Posted by Roberta Grimes • September 06, 2016 • 32 Comments
Afterlife Research, Human Nature, The Teachings of Jesus, Understanding Reality
The fact that our two most trusted institutions still keep us ignorant of the 
nature of reality and of our own eternal natures is the source of every one of our problems. From poverty and criminality through hatred, oppression, war and greed, all the fear-based evils that plague us stem from this odd alliance between science and Christianity to keep us from understanding what is going on and who you and I actually are! So naturally, afterlife researchers will occasionally speculate over hors d’oeuvres and wine about how the world might change if everyone on earth knew what we few know now.
Let us speculate together. Let’s imagine that tomorrow a phone app is released that allows anyone to talk to dead relatives simply by ringing them up. It is available for free, and within the week it is being used on billions of cell phones all over the earth. What do you think will happen next? Here are my thoughts:
topic everywhere. There is no area of our lives that will be unaffected by it.
hell, and that Christian traditions from communion through tithing to the Ten Commandments are all irrelevant.These seen to me to be the first results, beginning within days and disseminated worldwide within no more than a year. And as people become ever more engaged in these new and deeper understandings, there will begin to be ripples of disruption through every aspect of human life. Here are a few of the things that should be well underway within the first few years:
to crack than is religion. While giving people an easy way to talk with and learn from their dead relatives is going to be enough to break religion’s perceived hold on people’s minds, for the scientific gatekeepers to give up on materialism is going to take shaming on an epic scale. Expect efforts to debunk what is going on to continue for a year or more, until gradually younger physicists and researchers in every scientific field will have had enough personal experience of communicating with dead folks themselves that they will begin at last to investigate what actually is going on. My guess is that within just a few years’ time the hard and depressing work of sifting through and throwing out a century’s worth of bogus materialist scientific theories will have begun.
loved ones that Jesus absolutely did not die for our sins. Since the Christian Gospels hold the most important set of teachings ever given to humankind, some churches may abandon two thousand years of error and begin at last to teach the truth; but some will not. And those that hold fast to discredited dogmas will find themselves empty of parishioners.
think on an eternal scale, those who have been complacently assuming that Jesus “saved” them so they don’t have to bother will feel a swelling hunger to grow spiritually. And as more and more former old-dogma churches make teaching the Gospel truths their core purpose, my hope is that we will see a new and genuine Christianity emerge that eschews all dogmas and teaches only God’s truth.Stop and savor all of this for a moment. We are talking here about a paradigm shift that is without precedent in human history! We would have to go back to the discovery of how to use fire to find anything comparably revolutionary. And the glorious fruit seems inevitably to be the raising over just a decade or two of the consciousness of sufficient people that human consciousness over all the earth will begin a rapid elevation. It will be that broad elevation in consciousness that is going to bring 
humankind together as we never before have come together, until all our problems begin to wither away in the light of a brighter dawn.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a twentieth-century French Jesuit priest. He said, “Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”
It is about to happen now. And it will be glorious!
Roberta, this post is so powerful and inspiring. I have gone through a tremendous spiritual awakening and expansion, and all of the things you say here are the truths to which we can know and must evolve to understand at this time. Healers of many types and from many places are awakening to help others see the things you specifically mention.
I just published my first book last week called Life from the Ashes. It is the story of my tragic loss of my 14-year-old son, Connor, in an airplane crash and the unexpected path of hope and healing I found after. Connor led me to this path from spirit, and what you describe above as a “what if” possibility is real and possible for all of us!!! We can learn to hear our loved ones in spirit, and I have lived it. I also now help others learn how to through my coaching work.
Please download my book and read my story. This is for anyone who has experienced loss or trauma, for anyone who knows someone who has, or for anyone who wants to know that spiritual awakening through learning to hear our loved ones in spirit is possible!
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01LA6PYK8
Thank you for posting this.
Thank you for commenting, Shari, and I’m glad that you have been able to grow so well spiritually from the temporary loss of your son. That opportunity to grow is his gift to you, and he must be so proud of you!
