Table of Contents

    • Preface: Advance Care Directives
    • Forward: Scientific Research Methodology
    • SECTION I: In What Do You Trust?
  1. Revelation Or Experience?
  2. Hyperdimensional Or Material?
  3. Deism Or Humanism?
  4. Endless Or Pointless Existence?
  5. Proven Or Pretend Time?
  6. Catastrophism Or Uniformitarianism?
  7. Reformation Or Retrogression?
  8. Intelligence Or Intelligentia?
  9. Education Or Indoctrination?
    • Section II: The Stones Cry Out
  10. It Is Impossible For Science To Prove Anything Continue reading “Table of Contents”

Introduction: Advance Care Directives

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

It is 100 seconds to midnight…

In 2020, online lying literally killed…deliberate attempts (sometimes by national leaders) to disseminate misinformation and disinformation…

a “massive ‘infodemic’—an over-abundance of information …makes it hard for people to find trustworthy sources and reliable guidance when they need it…” 

Foreword: Scientific Research Methodology

In stark contrast to emotion-based religious strategies to obtain and retain followers, the posts in this blog use the same procedures used in scientific research and literary and legal hermeneutics to assess the reliability – internal consistency, and validity- external agreement of the historical and scientific statements purportedly relayed by an infinite God.

The reader is not expected to read and comprehend the following, simply to scan over and, frankly, to be impressed with the rigorous methods applied to this blog’s evaluation of the claims made by rival authority figures.

Have you applied the same rigor to determining the trustworthiness of your believed means of salvation from catastrophe in this life and, especially, any possible after-life?

Continue reading “Foreword: Scientific Research Methodology”

SECTION I: In What Do You Trust?

The history of “In God We Trust” becoming the official motto of the United States

as the country became ravaged by the Civil War, religious sentiment grew… Reverend M. R. Watkinson appealed to Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase, to add the phrase to all U.S. coins…He wrote, “This would place us openly under the Divine protection…

Really? The belief that proclaiming a condition brings it into existence is magical thinking. Common in young children but considered psychotic or New Age religion in grownups.

Trust is not created by fiat. Trust is formed by neurological connections in the brain through interactions with others.

Erik Erikson, a developmental psychologist, researched the importance of trust in infancy. He noted that when caregivers are a consistent source of comfort, food, and affection, an infant learns trust. The baby develops a belief that others are dependable and reliable. If caregivers are neglectful the infant learns mistrust. The baby then develops a belief that the world is an unpredictable, undependable, and possibly a dangerous place.

Further research has shown that trust may be established even prenatally, despite the still-developing brain lacking the neurological ability for cognitive or emotional processing of experiences.

Continue reading “SECTION I: In What Do You Trust?”

1) Revelation Or Lived Experience?

Hundreds of thousands of people died in the December 26, 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. But as described in these news reports, others saw warning signs, and escaped with their lives…

a 10-year-old British girl saved more than 100 people because she had just studied the killer waves in school. When the sea suddenly began to boil, then pulled away from the resort she was visiting, leaving fish and boats stranded high and dry, Tilly Smith recognized that a tsunami was approaching. Fortunately, her frantic warnings were heeded, and the beach was evacuated just moments before the huge waves crashed ashore…

Many other people in the region were less attuned to nature, and paid with their lives. 

The most important knowledge, guiding our values and behaviors during our lifetime, is what happens after this lifetime.

Science cannot answer the question “Does God exist?”science studies the natural world, not the supernatural. No amount of scientific testing or theorizing could prove or disprove the existence of a supernatural creator.

So we are forced to rely on revelation by a supernatural being.

But there are over 4,000 religions in the world offering hope for a quality of spiritual existence after death of the body. Which one is trustworthy?

Continue reading “1) Revelation Or Lived Experience?”

2) Four Dimensions Or More?

