Forcing Your Beliefs On Others Quotes

No, you can't deny women their basic rights and pretend it's about your 'religious freedom'. If you don't like birth control, don't use it. Religious freedom doesn't mean you can force others to live by your own beliefs.

There is no need for us all to be alike and think the same way, neither do we need a common enemy to force us to come together and reach out to each other. If we allow ourselves and everyone else the freedom to fully individuate as spiritual beings in human form, there will be no need for us to be forced by worldly circumstances to take hands and stand together. Our souls will automatically want to flock together, like moths to the flame of our shared Divinity, yet each with wings covered in the glimmering colors and unique patterns of our individual human expression.

Religious freedom doesn't mean you can force others to live by your own beliefs.

When did speaking your beliefs become synonymous with forcing them upon others?

Making this a better world happens one person at a time. You cannot force your beliefs on anyone. Rather, be the example that others can emulate. Live your life so that others may be inspired by your words and deeds. That's how change happens.

Your doctors are also the victims of their own belief system, in other words. They constantly surround themselves with negative suggestions. When disease is seen as an invader, forced upon the integrity of the self for no reason, then the individual seems powerless and the conscious mind an adjunct. The patient is sometimes compelled to sacrifice one organ after another to his beliefs, and to the doctor’s.

There is some confusion as to what magic actually is. I think this can be cleared up if you just look at the very earliest descriptions of magic. Magic in its earliest form is often referred to as “the art”. I believe this is completely literal. I believe that magic is art and that art, whether it be writing, music, sculpture, or any other form is literally magic. Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words, or images, to achieve changes in consciousness. The very language about magic seems to be talking as much about writing or art as it is about supernatural events. A grimmoir for example, the book of spells is simply a fancy way of saying grammar. Indeed, to cast a spell, is simply to spell, to manipulate words, to change people's consciousness. And I believe that this is why an artist or writer is the closest thing in the contemporary world that you are likely to see to a Shaman. I believe that all culture must have arisen from cult. Originally, all of the faucets of our culture, whether they be in the arts or sciences were the province of the Shaman. The fact that in present times, this magical power has degenerated to the level of cheap entertainment and manipulation, is, I think a tragedy. At the moment the people who are using Shamanism and magic to shape our culture are advertisers. Rather than try to wake people up, their Shamanism is used as an opiate to tranquilize people, to make people more manipulable. Their magic box of television, and by their magic words, their jingles can cause everyone in the country to be thinking the same words and have the same banal thoughts all at exactly the same moment. In all of magic there is an incredibly large linguistic component. The Bardic tradition of magic would place a bard as being much higher and more fearsome than a magician. A magician might curse you. That might make your hands lay funny or you might have a child born with a club foot. If a Bard were to place not a curse upon you, but a satire, then that could destroy you. If it was a clever satire, it might not just destroy you in the eyes of your associates; it would destroy you in the eyes of your family. It would destroy you in your own eyes. And if it was a finely worded and clever satire that might survive and be remembered for decades, even centuries. Then years after you were dead people still might be reading it and laughing at you and your wretchedness and your absurdity. Writers and people who had command of words were respected and feared as people who manipulated magic. In latter times I think that artists and writers have allowed themselves to be sold down the river. They have accepted the prevailing belief that art and writing are merely forms of entertainment. They’re not seen as transformative forces that can change a human being; that can change a society. They are seen as simple entertainment; things with which we can fill 20 minutes, half an hour, while we’re waiting to die. It’s not the job of the artist to give the audience what the audience wants. If the audience knew what they needed, then they wouldn’t be the audience. They would be the artists. It is the job of artists to give the audience what they need.

This has been a novel about some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did. They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed--run over, maimed, destroyed--but they continued to play anyhow. We really all were very happy for a while, sitting around not toiling but just bullshitting and playing, but it was for such a terrible brief time, and then the punishment was beyond belief: even when we could see it, we could not believe it. For example, while I was writing this I learned that the person on whom the character Jerry Fabin is based killed himself. My friend on whom I based the character Ernie Luckman died before I began the novel. For a while I myself was one of these children playing in the street; I was, like the rest of them, trying to play instead of being grown up, and I was punished. I am on the list below, which is a list of those to whom this novel is dedicated, and what became of each. Drug misuse is not a disease, it is a decision, like the decision to step out in front of a moving car. You would call that not a disease but an error in judgment. When a bunch of people begin to do it, it is a social error,a life-style. In this particular life-style the motto is "Be happy now because tomorrow you are dying," but the dying begins almost at once, and the happiness is a memory. It is, then, only a speeding up, an intensifying, of the ordinary human existence. It is not different from your life-style, it is only faster. It all takes place in days or weeks or months instead of years. "Take the cash and let the credit go," as Villon said in 1460. But that is a mistake if the cash is a penny and the credit a whole lifetime. There is no moral in this novel; it is not bourgeois; it does not say they were wrong to play when they should have toiled;it just tells what the consequences were. In Greek drama they were beginning, as a society, to discover science, which means causal law. Here in this novel there is Nemesis: not fate, because any one of us could have chosen to stop playing in the street, but, as I narrate from the deepest part of my life and heart, a dreadful Nemesis for those who kept on playing. I myself,I am not a character in this novel; I am the novel. So, though, was our entire nation at this time. This novel is about more people than I knew personally. Some we all read about in the newspapers. It was, this sitting around with our buddies and bullshitting while making tape recordings, the bad decision of the decade, the sixties, both in and out of the establishment. And nature cracked down on us. We were forced to stop by things dreadful. If there was any "sin," it was that these people wanted to keep on having a good time forever, and were punished for that, but, as I say, I feel that, if so, the punishment was far too great, and I prefer to think of it only in a Greek or morally neutral way, as mere science, as deterministic impartial cause-and-effect. I loved them all. Here is the list, to whom I dedicate my love: To Gaylene deceased To Ray deceased To Francy permanent psychosis To Kathy permanent brain damage To Jim deceased To Val massive permanent brain damage To Nancy permanent psychosis To Joanne permanent brain damage To Maren deceased To Nick deceased To Terry deceased To Dennis deceased To Phil permanent pancreatic damage To Sue permanent vascular damage To Jerri permanent psychosis and vascular damage . . . and so forth. In Memoriam. These were comrades whom I had; there are no better. They remain in my mind, and the enemy will never be forgiven. The "enemy" was their mistake in playing. Let them all play again, in some other way, and let them be happy.

There are two powerful fuels, two forces; motivation and inspiration. To be motivated you need to know what your motives are. Over time - and to sustain you through it - your motivation must become an inner energy; a 'motor' driving you forward, passionately, purposefully, wisely and compassionately... come what may, every day. Inspiration is an outer - worldly - energy that you breathe and draw in. It may come from many places, faces, spaces and stages - right across the ages. It is where nature, spirit, science, mind and time meet, dance, play and speak. It keeps you outward facing and life embracing. But you must be open-minded and open-hearted to first let it in and then let it out again. Together - blended, combined and re-entwined - motivation and inspiration bring connectivity, productivity, creativity and boundless possibilities that is not just 'self' serving but enriching to all humanity and societies...just as it should be.

They were no colonists; their administration was merely a squeeze, and nothing more, I suspect. They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force - nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others. They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind - as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness. The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea - something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to

They (Romans) were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force - nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others. They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind - as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness. The conquest of the earth which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea - something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to...

At the quantum level our universe can be seen as an indeterminate place, predictable in a statistical way only when you employ large enough numbers. Between that universe and a relatively predictable one where the passage of a single planet can be timed to a picosecond, other forces come into play. For the in-between universe where we find our daily lives, that which you believe is a dominant force. Your beliefs order the unfolding of daily events. If enough of us believe, a new thing can be made to exist. Belief structure creates a filter through which chaos is sifted into order.

If you define madness as the opposite of sane, you are forced into providing a definition of sanity. Can you define it? Can you tell me what it is to be sane? Is it to hold no beliefs that are contrary to reality? That our thoughts and actions contain no absurd contradictions?...If that is your criterion, then we are all mad—except those of us who make no claim to understand the difference. Perhaps there is no difference, except in our own heads. In other words...madness is a wholly human malady borne in a brain too evolved—or not quite evolved enough—to bear the awful burden of its own existence.

Reader: Will you not admit that you are arguing against yourself? You know that what the English obtained in their own country they obtained by using brute force. I know you have argued that what they have obtained is useless, but that does not affect my argument. They wanted useless things and they got them. My point is that their desire was fulfilled. What does it matter what means they adopted? Why should we not obtain our goal, which is good, by any means whatsoever, even by using violence? Shall I think of the means when I have to deal with a thief in the house? My duty is to drive him out anyhow. You seem to admit that we have received nothing, and that we shall receive nothing by petitioning. Why, then, may we do not so by using brute force? And, to retain what we may receive we shall keep up the fear by using the same force to the extent that it may be necessary. You will not find fault with a continuance of force to prevent a child from thrusting its foot into fire. Somehow or other we have to gain our end. Editor: Your reasoning is plausible. It has deluded many. I have used similar arguments before now. But I think I know better now, and I shall endeavour to undeceive you. Let us first take the argument that we are justified in gaining our end by using brute force because the English gained theirs by using similar means. It is perfectly true that they used brute force and that it is possible for us to do likewise, but by using similar means we can get only the same thing that they got. You will admit that we do not want that. Your belief that there is no connection between the means and the end is a great mistake. Through that mistake even men who have been considered religious have committed grievous crimes. Your reasoning is the same as saying that we can get a rose through planting a noxious weed. If I want to cross the ocean, I can do so only by means of a vessel; if I were to use a cart for that purpose, both the cart and I would soon find the bottom. "As is the God, so is the votary", is a maxim worth considering. Its meaning has been distorted and men have gone astray. The means may be likened to a seed, the end to a tree; and there is just the same inviolable connection between the means and the end as there is between the seed and the tree. I am not likely to obtain the result flowing from the worship of God by laying myself prostrate before Satan. If, therefore, anyone were to say : "I want to worship God; it does not matter that I do so by means of Satan," it would be set down as ignorant folly. We reap exactly as we sow. The English in 1833 obtained greater voting power by violence. Did they by using brute force better appreciate their duty? They wanted the right of voting, which they obtained by using physical force. But real rights are a result of performance of duty; these rights they have not obtained. We, therefore, have before us in English the force of everybody wanting and insisting on his rights, nobody thinking of his duty. And, where everybody wants rights, who shall give them to whom? I do not wish to imply that they do no duties. They don't perform the duties corresponding to those rights; and as they do not perform that particular duty, namely, acquire fitness, their rights have proved a burden to them. In other words, what they have obtained is an exact result of the means they adapted. They used the means corresponding to the end. If I want to deprive you of your watch, I shall certainly have to fight for it; if I want to buy your watch, I shall have to pay you for it; and if I want a gift, I shall have to plead for it; and, according to the means I employ, the watch is stolen property, my own property, or a donation. Thus we see three different results from three different means. Will you still say that means do not matter?

The history of man proves that religion perverts man's concept of life and the universe, and has made him a cringing coward before the blind forces of nature. If you believe that there is a God; that man was 'created'; that he was forbidden to eat of the fruit of the 'tree of knowledge'; that he disobeyed; that he is a 'fallen angel'; that he is paying the penalty for his 'sins,' then you devote your time praying to appease an angry and jealous God. If, on the other hand, you believe that the universe is a great mystery; that man is the product of evolution; that he is born without knowledge; that intelligence comes from experience, then you devote your time and energies to improving his condition with the hope of securing a little happiness here for yourself and your fellow man. That is the difference. If man was 'created,' then someone made a grievous mistake.

We lead our lives like water flowing down a hill, going more or less in one direction until we splash into something that forces us to find a new course. If I'd never met Mr. Tanaka, my life would have been a simple stream flowing from our tipsy house to the ocean. Mr. Tanaka changed all that when he sent me out into the world. But being sent out into the world isn't necessarily the same as leaving your home behind you. I'd been in Gion more than six months by the time I received Mr. Tanaka's letter; and yet during that time, I'd never for a moment given up the belief that I would one day find a better life elsewhere, with at least part of the family I'd always known. I was living only half in Gion; the other half of me lived in my dreams of going home. This is why dreams can be such dangerous things: they smolder on like a fire does, and sometimes consume us completely.

Hope does not mean that our protests will suddenly awaken the dead consciences, the atrophied souls, of the plutocrats running Halliburton, Goldman Sachs, Exxon Mobil or the government. Hope does not mean we will reform Wall Street swindlers and speculators. Hope does not mean that the nation’s ministers and rabbis, who know the words of the great Hebrew prophets, will leave their houses of worship to practice the religious beliefs they preach. Most clerics like fine, abstract words about justice and full collection plates, but know little of real hope. Hope knows that unless we physically defy government control we are complicit in the violence of the state. All who resist keep hope alive. All who succumb to fear, despair and apathy become enemies of hope. Hope has a cost. Hope is not comfortable or easy. Hope requires personal risk. Hope does not come with the right attitude. Hope is not about peace of mind. Hope is an action. Hope is doing something. Hope, which is always nonviolent, exposes in its powerlessness the lies, fraud and coercion employed by the state. Hope does not believe in force. Hope knows that an injustice visited on our neighbor is an injustice visited on us all. Hope sees in our enemy our own face. Hope is not for the practical and the sophisticated, the cynics and the complacent, the defeated and the fearful. Hope is what the corporate state, which saturates our airwaves with lies, seeks to obliterate. Hope is what our corporate overlords are determined to crush. Be afraid, they tell us. Surrender your liberties to us so we can make the world safe from terror. Don’t resist. Embrace the alienation of our cheerful conformity. Buy our products. Without them you are worthless. Become our brands. Do not look up from your electronic hallucinations to think. No. Above all do not think. Obey. The powerful do not understand hope. Hope is not part of their vocabulary. They speak in the cold, dead words of national security, global markets, electoral strategy, staying on message, image and money. Those addicted to power, blinded by self-exaltation, cannot decipher the words of hope any more than most of us can decipher hieroglyphics. Hope to Wall Street bankers and politicians, to the masters of war and commerce, is not practical. It is gibberish. It means nothing. I cannot promise you fine weather or an easy time. I cannot pretend that being handcuffed is pleasant. If we resist and carry out acts, no matter how small, of open defiance, hope will not be extinguished. Any act of rebellion, any physical defiance of those who make war, of those who perpetuate corporate greed and are responsible for state crimes, anything that seeks to draw the good to the good, nourishes our souls and holds out the possibility that we can touch and transform the souls of others. Hope affirms that which we must affirm. And every act that imparts hope is a victory in itself.