This insight is one that few bereaved parents can bear to consider, but we are told that we eagerly plan the deaths of children – together with the children whose early deaths with be their gift to us – as perhaps the most powerful spiritual growth opportunities possible. You are such a wonderful example to people who need to find hope and purpose in their pain. Thank you for sharing your story here!
Great information, excited about the future and watching all of this unfold! When my book, God is Love is released in a few weeks, it will help with this unfolding process as I address the false beliefs in the christian faith that are rooted in fear rather than love.
Dear Joyce, I’m delighted to see you also going up against the Christians in defense of Jesus and the truths that He came to teach. Thank you for that! And you’re right in saying that the core problem with Christianity is that it teaches fear and not love. Since these are emotions at opposite ends of the spectrum, it is impossible to love what you fear, which means that Christian practice is actually counterproductive when we talk about elevating the consciousness of the planet. There are many of us now trying to teach the truth, dear Joyce. And dead experts are confident now that we will prevail!
Roberta, As we have discussed, I generally agree with your own understanding of God and Creation. I do, however, have to wonder about the ignorance of humanity. Given God’ complete power over what exists, the fact that Earthbound humanity is born into ignorance must be God’s intention. What purpose(s) might this imposed ignorance serve?
Perhaps the material realm was created for humanity, with memory of the spiritual Heavenly realm blocked (which is what the NDE reports tell us), so that we may experience the stresses that are not possible in Heaven to enable spiritual growth and an appreciation for Heaven by contrast with the horrors of misfortune?
Our “best” science now is blocked on fundamental discovery of material reality. So called dark (unobservable) energy and matter are estimated to be 95% of the cosmos. Superstring theory hypothesizes that the strings and loops of matter and energy are at the plank length, and thus also unobservable. God thus has formed Creation such that mankind is blocked from direct knowledge.
Hello Jack! Oh, I do understand how you feel. If I thought the Christian God was real and was outrageously treating us this way, I would be pretty cranky, too! But the Christian God does not exist. No entity with the kind of personal involvement and control that you imagine exists. Please let me tell you instead what half a century of studying the evidence tells me is actually going on.
The only thing that exists is Mind, which is an infinitely powerful and infinitely creative energy-like potentiality without size or form. Everything else that we think of as real is just an aspect of that potentiality. All our minds are part of it, and in fact to talk about a distinction between us and God is just to buy into the illusion. Mind exists in a range of vibrations, from love at the highest to fear (and its byproducts – hate, etc.) at the lowest. At its highest vibration, God is therefore pure love! Mikey Morgan defines God as “the unity of pure love and all that exists.”
What we think of as God acting in the world is actually extremely advanced beings who almost certainly have been in bodies at one time (although not necessarily on earth). They act as our spirit guides and as the guardians of the planet, and for a long time they have given us pretty much free rein. After all, earth-lives are minutely brief on an eternal scale, and we are here to learn, and sometimes the kids will bruise a knee. However, lately so many human beings have chosen to act at the low end of the vibratory scale that the earth has become seriously unbalanced toward the negative. To correct that, the planet’s guardians and our own spirit guides are engineering an elevation of the planet’s vibratory rate that has been going on for at least a century and is gradually picking up steam. But NOBODY can just jump in and fix things! We don’t know why that is, but we know that it is true; and we assume that a major reason is that every human being on earth has free will. How do you magically fix things when there are seven million beings who can together pretty easily un-fix it? The only way is to elevate the consciousness of the entire planet, and in so doing to move all seven billion of us away from the fear end and toward the love end of the vibratory scale. And that, dear Jack, is what is happening now….
Wow, what an image! Fantastic post! I SO want to see that app released!!!
Barring that, and knowing that that Awakening is actually coming, I can look forward to it much clearer now.
I highly respect all who challenge Christians as I cannot. I find myself simply avoiding them now, even family because they won’t listen to me anyway.
