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Illuminat, Evil and Enlightenment

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Edited by Aideen Devine, Friday, 25 Aug 2023, 09:10

You can’t go online and research anything without coming across the ‘illuminati’.  Apparently, these are the elite who really run the world (and you can see just what a great job they’re doing!), they rope in all the top celebrities and are soooo evil because they believe in and worship the devil!!!  Wooooh! Scary stuff!

They’re supposed to be interconnected with the Freemasons and a load of other secret societies who, allegedly, possess old ‘knowledge’ or ‘magic’. They share symbols (pentagons, all seeing eyes etc) and you go through a ceremony or initiation when you join. Miley Cyrus is supposed to be one, and that would be enough to ensure it’s a club that I, and I’m sure many others, would never want to join!

I have actively avoided mentioning any of this up until now because I think it is all just another load of old crap, designed to distract and divide us, while the mega-rich continue to plunder the world’s resources for themselves.

Now if you want to run around with your trousers up over your knees, give secret handshakes (like a bunch of schoolboys), cover one of your eyes in photos and make hand gestures to signify your loyalty to Satan, then you really need to take a long hard look at yourself and grow up. Just writing that shows how absurd and rather pathetic it all is, ‘Oh, look at us! We’re Satanists, how evil are we?!’

If you look at it logically, if you believe in the devil, then you have to believe in God, I mean, you cannot have the ultimate evil without the ultimate good, it goes against the laws of physics. And I know whose side I would want to be on.

In the Navajo tradition, they believe that man is bad and has to learn to be good, a bit like the old Catholic teaching on original sin but not as fascist. I don’t think the Navajo would have excluded a child from the family burial plot because someone hadn’t poured water on its head and said some ‘magic’ words. The more you break this stuff down, the more ridiculous it all appears.  How could competent and intelligent people have been persuaded to believe this?! Then again, look around!

There was a time when I believed that man was inherently good but the events of this last year have made me reassess that belief. When you look at it logically, again, we have to learn to be, not only good, but to be human/humane. As M. Scott Peak pointed out in The Road Less Travelled series, it is natural to defecate in your pants, but you learn to control it, just as you can learn how to behave and control your emotions and actions.

There are several well known cases of children brought up with animals who adopted the behaviour of the animals. Psychology will also tell you that if language and a host of other ‘human’ behaviours have not been acquired by the age of 7, then the chances of acquiring them after that become slim. It would appear therefore, that there are no inherent instincts or behaviours that make us human and our ‘humanity’ is something that has to be learned. We are animals, whether we like to believe it or not; I was going to say animals with manners, but I don’t think our manners are as good as many other animal species (eg: elephants).  In the face of that, I think we need to show a lot more humility, and a lot less arrogance, about who we think we are and what we know.

M Scott Peck in People of the Lie pointed to laziness as the source of underlying evil in humanity. Being good requires effort, being evil requires no effort at all. Consciousness is that effort and begins early in humans, anyone who has children will remember the three year old who asked why, why, why? We also learn what we are allowed to question and what we are not. If you live in a society where you are forbidden from challenging or asking questions about that society and/or the belief systems you live under, you never develop beyond the psychological boundaries of childhood and mature into full adult consciousness. You remain passive and obedient, mindlessly accepting and believing everything you’ve been told or, at least, pretending to.

Ireland has had one of the hardest lockdowns in the world over the ‘pandemic’ and has been one of the least vocal in speaking out against it and the restrictions. The consciousness of the majority of the population remains undeveloped and immature. Centuries of British rule and the autocracy of the Catholic Church have created a passive and cowardly population. Here in the north, there is an additional factor to that submissiveness.  On the nationalist side, many people still fear Sinn Fein and what they, or their cohorts, might do if they go up against them. The silence against lockdown has been deafening on the nationalist side, a side many would have thought would have been the first to object to having their freedom taken away. But it’s amazing what the Council for Foreign Relations (aka CIA) can buy for €4.6m (Political principles, Ms McDonald?  That’ll do nicely, Mr Haass.) See link below.

There have been several voices of dissent on the Unionist/Protestant side (Sammy Wilson, Van Morrison) which, when you look at history, comes as no surprise. The first ‘Irish rebels’ were Presbyterians, going back to Wolfe Tone in 1798 and, in the Easter Rising, there were many from the Presbyterian tradition initially involved in the fight for freedom and equality. It was only afterwards, on the issue of Home Rule, that the divide opened up across religious grounds, leading to the political division of a mainly Protestant North and a Catholic South. These were the same tactics the British used to divide India from Pakistan and set Muslim against Hindu, and vice versa.

