Anti-Theism

The more postings I read on the Internet by supposed “atheists” leave me thinking these people are not atheists, but rather anti-theists. They seem to spend all their time arguing with believers-in-some-form-of-god OR writing about how there are so many mistakes in the Bible that it cannot be correct OR they just spend their time listing how superior they are to theists. I see no use in calling themselves atheists when they seem to have no conception of what their own atheism really means to them. Most of us mouth the words with hardly any breath behind it to say “Atheists are people who do not believe in God or gods.” Okay, if that is what they believe, why are so many of them prosthelytizing their atheism by running theists and theist literature down. I’ll admit I did the same thing when first I renounced religion and moved on to agnosticism and then atheism. But I didn’t do it for 40 years or so, I did it for maybe 6 months, and then I went on to find out what atheism means to me. Atheism looks for a more plausible story of creation, such as the Big Bang story where two cells came together as do a sperm and an ova, and a new life was created. That life is alive and living as our universe. No one knows where these two cells came from, but neither does a baby know it too started out when a sperm met an ova. Sounds plausible to me.

Atheism also believes in life. Life is that bit of magic, the one I call spirit, entering the rapidly growing body of the baby resulting from the sperm joining with the ova. It could be that our bodies are a universe within us. By comparing our bodies to the body called the universe, earthly life suggests that the universe too has a spirit, and that spirit has life. Perhaps our lives are directly joined to the universal life. Again, a very plausible story. Why reinvent the wheel?

And, if you believe in life, why not believe in the Three Prime Directives that seem to be part of every form of life we know. Every living being, every cell of every living being, seems to want to do three things:

1) Live as long as possible
2) Procreate as much as possible
3) Progress or advance as far as possible (dare I use the word “evolve?”

This is what atheism means to me. In fact, this is what Life means to me. That we (every living being in existence past, present, and future) are all joined as one being, the body of which is the universe we live in.

So, am I not saying I believe in a god, after all? No, definitely not, because the word God means many things, such as the creator, the ruler of the earth if not the universe, a being who knows the fall of a sparrow (and every time you kill a mosquito or a spider, or every one of God’s creations that some hunter slaughters for the joy of it), a being who creates disasters or kills children to teach us a lesson, and whatever else Gods are supposed to do. The life that inhabits my universe does none of these things, for it is barely rational yet. What it knows is what we embodied spirits know, which isn’t very much when you look at all the knowledge that must exist in our universe. All we know is what happens on earth, and a bit of what happens in our solar system. Hell, we don’t even know if Pluto is a planet, a moon, an asteroid, a dead superdreadnaught space vehicle captured by the gravity of our sun as it harmlessly passed our solar system, or an animated dog named Pluto by Walt Disney or one of his cronies. Beyond our solar system we speculate that we know things like galaxies and quasars, but we don’t Know them. They might in fact be lights coming through holes the size of pinpricks in a great huge canopy that encloses our solar system to keep us from contaminating the rest of our universe. We just don’t know, so neither does the being that is the universe. It isn’t a god, it is just a living being like us, exactly like us.

Maybe the universal body has the potential to become a god, I don’t know, and it doesn’t know, but I doubt that, or we would all have to be gods to all the living beings that live on planets in star systems in galaxies in the universes that are each of us. It stands to reason. And it even agrees with one of the first assertions of the Bible, that man is made in the likeness of God. Could be, I guess?

But that still does not explain anti-theism. Theists have the same rights as any atheist, to believe what they want, to do what they want, to exist and procreate and evolve if they want. So why are we bothering them with our “we are better than you” attitudes. No, all of us are on a journey called life, and some have progressed farther than others, and things like viruses and bacteria are just coming to life on earth for the very first time, to keep on advancing our numbers as they come into being, live as long as they can, procreate as much as they can, and evolve as far as they can. I say let them be, we once stood where they now stand, and they will stand where we presently stand. Some of them will even surpass us someday, because not all people evolve at the same rate, and some will see what we cannot see right now, where the original Big Bang Baby came from, or is going to. Those are my mysteries of life, and I don’t expect to know the answers in this lifetime.

rawgod

3 States of SPIRITUALITY…and more

Knowing where you stand can lead you to a happy life, filled with fun and adventure. Not knowing where you stand… Well, confusion and paranoia are two things that come to mind. This is why I am writing down what observation and experience have taught me about spirituality. For some people spirituality only means one thing, religion. To others it is anything to do with god, or gods. (Gods are generally believed to be superbeings who live outside of the world and possibly outside of the universe. They are believed to have power over the fates of individuals and or groups of people. Gods are believed to be creators of the universe.) Others think of it as talking about an eternal spirit within you. My personal definition of spirituality is the state of being wherein feeling and understanding can go and often do go beyond the realm of sensory perception, with particular attention to the interconnectedness of all living beings, and encompasses both religious and non-religious beings. In other words, I believe that all life is connected, no matter its size, shape, colour, place of birth, or level of intelligence, if any. Every life matters, because we are all alive. When we look at the world through the eyes of science, we find there are three natural states of matter: solids that do not change their shapes if left alone; liquids that can change their shape but not their volume; and gases that can change their shape and their volume to fill whatever container they are in, including invisible containers made by exerting pressures on the gases. For example, water is the most common substance on earth, and it naturally occurs in all three states of matter. As a solid we call it ice, as a liquid we call it water, and as a gas we call it water vapour. This is knowable through science. Now comes the kicker, the giant leap from the scientifically knowable to the scientifically unknowable, spirituality. Spirituality cannot be measured, nor can it be forced to be a solid, or liquid, or gas. Yet, despite the limitations of science, spirituality can be observed and experienced as if it were matter. The three natural states of spirituality are: exclusionary group, equivalent to a solid; individual exclusionary, which acts like a liquid, and universal inclusive, which acts like a gas. Every human being on earth is capable of existing in any of these three states, just as water exists in any of its three states. Water, though, can only change states by outside forces. And, while humans can be changed by outside forces, they can also change themselves by inner forces.

