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Devout Atheism

Posted by Roberta Grimes • May 15, 2021 • 46 Comments
The Source, Understanding Reality

Little darling, I feel that ice is slowly melting.
Little darling, it seems like years since it’s been clear.
Here comes the sun, here comes the sun,
And I say it’s all right!
– George Harrison (1943-2001), from “Here Comes the Sun” (1969)

A religion is a system of beliefs based in human ideas about what underlies reality. And by that definition, the most pervasive and destructive religion of all is whatever has become of mainstream science! To be frank, this is a problem so obvious, so destructive, and so central to everything that is going wrong in the modern world that the fact that we seem to be almost the only ones who are noticing it makes me feel like the little boy in the tale of the emperor’s new clothes. Academic scientists parade around in white coats with test tubes in their pockets and continue to assure us that very soon they are going to make progress on our most basic questions, even though it is ever more obvious to anyone who is paying attention that the entire profession of non-medical scientific research mostly stalled out a century ago.

Part of the problem is that the field of scientific inquiry is less hungry than it once was. There were so many world-changing breakthroughs in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that even now, a century later, broad societal respect and abundant funds with which to generate more breakthrough discoveries continue to flow into scientific fields that at this point really are not doing much. Nothing radically new and transformative has been produced by mainstream scientific research since Max Planck won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1918 for his work in quantum mechanics, and then Albert Einstein won the same prize in 1921, essentially for being Einstein. By now, the scientific community is reduced to trumpeting “discoveries” as irrelevant as stardust older than our solar system, and “advances” as tangential as better methods of gene-editing.

Another part of the problem with modern science is mission-creep. We have come to see science as so reliably productive of an ever-better way of life that we think it would be useful to apply its processes to just about everything. A recent article in The Atlantic calls for “a new science of progress,” saying that “Progress itself is understudied. By ‘progress,’ we mean the combination of economic, technological, scientific, cultural, and organizational advancement that has transformed our lives and raised standards of living over the past couple of centuries. For a number of reasons, there is no broad-based intellectual movement focused on understanding the dynamics of progress, or targeting the deeper goal of speeding it up. We believe that it deserves a dedicated field of study. We suggest inaugurating the discipline of ‘Progress Studies.’” Boy, talk about suffering an abject loss of focus on what should be the scientific mission!

But the primary problem with science in the twenty-first century is that, like every other religion, it is intellectually frozen in time. It reminds me of Spiritualism, which is a branch of Christianity based in communicating with the dead that was on the religious cutting edge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Spiritualism still exists, but to attend a service and sing traditional Christian hymns with altered lyrics from hundred-year-old hymnals feels like stepping back a century in time.

Science has since the early part of the twentieth century been little more than the dead-end religion of atheism. With forty thousand versions of Christianity now fostering belief in their various versions of the Christian God, it is not surprising that a religion would be trumpeting its belief in what we might call “no-God.” Not surprising at all, but still a tragic diminishment of the once-proud field of scientific inquiry.

Mainstream scientific research is governed by the belief that all of reality is material, and that reality therefore can be fully studied and entirely understood using only methods designed to study what are exclusively material processes. I assume your jaw dropped when you read that sentence! By now, it has been pretty conclusively established that even what we think of as “matter” is not solid in any reasonable sense, and such early-twentieth-century scientific stars as Albert Einstein and Max Planck knew and said that matter is illusory, that matter is energy, and that matter has an underlying non-material matrix that ought to be studied. But to this day, those who control the funding for scientific research continue to enforce the matter-based assumption that consciousness is produced by the brain! To read articles about the search for a source of consciousness in the human brain that still are being published in prestigious scientific journals almost a quarter of the way through the twenty-first century can make you laugh and cry simultaneously. For example, here is an actual pair of sentences from an article published in Nature only three years ago: “What is it about a highly excitable piece of brain matter that gives rise to consciousness? Once we can understand that, we hope to get closer to solving the more fundamental problem.” Actually, there are a host of “more fundamental” problems that will never be solved until mainstream science stops its absurd insistence on the dead-end dogma of materialist atheism. As we will shortly see!

