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It's one of the most misused words in the English language, because who is trying to conserve what? The right wing political faction in the USA tries to identify itself as such, but in fact, all they conserve is the wealth and power of rich people, their wanna-be followers and any laws favorable to their domination over this nation, our people, and much of the World, even if it subverts our Constitutional democracy, and even to the extent of conspiring with organized crime, acts of treachery committed by many politicians since the 1920s. But that's a radical agenda, not conservative. How else to describe the up-side-down situation today at the Mexican border where two American border guards were sent to prison for trying to arrest a Mexican drug smuggler to whom a Texas Court gave immunity to testify against them?! And throughout his Presidency, George Bush refused to say or do anything despite appeals from fellow Republicans to pardon and release them, which any President has the legal power to do. There is nothing conservative or patriotic about extreme corruption! Another distorted term is "free enterprise", to which men of business glorify and pledge their allegiance, even ahead of their own national flag. But is any capitalist enterprise actually free? Not under the domination of multi-national corporations who maneuver and conspire to take over the entire panorama of smaller businesses around the World and forge them into one enormous global economic empire, their "New World Order" - for example, the "North American Free Trade Agreement" (NAFTA) which gave big corporations the freedom to consolidate hundreds of small businesses throughout North and South America and eliminate thousands of jobs. Truly free enterprises are those that serve the needs of their own communities and reject the dictate of "get big or get out" which means very few survive. So, let's return these hijacked words to their natural owners, the many millions of U.S. citizens who want to be free to trade and conserve : 1. A vast, healthy, natural wilderness surrounding our towns and villages. 2. Our U.S Constitution, wisely amended and strictly applied. 3. A locally managed network of freely cooperative enterprises fairly regulated to protect and benefit all U.S. citizens. 4. Our national sovereignty with secure borders and a stable population that practices family planning to avoid overcrowding. 5. The natural human family with BOTH a gentle, well educated mother AND a gentle, well educated father, for the children they create or adopt. Every child wants both a mother and a father. Don't believe it? Ask them. 6. The right of every woman to decide if and when to give birth to one or more children, or none, her choice in gentle, friendly consultation with a husband who loves and respects her and a family planning clinic or hospital. 7. The natural peace and prosperity that hard working U.S. citizens have built up over the years of our struggle to go on being a free and independent people. Here then is a conservatism that decent human beings may prefer and practice in cooperation with each other in their communities - hopefully. POLITICS, RELIGION, FAMILY, RACE Why does the human race keep waging war against itself for the selfish power of various dictators, religious fanatics, racists and corporate robber barons? Because until ancient scholars began writing history most people had no idea they were part of anything like a "human race". They saw themselves as heroic Vikings, brave Mongols, Imperial Aztecs, Imperial Germans, Imperial French, Imperial English, Imperial Chinese, Imperial Japanese, etc. - and everyone outside each of their royal empires as more or less sub human. Even today, with all the information available, Islamic extremists still try to build a new and greater Caliphate on the ashes of the Western economic empire, China tries to replace the USA as the World's number one superpower and even Vladimir Putin imagines a resurgent Russian Empire, and obviously, many corporate executives dream of expanding their businesses to dominate the World Market and join a millionaires' club. It seems like all the people on Earth have dreams of wealth and power, if not personally, then with their family, nation, religion, and race - well, not everyone. Some of us yearn for a peaceful life in balance with Nature and each other, more today than ever as the exploding human population and massive industrial pollution drive our planetary biosphere into an ecocidal crisis, "An Inconvenient Truth" delivered at "The Eleventh Hour" and hated by ambitious investors in the World Economy they wish would grow forever and ever. So, is it possible for people to get along with each other without sinking so far into jealousy and greed they resort to corruption and violence? It's easy enough to advise people to let go of their get-rich-and-powerful ambitions and settle for smaller personal goals that help each other and save the Earth. But that's not nearly as simple as it may sound. People do harmful things without realizing it, when way too much of a good thing turns it bad. For example: The thousands of brave men and women, Black and White, who