Angels and Zombies

Christian de Quincey, PhD, is dean of consciousness studies at the University of Philosophical Research. He is a faculty member at John F. Kennedy University and Sophia University. He is founder and director of the Wisdom Academy. He is author of Radical Nature: The Soul of Matter, Radical Knowing: Understanding Consciousness Through Relationship, Consciousness From Zombies to Angels: The Shadow and the Light of Knowing Who You Are, Deep Spirit: Cracking the Noetic Code, and Blindspots: 21 Good Reasons to Think Before You Talk.



Here he describes a philosophical thought experiment concerning world of “zombies” that is identical in every physical respect to our normal world of experience – except for the fact that nothing and nobody is conscious. If such a world could exist it would mean that consciousness is not necessarily the product of a human brain. De Quincey also expresses his opinion that it will not ever be possible in the future to build robots that possess feelings and consciousness. “Angels,” in the philosophy of mind represent the opposite of zombies. They are entities that are, theoretically, fully conscious but entirely disembodied. Psychological speaking, the metaphors of angels and zombies represent the highest and lowest of human potentials.

God and the Bogey Man

Most people don't understand God. The idea of God within the minds of most people is some super version of the ego (not Freud's super-ego, just the regular ego super-sized). They project their own values onto God, judging reality based on their own preferences. Since reality does not conform to their own preferences, and morality is egocentric, that means God must be an asshole for causing reality to deviate from egocentric morality. If God was good then God would be like Superman.



Super God would automatically intervene in every instance where reality deviates from the preferences of the individual. Super God is the ultimate incarnation of the nanny state. Super God negates all free will because free will implies a freedom to harm others, and if God conformed to individual preferences of egocentric morality then we couldn't have something like that, could we? That's why the robots need to imprison us, because humans are too irresponsible to take care of themselves.






This mistaken view of God as Superman, or Super God, can lead to one of two conclusions for people: atheism, in the form of the problem of evil, or misotheism, the hatred of God.



I've spoken about the problem of evil, or as I call it the non-problem of evil, because I just don't see what the problem is. The real problem is lack of wisdom and maturity (and perhaps imagination) on the part of the person assuming the problem.



We can see a good example of how the idea of God as Superman leads to atheism in Michael Drosnin's book The Bible Code. Michael Drosnin is speaking with an Israeli mathematician who originally discovered the code Eliyahu Rips. Assuming the code exists, Rips believes that the author is God, while Drosnin does not. Rips is an Orthodox Jew and believes in the God of the Torah. Drosnin is an atheist because he believes in Super God.



"For me, it was not that simple. I had proof there was a code, but not proof there was a God. If the Bible code came from an all-powerful God, he would not need to tell us the future. He could change it himself. The code seemed, instead, to be from someone good, but not all-powerful, who wanted to warn us of a terrible danger so we could prevent it ourselves." (P. 87)



That's a pretty powerful theological assumption underpinning Drosnin's desire to write God out of the picture.



For Michael Drosnin one could just as easily call the problem of evil "the problem of laziness." "If God exists then he could do things for me, so why should I have to? Since I have to do these things, therefore God doesn't exist." Michael Drosnin basically says the exact same thing "If the Bible code came from an all-powerful God, he would not need to tell us the future. He could change it himself." You can almost hear the author whinging: "But I don't wanna change the future, why can't God do it for me? Because he's stinky, that's why! I have to change the future myself, so God doesn't exist, aliens did it!"



So, who is the encoder? You might as well ask, "If the teacher already knows the answer why do I have to answer the question? It must be because the teacher doesn't exist." Why do we have to do things instead of having God do everything for us? Why do we have to do things instead of having almighty government do everything for us? For our own protection why don't we let the robots sequester us away where nothing bad can ever happen to us?



If Michael Drosnin cannot get around his childish fantasy of Super God doing everything, thus freeing Michael Drosnin of all thought and responsibility, what hope does he have of accepting God as the author of the code (assuming the code exists)?



The solution to the problem of evil is called theodicy. People have been writing theodicy for thousands of years, beginning perhaps with the Book of Job. God in Job gives us a sort of non-answer, basically saying Who are we to demand answers from God? Where we there when God created the world? Can we comprehend things from God's perspective from our vantage point here on Earth in these finite bodies?



This makes sense on one level, because just as a dog cannot comprehend why a human might do seemingly cruel things, like a vet performing an operation or something, from the wiser perspective of the human the operation makes perfect sense. The human has the dog's best interests in mind when performing the operation that will cause pain and discomfort because it corrects some life-threatening problem that the dog was facing. The little pain the human induces is better than the alternative, which is much greater suffering and death. We might not understand the purpose of suffering, from our limited, finite perspectives, but an omniscient God does, and sees that it is for the best.



That might make sense on one level, but it doesn't really like a satisfying answer, because we could basically say the same thing about anything. Why does anything exist instead of nothing? Why the sky blue? Why is gravity the weakest of the fundamental forces? Literally any question can be answered with "That's for God to know and don't ask questions, mortal." Philosophy vanishes at that point (and leaves me with nothing to do). That's why theodicy evolved beyond the Book of Job, not because the answer is distasteful, but because it's boring.



The existence of God was taken as given only until maybe the seventeenth century. People suffered deeply, but they didn't question the existence of God. They had a more mature view of God. The idea of Super God hadn't been invented yet. People pursued theodicy as philosophy, as love of wisdom, as a mystical practice, not in order to answer David Hume or Michael Drosnin. Philosophers wanted to get into the mind of God. "This is why you suffer, now what are you going to do about it?" That was the original purpose of theodicy. It's a more mature view than sitting in an armchair and trying to defend the idea that God is not Super God, because you're actually doing something with your life. You're actually progressing toward a goal, not just resting in a sense of smug self-assurance.



Jesus said "In the world you will have to suffer." John 16:33 is what I call the heart of the Gospels. "These things I have told you, that in me you might have peace. In the world you will have to suffer, but cheer up, I have overcome the world." It can't get any more simple than that. Suffering is an intrinsic part of life in this world. The Apostles not only believed that, they also believed God exists and that Jesus is God.



These weren't stupid people. Ancient people were not stupid. In a lot of ways they were smarter than people living today, because ancient people had to live side-by-side with death and privation on a daily basis. Knowing how to use a smart phone or the names of all 57 genders won't save you if the apocalypse happens and an EMP destroys all electronics, but knowing how to plant crops and make fire will. The Apostles could be transported to the modern world and in a relatively short amount of time (especially the ones who spoke Greek like Matthew and Paul, although Paul came later) they could use their skills to find jobs and survive.



On the contrary, if you were transported back to the first century you would almost certainly die of exposure or be killed by bandits in a week. Machines and other people do most of the living for you. You just need to show up at your job inserting tab A into slot B, if you have one, or maybe just sit on your ass and collect welfare and all your needs are met for you. The world has become so integrated that people have become specialised to a degree even people living two generations ago could not fathom. It's led to boredom, laziness, and a lack of wisdom and morality. Furthermore, it led to the creation of the idea of Super God.



Buddha too said in the first Noble Truth that life is full of suffering. He also said that suffering comes from desire (pride in the Christian tradition*), that there is an end to suffering, as Jesus alluded to, and we even have his solution to escaping suffering: the eightfold path. In Christianity we had hints of this path mentioned in the Gospel of Thomas and in the monastic practices of the Desert Fathers, but those teachings were lost for a millennium due to the meddling of Athanasius of Alexandria.