The false humility promoted by ‘Christianity’, along with nationalism/republicanism, has created a culture of victimhood and martyrdom. The nodding assent on display is the result of a population who are not used to thinking for themselves, or questioning authority, or rather the authorities who are supposed to be on their side. Religious, political and community leaders continue to exploit this victimhood mentality to maintain power and control over the masses. (A strategy not confined to Ireland and now being used by the manipulators behind the BLM movement). This is not to say that the Irish haven’t endured some horrific abuses over the centuries and there is a kind courage in bearing suffering that is beyond your control. But none at all, when it is fully within your control as a grown adult.

When it comes to being good or evil, I don’t care if you worship God or Satan.  I do however, believe that both those entities are the excuse many use for a lot of self-righteous hypocrisy and some extremely questionable behaviour. I believe the choice between good and evil is ours and our alone, but it does require consciousness, and that can only be fully achieved with the right support and advice growing up, and begins with observing, thinking and asking questions. People may be able to control your actions at times, and we may not always be allowed to openly question what we are being told, but the majority of us still have the capacity to think, even if we can’t always express those thoughts.

Some believe that we need religion to provide the moral framework for the development of a conscience and that, without religion, people would not be good at all and evil would flourish. I disagree; there are some religions/belief systems that are fairly benign, eg: Buddhism, but the evils committed under Christianity would do Hitler proud and are no guarantee that a person will act morally or from a place of consciousness.  Religion may tell us what to believe but consciousness makes us think.

When we think about evil, we think about the great evils of Stalin or Hitler who as I pointed out in previous posts, never actually killed anyone. As Scott Peck pointed out, there is another low level of evil, within all of us that we need to be aware of and recognise. We would consider breaking a child’s bones an evil act, but would we feel the same about a resentful and jealous parent breaking a child’s spirit? Or what about the overly involved parent, who gives their child everything, as a way of emotionally manipulating the child and sabotaging their autonomy?

Then there are the diabolical horrors committed by humans against each other when in a state of war, or in defence of an ideology. I’m only a couple of chapters into the Gulag Archipelago and I’m appalled to think about the minds that dreamt up the tortures detailed in it. It’s easy to think the perpetrators were psychotic, and I’m sure there were a few psychos among them, but they couldn’t all have been, or maybe the devil made them do it.

As Solzhenitsyn points out in Chapter 4, ‘If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil, cuts through the heart of every human being’.

He acknowledges the potential within himself to do what his tormentors are doing. He wonders how he would behave if his life had taken a different direction, and questions what makes decent men complicit within these types of situations. He concludes that it is because they believe they are doing good and, as the old saying goes, ‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions’.

The corruption on display around the world by those in power today could make one think that maybe they are minions of Satan and Old Nick, himself, is running the show. But I’m not convinced.  They say the devil makes work for idle hands but I think it is the weak minded who are most easily led towards corruption.

I don’t know if the Illuminati are a real thing or are just a few deluded celebrities desperately trying to give themselves some ‘street cred’. Illuminati means enlightened and if they really are seeking enlightenment, then they will have difficulty finding it in the vileness that Satan represents. As Jordan Peterson says, ‘truth is the path to true enlightenment’ and truth is the very antithesis of the devil, aka, the Father of Lies. 

The population, at present, are being lied to on a grand scale. The powers behind the lies have been doing this for decades and are well practised in making a lie appear as truth, and the truth, a lie. They use censorship and propaganda to confuse and misdirect us, and people have been manipulated into believing they are doing good by wearing masks, social-distancing and taking ‘vaccines’, without any real scientific truth being presented to validate those claims . Debates rage in families and online regarding the efficacy of these measures and keep us divided and distracted, again.

The only defence against a lie is to consciously seek the truth and be authentic, and that begins with us and us alone. We have within us the power to do good or evil, and recognising and acknowledging our capacity for evil, as well as good, is the first step towards consciousness, and that requires honesty and effort. As we try to navigate our way through the web of lies and deceit that has been created as part of this ‘crisis’, remember the words of Edmund Burke, ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil, is for good men to do nothing’, so think on.