Once there were three tribes. The Optimists, whose patron saints were Drake and Sagan, believed in a universe crawling with gentle intelligence—spiritual brethren vaster and more enlightened than we, a great galactic siblinghood into whose ranks we would someday ascend. Surely, said the Optimists, space travel implies enlightenment, for it requires the control of great destructive energies. Any race which can't rise above its own brutal instincts will wipe itself out long before it learns to bridge the interstellar gulf. Across from the Optimists sat the Pessimists, who genuflected before graven images of Saint Fermi and a host of lesser lightweights. The Pessimists envisioned a lonely universe full of dead rocks and prokaryotic slime. The odds are just too low, they insisted. Too many rogues, too much radiation, too much eccentricity in too many orbits. It is a surpassing miracle that even one Earth exists; to hope for many is to abandon reason and embrace religious mania. After all, the universe is fourteen billion years old: if the galaxy were alive with intelligence, wouldn't it be here by now? Equidistant to the other two tribes sat the Historians. They didn't have too many thoughts on the probable prevalence of intelligent, spacefaring extraterrestrials— but if there are any, they said, they're not just going to be smart. They're going to be mean. It might seem almost too obvious a conclusion. What is Human history, if not an ongoing succession of greater technologies grinding lesser ones beneath their boots? But the subject wasn't merely Human history, or the unfair advantage that tools gave to any given side; the oppressed snatch up advanced weaponry as readily as the oppressor, given half a chance. No, the real issue was how those tools got there in the first place. The real issue was what tools are for. To the Historians, tools existed for only one reason: to force the universe into unnatural shapes. They treated nature as an enemy, they were by definition a rebellion against the way things were. Technology is a stunted thing in benign environments, it never thrived in any culture gripped by belief in natural harmony. Why invent fusion reactors if your climate is comfortable, if your food is abundant? Why build fortresses if you have no enemies? Why force change upon a world which poses no threat? Human civilization had a lot of branches, not so long ago. Even into the twenty-first century, a few isolated tribes had barely developed stone tools. Some settled down with agriculture. Others weren't content until they had ended nature itself, still others until they'd built cities in space. We all rested eventually, though. Each new technology trampled lesser ones, climbed to some complacent asymptote, and stopped—until my own mother packed herself away like a larva in honeycomb, softened by machinery, robbed of incentive by her own contentment. But history never said that everyone had to stop where we did. It only suggested that those who had stopped no longer struggled for existence. There could be other, more hellish worlds where the best Human technology would crumble, where the environment was still the enemy, where the only survivors were those who fought back with sharper tools and stronger empires. The threats contained in those environments would not be simple ones. Harsh weather and natural disasters either kill you or they don't, and once conquered—or adapted to— they lose their relevance. No, the only environmental factors that continued to matter were those that fought back, that countered new strategies with newer ones, that forced their enemies to scale ever-greater heights just to stay alive. Ultimately, the only enemy that mattered was an intelligent one. And if the best toys do end up in the hands of those who've never forgotten that life itself is an act of war against intelligent opponents, what does that say about a race whose machines travel between the stars?

All this attempt to control... We are talking about Western attitudes that are five hundred years old... The basic idea of science - that there was a new way to look at reality, that it was objective, that it did not depend on your beliefs or your nationality, that it was rational - that idea was fresh and exciting back then. It offered promise and hope for the future, and it swept away the old medieval system, which was hundreds of years old. The medieval world of feudal politics and religious dogma and hateful superstitions fell before science. But, in truth, this was because the medieval world didn't really work any more. It didn't work economically, it didn't work intellectually, and it didn't fit the new world that was emerging... But now... science is the belief system that is hundreds of years old. And, like the medieval system before it, science is starting to not fit the world any more. Science has attained so much power that its practical limits begin to be apparent. Largely through science, billions of us live in one small world, densely packed and intercommunicating. But science cannot help us decide what to do with that world, or how to live. Science can make a nuclear reactor, but it can not tell us not to build it. Science can make pesticide, but cannot tell us not to use it. And our world starts to seem polluted in fundamental ways - air, and water, and land - because of ungovernable science... At the same time, the great intellectual justification of science has vanished. Ever since Newton and Descartes, science has explicitly offered us the vision of total control. Science has claimed the power to eventually control everything, through its understanding of natural laws. But in the twentieth century, that claim has been shattered beyond repair. First, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle set limits on what we could know about the subatomic world. Oh well, we say. None of us lives in a subatomic world. It doesn't make any practical difference as we go through our lives. Then Godel's theorem set similar limits to mathematics, the formal language of science. Mathematicians used to think that their language had some inherent trueness that derived from the laws of logic. Now we know what we call 'reason' is just an arbitrary game. It's not special, in the way we thought it was. And now chaos theory proves that unpredictability is built into our daily lives. It is as mundane as the rain storms we cannot predict. And so the grand vision of science, hundreds of years old - the dream of total control - has died, in our century. And with it much of the justification, the rationale for science to do what it does. And for us to listen to it. Science has always said that it may not know everything now but it will know, eventually. But now we see that isn't true. It is an idle boast. As foolish, and misguided, as the child who jumps off a building because he believes he can fly... We are witnessing the end of the scientific era. Science, like other outmoded systems, is destroying itself. As it gains in power, it proves itself incapable of handling the power. Because things are going very fast now... it will be in everyone's hands. It will be in kits for backyard gardeners. Experiments for schoolchildren. Cheap labs for terrorists and dictators. And that will force everyone to ask the same question - What should I do with my power? - which is the very question science says it cannot answer.

Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it. Putting words on paper that have never been there in quite that way before. And although you are physically by yourself, the haunting Demon never leaves you, that Demon being the knowledge of your own terrible limitations, your hopeless inadequacy, the impossibility of ever getting it right. No matter how diamond-bright your ideas are dancing in your brain, on paper they are earthbound. If you’re trying a screenplay, you know it’s never going to be Bergman. If it’s a novel, well, what kind of a novelist can you hope to be when Dostoevski was there before you. And Dickens and Cervantes and all the other masters that led you to the prison of your desk. But if you’re a writer, that’s what you must do, and in order to accomplish anything at all, at the rock bottom of it all is your confidence. You tell yourself lies and you force them into belief: Hey, you suckers, I’m going to do it this one time. I’m going to tell you things you never knew. I’ve—got—secrets!

The way they were treated should make you angry,” Richard said as he started away, “but not because you share an attribute with them.” Taken aback by his words, even looking a little hurt, Jennsen didn’t move. “What do you mean?” Richard paused and turned back to her. “That’s how the Imperial Order thinks. That’s how Owen’s people think. It’s a belief in granting disembodied prestige, or the mantle of guilt, to all those who share some specific trait or attribute. “The Imperial Order would like you to believe that your virtue, your ultimate value, or even your wickedness, arises entirely from being born a member of a given group, that free will itself is either impotent or nonexistent. They want you to believe that all people are merely interchangeable members of groups that share fixed, preordained characteristics, and they are predestined to live through a collective identity, the group will, unable to rise on individual merit because there can be no such thing as independent, individual merit, only group merit. “They believe that people can only rise above their station in life when selected to be awarded recognition because their group is due an indulgence, and so a representative, a stand-in for the group, must be selected to be awarded the badge of self-worth. Only the reflected light off this badge, they believe, can bring the radiance of self-worth to others of their group. “But those granted this badge live with the uneasy knowledge that it’s only an illusion of competence. It never brings any sincere self-respect because you can’t fool yourself. Ultimately, because it is counterfeit, the sham of esteem granted because of a connection with a group can only be propped up by force. “This belittling of mankind, the Order’s condemnation of everyone and everything human, is their transcendent judgment of man’s inadequacy. “When you direct your anger at me for having a trait borne by someone else, you pronounce me guilty for their crimes. That’s what happens when people say I’m a monster because our father was a monster. If you admire someone simply because you believe their group is deserving, then you embrace the same corrupt ethics. “The Imperial Order says that no individual should have the right to achieve something on his own, to accomplish what someone else cannot, and so magic must be stripped from mankind. They say that accomplishment is corrupt because it is rooted in the evil of self-interest, therefore the fruits of that accomplishment are tainted by its evil. This is why they preach that any gain must be sacrificed to those who have not earned it. They hold that only through such sacrifice can those fruits be purified and made good. “We believe, on the other hand, that your own individual life is the value and its own end, and what you achieve is yours. “Only you can achieve self-worth for yourself. Any group offering it to you, or demanding it of you, comes bearing chains of slavery.

It's not always easy to do the right thing. But doing the right thing makes you strong; it builds character; it forces you to make decisions based upon your beliefs and not what other people think. In life, and in business, you have to stand for what you believe in and sometimes you have to stand alone. But what makes you a leader is having the courage of your convictions.

Love alone brings order eternal, Order brought by law is shortlived. Only selfless lovers make good lawmakers, All others are just playing make belief. Let love come as apocalypse and wipe out, All that is rigid, all that is prehistoric. Welcome love into your life as a purifying force, Let it bring you to life anew and terrific. Life is terrific when life has love but, To have love and to have lover ain't the same. Lover isn't one who has someone to love them back, But one who radiates love, despite living in drought without rain. None knows the value of rain, But the land of eternal drought. None knows the value of love, But the heart that loves despite hurt. Only the one who knows pain, Can love another without gain. Only the heart that knows hurt, Can help another without rain.

That said, I do have my own set of beliefs. One of them is 'each to their own' and I’ve got absolutely no problem with other people believing whatever the hell they want to believe. Worship away my friends – that’s absolutely fine by me. My only problem comes when people try to force their set of beliefs on others. That’s not cool. In short, don’t try to convince me to worship your God and I won’t call bull shit on your charade.

As noted before, we’re unfairly biased toward what we already know, what we believe to be certain. If I believe I’m a nice guy, I will avoid situations that could potentially contradict that belief. If I believe I’m an awesome cook, I’ll seek out opportunities to prove that to myself over and over again. The belief always takes precedence. Until we change how we view ourselves, what we believe we are and are not, we cannot overcome our avoidance and anxiety. We cannot change. In this way, “knowing yourself” or “finding yourself” can be dangerous. It can cement you into a strict role and saddle you with unnecessary expectations. It can close you off to inner potential and outer opportunities. I say don’t find yourself. I say never know who you are. Because that’s what keeps you striving and discovering. And it forces you to remain humble in your judgements and accepting of the differences in others.

The scout isn’t indifferent. A scout might hope to learn that the path is safe, that the other side is weak, or that there’s a bridge conveniently located where his forces need to cross the river. But above all, he wants to learn what’s really there, not fool himself into drawing a bridge on his map where there isn’t one in real life. Being in scout mindset means wanting your “map”—your perception of yourself and the world—to be as accurate as possible. Of course, all maps are imperfect simplifications of reality, as a scout well knows. Striving for an accurate map means being aware of the limits of your understanding, keeping track of the regions of your map that are especially sketchy or possibly wrong. And it means always being open to changing your mind in response to new information. In scout mindset, there’s no such thing as a “threat” to your beliefs. If you find out you were wrong about something, great—you’ve improved your map, and that can only help you.

What you believe to be true is relative to yourself and to others. In other words, you cannot force your belief into absolute truth. Not for other people. There will always be people who disagree and that is why people have dialectics, discussion, reasoning and logic by throwing arguments at each other. Why are there so many debates and contradictions in discussing matters related to metaphysics. Namely questions about the mind and the limitations of humanity in an effort to explore and investigate the truth itself.

none of us would feel exactly like this. What saves us is efficiency—the devotion to efficiency. But these chaps were not much account, really. They were no colonists; their administration was merely a squeeze, and nothing more, I suspect. They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force—nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others. They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind—as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness. The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea-something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to....

In theory, if some holy book misrepresented reality, its disciples would sooner or later discover this, and the text’s authority would be undermined. Abraham Lincoln said you cannot deceive everybody all the time. Well, that’s wishful thinking. In practice, the power of human cooperation networks depends on a delicate balance between truth and fiction. If you distort reality too much, it will weaken you, and you will not be able to compete against more clear-sighted rivals. On the other hand, you cannot organise masses of people effectively without relying on some fictional myths. So if you stick to unalloyed reality, without mixing any fiction with it, few people will follow you. If you used a time machine to send a modern scientist to ancient Egypt, she would not be able to seize power by exposing the fictions of the local priests and lecturing the peasants on evolution, relativity and quantum physics. Of course, if our scientist could use her knowledge in order to produce a few rifles and artillery pieces, she could gain a huge advantage over pharaoh and the crocodile god Sobek. Yet in order to mine iron ore, build blast furnaces and manufacture gunpowder the scientist would need a lot of hard-working peasants. Do you really think she could inspire them by explaining that energy divided by mass equals the speed of light squared? If you happen to think so, you are welcome to travel to present-day Afghanistan or Syria and try your luck. Really powerful human organisations – such as pharaonic Egypt, the European empires and the modern school system – are not necessarily clear-sighted. Much of their power rests on their ability to force their fictional beliefs on a submissive reality. That’s the whole idea of money, for example. The government makes worthless pieces of paper, declares them to be valuable and then uses them to compute the value of everything else. The government has the power to force citizens to pay taxes using these pieces of paper, so the citizens have no choice but to get their hands on at least some of them. Consequently, these bills really do become valuable, the government officials are vindicated in their beliefs, and since the government controls the issuing of paper money, its power grows. If somebody protests that ‘These are just worthless pieces of paper!’ and behaves as if they are only pieces of paper, he won’t get very far in life.