Thank you, Randal! And yes, we all are pining to see that app released. Those working on this side are determined that it has to be free, and it has to be available worldwide; the only barrier they are facing now is money, frankly. The electronics on our end are expensive, as is the work to get it all perfected. If someone had the ability and the will to write a million-dollar check, I think it wouldn’t take much more than a year.
And I understand how you feel about challenging Christians, especially those in your own family. Their religion will be going down soon, so our whole focus must be on separating Jesus from Christians in people’s minds. We can’t let people throw out that infinitely precious Baby and His teachings with what is apparently bathwater!
Naive though I may be about how funding works, what the obstacles are, and so on, it seems to me that a million bucks is a paltry sum to be raised. Presidential elections now cost over a billion dollars per, and there are plenty of billionaires around high-tech who could probably be persuaded that it would be a nice addition to their legacy to have funded such a project if the research looked good. Has anyone even written a proposal or a business plan? In other words, has anyone gotten serious about fund-raising?
You’re right, Joshpua: finding a million dollars for a project that would cement someone’s personal legacy while at the same time saving the world from destruction should be easy. But no, a formal search for funds has not yet been undertaken, and we expect it not to happen until sometime next year. The process is being opened, though, and there is someone with fundraising experience actually working on it, so that gives us a start!
I’ll take a job 2000 years ago please!!
Oh, me too! But on the other hand, health care then was rather poor….
Your reply to Hack Hiller has confused me. I feel it implies there is no God (a single energy or force which created the universe or multiverses; it doesn’t do anything even if it exists). Rather there are many god like beings (spirit guides) who guide and drive the creation; this is somewhat close to a polytheist concept. I don’t get it, would you please elaborate? Thanks
His name is Jack Hiller – it was a typo that I couldn’t find a way to fix. Sorry, Jack!
Tanveer, there simply is no anthropomorphic God. Not a single one. Not group of them! Recall Mikey Morgan’s definition: “God is the unity of pure love and all that exists.” God is ONE. And that one is all consciousness. Every conscious being is inextricably part of the unity that is God, not as a separate entity but rather as part of the whole just as a lamp’s light isn’t separate from the light of every other lamp in the room. A drop of water actually IS the sea.
So the beings not now in bodies who are helping us – our own spirit guides and the planet’s guardians – those that human-made and erroneous religious doctrines have us perceiving as God acting in the world are indeed God acting in the world, but not in the way that Jack had been perceiving them, as a single sentient God who was manipulating us and hiding things from us. I prefer to think of them as God’s minions, but how ever you think of them, they are the only way that I ever have found God actually acting – through the efforts and will of these powerful, high-vibration beings.
Does this help you? Our problem is that to begin to understand what actually is going on we’ve got to get rid of ALL religious concepts, including the concept of “God” as a separate sentient entity. Every religious is man-made. As someone said, the Christian Bible is man’s search for God, but the Gospels – just those four books of the Bible where Jesus speaks – are God’s search for man. And when you read the Gospel words of Jesus on the nature of God, you see Him telling us what we only now are learning from the evidence.
The good news to derive from all of this is that there is actually only one of us here: that unity of all love. And each non-separate aspect of it – each one of us – is loved more that any of us can imagine.
Thanks Roberta for the reply.
I agree with the first paragraph of your response.
2nd paragraph is more interesting, especially where you say “they are the only way that I ever have found God actually acting – through the efforts and will of these powerful, high-vibration beings.” Let’s expand this thought a bit further; would you agree that God acts through humans too; humans like Jesus for example? So the supreme consciousness of “One God” manifests itself through many forms, either it is universe, angels, spirit guides or through natural laws of physical world e.g. laws of physics and evolution. I don’t think God is a dormant consciousness. It is God’s consciousness which is driving everything. You are probably saying the same thing. Regards
Yes, I am saying something like the same thing, but your statement that “God acts” still bothers me. God is not an individual entity – no beard, no throne, no human failings – so to say that God “acts” is imprecise. I’m not saying that God is “a dormant consciousness” either, since all these entities are IN God. Literally nothing else exists! Physicist Max Planck said that a conscious and intelligent Mind is the grid on which all of reality is based, which is a material-based way of looking at it. God is not material, but God certainly does include everything!