Apologies forgot to add in the links:

https://theirishsentinel.com/2021/03/20/sinn-feins-deal-with-the-devil-e4-6-million-was-just-the-start/

https://rense.com/general81/miley.htm


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Boris, burkas & Bentine!

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Edited by Aideen Devine, Sunday, 12 Aug 2018, 17:56

So, Boris (the buffoon?) has upset many with his comments on burkas.  I managed to catch a bit of the debate on the Jeremy Vine show the other day; completely by accident, I might add, as I actively avoid news and talk shows as much as possible but I'd left the radio on while I was out doing a bit of gardening and had come back in for some lunch.  Of course, many were getting very self-righteous and demanding he apologise, but it seemed that equally as many were in support with the media, as ever, getting hysterical and doing its best to whip up a frenzy.  I'm not a fan of Boris Johnson and although we were on the same side in the Brexit referendum, he would definitely not be a natural ally.  I would, however, be a huge fan of his mother’s art and if you ever get the chance to go see it, then I would highly recommend it.  Her name is Charlotte Johnson, for anyone who’s interested.

On the whole burka debate, I have to confess having had similar thoughts myself on the whole, head to toe in black, garb but it wasn't letter boxes that came to mind. I remember the first time I saw a picture of a fully veiled woman, I was immediately reminded of a show I watched when I was young, Bentine Time, with the inimitable, Michael Bentine.  Now, I don't remember many details but I do remember he used to do these little puppet shows and there was one with spies or some such, and they were all in black with only their noses visible and that was the first thought that popped in to my head when I saw the picture.  Is that racism or Islamaphobia? I don't think so, it's not racism because Islam is not a race.  Islamaphobia? Hardly, it’s just a thought, my mind making a connection between two things that had similarities.  I get the same thing here when the Orange Order or any other group starts on about marching and their right to march.  The first thing that pops into my head is Barney the Dinosaur, my daughter was a big fan when she was young, saying march, march, march!  Maybe it’s just my natural instinct to draw comparisons between the absurd, the farcical and the comic, I’ll leave you to decide which is which.

This whole debate centres around what Muslim women wear and their right to choose and this is the problem I have with the burka.  In many cases, it is not a choice, it is an imposition, a cultural imposition in a patriarchal society dressed up as the ‘will of God’.  Now, there are those who say they choose to wear the niqab, hijab or burka as a symbol of their faith and they should have the right to do so, but I am not convinced.  I do, however, understand the mentality of women who defend that decision.  I remember back in the worst of the troubles when the British government took up a stance against all things Irish Republican and banned Gerry Adams from speaking on air.  Because I was brought up as an Irish Catholic and this was against 'our side', then you supported them even when it wasn't doing you or anybody else any favours.  But since I've never been convinced of any particular group's right to martyrdom or sainthood, especially when your so-called 'saviours' are the very people keeping your community down and subjecting them to terror and thuggery, as you grow up you question these ‘loyalties’ more and begin to see through the propaganda and brainwashing that allows the ‘believers’ to be exploited by others.

As for the ‘religious freedom’ side of this debate, I have absolutely no sympathy.  You are free to believe in whatever God you wish but it should be a private matter between you and the God you choose, had imposed upon you or were brainwashed into believing in.  Because the reality is, very few people ever actually choose their religion, it was usually chosen or imposed on them by their parents and/or the society they grew up in.  How many of us would believe in the religion we were brought up in, if we had never been told about Jesus or Mohamed or Buddha or any of them?  Would you even have a belief in a God if you had been left to decide for yourself purely on your own experience and if you did, what form would your ‘God’ take?

As to the question of burkas, what logic is there in an all-powerful, all-knowing being, who allegedly created and controls the entire universe, concerning itself with what a few women wear here on Earth? If this powerful, all-knowing deity made everything then, ‘it’ made women too, and if you truly believed in your God’s ‘greatness’, then how could a woman be a lesser thing than a man?  Surely, this God’s ‘creations’ would all have equal value; for how could something created by a ‘God’ be less than perfect?   And I’m absolutely certain an omnipotent, omniscient deity does not need some uptight, over-zealous patriarch acting on ‘its’ behalf and handing out diktats on clothing, cutting off anyone's genitalia or fighting its battles either.