organized the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s struggled heroically, often at the cost of severe injury and death, to bring basic equal rights to the millions of African Americans who suffered about 300 years of slavery, descrimination, lynching and every other form of violence in the Southern states and around the USA. As the laws were changed and better schools and better-paying jobs slowly became available, Black Americans have proven beyond any serious doubt that they can do any work White people can do, from manual labor to science and fine arts. Thus, there is no reason whatever to stop them from advancing as far as their talents and hard work can take them, including to the Presidency of The United States. (*) So, is that the happy ending of a great social drama? Sadly, no. Poor people of any race tend to have more children because poverty and disease cause more to die before reaching adulthood, so when the advance of modern medicine saves more children, their population grows dramatically. With greater freedom and prosperity, African Americans, who were already in the habit of struggling to raise large families, have now become the majority in many cities because that's where most Americans go to find jobs and start their careers. Add to this the massive immigration from Central and South America and the result is, for example, in the two cities where I grew up and lived and worked for many years, Philadelphia and New York, White people have become a minority, and the same in other big and medium cities across the USA. Is that so terrible? After what darker-skinned people have suffered at the hands of White Colonialsts for the past 300 years, maybe it's their turn to climb on top? So, does that mean that we, the descendants of those White Colonists, should suffer under the same kind of oppression our ancestors inflicted? Would that be poetic justice? Is it all just a global game of masters today, slaves tomorrow and around again?! A better question would be, does anyone advocate such a terrible revenge? Not likely, but only because no one is willing to talk about it, not even CNN's Lou Dobbs, who bravely exposes the corruption behind the massive invasion of illegal aliens into the USA, but he says little about what is happening in Mexico, Central and South America to cause that invasion and what is also happening in U.S. cities - OVERPOPULATION! Are poor people around the World to blame for having so many children? No, of course not. Poverty, ignorance, and religious dogma have trapped them in medieval lifestyles that need to be reformed. But anywhere that women have access to birth control education and the legal right to choose, most of them decide to birth no more than one or two children. That's why in Europe the White population is slowly declining as more women go for higher education and decide to work at a career because they are FREE to do so. But European business executives are worried and alarmed because, like their American counterparts, they need a constantly growing population to grow their business enterprises, otherwise foreign corporations may buy them out in hostile take-overs. So, thousands of immigrants are welcomed to settle in Europe to work for low wages, then European businesses can grow - except that most of those immigrants are from Muslim nations, and many are so fanatic they refuse to blend into their new homelands, instead establishing their own neighborhoods where they speak only their native languages. After the Nazi holocaust in World War Two, European laws against discrimination are very strict, partly because immigrants are needed, not only for low wage labor, but for genetic diversity as they assimilate into an increasingly inbred European population. But because many of the immigrants are from nations dominated by the Islamic religion, fanatics among them terrorize their own people to remain seperate and aloof. In England whole city neighborhoods are populated by Muslims who refuse to speak English and demand the government recognize Sharia Law; and like Neville Chamberlain before him, the Archbishop of Canterbury advocated the London authorities do exactly that - predictably stirring a nationwide outcry to remind the silly Bishop that English Law applies to everyone who lives there, no matter who they are. Germany, on the other hand, wisely keeps immigration under strict control, requiring all immigrants to learn the language quickly, and deporting anyone who fails to assimilate in a reasonable time. France too is torn between their ultra liberal traditions of friendly tolerance and the inescapable fact of expanding immigrant communities that express growing hostility to French authorities and periodically riot in the streets for an ever greater share of social services, even as their populations continue to grow beyond what the French economy can support. Thus today England and France are suffering a massive and relentlessly growing population shift in favor of North Africa and its predominantly Islamic religion and culture, but whoever calls it invasion by population explosion is quickly denounced as a racist by people who are pretending to be defenders of liberal democracy, although