Meanwhile, we just ought to note that there was a chance at the turn of the twentieth century for science to establish and assert a modern commitment to the open-minded pursuit of the truth. I noticed early in my afterlife research this odd refusal  by anyone with scientific credentials to even look at the excellent communications from the dead that were being received early in the twentieth century through physical mediums and documented and published by serious researchers. I investigated further – this was decades ago – and I discovered that the university science departments and the peer-reviewed scientific journals had begun soon after the start of the twentieth century to enforce what they were then calling “the scientific dogma of materialism.” This was not a new idea. In fact, the absurd notion that what is material and what is not material can be separately studied goes back all the way to Plato and Aristotle; but even after more than two thousand years, at the start of the twentieth century that odd dichotomy was still informal. It was only then that the scientific gatekeepers announced and began to rigidly enforce a dogma that was fully as nonsensical as putting scientific consideration of rock-formation off limits, or barring scientific investigation of any phenomenon associated with the color blue. Speculation is that it was the shock of physicists’ discovery that they now had quantum physics to contend with that made them feel forced to concentrate on materialism. Personally, I think it was a worry that they might inadvertently find the Christian God. But in fact, there never was the slightest justification for the scientific community to in any way limit what it was willing to investigate in the reality that it  professed to be thoroughly studying!  

The result of that foolish century-old decision to limit what scientists can professionally believe has led to a mostly wasted scientific century. Think of all the effort that has been stupidly spent on seeking a source of consciousness inside the brain! And consider all the basic research and the endless speculation that has been invested in making sense of ideas that never will make any sense because they are based in nonsense. For example, here are just three of many core areas of research that can never be productive in a thousand years until the mainstream scientific gatekeepers turn modern science into what it always should have been: an open-minded search for the truth.

  • The origin and nature of life. Most research being done in this field is laughable. The plain fact is that for life to begin and be sustained in even the simplest organism would require so many different fortuitous developments that have no other purpose that no materialist scientific theory ever will get us there.
  • The true origin of the universe. The notion of a Big Bang might comfort us with the thought that we have learned something important, but in fact it tells us little. We still don’t know what existed before the Big Bang, nor where whatever that was came from, nor what caused it to explode in the first place.
  • A Theory of Everything. The current standard model of particle physics, Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, and Max Planck’s quantum mechanics are all well-studied and demonstrated, and they also are in some ways incompatible with one another. Since of course this makes no sense, the search for what must unite them is underway! And so far, it has turned up goose-eggs.

The sorry religion of atheism, which is what mainstream science has been for a century, is as useless as was the long-ago worship of Moloch. Sacrificing first-born babies won’t make us any more divinely favored. And taking care to make sure that, whatever research we do, we never are going to find a Christian God is an exercise in useless silliness.

Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) was a Dominican friar and revered Medieval thinker. In his most prominent work, the Summa Theologica, Aquinas said, “Nothing is caused by itself. Every effect has a prior cause. This leads to a regress. This has to be terminated by a first cause, which we call God.” Every religion seeks to find that uncaused cause, and then it worships whatever it finds. For the religion of atheism that is modern science, the declared answer is that there is no “uncaused cause,” so everything that exists has happened randomly. And you and I know that notion is completely ridiculous on its face!

Here comes the sun, Here comes the sun,
And I say it’s all right.
Little darling, it’s been a long cold lonely winter.
Little darling, it seems like years since it’s been here.
Here comes the sun!
– George Harrison (1943-2001), from “Here Comes the Sun” (1969)

Pigeon collisions photo credit: FotoGrazio <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/94075184@N00/48922186542”>Pigeons collisions</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Roberta Grimes
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46 thoughts on “Devout Atheism

    1. Dear Scott, you’ve really made me smile! I wish I had been the clever one, but of course it was Thomas. When I wanted to use that birds-up-in-the-air photo to symbolize the state of mainstream science, he immediately wanted to make that one of crows arguing the final photo. Of course, he likely knew from the start how the article was going to end, as I did not; and he is smiling now at your perceptiveness and my thickness!

  1. It’s ironic that so many of todays Scientists are still unwilling to consider the WHOLE PICTURE – and that means ignoring a lot of evidence that “A Higher Power,’ is behind everything and has always existed! I do believe this trend is gradually going to change as more and more realize OUR GOD CONNECTION ALL ALONG! It’s what they’ve been calling spooky physics! LOL!

