Do You Know The Real You? Can You Make That You Happy?

Do You Know The Real You? Can You Make That You Happy?
At the center of your being you have the answer; you know who you are and you know what you want.
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 Chien Chih Sengtsan, Third (Chinese) Zen Patriarch ca. 600 CE
Stop talking, stop thinking, and there is nothing you will not understand. Return to the root and you will find meaning.
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 Big Bang Theory didn't develop by itself. Physics allows for transformation, but not for creation of something from nothing.http://billallin.com
Like most people, you probably have wondered, from time to time in your life, why you are here. What is the purpose of life? Where did it all begin? Or has everything that exists always been? Is there something greater, that is beyond our understanding, that made everything?
If there is something greater and it used matter and energy to create what is today, what is that greater entity made of?
Questions of this nature that go beyond these enter the realm of religion, which is not part of the objective of this article.
Most of us want to know how whatever is greater than ourselves, that is out there somewhere, relates to us.
Scarcely anyone asks themselves what role we can play to fulfill whatever objectives that greater power had. For the purposes of this discussion I ask for a leap of faith, that at some point in the past there was nothing, then there was something. It defies logic to believe that nothing produced something, that a void transformed into matter and energy. The "hot dense state" that began the
The universe operates with what we call physical laws, which allow everything to be the way it is. "What is" is remarkably well organized, even if we don't understand it. There was some reason behind the organization that made it all happen.
Throughout human history we had slavery. Everyone expected slaves to follow their master's orders. No one expected a slave to demand that the master explain himself. Yet Christianity, as one example, speaks to God as "master," then expects the master to do all kinds of things, to answer all kinds of questions, to produce all manner of miracles for Christians.
If you are employed, it's likely important to you that you do what your boss wants you to do. For some reason, many of us believe that the power that is greater than us--that created everything, including the laws that hold it all together--should account for himself (itself), should answer their questions, should help them when they have needs, should do this and should stop others from doing that.
An increasingly popular acronym among Christians is WWJD (What Would Jesus Do?) The people who ask this believe Jesus is a divine being. They wonder what a divine being would do when facing a problem in a material world. While the thinking process itself is noble, I would ask these people: Why should Jesus even care about your problem? If you believe you were created by a divine being, should you not as asking what you could be doing to satisfy that being?
It's all well and good to ask ourselves what life is about. But if you knew, what difference would it make to you? If you knew the exact purpose that the divine being had for creating you, would you devote your life to fulfilling that purpose? If not, you should ask yourself what business you have in asking the question.
You live in a society with laws. Yet you and everyone else breaks those laws from time to time, without feeling any pangs of conscience. You live under a government structure you expect to protect you, to keep you from harm, to help you in times of natural disaster, to guide your life course when you lose your job, your spouse or when you are trying to recover from an addiction. What do you do to acknowledge the important responsibilities you have given to your governments? Do you cheat on your income tax? Do you report others you know are breaking laws? Do you help others so they do not find themselves in the position of feeling they have to break laws?
If you are married or in a committed relationship, you likely expect your significant other to remain faithful to you. This despite the fact you know that over half the marriages in North America fail, 85 percent of married men have sexual experiences with other women at some point in their marriages and 65 percent of married women find sexual gratification outside of their marriage at least once. How "committed" is that? A large majority of us aren't even prepared to delivered what we promised in a legal document.
But we want a supreme being to perform at our will.
OK, smart guy, you say, what should I be doing that I don't do now? Thanks for asking, I hoped you would. If I could offer you a way to find happiness for the rest of your life, would you be interested?
We believe all kinds of advertising that promises if we spend money we will be happy. Turns out we get short term thrills, not long term happiness.And it costs money while using up life time and energy. Not much left at the end of the day. As the saying goes, I began life with nothing and I still have most of it.
Before you consider a way to make you happy, you should be clear in your mind what or who the real "you" is. Most of what you believe about yourself comes from your experiences in life and what others have told you. What you believe about almost everything likely comes from others, not from your own thinking.
If suddenly you found yourself alone, the last person on earth, would you still be the same you? I submit that with no one to tell you who you are, you would become (or revert to) the real you. How would you treat other animals, plants, the air you breathe, the water you would require to sustain your life? If you were alone on an island, a real life Robinson Crusoe, everything you did would impact your long term survival. You would be totally responsible, accountable for your entire future. The real you would inevitably emerge.
In your present life you leave responsibility for your future existence to others, to governments comprised of self-interested politicians, to big corporations that have proven themselves to be sociopathic, to your employer, to the leaders of your religion, maybe to your children, your parents or your spouse. The real you that would act in the best interests of yourself and your total environment you allow to remain buried.
You need to resurrect that real you. You need to take those Crusoe-like responsibilities seriously in your life. You need to take yourself seriously, take responsibility for how you impact the people, other lives, other living things and the world around you. That is the only you that you have a real chance of making happy.
In itself, taking full responsibility for yourself and your position on the planet will not make you happy. It will, however, clear your conscience of the fear that you are doing wrong, wrong that may be socially acceptable and encouraged by corporations. It will put you at peace with yourself.
Let's look at the only people in the world who are truly happy. Never mind those who get thrills, as that's not lasting happiness. Never mind those who indulge themselves in addictions, even "mild" ones such as shopping and marijuana use. They are short term and usually bring consequences that offset the temporary pleasures they deliver. A basically unhappy person does not become happy by donning a happy-face mask. The only people who live their lives with enduring happiness are those who help others.
It sounds counterintuitive. Give of yourself to help someone else and it will make you happy. No corporation teaches that. No TV commercials deliver that message. But connect the dots. The only truly happy people in your society, people who are happy virtually every day of their lives, are those who help others in some way.
Though Bill Gates is better known as co-founder and former CEO of Microsoft, today he gets more joy out of life from the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, a philanthropic organization that funds medical research, puts computers into schools that can't afford them all over the world and supports charitable groups that would not exist in the same way without the foundation's help. The world benefits from the Gates Foundation and Bill Gates is a happy man because of it. Other more financially confined individuals work full time at charities, shelters, group homes and many other public functions and are every bit as happy as Bill Gates.
What many find strange about people who help people (and other life forms) is that while they work to make other lives better, their own improves at the same time. It makes them feel good to do good, no matter if income is involved or not. No other endeavour in life works like that. There must be something built into us that gives us that kind of extraordinary pleasure, peace and happiness.
Those who ask what the purpose of life don't have to look far. The answer is inside every one of us.
That reward mechanism didn't come in our DNA when we were conceived. It had to come from somewhere. Otherwise it would be something created from nothing, which the laws of physics do not accept. Science can prove that we have it, that it works, and it works well. But science has no explanation. Happiness, like many other important things in life, is beyond the understanding of science.
No, the best things in life are not free. They require some effort. But what a reward.

Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to raise children who are well balanced and will not need to turn to self destructive behaviours as they get older.
Learn more at Lao-tzu, philosopher of ancient China, considered the founder of Taoism (6th century BCE)

Love and Happiness: Good Advertising Words, Not Real Emotions

Love and Happiness: Good Advertising Words, Not Real Emotions


Oh, threats of hell and hopes of paradise!
One thing at least is certain -- this life flies;
One thing is certain, and the rest is lies;
The flower that once has blown forever dies.
- Omar Khayyam, Persian polymath, poet, mathematician, philosopher, astronomer, and physician (1048-1131)

Love, happiness. Nice words. What does "nice" mean? Well, "positive." Except sometimes, such as when "What a nice outfit!" hides enough sarcasm to drown a rat.

How about the other words? Love. What does love mean? Again, it's positive, of that we can be certain. But is it? How positive would you consider love to be if a man loves his neighbour's young son? Don't stalkers love the movie stars or ex-lovers they follow around everywhere?

What does the word "love" even mean? A wife and husband may love each other, but their love always differs one from the other. In fact, on close examination, every case of love is different from every other. The word usually takes more space in dictionaries than any other word in the English language. How can we love if we don't know for certain what the word means? We do know that most of the time we like hearing it when others tell us they love us. It's a warm fuzzy with no substance behind it.