I have observed that most humans start out at birth in the spiritual state of the exclusionary group. They are taught by their parents (or guardians) to have the same religion or spirituality as their parents (or guardians). All religions and religious philosophies exist in a solid state. There is a core group of people that remain together keeping faith in the same beliefs as their parents did. As long as the child remains faithful to those same beliefs, it becomes part of the exclusionary group, which protects itself by excluding people of different faiths and traditions. Hinduism, Judaism, Catholic Christianity, Islam, Protestant Christianity, Taoism, Shinto, and Falun Gong are all religions (or religious philosophies) that count their memberships in the millions of believers. There is some cross-over and/or amalgamation on a minor scale, but not enough to take note of here. The change from one religion to another usually happens without a person excluding himself or herself from having some kind of religious faith. Group strength is derived from the number of its adherents.

But there are people who do exclude themselves from exclusionary groups, and choose either to live on the outside, either while looking for a new religion to replace their old one, or trying to decide if any religion is worthy of their membership. These people are called agnostics, not necessarily believing in a god, but not ready to state there is no god for them to believe in. Also in this state are non-believers in any god, called Atheists. There are no set beliefs for Atheists, they can each think for themselves if life has a meaning, or if life stops when a being dies. They can live peacefully on the outside of exclusionary groups, or on the inside of such groups trying to create as much chaos as possible. Some atheists can be seen to be god-deniers, as instead of living their lives as contributors to the global community or the universal community, they seem to live their lives attempting to prove that gods cannot exist, and that religious books are full of mistakes, contradictions, and sometimes outright nonsense. How they would react if proof of gods were suddenly found it is impossible to know. Their strength comes mostly from within, but weaknesses are present from the outsides.

Members of the third state of spirituality, which I have named universal inclusive, are still rare, but their numbers are slowly growing. Most are Atheist, but some can belong to exclusionary groups and combine their religious beliefs with their universal beliefs. Again, there is no set belief system, but there is the feeling that they are part of a universal community with all intelligent beings, if not all living beings. They see no need to spend their time debating the existence or non-existence of gods, but rather they use their lives to protect the weak from the powerful, to aid the sick and dying, to help people with addictions put their lives back together and become healthy citizens of the universe again, if they ever were. (A lot of people, such as myself, were so abused as children, whether mentally, physically, or sexually, that they never had the opportunity to be healthy. These are the people who need extra care, and a universal inclusive will work extra hard to help them heal. Meanwhile, beings in this spiritual state can find friends in any state of spirituality, because they realize that they all are on a journey called life, and no matter how long or short that journey is, there is not enough time for fighting. World peace, having enough healthy food and clean water to survive, not having to fear that someone is going to kill or maim them for no reason other than they look or think or speak differently, these can all be goals of the universal inclusive. My personal feeling is that they should be the goals of all living beings.

 

As an adjunct to this posting I would like to take a look at anthrpocentrism, which is just a big word that means human beings see themselves as the most important species on the planet, the species with the highest form of intelligence. Certainly humans have changed the world more than any other species of being alive today, but this is not a sign of being the most intelligent species. We humans are definitely the most mobile species, according to scientists who assert that the ancestors of humans started out from a valley in Africa, and are now found on every continent in the world. Our numbers rival that of many species, but bacteria and viruses outnumber us by the millions, if not billions or trillions. No, I don’t think that viruses or bacteria are necessarily intelligent, but they certainly go everywhere people go, and they show enough intelligence in relation to their size to hitchhike rides to all the places people go. Intelligence is not only human intelligence, but since that is the only intelligence we know of, not including what scientists tell us, that it is easy to think we are the only one who can control what we are doing just by thinking about it. But there is no intelligence involved in keeping us breathing, or wanting to eat, or wanting to propagate our species, every species on earth has those same instincts, or directives. They are a part of life, of all forms of life. Do you think there might be the connection? [Meanwhile, if you are interested, you can find a list (not verified) of the 25 most intelligent animals in the world at

http://list25.com/25-most-intelligent-animals-on-earth/%5D

Experimenting with Reincarnation

Purpose of the Experiment

Reincarnation is the process which allows life to live time after time, learning various lessons about life, until you’ve learned enough lessons to be called a Buddha.I propose to demonstrate how my theory of reincarnation works by using earthly objects and utensils.

