Nothing Happened Before the Big Bang, Inflation Is Not Past Eternal, And All Systems of Knowledge Are Incomplete

There's been a recent push to change the definition of "big bang", just as with changing the definition of countless other words to suit the will of dialectical materialism. This past month I've come across a new video† by a very popular youtube channel and an article on a popular website talk about "what happened before the big bang" and "why the big bang wasn't the start of everything".

Just as "nothing" no longer means absolutely nothing, it means "the ground state of the quantum vacuum", now the "big bang" isn't what it always has meant, when time, space, matter, and energy all came into existence from absolutely nothing, now it means "inflation", which happened 10^-32 seconds AFTER what was previously defined as the big bang. This is a devious little reach around to claim that "stuff happened before the big bang", just like calling "the ground state of the quantum vacuum" "nothing" allows you to say that ""science" (dialectical materialism) can explain how the universe was created from nothing without God."

Eternal inflation, the idea that the inflation that sped up the expansion of the early universe didnt' stop, it still continues in other regions of space beyond our cosmic horizon, spawning new bubble universes forever, was the first to go. Some thought inflation was eternal into the past too, but in 2003 Vilenkin and Alan Guth ran the calculations on Hubble's Constant and found that it doesn't work. Inflation may continue forever into the future, but it had to have a beginning in the past.

Next came the big bounce, the idea that after a long time, a trillion years or so, expansion slows and stops, eventually reversing until everything flys back into a single point called the Big Crunch. Then the shock of impact of everything on everything starts a new Big Bang, and the cycle continues forever. Unfortunately, disorder increases with time, so each new universe must be more disordered than the one that birthed it. If the cycle had been going on forever disorder would be infinite and the universe would be completely featureless. Since there's stuff in the universe the cycles couldn't have gone on forever. Some people then suggested that the universe just gets bigger with each bounce, so the disorder spreads out more so no one notices it (like in the M-Brane ekpyrotic model and possibly whatever the hell Penrose's new idea is - no one seems to understand his Aeons of time model, within the physics community or anywhere). But if the whole thing is getting bigger it had to start somewhere really really small, maximally small, and that means a finite beginning.

There's also an idea from the 1930s called the cosmic egg or primeval atom, where yes, there was a Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago, but the thing that banged was an uber-dense subatomic thing that existed forever until it got tired of existing as a tiny little particle and exploded. However, Vilenkin and a graduate student Audrey Mithani showed that quantum instability would have led to the egg's collapse after a finite time. The crack (the Big Bang) had to happen before the egg collapsed into oblivion so it couldn't have existed forever, even if it existed for a really, really long time before the Big Bang.

Here are several prior pieces I've written on why inflation cannot be past eternal:

Balking Hawking Part 1

Balking Hawking Part 2

Georg Cantor's Infinities (Part Two)

Balking Someone

Balking Hawking Part 3: In The Beginning

Make no mistake, when people say "science says" they mean "dialectical materialism says". Science does not say anything, science does not prove anything, individual scientists may say things, but science is not a catalogue of facts, science is a process.

I've made a video many years ago back when I used to make videos called "First Principle Anecdota"* that everything you know, and every conceivable system for attaining knowledge (that is, all forms of epistemology) necessarily relies on what are called "axioms" or "first principles", which are assumptions which must be taken as given but can never be proven true. At its base you can NEVER know anything about the world with absolute certainty. Everything must be based on things which you assume to be true but can never prove. Based on those assumptions you can create a system to demonstrate facts with arbitrary certainty, but the certainty of those facts is always arbitrary and is based entirely on your assumptions.

I've probably talked to hundreds of people about this and no one seems to get it. Not the "praise science" crowd who believe in dialectical materialism. It's like people can get arbitrarily smart, but their smartness is always asymptotic to the level of intelligence needed to realize that all knowledge is built upon unprovable assumptions.

Ordinary people, who are just smart enough to be dangerous, are easy to trick by these linguistic gymnastics like redefining words. You redefine "big bang" and "nothing" and get disaffected teenagers into becoming atheists. That's how they get you. Meanwhile the geniuses (technically the plural is genii), the real hard-nosed intellectual atheists who really look into the subjects like Anthony Flew, turn to belief in God because they realize that the universe and life are far too complex to be explainable by any series of coincidences.

I said a few years ago, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, "How do you change a cow into a horse? You redefine the word "horse" to include cows."

That's really what we've been seeing this past decade go into overdrive as the Fabian socialists who run the West have taken to redefining words as a form of mind control and behavior modification.


----------------------------------------
*By the way, my videos tend to have very specific titles, and if you search that in quotes mine will appear as the first result. I know Google has algoreithms that skew results to be more in line with previous searches, but I've never searched for that video before, so it's as close to neutral as you can get.


†That video that claimed inflation is the big bang is predicated on a lie. Most people do not watch videos to the end, and at the very end they admitted that inflation does not explain the initial state of the universe (what has always been referred to as the big bang). The video admitted at the very end that everything was a lie knowing almost no one will watch to the end.

This is just like how the New York Times will deliberately publish articles with provocative titles and then in paragraph 6 they will give the truth knowing no one will read that far into the article. An article may be titled "Trump Hates Brown People" and the article may have nothing to do with Trump except at the very end there might be a quote from some race baiter which says "Ralph Sharpman said in interview that "Trump hates brown people."" The NYT will run with that quote, and put it in quotations, but not tell you it's a quote from someone else or tell you the article is about Ralph Sharpman until the very end.

