a Christian family or church, you are intensely ashamed of it. Basically the Christian position is ‘if you are gay, pray it away.’ Of course at the end of all that, you’ll still be gay, jut deeper in denial about it. You’ll even pretend to yourself that you’re not. You’ll do anything to escape the truth about yourself. You might say to yourself for instance “I am not a gay person; I am a straight person because I can successfully resist my lust for another man…’ I’ve heard that one several times coming from Christians so it can’t be an anomaly. Of course the same holds true for being heterosexually lustful and unfaithful to your wife. These people who believe themselves to be truly righteous, who must be seen as righteous, simply cannot accept the fact that they are not, that they are just normal human beings with lusts and desires. Or in many cases, such as the pederasts, an abnormal human being with abnormal lusts and desires.
Becoming a priest or pastor or church leader or even just being very public about your Christianity is an excellent way to hide your darkness from the world. Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer, was caught when he used his church’s computer to create a floppy disk message to the police. He was hiding for years, by being a leader of his congregation. For the truly evil man always looks for ways to masquerade as good, and what better place than a church?
We also see this phenomenon on a lesser arc with politicians who claim to be devout Christians just to throw off the dogs of morality, as it were. How often do those who speak out the loudest against some form of moral flaw later proven guilty of that precise failing? On and on, over and over again, we see them fall one by one. Mark Foley, Ted Haggard, Larry Craig, George Rekers… The list goes on and on.
It makes so much sense, common sense, that a person with a huge moral failing (or just the belief that they have one, such as being gay) would be attracted to a position whereby they can pretend that they do not have it and be believed. Religion provides such an escape since it encourages blind belief, even tries to make it into a good thing by re-naming it 'faith,' so the people will believe in the pastor without looking too closely at him. It's their nature.
Of course, not to harp on it too much, but this is all traceable back to the flawed Christian moral system itself, based in coercion and not in empathy. We’re all victims of it, even those of us that are not religious. It permeates the very fabric of our society. It’s inescapable. Most of us were at the minimum raised by parents steeped in it, so most of us have memories of the incredible unfairness present in the Christian home. “Because I said so” and “Do as I say, not as I do” and “do it or else” are not ways of successfully bringing up a child in this world, unless one is aiming at bringing up a hypocrite.
They are however, almost exactly direct quotes of the Christian God in the Bible. This is God’s parenting style. How blind are we as a people that we cannot see that what we’ve been taught to believe is the ne plus ultra of moral systems, is in reality a totally defective sham that actually leads us down the path of iniquity, all the while believing that it’s the path of righteousness?
The blindness is due to the selfsame Christian religion, in that it actively discourages people from educating themselves in the ways of the world and only sees fit to teach them about an ancient text riddled with huge flaws. If the people weren’t blinded, they’d be able to see what they are falling for, and the religion simply can’t be having any of that.
***
Here’s an excerpt from a different book. Oddly this one is a metaphysical text on Kaballah:
“The evil within one’s self usually poses as the good as well. It has truly been said that ‘the road to hell is paved with good intentions.’ –The paving stones are more often the good intentions we carry out than those we do not.
The human mind is capable of incredible subtlety in the dodging of the facing of its own iniquity, though if one is very self-observant one can sometimes detect the qlippoth (demons) within through the manifestation within one’s self of any strong irrational dislike. The hidden maggots of one’s own soul are usually projected in righteous indignation upon others. The beam in another’s eye is usually the reflection of the mote in one’s own. (…)”
-Gareth Knight, ‘A Precise Guide to Qabalistic Symbolism’
I see a lot of truth in that quote.
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
God is Eternal... Wanna Buy Some Swampland?
(The "Vast Dream" Revisited, or the Big Brain makes a comeback as God...)
I still don't get it.
Christians say that the universe couldn't have been here forever, so it must have had a beginning. There was once nothing at all, and then *poof* there was a universe. Hard to explain all right. I agree.
(Which is why I maintain that there was always something, and not nothing)
However let's say that there was once nothing, and then there was something, like they say.
This they say proves in some way that there had to have been a creator god to start the ball rolling.
However, they absolutely refuse to even discuss where said creator god came from! In fact, they maintain that said creator god is eternal and has always been here!
This makes zero sense. How can God be eternal, if the universe cannot be? Either one is, I think, equally unlikely. In fact, it's more unlikely that it's God that is eternal, since God is a being.
Now here's the rub: I can imagine *something* coming from nothing, as in, a vacuum fluctuation. A huge one. That is actually possible. But not a fully formed deity. Such a thing cannot just arise out of nothing. A deity is an organized personality, so something needed to organize it. A vacuum fluctuation would just release energy and particles, but creating a God is harder than creating a man, no? Such a thing just doesn't appear out of nothing, already organized into a vast hypercomplex personality with powers and desires.
God, if he exists, had an origin, rest assured. Even a deity doesn't come from nowhere, or just exist forever. For one thing, this would mean that before God decided to create this universe, He waited FOREVER. A literal eternity, and then He made His move. Sure.
The idea that God has just been around forever is a huge cheat. He cannot have been. However, it seems even less likely that He just popped into existence out of nothingness. So, we can conclude from this that God is highly unlikely to exist at all, at least as advertised.
Unless... (Here I go again) Unless instead of a creator God, there is just a mind, a mind that has always existed, and NOTHING ELSE. In other words, this universe would not 'really' exist like we think it does; it would all be the dream of that eternal mind. This means that even questions of time wouldn't apply to the mind itself, since it dreams the time as well. It has to dream in a sequence, not 'all at once,' so it has to introduce the concept of time into the dream for changes to happen in it.
Or rather, we do. Because in this concept here, we are the ones really doing the dreaming, and not God, not the mind. We comprise the mind. It is literally us. Everything, even the 'inanimate' objects, are just made up of consciousness.
However, this is not in any way like the God of the Christians.
If God is a vast mind in which we exist as dreams, then said mind might be all there is, anywhere. No real matter, no real energy, no real space. Just a consciousness. A discorporate consciousness. Or perhaps rather, a discorporate data 'field' on which consciousnesses naturally arise.
Such a thing is surely possible as unlikely as it sounds, and it is not nearly 'as impossible' that a mind has been around 'forever' since in this scenario, the mind is all that ever was, all that is, and all that ever will be.
Of course, if this is true and everything is all a part of one vast consciousness, said consciousness would not in itself be 'self-aware.' Not like a deity, in other words.
More like maybe a huge computer database on which we are the only files, we meaning this whole universe. The database itself has no 'will' or 'consciousness,' it merely holds and stores information which does. As in, us.
Now as unlikely as this may seem to those conditioned to only believe in this reality as it appears to be, it does basically solve ALL questions. All of them. No, really.
Is the universe infinite or finite? It can now be infinite, because in a dream, there is no boundary. You can always think of something else being 'just over that horizon there...' And if we expect to find something, we will.
Is there life after death? What death? You are a pattern of consciousness which in our communal dream, dies. However that pattern is not dependent on matter and energy to exist since its 'real' existence is as a pattern of consciousness, or data. So it is free to die in the dream and wake up in another dream, for all we can know. At any rate, it is not bonded to matter, because matter isn't real, either.
This sounds like nonsense, I realize. However it's only when you get past how silly it sounds that you start to realize just how very possible it all is.
If it is true, wouldn't that be funny? Here we all are, so convinced that it's all matter and energy and that we have a good handle on what reality is, and then we would have to change our entire perspective on all of that. We'd have to get rid of what I like to call 'reality-bias' or the conditioning we all have to believe that reality is as we see it. It wouldn't be easy for most people to believe. Impossible is the right word, I think.
When you look at what science is finding at the quantum level, the seeming contradictions, the ‘quantum strangeness,’ the fact that it seems that matter is almost completely empty space, the phenomena of entanglement, the wave-particle duality and the collapse of the wave-form having something to do with our observations of it, and so many other things, they all seem to be hinting at something, and this is what I think they might be hinting at.
