From: M-Taliesin Area: Metaphysical To: Hagbard Celine 29 Jul 93 02:38:00 Subject: bible stuff UpdReq -=> Quoting Hagbard Celine to Questa <=- HC> glad to be of service. Thanks for your interest. HC> -!- WM v2.06/92-0603 HC> ! Origin: EarthRite BBS Idaho (208) 642-9400 (1:347/6) I saw your marvelous research on Bible Schtik earlier on the Magick Lantern BBS. Unlike Questa, who probably was smart enough to download and save the file at the time, I figured to go back and pick it up again later. As the Goddess would have it, it is no longer on the board. I want a copy of this document a whole, really big bunch. Could you post the entire text to me, or once again to the world at large?? I would really appreciate it. :D Thankx, M-Taliesin! Bright Blessings! / | ()MMMMM|>>>>>TALIESIN>>>>> | \ ... Jesus saves...passes to Moses...he shoots...he SCORES! 718499927771849992777184999277718499927771849992777184999277718 From: Fra.: Apfelmann Area: Metaphysical To: * 31 Jul 93 20:22:24 Subject: notes 0 UpdReq Note from the author This (notes0.prn) and the other files named accordingly (notesxxx.prn, x=0...9) is the author's personal comment on some aspects of religion and philosophy as taught by earth's "learned people". I have studied neither of these subjects, nor do I have the intention to do so before my next reincarnation, if such there be. Having seen the way theologians and philosophers argue and "prove" things, I can only assume that studying philosophy or theology is bad for the brain. Anyway, from my long and repeated talks with both theologians and phi- losophers, I got the impression that it is about time that someone did some thinking of his own and stop relying on those who have studied how-not-to-think-and-still-make-it-look-as-if-they-did. In the articles I have concentrated on philosophical and/or theological questions that had themselves raised as I started getting introduced to the subject of comparative religion. I do not claim to have said the last word on any of the subjects I treat in my articles, nor do I say that my conclusions are always correct. What I intend with this Collec- tion Of Heretic Remarks is a new outlook on religion and philosophy (meaning philosophy as connected with morals and religion, and religion as connected with methods of enforcement, so-called piety and the qua- sipsychological babblings of so-called gods by so-called priests and other charlatans), that does NOT connect with any former such outlooks, except where my conclusions agree, only that I try to reach these con- clusions independently of what is tought as philosophy or theology now- adays. What I am doing, actually, is to answer questions I have posed myself. Then I question my answers. If nothing else, I will at least (I hope) get some kind of discussion going that is going to make short process with any former prejudices against thinking for yourself, such as most religions have going to keep people from finding out the truth, which is that they only get to pay for other people's lives in (relative) luxury for the privilege of hearing pious poppycock in church once a week, and getting told the most outrageous fairy tales about the way the church spends its money (did you know that the Vatican owns large blocks of shares of several weapons factories through lots of dummy companies?). Despite myself (and SOME others, believe me!), I did NOT write these articles to criticise any existing religion(s), nor do I want to con- vert anybody to anything. I just want to get people to start thinking for themselves, and to discuss the sometimes unpleasant (to put it mildly) conclusions I got by thinking about the facts of life as seen by myself. Talking about discussion; discussion always means to hear ALL views held by ALL participants in the discussion. This may sometimes be rather unpleasant, as some of the views you will read will not be to your taste at all; but if you only hear a one-sided view on a subject, you're bound to get to false conclusions. This is self-evident. In order to achieve a REAL discussion, I sometimes take the stand of a de- vil's advocate, so please do not feel intimidated out of reading my articles by the fact that the conclusions I drew from the facts I used are somewhat unpopular with other people. This is what I intended. Another thing about philosophy: The way the philosophers of the last ten or twelve centuries worked was this: They saw that the society they lived in was a mental wreckage all over because of the morals other philosophers had them try to follow. As these morals did not work, the later philosophers tried to make things more bearable by changing the system of morals. The problem was (and still is), that these philoso- phers did NOT dump ALL the older philosophers had left them to be mis- erable with, but changed only some of the details, and darned few of those. This is where I try (in my opinion, successfully) to differ. I try not to let myself be influenced by the garbage most of yesterday's and to- day's philosophers put out. (I write these articles in english, so as to reach the broadest audi- ence possible.) Distribution The articles of this series will be published on this network by a friend of mine, since I myself have no access to ANY network at the mo- ment. While it may take rather long until I can get the new articles posted, this collection WILL be appended from time to time. I will publish the articles in groups of twelve, for reasons of having nice small files while still being able to publish another one every half year or so. The articles may be circulated anywhere you wish, provided that they are not altered in any way, and that the distribution note (meaning THIS) is always distributed with any other file(s) out of this collection. Translation into other languages is encouraged, provided I get to au- thorize the translations before they are published. Authorized transla- tions will bear an according remark from the author, that is, my own feeble self. The copyright remains with the author. If you do not want to wait until I get the next edition posted (which might take from a few weeks to about six months from the last update), you can send a 3.5" floppy with a self-adressed envelope and full re- turn postage (and please add another DM -.20 stamp to allow me to ans- wer letters from people who do not put the right return postage on the return envelope) to: Karsten Dykow Prassekstr. 16 23566 Lbeck (Germany) I will make it a point to send you the latest edition of ALL articles in the series with the least delay possible. The files will be in ASCII. You can also get the files converted for Apple Macintosh. Just note that you are an Apple user and which software you want to use, and I will send you the files already converted, if possible with what disk(s) you have sent me. I will NOT send anybody a printout of more than one article, since this would make it impossible to predict the postage needed. You can (and will, I hope) also write your comments on the articles to the above adress in german, english, french or czechoslovakian. If you want answer to your comments, you should a) state so and b) add a self adressed envelope with full return postage (and please add another DM -.20 stamp...) to your letter, since I have no intention of going broke answering letters from people who are too tight to pay for the postage of something they ordered. Did I forget anything? Yes. Anonymous letters (meaning letters that do not state name and adress of the writer on the envelope) will be burned unopened. Floppy disks will be initialized before use, so there is no point in sending me virus-infested disks. So, this is