What is happiness? Most people have an idea, until you try to pin them down to words to describe it. The first dictionary I checked had this as its first meaning: "state of well-being characterized by emotions ranging from contentment to intense joy." The dictionary uses a description that isn't definite. Characterized by a range of emotions. A range? Even the dictionary won't pin itself down to a meaning we can all latch onto.

I submit that love and happiness are not emotions at all. Religions use words such as "God" and "mother" to elicit warm feelings in their followers. Advertisers use "love" and "happiness" to arouse similar feelings, which people then associate with their product or service.

"Love" and "happiness" are advertising and entertainment lingo that mean little, but that make people feel good and want to buy products or watch movies. Have doubts? Watch a few television commercials and see how many have people who are obviously "happy" or "in love." Broad smiles that make people look beautiful as well as happy are so common in advertising today that it's impossible to land a gig in a magazine ad or a television spot unless you have perfect pre-whitened teeth you are prepared to show off in a big grin the way women used to show off certain parts of their bodies to sell product.

I know, I am presenting good ideas in a coarse manner. I want you to understand how you are manipulated into believing things by comforting words that give you warm feelings but that have virtually no verifiable meaning.

In religion, the Judeo-Christian-Islamic concept of what God (presented as male) will do for you is what a devoted mother would do. If you are old enough to have left the home of your mother, no problem, as God will look after you. All you have to do is to believe, to have faith that God is with you always.

I'm not saying there is no God. There is, I have experienced God and have sufficient evidence that I could convince any jury in a court of law. But I have evidence of God, whereas most religions have no evidence that is irrefutable. I don't look for followers of my religious ideas because I have no intention of profiting from their donations. Religions do. Advertisers and advertising agencies do. They are professionals and they are good at what they do.

You need to know when you are being swindled, hoodwinked. If you don't, it will cost you money and emotional energy, a part of your life. The science that studies these sorts of things is sociology. The people who use their knowledge and skills to twist minds--including those behind the leaders of major political parties--are essentially propagandists and brainwashers. They understand human nature and take advantage of those who don't.

I won't ask you to believe what I have said, because of what I have learned over many years in sociology and education. Learn for yourself. As I said, I don't want to make money off you or convince you of anything you can learn for yourself.

So, learn it. Then you will see how easily people around you are manipulated into thinking and believing what certain experts want them to believe. They believe what they are told to believe. The more often they are told they should believe a message, the more likely they are to believe it. Now you know why the same commercials appear so often on television on the same night, for example. Tell people something often enough and a certain percentage of them will believe it as fact. Even if the message is an outright lie.

Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to understand all the ways children need to develop, not just the limited amount they learn in school. If you know kids with problems, you know kids who have not developed in all ways. They can be fixed, but it's better to prevent them from having problems in the first place by knowing what they need. The book tells you how.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/

Darwin Was An Atheist and Other Lies We Were Taught

Darwin Was An Atheist and Other Lies We Were Taught


Charles Darwin was the ultimate atheist, or so we are encouraged to believe.

"As a Deist, Charles Darwin believed that God set in motion the physical laws of the universe, which he proposed included laws of "natural selection" and the mutability of the species. Clearly, Charles Darwin was not an Atheist, and those among the 'conservative' Theists who misrepresent him as such, do him great disservice. "
- Bill M. Tracer in Biography, September 7, 2007

Science cast Darwin as the godfather of the modern belief in a godless evolution of everything by molding his reputation into something Darwin himself would have strongly disapproved of. As Bill Tracer said in our opening quote, Charles Darwin was a Deist based on the evidence he saw in his travels and understood from sorting his copious data.

Science, in general, approves only of facts and theories it can prove or that it believes it can prove in the future as more data becomes available--and nothing of anything science can't understand or comprehend at the moment--it ignores Darwin's belief in a creator because the belief didn't fit with what the powers of the science establishment want us to believe.

Darwin saw creation as a work in progress, not as a six-day one-time series of events that happened a few thousand years ago. He likely wondered why an all-powerful deity needed to rest after one week of work and how a deity that didn't live on earth supposedly created everything according to an earthly calendar of six earth days. And maybe why spirits of good people who had died and gone to heaven needed streets paved with gold--or any kind of streets for that matter.

Ironically, Darwin's God seemed to work like a good and diligent scientist today, including making the odd mistake and working toward new horizons of creation. Instead of wiping out his mistakes (think the Great Flood of the Bible) God tweaks his creations and lets them develop and evolve into something better on their own.

Unlike modern scientists who believe that if they can prove or understand something it couldn't possibly have been created by a deity--that is, if I can understand it, it can't be of divine origin--Darwin saw connections he believed could never be explained or understood. His grasp of "everything" known was much greater than science of today will even acknowledge exists.

Extra-sensory perception (ESP), one identical twin feeling pain when the other is hurt, even many forms of original thinking fall outside of what science today is prepared to accept or understand. It simply ignores what it can't comprehend, as if nothing exists or is real unless it fits inside the box science made for itself. Witness how hard it was for Einstein's ideas or any other major theory backed by considerable mathematical evidence to be accepted as mainstream.

(As an aside, science has also cast Darwin as the wise old man with the long white beard, if you remember images of him, like a venerable Greek philosopher. Darwin was actually clean shaven for most of his life. He only grew the beard late in his life because he found shaving too hard on his skin. The beard photos convey the image of respect science wants people to have of Charles Darwin, even though science his misrepresented his theories.)

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Friedrich Nietzsche was an evil atheist who wanted to destroy everything religion has ever stood for.

"God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?"
- Nietzsche (first written in The Gay Science, later in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, this version in "The Madman")

Nietzsche must have had his tongue planted firmly in his cheek when he wrote this. Others, following his full explanations of how fantastical and unsupportable the descriptions of hundreds of gods of various religions around the world, claim that man created God in his own image, not the other way around.

The Christian God, for example, is not the God that Jesus of Nazareth spoke of in the Bible, but a semi-creation of Paul as he created his church in Greece. The Christian God of Paul (and of the Church of Rome that followed his lead) was a Father--Christians of the day were sexists who could not abide by a non-male God, Rome still does not accept women priests--with female characteristics.

He is kind, loving, caring, protective, helpful, attentive to all prayers and watchful of every move we make and notes every thought we think. Just like a good mother caring for a young child. The fact that no evidence exists of these characteristics in real life affects nothing to the religious propaganda.

The Followers of Jesus of Nazareth in the Holy Land, on the other hand, were Jews who had female leaders (Mary Magdalene, among others) as well as male leaders and who believed in peace and love, as taught by Jesus. The Church of Rome systematically had them destroyed, most by 250 CE, the rest in the Inquisition.

The fact that the Christian God (the same God as that of the Jews and Muslims) also must have created devastating diseases, natural disasters that have killed millions over the years and atrocities such as genocide the Abrahamic religions conveniently attribute to the Devil. Which they decline to admit must also have been created by the same God. But the Devil has given Christians a convenient dumping ground for everything they don't like about creation and everything unpleasant they can't explain about life and their own religion.

Nietzsche was not an atheist at all. He wanted religions to reformulate their concepts of God to conform with what is real, provable and even that may be sensed by people who are attuned to something beyond the material world. It was false gods that he wanted to be dead and buried.

Nietzsche could see a real divinity at work--perhaps even that nothing could exist without that deity--but he had no opportunity to be heard among the voices that shouted against him. His concept of existentialism was twisted to make it seem like nihilism or unfettered moral licence.

He believed that we should live today, for today is all we have. Whatever we are going to do, we should do it today. Not because we won't exist tomorrow but because tomorrow's conditions may have changed to prevent the good we want to do today from happening.

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Advertising is an emotional force designed to sell product or concepts that will generate cash flow. The most successful advertisers have learned how to manipulate human emotions so people believe they need things they really don't need. "Advertising" is a cleaner and more socially acceptable word for "brainwashing."