    1. Dear Jenny, it really is amazing, isn’t it? But they remain terrified of finding anything spiritual at all; perhaps this generation is more afraid of that than even any previous scientific generation. By now, a whole century of essentially no major scientific discoveries is in the history books! They likely expect that for them to abandon the dogma now would make them look even more ridiculous than they already have come to look!

  2. Fully agree with your despair about the pretense of modern materialistic science to having the ability to find ultimate truths, such as the nature of Creation and the nature of c0nsciousness. In my own research on these two fundamental topics over the past decade, as mentioned before, I was forced to the conclusion that science based on materialism is in principle incapable of objectively researching Creation and consciousness (the Principal of Interior Unknowability). The reason is that science properly requires an independent observer (the observer must be separate and apart from what is observed to attain a clear picture and understanding of what is being observed), but we cannot in principle site an observer who would be separate from our world to observe its formation; likewise, because we have an immaterial consciousness that functions in a universal field of consciousness, we cannot extract our personal consciousness from itself to observe it and the field of consciousness it which it operates. We are however familiar with how consciousness operates by self reflection (which is ruled out by formal science as a method producing merely anecdotal or unreliable reports). Thus, material science is incapable of directly addressing the nature of Creation and the nature of consciousness.

    1. Dr. Hiller: This makes perfect sense to me (if I’m understandng this correctly) because if science requires an independent observer that is separate and apart from what is being observed, then it wouldn’t be possible because the observer and that being observed are both part of the universal consciousness, and no such thing as a separate observer could exist to explain anything from a materialistic point of view.

        1. I read the summary and wondered that since time does not run in the 2nd domain, wouldn’t that mean that there is no such thing as time? – especially since time is defined as past, present and future? Could it be that it doesn’t exist in our domain either and that we merely invented it in order to live here more meaningfully?

          1. Dear Lola, there is indeed no such thing as objective time, nor is there any such thing as objective space (or distance). In this material reality, matter and energy are correlates of one another, and apparently in the same way time and space are related. Neither pairing, though, must of necessity be real, I gather, which is why in quantum mechanics we get what Einstein called “spooky actions at a distance”: widely separated particles can instantly affect one another. And I am the last person who should be talking about any of this, since I am a physics nitwit!

            But no, “we” while in human form didn’t invent any of these principles, and we didn’t invent linear time. When the Godhead invented this material universe as a place where our minds couldn’t mess with our environment as they do in the greater reality, linear time was just a part of that mix.

          2. Lolo, you raise a good question, one that I have wrestled with for years. While I claim no channeling, I would acknowledge that when writing on such philosophic issues, at times I get ideas, and so rapidly, it appears that there is guidance involved.

            Here is what I have sorted out (and explain at length in my ebook). Time runs here, just as we experience it. Given our mechanistic, if flesh, brain, we cold not cope with happenings, events flowing from past, thru the present now without them being sorted on a time line; without that sorting, we would experience an unfathomable jumble. However, the Out of Body Experience reports are unanimous that their spirit does not experience a flow of time, but yet the are able to comprehend the past and present (and to some extent the future, although it’s fuzzy, as it may change from what was forming) all together. The way I have conceptualized the nature of time in spirit is that there is only an eternal now, but events are yet sorted, but not by time running as we experience it, but by different location. As an example of how this can work, consider that a road extending from an infinite past to an infinite future exists, and you place a ladder at the present NOW point. From an observation you can make on top of the ladder, you can simultaneously see segments of the immediate past, NOW, and the future all together, and without confusion, because they are sorted out in different locations on the road. This time is frozen, and that’s what I therefore named my theory, Frozen Time.

    2. Dear Jack, I can see your point! I’m not sure how we even would approach topics like creation and consciousness from a materialist viewpoint; and as I think about how we might do that, I realize that literally nothing can be satisfactorily understood if we insist on materialist blinders. And why do materialists accept and study invisible energy? How is invisible energy in principle different at all from invisible consciousness?