Hypothesis

By adding controlled amounts of water colour powders to a tablespoon of water, then adding the water to a swimming pool of clear water, the paint should hardly make an effect to the colour of the water in the pool at the beginning, but in time should discolour the water, and ultimately make it impossible to see the bottom of the pool while floating face down in that pool.

Materials

1. 1 regulation size swimming pool filled to the very top with clear  water
2. 50 pails of various colours of  water paint powders
3. 1 tablespoon
4. 1 1/8 teaspoon
5. an unending supply of test tubes with storage racks of some kind
6. a microscope
7. empty ledgers entitled Reincarnation Experiment Book I, Book II, etc
8. sufficient pens to complete the record-keeping till the end of the experiment

Method

Preperation: Setting the controls–Using the tools at hand, count the number of particles of each colour of the paint powders in 1/8th of a teaspoon of powder and mark them in the ledger. Standing at a corner of the shallow end of the pool, remove 1 tablespoon of water from the swimming pool, put it in a test tube, and check it under the microscope for paint particles. There should be no sign of paint particles in the water. This water sample and the number of particles of paint in each colour of powdered paint will be your control samples.

Conducting the experiment–Remove 1 tablespoon of water from the swimming pool. Add  1/8 of a teaspoon of water paint powder, letting it dissolve, then replacing the tablespoon of water in the swimming pool. Wait until the paint disperses into the water. Repeat as necessary using a different colour of paint powder each time until all the 50 paint colours have been used once. Walk to the diagonal corner of the pool and remove 1 tablespoon of water into a test tube. Examine this water from the test tube to see if it contains any paint particles. In the ledger write down the number of particles, if any. Next assign the sample a clarity rating between transparent and opaque. Store the test tube and sample adjacent to the control sample. Note in the ledger if you can see a difference between the two adjacent test tubes. Repeat the complete process until the water is judged to be opaque at the diagonal corner where the test samples are taken , and draw a line under the last entry, noting the number of paint particles and colours in the final sample.

Completing the experiment–Count the number of test tube samples and compare that to the number of entries in the ledgers to ensure they are equal. Divide the total numbers of particles of each colour used in the experiment into the total number of particles of every colour used.This will give you the ratio of each colour used in the experiment. Compare the ratio of particles of each colour found in the final sample to the ratio of the total number of particles of each colour used in the experiment. Is there any correlation between them? What conclusion might you draw about how each colour spread throughout the swimming pool?

Making it real–Starting from a Tibetan viewpoint of reincarnation, it is believed, and has been for many centuries, that life exists on more than one plane, in more than one dimension. The life there is not human life, nor a godly life but a storehouse of sorts for spirits after they complete their life on earth.

I was brought up a Christian, as a believer in Christ, and for the first ten years of my life I never questioned it. Then little doubts began to creep in, questions that I asked of those older and supposedly wiser than me. Listening to the radio, reading newspapers, and watching TV made me wonder how anyone could live such a perfect life that they weren’t bound for hell. My main Sunday school teacher was a man who made money by paying men to work for him, but he kept more money than the total of the amount he paid his employees. To me that was called greed. There were men who got drunk every weekend , then came home and beat up their wives and children. Surely god would not want them in his heaven. In fact, the Bible tells the stories of a god that ruled with an iron fist, demanding to be worshipped, and killing or maiming those who did not worship him. So it was written, so I believed. I started to look, first at other Christian faiths, then at other religions who had other gods, or had different names for god, or bunches of gods living lives of ease while the humans they supposedly ruled had hardly anything to eat, or enough water to drink. It seemed to me like everyone was bound for hell, no matter what they said or did on Sundays, because there were six other days when it seemed they did not give a whit of how they lived their lives. I learned a word for that: hypocrisy. Everyone I knew was a hypocrite, and I wanted no part in such a religious monstrosity.

So I started looking elsewhere, and came across a series of books on Tibetan Buddhism. I didn’t know much more about it than I could find to read, but it made much more sense than anything else I had encountered. Especially attractive to me was the theory of Reincarnation. Instead of having just one life–one chance–to make it to heaven or be sent to hell, that idea struck me like a ton of feather-down  pillows. But these people had no hell, all they had was nirvana, a place you were sent when you lived a good life, and it was your reward for persevering all your incarnations until you finally got it right. (At least that was how I understood that in my middle teen-age years.) I began to study more about reincarnation when the Beatles changed the face of the world, and as soon as I turned the legal age to leave home if I so wanted, I gave myself my best birthday present ever, and left home. This word did not exist at that time, but I couch-surfed for a number of months, and tried to go to school to finish my education. That didn’t last long, as I grew my hair long, and started listening to what was called “underground music,” and I heard songs of other people who thought like me, and they were all flocking to the west coast. I packed a few clothes, and walked about ten miles to where the highway west began, and I stuck out my thumb. 34 hours later, and a few misadventures behind me, I reached Vancouver, and immediately fell in with a group of people who slept in abandoned houses by night, and panhandled all day to buy food for everyone to eat. Eventually I was offered some marijuana to smoke, nothing like the potency of today’s marijuana, and instead of getting “stoned,” I got “high” in the sense that I could think better and clearer about my budding belief system. Well, maybe I was stoned too, but each time I smoked grass I felt my consciousness raising higher and higher. Then someone else gave me some acid (LSD) and my consciousness soared. When the book Jonathan Livingstone Seagull came out a few years later, I knew exactly how Jonathan felt, flying higher and higher, faster and faster.