It’s just an opinion. I’m not starting a religion over it or anything. I just maintain that it’s a hell of a lot more likely that we seem to be giving it credit for.
It’s certainly a lot more likely than God.
I still don't get it.
Christians say that the universe couldn't have been here forever, so it must have had a beginning. There was once nothing at all, and then *poof* there was a universe. Hard to explain all right. I agree.
(Which is why I maintain that there was always something, and not nothing)
However let's say that there was once nothing, and then there was something, like they say.
This they say proves in some way that there had to have been a creator god to start the ball rolling.
However, they absolutely refuse to even discuss where said creator god came from! In fact, they maintain that said creator god is eternal and has always been here!
This makes zero sense. How can God be eternal, if the universe cannot be? Either one is, I think, equally unlikely. In fact, it's more unlikely that it's God that is eternal, since God is a being.
Now here's the rub: I can imagine *something* coming from nothing, as in, a vacuum fluctuation. A huge one. That is actually possible. But not a fully formed deity. Such a thing cannot just arise out of nothing. A deity is an organized personality, so something needed to organize it. A vacuum fluctuation would just release energy and particles, but creating a God is harder than creating a man, no? Such a thing just doesn't appear out of nothing, already organized into a vast hypercomplex personality with powers and desires.
God, if he exists, had an origin, rest assured. Even a deity doesn't come from nowhere, or just exist forever. For one thing, this would mean that before God decided to create this universe, He waited FOREVER. A literal eternity, and then He made His move. Sure.
The idea that God has just been around forever is a huge cheat. He cannot have been. However, it seems even less likely that He just popped into existence out of nothingness. So, we can conclude from this that God is highly unlikely to exist at all, at least as advertised.
Unless... (Here I go again) Unless instead of a creator God, there is just a mind, a mind that has always existed, and NOTHING ELSE. In other words, this universe would not 'really' exist like we think it does; it would all be the dream of that eternal mind. This means that even questions of time wouldn't apply to the mind itself, since it dreams the time as well. It has to dream in a sequence, not 'all at once,' so it has to introduce the concept of time into the dream for changes to happen in it.
Or rather, we do. Because in this concept here, we are the ones really doing the dreaming, and not God, not the mind. We comprise the mind. It is literally us. Everything, even the 'inanimate' objects, are just made up of consciousness.
However, this is not in any way like the God of the Christians.
If God is a vast mind in which we exist as dreams, then said mind might be all there is, anywhere. No real matter, no real energy, no real space. Just a consciousness. A discorporate consciousness. Or perhaps rather, a discorporate data 'field' on which consciousnesses naturally arise.
Such a thing is surely possible as unlikely as it sounds, and it is not nearly 'as impossible' that a mind has been around 'forever' since in this scenario, the mind is all that ever was, all that is, and all that ever will be.
Of course, if this is true and everything is all a part of one vast consciousness, said consciousness would not in itself be 'self-aware.' Not like a deity, in other words.
More like maybe a huge computer database on which we are the only files, we meaning this whole universe. The database itself has no 'will' or 'consciousness,' it merely holds and stores information which does. As in, us.
Now as unlikely as this may seem to those conditioned to only believe in this reality as it appears to be, it does basically solve ALL questions. All of them. No, really.
Is the universe infinite or finite? It can now be infinite, because in a dream, there is no boundary. You can always think of something else being 'just over that horizon there...' And if we expect to find something, we will.
Is there life after death? What death? You are a pattern of consciousness which in our communal dream, dies. However that pattern is not dependent on matter and energy to exist since its 'real' existence is as a pattern of consciousness, or data. So it is free to die in the dream and wake up in another dream, for all we can know. At any rate, it is not bonded to matter, because matter isn't real, either.
This sounds like nonsense, I realize. However it's only when you get past how silly it sounds that you start to realize just how very possible it all is.
If it is true, wouldn't that be funny? Here we all are, so convinced that it's all matter and energy and that we have a good handle on what reality is, and then we would have to change our entire perspective on all of that. We'd have to get rid of what I like to call 'reality-bias' or the conditioning we all have to believe that reality is as we see it. It wouldn't be easy for most people to believe. Impossible is the right word, I think.
When you look at what science is finding at the quantum level, the seeming contradictions, the ‘quantum strangeness,’ the fact that it seems that matter is almost completely empty space, the phenomena of entanglement, the wave-particle duality and the collapse of the wave-form having something to do with our observations of it, and so many other things, they all seem to be hinting at something, and this is what I think they might be hinting at.
It’s just an opinion. I’m not starting a religion over it or anything. I just maintain that it’s a hell of a lot more likely that we seem to be giving it credit for.
It’s certainly a lot more likely than God.
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Are You Proud Of Your Humility?
"The Modern Christian Credo: 'Since we're definitely going to heaven, let's start looking down on people now just for practice...'"
-Saint Brian the Godless
***
The Christian system of morality, being based in coercion and not in teaching genuine empathy, and thereby promoting an egocentric rather than an 'other-centered' worldview, is as noted here before, heavily flawed. It too often accomplishes that which it pretends to guard against. It produces a type of love based in fear, a type of empathy based in self-centeredness, and a type of humility based in pride. It teaches people to look outside themselves for evil, but never within.
Let’s face it, it’s hard to be humble when you know that you’re right. It’s hard to be humble when you’re one of the chosen few that are beloved by God. It’s hard to be humble when you know that God is going to save you when so many others will not be saved. (heh heh) It’s very hard to be humble when you know that you are a good and righteous person, beyond a shadow of a doubt, and that those who disagree with you are evil, because you belong to the Right Faith and they do not.
Hey, let’s face it; it’s hard to be humble when you’re a Christian.
Franklin Graham is in the news lately. He’s the son of Billy Graham, so he definitely has a lot of name cred. Mr. Graham is in the news because he is of the opinion that Islam is an evil religion, and is not afraid to say so. (He should look in a mirror sometime…) The Pentagon disinvited him to one of their Prayer Services due to this. So now he’s the darling of the right and Sarah Palin; ‘the poor soul, censored by the Obama Socialist Regime for merely telling the ‘truth…’’
One of his comments during all of this stands out to me. He mentioned that he loves all Muslims and wants to let them know that they do not have to strap explosives to themselves in order to get into heaven; they merely have to give up their own evil religion and accept Jesus Christ as their Savior.
Way to go, Frankie boy! Now, that’s what I call Pride with a Capital ‘P.’ In his overweening pride, he has, in reverse, actually managed to echo Osama Bin Ladin himself, who said that if the West wanted the terrorism to stop, the first thing it had to do was to ‘convert to Islam.’
You see, Mr. Graham is not in doubt as to his humility. He knows perfectly well that he is good, humble, righteous, and loving. And he knows that he knows best here. He knows this, because his faith in his religion tells him so. It informs him of his goodness and of the wickedness of others. It is his guide and his very being is based in it. It’s what helped him to be what he always wanted to be, after all, a good and righteous man. A humble man of God. Heck, he'd even be the first to tell you that he's only a wretched sinner, because he loves how humble that sounds. So, by 'knowing' all of this, by believing in this manner, he has no need to question himself in any of these areas ever again. He’s covered!
Good thing too, because it allows him to concentrate on ‘saving’ everyone else so they can be as perfect, as acceptable to God someday, as he is now. God willing, of course.
Mr. Graham is now free to be proud of his humility.
What Mr. Graham is missing for some reason here is that if one is proud of being good, of being humble and proud of acting humble and of being thought of as humble by others, then one is still as caught in the grip of pride and egocentricity as if they were an outright braggart braying their virtues to the world.
I guess that's why pride is the deadliest of all sins, and also the root of all evil. It's so deceptive. When you try to fight it you wind up playing right into its hands, unless you are really aware of what's happening and unless you are able to question yourself with an open mind. Sadly, this is actively discouraged by Christianity, both the ‘self-questioning’ and the ‘open mind’ parts.
