CosmicTribune-Editor

Religion and Exopolitics

2008-05-17T03:21:00.001-04:00

Published by the editors of http://www.cosmictribune.com/ct

Exopolitics and Religion

By Hal McKenzie

Abstract

Exopolitics deals with the political implications of intelligent extraterrestrial life on the earth, but the alien presence brings with it vast philosophical and theological implications that cannot be ignored. Ideas have political consequences, so a clear understanding of these religious and philosophical implications would enable mankind to deal with the alien presence more effectively.

Unfortunately, both the mainstream scientific and religious establishments are currently sunk in deep denial about the extraterrestrial presence, which makes it impossible to arrive at a clear understanding that could guide mankind along the optimum path. Ending that denial would fundamentally change both scientific and religious paradigms, and of course there are always those who fear and resist change.

Contrary to their fears, however, such a change would be for the greater good of both religious believers and scientific secularists. In fact, as this paper will attempt to prove, exopolitics is the key ingredient for bridging the seemingly unbridgeable gulf that has existed for centuries between the religious and scientific world views.

Debate over semantics

The end of government UFO secrecy might unearth documents that would shake the religious world. For example, engineer Bob Lazar, who claimed to have worked on alien technology at Area 51 in Nevada, told interviewer George Knapp that he saw a thick folder dealing with religion that said aliens played a role in human evolution, using humans as “containers,” and had a hand in the birth of Jesus. (1) This is a theme that has been aired by New Age writers before, but outrages traditional religious leaders who vigorously deny that God or his angels are ETs.

Their objections are purely semantic. If one believes the Bible to be true, one believes in extraterrestrials. The Bible mentions a plethora of off-world beings, among them God Himself, the Sons of God in Genesis Ch. 6 who before the Flood mated with earth women to sire the “giants” of old (“Nephilim” in Hebrew), and angels called cherubim and seraphim. Every major religion recounts tales of celestial beings coming from the sky, whether they are called valkyries, apsaras, devas or angels. Whether or not they wear spacesuits and fly around in spaceships, they all have extraterrestriality in common.

The debate between creationism and evolution is also mostly semantic. The story of creation in Genesis is similar to scientific concepts of the earth’s development in that it involves a progression over time, except that fundamentalists insist on translating a “day” of creation as 24 hours. What, however, is a “day?” Einstein taught us that time is relative. Twenty-four hours for someone traveling at near-light speed could be a million years for someone on the earth. If one believes Genesis to be a true revelation from a divine being, then the days of creation would have to be “god days,” not human days.

The controversy over the current “intelligent design” movement among scientists, which mainstream scientists dismiss as merely Biblical creationism in a new guise, is rendered moot if one acknowledges the reality of extraterrestrial intelligence. Let us assume for the sake of argument that intelligence evolved from random chemical reactions and Darwinian evolution. At some point, the intelligent beings that evolve this way would become aware of the evolutionary process and begin to tamper with it. Human beings have been doing this almost from the beginning of civilization, as for example with breeds of dogs and other livestock and food crops. Now we are altering genes on the cellular level with bioengineered crops and animals. In short, intelligent design is already a factor in evolution simply from our own activity.

Since we know as an established fact that we share this universe with intelligent beings far more advanced than we are, it is logical to assume that such genetic tampering had been going on for a much longer time and in much greater depth. Just as dog breeds are a result of human “intelligent design,” it is quite possible, even likely, that the human race developed at least partly through genetic engineering by a more advanced race or races.

The issue of origins, whether life came from a creator or by random chance, is also merely an academic point. Nineteenth Century scientists assumed that time moved in a straight line, or linearly. Modern astronomy and quantum physics, however, has shown that the universe is curved, and that time is not linear, but circular. Time travel, in which intelligent beings can influence the time streams of the past, is now accepted as a theoretical possibility.

Therefore, if intelligence were to develop anywhere in the time stream, it would inevitably feed back on itself, creating a new time stream that starts with intelligent design. The god-like level of intelligence or organized complexity that linearly-thinking scientists imagine is ahead of us in the future would therefore actually be behind us in our past. In short, if one accepts the reality of extraterrestrial intelligence, then intelligent design as a factor in human origins is not only probable, but inescapable.

The rift between science and religion, which began when the Catholic Church rejected Copernicus’ and Galileo’s discovery that the earth revolves around the sun, is therefore a delusion born of ignorance and denial. It created a false dichotomy between the world of fact and the world of faith. It created two cultures that can’t communicate with each other, creating confusion and misunderstanding that blocks a clear understanding of the real universe.

Ancient Scientists/Priests

Throughout most of human history, religion and science were not separate. Indeed, those we call “priests” or “shamans” fulfilled the same function that scientists do today, and vice versa. Exceptionally perceptive men and women observed and recorded the movement of the stars and could predict equinoxes and solstices and give advice on when to plant and when to harvest. Stonehenge and other prehistoric megalithic sites were not only religious sites, but complex astronomical computers. Those sages of antiquity also carefully noted the medicinal qualities of plants and herbs to heal their people and used psychology to motivate and unite them.

No doubt they employed theatrics to impress the masses. They also entertained beliefs and misconceptions that were far from scientific by modern standards—for example magic, astrology, and alchemy. However, these early traditions of learning formed the foundation of today’s astronomy, physics, mathematics and chemistry, and ancient magical traditions have gained new respect recently from scientists and New Age thinkers.

There is also evidence that some of these prophets or high priests served as compradors for extraterrestrial civilizations, receiving scientific knowledge that supposedly couldn’t have been known without “modern” science. Andrew Tomas in his book We Are Not the First lists 27 scientific and technological ideas known to the ancients that were rediscovered with the rise of modern science (2). These include atomic theory, the theory of relativity, the age of the earth (which the Mahabarata set at 4.3 billion years, very close to today’s 4.6 billion estimate); planets beyond Saturn, the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, electric batteries (found in Babylon that were 2,000 years old), aviation, robots and computers, indoor plumbing and sanitation, and so on.

Tomas cites the “mysterious torchbearers of civilization who, at the dawn of history, imparted their knowledge to the astronomer-priests all over the globe” (3). Apparently Roswell was not the first time technology transfer occurred between extraterrestrials and humans as Philip Corso described in his book The Day After Roswell. (4)

Maurice Chatelain, a mathematician who worked on NASA’s Apollo program, concludes that extraterrestrials intervened in human history about 65,000 years ago, about the same time that anthropologists say homo sapiens, or modern man, appeared on the earth. He calculates this date from the “Nineveh Constant,” an astronomical number found on a tablet from the ruins of ancient Nineveh describing the “great year” when all the constellations return to the same position in the heavens. Chatelain says that this number, which ancient peoples could not have known without outside knowledge, must have been calculated 64,800 years ago. (5).