As to women in burkas looking like bank robbers, I have to disagree with Boris on this one.  Bank robbers these days are more apt to look like Boris.  The traditional idea of a bank robber as someone who goes in and steals the bank’s money, sorry, our money, has actually reversed.  Now, the robbers are the bankers, gambling and losing our money and then robbing the public purse (with the complicity of the Government) to cover their debts with our money again!!!  Funny, I don’t hear the media getting too hysterical over that one!

 

 

 

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RELIGION

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Edited by Aideen Devine, Monday, 5 Jun 2017, 20:03

So, the Islamic extremist's are at it again, and all in the name of God no less, but this is what I don't understand about it, if they really believed in an all powerful deity, why do they need to carry out his 'work'?  Surely if he/she or it is so powerful, he/she or it can fight their own battles and take care of all those terrifying cartoonists with their pens or all those scary girls who want to read books, get an education and learn to think for themselves.

We here in the west act a whole lot of smug over this but at the end of the day, the good Christians of the west have been party to some fairly horrific acts themselves over the centuries.  I think Islam is going through the same crisis that Christianity went through in the 16th Century and it will probably implode at some point and most of those believers will eventually become like the rest of us and drift towards passive atheism, once they realize that the worst terrors of hell are man made, not God made.

It would be interesting to see, if people weren't indoctrinated into religion by their parents, how many of us would end up believing in God?  I think too often religion and religious belief is used by people to absolve themselves of responsibility.  They use their religion as an excuse for acting/not acting or behaving in a certain way and by following the tenets of their 'faith', they don't have to think or act for themselves.  By focusing all their attention on some heavenly afterlife, they ignore the reality of life as it is.  If there was no such thing as the belief in a better life to come, after you're dead ????( just writing that makes me realize how ridiculous the whole idea is), then maybe they would do something about the here and now and try and make it as good and enjoyable as possible for everyone.  

I mean life is really not that long, why waste the 3 score years and ten (if you're lucky) with all the negatives of human behaviour, tolerating the most miserable situations, and all in the name of religion?  And if we were weren't meant to think for ourselves, then why do we all have a brain of our own?

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Happy Birthday

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Edited by Aideen Devine, Friday, 9 Sep 2022, 16:31

A friend recently pointed out that my blog was a year old, which surprised me as I didn’t think I had started it until around April. So, happy birthday to my blog and thank you to everyone who read, or commented on it.  

When I began last year, I wasn’t exactly sure where it was going to lead, it actually hasn’t led anywhere ('Yet!’ she cried hopefully) but it all came about when I began taking acting lessons in January and the confidence I gained from them, is what led me to start the blog, and since I had a free one with the OU, I thought this was as good a place as any to start. I always had ambitions to write and an interest in politics, although growing up in Ireland through the 60’s, and 70’s (in truth, I’m still growing up) it would have been impossible not to. So, this seemed like a good way of getting the politics out without having to be a politician or joining any party. I have joined several political parties over the years but never stayed too long with any of them. The ‘politics’ of party politics is something I really can’t be bothered with and I have found that, in life, as with everything else, ego is the biggest obstacle to getting anything done whether it’s your own or someone else’s.  

When trying to decide on a title, I wasn’t sure if I should put my name on it, a lot of bloggers write under pseudo-names but I don’t like anonymous and always thought that if I wasn’t prepared to stand by what I said, then maybe I shouldn’t say it at all. So, that’s why my name is there. I like poetry, to read and to write, and while I’ll never be Wordsworth or Yeats, I like to indulge a little and since I had several poems from the creative writing course from the previous year, I thought it would be a fairly safe way of starting off. 

So, I had the poetry and the politics, and with the inclusion of opinion in the title, I liked how it sounded, so that was where the title came from. Looking back now at some of the pieces, I can see themes that have developed over the year. God, humanity, inequality, in amongst all the politics, poetry and opinions. 

The ‘God’ thing coming through surprised me because it was only when I started writing about it did I realize what a potent force it is in my life. Over the years, we have had a long and sometimes very fraught relationship. I fell out with Him/Her/It as a teenager and spurned all offers of reconciliation for many years. But He (I’m going with He, if only to cut down on the typing) was relentless in His pursuit and so thirteen years ago, I gave in, (He had me cornered and we both knew it). I haven’t always got it right and didn’t always do what I was supposed to, one time in particular stands out in memory which I got hammered for, so that is why now, it’s God’s way, or it’s no way. That’s not to say I take it all lying down, I argue the toss back and forth and I know this probably all sounds crazy, but it is what it is, and when I do what He says, I don’t go far wrong. It’s not an easy option, just the opposite in fact, but I’m committed now so I have to go along with whatever comes up.