the eventual outcome will be anything but liberal or democratic, because overpopulation serves the interests of large corporations that must grow ever larger to dominate and rule over a compliant global population of wage slaves. So, if White people have become too well educated to be efficiently exploited, then welcome the Brown people. I called Amazon.com to tell them they had sent the wrong book, and found myself talking to India where Amazon had exported their accounting procedures to low wage Indian workers, most of whom speak better English than most Americans. Am I the only person on Earth who understands this and is actually willing to say it? No, that's not possible. But who else? Why are people poor? Low wages certainly, but wages are low because there are millions of poorly educated workers around the World who still think like their peasant ancestors that a woman's place is at home cooking, cleaning and having lots of babies to make the family rich - but they never make it because a huge labor market puts them in competition with too many other workers so the employers can hire whoever will work for the lowest wages. That is happening today all across America, but the Congressmen and Senators whose elections are bought by corporate campaign contributors and the church leaders who bless them, believe God has ordained their wealth and class superiority! And wasn't it bizarre that the American Left, that vast agglomeration of progressive causes, including the labor unions, joined with President Bush and his big business supporters to advocate amnesty for the millions of illegal aliens who are undercutting the wages of hard working American families?! Do politics make strange bed-fellows?! - and isn't it equally strange that a North American Union may actually happen, not as a natural devolution into a continental network of eco-villages, but for the greater profit and power of multi-national corporations?! Is the United States self-doomed to suffer a similar fate as the former Soviet Union, now owned and operated by robber baron capitalists, organized crime, and ex-KGB enforcers, a nation with the highest suicide rate and a population that declines by a million per year? There are some on the Left who believe America deserves nothing less! Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Which is more important, raising wages or family planning? Obviously, both are part of the same process, so organize for reasonable wages AND smaller families. Then planet Earth can again return to its natural order and the human race can become a truly wise and practical species whose normal state of mind is happiness based on consciously living in balance with Nature and at peace with each other - (*) Racism is an instinctive emotional reaction by dominant males who jealously struggle to own and control the females of their pack or tribe to guarantee survival through their children. Anthropologists see this behavior wherever they go to study various animals, monkeys, apes and especially chimpanzees. Chimps act a lot like humans - they even cut a straw tool to extract termites from their big mounds of mud and use heavy sticks to crack open nuts. They also hunt, kill and eat monkeys and wage war against the dominant males of other chimp families, because they feel impelled to dominate a wider food-gathering territory by driving out or killing the other chimps who are not part of their growing family, just like us. In fact, paleo-archeologists are slowly uncovering evidence of an almost unbroken evolutionary passage from ape to human. Chimps and humans are descended from common ancestors, but where are they? Why is it so difficult to find their bones? Because they were eaten in cannibal feasts. This means the origin of our human behavior goes back so far into prehistory we will always be dealing with it, because it's in our genetic inheritance, down through the millions of years of slow physical change. So, is racism evil? Yes, when corrupt leaders use it to divide and conquer the people for fun and profit. But most often it's an ignorant mistake that damages our modern democracy, where our basic problem is no longer producing enough children to survive, but far too many. If White Europeans had not instinctively exploded their population after the years of plague, there would not have been enough of them to invade the continent they named America. If the Albanians had not raised large families there would not have been enough of them to settle in Serbian Kosovo. If the Chinese population had not exploded they could not have invaded and settled in Tibet. If Germans had not imagined themselves the master race they would never have supported Hitler who ordered them to raise large families to help him conquer the World. If White American colonists had not raised large families there would not have been enough of them to spread Westward and destroy the Indian nations. In fact, so many White people were leaving to escape from colonial oppression the resulting labor shortage inspired wealthy landowners to import African slaves. Then, since each slave was worth money, they helped them to birth plenty of children, so they could sell them for profit. Today, if