This is how they can technically not be lying outright but still be lying by saying something true in a misleading way. It's lying because it omits the context of the original statement.

Nihilism is Garbage

Friedrich Nietzsche: The Anti-Nihilist.
"I am Superman. Look at my muscles."

Nihilism is garbage. If you are a nihilist you are a nobody, a non-entity, a loser, and a defeatist.

I am intimately familiar with suffering. Injuries, disease, constant pain, years of unemployment and a string of dead-end jobs that offer no fulfillment. I know it all, and I'll admit to becoming a little bitter over the years, though I do think it has helped me advance philosophically.

People like to blame God, or speculate on how a life full of suffering is devoid of all meaning. The modern world feeds this mentality. It is designed from on high to make us feel inadequate. Anti-social media want us to feel like all of our frienimies are doing so much better than us when they are often just as miserable. Advertising wants us to be miserable so that we buy more crap we don't need or want. The media live off of suffering: "If it bleeds, it leads." Add to this the armies of Internet "black pills" and doomsayers who sell ebooks and subscriptions to even more doom online, and you have a recipe for nihilism, which Friedrich Nietzsche and personal experience in the world will tell you is currently the dominant philosophy of the West. Once we got rid of Christianity, when we killed God, we now find ourselves in this nightmare world where life is devoid of meaning.

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we not ourselves become gods simply to be worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whosoever shall be born after us - for the sake of this deed he shall be part of a higher history than all history hitherto."

From Nietzsche's The Gay Science

Nietzsche recognized that with the advent of the nihilism brought on by the new scientific materialism of modernity (and the full-on celebration of meaninglessness that has come about in post-modernism), we would face an existential crisis. The idea of God is so central to giving meaning to our lives that without it we are no better than ants, toiling day and night for jobs we hate just to keep our heads above water while we fill the pockets of Mammon worshipers who have managed to take the reigns of civilization, all without meaning or purpose.



God is dead, and we have killed him, and we are woefully incapable of filling the void in our current condition. It is one thing to feel at conflict with society and man's laws, but it is quite another to feel at conflict with the Source of all life and morality itself. Eliminating God leads to the enshrinement of the State, as the vacant throne of the Absolute cannot remain vacant in the mind of man for long. Whether the natural sciences or the all-powerful State, something man-made must take the role left vacant by the crucifixion of God. This has led to the worst totalitarianism, as, while God's laws are immutable, there is no limit to His mercy. However, the State has no mercy; it has no room for forgiveness of 'sins' against political correctness, as the State recognizes no authority outside itself. This is why the authoritarian Godless State has led to the worst atrocities in history: the murder of hundreds of millions with industrial sterility and efficiency.

When you no longer believe in God then you will believe in anything, and everything becomes permissible. If God is not your master than you are a slave to your senses. You are like the addict, the drunkard who cannot control how he drinks, but is controlled by his drinking. When you are free to do anything then you lose all of your freedom, because you are no longer in control of your body, but your body is in control of you. And when your body controls you then you are open to being controlled by the powers that be to fuel their endless lust for more power.

The reverse of nihilism, of "If it bleeds, it leads," is the philosophy of Major Dutch Schaefer: "If it bleeds, we can kill it."



The movie Predator shows us that no matter how powerful the adversary, no matter how hopeless the situation, our enemies are no less mortal than we are, and our troubles can be overcome. We just have to become the best possible version of ourselves. We have to become better than we thought we could be. Dutch didn't win because he was stronger than the Predator, or because he was necessarily smarter either. The Predators are thousands of years ahead of humans, having fully developed interstellar travel, cloaking devices, universal translators, and super medicine that allows for rapid healing of what would otherwise be incapacitating wounds. Dutch was able to win because he was able to exploit the weaknesses of his opponent to his advantage. He may not be smarter, but he can think on his feet and is more adaptable.

This is the philosophy of existentialism. Yes, life is full of suffering, but it is also full of joy, and you're hurting yourself to focus on the suffering while ignoring the joy. There are simple steps to reclaiming your joy and to once again find meaning and purpose in your life. Like everything it all begins with a choice. You have to take control of your own life and reclaim your birthright. You can take your life back because you choose to.

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.

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.

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.

Spirituality in 2016

Ken Wilber talks about the "spiritual but not religious" people in one of the footnote videos and there's points of agreement and disagreement I have with his assessment. I've written about this topic at least twice before. Just taking his numbers as given, 20% of Americans are "spiritual but not religious." Ken says they don't want the mythic elements of organised religion, they want direct access to genuine transpersonal realities. And I think there's definitely some of that. In the back of everyone's mind there's the drive to return to the Source, but I don't think that's the main reason people are checking out of religion, and I say that because people don't seem any more "spiritual" today than 50 years ago. People today seem much less likely to accept non-physical realities, and they also seem far less moral and far more materialistic. I think the main push is that people don't want guilt. People reject absolute morality so they can have, mostly, guilt-free sex, along with guilt-free gluttony (1/3 of Americans are obese), guilt-free envy, celebrity worship, and just all around hedonism. That's why drug addiction is so high, because people know they are living crappy lives and even though they have rejected religion they still know that buying $400 of shit and wondering why you bought it is wrong, people know this Weimar cabaret lifestyle of nights of heroin use and anonymous sex with 50 people followed by mornings of detoxing with green coffee enemas is wrong, and it's causing massive anxiety and massive depression. I do not see this as an ascent to Integral spirituality, I see this as a descent into egocentric hedonism.