The knowledge of these priest/scientists invariably led the masses to stand in religious awe of them. The pipeline to the stars, however, was apparently only intermittent in nature. When the original source of knowledge withdrew, over time the priest/scientists were replaced by sycophants and frauds who mindlessly carried on rituals they did not understand or used their position only for personal power.

What is worse, religions that started out as great truths to benefit mankind degenerated into ideologies, superstitions and dogmas to benefit the ruling elite or to justify prejudices that led to bloody religious wars. This pattern continues today in sectarian violence in Ireland and the terrorism of Islamic extremists, but also infects materialists, as demonstrated by fascism and communism. The twisting of truth into ideologies to fit a partisan political agenda is the enemy of truth and must be fought anew in every age.

Truth is not the property of any individual or group, but exists independently of human perceptions. Both religion and science in their essence are efforts to understand the truth of our universe so we can live in it as best we can.

Memories Survive as Myths

Perhaps extraterrestrial intervention in man’s prehistory survives today in the Judeo-Christian myth of the coming of a supernatural messiah on the clouds of heaven. Such myths can be deadly, however. A similar myth was held by the Aztecs, who anticipated the return of the white, bearded god Quetzalcoatl, which some historians suspect were ancient Phoenecian travelers who imparted astronomical knowledge and the building of pyramids to Mesoamericans. Unfortunately for the Aztecs, they initially confused the rapacious Spanish conquistadors with the return of their hoped-for saviors.

Another more contemporary example is the “cargo cults” among Pacific islanders. During World War II some islanders living at a Stone Age level suddenly experienced enormous ships and planes disgorging fantastic machines and cargo that turned their world upside down as the U.S. military chose their island as an air base. Then after four years they just as suddenly packed up and departed. The poor islanders concocted a religion based on their longing for the return of the fabulous cargo, complete with native-built effigies of airplanes and a control tower to coax their saviors to return.

Scientists, for their part, have tended to dismiss the Bible and other religious scriptures. These scriptures, however, constitute a gold mine of useful data that scientists have overlooked, the most important being the historical record of man’s relationship with off-world intelligences. Science fiction writer Sir Arthur C. Clark said, “Technology sufficiently advanced would be indistinguishable from magic.” A logical corollary to that would be that those who wield such technology would be indistinguishable from gods.

In the South African movie, The Gods Must Be Crazy, a Kalahari bushman thought a Coke bottle dropped from an airplane was a gift from the gods. Modern man and his technology were god-like to him. Since we have already established that extraterrestrials with advanced technology have interacted with humanity, it is not farfetched to consider that early accounts of celestial beings chronicle close encounters with ETs.

Divinity and Velocity

One of the “magical” qualities attributed to gods, for example, is immortality, but that quality is simply a matter of velocity, according to Einstein. Poul Anderson’s science fiction classic, Tau Zero, examines the possible consequences of the time dilation phenomena Einstein discovered in his theory of relativity.(6)

The title of the book comes from the equation “Tau equals the square root of one minus v-squared over c-squared,” where v is the velocity of a spaceship and c is the speed of light. The closer v comes to c, that is, the closer the ship approaches the speed of light, the closer tau comes to zero, which is to say time slows down for the inhabitants of the space ship. In Anderson’s story, a group of explorers in a starship traveling at near-light speed are unable to decelerate after an accident damages their interstellar drive. As they go faster and faster, time dilation increases to the point that they watch the universe end its expansion phase and contract again in the so-called “Big Crunch.” Orbiting outside the primal plasma cloud, they find haven by surfing along with the next Big Bang and decelerating until they find a new planet where life has evolved sufficiently to sustain them. All this occurs in what is, for them, a matter of months, but encompasses many billions of years for the universe outside the spaceship.

This suggests that divinity is related to velocity. Because of the tau factor, any beings that achieve near light speeds would achieve immortality (relative to planet-bound beings). Other divine attributes like omnipotence and omniscience would logically follow. Such beings could, for example, observe civilizations being born, growing and dying within a working lifetime for them, like biologists observing many generations of bacteria or fruit flies in the laboratory. To do this, they would need a monitoring, sampling and surveillance capability in planetary time, which seems to be part of the function of the UFOs seen throughout human history.

As for omnipotence, as tau approaches zero, the mass of the spaceship approaches infinity, according to Einstein. Such velocities would require the manipulation of titanic amounts of energy, which would give such beings the capability to transform the natural world on a cosmic scale, as in terraforming, just as smaller energy sources like fire and electricity gave man the ability to transform his world.

As support for this postulate, consider how major technological advances are linked to speed. Flight requires take-off speed and space travel requires escape velocity from earth’s gravity. As for today’s information-based technology, the constant search is for faster computers, leading to “quantum” computers that would achieve magical feats of data processing.

Based on the ufological and archeological record, it appears intelligent beings from other worlds, probably our cosmic ancestors, already accomplished such feats and have visited, perhaps even colonized, our earth. Prescientific earthlings who came into contact with them would of course perceive them in terms they could understand, likening them to emissaries from a celestial kingdom ruled by a god-king. People continue to have such encounters today, but science has changed the paradigm so now we see them as extraterrestrials. For example, the Bible says Elijah was taken up to heaven in a “chariot of fire.” If we were to witness the same event today, we would say he was beamed aboard a UFO, like Travis Walton in the movie “Fire in the Sky.”

Consider this passage in Genesis, Chapter 6: “And when men began to multiply on the earth, the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were fair, and chose wives from among them ... and there were giants (Nephilim) on the earth in those days, the mighty men of renown.” Zechariah Sitchin, an expert on Babylonian cuneiform writing, concludes that the Babylonian chronicles of the gods are actually accounts of extraterrestrials called the Ananaki who colonized the earth, genetically engineered modern humans from hominids and sired the biblical Nephilim through cross-fertilization with earth-women. (7) This is consistent with Lazar’s reported religion file at Area 51.

At first blush this poses a problem for monotheists. The antics of the Babylonian gods in the chronicles are not conducive to respect or awe, since they exhibit human vices.