*As a side note, nowhere in Buddhism, not even its most advanced teachings found in Tibet, explains the origin of suffering as far as I can tell. Christianity does mention the origin of suffering, and, unlike the new age spiritualist teachings, Christianity makes recourse to known human psychology rather than assuming the potential motives of omnipotent, omniscient, eternal, indestructible beings. Suffering, in Christianity, arose out of pride, which is a specific desire, the desire to be special. God loves us all equally, but Lucifer wanted special love, thinking himself better than the rest of creation. Since God refused him special love he decided to poison creation by introducing pride into the hearts of humans and angels, leading to the war in Heaven and the fall of man.



C. S. Lewis had a brilliant thing to say about the non-problem of evil. He noted that the problem is based around a contradiction. If the world was as bad, even half as bad, as people who use the problem of evil believe, then there's no way the idea of a good God could have ever arisen. If the world was so filled with evil and suffering that it could prove God does not exist then no one would have ever thought up the idea of God in the first place. The only way the idea of God could exist is if the world is nowhere near as bad as the problem of evil people believe it to be.



As if the idea of Super God leading to atheism wasn't bad enough (at least there are rational atheists, and atheistic arguments aside from the problem of evil, which is a very poor argument), what's even worse is the idea of Super God leading to misotheism. Misotheism is absolute laziness. It is absolute narcissistic infantile histrionic personality disorder. And I mean that in the technical sense. People who hate God have highly unstable and exaggerated emotions, are attention-seeking, have excessive pride, an unshakable belief in one's own rightness, and at the same time an unshakable belief that their own problems are absolutely unique in the history of the world and that no one has ever suffered to anywhere near as great a degree that they have, are unwilling to accept personal responsibility and have a need to blame others for one's own mistakes, are often hypochondriacs, and often perceives relationships as more intimate than they actually are.



Hating God or being angry with God is a form of idolatry. It is replacing God with a Bogey Man of your own ego. The idea of Super God leading to atheism makes sense, because Super God doesn't exist. Self-evidently, because otherwise there would be no problem of evil. The problem of evil exists because God isn't Super God. Super God doesn't go around solving other people's problems. Not believing in something that self-evidently doesn't exist is rational. It's poor theology, but it's still rational thinking. Misotheism, on the other hand, is completely irrational. Misotheism is seeing that Super God doesn't exist and then turning around and creating an evil counterpart to Super God. Misotheism is turning God into the Bogey Man. [The evil counterpart to Super God – the Bogey Man – is technically an extreme version of dystheism, the idea that God is not entirely good. In its extreme form dystheism supposes an entirely evil deity. The hatred of God – misotheism – naturally supposes that this extreme form of dystheism is true.]



The Bogey Man is a fictional entity whose purpose is to terrorise mainly children, because, let's face it, a lot of adults are assholes. Super God as the Bogey Man is a fictional entity for histrionic people to project their anger onto for being inadequate, because histrionic people are assholes.



Super God as the Bogey Man (who I will hereafter refer to simply as the Bogey Man) would not only be less good and moral than regular God, the Bogey Man would be evil. The Bogey Man would be the antithesis of God.



The Bogey Man must suspend free will in order to intervene in all situations. People want Super God to intervene to stop criminals from committing crimes, for example. People don't ask for Super God to prevent criminals from thinking about committing crimes, but for Super God to intervene only in the act of preventing crimes. Since Super God (the Bogey Man) is also believed to be the cause of all things then that means the Bogey Man must have placed the thought to cause the crime into the mind of the criminal and then is supposed to intervene in stopping the criminal from committing the crime. The criminal is just a puppet in the Bogey Man's hands. The criminal's mind is shackled to a body that it has no control over. The Bogey Man is making the criminal commit the crime and then prevents the crime as it is happening. The Bogey Man chooses to make some people sinners, destined for Hell just to have people to send to Hell.



If the Bogey Man exists then nothing you do has any meaning, because the Bogey Man is pulling all the strings. The Bogey Man controls all your actions, causes all of your suffering (even suffering caused by your own choices, because you have no free will, which conveniently relieves you of any responsibility), and then hands out punishment or reward on fiat.



The existence of the Bogey Man is even worse than that. Not only are you being made to suffer in life and rewarded or punished at random, you don't even control your own body. At the very least your mind is locked into a body that you have no control over (in some extreme cases even your mind is controlled by the Bogey Man, freeing histrionic misotheists from responsibility even for their own thoughts). That's absolutely terrifying. At best you are a prisoner of a body you do not control. At worst even your anger itself is caused by the Bogey Man.



If the Bogey man exists not only is your life meaningless, your life is nothing but entertainment for an omnipotent sadist. That's even worse than Descartes' evil demon, who can only trick you. With Descartes' evil demon you can still realise that the world is an illusion and come to know the true God through reason. The Bogey Man directly controls you, absolutely. While it is possible to outsmart the evil demon the Bogey Man is totally unbeatable.



Super God as the Bogey Man must be evil. That's why belief that Super God actually exists leads to misotheism.



Why someone would believe in the Bogey Man I've already explained. People who believe in the Bogey Man have to believe in the Bogey Man. Not because the Bogey Man forces them to believe, but because the Bogey Man frees them from responsibility and makes their problems out to be totally unique in the history of the universe.



Of course God is not Super God, or the Bogey Man. Belief in Super God or the Bogey Man is stupid and childish. The same God who gave us reason did not intend for us to forgo its use. That line of thinking will lead us eventually to Blaise Pascal, Rene Descartes, and into using our reason and contemplation to reach a better understanding of the mind of God and the origin of and solution to suffering.

The Last Judgment

Continuing on the same theme of the non-problem of evil and theodicy, here is a homily expressing the traditional Catholic answer to the existence of suffering. The Last Judgment, leading to reward or punishment in the world to come provides justice for a life that seems unjust.

Giving Thanks versus Anger with God

Hating God or being angry with God is a form of idolatry. It is replacing God with a Bogey Man of your own ego. The idea of Super God leading to atheism makes sense, because Super God doesn't exist. Self-evidently, because otherwise there would be no problem of evil. The problem of evil exists because God isn't Super God. Super God doesn't go around solving other people's problems. Not believing in something that self-evidently doesn't exist is rational. It's poor theology, but it's still rational thinking. Misotheism, on the other hand, is completely irrational. Misotheism is seeing that Super God doesn't exist and then turning around and creating an evil counterpart to Super God. Misotheism is turning God into the Bogey Man.

Population Will Peak At 11 Billion

Hans Rosling explains why a replacement rate of childbirth means that the human population will probably reach a stable limit of 11 billion. This is inevitable, provided the population explosion in Africa can be controlled by ending crippling poverty. The only way to get the population below 11 billion will be to institute a regime of mass murder and sterilisation. Responsible planning of resource allocation and energy development requires us to take into account a future world with 11 billion people.

The Sign and the Shroud: Part One: The Hypothesis

I'm reading the book "The Sign" by Thomas de Wesselow, and man this guy is a teenage edgelord douchebag, isn't he? He has to attack Christians and Christianity on every single page. I dare him to make a book mocking Islam.

I have a tendency to skip ahead, to read the author's conclusion first so I know what I'm getting into. Just like I don't like to pay to see a movie until after it's released and people on the Internet reveal the ending, because I'm not going to pay to see a movie with an ending I hate.

This guy writes a near 500 page book about the Shroud of Turin and the resurrection, so naturally I figure about 200 of those pages are filler and another 200 are details, so if I skim just 100 pages I'll get all the relevant details. It saves a lot of time reading multiple books. Here's his conclusions, that could have been shortened to a 20 page paper, not a 500 page book:

*The Shroud of Turin is the authentic burial shroud of Jesus. We can accurately trace its provenance back to AD 600, well before anyone had the technology or the know-how to make a forgery, so that means it's highly probable that the shroud is authentic.