He also mentions the mindset of terrorists, that I've written about here. He does a good deal of equivocating, "Southern Baptists bombing abortion clinics"? When was the last time that happened? "Buddhists releasing sarin gas in the Tokyo subway"? Aum Shinrikyo are not Buddhist, they are an apocalyptic cult led by a blind man who believes he is the reincarnation of Jesus Christ as prophesied by Edgar Cayce. That's not Buddhism, nor is it Christianity, it's worship of a charismatic figure by nihilists. And he lumps these people in with Al Qaeda (and radical Islam by extension). He says the reason these terrorists exist is because modernity has no place for their ancient religions, so they will destroy modernity completely. Well, if that were the case why are so many terrorists highly successful, highly educated Westerners? These people very clearly don't reject modernity because they are mostly educated professionals. Saudi Arabia, the largest state sponsor of terrorism, the place where Salafism was invented, exists only because of modern technology! These people do not reject modernity, they reject the meaninglessness of post-modern boomeritis.

I'm not saying very bad Christians don't exist, just that the worst of them tend to be assholes who disrupt solder's funerals. The very small handful who turn to violence can be easily handled (and are easily handled) by the police. They are such a tiny minority that they can be dismissed as mentally deranged. The only two groups of people who have a very large number of very violent terrorists are radical leftists and radical Islam. All, or very nearly all the mass shootings of the past decade have been perpetrated by radical leftists who were on psychiatric medication, the other groups causing trouble, the Black Lives Matter people who burnt Ferguson and Baltimore to the ground, they are opportunistic nihilistic leftists. I have yet to see a prototypical far right group like the KKK or Neo-Nazis kill a lot of people in the US in the past two decades. And there is no small minority of Muslims who support terror. In every majority Muslim country surveyed the majority of the populations, while not terrorists themselves, support terrorism, or at the very least a strict interpretation of Shariah that says infidels have no rights, women are property, gays should be murdered, and Christians and Jews should be second-class citizen dhimis. Religions do not need to get with the program and integrate modernity, not to eliminate terrorism, cultural Marxism and radical Islam need to stop seeing terrorism as a means to achieve political ends.

Ancient Versus Modern Views of Religion

"I'M GOD! WHO THE HELL ELSE WOULD I BE?!"



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.



It's just like, where did the idea that the Christian God is Zeus + Santa Claus come from? Maybe people, possibly idiots, would look at woodcuts from the middle ages and see images of a bearded God, but those are just a form of short hand. They're like using G to stand for the gravitational constant. When a physicist today writes G in an equation, or draws a diagram of electrons orbiting an atom like mini planets that's not meant to be taken literally, it's just an easy to remember reference. No physicist thinks electrons are little balls circling around the nucleus just like no medieval theologian thought God looked like an old man in the clouds (nor did the Bible writers). And where does the idea that God shoots lightning bolts come from?



Judaism and Islam both have strict prohibition against any depiction of God, and Christianity was like that for a long time too. Jesus had taken human form, so there's nothing wrong there, but God the Father is formless, and everybody knew that for a thousand years. At most artists would depict a hand reaching out from the clouds as a representation of God's interaction with the world, but no one believed God really had hands or lived in the clouds. It was not until much later that restrictions were relaxed and then a bunch of people who probably didn't believe in God all that strongly began experimenting with art and started to depict God in human form.



When losers and defeatists within the naytheist and the "new age" community always bring up the idea of God as Santa + Zeus living in the clouds, this is either a symptom of extreme laziness or is a deliberate malicious presentation of a cartoon version of God that no one believes in so as to mock religion. "I believe in 'god' (Gaia, The Force, whatever bullshit extremely watered-down abstraction "new age" people like to use) but I don't believe in 'god' as an old man in the clouds." Well, neither does anyone. Neither HAS anyone, ever, believed God was an old man in the clouds. It's an artistic representation, not meant to be taken as literal. Don't be stupid. The "new age" person implicitly continues in the original statement "I believe in a god that is my own ego, that permits me to do whatever I want and makes me happy without imposing any restrictions, because restrictions are meanness, not like recommendations from a doctor or a therapist 'if you want to improve X aspect of your life, here's a list of activities you should do. If you want to run a four minute mile, here's a workout regiment, if you want to know Truth, here's a method for looking into the deepest aspects of your mind.'"



Don't be stupid. The purpose of religion is not to stroke your ego, the purpose of religion is to completely and permanently destroy your ego. You're not supposed to like it. You're not supposed to like the restrictions placed on your animal nature. Religion is not a social club, it's not dancing or sticking your ass into the air on a vinyl mat or detoxing with green coffee enemas after a night of anonymous sex and heroin use.



That's why I can't stand the three main groups of people engaged in the whole religion issue, because they're all profoundly misinformed and anti-intellectual.



You have the naytheists who go to revival meetings where they bray about how they don't believe in God and worship "science" which makes as much sense as worshiping algebra. "Science" is nothing, can do nothing, has done nothing. Individual scientists - causal agents - are responsible for all the discoveries of "science". These people read the inner flap of Dick-to-the-Dawk-to-the-PhD's book and then know-it-all-ism takes place. They think a re-packaged argument that the Scholastics refuted a thousand years ago is the be all end all of religion and then they act like douchebag teenagers.



You have "new age" or "spiritual but not religious" people who are suffused with holier than thou mentality because they're not Christian and they worship the cultural zeitgeist of postmodern cultural marxism. That's what being "spiritual but not religious" means: Cultural Marxism + belief in The Force from Star Wars. If the TV comedian tells you to believe something about religion or politics or anything, that's what you believe in coupled with literal belief in The Force. You dare not say God, because that's masculinist. You'll worship gaya or divine vagina or midichlorians because it's softer and not judgmental of deviant behaviour, it's just super duper judgmental of the values that built Western culture and invented everything you use on a daily basis.