One God Who Cares

Ethical monotheism, the concept of one supreme and eternal being who loves and cares for mankind, can, however, find scientific backing in the Gaia concept proposed by scientist James Lovelock (8). This is the idea that the biosphere itself is an organism that creates its own conditions for extending life. Gaia, named after the Greek goddess of the earth, is currently thought of as our planetary ecosystem, but the late astronomer Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wrickramasinghe through their panspermia theory are proving that the web of life extends throughout the universe.(9)

Physicists are searching for a single “theory of everything” than can tie all other physical theories into one. Since electromagnetic, gravitational and atomic fields exist, why not an energy field as a ground for life forms, a biological or spiritual field? British biologist Rupert Sheldrake’s research in “morphic resonance,” based on his theory of “morphic fields” that link life forms across space and time, bridges the gap between physics and biology and fits neatly into the Gaia concept. (10) Sheldrake’s experiments suggest that information is not only carried by genes, but transmitted through energy fields across space and time. Evidence supporting this can also be found in the medical documentation that prayer helps healing in hospitals, as described in Dr. Larry Dorsey’s book Healing Words. (11)

Physicists are moving into realms that border on the mystical and magical, for example through experiments in “quantum events” that occur simultaneously with no apparent physical connection. Some biologists postulate that the human brain contains microscopic structures that replicate quantum events, leading to psychic phenomena like ESP, precognition and others.

All these discoveries point to the development of a scientific view of the universe as a living gestalt or organism, the invisible essence of which is an “overmind” or heuristic cosmic energy matrix, which influences life beyond space and time, transcending the cosmos’ individual parts while animating, directing and tying them all together. Any intelligent biological beings, no matter how powerful and god-like, would always be subservient to this Supreme Being, who is in fact the Creator.

Toward a Theology of Everything

Perhaps the missing piece in the “theory of everything” puzzle sought by physicists is the element of intelligent purpose and will inherent in the cosmos. In effect, they are looking for the physics equivalent of spontaneous generation, which according to Hoyle is a myth. In his words, “A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.” (12).

The theory of everything should then perforce become a “theology of everything.” Indeed, theology would still be “queen of the sciences,” as it was called in medieval universities, if religious leaders hadn’t turned chicken in the face of Copernicus’ and Galileo’s discoveries. Theology should be no different than biology or any other “-ology” that seeks knowledge of the real universe. In its truest sense it means knowledge of the divine, which includes cosmic intelligence, man’s ultimate destiny, spiritual growth and universal moral principles.

The religious clerics, however, lost their nerve at the new world Galileo’s telescope revealed, ironically exhibiting a profound lack of faith. If they had truly believed that God created the universe, they would have embraced the new knowledge as deepening their understanding of God. If they had done so, science would have been directed by holistic principles and religion would have been illuminated by science. Many of the subsequent horrors brought about by religious intolerance and pseudo-scientific ideologies might have been avoided.

America’s founding fathers, some of the best-educated men of the 18th century and well-versed in science, in the Declaration of Independence called the existence of a creator a “self-evident” truth. Has science discovered anything since then that debunks this truth or makes it less evident? Quite the contrary, there are plenty of scientists like Hoyle who see the hard facts before them— the complex design of the eye, just for one example— and think, as well as state publicly in rare cases, that this can’t be random, that there has to be a designer.

The U.S. founders’ reference to the creator and to “nature’s God” reflects a universal human quest for a social order or government based on principles that reflect the divine order of the universe. In ancient China, Lao Tsu and Confucius sought to order society according to natural laws of harmony and balance. The medieval feudalistic order in Europe was believed to reflect the divine hierarchy. The American experiment was based on European philosophers’ understanding of natural law, as was the communist belief system based on Marx’s sophistry of dialectical materialism. The disastrous failure of communism proves that Marx’s negatively-biased, anti-god philosophy was dead wrong, but the power of that idea shook this world like nothing had before.

This age-old quest, despite many failures, could reach a successful culmination if science could really discover and prove the existence of basic principles underlying the universe that are applicable to society. Today thinkers are continuing the quest through the ecological sciences, which study the interaction between living organisms and their habitat; and through cybernetics, the study of systems that underlie computers and artificial intelligence.

Most of today’s leaders, both on the left and the right of the political spectrum, are greatly influenced by 19th century philosopher Georg Hegel’s dialectic, which conceives of progress as being driven by conflict and contradiction through three stages called “thesis, antithesis, synthesis.” (12) Although Hegel himself was an idealist, Marxism-Leninism adopted his dialectic and combined it with materialism. The resulting philosophy of dialectical materialism has been used to justify war, violent class conflict and dictatorship. Although the collapse of communism proved the fallacy of this idea, today’s so-called “neo-cons” who drive American foreign policy are also dialecticians insofar as they see warfare as a generator of financial profit and a management tool for obtaining greater political power.

Hegel erred in thinking that our diseased, dysfunctional human race reflected natural law. Traditional religions on the other hand have always maintained that mankind has fallen away from its natural state of harmony. Modern science likewise has come to see progress in terms of symbiotic or mutually beneficial relationships. When the innate condition of dynamic equilibrium is disrupted through natural or man-made catastrophes, it inevitably reasserts itself. Just as the body has natural healing powers that can overcome disease, nature and society can heal themselves if allowed to follow natural principles.

For example, Nobel Prize winning-mathematician John Nash in his “Game Theory” proved mathematically that contending parties benefit more when they cooperate than when they compete. In this way the age-old “golden rule” of reciprocity, which most major religions express in some form or another, receives firm scientific backing, debunking the dialecticians.

Modern leaders who are still immersed in 19th century dialectical thinking are like doctors who do not know what a healthy body is like. Without a model of health to guide them, they can only manage the symptoms of the disease instead of curing it. In fact, when health asserts itself, as when peace breaks out among nations, they see this as “unnatural” and try to sicken the patient more so they can continue to “treat” the disease. If our politicians could catch up with modern science, they would “wage peace” instead of constantly fomenting new wars.

Through Sheldrake’s experiments, science is also discovering that life energy involves transmission of information that could be the spiritual counterpart of genetic information transmitted through DNA. This would corroborate the universal religious experience of information received through prayer, meditation, dreams, apparitions, visions or simple intuition. Former astronaut Gordon Cooper, surely a credible witness, says in his book Leap of Faith that a woman he knew regularly received detailed psychic transmissions from an extraterrestrial source, one of which saved the Space Shuttle from a disastrous failure by revealing a flaw in the cooling system (12).

Energy exists at different vibrations or frequencies, so perhaps spiritual growth is a matter of achieving a “higher” frequency. The highest frequency is “in tune” with God, the lowest is closer to animal life or to matter. Perhaps “heaven” and “hell” and realms in between are like channels on a radio dial, with souls automatically migrating after death at the frequency they attained during their lives.

The existence of this spiritual field could be the missing piece in the “theory of everything” that physicists seek, as well as a key to understanding the meaning and direction of our lives, although mainstream science does not yet acknowledge its existence. Perhaps scientists’ longstanding animosity toward anything religious is at the root of this denial.