This isn’t some libertarian mistrust of government policy, which is healthy in any democracy. This is deep skepticism of the very institutions of our society. And it’s becoming more and more mainstream. We can’t trust the evening news. We can’t trust our politicians. Our universities, the gateway to a better life, are rigged against us. We can’t get jobs. You can’t believe these things and participate meaningfully in society. Social psychologists have shown that group belief is a powerful motivator in performance. When groups perceive that it’s in their interest to work hard and achieve things, members of that group outperform other similarly situated individuals. It’s obvious why: If you believe that hard work pays off, then you work hard; if you think it’s hard to get ahead even when you try, then why try at all? Similarly, when people do fail, this mind-set allows them to look outward. I once ran into an old acquaintance at a Middletown bar who told me that he had recently quit his job because he was sick of waking up early. I later saw him complaining on Facebook about the “Obama economy” and how it had affected his life. I don’t doubt that the Obama economy has affected many, but this man is assuredly not among them. His status in life is directly attributable to the choices he’s made, and his life will improve only through better decisions. But for him to make better choices, he needs to live in an environment that forces him to ask tough questions about himself. There is a cultural movement in the white working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents by the day. Here is where the rhetoric of modern conservatives (and I say this as one of them) fails to meet the real challenges of their biggest constituents. Instead of encouraging engagement, conservatives increasingly foment the kind of detachment that has sapped the ambition of so many of my peers. I have watched some friends blossom into successful adults and others fall victim to the worst of Middletown’s temptations—premature parenthood, drugs, incarceration. What separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations that they had for their own lives. Yet the message of the right is increasingly: It’s not your fault that you’re a loser; it’s the government’s fault. My dad, for example, has never disparaged hard work, but he mistrusts some of the most obvious paths to upward mobility. When

And, sincerely, we respect her stance. The Liberal Rednecks are all about standing up for your beliefs even when they’re hateful, bigoted, and go against everything your alleged Lord and Savior stood for. The thing is, doing that would have involved quitting her job—but that’s just something the four-times-married mother was not prepared to do for her faith. Go on TV and be called a hero by powerful politicians who agree with her and her “stand”? Sure, that’s fine. Have the Church pay for her legal bills and prop her up (instead of, oh we don’t know, giving that money to the poor)? Yes, sir. But actually quit instead of breaking an oath (which, by the way, is a sin)? That’s just something Jesus apparently wouldn’t do. Kim Davis is an analogy for Christians at large in the South. She was not oppressed. She was not forced to do anything. She could have quit. The truth is she did not want to quit her job as an elected official. She wanted to bend the political will of those around her so she could prevent other humans from marrying each other because she didn’t like the idea of it. That’s not oppression—that’s someone trying to use the inordinate amount of power they have (over the media and literally as the clerk) to affect the lives of strangers she disagrees with. Guess what that is? Yup. That is oppression.

When you combine this sacred text with the belief that one’s group alone has a unique revelation, then you can say to others, “With all due respect, my good friends, God does not hear your prayers because you do not believe as I do.” Why do they say that? Because they combine an infallible book with unique revelation and think they have become God’s chosen people. They want us to believe that they alone are God’s and know how to interpret the Bible, since God cannot speak for herself. These presumptions of sacred text and unique revelation combine to create an arrogance of faith that is arguably the most destructive force in the world. It has gone on for centuries and it continues.

…the third article we discovered was by Linda Hartling, who ties together research from several areas to propose a model explaining how humiliation can lead to violence. Hartling suggests that humiliation can trigger a series of reactions, including social pain, decreased self-awareness, increased self-defeating behavior, and decreased self-regulation, that ultimately lead to violence. Hartling and colleagues state that “humiliation is not only the most underappreciated force in international relations, it may be the missing link in the search for root causes of political instability and violent conflict…perhaps the most toxic social dynamic of our age.” This connection between humiliation and aggression/violence explains much of what we’re seeing today. Amplified by the reach of social media, dehumanizing and humiliating others are becoming increasingly normalized, along with violence. Now, rather than humiliating someone in front of a small group of people, we have the power to eviscerate someone in front of a global audience of strangers. I know we all have deeply passionate and cultural beliefs, but shame and humiliation will never be effective social justice tools. They are tools of oppression. I remember reading this quote from Elie Wiesel years ago and it’s become a practice for me-even when I’m enraged or afraid: “Never allow anyone to be humiliated in your presence.

You’ve probably had a similar experience with someone you know. I’ve already recounted the stories of three of my closest friends—one in high school, one in college, and one in seminary—who seemed so dedicated to serving the Lord, and yet all of them eventually turned their backs on Him. One became a dope-smoking rock-concert promoter, and another became a Buddhist. These were not casual acquaintances, but friends at a very close level. I was sure they shared my passion for the true gospel as much as they shared my love for sports. These three young men proved to me that you can profess Christ and not know Him. You can think you’re a Christian and later see clearly that you’re not; you can certainly deceive other people. Seeing these seemingly intelligent, dedicated, strong Christians abandon their beliefs forced me to think about who is really a Christian and what being a Christian really means. Their actions portrayed them as fellow soldiers of Christ, but in the end their hearts exposed them as traitors. Spiritual defectors are an integral part of the story of Christianity, both past and present. They’re in your life and mine, just as they were in Jesus’ life. They shouldn’t surprise you, defeat you, disappoint you, or cause you to despair. Jesus’ insights on spiritual defectors in John 6, and the reaction to His teaching about the issue, give us one of the most compelling and enlightening stories of His ministry. It’s worth considering closely.

They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force—nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others. They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind—as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness. The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea—something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to....

cognitive dissonance. It refers to the disconnect between what we believe in our minds and what we experience or see in reality. The underlying theory is simple. The more we are committed to believing that something is true, the less likely we are to believe that its opposite is true, even in the face of clear evidence that shows we are wrong. For example, if you believe your colleague Bill is a jerk, you will filter Bill’s actions through that belief. No matter what Bill does, you’ll see it through a prism that confirms he’s a jerk. Even the times when he’s not a jerk, you’ll interpret it as the exception to the rule that Bill’s a jerk. It may take years of saintly behavior for Bill to overcome your perception. That’s cognitive dissonance applied to others. It can be a disruptive and unfair force in the workplace.

Richard was, at bottom, a guy who did stuff. A farmer. A plumber. A Barney. What he wasn't so good at was manipulating the internal states of other humans, getting them to see things his way, do things for him. His baseline attitude toward other humans was that they could all just go fuck themselves and that he was not going to expend any effort whatsoever getting them to change the way they thought. This was probably rooted in the belief that had been inculcated to him from the get-go: that there was an objective reality, which all people worth talking to could observe and understand, and that there was no point in arguing about anything that could be so observed and so understood. As long as you made a point of hanging out exclusively with people who had the wit to see and to understand that objective reality, you didn't have to waste a lot of time talking. When a thunderstorm was headed your way across the prairie, you took the washing down from the line and closed the windows. It wasn't necessary to have a meeting about it. The sales force didn't need to get involved.

Through the spectacles of geology, terra firms becomes terra mobilis, and we are forced to reconsider our beliefs of what is solid and what is not. Although we attribute to stone great power to hold back time, to refuse its claims (cairns, stone tablets, monuments, statuary), this is true only in relation to our own mutability. Looked at in the context of the bigger geological picture, rock is as vulnerable to change as any other substance. Above all, geology makes explicit challenges to our understanding of time. It giddies the sense of here-and-now. The imaginative experience of what the writer John McPhee memorably called 'deep time' - the sense of time whose units are not days, hours, minutes or seconds but millions of years or tens of millions of years - crushes the human instant; flattens it to a wafer. Contemplating the immensities of deep time, you face, in a way that is both exquisite and horrifying, the total collapse of your present, compacted to nothingness by the pressures of pasts and futures too extensive to envisage. And it is a physical as well as a cerebral horror, for to acknowledge that the hard rock of a mountain is vulnerable to the attrition of time is of necessity to reflect on the appalling transience of the human body.

His baseline attitude toward humans was that they could all just go fuck themselves and that he was not going to expend any effort whatsoever getting them to change the way they thought. This was probably rooted in the belief that had been inculcated to him from the get-go: that there was an objective reality, which all people worth talking to could observe and understand, and there was no point in arguing about anything that would be so observed and so understood. As long as you made a point of hanging out exclusively with people who had the wit to see and understand that objective reality, you didn't have to waste a lot of time talking. When a thunderstorm was headed your way across the prairie, you took the washing down from the line and closed the windows. It wasn't necessary to have a meeting about it. The sales force didn't need to get involved... ...It was time, in other words, to call out the sales force, take Jones to lunch, begin gardening personal contacts, shape his perception of the competitive landscape. Forge a partnership. Exactly the kind of work from which Richard had always found some way to excuse himself, even when large amounts of money were at stake. Yet now his life was at stake, and no one was around to help him, and he still wasn't doing it. He simply couldn't get past his conviction that Jones could go fuck himself and that he wasn't going to angle and scheme and maneuver for Jones' sake.

This is an enormous claim, but there is a certain logic to it. One of the most recent people to note this logic is Bono, the lead singer of U2, in a conversation with Michka Assayas: Assayas: Christ has his rank among the world’s great thinkers. But Son of God, isn’t that far-fetched? Bono: No, it’s not far-fetched to me. Look, the secular response to the Christ story always goes like this: He was a great prophet, obviously a very interesting guy, had a lot to say along the lines of other great prophets, be they Elijah, Muhammad, Buddha, or Confucius. But actually Christ doesn’t allow you that. He doesn’t let you off that hook. Christ says, No. I’m not saying I’m a teacher, don’t call me teacher. I’m not saying I’m a prophet. I’m saying: ‘I’m the Messiah.’ I’m saying: ‘I am God incarnate.’ And people say: No, no, please, just be a prophet. A prophet we can take. You’re a bit eccentric. We’ve had John the Baptist eating locusts and wild honey, we can handle that. But don’t mention the ‘M’ word! Because, you know, we’re gonna have to crucify you. And he goes: No, no, I know you’re expecting me to come back with an army and set you free from these creeps, but actually I am the Messiah. At this point, everyone starts staring at their shoes, and says: Oh, my God, he’s gonna keep saying this. So what you’re left with is either Christ was who He said He was – the Messiah – or a complete nutcase. I mean, we’re talking nutcase on the level of Charles Manson. . . . I’m not joking here. The idea that the entire course of civilisation for over half of the globe could have its fate changed and turned upside-down by a nutcase, for me that’s far-fetched . . . Bono is describing how Jesus’ statements about himself force us all into an all-or-nothing choice.

You certainly don’t “need” to evangelize. You can rest assured that God is perfectly capable of bringing people to himself in His own good time and in His own good way. That said, though, it’s very likely you will be galvanized by your own joy in the Lord to share that joy with others. It’s only natural to want to share something wonderful you’ve found with everyone around you – and especially with those in your life for whom you have affection or care about. And if that life-enhancing, life-saving something you’ve found is absolutely free to anyone who will but ask for it, well.. Well then it’s a wonder, isn’t it, that every bible sold doesn’t come with a bullhorn. The question of exactly when and how it’s best for you to personally share your faith with others is one that the Holy Spirit stands ever ready to help you answer. Primarily, it’s a matter of simply paying attention to the signals you get from non-christians about the degree to which they’re ready to have a conversation in which it would be natural to talk about the value and nature of personal beliefs. Forcing that conversation is unlikely to prove productive to you or to the other person. You don’t want to alienate someone by too zealously pushing Christ on them before they’re optn to that sort of interaction with you. The best rule of thumb when wondering how and when you should go about evangelizing is to just be yourself and relax about it. When it’s time to talk to someone about Jesus, Jesus by His spirit will let you know. Trust in this. God’s ultimate purpose is to bring every person on earth to the realization that his son died so they might have eternal life. And as a Christian you do have a role in that inspiring mission. Trust God to let you know when it’s time for you to step into it – how and with whom.

I've asked a number of analytic metaphysicians whether they can distinguish their enterprise from naïve naïve naive auto-anthropology of their clan, and have not received any compelling answers. The alternative is sophisticated naïve anthropology (both auto- and hetero-)-- the anthropology that reserves judgment about whether any of the theorems produced by the exercise deserve to be trusted--and this is a feasible and frequently valuable project. I propose that this is the enterprise to which analytic metaphysicians should turn, since it requires rather minimal adjustments to their methods and only one major revision of their raison d'être : they must rollback their pretensions and acknowledge that their research is best seen as a preparatory reconnaissance of the terrain of the manifest image, suspending both belief and disbelief the way anthropologists do when studying an exotic culture: let's pretend for the nonce that the natives are right, and see what falls out. Since at least a large part of philosophy’s task, in my vision of the discipline, consists in negotiating the traffic back and forth between the manifest and scientific images, it is a good idea for philosophers to analyze what they are up against in the way of focus options before launching into their theory-building and theory-criticizing. One of the hallmarks of sophisticated naïve anthropology is its openness to counterintuitive discoveries. As long as you're doing naïve anthropology, counterintuitiveness (to the natives) counts against your reconstruction; when you shift gears and begin asking which aspects of the naïve “theory” are true, counterintuitiveness loses its force as an objection and even becomes, on occasion, a sign of significant progress. In science in general, counterintuitive results are prized, after all.