Then you have the super duper throwback Lutherians. I think they are called Evangelicals, but they worship the perversion of Christianity invented by Martin Luther, the most Devil obsessed man in the history of the world. The Catholic Church had, and still has, a tremendous intellectual tradition. Most of the great Western universities began as Catholic seminaries. The Church preserved the Graeco-Roman world while books were being burned everywhere else for firewood. Then Luther came along and decided to do the exact opposite of everything Jesus actually said and invented a religion out of it. If Jesus said sell everything you have and give it to the poor, and not to worry about life, God will provide for you, Luther believed to work from the moment you open your eyes until the moment you pass out at night, never have a moment of fun, and hoard all your money like a miser, never spending a cent. Poor? The poor don't deserve charity, they should start a business. Intellectual tradition? One book is sufficient. Read the Bible and throw everything else out, including the newspaper. These people worship ignorance. The more ignorant they are the prouder they are. It's the same worship of ignorance and reliance of a single book that makes Islam the scourge of God. These people are the anti-naytheists. Naytheists worship "science", Luther's followers don't believe science exists. It's witchcraft. The Church a thousand years ago said witches are fake and the world is not demon haunted. It was a much later development, of Luther's followers, who invented the idea of witches and demons having unlimited power. UFOs are demons! They want to challenge your ignorance of one book! Ghosts are demons! Never mind that the Bible mentions genuine encounter with deceased spirits and says they were who they said they were, with Saul contacting Samuel, not a demon impersonating Samuel, and Jesus brought Moses and Elijah's spirits on the mountain, not demons impersonating them to test your faith. That voice you hear on the telephone is a demon! Medicine is a trick by demons! These people are obsessed with demons. That's all they ever think about. Everything is a demon to them.



And that's very nearly all the people you'll find on the Internet, and probably in real life too. Douchebag teenagers who "know" God doesn't exist because Newton can predict the gravitational constant, Cultural Marxists who worship deviancy, and demon obsessed hillbilly Christians who are proud of ignorance. And how far have I deviated from the original topic?

What Drives Radical Islam?

Why do all these really hardcore jihadis come from the West? "Jihadi John", the man in all those beheading videos, is from Britain, all the 9/11 terrorists were educated in Western universities. Why? All of a sudden, in a flash of insight, it makes sense. The West is so empty of meaning, so narcissistic, so apathetic, so materialistic, suffused with extreme relativism and leftism that despises religion, despises family, despises community, worships sin. When I see Westerners practice other religions – Hinduism, Buddhism – about 90% seem to me to be fake, empty. Most Christians seem fake, most Jews seem fake, but there are still millions of Westerners who are authentic Christians and Jews, but when they practice other religions it comes across as nothing but feel-good-ism. These people hate Christianity and authentic Western values, the values that led to a few backwater kingdoms in Europe to dominate the entire world in a couple of centuries, to rise above everything all other empires had created, to develop modern science, to develop industry, to delve into the depths of space and microscopic physics, these people hate the values that built all that. They want to get together, to practice "religion" with no strings attached: no sin, no morality aside from progressivism. They're all hippie leftists. Occasionally you'll get a Westerner to adopt religion fully, like Muho Noelke, the German man who became a Zen abbot, but most are just cafeteria style "spiritual but not religious" leftists. Disgusted by the lack of values, the lack of true religion in the West, the men who become jihadis latch onto the one system that promises them the rigor and authenticity they seek: radical Islam. It reaches its hand out to them, beckoning them to kill the Western world that has embraced everything they despise. Ken Wilber says that these people reject modernity, but they don't, they reject boomeritis, they reject the diseased version of modernity, not the healthy version of modernity that existed up until the 1950s. To defeat Jihad we need a rebirth of religion in the West. No military solution will do. Bombing jihadis will solve the problem for now, but they'll always keep coming back, just like the tumor that you cut out will keep growing back. Jihad is a disease of the mind, and no pill, no surgery can cure the mind, only right thinking can cure the mind. The only cure for bad religion is good religion.

Here's Why We Win

In
nature, which always triumphs, the one with the most children is able to
out compete everyone else. The progressives who have at best one, or no
children, there is no way they can beat religious people in the long
run, as a central tenant of most religions is to have lots of children
and spread out over the earth. Someone with one child is, genetically, a
loser compared to someone with seven
children. In fact, the only reason progressives still exist in 2014 is
because they spent the 20th century culling the population of religious
people, with the murder of over half a billion (China CELEBRATES 500
million abortions since Mao took over, to say nothing of the 200+
million killed during all the atheistic regimes - with a single Germanic
pagan occult exception). Progressivism can only exist by murdering vast
numbers of religious people.

It doesn't matter if short term
trends indicate a growth of secularism over the past fifty years. Fifty
years is a blink of the eye in terms of natural time scales. Written
history occupies only about 0.0025% of the total amount of time humans
have been around, and that was 5000 years. Secularism is over if it
keeps oppressing religion the way it is, and if secular people keep
trying to bring about their own extinction by not breeding.