Scientists say our sun will burn out and the material universe will perish in a “big crunch,” but life would find a way to escape the cycle of destruction and be born anew. Beyond the seeming immortality of microbial cells found in meteorites and cosmic dust, there is the reality of a spiritual life-energy matrix that interacts with the physical world in ways still only dimly understood. Perhaps, as Brigham Klyce suggests, the goal of life is to organize itself into a form that can survive the Big Crunch and sow the seeds of life in new universes (14). Or perhaps the life energy of the aforementioned gestalten Supreme Being “reincarnates” in new universes, which constitutes a conscious act of creation such as described in Genesis.

Exopolitics, by ending the denial syndrome associated with extraterrestrial reality, could lead to an all-inclusive scientific theology that would help end religious intolerance and false faith, or well as materialistic beliefs that contradict reality and lead to destruction. As Isaiah prophesied (Is. 11-9) “They shall not hurt or destroy in all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.”

A Global Consensus

That is where science plays a key role. The scientific method separates truth from superstition, fantasy, wishful thinking and ethnocentric bias. It is the only thing that can create a global consensus.

Of course, scientific facts alone cannot satisfy the human soul. People possess a spirit that needs spiritual nourishment. Without the discipline and critical thinking of science, however, religious seekers and believers often cannot tell the difference between spiritual food and spiritual poison such as propagated by cults or ideologies that have perpetrated mass murder and suicide, as in the People’s Temple, the Branch Davidians, and most recently Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaida. Through science, the elements that foster spiritual growth and happiness could be as well understood as science now understands the basic nutritional needs of the body.

In the past people believed in many fanciful concepts of the earth and planets, leading to worship of the sun, moon and planets as gods. Science replaced this Babel of beliefs with a global consensus based on reality, except for a few cranks like the Flat Earth Society.
Science, if freed from its anti-religious bias, could in the same way lead to a universal understanding of the Supreme Being, the spiritual world and basic issues of right and wrong. Then all mankind could share a common worldview and civil philosophy, regardless of individual religious backgrounds. People could still go to church, temple, or mosque; pray or meditate; sacrifice livestock, butter their lingams, or do whatever satisfies their souls, but would all agree on the key issues and work together as citizens of the global village.

Perhaps the extraterrestrials that have made their presence known on this earth are waiting for humanity to demonstrate a certain level of maturity before we can be welcomed into the company of star-faring civilizations. Perhaps an initiative such as this Journal could help bring that about. The key point is it won’t happen until the cosmic denial ends, and that won’t happen by itself, but only through the determined efforts of many individuals.

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1. Good, Timothy, Alien Liaison—The Ultimate Secret, Arrow Books, London, 1991, p. 184.
2. Tomas, Andrew, We Are Not the First, Bantam Books, 1971, p. 177.
3. ibid, p. 176
4. Corso, Col. Philip J. (ret.), with William J. Birnes, The Day After Roswell, Pocket Books, New York, 1997.
5. Chatelain, Maurice, Our Cosmic Ancestors, Temple Golden Publications, Sedona, Ariz., 1988, p. 35.
6. Anderson, Poul, Tau Zero, Guild America, 1970.
7. Sitchin, Zecharia, The Cosmic Code (book VI in the six-part Earth Chronicles series), Avon Books, New York, 1998.
8. Dorsey, Larry, “Does Prayer Heal?” Reader’s Digest, March 1996. Condensed from Healing Words.
9. Klyce, Brigham, www.panspermia.com.
10. Lemley, Brad, “Rupert Sheldrake,” Discover, August, 2000, printed from www.FindArticles.com on May 20, 2001.
11. Colson, Charles, “According to Hoyle: Worldview and the Big Bang,” Commentary #010830-August 30,2001, http://www.breakpoint.org/
12. Marrs, Jim, Rule by Secrecy, Harper-Collins, 2000, pp. 194-196.
13. Cooper, Gordon, with Bruce Henderson, Leap of Faith, An Astronaut’s Journey into the Unknown, Harper Collins, New York, 2000, pp. 228-230.
14. Klyce, “The End and the Big Bang,” www.panspermia.com

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Memo to Obama: When the 'Kingdom on earth' arrives, will the church vote matter?

2007-10-07T11:29:00.000-04:00

If God finally came home for dinner, would He put up with the squabbling going on around the table about what He expects?

Jews, Catholics and Protestants were into coalition-building in the 80s but now are back where they started. The secular press itches to throw stones at those presumed to have been without sin. And look at the Mideast which has never gotten over Sarah kicking out Hagar and Ishmael because she didn't like Abraham's first son playing with her Isaac.

What if God was one of us?
Just a slob like one of us
Just a stranger on the bus
Trying to make his way home

The collective consciousness of the Christian West [shared even by its secular humanist establishment] has been steeped in Jesus's doctrines of forgiveness, tolerance and sacrifice. But self righteousness and the politicization of moral issues is negating the spiritual.

Playing God on the question of which forms of intolerance should be tolerated has modern day Pharisees at each others' throats, especially after September 11. All hell broke loose when that Methodist in the White House sought to impose order in Iraq. When the easy part was over, he proposed sacrificing American lives in order to exorcise that hellhole. Was he a 21st century saint, an American cowboy, or worse, a religious zealot sabotaging world peace with the biggest military machine ever assembled? The answer thundered down from modern day syndicated prophets: Tolerate Saddam, impeach Bush.

If God had a face what would it look like?
And would you want to see
If seeing meant that
you would have to believe
in things like heaven and in Jesus and the saints
and all the prophets

Americans are considered quaint by some Europeans because more than eighty percent say they believe in God. In 1980 it looked like God might really be dead and fading from the collective consciousness. But then those zombie ideologies stumbled, disintegrated and were cast on the ashheap of history with a push from such as our stay-home-from-church 40th president, Ronald Reagan.

So the God vs No-God argument is over and faith-based values are on the rebound even in western Europe. But who is inspired?

Religious and sectarian divisiveness is on the rise. The children of the resurrected God are still spilling each others' blood. Today, after several wars "to end all wars", world peace is still as elusive as honesty in Washington.

Trying to make his way home
Back up to heaven all alone
Nobody calling on the phone
'cept for the Pope maybe in Rome

So what if Armageddo happened tomorrow? [Obama said we can "create the Kingdom on earth"]

If the estangement between God and humanity ended, would we still have to tithe on Sunday? Would religion come to be regarded as divisive, as a negative force more contemptible even than racism?

More to the point, will our grandchildren grow old in a post-religion world?

Published by the editors of www.CosmicTribune.com

'Across the universe', running on empty

2007-10-06T15:22:00.000-04:00

"Across the universe" is less a movie than an artistic experience, beautifully choreographed and sequenced to evoke the simple, mindless dreaminess of the sixties and seventies minus the pretensions at plot that might otherwise destroy the experience like grabbing a ringing bell.