And apparently God doesn’t work directly through people. Rather, spirit guides guide certain people who have agreed in advance to do things that are needed in the world, and those people may never realize they are fulfilling a promise. My own life is an example of this phenomenon, and I didn’t understand that until I was in my sixties.
I also want to make clear that using Jesus as a human example isn’t right, since my own guide tells us that Jesus is unique. He says that Jesus came to us literally as God on earth, to try to understand what had gone so wrong 2000 years ago and then to tell us how to fix it. That cure is His Gospel teachings, and they still work beautifully today!
I’m sorry to be so picky about this, but religious dogmas infect our language and our thinking and we really do have to root them all out if we hope to understand what actually is real.
I appreciate you being picky on words. I would too. I never had a concept of a God with beard, throne, or human failings. So totally agreed with you. My use of the word “acts” is symbolic in nature as it would be in many religious scriptures.
If God doesn’t work directly then where would have this universe emerged? Where the laws under which this universe operates would have come from? The gravity, the evolution, the structure of matter and it’s interaction with other matter (laws of chemistry), so on and so forth? Putting in a different way, what existed before the universe, the big bang and all laws under which physical realm operate? In my view, the universal consciousness which existed before everything else is “God”.
As you would already know, the concept of God incarnating in human form is not new to Christianity. There were many incarnations before Jesus. But, I respectfully disagree with you on Jesus being anything other than a human being; or for that matter with any other concept which involves God incarnating in the human form either in Budha, Ram, Krishna, Zeus or Jesus etc.
Roberta here:
Hmmm… it won’t allow me to respond to you in a separate comment, so please excuse my tacked-on answer:
1) Where did the universe come from? As best we can determine, consciousness itself continuously works it out. For example, the “cosmological constants” keep minutely being adjusted; it seems that nearly everything is in constant and dynamic motion to keep the illusion going that any of this is real.
2) What came before? There is no before, and there is no after. Time objectively does not exist! So there is only Now. I understand how hard that is to grasp while we’re in bodies, but it is self-evident to the dead. Eternity is the water in which they swim!
3) I was as surprised as you are to learn that Jesus is actually different from the rest of us. I haven’t asked who else among the other religious icons might share His distinction, although it’s a good question and I will try to remember to ask it the next time I get to visit with Thomas (my primary spirit guide). I should tell you, though, that while the Buddha is also sometimes mentioned, it is Jesus who is constantly turning up in accounts from the dead, and especially the upper-level dead! There is anecdotal evidence that He is the greatest being in every universe; it seems that no other being comes close.
I hope this helps, Tanveer!
Reading the words, even out loud, is one thing. But to really grasp them is something else. But when I imagine that I do, I see a glorious future for all of us. Literally, all of us. The veil is thinning now. I just hope that the app will be available for windows phones too ;-).
Hi Bent! The veil is indeed thinning. We are all feeling it now, which is one reason why things seem to be getting worse: those vibrating at a very low rate (think ISIS and think also those who are seeking to maneuver the world for their personal benefit) are feeling uncomfortable pressure increasing on them. Without the mass enlightenment that will come from having everyone on earth know the truth almost at once, it could get dramatically worse before it gets better! But I trust the powerful unseen teams that are working to ensure a soft landing for humankind.
And that beautiful world that you are glimpsing at the thought of it – that glorious, shining future – that is what Jesus called the Kingdom of Heaven, which He said we could make overspread the earth. It turns out that we need a little help to get started, so they are giving us that help. But raising our own vibrations still is up to each of us!