It
is the very conceit of these people that will be their downfall. A
culture that values individual pleasure over strong communities and lots
of children is, in evolutionary terms, dysfunctional. It is an
aberration, a disease, a mistake nature will soon correct. That is why
Japan will collapse before the end of the century, as will China. Russia
is taking steps to correct the situation before it is too late, by
curtailing abortions which currently outnumber live births (more babies
in Russia are murdered than are actually born!). Russia is taking the
hard steps necessary for biological survival by telling the children
"your personal pleasure does not trump the needs of society," a lesson
many in the West refuse to listen to (Remember Star Trek, when Spock
sacrificed himself? And we still haven't learned).

The United
States? The Dollar is over. There is absolutely no saving it. Many
countries are already dumping the Dollar when purchasing oil. The
economy WILL collapse, totally, and soon. And when it does all the
fashionable people who love abortions, hate guns, and have eliminated
from themselves all manner of survival instincts while praising their
bestial sexcapades, will be among the first wave to go in the mass
die-offs. Before 2100, and I'm predicting closer to 2064, progressivism
will be over. Secularism in the United States will be over. Nature will
correct itself, as it always does, and to the breeders go the spoils.
They may celebrate the victories they have stolen, the worst generation
in the history of the planet may celebrate their whole childless lives
(unless they purchase children as status symbols) in their progressive
wonderland, but they're it. They will be the last generation to
celebrate their sickness. The future belongs to the religious.

Idiots, Normals, Smarties, and Genii

 An article from Yahoo claims that "more intelligent" people tend to be atheists.



Who are these "more intelligent" people who are less likely to believe in God? Isaac Newton, probably the most influential scientist of all time, spent thousands of hours more studying Biblical prophecy than he did physics. All his scientific endeavors were conducted as an act of worship. James Clerk Maxwell, the second most influential scientist of all time, was also very religious, going so far as to become an elder of the Church of Scotland. Louis Pasteur, Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Nikola Tesla, Gregor Mendel, Michael Faraday, Robert Boyle, Galileo Galilei*, Gottfried Leibniz, Johannes Kepler, John Eccles, Werner Heisenberg, William Thomson Kelvin, Francis Bacon, and Rene Descartes all believed in God. Even Charles Darwin believed in God until much later in his life, and so did Alfred Russel Wallace, whom Darwin stole his evolutionary theory from. I'm left to wonder, are these "more intelligent" atheists "more intelligent" than the people I just listed? If they are not then why the fudge should I give a flying feather what they think?



The article says that these "more intelligent" people are really people with higher IQs, and they show a picture of Richard Dawkins holding up a picture of himself as an example, I guess, when the smartest thing Dawkins ever did was buy that really nice suit he's wearing in the picture (his selfish gene idea is intriguing, but I don't think it holds much water, he did create the word "meme", unfortunately, so that'll cost him some points, and everything he did after that is pure garbage). According to the article there was "a life-long analysis of the beliefs of a group of 1,500 gifted children - those with IQs over 135." Well, there's your first problem. Okay, your second problem. It is almost impossible to accurately assess the IQs of children, to say nothing of the fact that IQ doesn't really mean anything anyway.



What do I think? I think it has to do with know-it-all-ism. "More intelligent" people tend not to fit in as well with normal people and social isolation + greater capacity for X = ego boost. "I don't fit in because I'm better than everyone else." Someone with know-it-all-ism is more likely to believe that one knows it all, and is less likely to appreciate just how much one does not know. Someone with know-it-all-ism is also less likely to go with the crowd just because it's something to do, being different for the sake of being different, or because "I'm better than everyone else."



On the contrary, a true genius has risen above the show all together and realises "I may know more than everyone, but in the grand scheme of things I really know shit." A genius is thus more likely to appreciate the mysteries necessary for spiritual beliefs. That is why the vast majority of the world-changing geniuses believe in God or some higher order of the universe while the merely "smart" people are more likely to be atheists.









*Who was imprisoned because he wrote a satire about the Pope, who was also the leading temporal authority of the time, making Galileo's writing an act of treason, NOT because he wrote about a heliocentric solar system. There was no official Church position on cosomology at the time. The ammended geocentric model of Ptolemy made better predictions than the heliocentric model created by Copernicus because he got the orbits of the planets wrong, and it was this greater accuracy with predictability that made most people accept the geocentric model at the time. The idea that Galileo was arrested because the Church is anti-science is a load of horseshit propaganda.

The President's Speech at Ohio State University

The President told the Ohio State University graduating class of 2013: "You'll hear voices telling you that 'the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,' and that 'all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,' or maybe that 'when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.' These voices that you hear, hallucinate maybe, might even tell you that these voices have 'sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.' You should reject these voices. Because they aren't real. CPS should have abducted you as a child and given you six psychotropic drugs and murdered you because that's what they do, CPS takes kids and murders them. Because you're hearing voices. Yours is a generation possessed, but not by demons or the spirit of Thomas Jefferson, because we have thrown aside all those notions with the adoption of communism, which says that when you die you rot and if you're hearing voices you're insane and need deadly drugs that are a hundred times worse than the condition they are supposed to treat. I'm from the government, and I'm here to help. Barack Hussein Obama, mmm mmm mmm! I won the Nobel Peace Prize and I didn't do shit! We should have more government, because it's not what you can do for your country, it's what welfare you can get from your neighbors who are working hard for little pay. We should have a civilian Brownshirt army as powerful as, if nor more powerful than, our United States Army. The United States is bad. George W. Bush is the reason the Islamic world hates us, the United States stole most of its land from Mexico, and we need to ban guns because 'no one needs ten bullets to kill a deer,' because, hey, the Second Amendment is about hunting, not about defending your liberty from a tyrannical government. The founders certainly didn't use guns to defend their liberty from a tyrannical government, starting a new nation, and 'that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.' Nope. Never happened. We are one nation under government, because 'we are all socialists now.' Benghazi? Totally not an inside job. We didn't have multiple warnings, we weren't watching the events unfold via drones, we didn't give any troops a stand down order, we didn't blame the event on a video no one watched, and we certainly didn't track down the man who made said video and make him disappear in a plot to silence all opposition to our New World Order power grabbing scheme. Those new testimonies that just came out in the hearings on Benghazi? You should totally ignore them, because they are part of the 'vast right-wing conspiracy', as my friend Hilldog likes to call it, because she is certainly not a traitor for condemning four Americans to be raped and tortured to death in Benghazi. 'What difference does it make' if Hillary sent four Americans to their death and then lied about it? 'What difference does it make?' So, yeah, you shouldn't listen to those voices that you hallucinate, because they aren't real. The government is your God now. Obama's in his Washington, all's right with the world."