The Beatles did produce some of the best music of the era and it was the music, brilliantly expressed in dance and via digital magic, that was the soul of the film.

Music as the soul? Well yes. Not very substantive, it is true. But it was the music that perhaps best sums up the era for one who lived through it. And underlying "the revolution"? Only emptiness.

Did the generation that would change the world make it a better place? Well no. The Americans pulled out of Indochina and millions died. Then after that fossil Reagan (an anathema to his flower child daughter) came to power, the U.S. economy (and original thought) rebounded and communism became dust.

The message/conclusion of the movie was "All you need is love." Now there's a theme Hollywood dusts off on occasion. Come to think of it there was something of a Hollywood plot after all. All you need is love. It feels good, feels right. And that music . . .

Published by the editors of www.CosmicTribune.com

Al Anbar Awakening: 'These poor families are finally getting a small taste of normal life'

2007-04-17T10:49:00.000-04:00

There is something almost otherworldly about non-media dispatches from Iraq. The following e-mail is from Justin Harding, a U.S. Marine based in Ramadi, on his fourth tour of duty in Iraq.

A suicide bomber smashed a truck loaded with TNT and chlorine gas into a police checkpoint in Ramadi on Friday (April 6), killing 27 people. Almost every day, I drive the same road where the car bomb exploded. One week before the incident happened, I noticed the drivers in their cars on this stretch of the road were acting differently, so I changed my tactics. Instead of driving in a regular column, I would send three vehicles ahead to do some blocking moves. We also flashed our head lights and we have a flag in the lead truck to wave at the vehicles.

Everyone -- Marines, Army, and Iraqi police -- knew a car bomb attack was coming. People are so tired of the war here, so they tell authorities about the bad guys in the Ramadi area (not all the time but maybe 70 percent). So we were actively searching for this vehicle. Bad guys have tried to blow up this police station three times but failed because police are doing such a good job. So this was the fourth time. The police saw the car coming to their base and shot at it, causing the car to explode about 500 meters away from the police station -- it was a very big bomb.

Unfortunately, there were apartment buildings with many families nearby. The explosion hit those apartment buildings. So Iraqi people -- mostly Sunni -- were mad. Apart from the people killed by the explosion, many were affected by the chlorine gas.
On base they put a call out for all medical personnel to come to the hospital to deal with the mass casualties. We actually saved many lives that day.

This is the only significant attack in my AO since I have left -- very different from the last time I was here. They are calling it the Al Anbar Awakening. Many Sheiks have united. They realized that the Americans are not leaving. At first the Sheiks supported the terrorists -- this was when I was here last time and it was all-out gun battles and IED's and suicide bombings. Now the Sheiks realize that the Americans have money and power and are not leaving. So half of them (they are Sunnis) have decided to work with the American forces to get rid of the terrorists. The other sheiks still feel like their fellow sheiks have sold out to the Americans. The good thing is that the Sheiks who work with the Americans receive lots of support to make a strong police force and army. The Iraqi police have better humvees -- with armor and guns --than I did the last time I was here.

They have found numerous IED's, stopped assassinations and arrested terrorists who murder and intimidate families. I have seen this with my own eyes. It is very rewarding to see schools open, hospitals open, businesses open. Of course, half of the city is still a war zone, but so much progress has happened. My friends who died here did not die in vain and it moves me deeply.

The media are a bunch of blood suckers who are too scared and too interested in ratings to actually see what is happening in Ramadi. And I can only speak for this small part of Al Anbar. I haven't shot my personal weapon once!

I pray each night for about 10 minutes. The other 23 hours and 50 minutes are total dedication to my Marines and our mission and accomplishing my job with total focus and attention, studying my enemy and the terrain and using my Marines to prevent them from attacking. And if they do attack us, to frustrate their actions. Because of the "Al Anbar Awakening" these poor families are finally getting a small taste of normal life. How much have the Iraqi people suffered under Saddam and now the insurgents, and their unorganized sheiks and tribal elders. Now slowly these issues are being resolved.

Published by the editors of www.CosmicTribune.com

Where have you gone George C. Scott?

2007-03-30T01:28:00.000-04:00

What is it about George C. Scott's classic portrayal of Gen. George S. Patton that calls to mind the hit movie, "300"?

Both described earlier times and worlds in which weasels were scorned, not celebrated. In both films, the heroes called forth the best in the best men who willingly died for freedom — that precious quality that separates men from animals, capitalists from socialists, real Americans from the "metrosexuals". [Even after looking up the term in Wikipedia we are still confused. No doubt, Gen. Patton could have put it more concisely.]

At any rate, as the situation in Iran continues to heat up, Muslims and Americans and Europeans and Southeast Asians and Northern Africans had best come to terms with the fact that the ultimate enemies in our midst do not respond well to mercy and are only incited to greater violence by weakness. But against the truth as told by the fearless, they have no defense. And confronted by a world standing united against them, they will simply vanish.

Published by the editors of www.CosmicTribune.com

The grayness of the ultimate socialist state

2007-03-07T11:22:00.000-05:00

My daughter alerted me to the fact that one, and only one, multiplex in all of Northern Virginia was showing the film "The Lives of Others" which won the Oscar for best foreign film.

When I crossed into East Berlin at the Branderburg Gate in the early 1980s, my visual memories of East Germany were characterized by two colors: gray and colorlessness.

I will never forget the one spark of life I saw that day: a beaming old man leaning out his 4th floor window and giving the thumbs-up to an obviously American foreign devil across the street below.

All should see this gripping film, made by a director who was all of 16 when the Berlin Wall came down. He has managed to capture the essence of what was no doubt the most efficiently humorless Communist state. Hillarycare minus the artful spin. Hillary in glasses and minus the hairstyles.

Thank you Ronald Reagan and all the others who told the world the emperor was wearing no clothes, that the social science of socialism is pseudo-science.

Published by the editors of www.CosmicTribune.com

A charmer? Yes. James Jesus Angleton? No

2007-02-25T13:29:00.000-05:00

There is probably something otherworldly, if not quite cosmic, about legendary intelligence operatives. This may have been what Oliver Stone wanted Matt Damon to convey in the film "Good Shepherd". Or maybe not.

Damon looked nothing like James Jesus Angleton, but for spy buffs who saw the film, that was clearly the role he was playing. Angleton's ouster as the CIA's head of Counterintelligence in 1974 led to the effective end of U.S. counterintelligence, in his own view at least. Witness Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen.