      The core problem seems to me to be that literally anything that you set out to study could have one or more non-physical-seeming aspects, so if you refuse to know about those, you have no way really to make sense of anything! Try studying an electric blender while refusing to even know about electricity. Or the behavior of a flag without knowing about air. You are right – materialism is stupid on a level even deeper than I had heretofore imagined!

      1. Dr. Hiller: Does your frozen time theory mean that the events you see from the ladder still exist? It would seem that they do or otherwise they would be gone and it would no longer be possible to perceive them. I guess what I’m wondering is can we view the past in the spiritual world? Can we view the events that happened in history in what we call the past? I had heard that we could, but it sounded fanciful, but with the Frozen Time Theory, it sounds a lot more possible

        1. Lola, Great question, and one that I can only guess about.
          Let’s consider the life reviews that are given to some (20%) of the folks who have NDEs. They are placed into an immersive environment in which they re-experience what the had been doing and thinking–and also the impacts of their behavior on the thought and feeling of those impacted. It seems from this that their is a very high fidelity recording made as evets “progress” thru NOW. These recordings made be located along the road of time or by willfully “dialing” in to them. So, there is a high fidelity residual or recording of the past. To say if this recording is equivalent to the events recorded, or just a recording, is beyond by intuition as well as my limited knowledge.

          1. Dear Jack, I agree with your analysis of our life-reviews, which actually happen for everyone after actual physical death. They seem to be as accurate as if a film strip exists of our entire life, although what is replayed is primarily emotions – and it is the emotions of the others in every situation that are most prominent. What is amazing, though, is how fast they happen! It took you a lifetime to get through all those events, but in your life-review held in a place without time they seem to happen in only minutes.

            But life-reviews are personal. I am becoming steadily more convinced that our shared past in this material world is in fact a part of an ongoing creation and is constantly being enriched for us as we become more sophisticated in our approach to it. The past is therefore not fixed at all, but rather it is as changeable as the future. Even here, and although our earth-minds are too puny to make sense of it at all, the only time is no-time. All that ever exists is Now.

          2. If your life is “recorded,” then every little thing we say and do is documented in some way. The problem with this is that most of it would be incredibly boring. I wonder who or what is doing the “recording” and how they separate important events from unimportant ones. For instance, who cares if somebody is watching re-runs of some mindless TV show?

            Roberta’s Response:

            I don’t know this for certain, but it seems to be the strength of the emotions that we generate in other people – whether positive or negative – that determine whether some event in our lives is prominent in our life-review. Good question!

          3. Thank you Dr Hiller. Your “Frozen Time” theory seems like the answer to the question I asked 2 or 3 weeks back regarding what I tried, clumsily since the vocabulary doesn’t really exist, to couch as space/time versus time/space. If space is frozen while time flows on this side, and time is indeed frozen on the other side as you theorize, if I’m understanding you correctly, I wonder if that means space flows on the other side. Or maybe we should just stick with the idea of both time and space as illusory? I don’t know. It’s pretty mind bending to contemplate 🤪

  3. Your post comes at the best possible time for me personally. I have read about 80% of “Quantum Enigma”, and was thinking that I needed a greater background in physics to understand where the connection was. I refused to put the book down, and a dim light began to get brighter. I was thinking that it may be one of my greatest reads, when low and behold your article pops up!
    I thing everyone should read this book and your post to get an understanding of materialism vs. spiritualism . Thank you Roberta!!

    1. David, QM suffers from having adopted the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and the Copenhagen Interpretation that matter as particles does not have a definite, real existence until the energy of observation transforms their randomly hazy existence into real entities. Einstein had objected to this perspective, but lost the argument in physics. His EPR Paradox paper asserted that QM must be incompletely formulated or was in error, because it led to instantaneous “spooky action at a distance.” The the Aspect type of experiments appeared to demonstrate that QM was fine, and Einstein was wrong. However, the development of “weak” particle measurement has provided solid evidence that Einstein’s intuition was correct and Heisenberg and Bohr were wrong. Quantum entanglement occurs when the entangled particles are created, so there is no role for any instantaneous spooky action at a distance. Superposition states thus do not exist; the Schrodinger cat is either alive or dead, not both, and the multiple worlds hypothesis is falsified. You can read about this in my published paper ( https://jcer.com/index.php/jcj/article/view/934 ).