As a student in a media advertising class many years ago I was assigned to write commercials that appealed to the emotions. Those emotions should preferably appeal directly to some need my target market would have.

What if my viewers or listeners or readers didn't need what my sponsor had to sell? "Create a need" was the reply. You can always create a need if you base it on an emotion, such as vanity or the need for acceptance.

So we have a cosmetics industry founded on the belief that looking like a movie star is right and good. Revlon, founded by Charles and Joseph Revson and Charles Lachman (he contributed the "L" to the company name) began in the makeup rooms of movie sets in the 1930s. Every woman, they reasoned, wanted to look like a movie star.

The mind-molding advertising campaigns over the years have been so successful that the fact that a majority of men looking for a female mate want to see what she looks like without makeup matters little. Their advertising makes fortunes every year.

We have commercials to convince us that battery operated tooth brushes can reach places that "manual" brushes cannot, a concept that apparently doesn't stagger the beliefs of buyers. They also do not encourage us to use floss, where real cavities begin--tooth decay almost never begins where people brush, instead it starts between the teeth and at the gum line--because there is little money to be made by selling cheap floss material.

We have car manufacturers encouraging us to buy new cars so our old ones don't break down on our way to work--and so we will look especially good in them--but they don't make cars better so they won't break down as often. We don't hear about military vehicles breaking down in the middle of battles, so manufacturers must be able to make durable vehicles.

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In conclusion, let me leave you with one personal experience. As a student in a grade seven geography class, I found myself intensely interested in a map of the world on the wall, moreso than the lesson being delivered. As the tropics were very different from temperate Canada, my homeland, I was eager to learn about tropical countries so different from what I had experienced.

I noticed that the name Ecuador seemed strangely different from the names of its neighbouring countries which were mostly named after people or names in European nations. I also observed that the equator ran straight through the map of Ecuador.

Being a student of modest achievement and struggling enough with English that I knew nothing of any other language, I asked my teacher if the country name derived from its location on the planet, at the equator. No, I was assured, the similarities of the two words were mere coincidence. The very idea was dismissed quickly, with a sneer from the teacher for my interruption.

"Ecuador straddles the equator, from which it takes its name."
- Wikipedia

What can we learn from all this? No source can be trusted completely. Question everything. The truth does not emerge smoothly and effortlessly from what we see, hear and read on a daily basis.

Failure to doubt, to question and to do our own research opens us to be victims of those who want nothing more than to take from us. That applies to our devotion to beliefs as well as to our money.

Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to teach children what they need to know, when they need to know it, rather than leaving too much to their learning on the street.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/

Your Life In A Day

Your Life In A Day

With the passage of time, all such actions or lack of them, appear less significant. And anyway, since the cells in our body die and are renewed, replaced by different ones, we do in a literal sense become difference individuals. The connection I have to the boy I once was is now so fragile that it requires an act of conscious 'faith' to maintain that we are in any significant sense the same person.
- Sebastian Faulks, Engleby, Vintage Press (Random House), 2008

Today ain't like it used to be. But then, you aren't either.

As Faulks suggested in the quote, our physical self changes every day. In fact, there is no part of your body that still has the same cells as it had 15 years ago. Over that period you have been completely rebuilt.

In a world obsessed with the shape and appearance of the human body, that might seem disappointing. Especially as strings of genes in our DNA don't always and forever reproduce themselves exactly. Over time, they tend to lose code at their tail ends. Even our replacement parts don't reproduce exactly.

So what is the real you? Your body changes over time, completely replacing itself repeatedly over your lifetime. Your brain's memory contains all the same stuff it did 15 years ago, but it has added 15 years worth of learning and experiences to itself. If you attempted to count the new information your brain has added over the past 15 years it would be so staggering you wouldn't be able to count it if you took the rest of your life. Your brain has changed markedly over the past 15 years.

Your personality has changed. Sure you retain many of the same habits, relationships, values and so on, but if you could meet the you of 15 years ago today you might not recognize yourself. You don't even look the same in the mirror.

What identifies you as you? How do you know you are the same person?

Let's add a little perspective. Do you remember a movie or television program you watched over the past week or month? Was it real? Was there a real program you saw or maybe it was just a memory? In fact, you can't prove you even saw it. Memory proves nothing, as the recall of witnesses in recent court cases has shown. Some memory has been altered over time, some is purely invented.

For that matter, you can't prove you existed yesterday, or that there even was a yesterday. As shocking as it may seem, maybe today and the world you know about today came into existence when you gained consciousness this morning. If you believe that someone can create a movie in which you participate as viewer and in which you find yourself thinking that it's really happening at the time, then why could it not be possible that a whole past, an entire history, was created when you woke up today?

I know, it's not the way you have been taught to think. It's not what you have been lulled and trained into believing.

You have family members, loved ones, neighbours, work friends who aren't with you now as you read this. You can't prove they even exist, at this moment as you sit reading this. You trust that you can move from where you are to some other place and you will find them where you expect.

You may be right. But you can't prove it. When you move to one of these places, you change your own reality. You change from the present NOW to another NOW. Once there, what you are doing in this NOW will be equally as unprovable. It might be just a created memory, like your memory of that movie or TV program. What we know as memory and history could be entirely self-created memory.

The only reality you can depend on is this one, the one you are in. If you hope to be remembered by someone in a future NOW, then you had better act in ways that will cause you to be remembered. If what you do in this NOW only benefits you, then others will have no reason to remember you later. Why should they? They will be busy with their own NOW of the moment.

That may give you some insight into what you do with your time, the time you think of as NOW, as your own. Do you want to be remembered or not? Memories of people who think only or mostly of themselves don't last long. People remember (or create memories of their NOW moments) others who helped them, who cared for them, who showed them that they mattered.

If you believe that your body, your own personal NOWs, are all that are important, you have no reason to believe in a God. God serves no purpose if all your NOWs will eventually vanish and be forgotten. If there will never be anything left of the YOU you know when you die, then there is no need for God, no afterlife. Not even any purpose to what you are doing in this NOW. If nothing of you will continue to exist after you die, then life has no purpose. Does that make sense, that everything around you has no purpose?

Look around you. Does it seem as if all this could have happened by accident? The moon is as old as earth, as are the other planets in our solar system, yet they have nothing remotely similar to the reality of NOW you live in. Why? Cosmologists and science fiction writers claim there are likely many other civilizations out there somewhere in our universe, but they have absolutely no evidence to support their claims or speculations. No one has any evidence that the NOW you live in is anything but unique.

Does everything change constantly or does it all remain the same? Or do--gasp!--some things change constantly while others remain the same? Sorry, that last statement doesn't make sense to a thinking person. It's inconsistent, unlike anything in evidence around you. Everything you know changes, though some things change slower than you can detect so it seems as if they remain the same. Rocks change just as surely as the universe itself changes. We have evidence. At least we have memories of evidence we believe we read.

Your body changes when you die. Many of the bacteria that cohabit your body with "you" today--there are more of them than of cells in your body--may live on in other environments when the life that was your body has dissipated. Your body cells may separate into various atoms and molecules, but they won't disappear. Even if someone were to burn your body, the matter would change into energy, as Einstein proved. Remember e = mc2

Does that mean that when you die you are gone, or not? Are you comprised of your body and nothing else? Every atom that was your body remains and becomes something else. Does the part of you that you think of as "me" disappear? In nature, nothing disappears. It's the natural Law of Conservation. Why would the "you" that you spent so many years creating disappear? That's assuming you believe there is something more to you than animated cells.

If the "you" you created disappeared at your death, that would defy nature's laws. It would defy everything you have come to believe is real. Stuff doesn't disappear, it just changes.

You created something. You created you. Maybe you didn't create everything you know as real, but you created something. Does that make you a Creator? Does that make you God? Well, sort of. For that to be strictly true then there would have to be 6.7 billion other Gods on the planet. That doesn't make sense.

