Why are we here?To covet the beyond and neglect the here and now?14th June 2011 Ever since I read Ernest Becker's "The Denial of Death" (1974) in the middle 1990s, I have been convinced that humanity has spent the entire span of its known history literally barking up the wrong tree. Even the archpessimist Nietzsche agreed that the number one priority of all humans is a life that does not end, though this greatest of German philosophers went to great lengths to point out the fallacies of our own belief systems that produce out of their own self-referential contortions a fabricated solution to this problem � eternal life guaranteed if you just follow a few simple rules. A century later, Becker had clarified the equation to: "Man is a frightened animal who must lie in order to live" (a statement which encompasses the entire history of every religion). It has been my most sincere contention for some time that the corruption produced by this constant embellishment of establishment religious rituals not only diminishes human consciousness by its rote brainwashing and routine genocide of alternative ideas, it also has served to conceal the true purpose of human beings by leading them in a false direction � making the things required for eternal life overshadow and erase the realistic requirements for a healthy civil society on this planet. All our activities in this life are calibrated to the idea that we live forever. It is my belief that the sorry condition of this world at present is entirely due to this very idea, because Planet Earth today is a society that is based on a lie � the lie that we do not die. It would therefore be an occult karmic inevitability that we would destroy the planet because of this. Just imagine! A planet killed by self-serving prayer. The great architectural monuments on this planet � from the obelisks and pyramids of the past to the skyscrapers and cathedrals of today � are all blustering manifestations of the notion that we have overcome death by our monuments. The poet Shelley had something to say about that and a king named Ozymandias. So while we worship our monuments, our planet is being suffocated by our own excrement. Yes, you already know most of the details. Our entire lives are spent ignoring death and what it means. Therefore, the true lesson of life is never learned. So almost no one knows that without death, the possibility of love does not exist. What humanity is learning now is that the monotheistic model of religion has created nothing but two millennia of wars and hypocrisy, and the reason for this is that the structure was a lie to begin with. Whatever good in the way of civilizing barbarian tribes may have been accomplished, it was accomplished by fraud and force. The alternative was being burned at the stake. The Roman creation of the Hebrew godman was made possible by the destruction of ancient records, notably the burning of the Library of Alexandria by maniac Christians, to conceal the evidence of its thefts. This process led, in short order, to the Dark Ages, which lasted about six centuries. This impulse to erase the past, notably evident in sorry history of the Jewish Soviet Union, is always a sure sign of evil tyranny. What too few people still realize is that the construction of the Old Testament covered up the egregious crimes of the Hebrews in Egypt by describing a Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem. Modern archeology later proved ancient Israel did not even exist on any map when the great heroes of the Bible were supposed to have ruled there. Even worse in the creation of both Judaism and Christianity was the theft of rituals from the Old Kingdom of Egypt. The Babylonian Hebrews not only plundered Egypt with pestilence and usury, they stole their legends, changed the names, and that is the religion that powers today's fouled facsimiles of the worship of Osiris, Horus, and the Feather of Truth. But even way back then, in the unfathomable mists of prehistory, the human course was set in the wrong direction. Because the goal was always to survive death. And that never was possible. Hence, the human-created delusion that some all-powerful being had the ability � and the interest � to grant your wish for eternal life. Every church ever built had for its foundation this specific pretext. And every society ever created depended on this mentally constructed mythology for its authenticity, its supernatural sanction, and its reason for being. And it is not authentic at all. Like the Jews' claim to the holiness of their religion, it is based on nothing at all, only the insistence by its promoters that it is true, when it clearly is not. You can draw a straight line from from this lie to the current condition of the world. Our own personal immortality is far more important than the survival of the world, wouldn't you say? Let me put that another way. Who among us wouldn't abandon the whole world just to live another day? The corruption that has emanated from this millennia-long attempt to convince the world to believe in the impossible far outweighs any benefit these organizations claim to have had on the population at large. The crimes against humanity are authorized by these religions. And worse, this pathological course of action guaranteed that under the spell of a belief that is not true, that all subsequent decisions in the development of civilization