this. Enjoy the reading of the articles, if you can. See you, Karsten Dykow. Copyright Notice You may copy any article in the series and distribute them any way you want, provided that you ALWAYS attach this note and do not change the text. Also, you may not sell this product under any circumstances. You are not allowed (say both the german and the international copyright laws) to take anything in exchange for this work (meaning the articles) that is worth more than what you paid yourself in copying it... 718499927771849992777184999277718499927771849992777184999277718 From: Fra.: Apfelmann Area: Metaphysical To: * 31 Jul 93 20:22:56 Subject: notes 1 UpdReq A Collection Of Heretic Remarks Notes on several Problems of Philosophy accumulated in time by Karsten Dykow 1. What do you experience? What does ANYBODY experience? Life, of course. Beginning and ending, every single moment of your lifespan. From birth to death, from being to not being, back to being again. Every birth tells the same story: Life has a purpose. What is that purpose? I don't know, you don't know, NOBODY knows. In fact, nobody CAN know, or they would die instantly of more or less "natural" causes. The ultimate irony of life is that the best comes after it is all over: finding out what comes after death. Again, nobody can know, except after death, which makes speculation all the less satisfactory. Yet every monotheistic and several multitheistic religions tell us that they know by "divine inspiration". I wonder where this inspiration came from, from heaven or from hell? Again, no living person can ever know, and anybody claiming to KNOW the truth about what happens after death can only be a swindler. I think it is interesting that so many people believe in this "divinity" fraud. People WANT to know. That is the ONLY thing that distinguishes humans from animals. Animals do not want to know, they just accept what someone tells them. Animals do not FIND OUT, they just believe. In gods, in nirvana, in karma, in whatever happens to be fashionable at the time. Two thousand years ago, the roman gods were "in", so everybody within the empire believed in them. Before them, we had Baal Zebub, Jahwe/Jehovah, the greek and egyptian gods, and so on. Now, we have christendom, and time is running out on them. Still, anybody who is not a christian suffers intolerance from the hands of his fellow animals. This strikes me as a funny way to behave for a people which calls earlier societies "barbarian". 2. Who is this God person, anyway? It certainly looks to me as if nobody living on this planet can give me God's adress or telephone number. As a matter of fact, nobody has seen Him, talked to Him, smelled Him, or otherwise sensory experienced Him. Thus, seemingly, God is nonexistant. For all practical purposes, at least. Or is he? Let's have a closer look at this. The only ways to get into contact with the christian thing called God is by prayer and by self-revelation of God himself. Or so the christians tell us. Well, of course, if I pray to some mystical entity, like this god they call God, to let something happen, and if I do this over a large stretch of time, the thing will happen. This is what christians call a MIRACLE, and scientists RANDOM FORCES. Of course, if I wish something should happen to the ugly old heirloom clock on my mantelpiece that I don't dare to throw away because aunt Elma could find out, and someday the cat throws it down onto the floor, where the heirloom mysteriously, noisily and gloriously turns into a small heap of shards which I can throw away and still have a clean conscience when aunt Elma asks me what happened to it, I COULD say that my cat is my god and start taking my prayers to the cat instead of the church where I get thrown out anyway, because I never remember to take my hat off, not that I'd know why I should, but in the end the fact remains that my cat is not God, and God didn't throw that clock down, but the cat did, and I had a hell of a time getting those f...ing shards out of the carpet, and I still don't know how to tell aunt Elma, she'll rip my ears off at the knees or something. Anyway, god-dom is not about the destruction of something, but about the CONstruction of EVERYTHING. The universe. Everything. Excuse me, but that is a little too hard to swallow. Let us say, we do not want to overstretch our minds, and keep it down on the human-mind-level. God didn't build the car you got as a birthday present from your rich husband, the Ford Motor Company did. So, now, what is the criterium which defines who God is, or who is a god? Quite simple. Creativity. Creation is the word. A god is someone who creates. Clapton is God. So am I. Let us look back on the roots of the word: genus (lat.) means creation, genius (lat.) means creator. Philosophy defines a genius as someone who can create his own rules concerning something he's doing, just as I am doing now in writing this stuff I doubt anybody will read anyway. In this way, PER DEFINITIONEM, I am God. So any prayer of mine would be talking to myself, which I find rather dull, so I don't pray. But you may pray. To me. I am God. As shown above. Q.e.d. 718499927771849992777184999277718499927771849992777184999277718 From: Fra.: Apfelmann Area: Metaphysical To: * 31 Jul 93 20:23:12 Subject: notes 2 UpdReq 3. What do you believe? Or, the same question stated differently: Why do you believe? The key to believing anything is knowledge. This is self-evident. If you absolutely KNOW something, then, and only then, you believe it. The problem with BELIEVING is that if you believe anything at all, you cannot learn anything about this "anything". This is logical, if you decide to leave your beliefs outside and come in to have a closer look at your own mind. If you are so sure about anything that you can swear an oath to anything that is holy to you (your sister's beard?) that the thing you are sure of is true, THEN you believe. The problem is, of course, that what you are sure of does not necessarily become true just because you believe it is; as a matter of fact, good scientists nowadays do not believe anything is true until proved to be true in the long run, the long run being something like fifteen billion years, that being the age of our physical universe, if we accept the big bang theory, which as a matter of fact we do not even have to take seriously because it is less than a hundred years old; still, lots of people accept it because they believe in it. This prevents them from learning new facts about the creation of this our physical universe, for the quite simple reason that they do not want to give up their belief. This has happened hundreds of times. When Copernicus announced his (at the time dramatically new) view of the solar system, which was (insofar as the science of today is concerned) lots more correct than the ptolemaian view of a flat earth and so on, he was rejected by almost all (at the time) modern scientists, just because they did not want to give up their beliefs. The catholic church played its part, to be sure, but the main factor in Copernicus' undoing was the violent and wild rejection of the "learned" people of his time towards anything that might force them to give up their beliefs. This is still a rather strong force today. Lots of people seek refuge in religion(s) or similar things, so they cannot be hurt by the harsh realities of the real world which come crashing in at them faster than the eye can follow. There is a problem here. People prefer to believe in a "god" person or in several of them, that keep them out of trouble, or if they do get into trouble, they think they are being "tested" by