I am still no clearer as to what God is, my experience tells me that it’s this invisible force that moves us and that is as much as I can tell you. I can see parallels with the God of the Bible but mostly I see misinterpretation of how it works, and the closest explanation I have found to my experience is in the teachings of Taoism.

With the writing, I find myself drawn more and more to writing from a religious or spiritual  point of view, not just about politics and the morality of the systems of government we live under but, also, on what I see as the hypocrisy of the Churches who really don’t speak out enough about poverty and inequality. The huge disparity in wealth between those at the top and those at the bottom appals me, and I can’t understand how anyone can sit in comfort with millions and ignore the hardship that others are living under, and it especially appals me to watch the perverse glee of the Conservatives about the cuts they’re inflicting on those struggling at the bottom, and their demonization of the working class while giving the wealthy all the breaks, and still calling themselves ‘Christian’??

 Anyway, plans for the future include getting stuck into my course work and continuing with the writing. My Alternative Feminist has been quiet for a while but hopefully we’ll be hearing from her soon. I would like to write more on everything but every hour at the moment seems to be accounted for. I am hoping to begin a novel in the weeks ahead, and the drama starts up again in March so there won’t be much of a let up for a while yet.

There’s still plenty more to write about and as long as the Conservatives and the Churches remain as they are, there will be no shortage of things to comment on. So I shall wish you all well on ‘our’ anniversary, I shall be going to the opera tonight to celebrate and hope that you all continue to keep reading. 

Thank you for your time and your interest.

 

 

 

 

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Christian?

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Edited by Aideen Devine, Thursday, 1 Sep 2022, 14:24

A little quiz question for today, what do the Pope, the Queen, David Cameron and Bono have in common?  

Well, if you said the Pope is head of the Catholic Church, the Queen is the head of State for Britain and the Church of England, David Cameron is the head of the present Government, and Bono has a big head, then head would be the connection and you might be right and, actually, that is a right answer too, when you think about it. 

But that’s not the answer we’re looking for today, so, sorry if you said that but good thinking just the same. 

The answer we’re looking for is, and this might surprise some people, they all say or think they are Christians but in reality none of them are, which might surprise some people since two of them are heads of Christian Churches and at least one of them thinks they are God. 

So, how is that the right answer, I hear you say? Well, I was at mass a couple of weeks ago and the priest was talking about the reading that day, which was the one about how it would be ‘easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it would be for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God ’ (or heaven, anyway, same thing).  And he went on about wealth and poverty and I was sitting there thinking, ‘Well what about the Vatican?’  I almost got up and said it, and if it had been another priest I might have, but this priest is old and retired and then I thought, ‘Well he’s not Rome so why harass him about it’. And then yesterday we were back on the money question with the story of the Widow's Mite. Now, I go to mass, I consider myself Catholic, definitely not a Roman Catholic but Catholic in the original sense of the word, which comes from the Greek and means ‘universal’, and that is how I consider myself. I am a member of the ‘universal church of humanity’. 

I was in Rome a couple of years ago and while there was a lot to see, from an historical perspective, I didn’t particularly like the place and I certainly didn’t feel too inspired by the ‘Christianity’ of the Vatican, and wouldn’t be in a hurry to go back any time soon. When I was there, I was hoping for some profound spiritual experience and the nearest I got to encountering anything like that was looking at Michelangelo's Pieta, which is in St Peters and is a stunningly beautiful piece of sculpture. If you ever go to Rome, I couldn’t recommend going to see this highly enough. 

The other big attraction was the Sistine Chapel and, honestly, I felt a bit let down by it. Firstly, it’s not really a chapel, as you would imagine, it’s just another room in the Vatican and by the time you get to it, you have passed through so many rooms painted from floor to ceiling with angels and the like, that your eye is a bit tired by the overload.  

I had the same thing in the Renaissance section of the Louvre, I remember coming out and thinking, ‘If I see one more picture of the dead Christ…!’ And, for the record, the painting of God creating Adam, which I had always imagined was this huge painting across a domed ceiling, is in fact a small panel in the centre of the ceiling about 5ft by 3ft. (it probably is bigger than that, but from my perspective, that is how it appeared). The place was also packed, it was a hot day and, between the crowd, the stifling air and the smell of body odour, it wasn't a pleasant experience. 