The Renaissance is often envisioned in terms of Italy’s resurgence of magnificent art depicting the Classical World, but…

The best starting point to begin any cursory investigation into the Classical World is with the twin verse epics compiled by Homer…Iliad and Odyssey…between 1050 and 850 BC…Much like contemporary Hollywood superheroes, in whom we see our own desires and appetites incarnated…Zeus (Homer’s thundering “storm-bringer”) notoriously metamorphosed himself into various animal forms in order to impregnate a succession of unwitting and reluctant women…Through his mother Olympias, Alexander considered himself a direct descendant of Achilles[a demigod]…he used to sleep with a dagger and his private Iliad under his pillow, calling it his journey-book of excellence in war…Alexander lived out the poems he most preferred…

What began on…Alexander the Great’s Makran expedition passed to the Ptolemies in Egypt, to the generals and emperors of Rome…

[Roman] Virgil’s Aeneid, which is modelled on both Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey in almost obsessive detail and yet transforms them at every turn…Virgil chose to conclude with a duel between the champions on either side, Trojan and Latin: Aeneas [another demigod] slaughters Turnus in an excess of fury…Achilles abuses the corpse of his enemy, until even the gods are appalled at his inhumanity…

The scene has shocked and disturbed many readers, for the chilling violence with which Virgil elected to end his poem…Why has Virgil outdone Homer in the ferocity of the ending?

Sex and violence presented together clearly provided a highly arousing combination…

Continue reading “2) Four Dimensions Or More?”

3) Deism Or Humanism?

A purely materialistic world viewdominates modern Western culture, first articulated by the Greeks late in the history of civilization.

Until then the mystical world…was explained through…the gods…

In the second half of the fifth century B.C. the tradition of the Sophists emerged…they were worldly, liberal minded humanists…each person had his individual experiences and individual truth. Trying to define an objective reality was pointless…

Socrates… turned his back on science and cosmology and pursued ethics and logic…With his dialectic method of inquiry Socrates developed one of the core columns of Western thinking…True knowledge was something that could not be learned by listening to other people it had to be personally attained.

Plato…taught that every material object also had a transcendental aspect to it…The immortal soul was in contact with the divine prior to birth but lost this connection due to amnesia when entering the physical body… Logos…a divine ordering principle behind all things and events…[was] integrated…into his philosophy of an understandable world.

Aristotle…turned Plato’s principles of a divine order upside down…understanding of the natural world could be attained by perceiving the world with the five senses…logic, empiricism and natural science…turned out to be trend-setting for scientific research of the West

The religion of humanism was born.

 in one form or another, religion is found in all known human societies. Even the earliest societies on record show clear traces of religious symbols and ceremonies. Throughout history, religion has continued to be a central part of societies and human experience, shaping how individuals react to the environments in which they live…

As a belief system, religion shapes what people think and how they see the world. As a social institution, religion is a pattern of social action organized around the beliefs and practices that people develop to answer questions about the meaning of existence. As an institution, religion persists over time and has an organizational structure into which members are socialized.

Why Religion Matters: The Impact of Religious Practice on Social Stability

When policymakers consider America’s grave social problems, including violent crime and rising illegitimacy, substance abuse, and welfare dependency, they should heed the findings in the professional literature of the social sciences on the positive consequences that flow from the practice of religion…

Continue reading “3) Deism Or Humanism?”

4) Freedom Or Tyranny?

A purely materialistic world viewdominates modern Western culture, first articulated by the Greeks late in the history of civilization.

Until then the mystical world…was explained through…the gods…

In the second half of the fifth century B.C. the tradition of the Sophists emerged…they were worldly, liberal minded humanists…each person had his individual experiences and individual truth. Trying to define an objective reality was pointless…

Socrates… turned his back on science and cosmology and pursued ethics and logic…With his dialectic method of inquiry Socrates developed one of the core columns of Western thinking…True knowledge was something that could not be learned by listening to other people it had to be personally attained.

Plato…taught that every material object also had a transcendental aspect to it…The immortal soul was in contact with the divine prior to birth but lost this connection due to amnesia when entering the physical body… Logos…a divine ordering principle behind all things and events…[was] integrated…into his philosophy of an understandable world.

Aristotle…turned Plato’s principles of a divine order upside down…understanding of the natural world could be attained by perceiving the world with the five senses…logic, empiricism and natural science…turned out to be trend-setting for scientific research of the West

The religion of humanism was born.