this (these) supreme being(s). This is, of course, the same effect as the one described above. People are too lazy to look the world in the eye, so they make up some god and start to believe in it. Later, when this entirely hypothetical entity fails to keep them from burning their fingers up to their shoulders when they start a barbecue grill by sloshing gasoline all over the coal and lighting it with a BIC, they are too lazy to give up their beliefs and tell everybody that "god wanted it this way to test my integrity". This is entire and absolute nonsense. If you lose all your money in a poker game, the only reason is that you were stupid enough to draw to an inside straight when you knew the cards had been fiddled with, and not because your god wants to test how you live up to your own stupidity. But still, even this cannot shake true believers. You cannot defeat them. Every time you come up with something you absolutely know for sure, they will tell you to stick it in your ear and light it with a match. Because they are just as sure as you are, and possibly even more so. This, of course, is a problem. But not mine, and I wonder why I write any of this shit at all. You won't believe any of it anyway. 718499927771849992777184999277718499927771849992777184999277718 From: Fra.: Apfelmann Area: Metaphysical To: * 31 Jul 93 20:23:26 Subject: notes 3 UpdReq 4. How long do you wanna live, anyway? This, of course, is the title of a Stray Cats song. Still, apart from the song, the question itself remains. How long DO you want to live? Let us look at some facts. a.: Everybody (or almost everybody) wants to have a long life. b.: Nobody (or almost nobody) wants to be old. The first is a truism in any functioning society. The second is true at any time, only if you want to live a long life, there is absolutely no way to avoid getting old, and, in the end, BEING old. Let us have another look at facts1: c.: Everybody dies, sooner or later. It would be extremely lucky if you managed to get out of life alive. d.: The longer you live, the later you die. e.: Even if you die late, you die anyway. The first of these is absolute truth. I know nobody who managed to survive death. The second is also true, if we assume that time is linear, which we have to assume for now, since nobody I know of has designed and/or built a working time machine. The third follows directly from the first two truisms. So here are another two facts: f.: Most people are afraid of death. g.: Nobody knows what happens to them after death, and those who say that they do know have, up to now, been found to be frauds. There is an interdependence between these two points. What you do not know, you are afraid of. This, of course, is a psychological fact with very few exceptions indeed. And it is interesting, too, because it puts the truisms we looked at earlier into a close context. Everybody wants to get old, because getting old delays death, which everybody is afraid of because nobody knows what will happen to them afterwards. Actually being old, however, tends to remind people that they cannot stall kicking the bucket forever, because the older you get, the more likely you are to die soon. If you do not believe this, look it up in the statistics; you will find that the highest death rate of any age group remains with the newly born, and the older you get, up to an age of about fifteen years, the higher your life expectancy gets. But after the age of sixteen, which I will conveniently assume you have already surpassed, the high- est death rate remains with the old people. So every day you live be- yond the day when your joints start creaking brings you closer to death, which you fear for the previously stated reasons. Q.e.d. This problem connects easily with the problem of religion. Religions (well, most of them, anyway) tell you what happens to you after you die. Most people ignore the fact that what the priests of those religions tell them is not based on any evidence at all that they could produce, but they want to be consoled over the fact that they WILL die. This, of course, makes religions irresistibly attractive to lots of people. Religion tells you that if you were a good boy (or girl), you are going to "live" forever in some paradise or other. This is the most profound piece of bullshit anybody ever dared to tell me other than as a fairy tale, which usually contains at least a small kernel of truth. The reason for my thinking these stories are nonsense is simple: Nobody living now can know (compare also 1.-3., and most of the rest of this collection). The overriding fact in religious belief nowadays is that most people are too weak, too disturbed, too lazy or too faint-hearted to face the truth about life. Life is death. Life feeds on death. This is what we call RECYCLING. A human dies to give life to an apple tree or to grass, which is eaten by animals, which in turn have their lives given to feed more humans. Recycling in perfection. Nothing gets lost, except infinitesimally small parts of a gigantically huge machine called universe. This is what scientists call the second law of thermodynamics. Nothing gets lost, ever. It only is reformed, reshaped, regrown, again and again. The water you are drinking has been drunk over the millennia by dozens of other creatures. The same goes for the food you eat. These thaughts might give rise to the illusion that the same thing might happen to you. To your SELF. Your "soul", whatever that may be. ____________ Facts being one of the two things I am REALLY fond of. The other thing is fiction. This belief is what most religions are dealing in. Buddhism has multiple reincarnations, until you achieve such purity of thought and action that you dive into your own belly button and reach nirvana (ind.: nothingness), where your soul is allowed to dissolve so you no longer have to wander around in this "vale of tears" we call life. This makes death look good: Each death is a chance for a new beginning. Christian churches and sects give you another picture: One single reincarnation after your first death, and that reincarnation is indestructible, so you remain in heaven or in hell forever. Nice, is it not? To be bored in heaven - most people cannot imagine how long eternity actually IS, so you got all of this time on your hands and nothing to do with it but to do the same things all over again that you have done a billion times before. Logical, because the amount of time you have in eternity is infinite (that is what "eternity" MEANS) and the amount of things you can do is not - or to live your pseudo-life in hell in all eternity suffering great pain and things like that. This gives you a nice choice between being tortured to death without ever dying, and being bored to death with no chance of suicide. I really like this god person, you know, he is always so kind to his creations! This means that I, for reasons of retaining an untroubled mind that does not need to be catered to by expensive brain care specialists (so-called psychologists and psychotherapists, sometimes also witch doctors), have to choose the view that least troubles it. Which is that I exist now, have been existing from the time I became concious and will keep on existing until I die, and when I die, I die and that is the proverbial "it". The only problem is that you do not know you are dead until the first shovelful of dirt hits you in the face... 718499927771849992777184999277718499927771849992777184999277718 From: Fra.: Apfelmann Area: Metaphysical To: * 31 Jul 93 20:23:44 Subject: notes 4 UpdReq 5. Thinking is addictive. It is not, however, contagious, which, in my opinion, is a shame. Take