the women of South and Central America, including Mexico, were not birthing more children than they can support, those grown up children would not need to sneak across the U.S. border to work for lower wages than U.S. citizens can afford. From these examples, it is clear that without relentlessly growing populations and the competition it provokes, racism would hardly exist. But the desire to grow one's family, clan and nation is also instinctive, because more than any other less intelligent animal, fear of death is a ghost that haunts us. We see it every day in disease, accidents and war, so some of us go to church so we can feel safe and stop thinking about it, or else we push it down into our subconscious, only to erupt later as irrational anger against some man or woman of some other race or nationality who we imagine are "just plain evil", the word "evil" being one of our many symbols of death. Thus, as Ernest Becker wrote in "The Denial of Death", our dread of the inevitable end of our lives is a major source of our human dilemma. Other animals sense danger and react defensively, but they don't worry and go crazy in the knowledge that even if they live to be 120 they must eventually die. (*) Some folks have tried to solve this problem with their religion, but only three that I know of have done so sincerely and peacefully: the Buddhists around the World, the Mennonites, and the Amish of Pennsylvania and nearby states. And yet, those gentle Americans are making a tragic mistake. They refuse to marry outside their German nationality and Christian faith, so everyone is a cousin of everyone else. Obviously, it is well known from long experience and scientific study that such inbreeding produces deformed children, and that would be the fate of any and all such racially restricted people anywhere in the World. Prehistoric tribes experienced this problem and sometimes sent their warriors to raid other villages, not only to steal horses, but to kidnap women who were not related to them. In the historical novel "Follow the River" by James Alexander Thom, a band of Shawnee warriors invade a Colonial village, not only to loot and kill but also to carry away several women who they hope will marry their men and so avoid the horrors of inbreeding. It seemed normal to them because Native Americans had been doing that to each other for thousands of years, as had Europeans, Asians, Africans and all tribal barbarians as far back as anyone could remember or the archeologists could dig up the evidence. Fortunately, many other tribes in those same continents traded and inter-married peacefully. If not, the human race could have slaughtered itself to self-extinction long ago. The most warlike tribes tended to be those dominated by harsh patriarchal supremacy, while peace more often prevailed when women had greater influence. Therefore, the racist and misogynist theories expounded by various right wing extremists are simply mistaken. Racial mixing is not only harmless, it's necessary to enrich and diversify the genetic heritage we must pass down to our children. Examples abound - Tiger Woods, a master golfer; Condoleeza Rice, a master of political science, languages and a concert pianist; Barak Obama, U.S. Senator, eloquent public speaker and our new President; Bill Richardson, Governor of New Mexico and Presidential candidate, and many, more. Scientists, artists, writers, doctors, lawyers, you name it, people of mixed race are out there achieving great things for their families, their nations and the World. FREEDOM OF CONSCIENCE Criticizing any religion is difficult, but more so after living under its tyrannical domination for 1462 years, the time between the Council of Nicaea in AD 325 and the U.S. Constitution of 1787. Thus, the Bible looms largest in our Western lives because it was forced upon us by extreme violence, fear and trickery so our ancestors had no choice but to take Christianity very, very seriously, because their survival depended on it. Only with our Constitution and its Bill of Rights did we the people win the legally protected right to publically disagree with any church's doctrine or the preachings of any Minister, Priest, Imam or whoever. Till then, the King's judges could sentence dissenters and heretics to prison or death. But Christian violence never began with Jesus, instead with the Roman Empire under Emeror Constantine who converted to the religion they had failed to stamp out and, at its famous Nicaean Council, declared itself the final authority on Christian doctrine and gave itself the legal right to put to death anyone who publically expressed disagreement. Thereafter, down through the centuries, literally millions of dissenters, heretics, independent philosophers, pagan healers and simple loudmouths were arrested, tried, convicted, tortured and executed for "blasphemy". Burning at the stake was favored to "cleanse the soul of sin." The historical fact is the Roman Empire picked up the teachings of Jesus and turned them into a state-sponsored religion as a weapon of war to re-conquer the pagan tribes of Europe who had twice sacked and pillaged Rome, trying and failing to rid themselves of its tyranny. Wherever the Romans went they