*The Shroud was created by a Maillard reaction (the way bread browns when you bake it) caused by the unusually rapid decomposition of Jesus' body. We know this because the only other possible explanation is a miracle, and fuck off miracles, we're all atheists now.

*The image on the Shroud is the resurrection, even though you can't see it in normal light, and you don't notice that there's a face unless you're standing at least ten feet away from it, and the huge smoking gun of the still rotting body inside the tomb! All the "appearances" of Jesus after the "resurrection" were public displays of the Shroud.

*First century Jews had a different understanding of life after death and resurrection than we do today. They didn't believe in such childish notions, they were atheists too. They knew dead is dead, but seeing that image gave them courage to go to spread the Gospel and to face without fear the most horrific deaths anyone has had to suffer in human history.

That's his hypothesis. And except for the first part, the part actually based on history, it's total horseshit.

And if we remove the childish invective and the second half of the book that's a retelling of the New Testament with the Shroud inserted into the place of Jesus, we can trim this down to a nice scientific paper and submit it for peer review. But it's not. He has to go on and on and on for 470 more pages (the pictures are all beautiful, but as the citation page in the front of the book attests, none of them are the author's own work).

I tried to read the first page and it took about 30 minutes because every other sentence I had to stop to write a refutation, not of the author's opinions on religion, he can believe what he wants, but the blatant historical lies he tells. On the very first page, in one sentence, he tells two blatant lies about early Christianity:

*The author states that Constantine made Christianity the state religion of Rome in 325. That's false. Theodosius made Christianity the state religion of Rome in 380, 43 years after Constantine had died. Theodosius also never made it state policy to destroy pagan temples, although he didn't stop anyone who did destroy them.

*The author states that a Christian mob burnt down the Library of Alexandria because it was pagan, condemning the West to centuries of ignorance. That's not even false, that's a lie. The Library of Alexandria burnt down centuries before the reign of Theodosius (or Constantine, who the author conflates with Theodosius), possibly by Julius Caesar in 48 BC. Under the reign of Theodosius the Serapeum of Alexandria, a temple that had a collection of books, as temples often do, was burnt down by a political mob, that just so happened to be composed mostly of Christians, for political reasons. Alexandria was a hotbed of mob violence. Two political factions were going at it, the losing side sought refuge in the Serapeum, and the winning side burnt it down because it was a convenient way to eliminate their rivals.

This man has a PhD in art history, mind you. One would think (hope) that such a degree would require passing at least one actual history course. Anyone who has taken an introductory course in the late Roman Empire or early modern Europe knows these statements are false, so the only way a PhD history scholar could get these facts wrong is by deliberately telling lies.

Two pages later the author has to take yet another shot at Christianity and all other forms of belief other than atheistic materialism:

"The traditional notion of a flesh-and-blood resurrection remained unquestioned in Christendom for more than a millennium and a half. In retrospect, it is rather astonishing that such an improbable dogma could have dominated the minds of so many for such a long time. It stands as testimony to the imperialistic power of the Church and its sustained stranglehold on intellectual endeavor, a grip that only began to loosen during the period of the Renaissance and the Reformation. Even then, it was another 200 years before religious skeptics began to challenge the very basis of Christian faith, reviving voices that had been silenced since antiquity." (pages 5-6)

Here's an accurate artistic depiction of the author:



The author, a couple paragraphs later, talks about how the works of Celsus and Porphyry were destroyed in great book burnings by evil Christians who did things for the evulz.

No. Pretend to be the historian your degree says you are. Books are made of paper, papyrus, parchment, and other perishable materials. 99% of everything that has ever been written has rotted away to dust and is lost. Some roving mob of evil Christians didn't have to go around burning books, those books are lost all on their own because of the ravages of time. We don't have any first hand accounts of the life of Alexander the Great, only third hand commentaries by people living 400 years later, not because someone was trying to erase him from history, but because books rot. If you want a book to survive it has to consistently be a best seller (or its pre-modern equivalent) for millennia. The only way books survive is because enough people thought they were interesting or significant enough to make copies, and then generations later people made copies of the copies, and that's why we have the works of Aristotle and Homer and the Gospels, because enough people thought they were interesting or important enough to preserve. Most books were not copied down because most books are crap to begin with. If, in 1,000 years, Thomas de Edgelord's masterpiece has been lost to history it's not because evil Christians burnt all his books, it's because his books are just crap and no one saw it necessary to print new copies. It's as simple as that. There's no need to resort to malice as an explanation when laziness will suffice.

De Wesslow's treatment of the Shroud from an artistic point of view is tremendous. He points out why the image on the Shroud is inartistic. No artist would have made an image like the image on the Shroud, putting the blood on the cloth first and then putting the image on top, using multiple different perspectives on the front and the back, depicting anatomy the way it would have been totally unknown by medieval and Renaissance artists, creating an image so faint that no one can see it up close in normal lighting and that only takes on its true greatness in photographic negative. The Shroud betrays itself as anything other than an artistic work. Pointing out why the Shroud cannot be a forgery de Wesslow's work is very good. The problem comes when he tries to mischaracterise Christianity. It's just like Richard Dawkins. Dawkins might be a brilliant biologist, but he's a piss-poor philosopher who does nothing but rehash arguments that have been refuted millennia ago.

I've written about this before when talking about the religious views of ancient people. Ancient people were not stupid. Ancient people were not stupid. Did the Greeks really believe the gods were people who sat on Mount Olympos doing all the crazy stuff in the myths? Probably very few did, but most were smart enough to see the truth of the stories. They were written as a way to get a point across about very complicated subjects in way that was easy to assimilate and remember. The gods are so obviously anthropomorphized versions of abstract qualities. Aries is unchecked rage and Athena is the rational mind that takes over in warfare, the two primary ways in which people fight. These are psychological qualities that are represented as people as a form of shorthand.

Ancient people knew a dead body is dead. They knew that better than we do, isolated as we are from the reality of death. First century Jews would not see a stain on a cloth and believe that the rotting dead body right next to that stain had miraculously risen and was immortal, and believe it so strongly that they were willing to be crucified, beheaded, tortured, burnt alive. No one is so stupid to believe in a risen Christ when they can see the rotting corpse just because they found a stain on a cloth.

And the author arrives at this conclusion by cherry picking the Gospels, which he will decry as unhistorical in one breath and then a sentence later quote mine for his retelling of history. Which is it? Are the Gospels unreliable or are they the very corner stone of his thesis? Both can't be true. De Wesslow spends two thirds of the book rewriting the Gospels in contortionist fashion to insert the Shroud in the place of the risen Christ, because we're all atheists now, we know miracles are fake.

Coming soon: Part Two: The Science

The Life of Jesus: The Three Kings

Ye may remember from The Life of Jesus how astronomer Michael Molnar was able to determine that Jesus was born on 17 April 6 BC using ancient Roman coins depicting the star pattern at the time. A conjunction of all the planets, especially Jupiter and the Sun in the constellation Aries, prompted the wise men from the Bible to go looking for the infant Jesus. Molnar, along with Egyptologist Bob Brier, reason that the wise men, or magi, were Parthian astrologers, and their skulls may have been discovered by Constantine's mother Helena and they may be kept in the Cologne Cathedral.