a good look at what thinking is: Most of all, thinking is extremely exhausting, sometimes causing stress; it can lead to frustration, to psychoses, to irrational behaviour in spite of those psychoses (NOT because of them!), and to success in making people dislike you. It is, therefore, little wonder that most people choose the simple way out and do not think. Oh, sometimes they think they are pretty good thinkers, and that everybody is calling them fools for no good reason at all, but the fact is that the reasons for such people to be called fools are rather deeply founded. The problem is, of course, to define what THINKING means. If you THINK, you scan all the data that you can get on the subject you are thinking about, screen out pertinent data and use it to build a model in your mind that works exactly as reality does. Since you need ALL the data you can get and more to build such a functioning model, this is a rather exacting piece of work, which many people simply do not WANT to accomplish because it is too straining. This attitude of most people towards thinking as defined above (let us face it, we cannot avoid it anyway) leads to interesting symptoms. The most important of these are 1. religion, 2. video games, 3. TV serials. Religion usually is some kind of reality evasion. Living in the real world sometimes forces you to think, which is straining or even painful (for some people), so people have a tendency to suppress reality in a pseudoworld of beliefs, where other people, which are usually called priests, do the thinking for them. Video games serve the same purpose. You get out of this world to become a hero and do things which someone else has thought up for you to do. No thinking of your own necessary, no problems to think about, everybody is happy. TV serials are the second worst of these three (which is the worst? You should be able to figure that out by yourself!), because the only active part of the reality-evader (the audience) is to do absolutely nothing, least of all think, while the serial is on, except maybe to go into the kitchen during the break to get another can of beer. This is the ultimate apathy for people who have strong fears of having to think for themselves. There are, of course, always some people who DO want to do their own thinking. These people you find either on the top of society (any society at all), where they think up new religious rules for their followers, new video games or new installments for old serials, or somewhere in the middle (almost never in the bottom, though), where they look deceptively like everybody else, except for the fact that they read or create fiction. You cannot create fiction without having to think for yourself. This is self-evident. If you read fiction, which means novels of any kind, poetry, drama, science fiction, fantasy novels and so on, you have to create your own pictures in your head, meaning you create your own fiction, based on the words of the author. Movies and TV give you everything, you do not need to visualize it yourself. With bare words, you absolutely cannot do without thinking, being creative for yourself, and if you read fiction, you have to be creative. So this is how to decide whether somebody prefers to think for himself or not: The people who think also read. People who like thinking read more than those who like it less. People who do not read fiction you should not even try to start a conversation with; they cannot think for themselves. Mind you: with scientific literature, you do not need your imagina- tion, you do not need to think. It is all in there, you need not visu- alize it, and what you need to visualize they print a photograph of. Mind you also: What you are reading right now is NOT fiction, so your reading this does not mean that you think for yourself! 6. Logic is a deadly trap. Do not misunderstand this suggestion to mean that logic is useless. It most decidedly is NOT. Logic only leads to problems if used where it does not apply. This is a logical conclusion from the fact that logic needs data if it is to work properly. Insufficient or contradictory data renders useless all logic that is being applied to it. The problem is the same that applies to computers: Put garbage into the system, and all the output you will ever get is garbage. With too little or with wrong data, logic cannot work. With contradictory data a valid conclusion can still be logically drawn: The data was shit1. Despite these problems, logic is still the universally most important tool of mankind. If applied only to problems where sufficient data is available, it leads to solutions. Whether you like what conclusions you get or not is your problem. Many people do not like the conclusions they get, so they either ignore logic or feed it with data which does not apply, both of which leads to severe problems with reality. A virtual reality, meaning a mathematical or otherwise scientific model of reality is not reality, only a model thereof which does not have all the data the real thing has got. Thus, using this model, you get a whole lot of false information about the real world, only because you told yourself that all valid data is there (and that that should be sufficient), when in fact you withheld a rather inconveniently great amount of valid and applying data. Thus, economic crises are created. Also wars. And religions. If you read the bible or the Quran or the book of Mormon or whatever you got at hand on the matter of religion(s), you will find quite astonishingly large discrepancies between several parts (chapters, books, surahs, whatever) of those books. Contradictory data, to say it in the slang I used above. Which leads to the conclusion that somebody is trying to fool you. The problem is that lots and lots of people are BEING fooled. _________ 1 Only this conclusion is of little use, because it leaves one right where one has begun. 718499927771849992777184999277718499927771849992777184999277718 From: Fra.: Apfelmann Area: Metaphysical To: * 31 Jul 93 20:23:58 Subject: notes 5 UpdReq 7. With the right words, you can bust any communication. This is a universal truism in any natural language. The trick is to use the words of the language the way they were used when the words were formed into the shape (spelling, pronunciation) that they are known by nowadays. The trick itself consists of using the words literally. Nobody will understand what you mean correctly. For example, the english Cockney slang uses the word "fag" for" cigarette, several american english slangs use it for "male homosexual" (keep in mind that "gay" has acquired several meanings in this century alone!). The original word was "faggot", which, of course, describes a musical instrument. This meaning still is in use, but the shortened form somehow is never understood to mean "musical instrument made of wood and metals...