He began by expressing his gratitude to those “whom no partizan malice, or partizan hope, can make false to the nation’s life,” then passed at once, since peace seemed uppermost in men’s minds nowadays, to a discussion of “three conceivable ways” in which it could be brought about. First, by suppressing the rebellion; “This I am trying to do. Are you for it? If you are, so far we are agreed.” Second, by giving up the Union; “I am against this. Are you for it? If you are, you should say so plainly.” Third, by negotiating some sort of armistice based on compromise with the Confederates; but “I do not believe any compromise, embracing the maintenance of the Union, is now possible. All I learn leads to a directly opposite belief.” After disposing thus, to his apparent satisfaction, of the possibility of achieving peace except by force of arms, he moved on to another matter which his opponents had lately been harping on as a source of dissatisfaction: Emancipation. “You say you will not fight to free negroes. Some of them seem willing to fight for you; but no matter. Fight you, then, exclusively to save the Union. I issued the Proclamation on purpose to aid you in saving the Union. Whenever you shall have conquered all resistance to the Union, if I shall urge you to continue fighting, it will be an apt time then for you to declare you will not fight to free negroes. I thought that in your struggle for the Union, to whatever extent the negroes should cease helping the enemy, to that extent it weakened the enemy in his resistance to you. Do you think differently? I thought that whatever negroes can be got to do, as soldiers, leaves just so much less for white soldiers to do in saving the Union. Does it appear otherwise to you? But negroes, like other people, act upon motives. Why should they do anything for us if we will do nothing for them? If they stake their lives for us, they must be prompted by the strongest motive—even the promise of freedom. And the promise, being made, must be kept.

The beginning of our acquaintance with the outside world is not only sensory but is entirely subjective. For a long time we know only a sensorial subjective reality. We are not, however, alone: always we are in communication with other human beings—parents, teachers, etc. Without ever stopping to think about it, we behave as if all these others share the same subjective reality as we. There are as many subjective realities as there are subjects. The one thing that is common to all these subjective realities is the one reality we use in communicating with one another: the one “objective” reality for all of us. But, apart from this, there is obviously a third reality. This is Reality—with a capital R—that is understood to exist whether you and I are alive or whether we know it or ignore it. This is the Reality which must exist and must be there, whether men exist or not. When we use our thinking, and not only our sensing, we realize that this third Reality is more than likely the first. This Reality is immensely complex and is only very superficially known, either to science or philosophy or in music or poetry. But our sense of self-importance makes us believe that our subjective reality is just as valid. The “objective” reality is, finally, that part of our subjective reality which we are willing to concede to our fellow men. I can see that you can see and that you can read, but I can never believe that you can see as I can, or understand what you read as I do, even though logic forces me to recognize I must be wrong and have no grounds for thinking in this way. My subjective reality is mine entirely and follows all my whims. “Objective” reality is less whimsical: it is the reality experienced by all men. It limits and restricts your and my subjective reality to that upon which all others agree. Subjective reality is anchored in us and is as real as our bodies. Objective reality is the measure of our sanity. But Reality has never as yet been perceived in its entirety. Our belief that we know Reality is an illusion, a maya; it is a measure of our ignorance.

Put shortly, these are the two views, then. One, that man is intrinsically good, spoilt by circumstance; and the other that he is intrinsically limited, but disciplined by order and tradition to something fairly decent. To the one party man's nature is like a well, to the other like a bucket. The view which regards man as a well, a reservoir full of possibilities, I call the romantic; the one which regards him as a very finite and fixed creature, I call the classical. One may note here that the Church has always taken the classical view since the defeat of the Pelagian heresy and the adoption of the sane classical dogma of original sin. It would be a mistake to identify the classical view with that of materialism. On the contrary it is absolutely identical with the normal religious attitude. I should put it in this way: That part of the fixed nature of man is the belief in the Deity. This should be as fixed and true for every man as belief in the existence of matter and in the objective world. It is parallel to appetite, the instinct of sex, and all the other fixed qualities. Now at certain times, by the use of either force or rhetoric, these instincts have been suppressed - in Florence under Savonarola, in Geneva under Calvin, and here under the Roundheads. The inevitable result of such a process is that the repressed instinct bursts out in some abnormal direction. So with religion. By the perverted rhetoric of Rationalism, your natural instincts are suppressed and you are converted into an agnostic. Just as in the case of the other instincts, Nature has her revenge. The instincts that find their right and proper outlet in religion must come out in some other way. You don't believe in a God, so you begin to believe that man is a god. You don't believe in Heaven, so you begin to believe in a heaven on earth. In other words, you get romanticism. The concepts that are right and proper in their own sphere are spread over, and so mess up, falsify and blur the clear outlines of human experience. It is like pouring a pot of treacle over the dinner table. Romanticism then, and this is the best definition I can give of it, is spilt religion.

The First Amendment protects our freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to practice religion, to peacefully assemble, and the right to petition the government. This is true tolerance as defined by our founding documents. This is the right of all American citizens. Does the right of free speech end on college campuses of higher learning? Does it end when you step into a designated "safe space" at your local university? Does it end if your choice of words is construed to be a "trigger warning" when you walk into a classroom? The answer obviously should be no. Unfortunately, the answer today on most college campuses is yes. And take this warning seriously: it won't end there. The commentator Andrew Sullivan has noted the student anti-free-speech movement "manifests itself . . . almost as a religion". He continues: "It posits a classic orthodoxy through which all of human experience is explained--and through which all speech must be filtered. Its version of original sin is the power of some identity groups over others. To overcome this sin, you need first to confess, i.e., "check your privilege", and subsequently live your life and order your thoughts in a way that keeps this sin at bay. This sin goes so deep into your psyche, especially if you are white or male or straight, that a profound conversion is required. It operates as a religion in one other critical dimension: If you happen to see the world in a different way, if you're a liberal or libertarian or even, gasp, a conservative, if you believe that a university is a place where any idea, however loathsome, can be debated and refuted, you are not just wrong, you are immoral . . . your heresy is a direct threat to others, and therefore needs to be extinguished. You can't reason with heresy. You have to ban it". Ironically, Christians, and others committed to the free expression of ideas, are the ones who are often accused of trying to force our beliefs on others. But that's not the case. Because we believe in objective truth, we believe reason and a robust exchange of ideas, with good, healthy debate can guide us to the truth. It is the radical Left that denies objective truth and therefore always relies on forced compliance and fascist tactics.

The PEOPLE, SCHOOL, EVERYONE, and EVERYTHING is so FAKE AND GAY.' 'I shrieked, at the top of my voice fingers outspread and frozen in fear, unlike ever before in my young life; being the gentle, sweet, and shy girl that I am.' 'Besides always too timid to have a voice, to stand up for me, and forced not to, by masters.' Amidst my thoughts racing ridiculously, 'I feel that it is all just another way for the 'SOCIETY' to make me feel inferior, they think, they are so 'SUPERIOR' to me, and who I am to them.' 'Nonetheless, every day of my life, I have felt like I have been drowning in a pool, with weights attached to my ankles.' 'Like, of course, there is no way for me to escape the chains that are holding me down.' 'The one and only person, that holds the key to my freedom: WILL NEVER LET ME GO! It's like there is within me, and has been deep inside me!' 'I now live in this small dull town for too damn long. It is an UNSYMPATHETIC, obscure, lonely, totally depressed, and depressing place, for any teenage girl to be, most definitely if you're a girl like me.' 'All these streets surrounding me are covered with filth, and born in the hills of middle western Pennsylvania mentalities of slow-talking and deep heritages, and beliefs, that don't operate me as a soul lost and lingering within the streets and halls.' 'My old town was ultimately left behind when the municipality neighboring made the alterations to the main roads; just to save five minutes of commuting, through this countryside village. Now my town sits on one side of that highway.' 'Just like a dead carcass to the rest of the world, which rushes by. What is sullen about this is that it is a historic town, with some immeasurable old monuments, and landmarks.' 'However, the others I see downright neglect what is here, just like me, it seems. Other than me, no one cares. Yet I care about all the little things.' 'I am so attached to all these trivial things as if they are a part of me. It disheartens me to see anything go away from me.' 'It's a community where the litter blows and bisects the road, like the tumble-wheats of the yore of times past.' 'Furthermore, if you do not look where you are going, you will fall in our trip, in one of the many potholes or heaved up bumps in the pavement, or have an evacuated structure masonry descending on your head.' 'Merely one foolproof way of simplifying the appearance of this ghost town.' 'There are still some reminders of the glory days when you glance around.' 'Like the town clock, that is evaporated black that has chipped enamel; it seems that it is always missing a few light bulbs.' 'The timepiece only has time pointing hands on the one side, and it nevermore shows the right time of day.' 'The same can be assumed for the neon signs on the mom-and-pop shops, which flicker at night as if they're in agonizing PAIN.' 'Why? To me is a question that is asked frequently.' 'It is all over negligence!' 'I get the sense and feeling most of the time, as they must prepare when looking around here at night.' 'The streetlamps do not all work, as they should. The glass in them is cracked.' 'The parking meters are always jammed, or just completely broken off their posts altogether.' 'The same can be said, for the town sign that titles this area. It is not even here anymore, as it should be now moved to the town square or shortage of a park.

One of the positive side-effects of maintaining a very high degree of awareness of death is that it will prepare the individual to such an extent that, when the individual actually faces death, he or she will be in a better position to maintain his or her presence of mind. Especially in Tantric Buddhism, it is considered that the state of mind which one experiences at the point of death is extremely subtle and, because of the subtlety of the level of that consciousness, it also has a great power and impact upon one’s mental continuum. In Tantric practices we find a lot of emphasis placed on reflections upon the process of death, so that the individual at the time of death not only retains his or her presence of mind, but also is in a position to utilize that subtle state of consciousness effectively towards the realization of the path. From the Tantric perspective, the entire process of existence is explained in terms of the three stages known as ‘death’, the ‘intermediate state’ and ‘rebirth’. All of these three stages of existence are seen as states or manifestations of the consciousness and the energies that accompany or propel the consciousness, so that the intermediate state and rebirth are nothing other than various levels of the subtle consciousness and energy. An example of such fluctuating states can be found in our daily existence, when during the 24-hour day we go through a cycle of deep sleep, the waking period and the dream state. Our daily existence is in fact characterized by these three stages. As death becomes something familiar to you, as you have some knowledge of its processes and can recognize its external and internal indications, you are prepared for it. According to my own experience, I still have no confidence that at the moment of death I will really implement all these practices for which I have prepared. I have no guarantee! Sometimes when I think about death I get some kind of excitement. Instead of fear, I have a feeling of curiosity and this makes it much easier for me to accept death. Of course, my only burden if I die today is, ‘Oh, what will happen to Tibet? What about Tibetan culture? What about the six million Tibetan people’s rights?’ This is my main concern. Otherwise, I feel almost no fear of death. In my daily practice of prayer I visualize eight different deity yogas and eight different deaths. Perhaps when death comes all my preparation may fail. I hope not! I think these practices are mentally very helpful in dealing with death. Even if there is no next life, there is some benefit if they relieve fear. And because there is less fear, one can be more fully prepared. If you are fully prepared then, at the moment of death, you can retain your peace of mind. I think at the time of death a peaceful mind is essential no matter what you believe in, whether it is Buddhism or some other religion. At the moment of death, the individual should not seek to develop anger, hatred and so on. I think even non-believers see that it is better to pass away in a peaceful manner, it is much happier. Also, for those who believe in heaven or some other concept, it is also best to pass away peacefully with the thought of one’s own God or belief in higher forces. For Buddhists and also other ancient Indian traditions, which accept the rebirth or karma theory, naturally at the time of death a virtuous state of mind is beneficial.

Notice that Jesus knows exactly who he is asking to lead his community: a sinner. As all Christian leaders have been, are, and will be, Peter is imperfect. And as all good Christian leaders are, Peter is well aware of his imperfections. The disciples too know who they are getting as their leader. They will not need—or be tempted—to elevate Peter into some semi-divine figure; they have seen him at his worst. Jesus forgives Peter because he loves him, because he knows that his friend needs forgiveness to be free, and because he knows that the leader of his church will need to forgive others many times. And Jesus forgives totally, going beyond what would be expected—going so far as to establish Peter as head of the church.11 It would have made more earthly sense for Jesus to appoint another, non-betraying apostle to head his church. Why give the one who denied him this important leadership role? Why elevate the manifestly sinful one over the rest? One reason may be to show the others what forgiveness is. In this way Jesus embodies the Father in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, who not only forgives the son, but also, to use a fishing metaphor, goes overboard. Jesus goes beyond forgiving and setting things right. A contemporary equivalent would be a tenured professor stealing money from a university, apologizing, being forgiven by the board of trustees, and then being hired as the school’s president. People would find this extraordinary—and it is. In response, Peter will ultimately offer his willingness to lay down his life for Christ. But on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, he can’t know the future. He can’t understand fully what he is agreeing to. Feed your sheep? Which sheep? The Twelve? The disciples? The whole world? This is often the case for us too. Even if we accept the call we can be confused about where God is leading us. When reporters used to ask the former Jesuit superior general Pedro Arrupe where the Jesuit Order was going, he would say, “I don’t know!” Father Arrupe was willing to follow, even if he didn’t know precisely what God had in mind. Peter says yes to the unknowable, because the question comes from Jesus. Both Christ’s forgiveness and Peter’s response show us love. God’s love is limitless, unconditional, radical. And when we have experienced that love, we can share it. The ability to forgive and to accept forgiveness is an absolute requirement of the Christian life. Conversely, the refusal to forgive leads ineluctably to spiritual death. You may know families in which vindictiveness acts like a cancer, slowly eating away at love. You may know people whose marriages have been destroyed by a refusal to forgive. One of my friends described a couple he knew as “two scorpions in a jar,” both eagerly waiting to sting the other with barbs and hateful comments. We see the communal version of this in countries torn by sectarian violence, where a climate of mutual recrimination and mistrust leads only to increasing levels of pain. The Breakfast by the Sea shows that Jesus lived the forgiveness he preached. Jesus knew that forgiveness is a life-giving force that reconciles, unites, and empowers. The Gospel by the Sea is a gospel of forgiveness, one of the central Christian virtues. It is the radical stance of Jesus, who, when faced with the one who denied him, forgave him and appointed him head of the church, and the man who, in agony on the Cross, forgave his executioners. Forgiveness is a gift to the one who forgives, because it frees from resentment; and to the one who needs forgiveness, because it frees from guilt. Forgiveness is the liberating force that allowed Peter to cast himself into the water at the sound of Jesus’s voice, and it is the energy that gave him a voice with which to testify to his belief in Christ.