Julian Huxley’s brother, the novelist Aldous, as the author of the prescient novel Brave New World(1931) portrayed both the possibilities of an ordered rationalised society based on cloning, and its defects. By 1958 when Aldous wrote “Brave New World Revisited”, he felt, “The prophecies made in 1931 are coming true much sooner than I thought they would…” Aldous Huxley’s main fear by then was brain washing and mind control: Lacking the ability to impose genetic uniformity upon embryos, the rulers of tomorrow’s over-populated and over-organized world will try to impose social and cultural uniformity upon adults and their children. To achieve this end, they will (unless prevented) make use of all the mind-manipulating techniques at their disposal and will not hesitate to reinforce these methods of non-rational persuasion by economic coercion and threats of physical violence…

Huxley tried to get population problems onto the agendas of the United Nations as well as onto those of its specialised agencies, not least UNESCO, FAO, WHO as well as supporting the UN Population Commission…He was aligned with the Rockefeller Foundation…

On leaving Unesco, Huxley continued his efforts to promote biological values. He took the position that mankind had a unique responsibility – and capacity – for further evolution….This meant that conclaves of experts – as opposed to government representatives – had both a cultural and biological importance….Huxley organised a study group “to study the problem of a possible new “ideology” appropriate to the present situation”. Huxley wanted this to be an interdisciplinary, and yet also a secret and anonymous group, linking high powered thinkers with practical activities. This was Huxley in elitist mode.

Eugenicists adopted an elitist stance of engineering a society…selective education favoured by eugenically minded psychologists was weakened by advocates of…comprehensive schooling…eugenics empowered women’s activism. Margaret Sanger in the United States provided…classic eugenic aims. As regards abortion and birth control, eugenicists gained in influence through such organisations as the International Planned Parenthood Federation…

The humanist elites have not stopped accumulating wealth through power and oppression.

We all have an idea of what a civilized society looks like. We like classical music, we go to the theatre, we play the piano, we like to read nice novels, we like to hear poetry and we take our children for walks in the countryside. We think all those things make us civilized.

But look at Reinhard Heydrich: he had a piano in his office and would play Mozart at lunchtime. Then, in the afternoon, he would organise countless deaths in the concentration camps. He would sign away the lives of millions of people with the sweep of a pen.

It’s easy to say that Hitler was a deranged lunatic assisted by a gang of criminals, and that the people of Germany were either a bit awful or they were intimidated by the Gestapo. But the truth is more nuanced, and it should force us to think about ourselves.

Not many of us would be among those brave and individual thinkers who would stand up and say, “This is wrong”.

Gradually, by continually compromising, people can end up in that position.

In 1938, when Austria was being invaded, [Franz Stengl] was a police detective in the Austrian police force. Somebody told him that the Nazis were coming in one Monday morning, so he broke into his personnel file and put in a falsified Nazi Party membership card.

Stangl forged the card; he wasn’t a member of the Nazi party.

When the Nazis occupied, they immediately went through the files of all the policemen and identified Stangl as a party member. It was a tremendous lie, but enabled him to keep his job.

Consequently, he ended up in the T-4 programme, because he was seen as a reliable person. T-4 was a euthanasia programme that aimed to kill off the physically and mentally handicapped.

Stangl then got the job of a commandant at Treblinka, which was a pure and simple death camp. He ended up being the master of death, responsible in one year for nearly a million Jewish deaths.

Think you’re safe here, in America, instead of Nazi Germany?

If you look at history as an investigative journalist instead of an unquestioning patriot, you’ll see that America took over Nazi Germany’s elitist and eugenics war agenda.

As early as 1960 US military manuals encouraged intelligence operatives to ally themselves with “smugglers” and “Black market operators” to defeat communist insurgents…the CIA did just that. Take Southeast Asia…the agency allied itself with…the Hmong in Laos, who…were trafficking opium. Or Afghansitan…in the 1980s the CIA backed the Mujahedeen against the Soviet Union….the same Mujahedeen have controlled up to one third of the opium (used to make heroin) reaching the United States.

a three-decade war pitching the CIA-backed Colombian military and allied rightist paramilitaries …involved in Colombia’s drug trade…of about 80 percent of the world’s cocaine, the base substance of crack…

By so doing, the CIA has facilitated crimes involving both human rights and drug trafficking.

The most important assassination of the 20th century

Patrice Lumumba, the first legally elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo…assassinated…1961…by American and Belgian governments…it was during the colonial period that the US acquired a strategic stake in the enormous natural wealth of the Congo, following its use of uranium from Congolese mines to manufacture the first atomic weapons…

Patrice Lumumba’s determination to achieve genuine independence and to have full control over Congo’s resources in order to…improve the living conditions of our people was perceived as a threat to western interests.