The Case of the Gold Leaf Lady with Stephen E. Braude

Stephen Braude presents his research on the case of Katie, the Gold Leaf Lady -- an
individual who experiences a metallic substance, similar to gold leaf,
forming on and around her body. Chemical analysis has shown that the
substance is actually brass. Braude goes into some detail explaining why
he was able to rule out fraud in this puzzling case. He also describes
Katie's other psychic gifts, including trance mediumship, xenoglossy,
and clairvoyance. He also describes the psychodynamics behind the gold
leaf manifestations.

Table Levitation with Stephen E. Braude

Table levitation has been studied, at times, under quite good conditions, and provides good evidence of rarely seen macro-PK phenomena. Stephen Braude is even performing experiments today using modern scientific apparatus in full-light conditions. Commonly associated with Spiritualism, table levitation does not seem to provide good evidence for spirit interaction, but instead appears to be a psychokinetic effect produced by the living people present.

The Crossing of the Red Sea

Hurricane Irma's incredible power drew all the water from this beach at Long Island in the Bahamas, leaving behind only dry land.



In the story of the Exodus, Moses raises his staff and the Red Sea (Yam Suph, sometimes translated as the Sea of Reeds) empties of its water. God caused the sea to recede with a powerful east wind (Ex. 14:21). The water was piled up in a great wall to the side of the dry land, and this phenomenon lasted long enough for allegedly 600,000 Israelites to cross. When the Egyptians followed in their chariots the wind stopped and the sea returned, drowning them.



This is exactly what was seen at the Bahamas, minus the drowning Egyptians. Hurricane Irma's powerful winds and low pressure caused a huge bulge of water in the center of the storm, draining the beach, and the beach was dry for many hours, apparently. When the hurricane hit land the huge storm surge caused tremendous waves to crash on shore and caused massive flooding.



The mechanism exists for a powerful wind (hurricane or other storm) to drain a shallow body of water long enough for people to cross, and for huge waves to arrive to drown masses of people. The narrative account exists that says that just such an event happened somewhere in Egypt over 3,000 years ago during the Exodus. You could argue that such an occurrence was purely natural, and that it was one hell of a coincidence, or maybe it really was a miracle, but the crossing of the sea is definitely plausible. We can't prove that it happened, but it definitely could have happened, and this is what it would have looked like.

Poverty Does Not Cause Crime

Poverty does not cause crime. Taoudenni is the poorest place in the world, and they don't even have a word for crime. The couple of times a year when there's a disagreement between two men (the population is 100% male, because the environment is so harsh the women and children live hundreds of miles away and the men see them a few months out of the year) the village elder comes up with a solution and everyone accepts it as final.







What causes crime is relative poverty. If very poor people live in the same area as very rich people that conflict causes crime.

Ken Wilber: Only Religion Can Save The World

Ken Wilber explains why only religion provides the structures and tools necessary for both growing up and waking up. Nothing else can create a cohesive community that gives meaning to our lives, or provide the means of escaping suffering and discovering our true identity.

Why the US Wastes So Much Food

We already know why Europe wastes so much food. We've all heard of the butter mountains and wine lakes. The EU's socialistic Common Agricultural Policy demands that farmers produce hundreds of millions of Euros worth of surpluss goods, that the government buys with confiscated taxpayer money, in order to keep the paper lantern economy afloat. But the United States is different. Except with corn production, which is wasted to make horribly inefficient E85 gasoline, the US does not have anywhere the same level of central planning when it comes to agriculture as the EU (thank God). So why does the US waste enough food to feed an extra billion people? It turns out that capitalism (or crapitalism when it fails like this) can be just as destructive as socialism.

Pascal Rewagered and the God of Smart People

Blaise Pascal
formulated his famous "wager" in his notes and never
published them in his lifetime. The wager says basically that we
cannot know whether God exists or not, so we should act as if God
does exist because the promised reward for living a moral life is
infinitely beneficial and the punishment for living an immoral life
is infinitely harmful. If God does exist and we live a moral life
then we get infinite reward. If God does not exist and we live a
moral life we sacrifice nothing because life would be equally
meaningless no matter how one chooses to live.




As Clavius states in the movie Risen what his greatest fear is: "Being
wrong, and wagering eternity on it."




The main objections most people have to
Pascal's wager never seemed to cut it for me.




The first objection, which Pascal
himself simply laughed at as a word game, is that there are multiple
religions with different gods and to follow one religion faithfully
would mean violating the tenants of other religions, all of which
have infinite consequences. This objection is false, and obviously
so, because there really are only two religions with infinite
consequences – Christianity and Islam – and the two are mirror
opposites of one another. And if you need help figuring out which is which then you're hopeless and shouldn't be pursuing philosophy.



The second objection argues that God
would never accept someone who is persuaded by the wager because such
a person is being moral for selfish reasons. This objection, too, has
been transformed into a joke by the anti-Christians, because the only people opposing Pascal very rarely talk about other
religions, which always seemed suspicious to me, as if their primary
objective was just anti-Christian. They are not atheists because none of them seem to oppose the infusion of paganism into modern society, like all the days of the week and the months being named after pagan deities (and yes, there are many thousands of people who profess belief in Odin and nature spirits and all of that, so the argument that these are dead religions falls flat). And very few of them ever dare criticise Islam, and most actively praise it. Let's face it, if the money said "In Thor We Trust" or "In Allah We Trust" none of these so-called atheists would complain. Their only problem is with Christianity because it gives them the out to be edgelords.



Atheists seem to be saying that God, or
at least the Christian God, would endow humans with the faculties of reason and intelligence and then demand that we never use them. The God of the objectors wants humans to be stupid, based on the false notion that faith means "belief without evidence", when, in actuality, faith in the Biblical context means something closer to trust, and is arrived at through reason and evidence.



Stupid people, overwhelmingly it seems, are not moral. Certainly not more moral than smart people. Stupid people kill albinos because they believe albinos practice sorcery. Stupid people kill others for sorcery, full stop. Stupid people have sex with their cousins and produce inbred children who are even stupider. Stupid people cut open the heads of bald men believing treasure to be inside. Stupid people are less moral because stupid people have lesser ability to defer gratification, which makes them more violent, and stupid people are also less empathetic, meaning less able to take on the perspectives of others. This means that the God of the Anti-Pascalites wants humans to be immoral. If God wants people to be immoral then God is not God but is instead the Devil. The Anti-Pascalites are confusing the Devil for God and are crafting an erroneous argument out of their own confusion.



But God is not the Devil, and God wants people to be moral, because God is moral. If God wants people to be moral then God wants people to be smart. Smart people come to trust God through reason and evidence, and can apply that reason to see that it is better to be moral and believe in God than to be immoral and disbelieve in God. An intelligent person can appreciate Pascal's wager, because morality within a Western context is inextricably linked to Christianity.



This isn't to say that God exists. Pascal was not arguing for the existence of God with his wager, although he did present arguments for the existence of God in the same unpublished book. Pascal was merely saying that it is better to act as if God exists, meaning that it is better to act morally than to not act morally, because the consequences otherwise are too horrific to contemplate.



And we've seen those consequences. We've seen the hundreds of millions dead as a result of societies that have tried to kill God. The consequences go above and beyond survival after death, they impact the world of the here and now. The only thing that can replace God is the absolutist state, and the problem with the absolutist state is that it does not recognise any authority outside of itself. The absolutist state has no room for forgiveness, where as God's mercy is very great indeed. We've seen this with the gulags and the killing fields, and more recently with cultural Marxism and how the left has begun to eat its own. In the great oppression olympics, the left has sought to crucify its own members who are not extreme enough. There is only one place behaviour like this ends, and that's a mass grave.