And then it happened. One night while high on acid I broke through the barrier in my mind, and I symbolically  rode the Silver Cord to the place where dead spirits go. Only I wasn’t dead, I was totally aware of my body back on earth, and I knew something was happening that I was very privileged to see. It was the most beautiful place I had ever encountered, sight, sound, presence, without gravity, and without time as I knew it.  And then a voice, my voice, said to me, “_____ ______ ______ , you are here before your time. You have two choices, remain here and become one with us, or return to earth to your body.?” I never even thought about it, I returned back to earth and found the hole in my mind I had exited through. My body was busy repairing it, and I barely got through before the hole was fixed. I don’t want to know what would have happened if I had been two seconds later.

I returned to that place of beauty one more time, sort of like an experiment to see if I could duplicate the event, and I did, but my way into My Home was blocked, and I was sent back to earth with the warning, your next time will be your last. Use your life wisely. For the next month I walked around happy to the point of being giddy. Nothing bothered me, everyone was my friend and sibling,  and somewhere in my mind was information I absorbed while in that place, and I had only to look for it and I would find it.

But that proved harder than I thought it could be, and I took 30 or more years to finally begin to understand. During those years I came close to death many times, being run off the road while riding a bicycle down a mountain road, the car that did it speeding off ahead and not stopping to see if they had killed me. Falling asleep while driving alone on the highway, and waking up with barely enough time to avoid the semi-trailer coming at me, close enough to see the truck driver was still sound asleep too. Losing control on an east coast highway, with just enough of a grass median to spin around three or four times without entering the oncoming traffic lane. Being down in San Diego in the Old City populated only by Mexicans, most of whom probably did not have green cards. I was walking down a sidewalk, not knowing anyone was around, when an arm reached around my head, and I could feel the razor sharpness of the knife blade being held against my carotid artery, one second away from death, until I told the attacker I was a Canadian, and I was just walking around admiring the architecture of the houses. Next thing I knew I was getting a guided tour while the very friendly young man steered me out of Old City and back into a nearby park that formed the boundary between life and death for some people. And there were other times I have forgotten about, but as near as I came to death, something or someone always came to my rescue. I think most of the time it was me protecting myself.

But getting back to reincarnation, it is impossible for me not to  believe it exists, not having seen what I have seen, experienced what I have experienced, changed in so many positive ways that there has to be a purpose for it, and a purpose for life in general.

About Reincarnation

What I am about to talk about is how I see the way the universe works. I’m pretty sure you will see things differently, because while we occupy physical bodies I believe we all walk different paths towards the same goal–growing a better universe.

I have spoken about spiritual evolution, and I may have mentioned I have been alive since life came to be in this universe, but I do not think I have yet explained how these things are possible. And my answer is “through reincarnation.” Unfortunately, most Westerners (European-based cultures) do not have a very good understanding of how reincarnation works. For that matter, people born in the Orient don’t necessarily understand it either. But they believe in it, so that puts them way ahead of the rest of us. But I have come to understand reincarnation differently than most Oriental philosophies and/or religions understand it.

For starters, karma cannot exist in my philosophy.. It is a great idea for karma to exist to explain the luck of the draw, either good or bad. But when you come right down to it, you may as well be saying “It is the will of God” in place of saying “it’s just your karma.” Karma, if you are not familiar with the term, is a Buddhist belief that the product of your actions, your speech, and your ideas or thoughts from past lives affect your present and future lives. In my understanding of reincarnation, there is absolutely no carryover between incarnations, the link is so tenuous as to be non-existent. There is not one spirit that dies and is then reborn, but a spirit that mixes with  a great pool of spirits and becomes one with them, and when a rebirth is about to happen a small bit of the one big spirit pool detaches itself and enters the body of whatever being it is that is being born. So, though I hate to disagree with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, in this idea I must. Since much of what I believe has come from Tibetan Buddhism, that was just my jumping off point. I was The Fool, number 0 of the major arcana of the Tarot card deck, starting on a journey by stepping off a cliff, not knowing where I was going, or if I would ever get there.

I don’t know if I got “there,” but I got somewhere, and I like it here, though I will be unable to stay much longer. But while I am here, I would like to share my learning with someone, for what is the use of learning something if you take it to the grave with you.  Which is why I am writing this blog, and why I write on LiveReal.com.

So, I do believe in reincarnation, but I do not believe in Karma. I do believe in Life, but I do not believe in any kind of god. To read what I have just written, I should feel like I am trapped inside some kind of paradox,  but I don’t, because I’m not. Life, once you understand it, is actually a very simple thing. You live. You learn. You die. And then you return to the Self you really are, where you mix the wisdom you have learned into the undefinable pool of beings that makes up the real you, and the real me., and you advance the universe just that one iota more, and it makes you so happy to have been of service. Then, as you sink into the collection of beings that contain the life force, you forget you were ever anything else, or anyone else. And you realize how little you still know, how little our collective knows, and you are one with all life like you have always been, and always will be.