      1. Dear Jack, you are so much more intellectual about this than I am! The rules of physics apply only in this material universe, while everywhere else things are indeed created by Mind directly, there is no actual distance between any two points – no matter how far apart they seem to be – and the double-slit experiment that shows consciousness making particles and waves makes perfect sense!

        To my mind, none of this is about particles and how they might interact with one another. Particles are not solid if you examine them closely enough, so how are they even particles at all? This material universe makes up less than five percent of what the scientific community tells us actually exists, and to make it much harder for our minds to mess with the “matter” here it is made to contain all these tiny and widely-spaces vortices of energy. In the more than 95% of reality that is not material, there still is solid “matter,” but it is not composed of particles and apparently once our minds are reasonably well developed we can “think” it into and out of solid and stable existence (which is how nearly all buildings are built in the Summerland).

        I guess that when you reason from the perspective of the greater reality, material physics really seems to be beside the point!

        1. Dear Roberta, your comment here is most interesting. About three days ago, as I was going to sleep, it occurred to me that there is a really interesting question about why matter was created with a large variety of tiny (compared to our physical size) particles that are really forms of energy, instead of a few “blocks” of solid matter (even if convertible to energy). So, it was interesting to see you speaking of blocks of matter. Re dark energy and dark matter, their presence has been inferred to account otherwise inexplicable movements of stars and galaxies. But “dark” is a cover for the true state of this influence and really translates to “inexplicable.”

          1. I heard that dark matter makes up most of the universe, but no one knows what it is. Views from the Hubble telescope didn’t result in any real answers. One of the newest theories is that dwarf stars that no longer give out light are responsible due to their massive size but once again, it is only a theory. Because of their massive size, though, they might account for the unexplained movement of galaxies etc. What do you think?

          2. My dear Jack, it is so good of you to be willing to discuss physics with someone so physics-clueless as I am!

            And my approach to dark matter and dark energy will even more convince you that I am a physics fool. But I had long thought that there is clearly such a gigantic greater reality that it had to be detectable in some way, and when I came across the whole dark matter and dark energy speculation I had an immediate “Eureka!” Even the proportions are about right. They make the entire realm of physical matter less than five percent of all there is, and that seems to be about right. Dark matter and dark energy won’t react with photons of light, which I had understood to be why they are called “dark,” and which in turn suggests that they are not composed of material particles. Therefore, the scientific search for the particles that make them up is likely to be another scientific dead-end.

            For the first time in my life, I wish that I ever had taken even one physics course!

    2. Oh dear David, I am so glad that you found this helpful! And don’t you simple love Quantum Enigma? I agree that book is destined to be a classic, as more and more people get to the point of understanding the afterlife evidence well enough to wonder how it might possibly fit with what we see around us.

      But in all of this effort to understand what actually is going on, science should be leading the way! It is beyond ridiculous that people without science backgrounds – good grief, I’m a lawyer who majored in religion in college! – are making better sense of the greater reality as a whole than can trained physicists. After those two twentieth-century greats, Planck and Einstein, physics latched onto materialism and simply devolved into silliness 🙁

  4. I think I understand that a major point of today’s blog is our scientific community’s refusal in the last 100 or so years to recognize consciousness and put all their studies into materialism. The past blogs and Roberta’s podcast have really helped me understand this problem. But I do see a silver lining on some things that science has been able to bring to our table since I was born in 1953. Some of these things are: black and white TV, colored TV, cassette tape players, cd players, the laptop, smart phones, cable and satellite dishes, the internet, robotic surgery, CADcam ( especially in making dental crowns) and digital radiography, just to name a few. And if it wasn’t for the dead scientists living in the afterlife communicating with today’s scientists, we would not have these things. How ironic!!

    1. Dear David, of course you are right in saying that technology has advanced in the past century; but all these flashy inventions are based in scientific discoveries that predate your birth and mine. These inventions enhance our lives – true! – but the development of them has not improved our understanding.

      And we are indeed enjoying the help of graduated scientists, including many names that we recognize; but as I understand it, their interest is primarily in developing more reliable “electronic” communication between there and here. They understand that until we have that better communication, and many more people then are able to conclude for themselves that of course their dead loved ones have survived, this world will remain steeped in negativity and pain. Bless them! But apparently getting reliable everyday communication going has proven to be a lot harder than any of them had thought that it would be!