What makes more sense is that you, as creator, are part of a larger Creator, a system. You can't hold the whole system together. But you can be a component of it. You can't be God. But you can be part of God. God can be part of you. This isn't a religious lesson, it's an exercise in logic.

Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ of Christianity and the figure believed even by Muslims as the Son of God (Jesus and his mother are both mentioned in the Qu'ran), taught that. Read the Gospel of John. Read it straight, not filtering what you read through what you have been taught. If you grew up in a Christian family, your beliefs were more those of Paul, not so much of what Jesus taught. Paul, a Greek, taught what he believed and attributed it to Jesus and God. That's what inventors of religions do, they never give themselves credit or their followers wouldn't believe them. Read the actual words of Jesus, not their context because the Church of Rome doctored up the context of the few words of Jesus that were recorded.

Jesus taught that God is within each of us, not up in the sky somewhere. He said that we could find God within ourselves. We just have to look.

Having read this far, you have had a peek at possibilities relating to existence, your own and that of the world you know. Look further. Never mind the crap you have been taught by others. (Sorry, that was rude. I detest being asked to "have faith" in something for which there is no evidence when real evidence of something different is all around us.)

God, the purpose of life and the continuance of you after the death of your body are not subjects about which you need to "have faith." The evidence is all around you. Nature gave you some of it. Your brain can now give you more. If you want to know what life is about, study your surroundings and think it through.

What is real may not necessarily be what is around you. NOW is like that movie you saw and remember. Reality is much more significant, more grand, much superior to what you see in advertising or hear in your place of worship. Or to what you see as you look around the room you are in.

Look for it. Start now.

One final point. While you are creating you, create something worthwhile, something worth enduring. Keep in mind, if you want to be remembered, don't be too generous at helping yourself because selfish people aren't remembered fondly.

Bill Allin is the author of Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to grow children who can think for themselves as adults, who will pay attention to what is real instead of advertising disguised with smoke and mirrors.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Living Beyond Your Life Today

Living Beyond Your Life Today
It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.It's the dream afraid of waking that never takes the chance.It's the one who won't be taken who cannot seem to giveand the soul afraid of dying that never learns to live.
- Lyrics in The Rose, Bette Midler artist, Amanda McBroom composer

As often as my heart has been touched by Bette Midler's singing of The Rose, and today when I heard composer and American chanteuse Amanda McBroom sing it, I have thought that I must write something about fear dominating people's lives. But I didn't write. I was afraid that what I wrote would not be as perfect as the song. Note the irony.

Realization of my own fear and how it has affected my reluctance to write about fear became my motivation to write this.

Fear is much more than an emotion, more than an enhancement of the instinctive caution native to each of us. Fear instructs our lives. It dominates the lives of many of us. It shapes us as individuals, as communities and as nations.

Along with everyone else I have watched business and investment leaders charged, convicted and imprisoned for lying out of fear. True, they embezzled millions of dollars from shareholders and investors. But why? They were afraid to tell the truth, that they had failed. They delayed admitting their failure by lying, which ultimately resulted in their incarceration.

Along with everyone else I watched the American public being hoodwinked by their president so he could finish what his father failed to do, and line the pockets of his benefactors with gold in the process, by taking his country into a second (simultaneous) war, this one in Iraq. The USA will be lucky to avoid the fate of its former rival, the former USSR, that went bankrupt and dissolved into chaos in the 1990s. Why would Americans allow themselves to be lied to, to go into an unwarranted and extraordinarily costly war? They had been taught to be afraid that a dictator who could barely hold onto power in his own country had international connections that would wreak havoc on US soil.

Americans believed they should be afraid, though they had no evidence other than the lies of their president. Fear is on the curriculum in every US school, those it is given various other names.

Having moved to the Miramichi area of New Brunswick, Canada, in 2008, I saw how apparently comfortable my new neighbours were toward the possibilities of losing their jobs and having to start over. In my native Toronto, some people would commit suicide or turn to addictive behaviour--at the least start toking marijuana--at the prospect of losing their job. Not because they knew they couldn't start over but because of the fear of public recognition of their job loss as a personal failure. Miramichiers expect to lose their jobs at some points in their lives and they accept no stigma about it--and offer none against others--whereas people of Ontario fear the public disgrace.

The fear of losing their reputations as well as their jobs causes many people greater fear than the prospect of finding another job. That fear affects their lives, how they conduct themselves every day of their lives. Collectively, the fear of many people impacts whole communities and countries.

People become afraid to speak to each other on elevators or when passing on the street, likely because they fear ending up on the front pages of newspapers as victims of murder, mugging or rape. They fear letting their children out of their sight because they might be charged with neglect, that fear resulting in children who never grow out of their dependence on mommy or a mommy figure in adulthood.

In every case, fear is unwarranted. In every case, fear is taught by those who have something to gain and learned by those who will provide that gain. Fear is a way for a few to control the behaviour and lives of many others. How many Germans in the 1930s and 1940s followed Hitler, becoming murderers and traitors in the process, because they were afraid of Hitler's power? How many wars have been fought--virtually every war has some association with religion--because the people of one side were made to fear people of the other?

The cosmetics--and to a large extent the pharmaceutical--industry exists solely because of the fear they have created in people, in individuals, that they are not perfect. The OTC (over the counter) supplement industry is booming because people fear becoming ill and disabled as they get older. Some will overdose and harm themselves in the process of trying to protect themselves.

Returning to Amanda McBroom's lyrics, "it's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance." How many people fail to find love in their lives, or mess it up if they do, because they fear a relationship breaking up? Media reports of marital breakup rates are ceaseless, while education systems never address the problem that people don't know how to have successful relationships. People who avoid falling in love because they fear breaking up miss an important point about life. Falling in love and breaking up is part of how a person becomes complete, how a person learns to do it better next time. Taking chances is instinctive, while avoiding them is done out of fear of failure. It's fear that's not natural.

"It's the one who won't be taken who cannot seem to give." By not trusting others out of fear that they will fail us or steal from us we become closed up emotionally. We become the kind of people that others don't want to trust. People don't want to trust others who don't trust. Trusting another person with our emotions may be risky, but not trusting anyone with our emotions but ourselves generates much greater risk of poor mental, emotional and even physical health (suppression of the immune system).

"The soul afraid of dying...never learns to live." The person who fears death becomes afraid of life. Everyone accepts that death is part of life: birth, death and taxes (thanks to G.B. Shaw). However, many fear death because they have no idea what to expect afterwards. They have rejected the obviously fictitious guesses of traditional religions about the hereafter, but have nothing to replace them with.

If you plan to go on a hike into a wilderness area or national park where you haven't been before, you go prepared. You take a compass or GPS, some form of shelter, you scout topographic and place maps, you take more food and water than you expect to use. You know where you are going, even though you haven't been there before. Then why not do that with the afterlife: prepare.

Are you afraid of dying and as a consequence you don't know how to live? Living well is your whole purpose for being here. If you are afraid of dying, you become selfish, as all fearful people become. They think of themselves because they tend to fear what others may introduce into their lives. That's the complete opposite of what living is about.

Every animal and plant we know has the instinct for survival. We humans have it too. But if we depend on our survival instinct to give us direction for our lives, we live a life no different from that of any other animal or plant. Certainly no greater. And we can expect what happens on our death to be similar to what we expect happens to grass and oak trees, gerbils and frogs when they die.

If you want to live, you must not fear death. Death is simply the end of one phase of your existence before you move on. Prepare yourself for your death by living your life to help others. That is the only way you can be different from any other animal or plant. Only people help their own kind, more than simply to avoid starvation.

You have nothing to fear about death unless you allow yourself to be deceived by those who just don't "get it." People who believe that only what may be detected and manoeuvred by the senses really exists have put themselves into a box at which they are the centre. They may lead peaceful and self-fulfilling lives, but they do little to help others because they can't see outside their box. They are, in effect, intelligent ants with only two legs.