Anyway, what got me about it, was the wealth of art in the Vatican museum and, also, the fact that the Pope lives like an earthly king. He lives in a palace, is surrounded by lackeys and riches, he is dressed in expensive robes, waited on hand and foot and separated from the people. He is supposed to be Jesus’ representative on earth, how is that anything like Jesus? And another thing, he is supposed to be infallible, says who? I would like to know where that idea came from? He can’t be infallible, he is a human being, it isn’t possible, all humans are flawed and imperfect, it’s the most interesting thing about us. Just think how boring it would be, if we were all perfect and flawless?  

When you look at it, everything about the Pope goes against everything Jesus preached about and the same goes for the Queen. It is a complete hypocrisy to have a Queen as head of any Christian church and the same applies to David Cameron and Bono, you cannot be that rich and be a Christian, it just isn’t possible, you may perform Christian acts now and again, but as long as you are sitting with all those millions (and avoiding paying tax) you are not and never can be a Christian in the truest and only sense of the word. 

And since we’re on the subject of Churches and religion, any religion that differentiates between men and women is wrong, especially if the Bible is a big part of the religion, because one of the first statements in the Book of Genesis says, that God made them, male and female, both equal. That’s it, equal, no more, no less, equal.  Not the Animal Farm kind of equal, where ‘everyone is equal, only some are more equal than others’, no, not that one. There was no qualification to it, all equal, no argument. 

And if you really believed in the God of the Bible, you couldn’t regard any human being as not being your equal, (or as discussed in previous blogs, of equal value), because if you believe God made everything, then to say that a woman is something less than a man, is to insult God. If God made them equal then who is any human being to say that Her/His/It’s creation, woman, is something less, when they are both human. The value for what He/She/It has created, then extends to everything because if you truly believed that, then you have to consider that everything that God has created is of value to God, otherwise it would not exist.  

Which makes it very arrogant and insulting to go traipsing around claiming dominion over other lands and other human beings and treating them badly, or as your own personal property. Because if everything is God’s creation then, maybe it’s time we started to really think about that and consider how we are living and how we treat other people and the planet. Maybe it’s time we cleaned up our act and started taking care of what we have been given because whether there is or isn’t a God, and whether you believe or don’t believe in a God, we only have a short time here so why don’t we do our best to live well and respectfully, and try and make life better for everyone.  

I mean, does the Queen, David and Bono, and all those other millionaires and billionaires, really need all that money. They can’t spend it in a lifetime and it won’t buy them another life. They can’t take it with them so what do they need it for, to feed their egos and make them feel like they are successful, that they are better human beings than the rest of us?  

Sorry, but the bad news about that is, if you can sit with millions or billions in a bank while on this planet another human being is dying for the want of something as basic as food, then you have failed in the most important area of life, you have failed as a human being and you have certainly failed as a Christian. 

What are we here for, if not to live, life is supposed to be lived is it not?  Why does it always feel that life is something to be endured or survived, why can we not just live and live well? We speculate and ponder on the meaning of life and maybe it is something as simple as that, to live it and live it well. 

Comments as usual, are always welcome.

 

 

 

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Common Humanity

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Edited by Aideen Devine, Thursday, 1 Sep 2022, 15:08

X Factor, Jeremy Kyle, The Only Way Is Essex, Made in Chelsea, Jersey/Geordie Shore, what do these programmes all have in common? 

The answer: they all seek to reduce the value of human beings in order to provide ‘entertainment’ and I use that term very lightly because I don’t find any of them in the least entertaining. 

I don’t watch X Factor, I did once, back at the beginning when everyone was talking about it, just to see what it was about. I tuned in one Sunday morning when the repeat showing of the auditions was on and this is the reason why I have never watched it since. A young man came out to sing and it became obvious, very quickly, that he did not have talent as a singer but the disturbing thing about watching it was that this young man was what we term ‘special needs’. Sharon Osbourne was the only one to show him any humanity as the rest of them fed off his confusion and humiliation. I felt physically ill watching it and haven't watched it since then. 

I say confusion because I later learned from someone who, when at music college, had been encouraged by her friends to enter the auditions which were being held locally. She told me about the process of turning up, being left outside for hours, being ushered into a booth to sing and then told to come back for the next audition or not. A few weeks later she went through the same process again, but something about the whole set up did not feel right so she did not go back for the third audition, this is the process you go through before you get to stand up and sing before the ‘judges’. So, in the case of the young man, if he had come through that process, then he was merely being used as fodder with no regard to his humanity and that is fine, up to a point, if you are fully aware of what is happening, or why you are standing there, but he didn’t. 

