The worst thing about my viewing the innards of NewAge beliefs is discovering it's inherent lethality. The fist in the velvet glove. How they'll say it's all about peace and love and whatever in public but between each other talk about "washing away" those they don't like - and working, always behind our backs, to do just that.My ex-wife (whether she knows it or not) was sexually abused, my mother-in-law was killed, and now I'm divorced and lost. I know I'm not alone. And I see society as complicit. Rhonda Byrne's "secret" is ripping off people and running away with millions and the response is muted at best. Louise Hay openly says she doesn't give a damn about right or wrong and knows she's inflicting lying charlatans, like Sylvia Browne, on the public - with the backing of PBS which supports her crap and that of others like Scientology - and nobody says a word in disagreement. Montel Williams helps out too. Oprah Winfrey leads an army of wealthy NewAge liars, and she's protected by the same generation of journalists who decided the American public needed to know about every NewAge idiot in the world - except the one John Edwards was doing - and everyone from The New York Times to The Huffington Post to The Daily Kos to Wikipedia was in on keeping what Edwards was doing from us all. Why? And exactly who all is in on it?
If we know they don't have our best interests at heart (and we do) then why does anyone else play along? To the point where they can run Barack Obama for president, with the phenomena of the "Cult of Obama" acknowledged in his run, and everybody acts like it's all so normal to witness cults in American politics and nobody bothers to investigate it. Of course not: the last time anybody decided to seriously investigate the cults in our politics, 900 Americans got killed, and all the cult's supporting politicians stayed in power.
Madonna's promoting Kabbalah, and more, with her network of friends? Why? Tom Cruise and Scientology - "the world's most dangerous cult"? Oprah leads seminars, with a schizophrenic fruitcake, on "The Power of Now" and nobody's curious as to why we have this? Rielle Hunter has no feelings for a woman dying of cancer and nobody gives a damn what kind of beliefs produce such people? Suzanne Summers ghoulishly tries to talk Christina Applegate out of cancer treatment? Louise Hay, the "mother of NewAge," says people who die in mass deserved it? Many in the Democratic Party want to be a "citizen of the world" while standing in opposition to American interests, all the while rattling on about "I'm trying to save the planet," when they took an oath to look out for the United States - and they do it to the lightest questioning from reporters in my lifetime.
Who are these people and what are they really doing to us? Who are these "journalists" that would willingly avoid such a huge story? And the most important question is the one I'm going to keep asking of my fellow Americans until my black ass gets a straight and satisfying answer:
What's wrong with you people?
There is general agreement among cognitive scientists that a propensity to follow religions evolved early in human history. However, there is disagreement on the exact mechanisms that drove the evolution of the religious mind. There are two schools of thought.
ReplyDeleteOne is that religion evolved due to natural selection, in which case religion conferred some sort of evolutionary advantage. This view finds some support in the extensive studies that show positive associations between religious practice and health and longevity. Proponents of this view include David Sloan Wilson.
The other hypothesis posits that religion is an evolutionary byproduct, a neurological accident. Stephen Jay Gould was a proponent of this hypothesis. He believed that religion was an exaptation or a Spandrel. That is religion evolved as byproduct of psychological mechanisms that evolved on the basis of conferring other evolutionary benefits, but confers no particular benefit on its followers.
I hate to echo the NewAgers I've met but:
ReplyDeleteI don't care.
I'm done.
I see - your question was rhetorical.
ReplyDeleteNo, not really - and I apologize: I'm not having a good day.
ReplyDeleteI don't think that answer is sufficient in 2008: We know better - or have the capacity to know better. Plots are being hatched, people are being killed, money is changing hands, and lives are being destroyed. And nobody says anything? It doesn't add up in the modern era.
The problem is that journalists in the US have gone soft on both sides. Bush jr is largely responsible for this as the only person with the courage to stand up in a press conference and ask the obvious question: "Why are you taking us to war?" received a non-answer and (literally) got sent to the back of the room.
ReplyDeleteNow Helen Thomas has been covering Presidents, Democrat and Republican, for forty years so if she says there's something wrong, I listen. Transparency cuts both ways and I'm hoping whoever gets in next time will be as honest and open as possible with any decision affecting the people at large. It would make a change.
The other problem in dealing with New Age duplicity is that existing religious bodies have caused this situation by demanding special treatment: no taxes on church profits, erosion of the separation of Church and State.