This life force is not heaven, hell, nirvana or paradise, as I have said before. It is more like a staging area, or a muster point. From this pool comes all spiritual life, and the spiritual life enters the physical body , wherever that physical body is, whatever that physical body is, and it all starts again.

I Have a Dream…a side trip to the future

Question: What is the purpose of Spiritual Atheism?

Answer: To bring about a new way of living.

Question: How is it that we can do that?

Answer: By learning who we really are and living a life filled with happiness and love.

Question: You say that the best way to do that is to look inside ourselves?

Answer: All the tools to discover ourselves and take control of our own lives are inside us, and using them will help us end all the things that are wrong with our society.

Question: Is such a life possible?

Answer: It is not only possible, but it is probable, even if I never write another word. It has nothing to do with me. It is all up to everyone individually.

Question: How can you guarantee such a thing will happen?

Answer: Spiritual evolution cannot be stopped. I just happen to be the first person I know of that is willing to write it down for others to find. Please note, though, you cannot force yourself to evolve spiritually, just as you cannot force your body to evolve physically. Yet that will happen too.

Question: In your writings you use the term “living beings” a lot. Do you not merely mean human beings? People?

Answer: I do not know that earth is the only planet harbouring life, and in particular intelligent life. Life on our planet did not start out as intelligent, but as both natural and spiritual evolution have advanced us to this time and space, so they will continue to advance us as we continue to change and progress. Barring us blowing up our planet with nuclear weapons, or killing all life on earth with biological weapons, evolution cannot be stopped. It is my dream that we will remain alive as a life-sustaining ecosystem, and we will reach a point sometime in the future where we need no gods to worship and plead with, no gold to have to use to buy the things we need to be able to live, and no governments to tell us how to live our own lives. I call this the Era of Responsible Anarchy.

Question: This sounds like a pipe dream, another oxymoronic phrase just like spiritual atheism. What do you mean by responsible anarchy?

Answer: Responsible Anarchy simply means living our lives by taking responsibility for our actions and our speech. Once enough of us reach this stage, the need for gods, gold (as represented by money), and government will all become obsolete. What that means to us as individuals and as a species, notwithstanding that all living beings throughout the universe are heading in this same direction, is a world society filled with love and respect for everyone. Many of our so-called emotions will disappear: hatred, greed, anger, envy, jealousy and others will prove to be coping mechanisms learned at our parents knees, or through the lives of friends. When we see others get angry and become aggressive, we will realize they are letting go of their self-control in order to cover up their own faults and inadequacies. Jealousy is akin to ownership, and no one can own another being. Envy is generally brought on by not having something another person has, and feeling that you must have it too. Greed is the desire to have more of something than you will need. Hatred is what you allow yourself to feel when you do not understand something that is going on around you: seeing someone of another race acting differently than you are obliged by society to act, or not being able to understand their language and customs, or even meeting someone who looks exactly like you, but yet they are as different from you as night is from day, any kind of misunderstanding can provoke anger. But take note, humans express anger mostly when they are around someone weaker than they are, or someone they know will not react to their anger in a way they understand. Or, if you feel you need to be punished for some real or imagined misdeed, then you will let your anger come out in hope of that other person punishing you. Even love does not have to be a real emotion, but an excuse to get close to someone you want to dominate, be dominated by, or even just to have sex with. Few of these things happen without cause, consciously or subconsciously, but because you learned them by watching or experiencing them as a child. By becoming responsible for yourself, these “learned expressions of feelings” will become a thing of the past. You will not need anyone else telling you what to do or how to act, because you will know inside you that you will be able to get along with this other person or group of persons, and your children will learn responsibility at your knees without you having to reprimand them for not learning them. When people are ready for some lesson to be learned, they will learn it, internalize it, and see that it fits with the kind of person they are inside themselves.

Responsible Anarchy

As people evolve spiritually, they tend to realize they live alone in their own minds. For millenia, probably since the first intelligent being on the planet said, “I,” she, the one the scientists call Lucy, the mother of all human beings, looked around her and thought, What am I, and came to the conclusion her parents, who had no intelligence, were to blame for her being different from every being on the planet. The amazing thing about this was that she passed the gene for intelligence on through her DNA , and her children passed it on to their children. This is how a mutation works. Somehow a sperm and an ovary came together in such a way that Lucy metamorphosed from an animal into a person, and though she did not understand it, she probably did not like being different from her group. But there was more to it than that. Lucy was probably a vegetarian as were all her group, but the gene she passed on prepared her descendants for the next drought, the one where plant life dried up and died before it could provide the nutrients for human life. But the intelligence gene alive in her children’s children saw the possibility of eating meat as a way to replace the lost nutrients from the dead plant life. By eating grubs and other insects, they survived, but they too mutated into a new kind of being, a hunter. It would not have taken a group of hunters long to scavenge the land around them for bugs and grubs, so they had to branch out from the valley of their birth in search of food capable of keeping them alive. Not understanding the works of nature, they would have found blame in the dying plants, and the scarcity of crawling foods, for their predicament. They ended up having to move farther and farther away from “home,” until they were  lost. They no longer knew where their homes were. But the important thing is, they did not blame themselves for the predicament they were in, but blamed nature for forcing them away.