Whether we want to think of the metaphysical implications or not, the pragmatic implications of cultural Christianity more than justify the continuation and strengthening of Christian culture within Western society.

Atheist Richard Dawkins identifies as culturally Christian.

The Long, Slow Decline: Are Galactic Civilizations Possible?

Matt O'Dowd from the web series PBS Space Time gives a 30 minute presentation on the possibility of escaping the Long, Slow Decline and building a galactic civilisation. The problems facing us are lack of drive, the energy cliff, and most importantly the ability to communicate.

His conclusion? If the speed of light is the absolute limit to communication then it should only be possible to sustain a civilisation over a few hundred light years before distances become too great and fragmentation occurs. The galaxy may be full of civilisation, but they are too far spread out to effectively communicate with one another.

Was The Great War Inevitable? (Preview)

The First World War could have been avoided, in 1914.

Had Russia not rushed to the aid of Serbia the war would have ended by December in an embarrassing Austro-Hungarian defeat.

Had Germany not rushed to provide blanket support (the "blank cheque") of Austria-Hungary after Serbia was only 20 minutes late responding to the Austro-Hungarian list of demands the chickenhawks in Vienna would have been forced to sit on some ice, and then, in 1916 when the emperor died, the empire would have fallen apart on its own.

Had Britain not rushed to defend Belgian neutrality against the evils of the Hun (7,000 dead Belgians were worth more to the British than 10 million dead Congolese) the war would have ended in 1914 with a repeat of the Franco-Prussian War 40 years earlier.

The war could have been avoided in at least three different ways. The question is should the war have been avoided? If not 1914 would not another casus belli arisen eventually as two bloated and decrepit empires teetered on the verge of collapse and as Germany would inevitably sought its place in the sun? Was it better to preempt a potentially more disastrous future war by charging into war in 1914?



(Coming in July)

The Long, Slow Decline: The Kessler Syndrome

The Kessler Syndrome, proposed by Donald Kessler in 1978, is a runaway destruction of satellites in orbit by space debris. As each satellite is destroyed it produces more debris that destroys more satellites until space becomes inaccessible from the Earth because the planet will be surrounded by an impenetrable barrier of shrapnel for decades. The more rockets that are sent up, and the more decommissioned satellites that remain in orbit, creates an increasing probability for a cascading failure of low earth orbit. Currently there are no extant methods of reducing the amount of garbage in space. This represents yet another technological hurdle that humanity will need to solve in order to avoid the decline and pursue a spacefaring future.

The Alexandria Project

Has the body of Alexander the Great been discovered in an Egyptian monastery?



Stephan A. Schwartz has used remote viewing to locate many archaeological finds that were believed to have been lost. In one project in Alexandria, Egypt, Prof. Schwartz and his team may have made the discovery of the millennium, the location of the bones of Alexander the Great. He is working on getting permission from the Egyptian government to do DNA tests on the bones, located at the Monastery of Saint Macarius in Wadi El Natrun to see if the skeleton that was discovered using remote viewing is the body.

The Long, Slow Decline

How much computing power would be needed to simulate the Matrix? A whole lot more than every computer combined. Unless there's some quantum leap in computing it may even be impossible.



That's just like a realisation I had a few years back. I wrote a piece called "Dreams of Foreign Suns" (it was all the way back in 2013, was it?) and again in "A Future I Did Nazi Coming".



At least three factors seem to be working together against creating the science fiction future:



1. Declining rate of technological advancement.



We've already seen the decline in shrinking processors. Processor speed is able to increase because we're adding multiple cores to processors, but the miniaturisation of transistors will reach a hard limit very very soon due to the quantum effects on individual silicon atoms.



At the same time we're seeing decline in advancement in other technologies. It's been decades since new antibiotics have been developed, and with the disaster of antibiotic resistance, the age of wonder drugs will also reach a hard limit probably over the next generation. We'll once again return to the era where a papercut could be life threatening.



There's also a decline in new energy technologies. I did a study in 2004 for a landscaper about the cost effectiveness of solar power. Scanning the literature last year I discovered, to my dismay, that the efficiency of photovoltaics has not increased at all in 12 years. Not to mention the fact that to manufacture solar cells requires an input of more energy than the cells will produce in their entire lifetime and creates tons of toxic waste, the whole technology is a bust. Add to that the reality that acquiring energy basically means pumping water into low pressure gas wells to re-vitalise them, and the endless political hurdles facing thorium power, our future energy prospects seem grim.



We're also running out of key resources like phosphate and potable water. There's likely another two centuries of "fossil" fuels remaining, even at the current rate of consumption, but ground water will definitely be gone in the next 50 years (and probably sooner) unless some drastic change is made. Once water and phosphate are depleted the Earth's population drops from 8 billion to 1 billion, because that's how much food traditional agriculture can produce.



2. I'm going to call this the "Energy Cliff".



The amount of energy it takes to become a spacefaring civilisation is absolutely astronomical. It's possible, as I've pointed out before, we've known how to travel to at least the nearest stars within a single human lifetime using technology that is reasonably within our capability, it's just not very practical. We could use nuclear pulse propulsion, such as Orion, and even though the fallout would likely only kill three or four people, the EMPs produced by the 800 nuclear explosions needed just to reach orbit would destroy the technology that's keeping billions of people alive. To say nothing of the tens of thousands of new nuclear warheads that would have to be produced to fuel the rockets.



It doesn't seem likely that we'll find the power to keep China's endless construction of ghost cities afloat, let alone colonising say just the Moon and Mars. If we're going to do this in human time scales (one month to Mars instead of 14, 50 years to Alpha Centauri instead of 40,000) there is going to have to be a quantum leap in the ability to produce energy to get the damn rockets into space. Kerosene and liquid oxygen just won't cut it, and neither will setting off a ton of nukes.



3. Humans are becoming more anti-social.



Call it "affluenza", or vermin paradise*, or whatever you like. The more people move to cities the more anti-social they become. Anti-social humans are the perfect useful idiots for gigantic, bloated bureaucratic governments that either don't want to or are unable to tackle problems 1 and 2. The European Union passed a law regulating the acceptable degree of bend in bananas, thousands and thousands of tons of fish are caught and thrown away, lakes of wine and mountains of butter are destroyed to meet arbitrary quotas set by bureaucrats. And the rapefugees. Millions of rapefugees are imported to keep the criminal debt-based banking system solvent.



The more people move to cities the more they become anti-social and the more likely they are to vote for these kinds of obstructionist governments that, ironically, call themselves "progressive" while stonewalling any real technological, economic, scientific, or cultural progress. The more "progressive" human society becomes the less actual progress humans will make toward developing new energy, medicine, and aerospace technologies.



And there doesn't seem to be a way out.



By the way, I'm not suggesting going back to the 1950s. I'm not suggesting that radical "off the grid" "rugged individualism" or just becoming more like redneck 'muricans is the solution either. It's not. That's the problem that I've been trying to point out for several years now. Neither the "right" or the "left" has the solution to these problems. They both seem to be in a state of arrested development.



Drilling into Mt. Rushmore to get more oil won't solve any of these problems. Neither will driving gas-guzzling tanks just to piss off environmentalists, nor will wind turbines and solar panels.



The "free market" or anarcho-capitalism won't solve these problems.



Communism, socialism, or "social democratism" won't solve these problems.



Feminism, MIGTOW, transhumanism, AI, the "singularity", or any other utopian visionary bullshit won't solve these problems.