In the 1990s legal scholar and public policy advocate Wendy Kaminer published a brace of books engaged with the New Age cultures of recovery and self-help. She represented an Old Left perspective on new superstition, and although she was of the same generation as the cultural studies scholars, she did exactly what Andrew Ross warned academics and elites against. She criticized the middlebrow, therapeutic culture of self-help for undermining critical thinking in popular discourse. She encouraged the debunking of superstition, deplored public professions of piety. Her books were polemical and public interventions that were addressed to the maligned liberal and more or less thoughtful reader who took an interest in the issues of the day. In some ways, her writing was a popularization of some of psychoanalytic theory scholar, sociologist, and cultural critic Philip Rieff’s and Richard Hofstadter’s critiques of a therapeutic culture of anti-intellectualism.77 She speculated that the decline of secular values in the political sphere was linked to the rise of a culture of recovery and self-help that had come out of the popularization of New Age, countercultural beliefs and practices. In both I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help Fashions and Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials: The Rise of Irrationalism and the Perils of Piety, Kaminer publicly denounced the decline of secular culture and the rise of a therapeutic culture of testimony and self-victimization that brooked no dissent while demanding unprecedented leaps of faith from its adherents.78 Kaminer’s work combined a belief in Habermasian rational communication with an uncompromising skepticism about the ubiquity of piety that for her was shared by both conservatives and liberals. For Kaminer, argument and persuasion could no longer be operative when belief and subjective experience became the baseline proofs that underwrote public and private assertions. No speaker or writer was under any obligation to answer his or her critics because argument and testimony were fatefully blurred. When reasoned impiety was slowly being banished from public dialogue, political responsibility would inevitably wane. In the warm bath of generalized piety and radical plurality, everyone could assert a point of view, an opinion, and different beliefs, but no one was under any obligation to defend them. Whereas cultural studies scholars saw themselves contesting dominant forms of discourse and hegemonic forms of thinking, Kaminer saw them participating in a popular embrace of an irrational Counter-Enlightenment. Like Andrew Ross, Kaminer cited Franz Mesmer as an important eighteenth-century pioneer of twentieth-century alternative healing techniques. Mesmer’s personal charisma and his powers of psychic healing and invocation of “animal magnetism” entranced the European courts of the late eighteenth century. Mesmer performed miracle cures and attracted a devoted, wealthy following. Despite scandals that plagued his European career, the American middle class was eager to embrace his hybrid of folk practices and scientific-sounding proofs. Mesmerism projected an alternative mystical cosmology based upon magnets and invisible flows of energy. Mesmer, who was said to control the invisible magnetic flow of forces that operated upon human and animal bodies, built upon a network of wealthy patrons who were devoted to the powers of a charismatic leader, Mesmer himself. Mesmer’s manipulation of magnets and hands-on healing evoked for the French court the ancient arts of folk healing while it had recourse to ostensibly modern scientific proofs. Historian of the French eighteenth century Robert Darnton insisted that mesmerism could not be dismissed as mere quackery or charlatanism but represented a transitional worldview, one that bridged the Enlightenment and the particular forms of nineteenth-century Romanticism that followed.

Naomi stretched as she woke with an exaggerated yawn in her own bed. How the hell did I get here? Recollection of the dirty trick the two men played on her the previous night made her sit up abruptly. The sheet fell away and she noticed her clothing of the previous eve gone, replaced with a t-shirt and shorts. “Those dirty, rotten pigs,” she cursed as she swung her legs out of bed and sat on the edge. “You called?” A head topped with tousled hair poked out from around the door frame of the bathroom. Number sixty-nine’s dark eyes twinkled and his lips curled in a sensual smile. Despite her irritation, her body flooded with warmth. “You!” She pointed at him and shot him a dark glare. He grinned wider. “What about me, darling?” “I’m going to kick your balls so hard you’re going to choke on them. How dare you drug me and then do despicable things to my body while I was unconscious?” Stepping forward from the bathroom, he raised his arms in surrender and her eyes couldn’t help drinking in the sight of him. No one should look that delicious, especially in the morning, was her disgruntled thought. Shirtless, Javier’s tight and toned muscles beckoned. Encased in smooth, tanned skin, his muscular torso tapered down to lean hips where his jeans hung, partially unbuttoned and displayed a bulge that grew as she watched. Unbidden heat flooded her cleft and her nipples shriveled so tight she could have drilled holes with them. She forced herself to swallow and look away before she did something stupid— say, like, licking her way down from his flat nipples to the dark vee of hair that disappeared into his pants. “It would take a braver man than me to disobey your mother’s orders. Besides, you needed the sleep,” he added in a placating tone. Scowling, Naomi mentally planned a loud diatribe for her mother. “Let me ask you, how does your head feel now?” His question derailed her for a second, and she paused to realize she actually felt pretty damned good— but now I’m horny and it’s all his friggin’ fault. She dove off the bed and stalked toward him, five foot four feet of annoyed woman craving coffee, a Danish, and him— naked inside her body. The first two she’d handle shortly, the third, she’d make him pay for. He stood his ground as she approached, the idiot. “What did you do to me while I was out?” she growled as she patted her neck looking for a mating mark. “Nothing. Contrary to your belief, snoring women with black and blue faces just don’t do it for me.” His jibe hurt, but not as much as her foot when it connected with his undefended man parts. He ended up bent over, wheezing while Naomi smirked in satisfaction. “That’s for knocking me out. But, if I find out you did anything to me other than dress me, like cop a feel or take nudie pictures, I’m going hurt you a lot worse.” “Has anyone ever told you you’re hot when you’re mad?” said the man with an obvious death wish. Only his speed saved him from her swinging fist as she screeched at him. “Go away. Can’t you tell I’m not interested?” “Liar.” He threw that comment at her from the other side of her bed. “I can smell your arousal, sweetheart. And might I say, I can’t wait to taste it.

Love evoke powerful force of divinity in every man.

Look at you.” I gestured toward him, for he could not disguise his pain, nor hide the fever that brought beads of sweat to his forehead. “You did this to yourself, Steldor. You punished yourself with your actions, but nothing else was accomplished. You just wanted to be a martyr.” “What’s wrong with that?” he shot back. “You want to be a saint! You want to be the one who brings peace to these people. You’re the one who brought war, Alera. You’re the reason Narian didn’t leave for good when he fled Hytanica. He loves you, and that’s why--” He stopped talking, unable to make himself complete that sentence. “You’re right about one thing,” I whispered in the dead silence. “Narian loves me, but what you won’t acknowledge is that he’s the reason any of us still have our lives. He’s the reason you weren’t killed for that show you put on.” “Extend my thanks,” he said, tone laden with sarcasm. I threw up my hands. “This is pointless, us dancing around in circles. You still won’t listen to anyone, let alone me. I may as well go.” “But you won’t--you aren’t yet ready to leave.” I didn’t move, hating that he knew my threat had been empty, and he stood. He drew closer to me until I could feel the heat radiating from his body. “Hytanica and Cokyri will always be different worlds, Alera. Before this is over, one of those worlds will be destroyed. We can’t coexist like this.” “Not when people like you refuse to believe any different.” “At least I’m not hiding from the truth. You’re so wrapped up in Narian that you can’t see the situation for what it really is. Cokyri is a godless, brutal, warrior empire that despises the very way we live. Now that they are in power, they have no need to honor our traditions or tolerate our beliefs. Don’t you see, it’s not just the Kingdom of Hytanica that will no longer exist. It is our entire way of life.” I stared at him, shocked and confused. Narian and I had always been able to work through our differences, so I had assumed our countries could, as well. But he and I wanted to be together, we wanted to be joined. Our countries did not. “Cokyri is interested only in obtaining certain things from us,” I argued, although a bit of doubt now nagged at me. “As long as we follow their regulations, we can live in the manner we always have.” “Then I’d keep an eye on their regulations, Alera. They’re already changing our educational system, what we are permitted to teach our sons. Religion will come next.” “Change isn’t necessarily all bad.” “It is when it’s forced down your throat. And in case you haven’t notice, the Cokyrians overseeing the work crews have not allowed us to rebuild our churches. They have been reconstructed, but for different, more practical purposes. The Cokyrians are quite enamored with practicality.” Not knowing what else to say, I turned to depart, only to feel his hand on my arm. “It doesn’t have to be like this, Alera. Between us, I mean.” He was looking at me with those dark, intense, fiery eyes--eyes that held love I had never reciprocated. “Things are what they are, Steldor,” I replied, decisive but desolate. “We’re separated by too much. We always have been. Just please, give yourself time to get well.” Before he could stop me a second time, I stepped out the door, feeling the weight of frustration lifting from my shoulders with each step I took away from him. I had been foolish to think he and I could communicate in spite of our differing beliefs. Neither of us wanted to cause the other pain, but that was all we had ever been good at doing.

Consciously or not, the Senator (or his staffer) was only attempting to speak the language of the locals. He was value-adding (or adding alpha as very refined managers say). Value-adding is a mantra of modern economics: it describes the increase in value that a particular manufacturing process, or design or labelling or some other enhancement brings to a product before its sale. Those who talk a lot about value-adding often sound as if they are trying to achieve the same effect with the language: they force it into a new mould, streamline it, give it cachet. They make it into a machine with a minimum of moving parts, but with constant upgrades and (naturally) enhancements. And if you want to get reconciliation taken seriously, you had better put your case in these terms. The Senator’s imitation of the style is a remote sign of the gathering belief that the whole world – or such parts of it that function properly – can be understood either as a metaphor for free market economics and the management philosophies it has spawned, or as an actual consequence of them. That is to say, as an outcome or an event.

Acceptance is a thing... look into it. If it is something in you, about you, done by you... and you aren't happy with it... you don't have to accept it. You have the power to affect change. If it something in someone else, about someone else, done by someone else... and it doesn't directly effect you in a negative way (actual effect, not perceived, mind you) ... you can rally against it, or accept it. While you may have the power in someway to force change on others... acceptance is also totally a real thing... seriously. Look into it. Don't like what others think, or feel, or do with their lives? Neat. Do those things have a direct negative impact on you? If yes, then communicate (in whatever means are situationally appropriate) and seek a positive resolution. If no, then do as I tell my eight and ten year old children... ignore them. You... no matter your age, gender, sexual orientation, belief structure, occupation, or affluence (real or perceived)... You absolutely have the right to accept others. Honest.

Liberate yourself from unconstructive beliefs forced upon you by others for imprisonment sake. Allow into this space a new-fangled reality which warrant viewpoints increasing a new understanding.

Sure, rejection hurts. Failure sucks. But there are particular certainties we hold on to - certainties that we're afraid to question or let go of, values that have given our lives meaning over the years.The woman doesn't get out there and date because she would be forced to confront her beliefs about her own desirability. That man doesn't ask for the promotion because he would have to confront his beliefs about what his skills are actually worth. It's easier to sit in a painful certainty that nobody would find you attractive, that nobody appreciates your talents, than to actually test those beliefs and find out for sure. Beliefs of this sort - that I'm not attractive enough, so why bother; or that my boss is an asshole, so why bother - are designed to give us moderate comfort now by mortgaging greater happiness and success later on. They're terrible long-term strategies, yet we cling to them because we assume we're right, because we assume we already know what's going to happen. In other words, we assume we know how the story ends.

Truth comes from belief—remember that. Truth comes with recognition that it is universal and all-encompassing and plays no favorites. If you cannot accept it into your own life, you cannot force it into the lives of others. You must embrace it first, before you can employ it! You must make it your armor!

Once you are clear on what is necessary it is important to apply a strategic plan and act towards this initiatory process of Illumination. This will no doubt be difficult and at times the remnants of the belief or restriction nudges you to stop and take the comfortable road which is stagnation and failure. The Luciferian must resist and with a whole heart hate this weakness and the sickness of spirit it brings, infecting other thoughts and actions over time. Conquering will require consistency, discipline and an overwhelming force of your personality to attain this initiatory experience of Illumination. This is Magick is the most potent and powerful way, the Luciferian becomes by the totality and obsessive energy fueling Will, Desire and Belief.