A long time ago a friend recommended the short book, “Your God is Too Small,” by J.B. Phillips (whom I recently was not surprised to learn had an NDE in his 20s), and this was the first encounter (besides the Upanishads in a Comparative Religions class in college) that I had with someone who pointed out the absurdity of our cultural notion that a force identified as divine would be best understood as a “big” human who worked like a puppet maker to manufacture each of us as his “children” so we could love him and worship him. This Western concept seems like a very weird notion, unlikely to comfort anyone — and yet that oddly is exactly what so many people still seem to insist on. I found the “God” in Phillips’ book still too small, but it was a start for me on a path where I found one bit of evidence after another that God is indeed “unknowable” within the grip of our Western tenacity for linear time and an eternity that simply is an extension of that line.Its a line of thinking that stands in our way of appreciating (if not knowing) real creation and what eternal love really implies.
All so beautifully said, Mike! Personally, the only way I could begin to know God and God’s minions was by giving my life to God and then starting to live my life with an open prayerline in which I felt as if the top of my head was open and my every thought was being beamed upward. It’s hard to yield to that extent! We all try to protect a zone of privacy. But there is no privacy from God, anyway; God and God’s minions know our every smallest thought. And by yielding to this extent, I found myself beginning to be aware of being one with God, the immensity and the power and the infinite love. I began to do this seven years ago. It really altogether transformed my life!
I’ve come to feel and think, Roberta, that it’s not the intellectual thoughts a person has about what “God” is or isn’t that will determine the initial level that person will find themselves at when first arriving in the afterlife. Rather, based on your teachings and other serious afterlife researchers, it will be the love in our hearts that will be the most important factor. Whether one goes to a church or any place of worship or does not will be irrelevant either way. (Though there is nothing wrong with having fellowship will like minded people)
As for your blog, it’s positive and inspiring. I, myself, look forward to this app that will connect with the “dead” in the afterlife. A “soul phone” as you once called it. But, I think there will be more resistance to it than you anticipate.
The fundamentalist and evangelical Christians will denounce it as either a fraud, or when it proves itself, as the “work of Satan.” They’ll claim that demons are imitating our relatives and other voices to trick us. The more mainline and liberal Christians will be more open minded and come to eventually embrace it.
The Jews, orthodox and reform, have beliefs in some kind of afterlife and may come to accept it once it proves its validity. Though, probably resistance on the part of the ultra-orthodox.
Fundamentalist Muslims will denounce it, like the evangelicals, as being coming from Satan. The more moderate and liberal Muslims may come to accept it in time.
Most Buddhists sects believe in some kind of afterlife, but only as a temporary illusion, not as an eternal transcendent reality. Those sects won’t embrace it entirely. And Zen Buddhism doesn’t accept any afterlife and will not accept it.
The Hindus have afterlife beliefs similar to what is being said through the verified afterlife communications we have in the West. I’d speculate they’d accept the “app to the afterlife,” but with some reservations, as there are a number of Hindu sects that vary in their approach to the afterlife.
Of course, I’m speaking in generalities here and much more could be said. I’d be good to get the thoughts on all this from Dr. Stafford Betty, whom you had an excellent interview with on your podcast, who’s a professor of religion at Cal State Bakersfield. He’s the expert on Eastern religions and their afterlife views.
Atheists of all stripes will be complete skeptics, but the heaviest resistance will come from the scientific materialist/atheist community. They’ll vilify and denounce it as “clever electronic trickery” and fight it for many years. Probably many of the top materialists scientists will even refuse to test it, condemning it as “worthless foolery.”
Just a few thoughts, but I do think that eventually the “app to the afterlife”, when it’s working 100% or close to it, will revolutionize practically everything for the better.
Hello Roberta,
Great followup to your last blog post, thank you! I just finished J.D. Messinger’s “11 Days in May” as a result of your interview with him in one of your earlier podcasts. In the epilogue J.D. recommends Ervin Laszlo’s work on the “Akasha Paradigm” for the scientifically inclined. Your blog posts on the scientific logjam have led me in this direction to better understand the problem. You mentioned that there are a few brave scientists out there studying the greater reality, and he appears to be one of them. I would love to hear you interview him and the other scientists in the field.
