http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/05/dont_shoot_sama.html#comments
This sums it up pretty much perfectly methinks…

nobody’s site: http://churchofnobody.blogspot.com/
The greatest terrorists are the state sponsored terrorists.
Without so much as a crumb of doubt.
On Religion/Alcoholism, some EXCELLENT writings by KevinB: http://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2009/05/the_alcoholism.html
Craig
AA do not religiously indoctrinate in the usual sense of imposing a doctrine of fixed ideas (on people who are indeed very vulnerable). They offer a method for the alcoholic to gain control back over their selves and their lives.
I’m no expert but I believe this starts with admitting that they have no control over their problem and then handing over this problem to a ‘higher power’ (i.e. trusting ‘God’, whatever God is, to help them back to wholeness)
If you do not believe in the existence of a higher power then this approach will always look like a load of rubbish to you.
…..but all this religious language (and even faith itself) is just myriad ways that people have found of accessing and describing their own deepest nature.
If you want to understand the nature of any material substance you must put it under stress of every kind. Heat it, cool it, stretch it squash it, bombard it, break it etc. Then you know what a material is.
For humans too, it seems that the deepest self-revelations almost always occurs at times of greatest stress……when people come to ‘the end of the line’, in near-death experiences etc.
Bill Wilson had his encounter at the absolute nadir of his life. I, and millions like me, have had similar experiences. I felt the ecstasy, the saving grace, the absolute approval, the total acceptance, the wordless understanding. I don’t know what it was that came to me. Let me call it a brief experience of God’s presence. I am not experiencing this thing now, but I know this……It is ALL I want. Near-death experiencers often describe similar feelings and awareness. They are also usually transformed by the experience……in a good way.
Anyone who has been there can tell you that this was the most real experience a person can have…..and if it was real for me it is real for others and is therefore a revelation about our universal human nature….it is there just below the surface in everyone. When you are in this place the feeling of complete connectedness, that in some sense I AM you, the total absence of fear, the fabulous sense of empowerment change a person in a profound way. One gains the strength to accept oneself and deal constructively with one’s life.
Believers like me say there is a God and to offer this idea to our fellows is to offer liberation, self-empowerment and contentment…..not to trap them in a sinister destructive ‘cult’. (I don’t personally do any of this stuff by the way. I just try to defend ‘religious’ people against the Richard Dawkins of this world)
To imagine that people who go out into the world trying to propagate their faith are necessarily some kind of mind-controllers is a gross distortion and, perhaps, wishful thinking…….though it is true that religious nuts and some religious organisations have often abused true loving spirituality under the cover of religious ideas that they (presumably) profoundly misunderstand.
Christianity is under severe attack in this country.
This should not be surprising as the sublime teaching and demands of Christ represent the most serious threat there is to the mind-controlling social-engineering nexus that is feverishly busy trying to occupy (and corrupt)our hearts and minds.
It delivers its subtle tyranny via cod-rationalism, atheistic humanism, extreme permissiveness, legally enforced tolerance, compulsory procedures that are all about inputs not about the justifier ‘outputs’ that are mere pretexts put in place to conceal the real agenda……..that is to render society witless, faithless and helpless in the face of whatever the oligarchical powers that rule us want to deliver……or, more accurately, demand of us.
Only faith and the love of God can defeat these fiends.
Therefore we should rejoice because the battle has already been won in heaven. When humans stop listening to the propaganda and hear the music that sings in their hearts the battle will be won here on earth also.
Posted by: KevinB at May 9, 2009 7:49 PM
folluow up:
Craig,
When we talk of such things we must admit that in a literal sense we do not understand what we are talking about. We are trying to relate our sense of an extra-dimensional reality.
Talk of ‘God’ likewise…..
…….but even when we describe physics through mathematical language we are really dealing with mental models and ‘metaphors’. There really is no other kind of expressed reality when we try to describe our experience (i.e. something that really happened) because even if you state what is literally true (‘the car hit the wall’) this statement merely generates an image of the event in the consciousness of another. Everything is metaphor.
I have been hit by a car. Nothing too serious. My subjective experience of this incident remains in my consciousness. If I say that the ‘spiritual’ experience I tried to describe above is much more real and powerful in my consciousness then how should I talk about it?
I can admit that I don’t know what it was really. I know it was not merely psychological. Nor the subjective impression of an electro-chemical event……though it was these things too.
I believe that there is a loving affirming reality that exists within and beyond all things. I believe that the power of anything that opposes it is feeble by comparison. I know my own experience but can I claim to ‘know’ what I deduce from my own experience?
We are spiritual beings having a human experience. Our souls survive physical death. I reasonably hope be enveloped in the source of this ecstasy again after death as many people who have ‘died’ and returned claim to have done.
What kind of words must I use?
God?
Heaven?
They’ll have to do.
We are here to get as close to this reality as we can and to bring it to others and to direct our descendants towards it.
Truth, Love, Justice, Beauty?
Will that do?
Are these not the same thing?
Unfortunately, not for everyone….
…….so we surely must look for guidance, for context.
For me, Jesus Christ will have to do. He talked the talk and walked the walk. He identified the perils that threaten us all.
His spiritual guidance was delivered in parables.
Metaphorical enough?
His warnings about the world were timely then and they remain so now.
Do not tolerate the activities of the moneylenders, nor trust the scribes, nor Lawyers, nor Pharisees, those Luciferian priests, creators of the Talmud, who made themselves Gods and invented their own other-hating hegemonic ‘Law’.
If Christ came back he would surely return to preach universalism and save his same people from these same fiends.
We must pray for all who are deliberately wicked…..and love them….
….they can’t stand that….such treatment does not affirm their reality to them.
So mock all you like but,
literally true?
No…..what is?….almost nothing.
But absolutely true. Yes. A million times yes. The light will break through. We will see ourselves as we really are. The hearts of men will turn and make the world anew.
….and as you will surely understand, Craig, the more we believe it the more it is likely to happen.
Literally.
Posted by: KevinB at May 9, 2009 10:44 PM
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