At the quantum level our universe can be seen as an indeterminate place, predictable in a statistical way only when you employ large enough numbers. Between that universe and a relatively predictable one where the passage of a single planet can be timed to a picosecond, other forces come into play. For the in-between universe where we find our daily lives, that which you believe is a dominant force. Your beliefs order the unfolding of daily events. If enough of us believe, a new thing can be made to exist. Belief structure creates a filter through which chaos is sifted into order. —ANALYSIS OF THE TYRANT, THE TARAZA FILE: BG ARCHIVES

THROAT CHAKRA—VISHUDDHA How do you know the truth? Truth is the operative word in this section, whereas voice is its secondary focus. Most people are focusing on voice and expression at the Throat Chakra — that is, the capacity to express ideas and thoughts. What matters most is not how you talk at the Throat Chakra, but what you convey. The "what" is your truth, your most insightful wisdom; the "how" is your medium to express your truth. Both the "what" and "how" of truth are sitting here at the Throat Chakra, at the center of your physical throat (or the apple of your Adam). What do you mean by "truth?" Many claim the reality is a personal quest to discover the values and beliefs that drive choices and decisions about your life. Others suggest that a collective truth exists, a unified wisdom to which all can aspire and seek integration. Let the intersection of these two approaches inspire you to explore individual and collective truths to understand how to integrate what you see, learn and experience into your life. Throat Chakra Gemstones The gems of this chakra are believed to be the gems of Lemuria, an ancient civilization aligned with the realm of the dolphin, which reflect knowledge that had been preserved and held in crystals before the destruction of that community. One of the main Lemurian gemstones, AQUA Atmosphere QUARTZ is a powerful purifier of the atmosphere and also encourages power, tenacity and stability. •       AMAZONITE is the primary stone of reality, and it enhances confidence for public speakers, allowing them to express with ease even the most difficult words and themes. •       ANGELITE (in crystalline form, known as CELESTITE) invokes the angelic forces to evoke in your spaces the presence of angels, like archangels. Take this jewel with you or sleep by it to feel more connected to your own personal angels and guides. •       Since centuries TURQUOISE has been valued by indigenous Americans who find it a powerful purifier and healer, as well as a tool that strengthens and defends warriors in combat. It was revered as a source of good fortune in antiquity Persia. Connect to your gemstones in the Throat Chakra in moments of anxiety or frustration. Here's how to do this: Lie down in a comfortable position and keep in your right hand, the receiving one, one or three of your beloved light blue Throat Chakra crystals, through which energy reaches your body. (Some people feel their left hand is their Receiving Hand; go with what they feel right for you.) Set the intention to receive the gifts of the Throat Chakra, peace, wisdom and truth. Then move the stones to your hand, or Projecting Side, so you can take the energy out into the universe as a gift for everyone. Imagine a bright blue ray of truth and light beaming out into the world for everyone to see, receive and enjoy.

So why are people in modern societies so often aghast at “primitive” religion, so unable to comprehend how “primitive” belief got started? In part, it is the classic human failure of objectivity—an inability to see that your own beliefs may seem as strange to others as theirs seem to you. (An African Pygmy once responded to a missionary’s description of heaven by asking, “How do you know? Have you died and been there?”) And in part it is a failure of imagination. Imagine that you are living in a small encampment surrounded by jungle or woodland or desert, entirely untouched by science and modern technology. Within the encampment, the social universe operates by largely intelligible laws; people don’t generally, say, fly into a rage and assault their neighbors without a cause of some sort or another. But from outside this universe come mighty and momentous forces—storms, droughts, deadly animals, fatal illness. You are viscerally interested in explaining and controlling these things; you readily absorb and repeat any news or conjecture bearing on this goal. And, above all, you are only human. The rest is history.

Belief in yourself can certainly be difficult and painful, and the process is not effortless. You will constantly battle fear, doubt, negative feedback, and hundreds of other forces. Like gravity, these forces have the ability to continually pull you down. It takes effort to get out of bed, get dressed, and battle all day on your nine-to-five, then be the weekend warrior for your dream.

The day he is found out, O’Brien is herded by a dumbfounded crowd to the Shinto torii gate that marks the entrance to our campus. Avery is in tears, something none of us could have imagined. Before passing through the torii, O’Brien stops and addresses all of us: “Hey, I’m sorry for fucking you over. You’re my friends and my family because I don’t have any other friends or family. If you consider what I’ve gained by enabling so many proxies to function undetected, and thereby so many eluders to successfully elude—that is, nothing—versus what I’ve lost—everything—you’ll understand that only one thing could justify that appalling cost-benefit analysis. That thing is belief. I believe in what the eluders are doing, I believe in their right to do it, and the force of my belief more than compensates for the fact that acting on it will cost me everyone and everything I love. I have no regrets, even now,” O’Brien concludes, “much as I will miss you.” And then he walks out through the torii gate. The chaos that follows this revelation takes many forms and strains. An inquiry begins into whether the man who made that speech was really O’Brien, or whether the real O’Brien was kidnapped by eluders and animated holographically beside the torii gate using gray grabs from the collective to capture his workplace tones and gestures and speech. Another hypothesis has it that the eluders somehow breached O’Brien’s skull with a weevil—a burrowing electronic device that can interfere with thought—and were controlling his behavior and speech from afar. It is difficult to disprove either of these theses, and I owe it to trusted typicals who persuade me of their unlikelihood on two bases: 1) Such actions would entail the use of the very invasive technologies the eluders abhor and are trying to elude. 2) Interventions like these are beyond the eluders’ technological range; they simply could not pull them off.

New York Post, August 3, 2022 “ ‘Luxury beliefs’ are the latest status symbol for rich Americans” by Rob Henderson One example of luxury belief is that all family structures are equal. This is not true. Evidence is clear that families with two married parents are the most beneficial for young children. And yet, affluent, educated people raised by two married parents are more likely than others to believe monogamy is outdated, marriage is a sham or that all families are the same. … Another luxury belief is that religion is irrational or harmful. Members of the upper class are most likely to be atheists or non-religious. But they have the resources and access to thrive without the unifying social edifice of religion. Places of worship are often essential for the social fabric of poor communities. Denigrating the importance of religion harms the poor. While affluent people often find meaning in their work, most Americans do not have the luxury of a “profession.” They have jobs. They clock in, they clock out. Without a family or community to care for, such a job can feel meaningless. Then there’s the luxury belief that individual decisions don’t matter much compared to random social forces, including luck. This belief is more common among many of my peers at Yale and Cambridge than the kids I grew up with in foster care or the women and men I served with in the military. The key message is that the outcomes of your life are beyond your control. This idea works to the benefit of the upper class and harms ordinary people. … White privilege is the luxury belief that took me the longest to understand, because I grew up around poor whites. Often members of the upper-class claim that racial disparities stem from inherent advantages held by whites. Yet Asian Americans are more educated, have higher earnings and live longer than whites. Affluent whites are the most enthusiastic about the idea of white privilege, yet they are the least likely to incur any costs for promoting that belief. … When laws are enacted to combat white privilege, it won’t be the privileged whites who are harmed. Poor whites will bear the brunt. … In the future, expect the upper class to defame even more values — including ones they hold dear — in their quest to gain top-dog status.

New York Post, August 3, 2022 “ ‘Luxury beliefs’ are the latest status symbol for rich Americans” by Rob Henderson One example of luxury belief is that all family structures are equal. This is not true. Evidence is clear that families with two married parents are the most beneficial for young children. And yet, affluent, educated people raised by two married parents are more likely than others to believe monogamy is outdated, marriage is a sham or that all families are the same. … This luxury belief contributed to the erosion of the family. Today, the marriage rates of affluent Americans are nearly the same as they were in the 1960s. But working-class people are far less likely to get married. Furthermore, out-of-wedlock birthrates are more than 10 times higher than they were in 1960, mostly among the poor and working class. Affluent people seldom have kids out of wedlock but are more likely than others to express the luxury belief that doing so is of no consequence. Another luxury belief is that religion is irrational or harmful. Members of the upper class are most likely to be atheists or non-religious. But they have the resources and access to thrive without the unifying social edifice of religion. Places of worship are often essential for the social fabric of poor communities. Denigrating the importance of religion harms the poor. While affluent people often find meaning in their work, most Americans do not have the luxury of a “profession.” They have jobs. They clock in, they clock out. Without a family or community to care for, such a job can feel meaningless. Then there’s the luxury belief that individual decisions don’t matter much compared to random social forces, including luck. This belief is more common among many of my peers at Yale and Cambridge than the kids I grew up with in foster care or the women and men I served with in the military. The key message is that the outcomes of your life are beyond your control. This idea works to the benefit of the upper class and harms ordinary people. … White privilege is the luxury belief that took me the longest to understand, because I grew up around poor whites. Often members of the upper-class claim that racial disparities stem from inherent advantages held by whites. Yet Asian Americans are more educated, have higher earnings and live longer than whites. Affluent whites are the most enthusiastic about the idea of white privilege, yet they are the least likely to incur any costs for promoting that belief. … When laws are enacted to combat white privilege, it won’t be the privileged whites who are harmed. Poor whites will bear the brunt. …

The rabbi shrugged. “It’s a common enough belief among nations that they have a special mission with respect to the rest of the world. The Greeks thought they alone were civilized and all other people were barbarians or savages. The Romans thought it was their duty to spread the benefits of Roman law and order to the rest of the world. The Spaniards thought their function was to spread Catholicism, and the English felt that they were conferring the benefits of Victorian England on India and Africa. Our own country feels a mission to spread democracy, just as, until very recently, the Russians thought it was their function to spread communism. And then there is Islam, which once again feels it has a special mission. The big difference is that we were enjoined to do it by force of example rather than by the sword. You may ridicule the idea that an Almighty God would select one group of people from all the rest, but the fact is that that group believed it, and more or less acted accordingly.” A student ventured, “Is that the official view?” “How do you mean ‘official’?” asked the rabbi. “Well, you know, the accepted version of the Jewish church or synagogue, or whatever you call it?” “If you’re thinking of an official creed,” said the rabbi, “we don’t have one. Every synagogue is autonomous. And every Jew tends to interpret the Law as he sees fit, as it applies to himself. We have

Imagine once again that you are struggling with highly distressing mental experiences—unusual perceptions and/or beliefs that others around you do not share. This time, however, you live in a society or a community that validates your experience. Your beliefs may be challenged, but not your underlying experience. You will not be locked up against your will or forced to ingest debilitating drugs. You will not be told that you have a diseased brain with no hope of real recovery, but rather, there is the assumption that you will recover, and there is even the assumption that your experiences may eventually allow you to contribute to your community in a unique and powerful way. Your needs for choice, dignity, and respect will be held—your mind, body, and spirit will not be invaded. You find that people listen to your suffering with empathy and compassion rather than fear and judgment.

The popular image of a scientist is a disinterested and objective observer who dispassionately studies empirical data. But in reality, science is marked by fads, trends, paradigms, fashions, feuds, warring camps, petty jealousies, and die-hard beliefs. Conventional science usually reacts to new findings with disparagement. When confronted with the evidence for energy healing, one skeptic exclaimed, “I wouldn’t believe it, even if it were true!” Innovation faces daunting headwinds. The opposition to new therapies has unfortunate side effects. A group of distinguished colleagues and I analyzed US government reports on health-care innovation. We found that the average medical breakthrough takes 17 years to get from lab to patient. Even more startling, only 20% of new treatments jump this “translational gap.” The other 80% are lost forever. The result is that when we seek treatment, we are getting only one fifth of 17-year-old medicine. We would be outraged if we were forced to use a cell phone that was 17 years old, with 80% of its features disabled. But as a society, we treat this paradigm as perfectly reasonable when it comes to taking care of our precious and irreplaceable bodies. The neuroscience establishment fought the idea of neural plasticity tooth and nail. Yet eventually the evidence became too overwhelming to deny, and the weight of scientific opinion began to change. The rats that Marian Diamond studied had either an enriched or an impoverished environment. That changed their brain state. If you’re surrounded by a nurturing physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual environment, you’re in one brain state. If you’re surrounded by danger, uncertainty, and hostility, you’re in a quite different brain state.

Diet culture is a system of beliefs that: • Worships thinness and equates it to health and moral virtue, which means you can spend your whole life thinking you’re irreparably broken just because you don’t look like the impossibly thin “ideal.” • Promotes weight loss as a means of attaining higher status, which means you feel compelled to spend a massive amount of time, energy, and money trying to shrink your body, even though the research is very clear that almost no one can sustain intentional weight loss for more than a few years. • Demonizes certain ways of eating while elevating others, which means you’re forced to be hyper-vigilant about your eating, ashamed of making certain food choices, and distracted from your pleasure, your purpose, and your power. • Oppresses people who don’t match up with its supposed picture of “health,” which disproportionately harms women, femmes, trans folks, people in larger bodies, people of color, and people with disabilities, damaging both their mental and physical health.

Belief is a gritty, potent, primordial force. In the 1950s, a scientist named Dr. Curt Richter proved this when he gathered dozens of rats and dropped them into thirty-inch-deep glass cylinders filled with water. The first rat paddled on the surface for a short time, then swam to the bottom, where it looked for an escape hatch. It died within two minutes. Several others followed that same pattern. Some lasted as long as fifteen minutes, but they all gave up. Richter was surprised because rats are damn good swimmers, yet in his lab, they drowned without much of a fight. So, he tweaked the test. After he placed the next batch in their jars, Richter watched them, and right before it looked like they were about to give up, he and his techs scooped up the rats, toweled them off, and held them long enough for their heart and respiratory rates to normalize. Long enough for them to register, on a physiological scale, that they had been saved. They did this a few times before Richter placed a group of them back into those evil cylinders again to see how long they would last on their own. This time, the rats didn’t give up. They swam their natural asses off…for an average of sixty hours without any food or rest. One swam for eighty-one hours.