butchered and burned in the name of a man who would have condemned and opposed it, a man whose name, Jesus Christ, was never spoken in his lifetime, a man known as Yeshua ben Yosef who preached peaceful resistance against the Roman conquerors, who then crucified him because his growing popularity threatened the flow of taxes to Rome, and because the idea of worshipping one God with a more peacefully cooperative lifestyle was spreading all over the ancient World, so since they couldn't destroy it, they adopted it and corrupted it to save their hated Empire. What more evil perversion of Jesus' teachings could there be?! Does this mean the Roman Catholic Church is an evil institution? No more so than most of the other organized religions. Only the Bhuddists seem to have largely escaped the temptations of wealth, power and violence, so far. All the others, including the Protestants, fell into the trap of political and military involvement with Kings, landlords and bankers whose great wealth was based on the slavery of millions of peasants and laborers from ancient times to the present day. Only the English and American Revolutions actually changed it. Yet, within all the churches, passionate reformers have struggled, suffered and died to change them from within, like the Maid of Orleans, Francis of Assisi, Martin Luther and thousands of lesser known heroes and sheroes, many of whom were burned at the stake for daring to speak out against the corruption and killing. They couldn't get away with burning Francis, so they absorbed him into the Church by making him a Saint. Was it Pope John who actually apologized for the many centuries of oppression and admitted that all those perpetrators were not really Christians, even though they dominated the Church? But the only reason we know anything is because the Magna Carta surrendered to the English people's demand for the right to protest against injustice, and because Oliver Cromwell's English revolution overthrew the Devine Right of Kings, and because our U.S. Constitution established the first working democracy, including the Amendment that states: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercize thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." Without that, no scholar or reporter would ever have dared to examine the papers and archives, previously held in secret, that document the horrible and tragic events of history. Before then, many who tried were cast into prison, or murdered. In fact, it's happening now in China, Russia and anywhere the people do not have legally protected rights similar to those we enjoy here in the Western democracies (but for how much longer?!) Nearly all the Catholics, Protestants and Jews I have known over the years have been and are today decent, friendly citizens who tolerate disagreements because they appreciate the freedom to do so. The same is probably true of most of those who practice the Islamic faith. But in each religion there are a few who have become so mortally terrified of death they believe they must OWN God or Allah and exclude all those who will not submit to the dictatorship of their Church, Synagogue or Mosque, and they advocate extremely harsh punishment to those who will not surrender. Thus, Christian fanatics shoot doctors who perform abortions, while extreme Orthodox Jews in Israel advocate the total expulsion of all Palestinian Arabs, and the Islamic fanatics commit the horrible crimes we see in the news every day. They do these things because deep down inside they are desperately afraid, so they cling to their religious dogma and go to war against the sinners, blasphemers and infidels, and thus commit far worse sins and crimes than those of their enemies. In my opinion, they are mentally deranged and need long term psychoanalysis with doctors from their own culture. We know from experience that people turn violent mostly because they were abused as children. Parents who try to beat the evil out of their boys and girls actually beat evil into them, because a frightened child will repress violence into subconscious anger which erupts years later in response to social pressures as an adult. A father can't stand the crying of his child because it reminds him of his own childhood which he cannot bear to think about. But in psychiatric treatment, such repressed trauma can be coaxed up into a person's conscious mind and examined with the sympathy and understanding he or she never got as a child. But Sam Giancanna's father beat him so savagely he grew up to become a big Chicago gangster. Gary Gilmore's father beat him savagely and he grew up to rob and kill and when sentenced to death, actually refused the years of appeals he was legally entitled to and demanded to be shot by the Idaho firing squad. So extremely twisted emotionally by his father's brutality, that's how much he hated life. Yet, in more peaceful days and hours, he had also developed a remarkable talent for drawing. What a waste. Like Giancana and Gilmore, all the World's dictators were subjected to various degrees of violence as children, Hitler, Stalin, Saddam Hussein, etc. Thus, abuse of children is one of the major causes of war, but still the Pope will not allow his priests to