Real pride is not necessarily overt. Real pride does not always show itself. The man who openly brags about his accomplishments is one example, but so is the man who does not brag solely because he knows that it would not look good to do so, and the second type of person is much more common.
And so also is any man an example of pride that truly believes himself to be humble; for no truly humble being would be able to know that they themselves are humble and remain so. It is not possible for a truly humble person to know in their own mind that they are humble, for such knowledge is the very death of humility itself. Such knowledge is the seed of pride. Such knowledge ends the process of self-questioning and self-examination which is the very key to genuine humility.
So basically, the proud man believes himself to be humble, but the humble man knows himself to be proud.
Christianity, by teaching that evil is always easy to see and to define and that pride is something obvious, does the faithful a great disservice. By painting the very subtle as simple and overt, it leaves it’s believers in a state of vulnerability. They always look to the sins of others, while being totally blind to their own. This allows them to actually become proud, evil wretches in the world, all the while being absolutely convinced that they are the diametric opposite of all that.
Once a man truly *believes* that he himself is definitely not evil (or is definitely good) and therefore that he would not do anything that was evil, that’s precisely the moment when he becomes capable of doing real evil. Real evil, the darkest kind of evil, always comes wearing sheep’s clothing. Real evil always masquerades as goodness. Just look at the Catholic Church. This is not because Satan likes it that way either; it is because Satan is a (very twisted) myth designed to cover up the fact that the real source of evil in the world is merely living and breathing people who are convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that they themselves represent only the highest good and that they know what's best for everyone else, too.
People just like Franklin Graham. Or Osama Bin Ladin, for that matter. Or maybe... you?
-Saint Brian the Godless
***
The Christian system of morality, being based in coercion and not in teaching genuine empathy, and thereby promoting an egocentric rather than an 'other-centered' worldview, is as noted here before, heavily flawed. It too often accomplishes that which it pretends to guard against. It produces a type of love based in fear, a type of empathy based in self-centeredness, and a type of humility based in pride. It teaches people to look outside themselves for evil, but never within.
Let’s face it, it’s hard to be humble when you know that you’re right. It’s hard to be humble when you’re one of the chosen few that are beloved by God. It’s hard to be humble when you know that God is going to save you when so many others will not be saved. (heh heh) It’s very hard to be humble when you know that you are a good and righteous person, beyond a shadow of a doubt, and that those who disagree with you are evil, because you belong to the Right Faith and they do not.
Hey, let’s face it; it’s hard to be humble when you’re a Christian.
Franklin Graham is in the news lately. He’s the son of Billy Graham, so he definitely has a lot of name cred. Mr. Graham is in the news because he is of the opinion that Islam is an evil religion, and is not afraid to say so. (He should look in a mirror sometime…) The Pentagon disinvited him to one of their Prayer Services due to this. So now he’s the darling of the right and Sarah Palin; ‘the poor soul, censored by the Obama Socialist Regime for merely telling the ‘truth…’’
One of his comments during all of this stands out to me. He mentioned that he loves all Muslims and wants to let them know that they do not have to strap explosives to themselves in order to get into heaven; they merely have to give up their own evil religion and accept Jesus Christ as their Savior.
Way to go, Frankie boy! Now, that’s what I call Pride with a Capital ‘P.’ In his overweening pride, he has, in reverse, actually managed to echo Osama Bin Ladin himself, who said that if the West wanted the terrorism to stop, the first thing it had to do was to ‘convert to Islam.’
You see, Mr. Graham is not in doubt as to his humility. He knows perfectly well that he is good, humble, righteous, and loving. And he knows that he knows best here. He knows this, because his faith in his religion tells him so. It informs him of his goodness and of the wickedness of others. It is his guide and his very being is based in it. It’s what helped him to be what he always wanted to be, after all, a good and righteous man. A humble man of God. Heck, he'd even be the first to tell you that he's only a wretched sinner, because he loves how humble that sounds. So, by 'knowing' all of this, by believing in this manner, he has no need to question himself in any of these areas ever again. He’s covered!
Good thing too, because it allows him to concentrate on ‘saving’ everyone else so they can be as perfect, as acceptable to God someday, as he is now. God willing, of course.
Mr. Graham is now free to be proud of his humility.
What Mr. Graham is missing for some reason here is that if one is proud of being good, of being humble and proud of acting humble and of being thought of as humble by others, then one is still as caught in the grip of pride and egocentricity as if they were an outright braggart braying their virtues to the world.
I guess that's why pride is the deadliest of all sins, and also the root of all evil. It's so deceptive. When you try to fight it you wind up playing right into its hands, unless you are really aware of what's happening and unless you are able to question yourself with an open mind. Sadly, this is actively discouraged by Christianity, both the ‘self-questioning’ and the ‘open mind’ parts.
Real pride is not necessarily overt. Real pride does not always show itself. The man who openly brags about his accomplishments is one example, but so is the man who does not brag solely because he knows that it would not look good to do so, and the second type of person is much more common.
And so also is any man an example of pride that truly believes himself to be humble; for no truly humble being would be able to know that they themselves are humble and remain so. It is not possible for a truly humble person to know in their own mind that they are humble, for such knowledge is the very death of humility itself. Such knowledge is the seed of pride. Such knowledge ends the process of self-questioning and self-examination which is the very key to genuine humility.
So basically, the proud man believes himself to be humble, but the humble man knows himself to be proud.
Christianity, by teaching that evil is always easy to see and to define and that pride is something obvious, does the faithful a great disservice. By painting the very subtle as simple and overt, it leaves it’s believers in a state of vulnerability. They always look to the sins of others, while being totally blind to their own. This allows them to actually become proud, evil wretches in the world, all the while being absolutely convinced that they are the diametric opposite of all that.
Once a man truly *believes* that he himself is definitely not evil (or is definitely good) and therefore that he would not do anything that was evil, that’s precisely the moment when he becomes capable of doing real evil. Real evil, the darkest kind of evil, always comes wearing sheep’s clothing. Real evil always masquerades as goodness. Just look at the Catholic Church. This is not because Satan likes it that way either; it is because Satan is a (very twisted) myth designed to cover up the fact that the real source of evil in the world is merely living and breathing people who are convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that they themselves represent only the highest good and that they know what's best for everyone else, too.
People just like Franklin Graham. Or Osama Bin Ladin, for that matter. Or maybe... you?
Friday, March 19, 2010
WHY DID GOD LIE TO US?
"Religion is The Great Lie that perpetually re-tells itself"
-Saint Brian the Godless
***
Why did God lie to us?
***
This is what we've figured out by ourselves, with our own eyes and brains, using logic and reason, which is to say science:
The Earth is at least 4.5 *billion* years old, if not more.
The Universe is at least 13 billion years old, if not more. Quite possibly much more.
Starlight coming from the very nearest of the stars, traveling at 186,232 miles per second, takes about *four and one half years* to get here from there. A very long way off
The farthest stars are thirteen billion light-years away. The light that we see coming from them is 13 billion years old. How did God make it, if the universe is young? In mid-space traveling to here so we'd think it were old? He thinks of everything, that deceptive, cagey God of ours. What a good liar! Of course He is, He's good at everything.
Dinosaurs died 65 million years ago. But many species became our birds. This is established science now. The birds are the remnants of the dinosaurs, which is easy to see that if you really look at them.
First "people" (Ramipithecus) 10 million years ago or less. They only stood three feet high.
First appearance of homo sapiens (That's us): about 130,000 years ago or more. Which is a lot longer than the bible tells us.
First human civilizations, villages, towns etc.: 130,000 years ago or more
Recorded History: About the last 5000 years or so. This is a very brief period of time when you look at how long we have been here. We've been here 26 times longer than we've written about it. What we know of history is only one twenty-sixth of the story of mankind. I find that amazing.