I have seen some of the Jeremy Kyle show, another foul piece of programming which, again, takes human beings under the guise of ‘helping’ them in order to turn their lives into a public spectacle. I have never seen TOWIE, or Jersey/Geordie Shore but I did see them advertised in a friends house one day and from the talk at work, this confirmed everything I had deduced about them, well, let’s face it, you wouldn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to work that one out.  I did also see about 15 minutes of Made in Chelsea one time, another piece of garbage television and, quite frankly, 15 minutes was about 14 minutes too long. 

The ‘scripted reality’, (a contradiction in terms to begin with) of these shows is television at it’s laziest, as it relies on reducing humanity to their lowest common denominator. The spectacle they hope to create is every bit as nauseating and disturbing as the events that used to take place in the Roman Coliseum. It was interesting that Anders Breivik talked about having to stop thinking about the people he was going to shoot as human beings in order to carry out his slaughter. The same thing happened under the Nazis in Germany and throughout the conquest of places like Ireland, Africa, the Americas and the Antipodes. In order to hurt, humiliate or kill other humans they had to be regarded as not fully human, or not as evolved, their value reduced, their worth regarded as being less than another's.

There are many ways we reduce our humanity, we do it by drinking too much, eating too much, taking drugs, being physically, psychologically and/or verbally abusive, allowing ourselves to use or be used sexually, or for monetary gain. We also do it by grouping people into social hierarchies like the class system or the caste system. We do it by labelling people with derogatory descriptions likes chavs or the ‘n’ word, (I loathe that word in particular, and physically cannot say it, so I won’t write it either) or claiming that the church someone attends is better than those of another faith. But the real reduction is when we deliberately pick on those who don’t have the skills or the intellect to understand what is being done to them, because in seeking to reduce them, we also reduce ourselves.  

I didn’t get off to a very good start in life and from there it went rapidly downhill, which explains why I am doing Open University at my age. This is not an exercise in blame, the reality of the situation was that my parents were ill-prepared for the task of parenting. I was too, which of course I didn’t realise until I became a parent, but luckily enough I was blessed with a certain intellect and realised how inadequate I was and so set about trying to acquire some skill in the area, which is why I believe it should be part of the school curriculum. 

There were also other events which over the years contributed to the de-valuing of me as a human being and left me with no sense of self-worth. Then twelve years ago, I hit a crisis point, one of a few over the years but the one where I finally started to turn it around. Since then I have been on this spiritual journey which regular readers (yes, you two, I’m giving you a mention today) would know, as I’ve mentioned it before, and since then I have done a lot of work to raise my sense of worth. By that I do NOT mean that I now have high self-esteem, because self-esteem leads to a large ego and an overblown sense of your value, what I have now is self-love and self-respect which are basically the same thing. I am not any more valuable than any other human being on this planet but neither am I of any LESS value than any other human being on this planet. And this is true for everyone whether you believe you were created by God or whether you believe your existence here is the result of the evolutionary process alone (for me personally they are one and the same thing).  And when I see something on television like the Jeremy Kyle show then, I think, ‘there but for the Grace of God go I’, because if I had not been blessed with the gifts of intellect and understanding (and I don’t mean that to sound like I know it all, every day is another learning experience) I might never have reached the place where I am today. Which by the way, I didn’t do all on my own, I did it with God/Universe’s help and help from other people. I also read and thought a lot about things and, on that note, for anyone in need of some good advice or who maybe doesn’t have much of a sense of their value as a human being, I  would highly recommend ‘The Road Less Travelled by M, Scott Peck. This book was an invaluable source of help and I would also recommend the follow up ‘ Further Along the Road Less Travelled’.   

The degradation of humanity is usually the first step on the road to tyranny as history has shown us and something we always need to be aware of.



Permalink 3 comments (latest comment by Aideen Devine, Monday, 15 Oct 2012, 23:29)
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God?