This is the short version of the speech, with all the dead air and stumbling over words omitted. Here is a bit of the unedited transcript: "You'll uuh... uuuuuuhhhhh... hear uuhh... voices telling um, a bunch... you that 'the uuhhhh... tree of um liberty must uuuuhhhhh... uuhhhhh... uuhhh... be uuhhh... refreshed from uuhhhh... time to um time with the um blood of um patriots uuhhhhhh..... and uhhhhh....tyrants,'" because we all know that he is the great communicator. He is articulate and clean.

Anthony Flew on Why He Became a Deist

Anthony Flew, the world's greatest athiest, was one of the last true philosophical athiests (as opposed to the "new" atheists who belong to the religion of fundamaterialism). He was not wed to any particular ideas, but was willing to follow the evidence and argumentation wherever it led.



Journalist and well known advocate for Christianity Lee Strobel interviews Anthony here regarding his conversion from atheism to deism. What prompted the change? The very thing the new atheists oppost most vehemently: intelligent design. The design in nature and more importantly the design in life is undeniable to anyone with intellectual honesty. To put it simply: life could in no way arise through natural processes, it had to be created by a very powerful intelligent agent (the odds of all the proteins necessary for a cell to spontaneously arise through stochastic processes on the early Earth is something like 1 in 10^4000, or completely impossible even if the universe was around for trillions of years).



The video is 18 minutes long and more than worth your time.

Petrus Romanus

Pope Benedict XVI, age 85, has announced that his health is too poor to faithfully fulfill his duties as Pope, and he will step down on 28 February, being the first Pope to step down in 598 years. He is a very courageous man and I applaude his decision.



Pope Benedict is also a theologin, and well aware (as is everyone in the Vatican) of the prophecy of Saint Malachy. The prophecy, which was hidden in Vatican archives for nearly five centuries, reveals a highly accurate list of 112 future Popes, following Innocent II, until the end of days (starring Richard Harris). Pope Benedict XVI, who took his name from Saint Benedict, founder of the Benedictine Order, the symbol of which is an olive branch, was the  111th Pope on the list.



There is one Pope left. The final part of the prophecy (according to wiki translation) reads: "In the extreme persecution of the Holy Roman Church, there will sit Peter the Roman, who will pasture his sheep in many tribulations:

and when these things are finished, the city of seven hills will be destroyed,

and the terrible judge will judge his people.

The End.



If the prophecy is correct, and it has been scary accurate so far, the next Pope, who is expected to be selected before Easter, will preside over the Church during the end of days. Just when the end of days will begin no one can say, but there are supposed to be seven years of tribulations ultimately culminating in the creation of the new Heaven and new Earth; the final defeat of sin and death, and the glorious reign of the Lord forever.



Now, the official position of the Catholic Church and fundamaterialist archskep-dicks is that the prophecy is a 17th century forgery, which is probably the only thing both groups agree on. Supposedly, since the prophecy is "too accurate" it must have been fabricated to take into account the past Popes, and that, supposedly, all the predictions after the document was released to the public have to be fudged to fit. Unfortunately for both that's not true, as anyone can see that the later predictions have indeed been eerily accurate. Here are just a few:



* Benedict XV (1914-1922) was prophecised as "religion destroyed." He reigned during the rapid rise of Communism, which saw hundreds of millions of people forced into atheism, attempts by the Soviet Union to destroy the Russian Orthodox Church, and the First World War that led to widespread disillusionment with religion among the peoples of Europe.



* Pius XI (1922-1939) was prophecised as "intrepid faith." He stared down fascist dictator Benito Mussolini to establish the Vatican as an independent state, freeing it from decades of oppression by the Italian government.



* Pius XII (1939-1958) was the "angelic shepherd" who first sheltered the Roman Jews during the Holocaust, and later made pleas to the Hungarian government to protect the Jewish population of their country as well.



* John XXIII (1958-1963) "Shepherd and sailor." He was Patriarch of Venice, the spiritual leader of probably the world's most famous maritime city.



* Paul VI (1963-1978) "Flower of flowers." His coat of arms contains three fleur de lis.



* John Paul I (1978) "From the midst of the moon." His reign began during a half moon, and lasted one month.



* John Paul II (1978-2005) "From the labour of the sun." He was born during a solar eclipse and later entombed during another solar eclipse.



The past seven Popes have been predicted with stunning accuracy. If the document were a forgery how could a forger have gotten such a remarkable string of hits three hundred years after the document was supposedly written for political purposes? Even if you don't believe the prophecy to be genuine (I do), this is still a highly significant time historically. We are living during the last days of a prediction made 900 or 300 years ago, depending upon which side you take, which may or may not have had a significant influence on the past several centuries of Church history. Either way, we are living in interesting times.