marry, even though that very basic human impulse drives some of them to molest their choir boys; and still, few people dare to talk, and only in secret, about overpopulation, family planning and parenting classes in public schools. What are they afraid of? They fear losing the power of their medieval dogma that favors the macho husband, the political "strong man" and the corporate executives who demand an ever-growing population to serve their ever-expanding economy and their huge personal fortunes, regardless of national borders, and denying any responsibility for the ecocidal consequences to this living planet that we must care for and nurture to go on surviving as a healthy human race. It is as though some sort of demon had tried to take over the words of Jesus in order to control, confound and disgrace them beyond any possible redemption. If so, that scheme failed, because his words are easily available in any Bible where they appear in red letters, and his once lost parables are in the Gospel of Thomas, which was excluded and supressed by Church authorities, but found in a big jar buried in the desert with other missing books, like the Gospel of Mary Magdaline, all now available to anyone and everyone who wants to read and study them independently, freedom of information provided by democratic laws wherever they prevail, which we need to CONSERVE for ourselves and future generations of civilized human beings. So, let's suppose you have a "red-letter" Bible and you're reading Jesus' "Sermon On The Mount" where he advises his followers on how to live in God's good grace from day to day. In the Gospel According to Matthew, Chapter 6, verse 5, he says: "And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward." Then in verse 6: "But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy room, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly." and in verses 19, 20 and 21: "Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal; but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." This is what Jesus is quoted as having said in his Sermon On The Mount, yet the Roman Catholics built huge cathedrals and Protestants built thousands of grand churches, mostly paid for by rich and powerful men, and where millions worship and pray to exchange mutual admiration for each other as "good Christians" - exactly the opposite of what Jesus taught. THE REVELATION HERESY The only reason the so-called "Book of Revelation" was included in the Biblical canon by the Council of Nicaea was because Emperor Constantine wanted a new and more terrifying licence to kill the enemies of the Roman Empire, and that is exactly what happened. The Roman Legions used the twisted and extremely violent ravings of John of Patmos to justify their slaughter of millions of pagan Europeans if they did not immediately convert to Rome's perverted form of Christianity. Today, far from learning anything from the massive crimes against humanity committed by the Christian Churches, there was in America a very influential faction of "born again" Southern Baptist Republicans led by the Rev, John Hagee, who preaches: "Fear of God is the beginning of wisdom." He has a right to his opinion, but most who agree with Jesus' teachings believe very deeply that LOVE of God is a far greater wisdom. But the Armageddonites grew so weary of waiting these past 2000 years for Jesus to return as promised in Revelations, they decided to push for Armageddon in World War Three, thinking a vengeful Jesus would then arrive to grant them his "dispensation of sin" so they could carry out all the terrible threats invented by John of Patmos - and guess who was President Bush's closest religious advisor? Rev. Hagee, of course. So now you know why Bush was never worried about a nuclear World War Three that would kill all life on this planet. He was assured by his own Biblical authority that he would be saved by Jesus along with those few who had obeyed his teachings perfectly (!) and then be rewarded with a re-created PHYSICAL PARADISE ON EARTH ! And all these years I thought good souls went to heaven. How else but through God's love did the human race survive such madness? The physical creation of life one Earth was an event that is being scientifically examined, discovered and revealed, but the love that initiated that creation is a mystery beyond human comprehension, and the minute anyone pretends to know more than that, "God", "Allah", "Yahweh" etc. all become extensions of ego. Apparently, it is instinctive for us to personalize that creation as a holy father or mother because a baby impulsively adores the physical mother and father who nurtures it. But as time passes it becomes clear that mom and dad are not the masters of the universe. So who is? Then, because we humans like quick and easy answers, organized religion moves in to provide those answers, for the price of mental subservience. Thus, of all the precious things we need to conserve, the greatest is our intellectual freedom, the right each person to freely practice independent thinking. ( Send comments to me at j7t14r@gmail.com ) Gospel of Thomas....Gospel of Mary Back to Top?.... Back to Contents? |
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