BROADCASTING RESONANCE Anchored in nonlocal consciousness, your local life begins to change. As you resonate with the cycles of nature, as your heart’s coherence conditions the energy space around you, as you vibrate to the signal of love and joy in your consciousness, you attract people and conditions that match your states and traits. Without effort, as your magnificent new signal broadcasts out around you, resonating with the music of the universe, you’ll come into synchrony with people and events that bless and delight you. You’ll discover that you’re not alone. As you tune to the great symphony of life each day, you’ll find that you’re tuned to millions of other people who are likewise attuned. With no effort at all, you’ll discover wonderful new friends and companions wherever you travel. As the light shines from your eyes, it meets the light in the eyes of others. When you’re awake, you naturally enjoy others who are awake. 9.3. Coming into synchrony. LOVING THE SLEEPER Not everyone is awake, and that’s fine. Sometimes your friends and family members are tossing in their sleep, suffering unnecessarily. Their plight touches you. You feel their misery. You would love to see them wake up, and shed those beliefs, thoughts, and habits that drag them down. You can’t force them to do so, no matter how much you love them. Everyone makes their own choice. What you can do for people who are suffering is shine brightly yourself. If they’re ready, they’ll wake up. If they don’t, trust the universe. We each wake up when the time is right. Their time might come later; it’s not up to you. You can share this book and other resources with them. You can share your story as I have shared mine, and perhaps these examples will inspire them. If and when each of us wakes up is our choice. UNLOCKING YOUR POTENTIAL As you live in synchrony with the universe, enjoying the community of other Bliss Brainers, you find new possibilities opening up. You start to unlock potential that’s been trapped inside the suffering, selfing self. Increasingly, you’re not just in Bliss Brain during meditation. You’re in the Awakened Mind state with your eyes open, going about your day. All kinds of possibilities that were previously unavailable to you now become available.

IS FATIGUE ALL IN YOUR HEAD? In the early 1990s, in a physiology lab at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, an exercise scientist named Tim Noakes, MD, unveiled a radical new way to think about fatigue. Until then, prevailing wisdom held that fatigue occurred in the body. At a certain intensity or duration of physical effort, the demands we put on our muscles become too great and, eventually, our muscles fail. Ask any athlete, from a marathon runner to a powerlifter, and they will be familiar with the feeling. It’s not a particularly comfortable one. What at first is a manageable burn becomes worse and worse until they can no longer bear it. The runner’s pace slows to a mere shuffle; the powerlifter can’t manage to hoist the barbell up for one last rep. Try as they might, they simply run out of gas and their muscles cease to contract. Noakes, however, wasn’t convinced that fatigue occurred in the body or that muscles actually ran out of gas. He questioned why so many athletes, seemingly overwhelmed by fatigue, were suddenly able to speed up during the final stretch of a race when the end was in sight. If the muscles were truly dead, Noakes hypothesized, these finish-line spurts would be impossible. To prove his point, Noakes attached electrical sensors to athletes and then instructed them to lift weights with their legs until they simply couldn’t lift any longer. (In exercise science, this is called “inducing muscle failure.”) When the weights slammed down and each participant tapped out, reporting they could no longer contract their muscles, Noakes ran an electrical current through the sensor. Much to the surprise of everyone—especially to the participants whose legs were dead—their muscles contracted. Although the participants could not contract their muscles on their own, Noakes proved that their muscles actually had more to give. The participants felt drained, but empirically, their muscles were not. Noakes repeated similar versions of this experiment and observed the same result. Although participants reported being totally depleted and unable to contract their muscles after exercising to what they thought was failure, when electrical stimulation was applied, without fail, their muscles produced additional force. This led Noakes to conclude that contrary to popular belief, physical fatigue occurs not in the body, but in the brain. It’s not that our muscles wear out; rather, it is our brain that shuts them down when they still have a few more percentage points to give. Noakes speculates this is an innately programmed way of protecting ourselves. Physiologically, we could push our bodies to true failure (i.e., injury and organ failure), but the brain comes in and creates a perception of failure before we actually harm ourselves. The brain, Noakes remarked, is our “central governor” of fatigue. It’s our “ego” shutting us down when confronted by fear and threat. In other words, we are hardwired to retreat when the going gets tough. But like Boyle and Strecher demonstrated, it is possible to override the central governor.

I find the process is as important as the product. Writing or reviewing a mission statement changes you because it forces you to think through your priorities deeply, carefully, and to align your behavior with your beliefs. As you do, other people begin to sense that you’re not being driven by everything that happens to you. You have a sense of mission about what you’re trying to do and you are excited about it.

In general, the chakra system branched into two sections: the Vedic and the Tantric (now alive within Ayurvedic medicine and Tantric yoga, for example). The term tantra comes from two words: tanoti, or to expand; and trayati, or to liberate. Tantra therefore means “to extend knowledge that liberates.” Tantra is a life practice based on teachings about the chakras, kundalini, hatha yoga, astronomy, astrology, and the worship of many Hindu gods and goddesses. Tantric yoga originates in pre-Aryan India, around 3000 to 2500 BC. Many other varieties of Tantric yoga or spirituality have arisen from it, including Tantric Buddhism. Each system derived from Tantric yoga has a unique view on the chakras and their related gods, cosmology, and symbols. The history of chakras, as complex as it sounds so far, is even more complicated. The chakra system is intertwined with—and maybe even created by—several different cultures. Although usually associated with India, Tantric yoga was also practiced by the Dravidians, who originated from Ethiopia, as is revealed in the many similarities between predynastic Egyptian and African practices and ancient Indian Tantric beliefs.6 For example, numerous Hindu deities are rooted in “India’s black civilizations, which is why they are often depicted as black.”7 Some historians point out that early Egyptians were greatly affected by African beliefs,8 and in turn influenced Greek, Jewish, and, later, Islamic and Christian thought, in addition to the Indian Hindu.9 Other cultures also exchanged chakra ideas. Many practices of the early Essenes, a religio-spiritual community dwelling in Palestine in the second century BC through the second century AD, mirrored those of early India.10 The Sufis—Islamic mystics—also employed a system of energy centers, although it involved four centers.11 The Sufis also borrowed the kundalini process from Tantric yoga, as did certain Asian Indian and American Indian groups.12 As we shall see, the Maya Indians of Mexico, the Inca Indians of Peru, and the Cherokee Indians of North America each have their own chakra method. The Maya believe that they actually taught the Hindu the chakra system. The chakra system was brought to the West in yet another roundabout way. It was first thoroughly outlined in the text Sat-Chakra-Nirupana, written by an Indian yogi in the sixteenth century. Arthur Avalon then delivered chakra knowledge to Western culture in his book The Serpent Power, first published in 1919. Avalon drew heavily upon the Sat-Chakra-Nirupana as well as another text, Pakaka-Pancaka. His presentation was preceded by Theosophic Practica, a book written in 1696 by Johann Georg Gichtel, a student of Jakob Bohme, who refers to inner force centers that align with Eastern chakra doctrines.13 Today, many esoteric professionals rely on Anodea Judith's interpretation of Avalon’s work, to which she has added additional information about the psychological aspects of the chakras.

To the Historians, tools existed for only one reason: to force the universe into unnatural shapes. They treated nature as an enemy, they were by definition a rebellion against the way things were. Technology is a stunted thing in benign environments, it never thrived in any culture gripped by belief in natural harmony. Why invent fusion reactors if your climate is comfortable, if your food is abundant? Why build fortresses if you have no enemies? Why force change upon a world that poses no threat? Human civilization had a lot of branches, not so long ago. Even into the twenty-first century, a few isolated tribes had barely developed stone tools. Some settled down with agriculture. Others weren’t content until they had ended nature itself, still others until they’d built cities in space.

don’t think of all the misery, but of all the beauty that remains.” —Anne Frank The common belief is that grief is all about pain. Anyone who has been in grief would certainly agree with that. But I believe there is more. There is love. Why do we believe that the pain we feel is about the absence of love? The love didn’t die when the person we love died. It didn’t disappear. It remains. The question is: How do we learn to remember that person with more love than pain? This is a question, not a mandate. I am the first to say that there is no getting around the pain. We have to go through it because it is an inevitable result of the separation we are experiencing. It’s a brutal, forced separation. The word “bereaved” has its origins in the Old English words deprived of, seized, and robbed. That is how it feels when your loved one has been taken from you—as excruciating as if your arm had been ripped from your body. You’ve been robbed of what is dearest to you. The pain you feel is proportionate to the love you had. The deeper you loved, the deeper the pain. But you will find that love exists on the other side of the pain. It’s actually the other face of pain.

The birthplace of the ego is self-abnegation. It thrives when the inner self is ignored, denied, suppressed, and all but annihilated in favor of a force on the outside—typically the voice of others, especially our loved ones, the culture in which we are raised, or a system of beliefs that captures our imagination.

these fears and the insecurities that protect us influence: The rules we force ourselves to follow The opportunities we justify avoiding The excuses we give into The stories we tell ourselves about others The assumptions we make about the world  The generalizations about the world The unhealthy narratives we subscribe to The beliefs we hold about what is possible The limitations we place on others The logic and reasoning we insist are correct The best practices we follow  The self-sabotaging behaviors we engage in

Sometimes a light suddenly illuminates your path and saves you from the darkness, and you look for its source to thank that light, but you find nothing! Why can't you find it? Because you were the source of that light, your deep belief that you would be saved, your desire and determination to be saved, activated other forces and you were saved! You were the source of that light, you sent that help to yourself!

The road to success is rarely a straight line. For me, it’s always been more like a maze. Many times, when I thought I’d finally cracked the code, had it all figured out, and found the straight path to certain victory, I hit a wall or got spun into a turnaround. When that happens, we have two choices. We can stay stuck or regroup, back up, and try again. That’s where evolution begins. Hitting those walls time and again will harden and streamline you. Having to back up and formulate a new plan without any assurances it will ever pan out will tune your SA up and develop your problem-solving skills and your endurance. It will force you to adapt. When that happens hundreds of times over the course of many years, it is physically exhausting and mentally draining, and it becomes damn near impossible to believe in yourself or your future. A lot of people abandon belief at that point. They swirl in the eddies of comfort or regret, perhaps claim their victimhood, and stop looking for their way out of the maze. Others keep believing and find a way out but hope to never slip into a trap like that ever again, and those skills they’d honed and developed whither. They lose their edge.

Do not try to please others by changing your beliefs. Your beliefs can be the force that can change the system.

The Crusades. In 1095 Pope Urban 11 called for the knights of Europe to unite and march to Jerusalem to save the Holy Land from the rule of the Islamic infidels. Just decades earlier, Pope Gregory VII had declared, "Cursed he the man who holds back his sword from shedding blood," and now his wishes were coming to pass. The Crusaders rode into battle with the cry Deus volt-"God wills it!" Raymond of Agiles accompanied the Crusaders as a representative of the church during the first Crusade. He documented the taking of Jerusalem with these words: Wonderful things were to be seen. Numbers of Saracens (Muslims) were beheaded.... Others were shot with arrows, or forced to jump from the towers; others were tortured for several days, then burned with flames. Piles of heads, hands, and feet were to be seen in the streets of the city. It was necessary to pick one's way over the bodies of men and horses. But these were small matters compared to what happened at the temple of Solomon.... What happened there? If I tell the truth, it will exceed your powers of belief. So let it suffice to say this much at least, that in the temple and portico of Solomon, men rode in blood up to their knees and the bridle reins. Indeed, it was a just and splendid judgment of God, that this place should be filled with the blood of the unbelievers, when it had suffered so long from their blasphemies.5

What he wasn’t so good at was manipulating the internal states of other humans, getting them to see things his way, do things for him. His baseline attitude toward other humans was that they could all just go fuck themselves and that he was not going to expend any effort whatsoever getting them to change the way they thought. This was probably rooted in a belief that had been inculcated to him from the get-go: that there was an objective reality, which all people worth talking to could observe and understand, and that there was no point in arguing about anything that could be so observed and so understood. As long as you made a point of hanging out exclusively with people who had the wit to see and to understand that objective reality, you didn’t have to waste a lot of time talking. When a thunderstorm was headed your way across the prairie, you took the washing down from the line and closed the windows. It wasn’t necessary to have a meeting about it. The sales force didn’t need to get involved.