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Edited by Aideen Devine, Friday, 2 Sep 2022, 15:29

I’m back on the God question again today because these questions keep rattling around in my brain and the truth is no one really knows if God exists or not. Unless you’ve had a personal encounter with some awesome force beyond yourself, or you are taking on faith the teachings of whatever religion you subscribe to, you probably don't know any more than me 

I have read most of the Richard Dawkins book, The God Delusion, and while I can’t disagree with his conclusions about religion, I have to question why he thinks God, if he does exist, has anything to do with religion? I mean isn’t religion man-made? 

Seriously now, if you really think about it, or think about what God is supposed to be, do you really believe that all those dreary sermons and/or fanatical rantings, could have anything to do with what is supposed to be the most potent and awesome force in the entire universe and beyond? Let's really think about that!!

THIS ALL-POWERFUL, ALL-KNOWING, ALL-CREATING FORCE OF LIFE. 

Say it again, ALL POWERFUL, ALL-KNOWING, ALL-CREATING FORCE OF LIFE!!!

How could we even DARE to claim to know anything about it. We’re only a bunch of human beings, inhabiting (or trashing, depending on how you look at it), one small planet, in a fairly quiet corner of the universe. Maybe that’s why we are so far away from all the action, we haven’t learned how to behave ourselves yet, or take care of the beautiful planet we are privileged to live on.

Also, how could we possibly know anything about God, if God is supposed to be what we believe him/her/it to be?  Imagine an encounter with something like that, it would completely blow your mind!!!

So I’ll ask again, how could we have the AUDACITY, to claim to have knowledge of what God is, or to know how or what, he/she or it thinks?

Now, I can’t claim to have had an awesome encounter with a heavenly body (chance would be a fine thing!) beyond my understanding or not, but I have been on a bit of a spiritual journey for several years now.  I call it a spiritual journey because I have actively been seeking encounters or knowledge beyond what I see and hear in front of me. Things have happened that I can’t explain and I have questions to which I don’t, as yet, have any answer.   

For instance, I used to have a recurring dream, I won’t go into the full details of it here, but the important thing about it was this, in the dream I would wake up to find that I wasn’t really awake at all. As any good psychologist/psychiatrist/dream dictionary will tell you that is a message from your sub-conscious mind telling you to wake up to something that is going on in your life. So when I became conscious of it's meaning I didn't have the dream again, or at least until there was something else in my life, I needed to wake up to!

Now, what I don’t understand about it is this, how does my sub-conscious mind know something my conscious mind doesn’t? And another thing, how and why is the sub-conscious mind always right? Where does it get its information from? Not only that, but why do I have two minds anyway, why do I not just have one with all the information I need? 

And now, when I put that all together, I can only conclude that maybe, just maybe, (and I am only saying maybe because I don’t know either) the sub-conscious mind is God’s, or whoever, or whatever’s way of communicating with us. 

That out there in the universe and maybe it is the actual universe, or some other force that exists beyond us, that it can only communicate with us, through our sub-conscious mind because it’s complete and true reality would be...TOO AWESOME....TOO OVERWHELMING...TOO MIND BLOWINGLY SPECTACULAR to encounter in it’s fullness and would completely destroy us, mentally and physically. 

Think about it. And now that I do think about it, I probably shouldn't even mention he/she/or its name.  So read this very quietly, please, just in case.

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God vs Science

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Edited by Aideen Devine, Wednesday, 18 Aug 2021, 17:58

 I am very interested in everything, I think life is amazing and I become awestruck when I think of the amount of different life forms on this planet alone not to mention the possibilities that may exist out in the universe.

I have also been on a bit of a spiritual journey for a few years now and I have listened to the whole God vs Science debate with interest.  This is what I have concluded based on observation and my own experience.

Gravity is a force which cannot be seen or touched but you can see and feel it’s effects.  Magnetism is also a force which cannot be seen or touched but it is possible to see and feel it’s effects. 

 Throughout human history many people have recounted experiences of contact with an invisible force outside of themselves which they have not been able to explain, but for want of a better word or explanation, refer to as the Divine, or God.  It’s effects do not seem to be as regular or consistent as gravity or magnetism, but that does not mean that it does not exist, or that at some point in the future we may find an explanation for it.

 Man through his experience with it has turned it into a religion, rightly or wrongly, and tacked on a lot of his own rules and ideas to it, but that does not mean that within the universe there is not an invisible force at work that we don’t quite have a full understanding of yet. 

Personally I believe the closest anyone has come to really understanding or trying to explain it is Taoism which ties in with my own experience and as the Dalai Lama says ‘Anything that contradicts experience or logic should be abandoned’.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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