None of these positions will be able to solve these problems because they can't even see the problems. The very existence of these -isms is the heart of the problem.



A dramatic quantum leap in human psychosocial and technological evolution is required. And I don't think that's possible. I think humans are just too damn stupid. You can graph the ability of an animal to socialise by brain size, and even though human intelligence affords 10,000 times less interpersonal conflict than is seen in chimpanzees, it's just not enough. The upper limit on any totally cohesive human society is 5,000 individuals. Unless the fundamental limitations of the human brain are either transcended or global society itself is radically altered to accomidate those limitations, there can be no solution.



And that's very depressing if you think about it.





*There was an experiment with rats or hamsters or something (vermin) where their every need was instantly met. The population exploded until a certain population density was reached, then the rats became anti-social, stopped breeding, and they all died out.

A Brief History of the Study of Consciousness

Stuart Hameroff explains the Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch-OR) theory of quantum consciousness in microtubules. He presents data in support of three hypotheses:



1. Consciousness is a process in the structure of the universe, connected
to the brain via quantum computations in microtubules ('Orch OR')



2. OR-based primitive feelings present in the universe may have prompted
the origin of life and driven its evolution... to 'feel good'



3. Resonating brain microtubules with transcranial ultrasound (TUS) can
safely and painlessly improve mood, and offer promise for Alzheimer's
disease, traumatic brain injury and other disorders

The Nature of Psi with Vernon Neppe

Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove



Dr. Vernon Neppe describes areas of psi research that have all achieved statistical significance at the six sigma level. These include remote viewing, random event generator research, the global consciousness project, the ganzfeld studies, studies on the sense of being stared at, and feeling the future studies based on the work of Daryl Bem, presentiment studies. Neppe also includes some research in the area of survival after death. All of this research shows that human consciousness is capable of interacting with the physical world in ways that bypass the normal sensory and motor systems of the body. Neppe presents a single, multi-dimensional model that could account for psi.

Jesus' Crucifixion in Roman Sources

Many Roman historians, pagan and Jewish, mentioned Jesus, identified as a teacher and wonder worker (thaumaturge), in their histories. They say he was crucified by the Roman Prefect Pontius Pilate.

Rupert Sheldrake & Mark Vernon - What Happens When We Die?

A fascinating look at the possible connection between dreaming, expectations, the subconscious, and what happens after death.

The Miracle of the Holy Fire

Every year on the eve of Pascha, the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem enters the Edicule in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, and sometimes within minutes a blue light appears that ignites a bundle of 33 candles. The flame from these candles is passed around, all over the world, to the faithful. 2017 marks the first time in history that the holy fire has made its way to America.



The fire does not burn, as seen by the hundreds of pilgrims whose hair, skin, and clothes are unaffected by bathing in the fire. It also does not emanate from any known source. The Israeli army checks the Church beforehand for any source of ignition. There are no matches, torches, lamps, lighters, or flints. Magnifying lenses will not work inside the stone tomb in the center of a darkened church. Furthermore, the candles of some pilgrims are said to spontaneously ignite before being touched by fire.



Dr. Steve Turley explains the miracle of the holy fire in two videos below.

The Civil War Was About Slavery

The Civil War was about state's rights!


What right did the southern states want to defend? The right to own slaves. They admit to it themselves.

Eben Alexander: A Neurosurgeon's Journey through the Afterlife

Neurosurgeon Eben Alexander talks about his NDE while he had bacterial meningitis. Dr. Alexander has written about his experience in the remarkable book Proof of Heaven (for other similar books check out the Recommended Books page). The incredible rarity and severity of his illness, which wiped out not only his neocortex but brainstem as well, makes Dr. Alexander's experience a very strong case for the independence of consciousness from the physical structure and functioning of the brain. He explains more in this marvelous talk at the Theosophical Society.



Runs 98 minutes.

Do We Want Eternal Life?

Eternal life is feared and rejected by some because it is thought to be nothing more than a continuation of this life of struggle. Some (including Bob Couttie) suggest that a life of infinite duration would become boring or monotonous. My old teacher once pointed out that such an idea is preposterous. With infinite time on one's hands one could accomplish an infinite number of tasks. As he said, he would read an infinite number of books and then write an infinite number of books, and still have infinite time to do infinitely more things. Some, like poor old Bob again, suggest that a life of infinite duration would lead to infinite procrastination. Since we always have infinite time in which to accomplish some task we would see no hurry and so put off doing it forever.



It is suggested in this homily by Fr. Matthias that many people reject Christianity out of fear or revulsion to the idea of this life everlasting.



However, these people are all mistaken. Eternal life is not merely a continuation of this life indefinitely into the future. Eternity is not an infinite duration of time, eternity sits outside of time completely. Eternal life is life without time.



A timeless condition is attested to in the near death experience and in people who have experienced nirvikalpa samadhi. It is your true nature, your original face, the face you had before your parents were born. It is the state we will all experience following the resurrection.

The Necessity of a Russo-American Alliance

Americans harbor fantastical racism toward Russians. The easy answer might be to say it is a hold over from the Cold War, but the hatred runs far deeper than that.

It is true that Americans hated Russians during the Cold War, and Russians thought it was because of communism. However, after the Soviet Union collapsed, Americans still hated Russians. Americans hate Russians not because of communism, but because Russians are Russians.

The trouble goes back all the way to the beginning of the Russian state. Russia was always the other, never quite Europe, but not Asia. After four centuries of harassment and repression at the hands of the Turks, the powerful Russian empire stood poised to obliterate the Ottoman empire and deal the Turks reprisal for enslaving half of Europe. The great powers should have cheered Russia on and provided aid and moral support. Instead France and Britain, enemies for a thousand years, joined forces and helped the Turks defeat the Russians in the Crimean War.

Britain and France saw in the Ottoman empire a puppet, where as in Russia they saw a rival. Vast beyond all imagining, with a bottomless supply of resources and manpower, Russia could swallow up the world if given half a chance. It's better to stick to the devil you know than these sub-human sons of Vikings.

America, as heir to the West, inherited hatred of Russia along with British common law and the English language.

Russia is an upstart. They are not an Ancien Régime like Britain or France or even Germany, who, through intermarriage, managed to take control of all the ruling houses of Europe without firing a shot. We can always pretend Germany, or the Holy Roman Empire, is successor to Rome, even though no such entity existed until 1871.

The Russians, on the other hand, they just appeared in the sixteenth century. They are also Orthodox Christians, not good Protestants like the British or Germans. Even the French Catholics with their Vatican voodoo are better than the crazy beards and fur caps of the mad Russian monks.

And Russians were not true full-blooded Europeans, they were Slavic untermensch. They weren't animals like Africans or Asians, they were more sophisticated, more sinister. They were like Neanderthals, animals that masqueraded as men. But the veneer of civilisation was never thick enough to convince the inbred cliques of Western Europe that Slavs were fully human like themselves.

That hatred, along with the insatiable bloodlust of the military-industrial-intelligence-media complex, is fueling a Cold War 2 and threatening to tear apart any detente that President Trump hopes to build with Russia.

The Cold War was fueled by the bottomless desire for money and influence. Where once Uncle Joe Stalin had provided the bulk of the effort to stop the Nazis, with Roosevelt and Churchill happily smoking away with the Supreme Soviet, the end of the war had posed an existential threat to the nascent deep state. Without arms contracts the endless supply of money would dry up. With no enemy to spy on the intelligence apparatchiks would have to take jobs selling carpets or working in a delicatessen. No, they needed to concoct a new war so the party would never stop, and they fell back on the easiest target: Russia.