  5. David, you well note that science (and engineering) have produced wonderful technologies that contribute to a higher standard of living. But ironically, these contributions to our temporary material existence have diverted consideration of our eternal nature as immaterial spirit. Our nation is now fully divided, with one Party having taken God out of their policy statement, and the other unable to reconcile individualistic Capitalism with huge differences in wealth. Technology has also made the consequences of war and terrorism increasingly destructive.

    1. My dear Jack, you make an excellent point! As our physical standard of living has been so much enhanced by the amazing technological revolution of the past fifty years, we have diverted our attention more and more toward arguing over trivialities. And where is the progress there?

      Where war is concerned, I am daily comforted by the fact that we have been told by beings not in bodies that we will not be allowed ever again to use atomic weapons in warfare; but still, what we can do with the non-world-ending weapons that we also have created is quite bad enough!

  6. Quote from above : “…even though it is ever more obvious to anyone who is paying attention that the entire profession of non-medical scientific research mostly stalled out a century ago.”

    For me this is a key part of this week’s musing–this near-throwaway line about non-medical research. It is true, as David W points out above, that the technological advances, especially in medicine, have transformed the way we live in this experience we perceive as incarnation, at least for those few of us on the planet right now who can afford this technology. The remainder of the world is still living as if it were 1,000 years ago because for them, it may as well be.

    Sometime at its tipping point, what we today call “science” made a decision to focus on commercializing its investigations. Which means everything needs to lead to some kind of product in order to be taken seriously enough to be funded. After that, what we call science adopted a pragmatic philosophy that goes something like, “If we can’t monetize it, we don’t investigate it.” (They probably would not express it so baldly.)

    Fact is, the scope of true reality and the nature of God and what we call “eternity” are incomprehensible to to pragmatic philosophies of any kind–technological, religious or otherwise.

    1. My dear Mike, you make an excellent point! Even in articles in scientific publications about this nonsensical search for a source of consciousness in the brain, speculation often is made about the practical uses to which such a discovery could be put. In fact, it may well be that since money seems to be the lifeblood of scientific research, the lack of ways to imagine a prompt payback may be one of the leading reasons why there is so little interest in funding more basic research in physics and the other core disciplines. You make an excellent point!

      1. Materialistic science isn’t interested in funding anything if it doesn’t lead to discoveries they can apply to the physical world. I am not talking about the actual scientists, but the ones who are “running the show.” It’s such a shame as there are many great scientists out there with some great ideas, but they are trapped in materialism by those who control the funding.

  7. Hi Roberta,
    My first exercise in questioning what materialism means was back in my early college days studying art. Objects do not have inherent color, color is reflected from light touching the surface and reflecting to us. While, it is a rule of physics in this natural world, that along with the properties of objects, simply molecules vibrating at different levels, makes the concept of consciousness and spirit easier to comprehend. I was at my great-aunt’s funeral on Saturday, and for the most people were celebrating her entry into heaven. While the preacher spoke of sin and salvation as the key to entry into Heaven, I was thinking maybe that was the prime mission for Jesus coming to earth, to show mankind that death/ physical life is not a permanent state, and that we are not bound to the earth, but our consciousness moves on. Sadly, the church had a cross and crown of thorns as the focal point, and I understand the fear based religion needed that symbol, to accentuate fear and shame, but the lessons I have learned negate that whole message completely. We are not separated from the Godhead, we are just on an expedition here! ♥♥♥

    1. Right, Tim. People take their earth lives much too seriously because most feel that this is all there is when in fact they are experiences to teach us things, and they consist of the good and the bad so we can learn from them

      1. Yes, Lola – well said! Everything that happens in our lives is a spiritual lesson, and often what seem from a merely human perspective to be the worst things will seem in retrospect to be some of the best triggers for our genuine spiritual growth, and therefore the best things that ever happen to us. This is part of what we will be talking about next week, this astonishing change in perspective on everything that happens when we become certain at last that human life actually is eternal!