Christ: If He even lived at all, lived about 2000 years ago.
Christianity, about the same obviously.
One Hundred and Thirty Thousand Years of people being pretty much the same as we are today, sans our technology of course. We really know about only 5000 or so of those, except for archeological digs. Only two thousand years of it under Christianity. And even today, this minute, there are over 600 living religions on this world. Multiply that by two hundred thousand years. That’s an enormous number of religions and belief systems. All of them claimed or still claim to be the one, true religion, too. But we're the right ones. Yeah. We got it right, finally. Sure we did.
One can see how unlikely it is that the Bible is correct. By many, many different yardsticks it doesn't measure up to the easily observable facts. So, it's not literally true. This is a simple answer to a simple question. Logic dictates that it is not true in a literal way.
My original question was, "Why did God lie to us?" By this I mean, if He put things here that point clearly to the Bible truths not being true at all, isn't that a deception? However, if the Bible isn't true, and if He was responsible for the text of the bible, He lied there. So, either way, dishonesty from God.
The only other option possible is that science is right after all, and the Bible is allegorical, which doesn't reduce its beauty or value one whit. But many Christians will accept nothing less than complete victory in this argument. Their way or the highway. Afraid that if the Bible isn't true word-for-word, then their Faith means nothing. That, to me, is the real sin here.
Another point that I can make is that even in the Bible, God has been caught in a lie. It's in there. God hardened the heart of the Pharaoh, which can only mean that if God had not done that, the Pharoah would have been lenient with the Israelites. Hardening someone's heart against something is a deception, pure and simple.
So let's dispose once and for all with this Bible that everyone believes is so infallible in spite of it being rife with logical contradictions and outright hypocrisies, not to mention so much hatred and pride and self-righteousness and all the terrible examples that God the Father gives us as His Children to follow. We're long overdue. We've outgrown it, truly we have. It is only holding us back, keeping our thinking in the bronze age. It retards us, quite literally, and quite intentionally.
Christians = Children scared in a self-imposed darkness.
Science = The Light Switch
Got it now? Good.
Now go forth and multiply. Oh, and divide, subtract, and add as well. Get some education, come back, and then we can have an adult conversation. Tell me why God lied.
-Saint Brian the Godless
***
Why did God lie to us?
***
This is what we've figured out by ourselves, with our own eyes and brains, using logic and reason, which is to say science:
The Earth is at least 4.5 *billion* years old, if not more.
The Universe is at least 13 billion years old, if not more. Quite possibly much more.
Starlight coming from the very nearest of the stars, traveling at 186,232 miles per second, takes about *four and one half years* to get here from there. A very long way off
The farthest stars are thirteen billion light-years away. The light that we see coming from them is 13 billion years old. How did God make it, if the universe is young? In mid-space traveling to here so we'd think it were old? He thinks of everything, that deceptive, cagey God of ours. What a good liar! Of course He is, He's good at everything.
Dinosaurs died 65 million years ago. But many species became our birds. This is established science now. The birds are the remnants of the dinosaurs, which is easy to see that if you really look at them.
First "people" (Ramipithecus) 10 million years ago or less. They only stood three feet high.
First appearance of homo sapiens (That's us): about 130,000 years ago or more. Which is a lot longer than the bible tells us.
First human civilizations, villages, towns etc.: 130,000 years ago or more
Recorded History: About the last 5000 years or so. This is a very brief period of time when you look at how long we have been here. We've been here 26 times longer than we've written about it. What we know of history is only one twenty-sixth of the story of mankind. I find that amazing.
Christ: If He even lived at all, lived about 2000 years ago.
Christianity, about the same obviously.
One Hundred and Thirty Thousand Years of people being pretty much the same as we are today, sans our technology of course. We really know about only 5000 or so of those, except for archeological digs. Only two thousand years of it under Christianity. And even today, this minute, there are over 600 living religions on this world. Multiply that by two hundred thousand years. That’s an enormous number of religions and belief systems. All of them claimed or still claim to be the one, true religion, too. But we're the right ones. Yeah. We got it right, finally. Sure we did.
One can see how unlikely it is that the Bible is correct. By many, many different yardsticks it doesn't measure up to the easily observable facts. So, it's not literally true. This is a simple answer to a simple question. Logic dictates that it is not true in a literal way.
My original question was, "Why did God lie to us?" By this I mean, if He put things here that point clearly to the Bible truths not being true at all, isn't that a deception? However, if the Bible isn't true, and if He was responsible for the text of the bible, He lied there. So, either way, dishonesty from God.
The only other option possible is that science is right after all, and the Bible is allegorical, which doesn't reduce its beauty or value one whit. But many Christians will accept nothing less than complete victory in this argument. Their way or the highway. Afraid that if the Bible isn't true word-for-word, then their Faith means nothing. That, to me, is the real sin here.
Another point that I can make is that even in the Bible, God has been caught in a lie. It's in there. God hardened the heart of the Pharaoh, which can only mean that if God had not done that, the Pharoah would have been lenient with the Israelites. Hardening someone's heart against something is a deception, pure and simple.
So let's dispose once and for all with this Bible that everyone believes is so infallible in spite of it being rife with logical contradictions and outright hypocrisies, not to mention so much hatred and pride and self-righteousness and all the terrible examples that God the Father gives us as His Children to follow. We're long overdue. We've outgrown it, truly we have. It is only holding us back, keeping our thinking in the bronze age. It retards us, quite literally, and quite intentionally.
Christians = Children scared in a self-imposed darkness.
Science = The Light Switch
Got it now? Good.
Now go forth and multiply. Oh, and divide, subtract, and add as well. Get some education, come back, and then we can have an adult conversation. Tell me why God lied.
Tuesday, March 2, 2010
A Question of Feelings
I have a more-or-less simple question here for my Christian readers and Christians in general, regarding feelings:
Can you loving Christians who are commanded by your God Yaweh and His Son Jesus Christ to love others as you love yourselves and to love thy neighbor, admit one thing here?
Imagine if you will one day your child comes home from school and tells you about the neat Islamic prayers they had to say that morning while bowing to Mecca. Oh, it’s a regular thing now. They’ll be doing it every day from now on. Deal with it; it’s the Law. Plus the kids love the bowing.
Just imagine it. I bet you can, because some of you are misinformed enough to actually believe that this kind of thing is what Obama is really secretly all about. So imagine it.
Now can you please admit to me that you can understand that the way you would FEEL if the US Government did that, made it a law that all the schools made your kids say Islamic prayers and had your children bowing towards Mecca every day, or even just taught them to embrace pro-Islamic positions on important political issues that you care about, or even if you forget the Islam thing and they just taught them the many benefits of being an *atheist,* must be and indeed is of course identical to in every way and exactly the same as how I would FEEL if it were the law of the land that my children’s schools made them pray to Jesus every day or taught them your religion’s position on important political issues that I care about?
Can you please admit that much? You kind-of have to, really. I mean, what’s the difference? They’re logical equivalents. Of course I would feel the same. It is the same.
And so then you might as well go on to admit the obvious here. That of course you know this, but you do not care. That you believe your way is the only right way, and so my way is by default wrong and evil and therefore not worthy of your consideration. As bad as it would make me feel, my feelings are irrelevant to you.
You cannot love me enough to give a damn.
Isn’t that it, really?
Hey, just wondering.
***
Oh, and to those that think this is a trick question: Not all questions that require you to admit that you are in error are trick questions. You might actually be in error.
Heaven forbid!
Can you loving Christians who are commanded by your God Yaweh and His Son Jesus Christ to love others as you love yourselves and to love thy neighbor, admit one thing here?
Imagine if you will one day your child comes home from school and tells you about the neat Islamic prayers they had to say that morning while bowing to Mecca. Oh, it’s a regular thing now. They’ll be doing it every day from now on. Deal with it; it’s the Law. Plus the kids love the bowing.