(and so on)". It is, however, harshly misunderstood if used outside the area where the same contextual meaning applies. Ask a britishman "you a fag?", and he will offer you a cigarette if he smokes. Put the same question to a californian, and he will either kick your balls off or kiss you. Here you have another proof for the power of some words: Use this word, and you get one reaction, use another, and nothing happens at all. So, if you want to stay on the safe side, one might say, keep to using the unshortened words in their original context and meaning. The problemis, as indicated above, that nobody will understand what you are trying to tell them. The words change meaning not only with a change of place, but also with time. Take "gay", for example. In the "gay nineties" (the 1890s), no more people were "gay" (today meaning "homosexual") than today. It meant that the time was nice, everybody (or almost everybody) had fun and was gayly clad and so on. This is the problem when dealing with "original" meanings of words. You cannot use them anymore, even if you do find out what they were. The meaning of the words, as well as the context in that they are used, has been changesd over and over again. Another example: "joint". Now, a joint is usually (exception: if an M.D. is talking, and sometimes not even then) an enlargened roll-your-own cigarette that has been "salted" with either marijuana or hashish. Never mind the knee or elbows. So, if anybody asks you if you want a joint, tell them you alredy got several of them, and they'll ask you to share. Very funny, indeed. Language should not be fooled around with; it always serves the purpose it is used for well enough the way it is. 8. Let me tell you a fairy tale. * Once upon a time, on a planet so far away both in space and in time that only very few people have ever heard of it at all, there was a mu- sician who had written a song that was so good that it was going to be the hit of the century. Thus, he set out to find a record company that would publish the song, and eventually found a company that was willing to pay him a rather small amount of money if he would publish the song exclusively on this label and pay all studio costs. But, alas, you know how it is with industrial espionage, about one thousand and five hun- dred other record companies managed independently to copy the sheet mu- sic to the song and have their own recording artists have a go at it. And it came to pass that all these recording companies hurried the re- lease of this beautiful recording, and finally got it on the market on the same day, all one thousand and five hundred of them. Of course, there was a lot of confusion (mostly on part of the customers who wanted to buy the original recording), so the one thousand and five hundred recording companies set out to clear up the matter by claiming, independently, that THEIR recording was the one and only original recording, and started printing brochures and even books to prove their claim to the annoyance of the other one thousand and five hundred recording companies, who had done the same, of course. Soon the companies were joined by fans of this or that group or singer or recording company who somehow believed that their version of the song was the original, and started fighting each other. To understand how this was possible, you must know that at that time this country on this planet had a very democratic government: The head of the government and its members had to be elected by the people. So people voted, and nothing changed, except that shortly before this song had been written, most of them had confused notoriety with ability and elected a second-class western movie actor for president. Considering what business this president had been in before, it is hardly astonishing that he was bought out of his government by a record company, so he could just go on reigning right until the election peri- od was over, only he did not have to make no decisions at all, for which he got an awful lot of money. This was one of the one thousand and five hundred record companies that had covered the song. So, of course, they legalized killing anybody who would not believe that their record was the original recording. This led to the other one thousand and five hundred record companies publishing their records in other countries, where they had managed to get into local governments, so they could do the same as had been done unto them. Meanwhile, lots and lots of other record companies had covered the song, so it became still harder to find out which was which version. Eventually, some of the countries that were controlled by the recor- ding companies were starting to fight each other, and soon they started to systematically destroy the concurring records. This went on for a couple of hundreds of years, until, after two wars that were fought by almost all the countries on the planet, there was not one record of the song left. When this was discovered, some people said, "to hell with it, we don't care anyway", but most were still of the opinion that they had to have been the only company amidst all of the one thousand and five hundred record companies that had the original recording, and they kept on tel- ling lies, and they kept their comany records to themselves, lest some- body find out that there actually was no original recording, anyway be- cause the songwriter had copied it from his father, who had been a street singer. And if they haven't died, they'll still make lots of money. * This, of course, is a short version of the history of religions on earth. 718499927771849992777184999277718499927771849992777184999277718 From: Fra.: Apfelmann Area: Metaphysical To: * 31 Jul 93 20:24:10 Subject: notes 6 UpdReq 9. Why are all religions so intolerant? Or rather, why are some reigions not intolerant? With this second question I refer, of course, to the normannic religions (the cult of Odin, among others). This group of cults, which formed the viking religions until the thirteenth century (northern Germany and Scandinavia), was the only group of religions known to me that was tolerant enough to let itself be infiltrated by christian ideas just to be left alone. All other religions have only changed under force, except where chan- ges were introduced by the religious leadership to assimilate other re- ligions. The latter is a very christian practice. The christians have adopted the normannic feast of Ostara1 for the purpose of letting the normans have their revival and still be christians. The normans weren't too impressed, so the pope at the time decreed that the feast of Jul was to become the feast of the birth of their god's incarnation (now called christmas, although the cristians, due to trouble with the julian calendar, misdated the holiday by four days in relation to Jul (Christmas Day is on december 25, Jul is on december 21 and coincides with the winter solstice). In the scandinavian countries, the nonchris- tian midsummer night is still a major festivity of the year, in some places even more important than christmas. The normans, however, did not practice these forms of religious force- feeding. When they conquered Normandy, they became the only people in the known history of the world to adopt the conquered country's langua- ge (french), and the local religion, which was (you guessed correctly) christendom. This they did not do because of any kind of superiority of chistianity or christians, but for reasons of keeping the peace. Proof for this as- sertion is found in the almost unknown historical fact that when Bonifaz felled Thor's Oak to prove that Thor would do nothing to prevent or punish this heresy, and killed two monks in the process2, the onlookers, a german tribe, laughed, but let Bonifaz go on preaching anyway. This happened at a time when pagans were shanghaied into the ranks of christendom by baptism-of-sword (I don't actually know whether this translation is correct, but I could not find the word in any dictiona- ry, including the Random House Unabridged Dictionary of English. Could it be that this practice of the roman catholics actually has no english name?), meaning that some christian priest gave some pagan the choice between letting himself be baptized or being killed by the priests sword. This is all the more confusing for the fact that christendom is the religion that preaches tolerance and love and all that, whereas the nordic religions did not