Always love.

Spiritual but not Religious Psychosis?

There is a story in the Daily Telegraph about a study conducted at University College London that proports to claim that people who are traditionally religious, agnostics, and atheists are perfectly sane, but people who claim to be spiritual but not religious are nuts.



According to the study "[spiritual people] were 77 per cent more likely than the others to be
dependent on drugs, 72 per cent more likely to suffer from a phobia, and 50
per cent more likely to have a generalised anxiety disorder." The researchers concluded "'there is increasing evidence that
people who profess spiritual beliefs in the absence of a religious framework
are more vulnerable to mental disorder.

"The nature of this association needs greater examination in qualitative and
in prospective quantitative research.'" 

Why am I not surprised?



A person named Meg969 commented on the article "No panic folks, take it easy. :DTranslating into common English it means that 'spiritual' people know more, hear more, see more and feel more than others and so it is obvious they will feel agitated (after all they are people as well) more often than the 'rest'. Besides, spiritual people may indeed experience aspects of life to a bigger extent than others but at the same time they may find more strenght to control or abandon their addictives. Nothing new was found really. London team just trying to put it all into a negative context for spiritual people and the society in overall? I have a funny feeling this article aims to simply conclude that spiritual people are basically mentally unstable."



I tend to agree, and so does Ken Wilber.





The more perspectives you can take on the larger the field of your awareness and the less attached to this little identity you have constructed in this life. At the same time you are more tacitly aware of suffering in the world and feel more deeply. If you have not made the monumental leap to second tier you are stuck in the existential halfway house and life pretty much sucks for you.





At the same time, we can look at these findings in another way. People with higher intelligence and psychological trauma may look to spirituality as a means of finding relief from their problems because neither traditional religion or atheism have the tools necessary to meet their needs. In other words, spiritual people are not necessarily more likely to develop psychological problems, people with psychological problems are more likely to develop spirituality.



Now here's what's really gonna' bake your noodle. What is the point of this story? I could have told you all this without having to do some expensive study that "requires much more research dollars". I'm not sure, but somewhere among the 400 previous posts on The Urban Mystic, I probably did talk about this before.



My old teacher always admonished us to look at who was saying what and to understand their biases to understand what they were saying better. Understanding the Telegraph's political leanings makes the spin they put on this story very clear. What is the only thing that organised religion fears more than atheism? People who are not atheists who do not need organised religion. A center right publication like the Telegraph is sticking with the Church of England, and if people can find God without the Church then they are a bigger threat than Dawkins and his laughable rehashes of Fifth Century arguments against God's existence that are packaged in a cheap tuxedo of scientistic materialism. The Church can use the atheists as a foil to strenghten its grip on its members, but as soon as a rival appears on the God scene they start to lose it. The simple Church-atheist dichotomy breaks apart just like the left-right dichotomy was shattered in my brilliant video Integral Politics. It's all just a dog and pony show to distract you from the truth and maintain a ridged grip on power.

God, Evil, and Richard Swinburne

Richard Swinburne, one of the greatest living philosophers, tackles the atheist toolbox of arguments. A good video, aside from that echo.

Alvin Plantinga Versus The Atheists

Alvin Plantinga deconstructs common arguments used by atheists against God's existence and then states why he believes in God (2 videos).

Christopher Hitchens In Memoriam

Christopher Hitchens has died 15 December 2011 from pneumonia at the age of 62. The famous outspoken atheist intellectual, author of many articles and the book God Is Not Great, was diagnosed with esophageal cancer last year. Many will remember him as the atheist who was not a liberal (though, as he said many times, he was not conservative either). He attacked Noam Chomsky and Gore Vidal for saying that US foreign policy created al Qaeda and that 9/11 was due punishment for American imperialism. He defended the atomic bombing of Japan at the end of the Second World War, and called out Hitler and Stalin as the two evilest people ever. While an outspoken atheist, Hitchens extended his gratitude toward those who prayed for him during his time of need.



Here is David Berlinski's eulogy.

Why Dawkins Doesn't Debate Craig

Dick-to-the-Dawk-to-the-PhD won't debate William Lane Craig because he's scared there's a huge likelihood that he'll lose, but instead makes up fake reasons like: "I'll only debate members of the Church establishment and not professional debaters," and "Craig believes in genocide because he's a Christian." Other atheists are calling Dawk out on being a pussy. This guy (don't know who) posted two videos showing Craig destroy Dawk's fellow nay-theists Peter Atkins and Sam Harris with the remark "I think the real reason for Dawkins’s refusal to debate Craig is plain enough to see."



Here are the videos below:





Atkins





Harris

Exploring the Near Death Experience

Someone called TheSurvivalIndex has put out a 15 minute video detailing the cultural phenomena associated with the NDE. He says three main groups of people form the bulk of the popular presentation on the NDE:
1. Fundamentalist Christians,
2. New Age Haberdashers, and
3. Fundamaterialist Skep-Dicks.
Group 1 latches on to the pro-Fundamentalist Christian NDEs as proof of their beliefs and ignores or even denigrates NDEs that are favourable to other religions or to no religions at all (like atheists who have NDEs that tell them part of their life's mission is to be an atheist). Group 2 extrapolates from the NDE to believe all sorts of stuff that most likely is untrue (Loch Ness Monster, Fairies, Vampires, etc.*) and often tries to profit large offering spurious services to unknowledgable people. Group 3 likes to come up with bullshit just-so stories to explain away the NDE because they are committed to materialism, even when those stories blatantly ignore real facts, are based on illogic, and other fundamaterialists disagree and tear apart opposing stories. All three groups are able to thrive because the general populous doesn't actually read the primary material - actual NDE accounts and the reports of NDE investigators. Even though all three groups are contradicted by the evidence that doesn't bother them because as long as the vast majority of people are ignorant of that evidence they can still come off looking like authority figures.