Just imagine it. I bet you can, because some of you are misinformed enough to actually believe that this kind of thing is what Obama is really secretly all about. So imagine it.
Now can you please admit to me that you can understand that the way you would FEEL if the US Government did that, made it a law that all the schools made your kids say Islamic prayers and had your children bowing towards Mecca every day, or even just taught them to embrace pro-Islamic positions on important political issues that you care about, or even if you forget the Islam thing and they just taught them the many benefits of being an *atheist,* must be and indeed is of course identical to in every way and exactly the same as how I would FEEL if it were the law of the land that my children’s schools made them pray to Jesus every day or taught them your religion’s position on important political issues that I care about?
Can you please admit that much? You kind-of have to, really. I mean, what’s the difference? They’re logical equivalents. Of course I would feel the same. It is the same.
And so then you might as well go on to admit the obvious here. That of course you know this, but you do not care. That you believe your way is the only right way, and so my way is by default wrong and evil and therefore not worthy of your consideration. As bad as it would make me feel, my feelings are irrelevant to you.
You cannot love me enough to give a damn.
Isn’t that it, really?
Hey, just wondering.
***
Oh, and to those that think this is a trick question: Not all questions that require you to admit that you are in error are trick questions. You might actually be in error.
Heaven forbid!
Saturday, February 13, 2010
Coercive Morality; Love Me Or Else!
"Fear of God is a barrier to real morality, not a path to it."
-Saint Brian the Godless
"Learn to think before you learn to believe, or you’ll soon believe that you don’t need to think.
-Saint Brian the Godless
"Jesus Christ is good enough to hide an awful lot of evil in a man."
-Saint Brian the Godless
The Christian God is Mysterious. We cannot even guess His ways. He loves us, His most prized creation. He loves us over all else. We are as His children, and He is our Father in Heaven, as the prayer goes.
However, while He tells us not to judge others (through Jesus) it appears that He does so not because it is wrong to judge others, but because He reserves *that pleasure* for Himself. He not only judges us all, but feels free to act upon that judgement and relegate our poor souls to a place of eternal torment when we die, and also from time to time feels free to hasten that demise in certain circumstances if we displease Him enough.
His actions belie His words, and vice-versa. We are in essence told to 'do as I say and not as I do' by God.
So what does this teach us? Where does that leave us psychologically as a society that is admittedly largely based in the Judeo-Christian mythos?
It teaches us that a being who is willing to absolutely lay us out and fry our ass until the stars go out, willing to torture us forever for just the 'act' of not believing in Him with zero evidence, willing to kill people instantly for just being curious or for other silly 'mysterious' reasons that only HE knows, a being that can and has laid waste to whole cities and even committed genocide and even nearly destroyed the whole world once except for one family, loves us. Somehow, that horrifically fearful and easily provoked being loves us in spite of all that. Loves us more than anything, so much so that He'll send us straight to hell if we give Him one ounce of 'lip.'
It makes people believe that love can involve abuse. It teaches the abusers that it's okay to abuse, and it teaches the abused that they should just 'shut up and take it' because He (he) knows what's best for you, because He (he) loves you in spite of the beatings or whatever.
And that one thing my friends, has sown one hell of a lot of domestic misery in the world. Think of the psychology of it, really think about it, and you'll know that what I'm saying is true.
God sets very bad examples for us, and then we do our best to follow them. It's not even conscious. Of course we do. He's God. The Ultimate Father Figure. And like all parents who tell their children to just 'do as I say and not as I do,' we His children invariably do as he does and not as he says. Actions always speak louder than words, after all.
So we have 'Divine Sanction By Example' of such things as Wrath, Self-Righteous Indignation, Pride, Murder, Jealousy, War, and all sorts of abuse, both physical and psychological. No, God does not tell us to do these things to each other. God does them (or has done them in the past) to us Himself.
It's been wonderful for our collective mental health. Just watch the news sometime.
It is the nature of genuine morality based in empathy that it cannot be taught at gunpoint. Even less can it be taught by threat of eternal damnation. It cannot be coerced in our children, nor can it be coerced in God's Children. What can be taught us by coercion, is fear.
-Saint Brian the Godless
"Learn to think before you learn to believe, or you’ll soon believe that you don’t need to think.
-Saint Brian the Godless
"Jesus Christ is good enough to hide an awful lot of evil in a man."
-Saint Brian the Godless
The Christian God is Mysterious. We cannot even guess His ways. He loves us, His most prized creation. He loves us over all else. We are as His children, and He is our Father in Heaven, as the prayer goes.
However, while He tells us not to judge others (through Jesus) it appears that He does so not because it is wrong to judge others, but because He reserves *that pleasure* for Himself. He not only judges us all, but feels free to act upon that judgement and relegate our poor souls to a place of eternal torment when we die, and also from time to time feels free to hasten that demise in certain circumstances if we displease Him enough.
His actions belie His words, and vice-versa. We are in essence told to 'do as I say and not as I do' by God.
So what does this teach us? Where does that leave us psychologically as a society that is admittedly largely based in the Judeo-Christian mythos?
It teaches us that a being who is willing to absolutely lay us out and fry our ass until the stars go out, willing to torture us forever for just the 'act' of not believing in Him with zero evidence, willing to kill people instantly for just being curious or for other silly 'mysterious' reasons that only HE knows, a being that can and has laid waste to whole cities and even committed genocide and even nearly destroyed the whole world once except for one family, loves us. Somehow, that horrifically fearful and easily provoked being loves us in spite of all that. Loves us more than anything, so much so that He'll send us straight to hell if we give Him one ounce of 'lip.'
It makes people believe that love can involve abuse. It teaches the abusers that it's okay to abuse, and it teaches the abused that they should just 'shut up and take it' because He (he) knows what's best for you, because He (he) loves you in spite of the beatings or whatever.
And that one thing my friends, has sown one hell of a lot of domestic misery in the world. Think of the psychology of it, really think about it, and you'll know that what I'm saying is true.
God sets very bad examples for us, and then we do our best to follow them. It's not even conscious. Of course we do. He's God. The Ultimate Father Figure. And like all parents who tell their children to just 'do as I say and not as I do,' we His children invariably do as he does and not as he says. Actions always speak louder than words, after all.
So we have 'Divine Sanction By Example' of such things as Wrath, Self-Righteous Indignation, Pride, Murder, Jealousy, War, and all sorts of abuse, both physical and psychological. No, God does not tell us to do these things to each other. God does them (or has done them in the past) to us Himself.
It's been wonderful for our collective mental health. Just watch the news sometime.
It is the nature of genuine morality based in empathy that it cannot be taught at gunpoint. Even less can it be taught by threat of eternal damnation. It cannot be coerced in our children, nor can it be coerced in God's Children. What can be taught us by coercion, is fear.
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Macho Christ Will Kick Your Ass!
An interesting article in the New York Times recently:
Flock Is Now a Fight Team in Some Ministries
A pertinent excerpt:
"Recruitment efforts at the churches, which are predominantly white, involve fight night television viewing parties and lecture series that use ultimate fighting to explain how Christ fought for what he believed in. Other ministers go further, hosting or participating in live events.
The goal, these pastors say, is to inject some machismo into their ministries — and into the image of Jesus — in the hope of making Christianity more appealing. “Compassion and love — we agree with all that stuff, too,” said Brandon Beals, 37, the lead pastor at Canyon Creek Church outside of Seattle. “But what led me to find Christ was that Jesus was a fighter.”
The outreach is part of a larger and more longstanding effort on the part of some ministers who fear that their churches have become too feminized, promoting kindness and compassion at the expense of strength and responsibility.
“The man should be the overall leader of the household,” said Ryan Dobson, 39, a pastor and fan of mixed martial arts who is the son of James C. Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, a prominent evangelical group. “We’ve raised a generation of little boys.”"
Promote kindness and compassion? Heaven Forbid!
Is it me, or are they just getting stupider?