Scientists consider themselves the guardians of reason in a methodical search for truth. The real shame will come when they recognize that they are not the rational ones, but then I think they will be glad to study the 95% of the universe that was previously off-limits. It will be like another renaissance from the dark ages!
In the meantime, I think it would help a great deal if they felt they had something to study that they didn’t find irrational or too “woo-woo”. I’d love to hear some suggestions from their kind on how they might approach this.
Hello Eric! Thank you for the suggestion. I haven’t interviewed Mr. Laszlo for one reason: he talks about the Akashic records. I consider “Akashic,” like “karma” and some other terms, to be a religion-based word, and therefore imprecise, archaic, and imbued with religious meaning. I wouldn’t say “God” in public for the longest time, for the same reason. But I am becoming a bit more open-minded now, and on your suggestion I’ll reach out to him!
I wish that I could share your belief that scientists will be “glad” to discover their error in having ignored the afterlife evidence for so long, and will plunge right into studying it. But my long experience with them suggests that the opposite will happen, and even when every layperson on earth is accepting abundant new and incontrovertible evidence that the human mind is eternal, they will will be doubling-down on their cherished materialist dogma and trying to debunk everything else :-(. The problem is not the scientists, but the gatekeepers (journals, university departments, research funders) and also the older scientists whose entire careers have been built upon what amounts to a lie.
Indeed, by now it is clear to anyone who closely reads popular science magazines that most working scientists already get (or strongly suspect) that the fundamental dogma of materialism is plain wrong, and that Max Planck was right in saying “there is no matter as such.” Indeed, I have read articles about dark matter, for example, where a scientist actually has said something like, “Perhaps our basic understanding is wrong” (they no longer will say “fundamental dogma” in print). But to this day, no working scientist can do more than that without risking his or her career.
So they won’t reach out to us for ideas about how they might approach this evidence. Scientific inquiry is tightly controlled from the top. This means that when the end comes – and it looks as if that means within a decade or two – there is likely to be widespread confusion and crisis in the scientific community, and enough of them will fight back for long enough that I fear that all but the very youngest are going to feel forced to go down with the ship.
(Special note to any curious scientist who may ever be reading this: the leading lights in the field of afterlife studies will be delighted to give you all the evidence we’ve gathered, entirely confidentially! If you are still clinging to the rigging, we are all around you in our little inflatable dinghies, waiting eagerly to pluck you out and give you enough of the basics so you can build from there and eventually claim your Nobel Prize. Just reach out!)
Last January I wrote my own blog post on this fascinating subject. People often ask me why I am so fascinated with afterlife research, and reflecting on the possibility of the soul phone provides a tantalizing list of answers to that question.
https://soulembraces.com/2016/01/20/dying-and-not-dying-2/
Odd that not a word is said about the real threat to humankind – the slave ‘religion’ of Islam.
I’m not a Christian and do believe it, like all the others, is man-made with all the limitations that entails, but to go on and on about the failures of Christianity is suspect.
I bought and enjoyed The Fun Of Dying and bought Liberating Jesus but the latter is obsessed with the shortfalls of Christianity. I guess that’s because Roberta is trying to atone for her former belief.
Btw, and I mentioned this on Amazon, if Roberta was truly channeling Jesus then why didn’t she just ask Him which of the words attributed to Him in the Gospels are authentic, and which are made up by men who had their own agendas.
Also, the notion of some kind of Armageddon happening in two hundred years started by Christians is bizarre. For one thing Homo Sapiens will no longer exist – we will genetically modify our species to God only knows what long before that future date.
All that negativity aside, the book’s core statement is absolutely correct – the only thing that matters to us trying to get into the nicer parts of the afterlife is to follow to the best of our ability Jesus’ Great Commandment, love thy neighbor as thyself.
Mike S.
It’s impossible for any of us to live up to every other person’s expectations, as your comment illustrates! I apologize profusely to you for my failings, Mike, and I hope you will allow me to answer your complaints.