    2. Oh my dear Tim, you make me smile! Would that every Christian could have the insights that you have had, and could see behind those fear-based dogmas the pure love and joy that is the genuine Godhead!

      Yes, I agree that Jesus came to teach us that human life is eternal. I think, though, that the dramatic demonstration of survival that was His crucifixion and resurrection was not necessarily part of the plan, but rather He had trouble teaching primitive people that the mind can never die so then this demonstration was added to His life-plan. Reading the Gospels very closely even lets you see the flaws in the plan – above all, the fact that He could reanimate the body but it was so damaged that apparently He soon had to ditch it – is to me some great additional proof that it really did happen!

  8. I don’t understand why Jesus left what Dr. Silverstein called “a burst of conscious light” that he feels is responsible for the image on the shroud. If we all die and become spirits, why was his scenario so different? I don’t understand why Jesus would want to reanimate his body, as the emphasis should have been on the spirit body so that people would get the idea that their bodies are just vehicles for the soul. Was he trying to prove it was really him when he re-animated, his body?

    1. Dear Lola, it was a burst of extremely powerful energy that reanimated the body and scorched the shroud. His scenario was different from the usual process because He had left His dead body as we all do, and then He had reanimated it a couple of days later sufficiently to actually use it again. I think that never has been done by anyone else anywhere, whether before or since. But of course it had begun to decay! Processes in it had been ended. It was an amazing thing that He could reanimate it and use it at all, but He seems to have dropped it once He had demonstrated its wounds and convinced His followers that it was indeed the same body. Then for the balance of the 40 days that He remained, He seems to have shown Himself in his etheric body – the sort of body that we all use in the astral plane – which, again, would have taken tremendous spiritual energy for Him to maintain on earth.

      And my dear, you grossly overestimate the sophistication of first-century people! Of course they had to be shown that it was really Him. Wounds and all. And they had no idea about their having a spiritual nature – there was a limit to what He could teach them in just three years! – so He kept it simple. “Look, folks, you saw Me die, and now here I am alive again. There is no death. I’ve proven that to you.” That was His message!

      1. Yes, that seems to be the case. I figured he felt the need to prove it was him. The burst of energy was probably why he could reanimate his physical body.

        1. Hey Lola 👋
          You touch on something that I’ve always thought the most ‘mystical’ of anything that has happened here on earth: the Resurrection of Jesus. (By ‘mystical’ I mean sacred, incomprehensible and of the unseen world beyond this one.)

          It seems in being human we have one difficulty that animals do not have: We know we are going to die. Animals live in the present and in the main, they don’t know that their lives will terminate at some point. (Okay, perhaps right before death wolves and dogs et al leave the pack to die. They feel something is about to happen to them. And perhaps elephants, who engage in mourning rituals, may have mortality awareness, but animals generally seem oblivious of their own fate..)

          Our fear of mortality stems from having enough awareness of self to know that our life will end one day, but we don’t have sufficient conscious spiritual awareness to know that we live beyond physical death. (I mean the human species as a whole, not those individuals who are aware of life after death.)

          I’ve always thought that Jesus resurrected to show people of the veracity life beyond death. But He did something else too. He resurrected to spark that quantum leap to spiritual awareness in human beings. He is the catalyst to our conscious evolution. He wishes to take us from the fear state to the love state. I guess it needed tremendous light energy to spark that human ‘reaction’, as it were. (And this leap is actually meant for us here in the 21st Century, since we are the people living in the now. Illusions of past and future aside.)

          Interestingly Lola, I’ve heard Jesus-aware people in India say one thing: Jesus is essentially Spirit and when Spirit is born in a human body, that body contains physical elements. As Spirit resurrects after death, He sheds and transcends the earthly elements to become pure Spirit again.

          Jesus released earth, water air, fire and light to resurrect on the third day. The last and subtlest element was light, which He powerfully released as only He could. Hence we see the image on the Shroud kept in Turin. And when Jesus’ disciples saw Him in celestial form some time after His death, they saw pure Spirit.