The military-industrial-intelligence complex, of both super powers, had to get rid of Kennedy and Khrushchev because they faced off eye to eye and found common ground and then turned inward to repair their broken countries. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the missiles were removed from Cuba and Turkey and almost 20 years of hostilities between the USA and USSR began to cool, Kennedy tried to restrain the power of the CIA and the private Federal Reserve, and Khrushchev tried to take resources away from the KGB and the arms manufacturers to improve the welfare of the Soviet citizens. Naturally they had to be removed and two war hawks, LBJ and Brezhnev, put in power.

Militarism, not communism, destroyed the USSR, and it very nearly destroyed the USA. USA just had a head start in terms of money it could lose, having avoided a disastrous civil war and destruction of 20% of its industry in WWII. If both countries started off on an even playing field both would have collapsed around the same time.

Of course the USSR couldn't compete. 3 million dead in WWI, another 4-5 million wounded. Loss of most of Russia's agricultural land. 6 years of civil war, another 3 million dead, at least. 7 million dead in famines in 1921-22, another 5-10 million dead in famine in 1932-33. At least 20-26 million dead in WWII, plus the destruction of at least 20% of all Soviet industry and agricultural land.

The Cold War was like a heavyweight champion fighting against some guy with both legs and an arm tied behind his back, and still, despite all that, in a single lifetime, people in the Soviet Union started basically as slaves living off the land making nothing to ending up making half of what people in America were making in 1991.

Imagine what could have happened if Kennedy and Khrushchev were allowed to make peace instead of being eliminated and having pointless war continue.

Imagine now what a glorious future we can live in if Trump and Putin are able to bring our two nations together. One unified force to eliminate Islamic terrorism, one unified force to chart a path to Mars and the outer moons. American technical know-how combined with the ironclad faith of the Russian Orthodox Church can restore Western civilisation to the glory it once was before materialism, atheism, cultural relativism, and moral nihilism began to eat away at the very heart of the greatest civilisation in human history.

I've spoken on this topic at length. The emptiness that has taken root in the West is the driving force behind Islamic terrorism. Lack of religion in the West, lack of value and meaning to life, is creating a vacuum, both spiritual and physical. Westerners are refusing to breed, so to solve the problem of a rapidly declining population, Angela Merkin, like a reverse Hitler, is flooding Europe with Islamic third-worlders. With no strong Christianity within Europe, there is nothing to stop those migrants from forming rape gangs and burning Sweden to the ground. Merkin is committing genocide against the German people.

The only thing that can keep the West from falling to pieces is strong Christian faith and a desire to breed, providing both the spiritual and physical bulwark against the endless hordes of Islamic migrants who believe women are property, rape is acceptable, homosexuals should be murdered, and all knowledge should be burned except for a single, all-encompassing book that can be interpreted six ways till Sunday by every back alley cleric and self-proclaimed Caliph.

And the only place where Christianity still reigns in Europe is Mother Russia.

We've watched as secular states in the Middle East and north Africa have been decapitated: Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan (the pro-Soviet government the United States destroyed by creating Al Qaeda). Egypt was nearly destroyed, and by every indication it appears that Erdogan of Turkey is an Islamist. The United States has its sights on Syria and Iran, two of Russia's allies. They should be our allies too, in the war against radical Islam. You see, even though the people there are overwhelmingly Muslim, they are ruled by rational actors who fully embrace technology and the twentieth century. Iran provided the US with support in eliminating the Taliban after 9/11. That's not because they are pro-America, Tehran just didn't want radical Islamists at their doorstep. There is also a horrendous heroin problem in Iran, fueled by the vast fields of opium poppies that grow from one horizon to the other in Afghanistan. Just as Britain and America sided with Stalin in World War Two, Iran sided with America against the Taliban because they shared a common enemy.

The United States went to war in Afghanistan out of revenge. Iran did so because they don't want mad, seventh century barbarians right next door poisoning and murdering their people.

Secular dictatorships in the Middle East are necessary to keep radical Islam from spreading, just as strong adherence to Christianity is necessary in Europe for the same reason. There were no refugees when Gaddafi was in power. He provided his people with free housing, food, water, and jobs, all paid for by the ocean of oil Libya sits atop, and he provided security by eliminating any Islamist barbarian who tried to stir up discord. The same is true with Assad in Syria.

If you sow the wind you will reap the whirlwind. If the United States works with Russia, Syria, and Iran to defeat radical Islam, everyone's lives will improve. There will be no need for anyone to migrate to Europe because Syria and Iraq themselves will be safe once again. Everyone wins except the arms manufacturers and the intelligence agencies.

That is why it is imperative that Trump is able to defeat the chickenhawks in Washington. That is why US troops need to be pulled out of Poland and the Baltic states, why the people of Crimea be permitted to stay in Russia where they voted to be. If the West is to survive, if world peace is truly to be realised, there must be an alliance between the US and Russia. If not then the West is destined to be reduced to dust in the wind.

The Cult of Darwin

Evolution is why I originally went to school, specifically to study human evolution. That lasted about a year before I realised that it was simultaneously boring and a cult. It's not occult, it is a cult. It is a materialist quasi-religion with very little evidence. Occasionally you will find a transitional form here or there, but you need about 50,000 transitions between species and maybe you find 2 or 3, which doesn't really prove anything.

Evolution is based on the logical fallacy post hoc ergo propter hoc. Because fossil B looks similar to fossil A and appears in later strata that means species B evolved from species A.

There's no way logically to draw that conclusion. Just because B appears after A does not mean A is the cause of B.

First of all, with fossils we're basing phylogeny on morphology. That's wrong. You can't do that. If you were to try that with living organisms you would get nonsense. A hippopotamus looks a lot like a pig, but genetically they're nothing alike. Ants and termites are both eusocial insects that live underground, but genetically they're nothing alike. Birds and bats both have similar skeletal structures that are necessary for flight, but genetically they're nothing alike. You can't base phylogeny on morphology because it doesn't work. Phylogeny needs to be based on genetics if on anything.

And yet all fossils are organised based on morphology even though that technique fails when it is tried on living species. Fossils themselves provide no evidence other than the sudden appearance and disappearance of certain species.

At the same time, every experiment that has ever been conducted to test evolution has also failed.

40,000 years of selective breeding has not turned dogs into a separate species. Dogs can still breed with wolves, and can still breed with coyotes and other canines. That makes them the same species, doesn't it? (That's a separate side issue: we don't even know what a species is.) Furthermore, as Tom Bethell points out in the video below, all these different dog breeds are allowed to mate in the wild and the offspring, over just a couple generations, return to the same morphology of the wild dog. 40,000 years of being separate from wolves and when returned to the wild dogs will revert back to wolves in a couple of generations. Nothing has changed except gossamer cosmetic features.

Another example is Richard Lenski's E. coli. 80,000 generations and nothing has changed. The longest laboratory experiment in evolution ever conducted and nothing has changed but cosmetics. The bacteria are plumper, because they are kept in a hypertonic solution, but if released into the wild they immediately return to their normal shape, and the rate of expression of a single pre-existing gene has increased, allowing for the digestion of citrate. That gene already existed, it was just turned off, and now it's turned on because the bacteria are placed in an environment that has a high concentration of citrate. In 80,000 generations nothing has happened.

And yet we are supposed to believe that in 80,000 generations humans went from Australopithecus to us. It's impossible. You couldn't do it in 8 million generations.

And that's just with natural selection (which, as Karl Popper correctly pointed out, isn't testable and is not a scientific theory). Abiogenesis is a whole other Pandora's can of worms unto itself.