However, they set the tone for all future generations that have lived until today, and even for some generations still to come. Right now there are few people who admit to being to blame for their actions, and the others can find all kinds of scapegoats for why they do the things they do. This was the fate of humanity, until someone invented the God Theory, and suddenly besides blaming others, they began to blame their gods for all their bad luck. It was only the few that took the blame upon themselves, and most of them were executed for their indiscretions. The resulting problem was that no one became responsible for themselves, and eventually God became the focus of the blame for a large number of the world’s population, and it was an easy accusation because no God stood up for itself to say “It is not my fault.”

“It is the will of God!” has been spoken from so many lips that to try and count them would take hundreds of lifetimes. It is time to break that pattern, and for us to take responsibility for our actions and our words. I call this Responsible Anarchy. As you gain confidence in who you are, you begin to take over your own life. If something happens and you are the one responsible for that happening, you stand up and say, It was me who did that. Or the group you belong to. YOU are becoming responsible to yourself, as well as to your society. And as that happens, you begin to realize that it is the lawmakers of the land who are trying so hard to control the public that they are making laws to benefit themselves more than others, and designing the laws to keep a steady stream of individual workers under their thumbs, with very little change in allowing more freedom to the very people they say they represent. Law is not about granting freedoms, but about taking away those freedoms that the average worker still has. And this eventually will have to stop. Karl Marx suggested the overthrow of the capitalist classes by the workers, if not by peaceful means, then by violence. I see this happening more by throwing out the lawmakers (government) because it will be a social necessity. When no one cares about your laws, and you are able to live as you want to live, politics will die a quiet death.

Now let us take a leap into the future, I do not know how far we have to go. And this is my dream. People, all people, are allowed to live freely together no matter what their race, religion and creed. No matter if they have lots of money or not. That will eventually level itself out, one way or another. And there will be no one in charge, because we will all have roles to follow, roles that we choose on our own, and roles that allow us supreme freedom.

This is what the future holds for us, because this is where spiritual atheism is trying to lead  us. And it is through Spiritual Evolution that all this will come to pass. I say again, the thing to remember is that we cannot rush this to happen. It has taken 3 billion years or so to get this far. It is not something we can accomplish overnight. But it will be accomplished, and I hope we (future human beings) are there to see it happen.

Spiritual Atheism (Revised Edition)

Spiritual Atheism. To say it sounds like a contradiction in terms, what is called an oxymoron. Two words that negate each other. Something said by, please pardon the language, a moron breathing too much oxygen. But if that’s what it is, then that is what I am calling myself: a moron breathing too high a rate of oxygen to the point of confusing myself.

However, I am not confused at all. I do not believe in any deity or group of deities, God, a pantheon of Gods such as almost every religion started out with, or any kind of being who knows all, sees all, and demands to be worshipped.  A superbeing who kills babies to teach its parents a lesson. An all-pervasive, all-persuasive, all-interfering being who cares so little for his flock he allows millions of people to die horrible, untimely deaths, and then expects the survivors to say “It was God’s will. He has to have a plan to do something like that.”

No caring ruler could ever come up with such a plan. We are alive on earth to learn some kind of lesson that will make us better people, that will make the universe a better place to be. Such a god would supposedly know what the lesson is that is to be learned, and if it already knows it, why not just tell us, and save us from the horrors, the lifetimes of guilt, the neuroses and psychoses that often turn well-meaning people into people who cannot stand the punishment, and end up taking their own lives for something they did not do or ask to have done to them. What possible lessons can be gained from such enigmatic disasters as earthquakes, tidal waves. hurricanes and tornadoes, etc? That life is worthless? That our lives and deaths are already planned for us, so it doesn’t matter if we learn the lessons at all? Or to teach our descendants, the children of those left alive, and their children that we shouldn’t oughta have done that? And all that is ignoring what the people who died so horribly must have done to deserve such fates. No! It is impossible for me to believe that such a being has control over anyone’s and everyone’s lives, not to mention my life. Can you believe I grew up Christian? I must be out of my mind to stop believing in such a God… Or is it God who is out of its mind…?

How about I ask you a different question, one that sits in the middle of those two possibilities? What if there is a God, but it doesn’t know what it is doing, or what is being done in its name? Would it then still be called a God? Is a believer in this kind of a god to be called a theist or an atheist? A theist believes in a God of some kind who provides some kind of life after death. An atheist does not believe in a god of any kind, and that there is nothing after death. And here is where spiritual atheism takes root. I believe there is no god, but yet there is life after death.

For me, if there is no life after death, then living itself is worthless. We would just be some kind of entertainment for invisible viewers, television or movies on a grand stage. Murder dramas mixed with comedies mixed with soap operas mixed with war scenes and an incredible number of sex scenes. Add your own kind of television show or movie theme to my list. I’ve heard it said hundreds of times by hundreds of people, “I feel like I am on a stage, but with no scripts and no rehearsals, no directors or producers, no writers even. Just us, just the actors, going through the actions of pretend lives.” Is this how you feel, like whatever you do or don’t do is of no consequence?