          Anyway, that is what I heard in India. I wonder what our dear Roberta and Thomas would make of that! 😀
          😉❣️🌅

          1. Efrem: I’ve often wondered what would have happened if Joseph of Arimethea did not supply a cloth to cover Jesus (this is very rare in crucifixion victims, as their bodies were usually cruelly discarded). There would be no cloth to hold his image, and the Shroud of Turin wouldn’t exist. Anyway, the people in India make sense. I think it is logical that earthly elements would have to be discarded after death so that nothing but pure spirit would exist.

  9. Hi guys
    I truly love this blog as with questions and answers no one I’d offended yet so many people helped along on their own journey like myself. Recently I have been reading that there is no actual evidence that Jesus actually was crucified and rose again , that it is all mythical written after quite some time and there is written evidence to prove it ?
    any thoughts On This guys my head is almost exploding with thoughts … much love xxxxx

    1. Hello dear Louise! Please be assured that contemporary evidence that Jesus lived, was a troublemaker, and then died on a cross is surprisingly available in contemporary writings from nearby areas that are unrelated to the Gospels. This needn’t be so, of course, when there also is evidence that the first written accounts of the crucifixion, now lost, were likely recorded within a decade or so after it happened. And then there is the shroud, which is absolutely stunning contemporary evidence! But even before I knew about any of this, I was sold on the plain fact that Jesus existed by the way His life and teachings inspired so many people almost immediately to teach and to die for what He had said. But in fact, there is a great deal more evidence for the existence and details of the life of Jesus than there is for folks like Socrates and Plato, whose existence everyone takes for granted.

      People have approached the life of Jesus in many ways that actually don’t matter now. I have just watched a series of films done from the scholarly position of theologians who know the language and culture of that day and see Jesus as having been obviously something of an early communist, “Jesus from Sky-Vault,” who was teaching the almost immediate advent of a theocracy – the kingdom of Sky-Vault – where all would share everything.

      Um, no. What you and I have that no past generations had was direct, reliable, and highly consistent communication with those that we used to think were dead. We have the opportunity to KNOW now who Jesus was, and what He taught! We know the truth. And that changes everything 🙂

  10. Hi Roberta. Imagine if materialist science would take a truly unbiased look at the Shroud of Turin. Even though a large amount of research has already been done, and the level of evidence in my opinion is already approaching what would be needed in a court of law, mainstream science would rather just use the obviously flawed medieval carbon dating that was done as an excuse to ignore all the other evidence. What an ultimate “white crow” (all it takes to prove that all crows are not black is one white crow) object the shroud could be if it was taken seriously and studied with the kind of resources it truly deserves. Traditional science cannot abide even contemplating such a potential outcome. They’d be squawking like the crows in that final picture in your post. I hope that someday science and spirituality will no longer be so mutually exclusive, but just cooperate, without agendas, to seek the ultimate truth.

    1. Oh my dear Scott, that is how science actually works! Science is a religion, every bit as much as Christianity is a religion. Science is the religion of no-God, based in the dogma that matter exists without an uncaused-cause; so that is the belief that science must support at all costs. This is not about objective truth for science, any more than it is about objective truth for Catholicism! I share your hope that we will eventually get past all of that obfuscation, and in fact I am sure it is going to happen. The day will come when the truth will dawn on all the earth, and that will make all the difference! But it won’t happen until all religions, and science included, have been vanquished.

  11. Hi Roberta, hi everybody!

    I think it could be true that the original post might be focused on what maybe we should call mainstream science in the Western halls of research. These are the descendants of the Royal Society and—again, I am not sure, so asking more than stating—are part of an Old Boys Network. They know each other and support each other. I wonder if this sort of culture grew up in Asia and Africa and other parts of the world not associated with the Royal Society? I do know that the Dalai Lama participates annually in the Mind & Life Institute, which often brings people together from many perspectives to discuss Mind and Wisdom.

    1. PS-I mean if this culture of parochialism ALSO grew up in Asian and African scientific pursuits. We don’t hear too much reported about developments coming out of those parts of the world.

      1. Dear Mike, I have come to believe that it is all basically a network of old-boys’ clubs that are highly chummy and protect their own. And especially with modern mainstream science, attempts to get the members to think independently are seen as threats, so they just circle the wagons tighter! But we have two big advantages now: the internet, and – more importantly! – the actual truth. And in the end, if we are persistent, the truth will win.

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