would be skewed by this erroneous assumption � the primary example of wishful thinking in history. This erroneous assumption is why we attempt to build empires rather than spread love. We blame it on our need for food and other resources, but really we are attempting to immunize ourselves from our own deaths by conquering others. You can see this axiom at work if you think seriously about the nature of sporting events, which offer victory over darkness and ignominy, however transitory, as a homeopathic sop to our primary wish to live forever. Imagine how different society would be if we recognized death and the disappearance of ourselves as a natural inevitability rather than as a subject not to be talked about. Each one of us WILL come to that moment when there is nothing else on our minds, and it is then we will realize that our entire lives are really only a preparation for this moment. I've always felt that religious types are hurling profound insults at the God they profess to worship by insisting they know exactly what He said, and when He said it. I myself believe that any conjecture about an afterlife is useless, since eligibility for such is wholly dependent on your actions on this plane of existence. That's why prayer bothers me. A real prayer is an action that helps someone else and is of no direct benefit to the person taking the action. Just do the work. Organized religion talks light but brings darkness, threats, exploitation, blackmail. Organized religion has no allegiance to you; only you to it. Hence, it is slavery, and very effective, because it has convinced you it has given you a gift, when in actuality it has only addicted you to its ontological anesthesia, and actually prevented you from thinking about who you really are in a nonjudgmental way. Organized religion is for idiots unable or unwilling to even attempt to plumb the depths of their own minds. And it's all based on a falsehood that God is some entity outside the body when in reality it is a quality, an aptitude, OF the body, inasmuch as it is of the mind and derived from the minds of other people. And while I'm haranguing belief systems, let me point out the single most important debility of organized religion: it teaches humans to be followers, subservient to the curious pronouncements of strange men thousands of years ago. Religion does not activate leaders, it rubberstamps followers, and hence perpetuates bad habits of believing without knowing (the common attitude of most young soldiers) and killing without thinking, because it has been ordered from above by people who have the weight of organized and corrupt religion on their side. Following these examples of religious rectitude has produced nothing but two thousand years of war. Over these past fifty-some years of writing for various publications, I've always kept the possibility of one story in mind. After all, what is the purpose of life? To advance the cause and general health of all lifeforms, I'd say. Not just the beneficial ones, either. You have to study the effects of the bad ones to eliminate them, if necessary. That one story, I still haven't decided on a title, would be something about the heritage of the human future. What will it be? What do we want to make it? And what are we being made into that could forever prevent us from exerting a controlling influence over our own future? In other words, what are we aiming for? I've honed it down to one sentence, first written about 25 years ago. "To make laughter reign beyond the sun for as long as the future shall be." But lest I get too metaphysical, sometimes I look at life like a car wreck. First, see if anybody's hurt or worse. Then, clean up the wreckage. Finally, find out what happened so you can attempt to prevent it from happening again. If the same thing keeps happening, then you must take action against the people who are perpetrating it. The most valuable piece of information I have seen in the catacombs of the Internet was uttered by the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius. He said this. You have something inside you that nobody can ever take from you. It is not dependent on anybody else's approval. You get to decide whether you are happy or not. Do not allow anyone else to make the decision for you. And hey, what's the worst thing that can happen? The worst thing that can happen to you after you die is that you wind up at the party at the end of time � everybody winds up there sooner or later. Of course this means having to spend eternity with your relatives and the friends you have made during your life, with no way to communicate back to the living world whether this is actually hell or not.< John Kaminski is a writer who lives on the Gulf Coast of Florida, urging people to understand that no problem in the world can be authentically addressed without first analyzing tangents caused by Jewish perfidy, which has subverted and diminished every aspect of human endeavor throughout history. Support for his work is wholly derived from people who can understand what he�s saying and know what it means. www.johnkaminski.info 250 N. McCall Rd. #2, Englewood, FL 34223, USA Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822). I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: 'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!' Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away." |