We and a few other journalists made Angleton's acquaintance while he was alive but he was so obsessed with secrecy that it was the bad guys like Seymour Hersh who, during the gloomiest days of the Cold War, got him ousted in disgrace in 1974. The Church Committee then continued with the castration of U.S. intelligence to the point that with Plame-gate, elements in the CIA arguably got away with undermining a U.S. president in the midst of a war. How surreal is that?

Angleton described his espionage world as a "wilderness of mirrors" in which the KGB too often mesmerized naive Americans. Hollywood is now trying to get wise. "The Good Shepherd" starring Matt Damon comes pretty close to telling the real story of James Angleton except for a few major changes in substance and style.

A newer film, "Breach ", about one of the worst espionage diasters in U.S. history probably came closer to facts than Good Shepherd. But the hero of that movie, we are told at the conclusion, ditched his budding career as an FBI agent to become a lawyer in Washington. How much further down to earth, can one get?

Published by the editors of www.CosmicTribune.com

The Founding Fathers: Not just God-fearing but, horrors, out-and-out Christians

2007-02-21T20:45:00.000-05:00

The invaluable American Spectator has as its cover story in the February issue a special by M. Stanton Evans on the subject of the religious orientation of our Founding Fathers. You will have to buy the magazine because the article is not available online. It's well worth the price.

The non-stop secularist propaganda may have convinced us that these lamentably male and pasty non-ethnics were, thankfully, hard-headed rationalists and secularists as well if one could strip away the temporal cultural trappings of the day (which modern historians have).

Evans offers inconvenient facts and quotes that should be common knowledge:

George Washington's 1778 directive [What if the following had been said by our current George W.?]: "The commander in chief directs that Divine service be performed every Sunday at 11 o'clock, in each brigade which has a Chaplain . . . . While we are duly performing the duty of good soldiers, we certainly ought not to be inattentive to the higher duties of religion. To the distinguished character of a patriot, it should be our highest glory to add the more distinguished character of a Christian."

And this from Washington's successor John Adams, a decade after the First Amendment was adopted: "[Citizens should] acknowledge before God the manifold sins and transgressions with which we are justly chargeable . . . beseeching Him at the same time of His infinite grace, through the Redeemer of the world, freely to remit all offenses and to incline us by his holy spirit to repentance and reformation."

Evans cites similarly shocking utterances by Jefferson and Madison as well as the following description of a key framer of the First Amendment, Roger Sherman:

"He objected to traveling on Sunday, was a leader in the ecclesiatical doings of New Haven, and engaged in theological correspondence even while tending to his worldly oblications. One of his writings is entitled, A Short Sermon on the Duty of Self-Examination Preparatory to Receiving the Lord's Supper."

Nor does Evans overlook that enlightened Benjamin Franklin, a Unitarian (the modern versions of which are well known to believe in absolutely nothing). But, Evans notes:

"[I]t was Franklin who at the Constitutional Convention called for prayer to aid the drafters in their efforts, saying that, the longer he lived the more he was convinced 'God governs in the affairs of men'."

Could such men be elected to public office today?

Published by the editors of www.CosmicTribune.com

Have I got a great UFO picture for you

2007-02-12T19:08:00.000-05:00

Seeing is believing. UFOs exist. Just ask Hollywood and the American public.

Nearly 50 years since an alleged UFO was sighted at Roswell, New Mexico, a new CNN/Time poll released Sunday shows that 80 percent of Americans think the government is hiding knowledge of the existence of extraterrestrial life forms.

50 years of grainy photos and unconfirmable testimonies, not to mention the movies "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and "ET" have conclusively proven to the satisfaction of most Americans that "we are not alone."

Still, there is a nagging uncertainty lurking just beneath the surface of rational minds: namely, those grainy photos. Voila! In a burst of initiative that vaporizes all remaining congitive dissonance, a netizen has provided a high-res image of a UFO .

The pendulum is swinging back from the extreme rational end of the human perception spectrum where it hovered late last century. Facts, logic, even common sense are less important than a good cinematic story line. Thus, for example, China (think panda bears) only wants to get along with the rest of the world and its military buildup is just as benign as were Idi Amin's intentions in Uganda.

Oh, and there were no WMDs in Saddam's Iraq. Evidence to the contrary was ignored by the big media and so didn't exist.

Case closed and if you'll wait while I get my coat, I'll take you to my leader.

State of the World, not including Hillary and Obama

2007-01-20T23:26:00.000-05:00

Please don't confuse the world situation with the 2008 presidential sweepstakes.

We admit that Hillary's opposition research on Sen. Obama's childhood education in a Madrassah (Islamic school) in Indonesia (Wahhabi or not, that is the question) is a wild story. The ironies raised are so overwhelming in volume, we will just have to transcend that story right here and now.

But speaking of Islam and world peace, well, let's just not go there for now.

Instead, consider that our colleagues at WorldNetDaily report that one of their highest-traffic articles of all time was the account last week of the retired air force colonel who witnessed and photographed flying objects "not of this world."

The WorldNetDaily editors reported that this report "has ignited a frenzy of interest in unexplained airborne phenomena" and a flurry of other reports.

Now there are two possible explanations for this unexplained phenomena:

1) The world population, having been barraged with confusing and contradictory information about Senators Obama and Hillary, has been desensitized to their physical and political surroundings and have tuned out the daily reality show masquerading as news into a new frequency (much like Dan Rather did) enabling them to see things that others cannot. Or, on the other hand,

2) Those overachieving space aliens, having been barraged with confusing and contradictory information about Senators Obama and Hillary, have decided their cosmic cousins on planet Earth, in their own peculiar and pathetic way, are crying out for help. Thus they are planning to intervene and solve our world's problems in their own way and in their own time.

Which brings us back to the topic at hand: we just dropped in to see what condition's the world's condition is in. In response, we offer for your attention a 90-second graphic history of world religion and war.

Now, after you have taken that in, we'll release you back to the mind control machinations of Obama, Hillary and their workaholic spin doctors. Alternatively, you could tune out, retire to the back yard and tune in.

Next: Are space aliens illegal aliens?

I woke up this morning in need of a latte

2007-01-08T08:26:00.000-05:00

I woke up this morning in need of a latte. Food too natch, something from the biscotti phylum, and one of those much-touted long walks on the beach.

The complete fantasy package is a long walk on the beach with a latte and my dog. I’m wearing Birkenstock loafers and biodegradable hemp fiber shorts that run half on electricity, half on gas. The dog is a golden retriever named Dakota or maybe Aragorn. Yeah, Aragorn. And not my dog but a free, self-determining companion animal, irrespective of race or creed.