Estimates place the odds of all the correct chemical reactions taking place, forming all the right amino acids, assembling into the right proteins, all in the correct sequence to form the first cell at 1:10^80. Anything beyond 1:10^50 is statistically impossible. It would require more time than the entire expected lifespan of the universe. Deep time is deep, but it's not bottomless. The ONLY recourse to this problem is the multiverse. There needs to be a minimum of 10^500 random parallel universes in order for our one to have life. That's metaphysics; that's religion, not science. It's impossible, even in theory, to verify the existence of these other universes.

Neodarwinism is not science, it's a materialistic religion based on multiple unfalsifiable assumptions. It polices speech and behaviour like any religion, it has dogma like any religion, it's deeply in bed with government like a religion, and it gets tithes (government grants) like a religion. It has a holy book, a prophet, and it has worship service (new atheist revival meetings and undergraduate courses). It absolves its believers of guilt (if you're just an animal and when you die you rot you can justify literally anything and need feel bad about nothing), and it provides believers with a sense of belonging to a community.

Evolution is a religion.

And that's why I quit. I wanted the truth, I didn't want to replace one set of beliefs for another.



At the same time I think it's important to state that I have no alternative. I'm not a supporter of any alternative hypothesis. I don't believe God created all the species all at once, I don't believe ancient aliens visited the Earth and killed off the dinosaurs so they could create humans to mine gold, I don't believe backward causation from some future omega point is pulling life toward an ultimate goal, and that's kind of it, those are really the three hypotheses that people have put forth over the centuries. Within the fossil record some species just appear at one time and die out at another, and we have absolutely no idea why. Within our own experience in the field we find species going extinct (often because we extinct them), and we find new species, but those species were just in inaccessible places, we've never observed a new species evolve.



The only honest, philosophically defensible position, I think, is agnosticism. Species appear and disappear and we have absolutely no clue as to why. Any other position is metaphysics, not science.

Forgiveness

Richard Smoley, from the last video, looks at the topic of radical forgiveness. Forgiveness is a key topic within Christianity, and it is the practice at the heart of A Course in Miracles. The idea behind forgiveness is that one does it for one's self. You don't forgive the other person to give the other person something, you forgive the other person because you have created an image of the other person in your mind that is eating away at your peace. To cure your own distress you must cure that mental impression.



At the same time forgiveness does not mean to become a doormat. Remember, Jesus overturned the tables at the temple and he whipped the money changers. Jesus instructed his followers to "Sell your cloak to buy a sword." You shouldn't leave yourself defenseless, nor should you let someone off the hook who is abusing you. We are instructed multiple times to avoid toxic people.

The Supernatural with Richard Smoley

Fabulous talk from Thinking Allowed. Easily one of the best of the series.



Richard Smoley is editor of Quest: The Journal of the Theosophical
Society in America. He is also former editor of Gnosis Magazine. His
books include Hidden Wisdom: The Guide to the Western Inner Traditions,
Inner Christianity: The Guide to the Esoteric Tradition, Forbidden
Faith: The Secret History of Gnosticism, The Essential Nostradamus,
Conscious Love: Insights from Mystical Christianity, The Dice Game of
Shiva: How Consciousness Creates the Universe, The Supernatural:
Writings on an Unknown History, The Deal: A Guide to Radical and
Complete Forgiveness, and How God Became God: What Scholars Are Really
Saying About God and the Bible.

Here he notes that many of the
great spiritual teachers of the twentieth century (Blavatsky, Steiner,
Gurdjieff, Jung) had teachers who remain unknown. He suggests that this
reflects the desire of all these individuals to avoid the limelight of
public scrutiny. While describing most channeled material as “banal”, he
praises Jane Roberts’ Seth material as well as A Course in Miracles. He
reviews the history of Satanism and, paradoxically, associates it with
the objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand. He also comments on the writings
of Aleister Crowley as well as tantra.

A Guide to Your Interiors

Starting at the bottom, everyone knows what the Gross Body is. It's the thing we normally think of when we think of the body. Sometimes it is gross, but here it's referred to as gross because it is the most dense form of matter.

At the top of the Gross Body is the Brain. Everyone knows what the brain is. It's a vital organ and most people only use the stem. The brain is the seat of consciousness, most likely the microtubules.

Right below the brain is something called the Red Bodhicitta, located at the navel. It's part of the subtle anatomy, but it's more tied to the gross anatomy than it is to the subtle bodymind. It's located here in relation to the brain because it's relative location is important. The red bodhicitta represents perfect insight. It is one of two anchors that hold keep the soul attached to the body, and is the power source of the body. It provides the energy for meditation. We get the red bodhicitta from our mother.

Atop the brain is a series of elliptical forms.

I'll start with the white circle. It is the White Bodhicitta, and it is skillful means. It is said to be the mind of enlightenment. At the moment of death the white bochicitta descends from the crown of the head and presents us with the perfect opportunity to attain enlightenment. If not, we'll get several other chances later on, but that's a topic for another day. We get the white bodhicitta from our father.

The next biggest ellipse, with the pretty clouds, is the Gross Mind. That's what we think of when we think of the mind. The gross mind is almost constantly full of thoughts that arise and cease, represented here as clouds that obscure the clear blue sky. The gross mind contains two parts, the Ego, which is the frontal personality that we associate with, and the Gross Shadow (the darker part), which is all the stuff we have disidentified with and have repressed. The shadow is almost always unconscious, and it is much larger than the conscious ego. It is the seat of projection. Any bit of the shadow we do not reintegrate into the ego during this lifetime we must deal with either in the between life state or the next life. There is no getting around it.

Inside the gross mind is the Subtle Bodymind (a combination of the subtle body and the subtle mind). It is full of golden light, often encountered in the early stages of meditation. The subtle bodymind is what reincarnates. Any it of the gross shadow that we failed to deal with in life will accumulate in the Subtle Shadow, the darker part of the subtle bodymind. Sometimes it's called Karma, but that word has a lot of baggage associated with it. It's the aspects of our self that we do not want to deal with. It is all the unconscious tendencies that pull us through life, and pull us to the next life. It doesn't seem to be a sort of accountant that balances good deeds and bad deeds, it seems to be more like a magnet that draws us to a life we are most attune with. Fears, addictions, unresolved issues, all of that pulls us in certain directions. Usually directions the ego does not want.

Inside that, at the very center of the self, is the Individual Soul (sometimes called the Atman or the Indestructible Drop), represented here as a sphere of blue light (often encountered in deeper stages of meditation). The soul is the original self-contraction that started manifestation. It is made of two things: wisdom (absolute bodhicitta) and compassion (relative bodhicitta). Wisdom is our capacity to recognise emptiness, and compassion is our capacity to be moral. The soul is said to be absolutely indestructible. It is the very subtlest mind of enlightenment that anchors all other structures. The soul is indestructible even for perfectly enlightened buddhas. It is not an unchanging substance, or a thing, it is the very heart of the mind. If the soul never changed then enlightenment would be impossible!

At the very outside, the biggest ellipse, is the Absolute Soul (God or Brahman). It is Absolute Existence and Absolute Truth. It is clear light (clear meaning transparent, like pre-dawn twilight). Absolute freedom and fulfillment; the source and goal of all existence. The gross body is projected out from the Absolute and appears to us to be something outside and apart from it, but you can see from the overlap that the gross bodymind, like everything else, exists within the Absolute. At the moment of enlightenment the individual soul identifies with and abides as the Absolute Soul without any loss of individuality.