Now I don't have anything against Mixed Martial Arts. I took karate for years, off and on, along with other styles of self-defense, and I enjoyed them very much and got a lot out of them as a person. That isn't the issue here.
These churches are choosing to attract young people, immature people, with an immature message of violence and agression. They are using the appeal of machismo to attract young people who don't know any better, when they should be teaching them to control these immature impulses and lead a more loving and peaceful life. Ironically, most really good martial arts schools would never consider trying an appeal to juvenile machismo in an attempt to increase their membership They have too much integrity, which is why they're the really good schools in the first place. Martial arts, at it's core, is more about attaining inner balance, the Yin and the Yang, than it is about kicking ass and taking names.
I guess the churches figured that they'd appeal to the dark side of people in order to bring them into the light or whatever. Great idea; in order to appeal to the unevolved personality, devolve yourself down to their level instead of attempting to inspire them to rise to yours. Too bad this totally negates the very meaning of their existence as followers of Jesus Christ like it does and all, but hey, business is booming, so who cares?
Flock Is Now a Fight Team in Some Ministries
A pertinent excerpt:
"Recruitment efforts at the churches, which are predominantly white, involve fight night television viewing parties and lecture series that use ultimate fighting to explain how Christ fought for what he believed in. Other ministers go further, hosting or participating in live events.
The goal, these pastors say, is to inject some machismo into their ministries — and into the image of Jesus — in the hope of making Christianity more appealing. “Compassion and love — we agree with all that stuff, too,” said Brandon Beals, 37, the lead pastor at Canyon Creek Church outside of Seattle. “But what led me to find Christ was that Jesus was a fighter.”
The outreach is part of a larger and more longstanding effort on the part of some ministers who fear that their churches have become too feminized, promoting kindness and compassion at the expense of strength and responsibility.
“The man should be the overall leader of the household,” said Ryan Dobson, 39, a pastor and fan of mixed martial arts who is the son of James C. Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, a prominent evangelical group. “We’ve raised a generation of little boys.”"
Promote kindness and compassion? Heaven Forbid!
Is it me, or are they just getting stupider?
Now I don't have anything against Mixed Martial Arts. I took karate for years, off and on, along with other styles of self-defense, and I enjoyed them very much and got a lot out of them as a person. That isn't the issue here.
These churches are choosing to attract young people, immature people, with an immature message of violence and agression. They are using the appeal of machismo to attract young people who don't know any better, when they should be teaching them to control these immature impulses and lead a more loving and peaceful life. Ironically, most really good martial arts schools would never consider trying an appeal to juvenile machismo in an attempt to increase their membership They have too much integrity, which is why they're the really good schools in the first place. Martial arts, at it's core, is more about attaining inner balance, the Yin and the Yang, than it is about kicking ass and taking names.
I guess the churches figured that they'd appeal to the dark side of people in order to bring them into the light or whatever. Great idea; in order to appeal to the unevolved personality, devolve yourself down to their level instead of attempting to inspire them to rise to yours. Too bad this totally negates the very meaning of their existence as followers of Jesus Christ like it does and all, but hey, business is booming, so who cares?
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
IS THE DINESH BLOG DEAD?
Is the old Dinesh D'Souza blog finally dead? All I get when I try to go there now is an AOL opinion news page.
Let's meet up here... sign in and we can at least continue the conversation.
Hope to talk to you all soon.
-Saint Brian the Godless
Let's meet up here... sign in and we can at least continue the conversation.
Hope to talk to you all soon.
-Saint Brian the Godless
Sunday, October 25, 2009
My Son the Manifestation
This is a tale of unlikelihood transcended.
First, a preamble: I am not a witch, warlock, demon or angel. If I am anything unusual at all, I am by nature an experimenter who keeps an open mind.
In recent years I have been experimenting with my own mind, in the manner of many who have gone before me.
Oh, it wasn’t my idea, not at first. I didn’t seek this out.
It all started with my synchronicities. I didn’t ask for them. But they started, at about age 35 or so, and they’ve continued apace until this day. (I am 48 at present)
There are far too many to dismiss with random chance and the bell curve. If I were to focus on any one, I might explain it away easily enough, but taken together they force me to at least consider the possibility that there is more to this reality than readily meets the eye.
For more background on this, see my “Big Brain Speculations,” if you haven’t already.
To summarize, I have been forced by what I have seen happen in my life in recent years, to at least consider the possibility that this reality, this universe or what have you that we all find ourselves in, is not based in matter and energy as it so readily appears to be. I have instead found myself seriously considering the possibility that this reality, everything we can perceive, is instead made of thought, or if you prefer, data. We only think that reality is matter and energy and that we are as well, because all of it, ourselves included, is thought or data. Or even ‘spirit’ if that floats your boat. At this most basic level there’s little difference between them. In other words, I have been entertaining the idea that reality is a dream. Similar to our sleeping dreams, yet very different in that we are all dreaming it together.
This is where my thoughts have led me. A lonely place, to be sure.
So naturally I have to test this all the time. It’s too unbelievable for me to just accept, even though my ‘experiments’ are the very thing which led me here.
The nature of these experiments of mine is usually that I attempt to influence reality in some way by merely thinking about it. Oh, not in the “abracadabra alakazam” magical sense, but instead more of attempting to change my subconscious picture of reality, since in the course of my mental experimentation it became apparent that if our thoughts influence reality at all, it is our subconscious thoughts that do so and not our conscious thoughts. The idea is that if I can change my own deep beliefs, change my ‘picture’ of reality, then the dream that is reality will resonate with that and also change. So they’re basically various techniques that taken together amount to controlled self-hypnosis.
>Synchronicity alert! (Intermezzo)
I felt that since I am in the middle of writing about this very thing, it’s only right to report to you a synchronicity that I’ve only just experienced ten minutes ago as I write this. I think if you can imagine having this sort of thing happen to you all the time you might feel more sympathy for my search for alternate explanations of what is going on with reality.
It went like this: Tonight I was sharing some of the music of my youth with my wife, a la YouTube. Fantastic thing, Youtube. For some reason I found myself thinking of Traffic with Steve Winwood, and so I let her listen to the band "Traffic’s" “Low Spark Of High Heeled Boys” one of my all-time favorites, and damned near a half-hour long, too. Steve Winwood is amazing. And what better name for a drummer ever existed than “Reebop Kwaaku Baa?”
Then I looked at the other "Traffic" songs listed there on YouTube and I played her another one that I recalled from my early days, named “John Barleycorn Must Die” and then in answer to her confusion explained to my darling wife the legend of John Barleycorn, the death and rebirth of the barley seed being an allegory of *our* death and re-birth… Then about twenty minutes later after she went to bed I picked up the novel that I am currently in the middle of reading, (re-reading actually, from twenty-five years ago) “Time Enough For Love” by Robert Heinlein, and started into it again. Well, four pages after the point where I picked it up again I read that the main character Lazarus Long had lost a couple of mules while on a pioneering excursion, and one of them was named, you guessed it, John Barleycorn.
John Barleycorn? Really?
I hadn’t spoken anything of the legend of John Barleycorn nor the song of the same name to anyone nor even thought of it in many years, perhaps decades, and then when I do, well twenty minutes later there I am reading it again in a random novel. It’s like an echo in reality. Sure, I had read that novel before, but a quarter-century ago, and there is absolutely no way that I would have recalled the name of a mule lost in transit from that long Heinlein story after all these years. I hadn’t even remembered that there were mules in the story, much less their names. I was thinking about the band "Traffic," and not the novel that I'd be getting back to in a while.
I really do get this all the time.
>End of Synchronicity Alert. Back to my son.
Originally when my wife and I decided on having a baby I thought that it could not hurt if I ‘affirmed’ in my mind that such would indeed happen. I constructed what used to be called a “sigil,” a physical symbol representing my son-to-be, even including his name, which we had already picked out. Connor. Lover of hounds, or perhaps lover of wolves. This is how one can influence their own subconscious mind. By constructing real-world representations of their desire in symbolic fashion. Anything that has emotional resonance works. By this I mean that employing ‘props’ makes the self-hypnosis more effective.