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Joseph-Desiré Mobutu managed to destroy the third largest – and potentially the richest – country in Africa.

Early in his rule, Mobutu consolidated power by publicly executing political rivals…and other threats to his rule…before an audience of 50,000 spectators.

In 1968, Pierre_Mulele, Lumumba’s Minister of Education…was lured out of exile…still alive, his eyes were gouged out, his genitals were ripped off, and his limbs were amputated one by one…

Mobutu…nationalized foreign-owned firms and forced European investors out of the country…handed the management of these firms to relatives and close associates, who quickly…stole the companies’ assets…[the country] went from prosperity to bankruptcy almost overnight…

By 1977…rebels based in Angola invaded…The governments of Belgium and France deployed troops with logistical support from the United States and defeated the rebels

The infrastructure virtually collapsed…The soldiers…supported themselves by robbing the civilian population…

[Meanwhile] Mobutu…cruised on the Congo on his yacht…he erected a palace, the Palace of Versailles of the jungle. For shopping trips to Paris, he would charter a Concorde from Air France. The man who diplomats allege could pay off Zaire’s entire debt with a personal cheque has more than 20 luxury properties in the West…

Mobutu’s rule earned a reputation as one of the world’s foremost examples of Kleptocracy and Nepotism.

Mobutu led one of the most enduring dictatorships in Africa…

Mobutu was the subject of one of the most pervasive Personality cult of the twentieth century. The evening newscast opened with an image of him descending through clouds like a god…He held such titles as Father of the Nation, Messiah, Guide of the Revolution, Helmsman, Founder, Savior of the People, Supreme Combatant…

For the most part, Zaire enjoyed warm relations with the United States…Mobutu befriended several US presidents…

Zaire received nearly half the foreign aid Carter allocated to Sub-Saharan Africa.

Mobutu enjoyed a very warm relationship with the Reagan Administration…Mobutu visited the White House three times, and criticism of Zaire’s human rights record by the US was effectively muted…Reagan praised the Zairian strongman as “a voice of good sense and goodwill”.

Mobutu also had a cordial relationship with…George H. W. Bush; he was the first African head of state to visit Bush at the White House.

Mobutu was befriended by televangelist Pat Robertson.

2011: The United States has found itself in a seemingly endless series of wars over the past two decadesDespite frequent opposition…the foreign policy elite operates on a consensus that routinely leads to the use of military power to solve international crises…

the notion that the United States and its allies were now free to project power to “do good” has remained intact…

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A new study has found that as much as a sixth of foreign aid intended for the world’s poorest countries has flowed into bank accounts in tax havens owned by elites.

Pick a side. Fodder for the elite’s exploitation, or fall on the mercy of a Supreme Being whose treatment toward helpless humanity is legendary.

Thoughtful consideration of the available options must lead to a realization that identifying with, through shared ideology, means becoming victims of, the narcissistic elitists of this world.

5) Pointless Or Endless Existence?

Stephen Hawking is a genius physicist and “one of the most important scientists and public intellectuals of our time, if not all time.” 

But despite being a top ranked scientist among scientists, Stephen Hawking does not base his choice of belief system on evidence.

Note carefully that Stephen Hawking’s choice of belief is made to resolve his emotional response to the concept of an afterlife. As he states, he is grateful, i.e. relieved to conclude that there is no afterlife.

This is understandable, since he spent his entire adult life struggling with a severely debilitating physical disease, experiencing, in essence, the misery of a disembodied soul as postulated to be the condition of the afterlife.

But is someone’s emotionally disturbed coping mechanism a viable basis on which to base belief directing your own life’s choices and plans for your soul’s fate after death? 

Continue reading “5) Pointless Or Endless Existence?”

6) Proven Or Pretend Time?

Traditional Christian views held that the world started with its Creation and would end with the second coming of Jesus. This concept did not give evolution enough time to producing anything. 6000 years was not enough time to create the incredible diversity of life in the world.

Charles Lyell (1797–1875) was a close friend of Charles Darwin. Lyell’s elite social and political connections within Britain’s Military Industrial Complex – like his friend Darwin – authorized him to underwrite a new “explanation of time” that due to its “eloquence…convinced a wide range of readers of the significance of “”Deep time.

Continue reading “6) Proven Or Pretend Time?”