Brian Williams Was There

Islam: The Untold Story

Tom Holland's documentary film on the early history if Islam. In the 7th century the Arabs came out of nowhere, taking advantage of war and plague that devastated the Roman and Persian empires, conquering most of the known world, but there is very little evidence that these early Arab conquerors were motivated by Islam. Who was the real Muhammad? How was the Quran first written? How much of the official origin story of Islam is real and how much was invented after the fact, a century or more later, to justify the conquests of the Arabs generations earlier? It's well known that the Saudi government has been destroying early Islamic sites for years, including a house that was claimed to be the birthplace of Muhammad. Why would a people willfully erase their own history, unless there is something they are trying to hide?



Tom Holland suggests that the true origins of Islam and Muhammad came not from Arabia, but from the Negev, and it was not until much later that the Mecca story was invented to further distance Islam from Christianity and Judaism. This could explain why the early sites are being destroyed, not because of the danger of idolatry, but because those sites were fakes, built centuries later, and the Wahhabis in the Saudi government don't want anyone - especially devout Muslims - from discovering that the buildings and cemeteries date from well after the life of Muhammad and his companions. It could also explain why the Quran makes more sense when read in Syriac (the language used in the Negev and Sinai at the time) than when read in Arabic.



Runs 71 minutes.







In case of further questions, the author of the program has written a follow up article addressing various criticisms.

Interview With The Sage

Franklin Merrell-Wolff (11 July 1887 - 4 October 1985), affectionately referred by his followers as Dr. Wolff, was a brilliant American philosopher and mathematician who explored various religious movements (Sufism, Theosophy, Kriya Yoga), culminating in experience of Satori in 1936. In 1982 Faustin Bray conducted this interview with  in support of a documentary being produced to save an
ashram he built in the Sierra Nevada. Runs 8:30

Pyramid Secrets Revealed

Jean-Pierre Houdin, French architect, quit his job and sold his home so he could devote himself 24 hours a day for five years to solve the mystery of how the Great Pyramid was built. The result of all that work is probably the only credible hypothesis anyone has ever come up with. Working with Egyptologist Bob Brier, Houdin visits Egypt to look for evidence of his internal ramp hypothesis and does not leave empty handed. It turns out there is a lot of supporting evidence of an internal ramp. Houdin's hypothesis also explains the mystery of the Grand Gallery, a feature that appears in no other pyramid. He proposes that a series of sledges holding heavy counterweights were placed inside the Grand Gallery, permitting a handful of men to lift the mammoth 60 tonne granite stones found in the King's Chamber, a feat that would have been impossible to achieve with manpower alone. Houdin's hypothesis also explains the meaning of the machines that were said to be used to construct the pyramid. It turns out the whole structure was one giant machine after all, designed to build itself from the inside out. No aliens are required to explain the pyramid and our intelligence is not insulted with fanciful notions of thousands of men hauling stones up a giant ramp that would be many times larger than the pyramid itself.



Runs 51 minutes.

Freedom

Richard Rose: Zen and Death

Do we want the Truth or do we want to be "educated"? There is a tendency of people in control, whether in universities or in governments, to want to "educate". Not for the Truth, but for the convenience of the moment, thinking they are the prophets of the zeitgeist, and by their manipulation of the public mind the will bring people around to the "right" direction.
- Richard Rose

Richard Rose talks on everything. He talks about the four categories of mystical experiences, how society conditions us to believe lies regarding who we are and what death is, the near death experience, and the importance of finding the Truth and who we really are. We exist before we are born and continue to exist after we die. The purpose of life is finding this Truth out for ourselves through direct experience. Runs 1 hour 10 minutes.

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.