So I put a good amount of effort into the construction of a sigil representing my hopefully-soon-to-be-conceived son Connor. A symbolic representation, drawn on paper, carefully folded, with other ancillary actions performed. The more important I made it on my mind, the more likelihood of it affecting my reality, or so the theory goes.
Oh and yes, this is indeed called “Magic” or even “Magick” by some, but it’s really just a controlled form of self-hypnosis through symbolism and emotion. I prefer to think of it as focused meditation with the aid of props. I’m no Merlin. Just a humble experimenter. As one author calls it, I am a psychonaut. Or just a psycho. I'll leave that to you to decide.
So my wife got pregnant, tested pregnant the very next day after my experiment. Then she miscarried a month later. So much for all of my meditation. Or so it would seem.
We then tried various doctors, and the verdict came in. It was highly unlikely that we could ever get pregnant naturally. In fact, they were amazed almost to the point of disbelief that we had managed to get pregnant even the one time.
Our remaining options were artificial insemination, which we tried, and tried, and tried again, and after the many times that that didn’t work, all that remained to us was ICSI in-vitro fertilization, the proverbial “test-tube baby” At about twelve thousand dollars a try. After our insurance, which is fortunately a very good plan, it would still be the better part of four thousand dollars a try. And all that we had to spare in our bank account was about four thousand dollars.
We had run out of options. All that we had left was ICSI, but all we could afford was one try, one attempt, when our doctors all told us that we would likely need between four and six tries to get pregnant.
To gamble with all that remained of our savings on that one attempt which was likely doomed to failure, or not? That was the question facing us.
Now I have to say that while the first mental experiment was a failure in that the baby did not survive, it still produced (so to speak) a pregnancy, and an unlikely one at that, and right on cue, so I wasn’t giving it up yet. After all, this sort of thing costs me nothing to try. There’s no fee attached to meditating. And I still had the sigil that I used as a focus from the first time.
So in what in retrospect seems a truly foolish and even crazy thing to do, I decided that the one ICSI attempt would have to do. Moreover, I decided that it would work. So we scheduled it and went through the process. I had decided that I’d darn well make it work the one time. Looking back at it, it was brash overconfidence.
So I tried my meditating again. This time however I put a lot more effort into it, emotional effort as well as intellectual. I employed mental imagery from Judeo-Christian mythology in my visualization, since that was what I’d grown up with, hoping that it would have the most significance to my subconscious mind, and even employed fire at the end to rather dramatically destroy the sigil, imagining that I was ‘releasing it’ into the world. Drama is the key to this sort of thing, if there’s anything to it at all. There is no ‘magic’ in a sigil or in visualization. It’s all in the mind of the person doing it. In the person’s conviction, in their ability to truly believe something that is essentially unbelievable, just enough for reality to echo it in response, much like what I think happens when I get my odd synchronicities.
It isn’t easy to suspend one’s own disbelief. However, at the end of my little ritual with my sigil and visualizations when I lit the fire and attempted to muster as much conviction as I could, I had the distinct, albeit fleeting impression of *something* happening, almost like a distant sound in my head, gong-like almost, for the lack of a better description. I immediately *seized* on that fleeting echo, ‘pretending’ that it was real and symbolic of a successful completion to the operation, all in order to more effectively convince myself that something happened, causing myself to believe in it all the more so because of it. Even if nothing happened, I did a very good job of convincing myself that it had, is the point.
Did it *work?*
All I can do is list the ‘results,’ if such they were. I still can’t really believe that this stuff can work, but here’s what happened afterwards. Once again my wife tested pregnant, the very next day. Of course that’s when she would have tested pregnant since we’d gone through ICSI, so nothing miraculous in that. The fact that the one attempt worked was a one out of four or five shot however, and the fact that it turned out to be a boy (as I had affirmed) was another fifty-fifty of course. So approximately a one-out-of-ten, or a ten percent shot that it would have worked as it did. Plus a very healthy baby testing off the charts on height and in the 95th percentile in weight. A big, healthy boy named Connor, who looks enough like me at that age that he could easily be my clone. We’d selected the name in advance of it all of course, and I’d employed it in my meditations, so that’s his name.
Here’s the strange part, or one of them at any rate. I knew it would work right after I ‘heard’ that ‘sound’ in my head at the end of it, and I knew that it would be a boy. I just knew it. Now maybe I could have been wrong, but I had definitely defeated my own doubts in this matter, as I had set out to do. Did the fact that I had defeated all of my doubts influence the outcome? Who can say? Most would deny it, as being irrational or even crazy to even think it. Myself, I’m not so sure. It *felt* like something happened, and the results are exactly as hoped for. No evidence that I made it happen, but none that I didn’t, either. Also, I’d done this sort of thing before and always had pretty good results with it, although never with something so important as a baby.
So that’s my story, incredible as it may sound. And incredible it will remain to most of my readers I think. I wouldn’t believe it myself if I wasn’t the one involved.
I like to think of it like the Shakespeare quote. “There are more things in heaven and earth…”
Minor Update, April 13, 2010:
I neglected to mention that I also visualized him looking just like me only with his mother's eyes, bright blue. I even spoke of it often with my wife before the first pregancy and subsequent miscarriage.
My eyes are hazel.
He is the exact image of me as a child, so much so that I've got the rather uncommon experience I think, of looking at the living face of myself as I used to see it in a mirror as a very young child. I cannot tell you how eery that is, and still very, very cool at the same time.
And yes, his eyes are bright blue. We can be sure now because he's over 9 months old. Cue the Rod Serling intro...
First, a preamble: I am not a witch, warlock, demon or angel. If I am anything unusual at all, I am by nature an experimenter who keeps an open mind.
In recent years I have been experimenting with my own mind, in the manner of many who have gone before me.
Oh, it wasn’t my idea, not at first. I didn’t seek this out.
It all started with my synchronicities. I didn’t ask for them. But they started, at about age 35 or so, and they’ve continued apace until this day. (I am 48 at present)
There are far too many to dismiss with random chance and the bell curve. If I were to focus on any one, I might explain it away easily enough, but taken together they force me to at least consider the possibility that there is more to this reality than readily meets the eye.
For more background on this, see my “Big Brain Speculations,” if you haven’t already.
To summarize, I have been forced by what I have seen happen in my life in recent years, to at least consider the possibility that this reality, this universe or what have you that we all find ourselves in, is not based in matter and energy as it so readily appears to be. I have instead found myself seriously considering the possibility that this reality, everything we can perceive, is instead made of thought, or if you prefer, data. We only think that reality is matter and energy and that we are as well, because all of it, ourselves included, is thought or data. Or even ‘spirit’ if that floats your boat. At this most basic level there’s little difference between them. In other words, I have been entertaining the idea that reality is a dream. Similar to our sleeping dreams, yet very different in that we are all dreaming it together.
This is where my thoughts have led me. A lonely place, to be sure.
So naturally I have to test this all the time. It’s too unbelievable for me to just accept, even though my ‘experiments’ are the very thing which led me here.
The nature of these experiments of mine is usually that I attempt to influence reality in some way by merely thinking about it. Oh, not in the “abracadabra alakazam” magical sense, but instead more of attempting to change my subconscious picture of reality, since in the course of my mental experimentation it became apparent that if our thoughts influence reality at all, it is our subconscious thoughts that do so and not our conscious thoughts. The idea is that if I can change my own deep beliefs, change my ‘picture’ of reality, then the dream that is reality will resonate with that and also change. So they’re basically various techniques that taken together amount to controlled self-hypnosis.