Nothing in nature suggests that life ends with death. In nature, every atom that ever existed still exists today, unless it has been transformed into energy, which is simply another state of existence. Conservation of Energy and Matter is the rule of nature. Why should it not be the rule for life as well.

However, you must live your life outside the box. You must be more than other animals and plants or you can expect only to be reformulated as one of them at death. You must create a persona for yourself that is distinctive from that of any other person, while seeking to work with others for the greater benefit of our kind. Nature conserves what exists, so create yourself into something worth saving on the death of your cellular body.

You should not expect your aches and pains and earthly troubles to pass with you into a future life. Why would you want them? Yet how you deal with them while you are here will determine what kind of persona you create for yourself.

Don't be afraid. Every other animal and plant on earth is guarded about its safety, about its existence in the future. They expect the end of their lives to be the ends of who or what they are.
You don't have to be afraid. Fear requires too much selfishness, too much energy and too much life-time.

Live your life as if you want to continue with the next phase of your existence after you die and you will have created something worth conserving after you die. According to everything we know about nature and the "real world" we know now, what you create will continue after your body quits.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to teach their children how to live life without fear, but with powerful and effective guidance about how they should live their lives.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Why You Are Here

Why You Are Here

You are not here merely to make a living. You are here to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, and with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world. You impoverish yourself if you forget this errand.
- Woodrow Wilson, 28th US President (1856-1924)

Many people in Western countries, usually in their quiet moments alone, wonder what the purpose of life is, why we are here. So we are told, just about everyone wonders this.

This is not true in most parts of the world where they know--or believe they know--why we humans are on earth. Does it matter whether they really know the purpose of life or whether they have simply come to believe in what they have been told. Either way, they have no need to ask the question. For them, the question of purpose of life does not exist. They learn what life is about within their families, their school systems and their communities as they grow up.

Why, then, does the question exist so predominantly in Western countries?

It's not that westerners care more than non-westerners. Nor that they are not as bright.

People in Western countries totally surround themselves--often of their own volition--with the belief that they exist to be consumers, to buy products made by industries. We are taught that happiness can be bought if we have enough cash.

If this sounds coarse, crass, unbelievable, look around you if you live in a Western country. Schools teach children to get a good education so they can get a good job, so they can earn money to buy stuff they will be persuaded they can't live without. Television bombards viewers with commercials touting their need for all kinds of products, some of which are unhealthy, harmful, damaging to the environment, or simply don't work as advertised.

Religions claim their members can buy their way into the afterlife by donating to their place of worship today and belonging to the congregation. True, religions don't make their claim that way, in those words. They use comforting words, attractive words, seducing words. As television commercials do. How comfortable could you be as a member of a religious congregation if everyone knew that you contributed nothing to the coffers? It's pay up and you're good.

In Western countries people argue and debate whether God exists, which religion God favours over others, whether God favours their side of the current war or not. All the while they wonder why they exist, what the purpose of life is.

Could the purpose of life be to follow, to buy, to believe what we are told? If so, what distinguishes humans from ants or wolves? From sheep that follow their leader (often a goat--apparently sheep don't even care) into the slaughter room of the abattoir? Most of us find it difficult, at least once in a while, to accept that our purpose for existence is to be obedient consumers.

If human life has a purpose, it cannot be to act similar to animals we believe ourselves to be superior to. If we do not act in superior ways, then we are not superior, which means that it will be hard to believe in a afterlife. If we do not act differently from other animals, then our fate is similar to that of those animals. Heaven, if you will, would be filled with toads, weasels and mosquitoes, though there would be room for us as heaven is infinite.

What makes us different from other animals? Is it our large brain that allows us to use cognitive processes that are apparently unavailable to other animals? Maybe. We don't really know what other animals think about, what kinds of thinking they do. While we search the cosmos for life elsewhere, we can't even communicate with other living things on earth, things that have the proven ability to communicate with each other. Some, such as pets, understand our thoughts, feelings and language far better than we can understand theirs. Which brain is superior? We don't really know.

What can we do that other animals can't? We can help each other in ways far beyond what others animals can do for each other. We can deliver progress in research and technology that can help many. We can provide support for the weaker among us, where the weaker among other animals become lunch for predators.

We can do these things, but most of us don't.

If we don't do what we have the superior ability to do better than any other animal, we are like other animals. If we do not do these things to help our species, other living things and our planet to improve, then we choose to be nothing better than ants and rats. (We even refer to city life as "the rat race.")

If you wonder why you exist, look beyond other animals, look beyond television commercials that want you to be like everyone else, look beyond the forces among us that want us to be bipedal sheep. Our purpose is to be as good as we can be. To be better than other animals, we must not act like them. We must act differently from them. We must be superior to them, as we have the ability to be.

Superior doesn't mean forceful or powerful. That survival of the fittest and most powerful attitude pervades nature in all other animals.

If we have a purpose for existence, it's to be different. It's to help in ways that other forms of life can't even imagine.

That purpose, or evidence for it, is all around us.

Do not ask any more. Instead, do what you should to make a difference.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to know how and when to impart the important lessons of life to their children at the right time and in the right ways.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Who Is An Atheist?

Who Is An Atheist?

"Samuel [Champlain] has seen other men of the church become as this one: to them, their own insight becomes dogma. Indeed it seems a perversion common to all leadership..."
- The Order of Good Cheer, Bill Gaston novelist, House of Anansi Press, 2008

An atheist is someone who can't believe that something exists that is greater than himself and more mysterious than he can understand.

An agnostic is someone who suspects the atheist may be right, but is prepared to reserve judgment until he gets more evidence, though he usually isn't prepared to look for the evidence himself.

Which is the greater sinner?

Neither. The whole concept of sinning was invented by religions whose main purpose was and is to control the behaviour of their followers. Establishing "superhuman" control over who qualifies as a sinner and who is a devoted follower who toes the line with regard to all rules of behaviour is one of the most effective ways to control the lives of others.

What's wrong with being an atheist? For one thing, atheists are the objects of scorn and prejudice from those who profess to be religious. For another, atheists have no rules of conduct to break, so they can't feel guilt at sinning, as religious people do because virtually every one of them breaks their religion's code of conduct on a regular and frequent basis. The religionists can always console themselves that atheists are worse.

But are atheists terrible people? My experience with atheists is limited and the number of people I have spoken to about their personal experiences with atheists is relatively small, but atheists seem to be among the most spiritually healthy and morally and ethically straight and well balanced of all the people I have met in my life. In short, atheists stand among the most upright and civic minded people among us.

It is as morally wrong to hate or take action against atheists as it is to commit acts or speak prejudicially against people of a different skin colour, nationality or religion. Yet the most bigotted and prejudiced people are those strongly attached to their religion.

Atheist seem to say that "God doesn't exist." Yet what they really say is that the God that is portrayed by advocates of every religion ever created could not possibly exist. The God of the Christians, for example, is contradictory, indecisive, prejudicial, favours one group over others, brutal, aggressive and peace loving at once and vindictive, based on the Bible and Christian history. Atheists claim that doesn't make sense.

Religionists make no attempt to associate what we in the 21st century know about the mystical and miraculous with their explanation (definition) of God. The Church of Rome designates saints, for example, based on events it cannot explain by any other method than as "miracles" after the death of a well known good person. Yet don't try to find a non-Catholic among the saints, even though events of a miraculous nature occur in association with living and dead people who are not church members. How could the God of the Christians enact miracles through non-Christians if Christianity is the only means to salvation, as the Christians claim?

Religions began in the early days when humans gathered in small bands, then tribes. The religion of each tribe worked because it answered unanswerable questions. That situation in itself should be enough to tell everyone that the religion is or was fictitious. But it didn't and it doesn't today. Adherents are asked to "have faith" because the mysterious answers came through someone who claimed to have gotten them directly from God.

If claims such as those made by religions were made in television commercials, about any product or service other than something related to God, the advertisers would be stopped and possibly charged with making false and unsupportable claims. It's a crime, unless your claim has something to do with God.