preach any such thing. (Historical fact: The baptism-of-sword has not at present been abolished, it has only been taken exception to by some of the recent popes and is subject to re- institutionalization at any time). This all leads to the thought that maybe christendom needs to employ force to survive. I, personally, find this a logical conclusion from the historical facts known to me at this moment. Christians have always aggregated where political power was, they have exploited the halluci- nations of at least one roman emperor (Constantin the Great) to convert him and, de facto, make a power grab to become the real emperors of the roman empire. With the roman empire in their hands, they could take control of all roman provinces in their own time, and spread christia- nity wherever they went; after all, they had the roman legions. When Carl the Great (Charlemagne), then a mere king of the Franks, married the daughter of a Gallic tribe leader, who was a christian, he could only marry her under the agreement that he would allow himself to be baptised during the wedding ceremony, which was shrewd politics on part of the christians, and poor judgement on part of Charlemagne. Him being the de facto emperor of an almost european empire even before the ack- nowledgement by pope Leo III in the 800th year of the christian era, christendom could not be stopped anymore. ____________ 1 A virility and field goddess 2 The felled tree got cought in a sudden breeze, which turned the tree around in such a way that it fell on the two unfortunate monks and kil- led them. Considering this conduct of a church which claims to be the only way to their god's grace, and to be humanitarian in ALL its actions, it is hard indeed for me to remain a christian, which is why I am not one. It is my herewith stated belief (which I decline to prove here, as in my opinion it is self-evident from the way some people act) that to be a christian in the biblical sense, it is not necessary to be a christian in the ecclesiastical sense; I have known and still do know atheists who conform to all so-called christian forms of conduct but viciously decline to be called christians because they say (and, having read the bible in several translations, including Luther, Gideon and King James, I agree) that being an acting member of a christian church is contradictory to the biblical christian ideals. This leads me off in another direction: The christian ideal, as stated in the bible, is never to use force, no matter under what conditions. Iesus Ben Iussuf, the carpenter some jewish sectarians claimed was the son of their god (Jesus, by the way, always denied this kinship to his god, as you can read for yourself in the evangelia), set up a set of morals, but he compelled nobody to follow this moral code who did not really want to. This got him nailed to the cross, which ironically became the symbol of a religion that used brute force whenever its leaders thought they could gain a political advantage that way. This is what I call bad style. 718499927771849992777184999277718499927771849992777184999277718 From: Fra.: Apfelmann Area: Metaphysical To: * 31 Jul 93 20:24:26 Subject: notes 7 UpdReq 10. People who force others to follow any moral code at all should be crucified. This is a good attitude at any time, I should think. Anyway, people who are good at preaching should always look out for people willing to give them a light. They might mean the pile of wood under your feet rather than whatever you want to smoke at the moment, if you're a smoker. If you are a non-smoker, you should be aware of the fact that the only reason for anybody offering you a light is to light the wood. Too warm a fire is bound to be rather uncomfortable. Iesus Ben Iussuf, the nazarenian preacher, got nailed to a tree for the simple reason of preaching too much, and too convincingly. What he actually had was the set of morals handed down from his parents, which was the torah. The torah (with some parts left out and two or three books added: the old testament) gives people a workable set of morals. These are expressed most understandably in the ten commandments. The ten commandments are rather hard to obey at times, and while they worked (and continue to work) for some five thousand years now, they are not the last word said on how to treat your fellow people. Jesus took these commandments, which are hard enough to follow already, and reinterpreted them in a way that made it IMPOSSIBLE to obey them. "Thou who lookedst at thy neighbor's wife, thou hast already coveted her!", he sais. So what are we to do? Put our eyes out? Let's define what morals are. Morals are somebody else's idea of how you should lead your life. Meaning that whatever set of MORALS you have at the moment, you do not necessarily agree with them, probably circum- vent them, and definitely wish they would not exist. Morals are, by de- finition, the thing your society - the society that raised you - put into your brain camouflaged as ethics. Ethics is what is necessary to regard in dealing with other people to keep you alive. You may be known as a womanizer (or as a vamp), but that does not con- flict with your staying alive, except where the Quran, as interpreted by the schiites, is Law. So any set of rules that prohibits fucking the arse off your neighbor's wife is, by definition, morals. Whereas ethics would only prevent you from doing this if she objects to being screwed by you, and if there is an inconveniently strong probablity of her hus- band either disliking it (which definitely is not always the case!), or finding out and sending you to the showers with a shotgun, thereby earning his wife's disgrace by putting shotholes all over the bed, which probably was quite expensive, especially the water mattress, and blood stains all over the sheets, you know how hard they are to get clean, and so on. It would be a good idea, I think, to get rid of morals as such alto- gether. Sometimes they DO represent some kind of social glue that mana- ges to keep society together, but the few times they have managed to keep society together even after it was doomed, they created consider- able trouble after the downfall of the society that created them, because they would not go down with the society but would, instead, hang around for another couple of centuries, wreaking considerable havoc. As to be seen in Germany after both world wars, when the basic morals of the time immediately before and during the war lingered on and prevented people from liberating themselves. After world war two this symptom was specifically grave. Germans nowadays are still trying to get rid of the paradox that the Israelites and Sinti and Roma and so on make them responsible for the atrocities the Nazis committed against their peoples even though they were not even BORN at the time. Instead of concentrating on pleasing the societies we live in, we should, in my opinion, start to bloody please ourselves, committing ourselves to ethics rather than morals. This may be disturbing for a while, but while morals are necessarily dishonest, as you are bound to override your culturally implemented set of morals sooner or later (if you haven't already) while having to keep a face of utter obedience to morals, ethics are probably the most honest set of rules humanity is capable of producing. Ethics is a very individual concept. Everybody HAS to have their own. Otherwise, ethics could not work. By the definition given above, ethics is the set of rules that you need to stay alive in society. Since everybody is only what (s)he identifies with (and here you can see the trouble patriotism can get you