Old Religion has to be depowered first. Otherwise it's open slather.
Please stop, dude: Bush had nothing to do with the lousy coverage in the country; it's a generational shift with the youngsters buying into too much NewAge bullshit regarding relativism and looking objective when it's not called for. As a liberal told me: you pass judgment and you're an asshole. Well, you're also an idiot if you can't tell good from bad, too.
ReplyDeleteHelen Thomas has been around a long time, but she's also a liberal, so why anyone would trust her without taking her biases into account is beyond me. I mean, they keep losing elections for some reason - and it's not brainwashing at work, that's for sure. (You're not going to flash "change" in front of a group of Republicans and think they'll mistake it for a platform.) I don't care about transparency but intelligence and,...well, more intelligence.
I don't think you, or even most liberals in American, understand religion in this country: it's not like they're the new players on the scene. Even being an atheist, I understand it as part of the fabric of the country. That's why they don't bother me as much as the NewAgers, Pagans, etc. They're the ones who don't give a damn, are openly (and overly) hostile, and spend their time lying for whatever ends they're trying to attain. You can't blame churches for that. Blame the fact they've never made a difference, and that frustrates them enough to repeatedly act out, to over-reach, and to fuck up - repeatedly. They are the biggest problem because they're unchecked, subversive, and full of hate for those they force to gather against them because they refuse to tell the truth about their intentions, which are always self-serving, no matter what they say. The same old wine in a new bottle. Historically, they're humanity's weakest links, which makes them dangerous to everybody else.
Except you of course: they're "your people." (LOL)
"my people" aren't liberal or New Age, but that fact aside, saying "you're an idiot if you can't tell good from bad" just makes no sense in this context. I seem to be able to discern a difference between the two, and back up my assertions, with considerably greater veracity than a certain man of integrity.
ReplyDeleteAs long as you keep on this partisan stance you fail to see the real value or virtue in anything including your own side. I don't care if Helen Thomas is a liberal, or a Patagonian mudshark, I care whether her concerns have merit, and if they do, what the practical implications are.
If you were so concerned about standards of good and bad, then you'd do a better job of addressing your critics. I see no shortage of bad on the Right but if you're going to gloss it over then you're no use to anyone either.
And sorry, but I could sit all day and point to religious charlatans, liars, sex cheats, pedophiles, thieves, and corrupt and dishonest bastards operating from within the Church. To let them off with a pass because they're 'an established part of the nation' is taking favouritism to an absurd level.
It's just business as usual. You may as well complain that the sky is blue.
ReplyDeleteThe technologies of mind control are as old as `civilization' itself. The interesting thing is that even when the mechanism of the technology is no longer an occult secret of the socially elite but open for those as care to look, it still works perfectly.
You can fool some of the people some of the time and that's all it takes in any society.
Yea, I've considered that; thinking my intimacy and shock (from the death included) is what gets to me more than others. But intellectualizing it doesn't make it any less creepy. Nor does it mean we shouldn't talk about this stuff especially. People are using it, and it's working: discuss.
ReplyDeleteI couldn't have confidently predicted back in January that John McCain will win in a landslide, despite what I think of as the NewAger's best efforts, without telegraphing A) I think I know my country pretty darn well and B) I think the fundamentals of America are sound. But damn it, if this era and election - what we're witnessing right now featuring Bill and Hillary and Al Gore and Oprah and Obama and Gavin Newsom with Nancy Pelosi just "trying to save the planet" mixed with Scientology and est and "Head-On" - if this isn't a perfect storm to note the results these other so-called metaphysical streams flowing through our political discourse present, then when and where is it?
Donning my conspiracy theory hat, which I'm quite comfortable with, I think it goes back to Eisenhower's valedictory speech. The Military-Industrial Complex. A major part of the budget of the CIA is for film and video production. They aren't making training films. These New Age and Green movements are well-funded by big foundations with commercial and government backing. If it isn't an actual control system (which I think it is) it's an ambitious on-going government-sponsored experiment that is being done without any real regard for the consequences for most of humanity.
ReplyDeletePolitical elites perceive most of the people as `useless eaters.' Just check out the scholarly articles and books published about howto `fight' the Cold War and `preserve human civilization' in the face of an all-out nuclear exchange if you don't believe me.
Unfortunately, it seems to me, once you peer behind the curtain it's hard for a sane man, who isn't a psychopath or terminally narcissistic, to keep a grip on his sanity.