The atheist says "This is wrong." The agnostic cries "Huh?"

While we try to expurgate prejudice from our societies, religions themselves are the sole sources and support systems for prejudice and bigotry. Each religion could easily eliminate prejudice from its teachings, but that would require it to admit that it is not superior to all other religions. Religions, like snake oil salesmen of the past, require their followers to believe that their product is the best, the only true, safe and superior one. This engenders and foments hatred and prejudice.

Religionists never ask atheists why they do not believe the precepts of a particular religion. More importantly, they never ask atheists what they do believe, as that would be risky since the atheists may well have an excellent reply to which the religionists cannot offer a defence or counter argument.

For all the majority of people know, atheists may be the most spiritually upstanding people in the community. Some atheists may even have a better explanation about what God is and the mystery of what we exist than the religions have offered.

But no one will ask an atheist what he or she believes. And if someone does, the religions will make sure that the atheist is socially ostracized and "unfortunately no longer employable." Historically, that's how it works. Remember the trials of the "witches" of Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692? The evidence, like the charges themselves, were totally fictitious. History abounds with similar and brutal examples.

The followers of every religion can give explanations for the same mysteries. They all believe these explanations equally strongly and fervently. Every religion is built on story upon story, each one created to give the teller power over the listener that he would not have otherwise. Those who make up the stories and those who retell them get paid for repeating them.

Unfortunately, reality is never allow to impinge itself on these stories, on these religions. Too bad, as the truth is so much more glorious and amazing than the religionists could imagine. Truth and reality have no major roles to play in religion. Religions ask their followers to have faith that the old stories are true, no matter how contradictory, how unsensible they are and how much evidence exists to disprove them.

We should not wonder that television has become such a powerful religious medium and its leaders such powerful manipulators of public belief.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children who have the knowledge and skills to avoid having their beliefs manipulated by skilled propagandists.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Can You Grasp Spirituality?

The further one grows spiritually, the more and more people one loves andthe fewer and fewer people one likes.
- Gale D. Webbe, clergyman and author (1909-2000)

It almost seems as if there is something missing from this quote, something additional that the person who captured the quote originally neglected to include.

But first let's consider the concept of spirituality. In this sense of the word, we generally agree that spirituality refers to the incorporeal, that which is not a material part of nature. Whether the supernatural part of spirituality could be pure energy or something entirely separate from our understanding of reality is debatable.

Mostly it's debatable because science tends to think of energy as something that may be harnessed to do work. Dark energy, a recently invented term to describe why the universe is apparently blowing apart faster than ever before, is accepted as energy because it's a force that is actually doing something. As God or the supernatural can't be proven by science to actually do anything (especially any kind of work), science disavows the supernatural as being pure energy.

Just because God or the supernatural can't be proven by science to do work does not mean that it doesn't exist, only that science cannot deal with it because it's beyond the realm and purview of science. Science works almost entirely within the proverbial "box" thinking. Anything that does not fall within the "walls" of the box does not exist and will not be considered seriously by science.

Spirituality, by its definition, includes something that is beyond matter and beyond the thinking box of science.

What does it mean, if a person has grown spiritually? It means something that people who insist upon living their lives within the box cannot understand. They can't even grasp the possibility or potential because--whether they realize it or not--they deny the possibility of existence beyond their box.

Imagine someone who has grown up living in one house. The person has never left that house, ever, in 35 years. All that person knows of the world is what he experiences in that house and what he sees out the windows. He comes to believe that what is inside the house is real, what he can see outside of the house may or may not be real (the way we think of movies), and what he may hear about what he cannot experience or see simply does not exist. It could not exist, he believes, because he has no way to comprehend existence beyond his experience and his senses.

Growing spiritually means experiencing beyond what box thinkers can conceive could be real. A person who has grown spiritually passes among people who have no grasp and who have had no inclination to understand or experience anything beyond the box walls of their lives. The spiritual person may love others in their life, recognizing them as part of the wholeness that is total existence. But he may find them hard to like because they are so simple, so limited, so ignorant.

A person who has grown so he or she has the ability to live in a spiritual existence will not dislike anyone. Yet they have no need to like others either. Does a grain of sand feel the need to like and be liked by other grains around it on a beach? The grain of sand, like the spiritual person, lives in a wholeness of everything, where sand, plants, animals, people and even the person himself is a component of the whole of existence.

We know that when plants and animals and people die, their bodies get recycled so the atoms that formed them become part of something else. We know that matter (stuff) can be changed into energy (such as by burning) and energy into matter (as proven by Einstein's famous equation). It's called the Law of Conservation. Nothing disappears, though it may change its form. What exists, continues to exist, whether as matter or as energy.

Box thinkers, non-spiritual people, believe the basic physics of this concept, but refuse to acknowledge its implications, its consequences for our lives and for all of existence through all of history. Is there nothing beyond matter and energy? If so, then there is nothing to you other than body cells and energy. That means nothing that is "you," no personality, no non-physical life, nothing that can form relationships with others. Could a cell of your body or potential energy within your gut form a relationship with other cells or other forms of energy within you or elsewhere? Most of us would say no, meaning that there is more to us than cells and energy.

Spiritual people live in two dimensions (or universes, if you will), one tangible and sentient, the other totally beyond the senses and understanding of box thinkers. Moreover, the latter is beyond the comprehension of themselves. Yet that lack of understanding, that intangibility, that failure to grasp is not frightening. It brings peace.

Spiritual people cannot help but love others, all others. They are not afraid of what they don't understand. After all, what they don't like or understand about the tangible world is only temporary, an existence in transition. What matters to them is real and does not change markedly. It's beyond understanding, outside the box.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to help their children understand the realities of the world and realities beyond their understanding, but still within their ability to experience.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/

The Big Bang: God's Answer To Boredom

When did God get bored with nothing and decide to create something?

Whether you believe any of the thousands of creation stories that have existed for millennia around the world or you prefer the utilitarian approach of science--it all happened by accident--the ever so popular, highly touted and taught-as-fact Big Bang theory was never satisfying for many people.

For so-called creationists, they wondered what the infinite, omnipotent, omniscient and everlasting God did before he spent that time building "what is." For Christian creationists, why would a creator do nothing for infinity before, then spend six days busily creating everything, followed by an endless amount of time trying to patch up what his most devilish creations messed up? That seems pretty lame, when you think about it.

And whose days were the six? Earth days? Earth is a tiny speck in a moderately sized galaxy among billions of galaxies, in one of a possibly incredibly high number of universes. Or were those God-days? God-days could be...infinitely long.

Why would an omnipotent deity need to rest on the seventh day? Why would he need to rest at all, ever?

Was it boredom that caused him to become a creator? Why did he create such an imperfect chief angel (the Devil) that decided to oppose him and become the spiritual father of every human being (see Hebrews in the Bible)?

For those who believe in a Godless creation, what "was" before the Big Bang? Why did it even happen?

Three theories have developed over the past few decades that may lend some credibility and understanding to the nothing-then-something event called the Big Bang.

The first was proposed by Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok, whose 199 theory was improved in 2004 to suggest that the whole of everything is cyclical. What we know as our universe is a "brane" (short for membrane) that is three dimensions floating in a four dimensional reality. (Imagine sheets of paper blowing in the wind to get an idea of the concept.)

Every once in a while, branes would collide. That, they claimed, was our Big Bang. What's more, our brane will collide with other branes again, though not likely soon.

The expansion of the universe is merely the early stages of the events following the explosion. When the universe gets thin enough, its components will find each other attractive again and come together. That whole cycle process should take about one trillion years. In other words, the time since the Big Bang is 0.1 percent of the time until the next cycle begins.

The second theory, proposed by Sean Carroll, suggests that time--especially the single direction of time, not going backwards--is the problem with previous theories. He says that time progresses more like the pendulum of a clock (that's my interpretation, he didn't use those words), moving one way, then the other. What we know as time is nothing more than the pendulum swinging one way.