To change topic for just a moment, there are many different forms of Buddhism, but where Buddhism started out as a philosophy of life, in many places it has taken on the qualities of a religion, mostly, I think, to combat those religions that use pomp and circumstance to try to convince adherents of other religious and philosophical beliefs that their religion is the only one that matters, that they own the One True God. Christianity in its several forms started out in one little corner of the world, and has spread in approximately 2000 years to every corner of our planet. It absorbs other religions and changes itself to adapt to the myths of the religions that it absorbs. If you want your religion or philosophy to survive, you have to fight fire with fire, and ceremonies and traditions are two of Christianity’s major weapons, not to mention the most powerful military machine in the world. That does not hinder its pandemic-like spread. So here we have , it has been approximated between 2 and 13% of the world’s population are atheists, sometimes counting agnostics in their numbers (people who are not sure which side of the fence to sit on), and between 87 and 98% of the world’s population believing in some form of god, visible or invisible.

And then there is me. And if there are others like me, which I’m sure there must be, the population of the world being now over 1 billion people, I have yet to meet one.To try to put my philosophy into as few of words as possible, only one word describes what I believe, and that word is “rawgod.” The being that is not now but someday might become god, if allowed to,  is a child, possibly a teenager by now, definitely not over 25 human years old, even though it was “born” (or came into existence) at least three billion years ago. This being is no superbeing in any stretch of the definition of a god, but a lonely being wanting company so desperately that it created life on Earth, and probably elsewhere, to prevent it from ever being alone again. In a future blog I will go into this birth and life much deeper, but I ask you right now to suspend your own imagination and see the world through my eyes.

Take a look around you and see what I see. Everywhere I look I see spiritual progress. Our ancestors worshipped trees and rocks and animals and weather, volcanoes, water, and gold.  (Read: http://www.urantia.org/urantia-book-standardized/paper-85-origins-worship for a concise version of how religions began by worshipping nature). Eventually they turned to pantheons of gods such as those on Mt. Olympus or in Bifrost. Slowly they evolved into worshipping the gods themselves, and finally the One True God. If this is not evolution I do not know what it is. And, amazingly enough, it parallels the evolution of man as a thinking being. (Also read James Michener’s The Source if you can still get hold of it.) As the mind grows, so does the spirit.

I am not sure how well I explained myself in this blog, so feel free to ask any questions of me. If they are of a general topic nature please ask them in the comment space. If they are of a more personal subject please send them to me at gewcolo@gmail.com, mark the subject line by the name of the Blog, and I will answer your questions as best I can. Thank you.

The “Who Am I?” Workbook

Of all the promises I made, I did not make one to not make you work hard. What I am going to ask you to do, if you are willing, is probably going to be one of the hardest things you will have to do in this lifetime. It comes with only four sections, but if you are anything like me, getting started is the hardest part. The four parts are:

Know thyself

Integrate thyself

Be thyself

BE

Part I requires the most work of your memory. First of all write down in your workbook everything you can think of of what you actually believe about life. Somewhere close to each belief you can put a check mark if you believe you gained this belief from your own experiences, or an X if you believe you heard it first from someone else, such as a parent, a teacher, a Sunday School teacher, or any adult in a position of authority over you at that time of life when you were encouraged to accept a belief without question. Do this for approximately 50 questions. If you are like most other people in this world,  you should score close to 50/50 for the X’s. Now ask yourself why you still believe them. Has anything happened in your life that absolutely confirms that belief? Has anything happened in your life that has made you ask, is that belief real? Or has anything happened in your life that has absolutely contradicted that belief? The more beliefs you can write down and answer completely honestly will lead you to who you really are, the kind of person you are. This exercise is not a one day exercise, or even a one month exercise, but truly a lifetime exercise. It doesn’t matter if the belief is a major one like: Is there really a God who rules the world? to small ones like did Rudolph really use his bright red nose to lead Santa Claus through the fog? If you believe it, or ever believed it, write it down, mark how you came to believe it, and then decide if you still believe it. Your answers to these questions will tell you who you really are inside.

Part II asks you if you like the person you are, if you would want to be this person’s friend? Not everyone likes themselves, but if you give yourself the chance, you can make changes in your personality to make you like yourself more. When I did this exercise myself, I realized that over half of what I said and did was a lie; I was literally scared to tell the truth. But that was a result of my abused childhood. Once I understood that part of me,  I was able to set up a pre-speaking lie detector. That means I try to screen my words and sentences before I utter them. Once spoken, words cannot be taken back. That was just one of the ways this process helped me. Another way it helped me was opening myself up to all kinds of new ideas that I never would have thought of before. Life became a whole new experience for me, the world a new world. All it takes is to understand yourself, what motivates you, what crushes you into the ground. I apologize if I am making this part of the workbook sound easy. But I’ve been doing it so long now it has become second nature to me. By the way, the more you like yourself, it seems, the more others will like you. Understanding yourself makes you smile with genuine joy, which will rub off onto others around you, and make them smile too.