1) I know absolutely nothing about Islam. Further, I follow the Lord’s dictate that before I offer to take the speck out of another’s eye, first I ought to remove the log from my own eye. And finally – probably most importantly – I have been given to understand that once perhaps ten percent of the world’s living people are actually following the Gospel teachings of Jesus, all of humanity will be transformed. Every human mind is united on the level of Spirit, so this idea is amazing and powerful and makes sense, and my primary guide, Thomas, says that it is true. So I concentrate on Christianity not because I am trying to make up for my own failings (which are abundant!), but because it is the only religion that I am competent to discuss, because I am obeying the Gospels themselves, and because the transformation of Christianity away from false dogmas and toward actually following the Gospel teachings is – according to those not now in bodies – going to be a key element in transforming the world.
2) I asked Jesus no questions. If you had Jesus working in your mind and making your fingers move, believe me, sir, you would not ask questions either! But for you, He did write the first Appendix to the book, which it is unfortunate that apparently you didn’t read because it answers your question about how we can tell which parts of the Gospels are the words of Jesus. To summarize what it says, anything which contradicts His teachings on love and forgiveness was added by others; anything about religion-building, anything threatening, and any reference to judgment, to some being favored while others are not, and to Armageddon or an End Times also was added later. But if you have the book, you can read that Appendix for yourself.
3) If you think the idea of Christians starting their own Armageddon is bizarre, you should have been sitting with Susanne Wilson and me during the fateful conference with Thomas, my primary guide, when he announced that it was coming! Of course it’s bizarre. But, Mike, so also is your assumption that in only 200 years we will have advanced enough to modify ourselves genetically. Good grief, 200 years is no time! I have personally already lived more than a third of that time, and seen no change in humanity even a tenth so amazing. And, tragically, we are heading now not toward greater scientific advancements, but rather we are slipping with increasing speed in the other direction. Fifty years ago we put a man on the moon using as much computer power as is in your iPhone, but no one believes we are capable of that now – not of the resolve, nor the competence, nor the efficiency. What horrifies me about Thomas’s warning is that during the course of just my own lifetime (I’m 70) I have watched this nation and the world slide from progress and hope and the beginnings of post-WWII unity into what is instead the beginnings of the very barbarism on the national and the world level that Thomas threatens us is where we are heading if we don’t turn things around. The reduction in freedom and consolidation of power and wealth in the hands of a few; the degradation of the environment; even things like the spread of diseases old and new and the lessening of our ability to fight them together with the reduction in fertility: all of it is already beginning!
Like you, I wish that I were stronger and more able to fight it all alone. But I am just one old woman trying to follow the dictates of Spirit. I do nothing on my own. I do the best I can, but I am able to do so little! But I gather that perhaps you are young, Mike. Perhaps saving the world will be something that you will feel convicted about now and will have the time to do?
Great post, Roberta, and I will reply in more depth when I have more time.
But let me say you have absolutely no need to apologize – my views hold no special weight in this universe. I’m just another person with an opinion.
As for ‘perhaps being young’, I’m exactly the same age as you – 70. My idealistic days ended before my 30’s began, after returning from military service and a brief flirtation with leftist politics.
This inconsequential world will save itself or not, it literally does not matter to the universe. But whatever advances we do make will come from science and technology. The moral evolution that ‘seemed’ to be taking place up to and into the 1990’s, with the fall of communism etc, ended with the 911 attack on the U.S. and the daily (now totaling 10’s of thousands) terrorist attacks by one ‘religion’.
That ‘religion’ has nothing to do with the Christian religion. I don’t know how anybody observant of the contemporary scene doesn’t understand that the woman-hating, gay-hating, modernity-hating, slave ‘religion’ of Islam is the existential threat of the 21st century (and the 22nd and 23rd, for that matter, if it isn’t defeated).
I’m not a Christian, mainly because I share your belief that ALL religions are man-made. The contradictions in the Bible, especially between the Old and New Testaments are simply too much for me to rationalize away.