into, if you think about it), everybody will make their ethics fit their identity. Identity is what you are. A patriot will die for his (her) country, because that is what (s)he identifies with. A death for the purpose of ensuring one's country's survival is survival of one's identity. Which, in my opinion, is a waste of identity, but what the heck, anyway. I am most definitely not a patriot. If it ever should come to a declaration of war that would involve my home country, all the border guards would see of me would be my back, getting away FAST. But whatever you invest your identitiy in, you want it to survive, even if it means you yourself are going to die. You pay for your identity by devoting your life to whatever it is you invest it in. The returns on such an investment are usually quite big: You get a purpose in life. You have a job to do. Anyway, what ethics means is that you actually DO have a set of rules you impose upon yourself to obey which will improve the chances of survival of whatever you have invested your identity in, whether you want to or not. So, if you just follow your own ethics, and everybody else did, there would be no lies necessary, because there would be nothing "shameful" in doing anything that goes against the line of others. So, to come to a conclusion, anybody who tells you to behave the way he wants you to behave, even if you do not agree with what he wants you to behave like, just remember that you can do the same thing to him: Tell him that he should follow your ethics as a moral code, and you will not have the trouble Jesus had. He had it coming, anyway: He disregarded his own ethics. 718499927771849992777184999277718499927771849992777184999277718 From: Fra.: Apfelmann Area: Metaphysical To: * 31 Jul 93 20:24:40 Subject: notes 8 UpdReq 11. Everybody is going to wind up in hell, sooner or later. With "hell", I do not, of course, refer to the christian idea of the place (as described by Dante Aligheri), nor do I mean the mohammedan Gehenna. Nor Hel, Hades, or any other religious place for the dead. I refer to Hell. Everybody alive is busy creating their own, personal, solitary brand of Hell. This you do by doing things. No matter how rightly and correctly you do everything, something will always be wrong, and somebody will always be pissed off by whatever it was you have done. So they will react. They will do everything possible to piss YOU off. If you have read article #10 of this series, you will know the difference between morals and ethics. If you have not read that article, you should do so NOW, in order to understand what I am trying to tell you. You already know the difference between ethics and morals. That was easy. Now comes the hard part. The difference between ethical and moral BEHAVIOUR is this: Somebody ACTING morally does not need to conform to morals. He only has to imi- tate hem. You can be the greatest Casanova since Giacomo de Seingalt himself; as long as you manage not to let the neighbors catch on, you are, by definition, acting within their set of morals. Thus, moral behaviour always goes with a rather big set of well-prepared lies, which are used AFTER you have done something. Ethical behaviour always assumes that you do not care about morals, only about your own survival. This means that you have to work things out BEFORE you act, meaning if you are going to seduce your boss' wife, you had better find out if he takes exception to this, and if he owns a shotgun. It would be a good idea, too, to get a job with another compa- ny in case he fires YOU, and not AT you when he finds out (you can al- ways be safe in the assumption that he WILL find out, sooner or later). This means that ethical behaviour needs a lot more preparation than moral behaviour does, which means that it is more uncomfortable to carry out. This, in turn, leads to the inescapable conclusion that most people living on this planet are infernally lazy, but that is another story entirely. Anyway, moral behaviour, which is, as shown above, mostly unprepared, always leads to unnecessary consequences, such as getting shot at by angry husbands. Ehitcal behaviour, which is only possible after think- ing the possible consequences of everything over quite thoroughly, only rarely has unwanted results, or at least none that were not considered AND ACCEPTED in advance. Therefore, ethical behaviour tends to piss less people off than moral behaviour does. Meaning that the more you act morally, the worse your situation is going to be: more and more people will try to give you Hell, in the literal meaning of the concept. This is where you create your own Hell: You get people pissed off at you. They only do what you (to them, quite obviously) want them to do: Piss you off like you never got pissed off before. They feel pissed on by you, and they give you back your own feces, making you drown in your own shit. I know, it sounds rather smelly, but most people seem to like it that way. Otherwise, society would not be the mess it is. 12. There is no real "sin" in any religious or moral sense. This may not be self-evident, but if you dissect the religious concept of "sin" as related to "guilt" and "conscience", you will find that it is true nonetheless. Like this: "Sin" is something that makes you feel guilty and gives you a bad conscience. By feeling guilty, you penalize yourself for whatever sin you may have committed. This is what gives you a bad conscience. If you are canalized by any "morality" religion, like chistendom or islam, you will feel guilty for the most unrational reasons, and some- times for no reason at all. Like, sneaking a look at your neighbor's young wife standing stark naked at the bedroom window, or feeling horny about your prep school teacher, or something. Anything. More rational reasons for feeling guilty would be things like beating up your best friend, or stealing from your parents, or losing money at a round of Poker. I think that these reasons to feel guilty are more rational than those mentioned before because their consequences have something to do with YOU, not with somebody else or nobody at all. Thus, there may even be somthing like "sin" after all. This would be to act contrary to your own ethics, thus endangering your identity. Your ego, whatever that may be. Coming back to the religious meaning of "sin", I feel I must comment on the way the biblical religions (meaning christendom, judaism, islam, jehovah's witnesses, mormons, jesus people and so on, in short, all religions that rely on the torah at least as part of their sacred wri- tings) treat this subject. In the torah, sin is defined as any act against the will of their god they call "God", "Jahwe", "Jehovah", "Jesus", "The Christ", and so on. The problem with this definition is, of course, that nobody can really know, according to those religions, what their god really wants, so they do not even know wheter they sin or not, in some cases. To clear this trouble up, this god gave them the ten commandments, so they had some rules-of-thumb to act upon. Since only half of those commandments have anything to do with society, while the others are purely for the benefit of the priesthood, one might question the authenticity of those commandments, but that is not the question here. The problem is, after all, CAN these rules-of-thumb be followed AT ALL? The answer, after the first look, seems to be "yes". After a closer look, it turns out to be a resounding "NO!!!!". This is how it works: Take the fourth comandment, "Thou shalt not steal", and the fifth, "Thou shalt not kill". Then take them seriously. The problem is, every time you step on an ant or any living thing at all, you kill something out of "God's" creation. And every time you eat anything, you prevent it from being eaten by the creatures that usually eat it. If you eat meat, you steal from the carnivores, and if you eat a really good salad, you steal from snails and butterflies and so on. Comes the time when you dare not move your feet nor eat anyting at all. Still, simply by EXISTING, you kill billions upon billions of bacteria and viruses. Thus, nobody can achieve the state of grace needed to get into the cristian "paradise", or its equivalents in other religions. Seems to me like everybody's going to end up in Hell, someday. 