Each time the pendulum (our universe in time) gets too far away from its position of equilibrium, it slows down then goes the other way. Time appears to reverse, though it's really just the pendulum swinging back toward its straight-down position. Then it goes out the other way.

The third theory, put forward by rebel physicist Julian Barbour in his book The End of Time, suggests that time is an illusion. There is no such thing as time.

Each moment we experience, he says, is like a snapshot. The past is nothing but imagined memory, with no more validity than an imagined future. Put many pictures together and you could flip them like a flipbook, giving the appearance of something happening, specifically the passage of time.

What's more, what we experience is but one snapshot in an infinite number of them in an infinite number of universes. Every possible scenario that could have happened since the Big Bang has happened in a flipbook in some universe, somewhere.

The Steinhardt-Turok theory may be tested as soon as 20 years, when technology allows scientists to study whether the waves left over from the big Bang look the way they would in the cyclic theory or like the ones that would be from the single Big Bang event. Apparently they will behave differently.

The Carroll theory may not be testable, unless we can live several billion more years to see time swing back toward the equilibrium.

The Barbour theory could never be tested because it would have to be tested in some time-oriented framework.

Barbour wants us to simply believe the theory he has worked so hard to develop for the past 40 years. Believe without testing? That sounds like religion, doesn't it?

In any event, if you have been uncomfortable with the Big Bang theory because it began from nothing, be assured that great thinkers are working to ease your mind.

Meanwhile, God must be chuckling.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents who want to teach their children what to believe and what to be suspicious about so that they have the opportunity to make up their own minds.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Attacking The Hypocrisy Of Science

There is a prospect greater than the sea, and it is the sky; there is a prospect greater than the sky, and it is the human soul.
- Victor Hugo (1802 - 1885), Les Misérables

It's impossible at this time to know what Victor Hugo meant by "the human soul." As many different concepts exist for it, it would be nearly impossible to find a consensus among any group of people no matter how small.

Let's put this quote into perspective. It's extremely difficult for anyone to have a workable grasp of the immensity that is the great ocean that comprises most of the surface of our planet. As a frontier of science, the ocean is still relatively unexplored territory. New (previously unknown) species of ocean dwellers are discovered through research every week, almost at the rate of one per day.

The quantity of water and life in the great ocean are beyond the comprehension of most people, if not all of us. At the bottom of the ocean lies more than three times as much land as humans have ever walked in all of history.

What is the sky? If you take a photo of it, or many photos to comprise a panoramic view of the sky, then assemble them into a contiguous whole, would that be enough to explain the sky? Of course not. The blue of the sky is merely a blue shift of white light coming from the sun. Beyond that are galaxies we can see at night, plus billions more galaxies we can't see, then maybe other universes beyond that.

That's not even considering other dimensions that may exist all around us, features of reality we can't sense but some people feel or experience from time to time. As the concepts of multiple universes and dimensions of space-time other than the one we perceive enter science through theories such as the string theories of physics, science is forced to accept that there may be existence beyond what they can detect with their equipment, that is little more than supersensitive versions of our own five senses.

Scientists exploring other galaxies with their telescopes and spacecraft tell us that planets far beyond ours may hold life. They don't want us to accept anything we may perceive as real if they can't prove its existence themselves, but they are quite prepared to propose that whole planets of life--some maybe with non-DNA-based life--probably exist beyond our present ability to detect. They use statistics as evidence, as if anyone with any sense of experience with the false and deceptive use of statistics would grant that any credibility.

Many scientists deny the existence of the human soul. They claim it's a figment of our brains, if it exists at all. They can even show what happens in our brains when what we call a soul is active. But, they believe, it's nothing more than our imaginations at work. Yet they want us to believe in other civilizations light years away and other dimensions of existence for which they have no evidence more than a vague theory with no proof in the works.

The trouble with our concept of the human soul is that far too many people have used their own versions of fictional concepts they made up to bilk many of us out of our money. Frauds and charlatans have existed almost as long as our species has. Many of them have purported to have knowledge of the human soul that the rest of us don't have. They don't, but we and our ancestors have paid good money to hear their stories anyway.

That doesn't mean that the human soul doesn't exist. Or, for that matter, that God doesn't exist. We all know that there are as many differing concepts of God as there are religions on the planet. That includes societies such as what we call the Roman Empire, that appointed their own Caesars as gods--they worshipped their emperor as a god.

That doesn't mean that God or the human soul doesn't exist. It means that most of us haven't the ability to detect them. We may pray to God, hoping that he exists, having been threatened with eternal damnation in Hell if we don't fall on our knees before the God that someone else tells us is the real God. But we can't be certain that the God we praise is real, any more than we can prove that unknown civilizations light years away are real, or different dimensions are real.

Or even that thought is real. Science can prove that something happens in various parts of the brain as we think and that different parts "light up" on their scopes as we do different kinds of thinking. But science has only proven that something has happened in the brain when we think. It has absolutely no concept of what thought is, at least nothing I consider workable.

The very scientists who are thinking about how to explain to us that things they can't prove don't exist can't prove that thought exists. By rights we should be able to claim that their thoughts are nothing more than activity of their imaginations.

So, what is the human soul? Nothing more or less than a part of God that is on loan to us while we inhabit these bodies of ours. We are all part of one great whole.

When our body dies, it gets recycled. Not an atom is lost when our body decomposes. It all becomes either part of other things composed of atoms (matter) or it becomes some form of energy. Just ask Einstein who explained it with his famous equation, e = mc2 No matter or energy are ever lost when a transfer or transformation happens. It's all part of a great whole.

Science can't explain energy either. They know energy exists because they have experienced it. So what can science offer to those of us who have experienced something beyond what even they can't comprehend?

Perhaps science should do what it tells us to do with thoughts about subjects we can't explain: shut up.

The human soul cannot be explained by science, so science should not have any right to make definitive pronouncements about it. Since the human soul is merely part of the greater whole we call God, it follows that science should have no say about God either. Science has no right to tell us that something we believe doesn't exist while it blithely accepts theories that propose the existence of things they can't prove; that would be hypocrisy.

I feel God within me. I can't explain that. I don't even have an interest in attempting to explain it or to prove it to anyone, let alone a doubter.

The doubters always make more noise than the believers who know they are right, who know what they feel within them. That doesn't make them right or those with greater perception and higher levels of consciousness wrong.

It only shows their ignorance and inability to tolerate thoughts that go beyond what they can comprehend. They are bigots with white coats.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to teach their children truths before the charlatans get at them. or to make corrections if they have.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Listening For God

The highest level of prayer is not prayer for anything. It is a deep and profound silence, in which we allow ourselves to be still and know him. In that silence, we are changed. We are calmed. We are illumined.
- Marianne Williamson, inspirational author and speaker (b. 1952)

In my experience, prayer is a mystery for most people. Many know why they pray and their objectives for doing so, but don't know what to expect in return.

A good friend, a Christian with fundamentalist beliefs, claims that we should pray for things, whether these be things we want to receive or events we want to happen. Thinking back over the many years I have known him, he may be right. He seems to have received what he asked for.

I don't ask for anything when I pray. I pray, as Marianne Williamson does, in deep and profound silence. I don't talk, I listen.

Listening may be the most underrated human skill. As I don't read quickly, having an information processing impairment in my brain, I learn as much as I can by listening to others who know.

People like to be listened to. If I seem to be absorbing what they say and continue to pay attention as they speak, they think I'm a good guy, someone worth knowing.

People ask such penetrating questions as Does God Really exist? What can God do for me? Why am I here? What is my mission in life? How can there be a God when such bad things happen in the world?

They ask. They Ask. They ask. But they don't listen for answers.

The Bible says that God created humankind in his own image. It would be more accurate to say that humankind created their God in their own image. What's more, their God seldom does what they tell him to do. Which is why he disappoints so many people.