Writing or reviewing a mission statement changes you because it forces you to think through your priorities deeply, carefully, and to align your behavior with your beliefs. As you do, other people begin to sense that you’re not being driven by everything that happens to you. You have a sense of mission about what you’re trying to do and you are excited about it.3

But let’s be clear: the madness of everyday life was its own issue. It didn’t have any relationship to whether or not Christianity was bullshit. Obviously, Christianity was total bullshit. It was the most insane bullshit! But it was impossible to make an argument against superstition and magical nonsense, and have it stick, when that argument was delivered from a society where every citizen was a magician. And yes, reader, that includes you. You too are a magician. Your life is dominated by one of the oldest and most perverse forms of magic, one with less interior cohesion than the Christian faith, and you invest its empty symbolism with a level of belief that far outpaces that of any Christian. Here are some strips of paper and bits of metal! Watch as I transform these strips of paper and bits of metal into: (a) sex (b) food (c) clothing (d) shelter (e) transportation that allows me to acquire strips of paper and bits of money (f) intoxicants that distract me from my endless pursuit of strips of paper and bits of metal (g) leisure items that distract me from my endless pursuit of strips of paper and bits of metal (h) pointless vacations to exotic locales where I will replicate the brutish behavior that I display in my point of origin as a brief respite from my endless pursuit of strips of paper and bits of metal (i) unfair social advantages that allow my rotten children to undertake their own moronic pursuits of strips of paper and bits of metal. Humiliate yourself for strips of paper. Murder for the strips of paper. Humiliate others for the strips of paper. Worship the people who’ve accumulated such vast quantities of strips of paper that their strips of paper no longer have any physical existence and are now represented by binary notation. Treat the vast accumulators like gods. Free blowies for the moldering corpse of Steve Jobs! Fawning profile pieces for Jay-Z! The Presidency for billionaire socialite and real-estate developer Donald J. Trump! Kill! Kill! Kill! Work! Work! Work! Die! Die! Die! Go on. Pretend this is not the most magical thing that has ever happened. Historical arguments against Christianity tended to be delivered in tones of pearl-clutching horror, usually by subpar British intellectuals pimping their accent in America, a country where sounding like an Oxbridge twat conferred an unearned credibility. Yes, the Crusades were horrible. Yes, the Inquisition was awful. Yes, they shouldn’t have burned witches in Salem. Yes, there is an unfathomable amount of sexually abused walking wounded. Yes, every Christian country has oriented itself around the rich and done nothing but abuse the fuck out of its poor. But it’s not like the secular conversion of the industrialized world has alleviated any of the horror. Read the news. Murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape, murder, rape...Despair. All secularism has done, really, is remove a yoke from the rich. They’d always been horrible, but at least when they still paid lip service to Christian virtues, they could be shamed into philanthropy. Now they use market forces to slide the whole thing into feudalism. New York University built a campus [in Abu Dhabi] with slave labor! In the Twenty-First Century AD! And has suffered no rebuke! Applications are at an all-time high! The historical arguments against Christianity are as facile as reviews on Goodreads.com, and come down to this: Why do you organize around bad people who tell you that a Skyman wants you to be good? To which the rejoinder is: yes, the clergy sucks, but who cares how normal people are delivered into goodness?

In a review entitled ‘When Religion Makes It Worse,’ Yael Sela and colleagues (Sela et al., 2015) observed that various parts of both the Old Testament, to which Muslims in part adhere or which have influenced Islam, and the Islamic scriptures, therefore, unsurprisingly render it God’s will that you can rape the daughter of your enemy if you invade their land. It would surely elevate the damaged self-esteem of Muslim refugee males to believe that they are part of an invading force. It is indeed a common belief among fundamentalist Muslims that they must colonise the West under Islam (Armstrong, 2001). Leviticus 20: 13 tells believers that in a situation of war, you should kill every male in the opposing tribe and take all the females for yourself. Zechariah 14 is explicit that the enemies of Jerusalem are to be vanquished while their womenfolk are to be raped and enslaved. Judges 21 tells those who fear the Lord to invade the place of their enemies and kill every male as well as every female who is not a virgin. Virgins, however, are to be forcibly married to the soldiers who have slaughtered their families. The Koran 4:3 is quite clear that a man should take multiple wives: ‘Marry of the women, who seem good to you, two or three or four; and if you fear that you cannot do justice (to so many) then one (only) or (the captives) that your right hands possess.’ In other words, you can do what you like with female infidels, with the womenfolk in the country which you have invaded.

Trust Trusting is an advantage of chakra healing. If you have life-force energy flowing through the chakras properly, you will have a healthy ability to trust. It ensures that you will have more faith in your relationships, more trust in your talents, and more confidence in the universe's simple goodness. Confidence also takes practice and conviction. You have to practice your belief in the basic goodness of the universe in other people, in yourself. The only way to gain more confidence is to try it out. If you give them the opportunity to convince you, you won't be able to tell if someone is trustworthy. If you don't try them out, you won't know the abilities. So, if you're always so sure the world is out to get you, you won't know the universe's simple goodness. These are not easy practices. If you're not used to trusting, turning it around won't be easy. If you are concerned with that, the first step is to notice it. You can then add chakra healing to your healing methods. The Muladhara Chakra, in particular, deals with confidence in general, and balancing the Manipura, Anahata, and Visuddha will help you trust yourself. For your mind, body and spirit, chakra healing is a positive thing. Join it with patience and gentleness. Moving softly and paying attention to how the body reacts is important to you. Do nothing that is going to cause you pain or that seems too much for you. Cultivate this relationship with your energy system with care and gentleness. Peace First comes from within to find peace. It's time to relax if you feel like you're constantly struggling. There is peace in your very heart, in quietness. If you're not used to accessing it, some practice will be needed. Chakra healing helps bring peace to your life because you allow the life force to flow freely through the energy channels of the body, support the endocrine system of the body, and support the sympathetic nervous system. If they are helped and do not have to work overtime, then you can relax at appropriate times and stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system. If your body is not in the state of flight or combat, overworking the sympathetic nervous system, the body has time to recover. And you can feel at peace as the body recovers. If energy flows through the body well, feeling peaceful is much easier than when energy is blocked.

So God exist so what? So he doesn't exist so what? It really doesn't matter as long you don't go as abusive parent and start forcing your beliefs onto others.

Mistakenly, many people confuse duality with polarity. In spiritual growth it is important to focus on polarity. Polarity can be viewed as complimentary forces that work together to create balance, on the other hand, duality is the belief in opposing forces that conflict with each other and create chaos. Your goal is to establish a balance between the two poles.

You cannot be this version of evangelical and not force your beliefs on others. Failing to convert is a failure on you and your dedication to your faith.

States following this approach say that reasonable behavior is what a prudent person would have done or believed in the same or similar circumstances. Where do these states find such a prudent person? They crowd source it. It’s called a jury. Juries make up a cross section of the community’s members, and reflect collectively its values, beliefs, and its judgment about what is reasonable behavior.

two factors. First, is the shooter’s belief honestly held? In other words, did he or she really believe there was a deadly threat? Second, do the facts, as they appeared at the time of the shooting support the shooter’s belief in imminent peril?

Followers of Christ are the most widely persecuted religious group in the world.. the most fundamental freedom is the privilege of each person to explore truth about the divine and to live in light of his or her determinations..from the beginning God has given men and women the freedom to decide whether to worship him..God did not (and does not) remove human responsibility..the Bible indicates the importance of willful choice and personal invitation..the gospel message is fundamentally invitation, not coercion..no one can believe except willingly..faith must be free in order to be genuine..What our government calls this "right" is commonly known as the "freedom of worship," but this label can be somewhat misleading because the way it is often applied in our culture unnecessarily and unhelpfully limits the "free exercise" of religion to the private sphere..This is part of the "free exercise" of religion: the freedom of worship not just in episodic gatherings but in everyday life. And it is such "free exercise" that is subtly yet significantly being attacked in American culture today..you have a hard time conceiving how you can participate in a celebration of something that you are convinced God condemns..in your heart you can't avoid the conviction that such participation would dishonor God..while [she] is free to exalt he God in the church she attends, she is not free to express her beliefs in the business she owns..while we have certain obligations to our government, our ultimate obligation is to our God..Church history..contains other examples of shameful attempts to spread Christianity by force or military might..none of this was, or is, right..the search for religious truth is often supplanted by the idolization of supposed tolerance. The cardinal sin of our culture is to be found intolerant, yet what we mean by intolerant is ironically, well, intolerant..the very notion of tolerance necessitates disagreement..I don't tolerate you if you believe exactly what I believe..it would be wise and helpful for us to patiently consider where each of us is coming from and why we have arrived at our respective conclusions..we can then be free to contemplate how to treat one another with the greatest dignity in view of our differences..tolerance applies to people and beliefs in distinct ways..toleration of people requires that we treat one another with equal value, honoring each other's fundamental human freedom to express private faith in public forums..toleration of beliefs does not require that we accept every idea as equally valid, as if a belief is true, right or good simply because someone expresses it. In this way, tolerance of a person's value does not mean I must accept the person's views.."Hey, as long as someone believes something, that makes it right.." Either Jesus is or isn't the Son of God..I lament the many ways that Christians express differences in belief devoid of respect for the people with whom they speak. Likewise, I lament the many ways that Christians are labeled intolerant, narrow-minded, and outdated whenever they express biblical beliefs that have persisted throughout centuries..The more we become like Jesus in this world, the more we will experience what he experienced. Just as it was costly for him to counter culture, it will be costly for us to do the same..It's only when we stand up and counter the culture around them with the gospel of Jesus Christ that they will experience suffering..On the other hand, if they stay quiet, they can remain safe. But they know that in so doing, they will violate their consciences and disobey the commands Christ has given them to share grace and gospel truth with the people around them..in a country where even our own religious liberty is increasingly limited, our suffering brothers and sisters beckon us not to let the cost of following Christ in our culture silence our faith.

Neopaganism is about accepting that no one is more responsible for my spiritual growth than the trinity of me, myself, and I. No one is more responsible for working to maintain stewardship of this planet and its occupants. No one is more responsible for ensuring that spirituality continues to be a forceful part of daily life. No one is more responsible for guaranteeing that humans have the right to investigate the truth for themselves, provided their beliefs and resulting actions cause no other person unnecessary harm or discomfort. Neopaganism is a spiritual practice that, having been born out of ancient times, has arisen to return the responsibility of life choices back to the individual so that we can no longer point a finger without noticing the three pointing back at ourselves.

Some consider magic to be pure spiritual power, whereas others consider it to be a force in the natural world like electricity or gravity.

In eight areas of your life you have the power to be guided by your soul: thoughts, emotions, perception, personal relationships, social role, environment, speech, and the body. In all of these areas your behavior affects the people you lead. If you evolve, so will they. Leading from the soul means that evolution is your top priority. You never act in such a way as to lower the self-esteem of others. You examine your underlying beliefs and modify them as new opportunities for growth reveal themselves. Because evolution is an unstoppable force in the universe, you draw upon invisible powers. Therefore being responsible is no longer a burden. It rests lightly on you as long as you continue to grow.

H’oponopono is based on the belief that we create our own environment; there are no external forces responsible for what is taking place within our surroundings. If your boss is evil, you are responsible. If your children are not doing well in school, you are responsible. World wars and poverty are your responsibility. The bottom line is that the world belongs to you and it is your responsibility to take care of it. Taking responsibility doesn’t mean that the problems are your fault, it simply means that you need to heal yourself in order to heal the situation that you find distressing. Some may agree with this theology, and to others it may appear completely nonsensical; but if you really choose to analyze it, you will find that your perception of the world is your reality. If you think the world is depressive and pointless because you choose to focus on all of the negative that is surrounding you, that’s how you perceive the world. You could change it if you would focus on changing yourself. Two people can live in the same environment but perceive it completely differently simply because of their perception.

Giving up that lifestyle threatened his identity too much. The Party Guy was all he knew how to be. To give that up would be like committing psychological hara-kiri. We all have values for ourselves. We protect these values. We try to live up to them and we justify them and maintain them. Even if we don’t mean to, that’s how our brain is wired. As noted before, we’re unfairly biased toward what we already know, what we believe to be certain. If I believe I’m a nice guy, I’ll avoid situations that could potentially contradict that belief. If I believe I’m an awesome cook, I’ll seek out opportunities to prove that to myself over and over again. The belief always takes precedence. Until we change how we view ourselves, what we believe we are and are not, we cannot overcome our avoidance and anxiety. We cannot change. In this way, “knowing yourself” or “finding yourself” can be dangerous. It can cement you into a strict role and saddle you with unnecessary expectations. It can close you off to inner potential and outer opportunities. I say don’t find yourself. I say never know who you are. Because that’s what keeps you striving and discovering. And it forces you to remain humble in your judgments and accepting of the differences in others.

Legal Status of Self-Defense in a Criminal Context Self-defense is justified when the degree of violence used to protect yourself is objectively reasonable and proportionate to the threat faced. As an example, the use of deadly force for defensive purposes is permissible in situations of “extreme” danger when you’re the victim of a forcible and atrocious crime, or face serious bodily injury or a potentially fatal attack. On the other hand, defense against criminal charges is unjustified, for example, if you claimed the right of self-defense when using deadly force and killed the perpetrator of a minor crime when the criminal did not appear to be a physical threat to anyone. The right of self-defense is not available to a person who seeks a quarrel with the intent to create a real or apparent necessity of exercising self-defense. Self-Defense against Assault It’s lawful for a person who is being assaulted to defend against a physical attack, as long as a reasonable person has grounds for believing, and actually does believe, that bodily injury is about to be inflicted. If that’s the case, that person may use all the physical force that she believes to be reasonably necessary and which would appear to a reasonable person, in the same or similar circumstances, to be necessary to prevent the injury that appears to be imminent. You’ll be judged by all the information that’s known and apparent to you at the time you defend yourself. You won’t be judged with 20/20 hindsight. Ultimately, the question will be whether your actions are “objectively reasonable” in light of all of the facts and circumstances confronting you at the time. Justification for self-defense typically cannot be applied to actions committed after a criminal act has taken place. For example, a victim of a sexual assault, after the rape is committed and the rapist leaves the scene of the crime, is not entitled to later seek revenge against the attacker. The Assailed Person Need Not Retreat A person who is threatened with a violent attack may exercise the right of self-defense and need not retreat. If you exercise your right to self-defense, you may hold your original position and stand your ground and defend yourself by the use of all force and means that would appear to be essential to a reasonable person in a similar situation and with similar knowledge. Actual Danger Is Not Necessary “Actual danger” is not necessary as a good reason for acting in self-defense. If you’re confronted by the appearance of danger and, as a reasonable person, you possess an actual belief and fear that you’re about to suffer bodily injury, and if a reasonable person in a similar situation, seeing and knowing the same facts, would be justified in believing that they were in similar danger, you may use reasonable force to act in self-defense whether the danger itself is authentic or merely apparent.