>Synchronicity alert! (Intermezzo)
I felt that since I am in the middle of writing about this very thing, it’s only right to report to you a synchronicity that I’ve only just experienced ten minutes ago as I write this. I think if you can imagine having this sort of thing happen to you all the time you might feel more sympathy for my search for alternate explanations of what is going on with reality.
It went like this: Tonight I was sharing some of the music of my youth with my wife, a la YouTube. Fantastic thing, Youtube. For some reason I found myself thinking of Traffic with Steve Winwood, and so I let her listen to the band "Traffic’s" “Low Spark Of High Heeled Boys” one of my all-time favorites, and damned near a half-hour long, too. Steve Winwood is amazing. And what better name for a drummer ever existed than “Reebop Kwaaku Baa?”
Then I looked at the other "Traffic" songs listed there on YouTube and I played her another one that I recalled from my early days, named “John Barleycorn Must Die” and then in answer to her confusion explained to my darling wife the legend of John Barleycorn, the death and rebirth of the barley seed being an allegory of *our* death and re-birth… Then about twenty minutes later after she went to bed I picked up the novel that I am currently in the middle of reading, (re-reading actually, from twenty-five years ago) “Time Enough For Love” by Robert Heinlein, and started into it again. Well, four pages after the point where I picked it up again I read that the main character Lazarus Long had lost a couple of mules while on a pioneering excursion, and one of them was named, you guessed it, John Barleycorn.
John Barleycorn? Really?
I hadn’t spoken anything of the legend of John Barleycorn nor the song of the same name to anyone nor even thought of it in many years, perhaps decades, and then when I do, well twenty minutes later there I am reading it again in a random novel. It’s like an echo in reality. Sure, I had read that novel before, but a quarter-century ago, and there is absolutely no way that I would have recalled the name of a mule lost in transit from that long Heinlein story after all these years. I hadn’t even remembered that there were mules in the story, much less their names. I was thinking about the band "Traffic," and not the novel that I'd be getting back to in a while.
I really do get this all the time.
>End of Synchronicity Alert. Back to my son.
Originally when my wife and I decided on having a baby I thought that it could not hurt if I ‘affirmed’ in my mind that such would indeed happen. I constructed what used to be called a “sigil,” a physical symbol representing my son-to-be, even including his name, which we had already picked out. Connor. Lover of hounds, or perhaps lover of wolves. This is how one can influence their own subconscious mind. By constructing real-world representations of their desire in symbolic fashion. Anything that has emotional resonance works. By this I mean that employing ‘props’ makes the self-hypnosis more effective.
So I put a good amount of effort into the construction of a sigil representing my hopefully-soon-to-be-conceived son Connor. A symbolic representation, drawn on paper, carefully folded, with other ancillary actions performed. The more important I made it on my mind, the more likelihood of it affecting my reality, or so the theory goes.
Oh and yes, this is indeed called “Magic” or even “Magick” by some, but it’s really just a controlled form of self-hypnosis through symbolism and emotion. I prefer to think of it as focused meditation with the aid of props. I’m no Merlin. Just a humble experimenter. As one author calls it, I am a psychonaut. Or just a psycho. I'll leave that to you to decide.
So my wife got pregnant, tested pregnant the very next day after my experiment. Then she miscarried a month later. So much for all of my meditation. Or so it would seem.
We then tried various doctors, and the verdict came in. It was highly unlikely that we could ever get pregnant naturally. In fact, they were amazed almost to the point of disbelief that we had managed to get pregnant even the one time.
Our remaining options were artificial insemination, which we tried, and tried, and tried again, and after the many times that that didn’t work, all that remained to us was ICSI in-vitro fertilization, the proverbial “test-tube baby” At about twelve thousand dollars a try. After our insurance, which is fortunately a very good plan, it would still be the better part of four thousand dollars a try. And all that we had to spare in our bank account was about four thousand dollars.
We had run out of options. All that we had left was ICSI, but all we could afford was one try, one attempt, when our doctors all told us that we would likely need between four and six tries to get pregnant.
To gamble with all that remained of our savings on that one attempt which was likely doomed to failure, or not? That was the question facing us.
Now I have to say that while the first mental experiment was a failure in that the baby did not survive, it still produced (so to speak) a pregnancy, and an unlikely one at that, and right on cue, so I wasn’t giving it up yet. After all, this sort of thing costs me nothing to try. There’s no fee attached to meditating. And I still had the sigil that I used as a focus from the first time.
So in what in retrospect seems a truly foolish and even crazy thing to do, I decided that the one ICSI attempt would have to do. Moreover, I decided that it would work. So we scheduled it and went through the process. I had decided that I’d darn well make it work the one time. Looking back at it, it was brash overconfidence.
So I tried my meditating again. This time however I put a lot more effort into it, emotional effort as well as intellectual. I employed mental imagery from Judeo-Christian mythology in my visualization, since that was what I’d grown up with, hoping that it would have the most significance to my subconscious mind, and even employed fire at the end to rather dramatically destroy the sigil, imagining that I was ‘releasing it’ into the world. Drama is the key to this sort of thing, if there’s anything to it at all. There is no ‘magic’ in a sigil or in visualization. It’s all in the mind of the person doing it. In the person’s conviction, in their ability to truly believe something that is essentially unbelievable, just enough for reality to echo it in response, much like what I think happens when I get my odd synchronicities.
It isn’t easy to suspend one’s own disbelief. However, at the end of my little ritual with my sigil and visualizations when I lit the fire and attempted to muster as much conviction as I could, I had the distinct, albeit fleeting impression of *something* happening, almost like a distant sound in my head, gong-like almost, for the lack of a better description. I immediately *seized* on that fleeting echo, ‘pretending’ that it was real and symbolic of a successful completion to the operation, all in order to more effectively convince myself that something happened, causing myself to believe in it all the more so because of it. Even if nothing happened, I did a very good job of convincing myself that it had, is the point.
Did it *work?*
All I can do is list the ‘results,’ if such they were. I still can’t really believe that this stuff can work, but here’s what happened afterwards. Once again my wife tested pregnant, the very next day. Of course that’s when she would have tested pregnant since we’d gone through ICSI, so nothing miraculous in that. The fact that the one attempt worked was a one out of four or five shot however, and the fact that it turned out to be a boy (as I had affirmed) was another fifty-fifty of course. So approximately a one-out-of-ten, or a ten percent shot that it would have worked as it did. Plus a very healthy baby testing off the charts on height and in the 95th percentile in weight. A big, healthy boy named Connor, who looks enough like me at that age that he could easily be my clone. We’d selected the name in advance of it all of course, and I’d employed it in my meditations, so that’s his name.
Here’s the strange part, or one of them at any rate. I knew it would work right after I ‘heard’ that ‘sound’ in my head at the end of it, and I knew that it would be a boy. I just knew it. Now maybe I could have been wrong, but I had definitely defeated my own doubts in this matter, as I had set out to do. Did the fact that I had defeated all of my doubts influence the outcome? Who can say? Most would deny it, as being irrational or even crazy to even think it. Myself, I’m not so sure. It *felt* like something happened, and the results are exactly as hoped for. No evidence that I made it happen, but none that I didn’t, either. Also, I’d done this sort of thing before and always had pretty good results with it, although never with something so important as a baby.
So that’s my story, incredible as it may sound. And incredible it will remain to most of my readers I think. I wouldn’t believe it myself if I wasn’t the one involved.
I like to think of it like the Shakespeare quote. “There are more things in heaven and earth…”
Minor Update, April 13, 2010:
I neglected to mention that I also visualized him looking just like me only with his mother's eyes, bright blue. I even spoke of it often with my wife before the first pregancy and subsequent miscarriage.
My eyes are hazel.
He is the exact image of me as a child, so much so that I've got the rather uncommon experience I think, of looking at the living face of myself as I used to see it in a mirror as a very young child. I cannot tell you how eery that is, and still very, very cool at the same time.
And yes, his eyes are bright blue. We can be sure now because he's over 9 months old. Cue the Rod Serling intro...
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