718499927771849992777184999277718499927771849992777184999277718 From: Walter A. Deeter Area: Metaphysical To: All 27 Jul 93 22:41:02 Subject: A Course In Miracles UpdReq Hi Everyone, I'm starting this topic in order to share with students of the Course on XBN, and also to provide information about ACIM and to answer the questions of others who might be interested. Toward the latter end, I'm offering the following short overview of the material. A Course In Miracles consists of three books, a Text, a Workbook for Students and a Manual for Teachers. The books were taken down by the late psychologist Helen Schucman between 1965 and 1972, in response to what she described as "...a sort of rapid inner dictation." The source of that dictation identifies himself clearly as Jesus. The books are set up as a self-study course, and many people do study on their own. However, it is more common for people to get together in discussion groups, to share their understanding with one another. There are also some people who teach the course to others. Larger general bookstores should have the Course, new age bookstores will, or you can order it ($25,00 soft cover) from the Foundation For Inner Peace, Box 1104, Glen Ellen, CA 95442, (707) 939-0200. Prior to beginning her scribing of the Course, Helen Schucman had a dream in which she was exploreing an ancient, dusty cave. She found a scroll and, in the dream she knew that it contained all the past and all the future. She knew that she could read this if she wished, but only the centermost panel of the scroll was visible and it said only, "God is." Helen decided that this was enough to know and woke with a feeling of great joy, feeling, somehow, she had "passed." "God is" could be described as the central idea of ACIM. God is everything. Every star, planet, blade of grass and great thinker shares beingness with God. A logical consequence of this statement is that it follows: anything which is not God, must be nothing. As expressed in the Introduction to the Course, "Nothing that is real can be threatened. Nothing that is unreal exists. Herein lies the peace of God." The Course says that "...to desire something wholly is to create it," and this is our origin. God created us, the Sunship through the extension of His being. We are loving thoughts in the Mind of God. The Buddhist philosophers have a story about "Indra's Net," which lies at the heart of the world and is made up of ten thousand pearls, so arranged that each of them is reflected in all of the others. We, the Course would say, are like those pearls. We are little parts of God. However, there are no "little" parts of God. Infinity divided is still infinity. We are, each of us, created all that God is. So, if this is true, why this mess? Why is that little voice inside whining, "but I'm not a Child of God, I'm slug vomit?" We feel this way, because we have chosen to see ourselves as separate from God. We had "the tiny mad idea" that it was not enough to be one of the pearls. We wanted a special relationship with God. Each of us wanted God to see him or her as different from the other pearls. Judgment entered into our minds, following false premises to a logical, though erroneous, conclusion: If we were different from one another, we were necessarily different from God. The Course calls this illusory state "the separation." We don't have to wonder how we could have entertained such a mad idea in the first place. We reenact the separation every moment of every day. It is only because of that, we're here. In our religious tradition, we have a story about Lucifer, an "angel of light," who wanted to be the most favored in the sight of God. By trying to be other than God had created him to be, Lucifer defied God's will, and so was banished from Heaven. We are really telling a story about ourselves. But, however much our guilty minds dwell on the notion of punishment, we have not been banished from Heaven, that is, from the Mind of God for nothing else exists. It would indeed be sin if we could make ourselves other than God created us to be, for "sin" is what we do in opposition to the Will of our Creator, but we cannot sin. Wishing only made it seem so. We have only entered a delusion in which we have forgotten what we are. We are no more guilty than a dreamer upon awakening from a dream. But like a dreamer dreaming we can feel very guilty indeed. We are so afraid that God is angry with us for opposing His (or Her or Its) Will, that set up an imaginary foe to take most of that guilt for us. We projected most of God's anger onto the Lucifer in our story. But, why would GOD be angry? GOD is not the one that we have hurt. In "A Return to Love," Marianne Williamson quotes a wonderful line, "We are not punished FOR our sins, we are punished BY our sins." And so it is, we have condemned ourselves to hell. Nothing holds us here save our own unwillingness to see the illusion we made for what it is. God merely waits upon our choice to return to Him, with total Love and total faith in what our choice will be. Making that choice for God is what ACIM is a course in doing. It has been described as a program of Spiritual Psychotherapy, which is a far better term for it than religion. The Course says that "The teachers of God come from all religions and from no religion." While Jesus is the author of ACIM, and most students of ACIM relate to it through Him, this is not required. What matters on our journey back to God is the walk we walk, not the talk we talk. So what is the walk? Essentially, we come to God through our brothers and sisters right here. As we learn to forgive other people, to see them guiltless as God created them, then what we think we hold against them (and what we think they hold against us) is deprived of its power to poison our hearts. And we learn to lay aside the heavy shield of fear and denial that we put between ourselves and God. This works because the world of time and matter, sin and separation isn't really here. What we "see" is nothing but a projection of our internal state. As Gerald Jampolsky puts it in "Love is Letting go of Fear," "Perception is a mirror not a fact." This process of letting go, of unlearning the whole illusion of space, time and separation from the big bang on, would be unimaginably difficult if we had to do it by ourselves. However we don't have to. God's answer to the ego--the separated self that we made, was His creation of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the part of us and of God which remembers Who we really are and quietly waits upon our decision to turn to Him for help. This idea releasing our will to the Holy Spirit is so like the gentile wisdom of the 12 Steps, "where surrender brings true victory," that many Students use ACIM and 12-Step concepts interchangeably. In the care of the Holy Spirit all of our loving thoughts are given to God and the separation quietly fades into the nothingness it always was. Love, Walter 718499927771849992777184999277718499927771849992777184999277718