If God is an ethereal being, comprised of neither matter nor energy, how might we expect that God could communicate with us? Could he communicate in words, as some say? Don't we claim that people who hear voices in their heads have psychiatric disorders? Or is it only a mental problem when the voices don't come from God?

It makes sense that God can only communicate with us in a manner that is different from the way our fellow humans converse with us. If he communicated with us in the same way as other people, he would surely be a man-made God. That doesn't make sense, unless you are a religious leader who wants others to follow him because he communes directly with the deity. There's a lot of that going around.

It makes sense to me that if we want to know what God has in mind for us, we should place ourselves in a context that is natural, not in a structure built by men. And we should open our minds to what the natural environment offers to us.

When I do that, flushing the effects of human creations from my mind, I can breathe in such energy that I can't explain it. The same breath in my home or a store or church is nothing more than a deep breath. When the context and environment are right, I become more than an individual person with each breath. I become part of a universal whole where I see everything tied together with unseen and unexplainable bonds. Everything in a unity.

I also feel love unlike anything I have experienced elsewhere. So abundant is that love within me that I feel it necessary to share it with others. As I must communicate with others differently than I do with God, I offer it to those who want to share with me. I offer love with words, but also with smiles and touch. A simple touch, such as shaking hands or touching a shoulder or arm while speaking. Sometimes a hug is what's needed.

Does it work? Do I make a difference by sharing my love with others? I can only say that only those who are hardened of heart leave my presence without feeling better than when we met.
That seems like reason enough as a purpose in life.

I do more. I share with you, whom I cannot see. I leave it to you to accept my offering and to learn how to accept the love on your own.

Look for it in deep and profound silence. Listen. It may take a while for you to learn how to hear. When you do, breathe in deeply. Do it again and again, as you will want to. It will be exciting, exhilarating.

Then share your abundance with those who need what they don't have.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book about how to share the important lessons of life with children so they may lead full and happy lives as adults.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

God Is A Fraud

I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of hiscreation, whose purposes are modeled after our own -- a God, in short, whois but a reflection of human frailty.
-Albert Einstein, physicist, Nobel laureate (1879-1955)

In my search for God over the past several decades I have concluded that evidence exists all over our planet that the deity people have tried to teach me about is a fraud.

I have also concluded that people who believe in their God do so fervently. Even those who have doubts will firm their beliefs up quickly if someone presents a formidable argument that God is a myth invented by needy people and hucksters who want to make money off gullible believers. Nothing confirms the belief in God by doubters more than finding someone who bad mouths the God they aren't sure about.

Two problems present themselves forcibly to my mind that suggest that God--the God of religions, whichever one that may be-- is nothing more than a convenient invention. First is that those who most strenuously preach the rules of their religion--those who dictate what is sin and what is not--tend to be sinners against their own rules when the facade is torn away. The hypocrisy of the legislators of sin being devout sinners under the skin repels me.

The second problem I have with the concepts of God that many people hold is the contradiction and hypocrisy of the believers. The hypocrisy part is similar to the legislators of sin being sinners themselves, only this latter example involves the practitioners of the religion rather than it leaders. They simply don't follow the rules they supposedly subscribe to.

Contradictions abound in the monotheistic religions. God is a vengeful God, but he wants us to be peaceful. God is a peaceful God until he wants his followers to go to war and to die if necessary to defend the faith. Defend it from what is never spoken, never asked, never answered, because faith cannot be killed unless every last believer is annihilated.

Some say that God punishes sinners for every sinful act they commit. The same believers will claim that their own particular sins are forgiven because Jesus (or some other prophet) died that their sins may be forgiven. Convenient.

Some actually believe (and can quote Revelations as evidence) that they can sin abundantly for their whole lives, then repent and be saved on their deathbeds and still be admitted into heaven.
Even the concept of heaven is absurdly contradictory. To Christians heaven is a place of eternal bliss, usually only available to devout and pure Christians, and sometimes their beloved pets.

The Christian heaven is as boring as I could imagine, surely a kind of hell itself where every bit of intellectual strength I have gained throughout my life will be lost through atrophy because the inmates have nothing to think about.

The Muslim heaven must be populated by an uncountable number of prostitutes because Muslim suicide bombers are promised 72 of them each when they reach the Pearly Gates. Female bombers, by the way, are greeted by male prostitutes. Islam is not consistent about whether these prostitutes are created by Allah just in time for the arrival of a new bomber or whether they were once occupants of terra firma.

Judaism spends so little time on the concept of heaven that many Jews are not clear about what heaven is. Jews are supposed to focus on being good on earth and leave important stuff like the afterlife to God. This would seem to work except for the fact that Jewish intellectuals and students spend countless hours debating how to interpret the words of their holy books. How can everyone follow what is debated so ferociously?

The point here, as stated in Einstein's quote, is that people have invented their respective God with human characteristics. Step back from that a moment and consider the absurdity. Believers agree that God is perfect, but present evidence in holy books that God has as many failures and foibles as any foolish human.

Atheists have disavowed anything to do with God or the religions that invented God. Yet it's not God they don't believe exists, but the contradictory, hypocritical and nonsensical God that devout believers believe in. What atheists don't believe exists is the God that religions have invented.

Interestingly, my personal experience and that of many others I have spoken to on the subject suggests that atheists tend to live more wholesome and beneficial lives than religionists who believe the atheists are sinners.

Every religion has some good in it. Every devout believer also has some good. The evidence for these conclusions is easy to see if we remove our prejudicial spectacles.

What most people who claim to believe in God seem to miss is the evidence for God that exists all around them. That kind of evidence would stand up in a court of law if the challenge were to show evidence beyond doubt.

Now you would like me to deliver that evidence into your waiting hands.

Open your eyes. Open your ears. Resensitize your taste, touch and smell.

Begin to pay real attention to real events that can't be proven by science but for which an abundance of evidence exists. Some of it in book form. Just look for it. Believing or concluding anything from a position of ignorance doesn't make sense.

Learn about life, especially in its finest detail. The more you learn about life, especially how systems relate to each other within one larger system (a human body, a plant or anything in the physical world) the more you must ask yourself if this all could have happened by accident.

Godless evolutionists claim that everything that happens can be explained by laws of nature. Not a single one of them will attempt to explain why those laws exist or how they happen to fit together so immaculately well. There is no more reason for natural laws to exist than for matter and energy to exist. Natural laws don't prove anything, they only explain phenomena.

Every single thing that we know exists continues to exist even when it transforms. That is, energy can become mass or can change to another form of energy, but it never disappears. Your body will transform when it dies. No physical part of it will disappear, ever.

Are you thinking about this? Do you have a personality? Can anything you know about the physics of the human body explain either the ability to think rationally or the existence of personality? Only by stretching reality into the realm of mythology or fantasy.

One natural law is conservation. Just as mass and energy can never disappear (nor can dark matter or dark energy, so far as anyone knows), so too the personality that became you cannot disappear just because your body wears out and transforms.

No one can even say for certain that your thoughts happen within your brain, though some electrical activity certainly happens there when you think. Electricity travels around the outside of an electrical wire, not through it. Nature has an energy travelling beside (outside of) mass, not inside of it.

Is it impossible to imagine that the personality that is you exists beyond the limits of your skin and clothing? Have you not felt sometimes that someone was staring at you from behind. Can you not sometimes feel the presence of someone in a room? Have you ever expected someone to call you, then the phone rings and that person speaks? Nothing in natural law can explain those phenomena that most people have experienced.

It's hard to imagine that your personality may be defined 100 percent within the confines of your body, and its activity can be accounted for by the actions of your muscles, nerves and brain.
If you want to find God, don't look in a book or listen to someone tell you their version of God.

You can find God yourself. Just don't look to someone who stands to make a profit by convincing you of something to explain God to you. That's a conflict of interest.

Look and learn. The more you learn, the more God will reveal himself to you.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book for adults to learn how they came to have the personalities they have and to help parents and teachers teach children what they need to develop fully in all ways.
Learn more at http://billallin.com