That said, Christians are not dangerous in any way. This country – this light of the world – was founded on Christian principles, the good parts of the faith. Christians are pussycats in a world with 1.6 billion Muslims intent on world domination. As with the communists of the 20th century, Islam will attempt to achieve its goal by any means necessary.
You talk about ‘fear-based’ lives. How about the fear of Muslim women to be anything other than servants to that patriarchy. How about the fear of homosexuals in Islam lands. How about the fear of Jews and Christians in the Muslim/Arab world.
I believe in an afterlife and God for one reason and one reason only – the compelling accounts of people who have had near-death experiences. I don’t know what to conclude about Jane Roberts channeling Seth, and the out-of-body experiences of Robert Monroe. At the time – in the 1970’s – when I was really into metaphysics, Roberts and Monroe seemed to be presenting authentic visions of other realities.
But clearly the God of the universe has little to do with us. Prayers are not answered despite people’s fervent wishful thinking. We are, deliberately, on our own here, making of our brief material existence what we will. That’s not a curse of existence – IT IS THE VERY REASON WE COME HERE! This is a school, a very very tough school and like our childhood schooldays, it will end. And then, possibly, reoccur with another life, although my former certainty about reincarnation has been shaken by the events of the last 20 or so years.
I’m not a cynic, I’m clear-headed, pragmatic, and eyes-wide-open to the reality around me for the last 7 decades and my (limited) understanding of mankind’s history.
Well, Roberta, I did write at length, didn’t I? I will look more closely at your thoughtful words above and reply further if I can add more to the conversation.
I understand your feelings, Mike. I’m glad that you have had an opportunity to vent here, but the evidence doesn’t support much of what you say, and for the record – since others are reading this – I just must say that.
Perhaps if you have things to say to me, it would be best if you said them in an email through the contact block on this website?
That’s kind of you Roberta, but I don’t see any reason to belabor the issues any further.
Despite any specific differences, I think we both agree that the individual human soul is advanced through trying our best to follow Jesus’ Great Commandment.
Just had to point out the inaccuracy of Mr. Stephens’ comment that Christians aren’t dangerous in any way. Does he not remember WWII was started in the name of Christianity or that only two Christian nations on the planet hold enough nuclear weapons to destroy the earth several times over OR the countless wars fostered by Christian nations since its inception. Was Mr. Stephens not paying attention to WHY Bin Laden attacked the US on 9-11 – the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia. I urge Mr. Stephens to research what prompted a Christian presence in a Muslim country and to do it objectively going back to the Cold War. Seventy certainly isn’t too old to study history and recognize its follies. Btw, I come from an American Christian background and was a NATO operative in a Muslim country during the 80’s.
I certainly understand how you feel, Stephen! I might quibble about the reasons for WWII or whether the fact that some Christian nations are armed with nuclear weapons makes the religion itself dangerous, but when Christianity was as young as Islam is now it was similarly violent. Nations were conquered for the sake of the faith, and whole populations were required to convert. Having read the Old Testament repeatedly, I would further note that precisely the same commands to destroy nonbelievers and those who have fallen away from their religion are in the Bible as are in the Koran. And Christianity has an appalling history of putting to the sword those who even think heretical thoughts, or else burning them at the stake – a history that goes right back to the persecution and destruction of the Gnostics. Crusades and Inquisition, anyone? Christianity does, too, still cling to the primitive notion that a “loving” God requires the brutal murder of His own Son, and that violent first-century concept still taints the religion with fear to this day. Fear is the opposite of love! Just by clinging to the notion that God can’t forgive us for being human without that blood-sacrifice, Christianity taints the entire world with negativity. Indeed, the teachings of Jesus are pure and beautiful and carefully following them is the easiest way for us to raise our spiritual vibrations (and those of the whole planet), but there is no significant Christian sect of which I am aware that makes the following of those teachings and the striving for spiritual perfection a priority.
Thank you for your thoughtful words, and for giving me the chance to further elaborate on them!