That Indian on television who cried looking at litter along the road, he’s there too, on the beach, looking at more litter. At his feet lies a half-full can of Sherwin-Williams Peach Blossom Whisper interior, oil-based latex paint. “We cover the earth,” the label says.

A newspaper called The Answer is blowing in the wind. A few loose pages catch around my leg and I look down at the classifieds. A light drizzle begins to fall as the Personals Section gets my attention. Tangled in my legs are four broadsheet newspaper pages of “in search of” ads (“ISOs”) in six-point type. It’s a warmish day and the drizzle intensifies into a full-fledged shower. Raindrops fall straight down from a windless sky.

Just before the pages are turned into papier-maché, I manage to read one of the ads. “ADJPNSCSCND (asian divorced jewish professional non-smoking christian street car named desire) ISO like-minded man for LTR. Must enjoy quiet walks in the rain. E. Rigby”

I look up and there she is. The author of that very ad is just fifty yards up the beach, walking quietly in the rain. I look around and see others. A lot of others, in fact. Why hadn’t I noticed them before? All the lonely people, where do they all come from?

There are now hundreds, maybe thousands of solitary individuals, all walking quietly. Nobody is speaking to anyone. There isn’t a rain hat or an umbrella in the bunch. Most are deep in thought, gazing down at the sand. A few are facing the sea while, metaphorically, also facing the latency of their unrequited hopes as a harbinger of humanity’s ultimate desolation amid love’s inability to deliver the goods forthwith…

Whatever.

The only sound on the beach is unison sighing.

A nice-looking youngish guy, yet somehow old in acquired wisdom – thin, with blue eyes, thick black hair, killer abs. He walks in low jeans and a shirt left unbuttoned, through the intermittently spaced lost souls, feeling his way as much with intuitive radar as with his eyes, searching, sifting. He approaches a young woman carrying a mocha java grande made from aged Sumatran beans. Full-bodied, smooth, spicy, complex. As is her coffee.

“Hi.”

“Hi.” She nods back and a moment of silence settles over them.

“You know,” he finally says, “I climbed cathedral mountains. I saw silver clouds below, saw everything as far as you can see. And they say that I got crazy once and that I tried to touch the sun. I lost a friend, but kept the memory.”

Though alarm bells of warning are going off in her head, they are like a ringing in the far distance, as removed as an Amish farmhouse fire bell two counties over. She looks at him with her head slightly tilted. Her soft mouth, shorn of all defenses, can utter only, “Gosh.”

He gazes sagely into the middle distance. “Now I walk in quiet solitude, the forest and the stream, seeking grace in every step I take. My sight is turned inside myself to try and understand the serenity of a clear blue mountain lake.”

She intones a long “wowwww,” way too softly for her own good. Her eyes are wide, undemanding of anything.

Flashing a Jack Nicholson scheisse-eating grin, he takes the mocha java from her hand, downs the rest of it and tosses the cup. "Name's Lucifer. I like long walks on the beach."

In a voice as quiet as the air floating between her ears: “Jennifer. Virgo. I like quiet walks in the rain.”

“Cool.”

I watch them stroll away together. The shower abates, and as it does, the walkers in the rain fade one by one. Nobody actually goes to their car and drives away. They just fade, literally, unmindful that it is also happening to everyone around them. With the cessation of x-amount of raindrops, each one grows increasingly transparent until right near the end when they suddenly poof into nonexistence.

The air makes a tiny plinking sound as each one disappears. Plink... plink... plinkplink... plinkplinkplinkplink. It was like watching a video of popcorn popping, being played in reverse.

It seems these personals ad walkers can exist only in the rain. Only at the beach. Their loneliness was compounded by the fact that none of the ads said, “love loud, boozy socializing on the beach in the rain.” Just quiet walks. Intimate, confessional statements from people trying to end their solitude by proclaiming a love of solitude. Once again there is a need for the existence of a typeface for irony.

Also typed in ironics, is my sworn statement to the Environmental Protection Agency on the unfortunate demise of a large school of dolphins accidentally killed in the preparation of this report. The printer, plugged in, fell off the table and bounced off the pier into the Club Med cove. The little Flippers never knew what hit them, and I’m sure they didn’t suffer.

Go ahead and judge me if you want. I have come to accept that I can’t be everything to all people. I am learning to be happy with myself, to love me as I am. I often surprise myself with gifts. I need a latte.

My biodegradable hemp fiber shorts are half-filled with gas as I go placidly amid the noise and haste, remembering what peace there may be in silence.

Larry Moffitt
Editor, www.ReligionAndSpirituality.com

Communism can be fun

2007-01-05T19:03:00.000-05:00

It's Friday, the New Year has begun, Nancy Pelosi is Speaker of the House, and you're still not inspired. What to do?

Here in the USA, you go out to dinner with friends or family, take in a movie or fire up the computer for a little surfing or blogging.

In North Korea, you can rule out all those options. You're stuck in some cold barracks with nothing to do but stare at the framed photos on the wall of the Great Leader (Kim Il-Sung) and the Dear Leader (Kim Jong-Il).

Okay. That's good. There is meaning in life. But there's still something missing. That little spark, the joie de vivre that would make you wag your tail if you were a dog. And this is where the Dear One has Nancy and Harry beat. He can't raise the minimum wage but he can provide happiness!

No more Mr. Nice Guy

2007-01-02T20:57:00.000-05:00

As the editor of ReligionAndSpirituality.com, I’m somewhat of an atheist magnet. A guy, let’s call him “Jim Bob,” wrote to criticize that our website is a citadel of Christian “wingnuts” of the “Religious Reich.”

Yikes! (although I do admire the richness of his language).

Jim Bob added, “I haven’t seen one word by a Muslim, Jew, Native American, Hindu, or any other religion but Christianity.”

The thing is, ReligionAndSpirituality.com is a very, very big tent, with 50-something weekly columnists. You can't throw a rock in there without hitting a Muslim; Jew; Baha'i; Buddhist; Hindu; pagan; straight-arrow, boy scout Christian; left-wing, commie, pinko Christian; thoroughly disillusioned former Christian or someone who talks to dead people.

So he’s never actually read the website. But that’s okay. I’m big-minded about this sort of thing and I explained in a beautifully polite and dignified manner, the enormous width and depth of the site’s content.

Okay, I may have also said he was a pathetic asshole. But not in a way that’s like a bad thing, or uncharitable. It was more like reminding him. Still, Jimbo took it in the wrong spirit, so the exchange didn’t go very well.

Is it just me, or has atheism taken a decidedly hostile turn lately? Seems like it used to be more live-and-let-live, as embodied in the words of John Lennon, the gentle soul of unbelief.

Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky

Atheism used to have a sense of humor. The famous 15th century political strategist Niccolo Machiavelli was on his death bed. The Bishop visits him and implores, “Niccolo, you are dying. Save your soul. You must renounce Satan and all his works.”

Machiavelli struggles to lift himself up on one elbow. “Father, I beg you, this is no time to be making enemies.”

Oxford University is the Jerusalem of atheism (or rather “reason” as they like to call it). “Reason” is in no way touchie-feelie. It likes stuff it can measure, cleanly and crisply. It was at Oxford where Howard Walter Florey discovered the medical value of penicillin and where Robert Hooke developed the microscope.

This is science; it’s the binary exactness of ones and zeroes. Off or on, buddy. Black or white. Put up or shut up. Don’t expect “reason” to join you in a group hug, or be thoughtful enough to hold your hair back for you when you puke.

Oxford proudly displays a naked, sprawled out statue of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was expelled from Oxford 200 years ago. He was expelled for being an atheist. What this should remind the ruling elite of today’s Oxford is how susceptible to head-spinning reversals are even hallowed halls. A hundred years from now they could easily have on display, a bareass sculpture of the provost who expelled Shelley.

My problem with atheism is as follows: It posits that after a person shuffles off the coil and goes to room temp, there is no “there,” there. You are dust, floating in emptiness, Not even dust. Just atoms. Heck, not even atoms. Nothing, nada, zip.

El Void-o.

Plus, your theory could easily be wrong, and if so, then you’ve also irritated God. And really, who needs that?

Atheism is lose-lose by its own definition.

Comedian Rodney Dangerfield said, “I went to an atheist’s funeral once. There he was, all dressed up and no place to go.” Rodney, who is currently dead himself these days, presumably now knows what’s available to go to. If I can get one of our columnists to chat him up about it, I’ll let you know what he says.

Larry Moffitt
Editor, www.ReligionAndSpirituality.com

The Tao of Firewood

2006-12-27T18:08:00.000-05:00

I hurt my thumb yesterday when I was splitting firewood with an unfamiliar six pound wood-splitting maul. I’m still trying to get the accuracy thing down. The maul glanced off the edge of the log and flew out to the side, twisting my thumb in the process.

I bought the splitting maul for my wife for Christmas. She loved it of course, but since she never splits firewood, she lets me use it. “I’m touched,” she said, “but God wants you to have this.” That was so sweet. And the maul is a real beauty too.

By the way, the splitting wedge shown above is NOT what I got my wife. Hers looks like a "fat axe" with a handle. I just wanted to show you what a very cool and kickbutt (though inhumane and uncaring), log splitter looks like.

My wife's gift, with it’s relatively lighter head and fiberglass handle, it’s far superior to the 10-pounder I had been using. The reason is because velocity produces much more force than mass does, and this lighter maul can be swung a lot faster (at the sacrifice of accuracy I found out). My smarter brother John, the physicist, is where I go for all my angular momentum needs. “Grasshopper,” he explained, “energy is proportional to the square of velocity, but is only directly proportional to mass.”

This is one time when less really is more. (It's artistically incorrect to say, but usually more is more. By a long shot.)

What my smarter brother meant is that you want the head of the maul to be going as fast as possible when it hits the wood, and although Goliath could have done serious damage with a 10 pound splitting maul, he could have cleaned up Dodge with a six-pounder.

So now I have ice on my thumb, and some time to contemplate the splitting of firewood.

Very few logs will split on the first whack. In fact usually the maul bounces off at first. I call a new log “laughing oak” because it seems to be mocking me. Sometimes the wood just wants to test me, to see if I am worthy to cut it. After all, it has lived 75 or 100 years and has seen a great deal more hardship and change than I have. As I look at the rings on the cross-section, some them are so close together as to almost be on top of each other. Those are the rings denoting scant growth – from years of no rain, or long and bitter winters. Several tight rings together can indicate a prolonged dry spell.

Running my fingers over the rings, I ask the section of trunk to tell me its story. It wants to tell everything.

But it wants to ask everything as well.

If it's going to be used it wants to be used well (and who doesn't?); it wants to be burned for warmth by people and families worthy of its sacrifice. If my intent is selfish, and my heart filled with darkness, then the wood is sad. But even grateful, contented wood doesn’t let the axe in easily. “You may feel free to split me,” it says, “but you must work hard for it, breathe heavy and sweat if you want to earn me. And finally, when you burn me, you must have a character that loves all humankind.”

That last one is the hard part.

Larry Moffitt
Editor, www.ReligionAndSpirituality.com

Introduction to "Cosmic Politics"

2006-08-28T22:35:00.000-04:00

Introduction: Education vs. Catastrophe

“History is a race between education and catastrophe.” -- H.G. Wells

The above quote by the visionary writer H.G. Wells, while written at the turn of the 20th century, seems to resonate even more in the 21st. Never before in human history has the balance been more precarious between the potential for a golden age of mankind and an era of wholesale destruction and misery.

On the one hand, we live in an unprecedented age of global unity, with former enemies becoming trading partners, instantaneous communication tying the world together in a “global village,” and technology offering the hope of a brighter future for all.

On the other, disintegrative and destructive forces throughout the world cast doubt upon the ability of mankind to realize the potential of this age. First, there is the threat of global warming and catastrophic climate change, which many scientists see as a greater threat than terrorism. Terrorism itself seems to accelerate daily as growing alienation between the Muslim and Western worlds spawns extremist groups bent on wreaking maximum damage on the West with the horror of nuclear terrorism looming in the background.

The collapse of the Soviet empire brought an end to the so-called “Cold War” but other potential adversaries emerge as China, India and the European Union vie with the United States for superpower status. The competition for limited oil resources is becoming increasingly intense as the booming economies of China and India gobble up more oil. Add to that the threat of unstable rogue nations like North Korea and Iran possessing or developing weapons of mass destruction, and the potential for another global conflagration seems very real.

Clearly, world leaders must adopt new ideas and paradigms suited to deal with the threats and the promises of this new age. Unfortunately, most world leaders still base their policies on outdated world-views, philosophies and paradigms that may have served national or corporate interests in the past, but are now incapable of dealing with the challenges ahead and even lead to destructive policies. The longer it takes for more enlightened ideas and policies to take hold, the more difficult it will be to avoid or recover from global-level catastrophes and the more humanity will suffer.

The Rest Of The Story

Groundhog Day, again and again

2006-07-05T20:17:00.000-04:00

Is the New York Times a bad recurring dream?

Well, the editors there want you to know that they are up to speed on the phenomena known as "persistent déjà vécu" or deja vu over and over and over again.

Wait. I'm sure I remember writing this blog entry before. Or did I read it somewhere?