Part III asks you to be yourself. How hard can that be? First of all, ask yourself how many faces you show to the world. You are one way with friends, another way with family. You are one way around men, then a totally different way around women. At school or at work there is still another you; and yet you can still change into someone new in a roomful of strangers where no one knows you. How many yous are there? For most people, they are a different person in every different situation, and then some. And if you have kids… I think you get my point. And, when you look around you purposefully, you see almost everyone else has as many faces as you do. Tell me, how do you remember which face to put on in each place you go? It’s easy, isn’t it, since you’ve been doing that since you were 5 or 6 years old.But which one is the real you? Succeeding at Parts I and II of your Who Am I? workbook helps you to find the real you, the inner you, the one you that exists inside each and every one of your faces. And wouldn’t it be much easier if you only had one face to show the world? It isn’t easy, I can tell you that from experience. And just when you think you have yourself down pat, someone from your distant past shows up, and you feel yourself metamorphosing right in front of them. Hold it. You are not that person anymore. You are you! And there is no one better in this world for you to be.

Part IV is the crown jewel of this tetralogy of tasks. You have found what you believe in, understood how your real beliefs changed your life, and learned to be one person, the same person, in all situations of life, no matter who you are with. Simple? I wish I could say “Yes,” but I cannot. Like a recovered addict who visits the place where his life was almost worthless, the people around you will not want you to change. While change, progressive advancement of your mind, is one of the most desirable states of life, if the people around you are not also changing, they are doing their best to make you go back as you were. That was one of the most shocking roadblocks I ran into once I had made my change, and it still happens to me today, especially with family. Some have watched you grow up from a child, while to others you have always been there. The likelihood is that you are not at all like you used to be. You speak honestly from the heart, you care more than you did before, you are more self-assured. You are the person they always wanted you to be, but never were. And now that you live like every moment is important, nobody knows you. And worst of all, you don’t know them. You are seeing them through different eyes for the first time, and all their habits and idiosyncracies that you pretended not to see before are magnified before your eyes. But you say nothing,  look at them as normal, and accept that they are who they are. You might tell a trusted few how you came to make yourself over, hoping they will want to follow your lead. But they have to be ready, as you were ready when you found this blog and it called out to you. “Read me Read me!” You heard them and you responded. But very few people hear the calling. Life is a long and arduous journey, and no matter how much you want someone to see and do as you do, it will likely not happen. I don’t yet know what the end of Life is. but I do know there is not just one way to get there. We can help each other, as I hope I am helping you, but you must take your own path, and we must be ready to say goodbye when the time comes.

 

Spiritual Atheism: A New Spirituality

Reading for Journeyers on the Paths of Life

Are you questioning your belief in GOD? Or ALLAH? Or BUDDHA? Or YHWH? Or whatever Deity you were brought up to believe in? Are you looking to add to the teachings of the Dalai Lama? Are you looking for something completely new, completely personal?

Or are you agnostic and searching for something completely different? Or even an atheist but it doesn’t feel exactly right? Or are you just a lost soul with nothing at all to believe in?

Do you believe in world peace?

If you answered “Yes!” to any of the above questions, this Blog might be for you. Only you can answer that. My only requirements are that you be alive, and searching for something that could fulfill your life.

No one knows how long seeds can wait for rain, but some flowers blossomed in the super bloom of 2005 that had never been seen in the park — indicating their seeds had been dormant for many years. These wildflowers have bloomed near California State Route 223
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3478137/That-s-one-benefit-El-Nino-Stunning-pictures-rare-super-bloom-wildflowers-California-desert.html#ixzz4XAC14lph

My Promises to You

I will not tell you what to believe. I will not tell you how to live your life. I will not tell you who you can be friends with. I will not tell you what is right (good) and what is wrong (evil). I will not tell you that you are going to heaven, hell, paradise, nirvana, or any place of glory, eternal life or eternal damnation. In fact, I will not tell you anything that isn’t already inside you, something you may have thought of, but ignored because it does not fit the world view you were taught to believe in. Or something you have never thought of at all, because you don’t have the words for it. You can have a great paying job, or scrounge off the government, or your friends and family. You can live in a mansion,  a brothel, or a homeless shelter. Best of all, I will not ask for nor accept any money or gifts you might want to send me. I firmly believe that if anything at all can better the life of human, nation, planet, or universe, it must be free to all. Spiritual writings you are paying for are not worth the time it takes to write a cheque, or register a credit card.

Who Am I?

I am not anyone special, not a cult leader, not a self-professed direct line to whatever superbeing you believe there is in charge of the universe. I do not believe in ghosts, seances, wandering spirits, demons, or angels.  I am a simple man, not rich, not poor, living 800 kms away from the nearest supercity. And of all the people who live in the small town where I live, no one knows me as anything but a guy who does not stand out in any way. I live in the shadows of civilization in what is called western society. And I believe in you. And I believe in me.

If you care to comment, please use the following form. Conversely, contact rawgod at gewcolo@gmail.com. Please put Blog comment or Blog question in the subject area.

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