*I'm not necessarily saying things like the Loch Ness Monster and fairies are not real - they may be - but I have looked into the topics and can't really find any good evidence for them. Loch Ness almost certainly can't support a single large creature, let alone a breeding population. There were biosonar signals detected in Lake Champlain though, indicating that, while not a "monster" there has to be a freshwater equivalent of a cetacean, something that has never before been seen. Things like fairies, gnomes, and other little people stretch my credulity a might, but they may have something to do with some spiritual force, I don't know and am open to the possibility. Vampires, either corpses reanimated by evil spirits (as the original vampires were), people infected with a virus that compells them to drink blood, or these psychic vampires who are real people who claim to drain people's energy in some way they never quite explain, are probably one of the least likely of these "paranormal" phenomena. If vampires reproduce like zombies there should have been a "vampire" apocalypse by now. The vampires in the Blade movies kept changing to suit the story and the Underworld vampires were never really explained very well, so I don't know how they stayed in hiding all these centuries. Psychic vampirism appears to be a lifestyle choice, like hippies or bikers other such groups, and probably aren't vampires at all, although they get happiness from playing a role. There are people who are difficult or depressed or assaholic and drain your energy that way, but there's nothing "paranormal" about that.

Imagine No Religion

I'm not sure John Lennon meant "no religion" to mean everyone should be an atheist. He was a lot smarter than that. Just looking at the most horrible acts of the twentieth century make the fact clear that atheism in its various guises (social Darwinism, communism, eugenics) caused more human suffering than anything else besides Smallpox. What I think he meant was that shouldn't have the fierce sectarian divisions that often come with religion. We have such gems of quotes from Lennon on religion as:



“People got the image I was anti-Christ or antireligion,” he said. “I’m not at all. I’m a most religious fellow. I’m religious in the sense of admitting there is more to it than meets the eye. I’m certainly not an atheist.”



He also didn't believe in Darwinism:



“Nor do I think we came from monkeys, by the way,” he insisted. “That’s another piece of garbage. What the hell’s it based on? We couldn’t’ve come from anything—fish, maybe, but not monkeys. I don’t believe in the evolution of fish to monkeys to men. Why aren’t monkeys changing into men now? It’s absolute garbage.”



Unfortunately people do misappropriate Lennon's music and his image. There are those who claim that religion is the root of all evil while ignoring all the good it does (what Ken Wilber calls the conveyor belt; I've also argued a lot about Christianity's integral role in ending slavery). Well, getting on topic, finally, here is the ultimate outcome of a society that has ditched religion, leveled off on flatland narcissism, and believes in nothing: the UK riots.



A country with cradle to craftmatic adjustable bed handouts, where no one has to work because they get government stipends, where everyone gets free (albeit very shitty) health care, could not help but explode when those handouts are taken away. The UK is broke so they decided to cut back on a pittance of the handouts so know-it-all teenagers dediced to smash stuff for no evident reason. Lots of buildings were destroyed and people killed (there may be racist elements involved). Of course you could say if people were allowed to own guns they could defend themselves, their families, and even total strangers, but the UK is ruled by a king (a queen actually; there won't be a king for a while), and kings love to have a control on the possession of weapons. Absent the ability to own guns, sales of baseball bats rose three hundred percent (my estimate) because everyone over 20 was afraid for their lives as know-it-all teenagers with immortality complexes destroyed everything insane.



The author, A. N. Wilson, has some brilliant points to make:



A Christian woman working for British Airways who wears a cross round her neck is asked to remove it for fear of offending other people. A nurse who prays with a patient in hospital is committing an almost criminal act. Catholic adoption agencies which disapprove of gay adoptive parents on religious grounds have their licences taken away.



And all the while, our governing classes and academics and teachers chip away at the fundamental truths of the great religions — truths that have stood the test of time for thousands of years — in their arrogant certainty that there are no moral absolutes and that the human race can make up the rules as it goes along.



At the nuttier fringes of the chattering classes there are those, like the geneticist Richard Dawkins and the journalist Christopher Hitchens, who actually believe that religion is a mental poison responsible for all the evils in the world.



The misguided and vacuous thinking of these so-called intellectuals is compounded by a sordid celebrity-culture which holds up role models who should be despised rather than admired.



Amy Winehouse, a pathetic drug-infused alcoholic girl of very modest talent, is held up as great diva; and when she died, her house was surrounded by fans, laying empty vodka bottles as a ‘tribute’.



What happens when you imagine a world with no religion? I don't have to imagine, I can just look across the pond to see how a society lacking morality and values is faling apart. How long before the madness comes to America? I don't know, but here's something I wrote a few months ago that may help:



In 2008 I said Obama would be like four more terms of Bush.

In 2009 I said I never imagined things could ever get this bad.

In 2010 I wished I was back in 2009.

In 2011 I said the world had gone mad.

Now I'm saying the world will not last till the end of 2012.



If we ever needed to heed Lennon's advice to "give peace a chance" now is that time.