Author: Roberta Grimes

Becoming Good Citizens of the World

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

A friend who often comments here has asked me why in this series of posts I have talked about the United States alone, when in his view it is time for Americans to become good citizens of all the world. He is precisely right! Imagine a world that has become one neighborhood, everyone watching out for everyone else, where all of humankind is united in love and we are far beyond any kind of war. But if that is the goal, how on earth can we get there?

Ever since the end of World War I, well-meaning people have wanted to put into place some sort of worldwide governance that might be able to end all wars. Not only have these efforts come to naught, but a case can be made that they actually have sharpened existing divisions among nations. The problem with our attempts to unite the world has been the fact that every one of them has been top-down! Uniting the world’s governments can be of little help if our real goal is to unite the world’s people.

 The United Nations is typical. The U.N. is an assembly of governments, many of which are frank dictatorships. No attempt is made by the U.N. to lessen the depredations of the world’s worst rulers, so far from uplifting the people of the world, the United Nations gives legitimacy and support to tyrants who oppress and destroy. The U.N. might prevent a war or two, but in refusing to insist on basic human rights it makes the conditions of many still worse.

As is true of politics and religion, coalitions of governments are primarily about controlling and impoverishing people. No matter the good intentions with which political, religious, and world organizations might begin to do their work, soon they are all about funneling power and money into the hands of a few. All you need to know about Christianity is that the Catholic Church is worth at least $130 billion now, the Mormon Church is worth $200 billion, and even the Church of England is worth $7.8 billion. In America, successful politicians routinely amass great personal wealth; and even Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian hero, died a billionaire! Every bit of all this money gathered into hands at the very top came from the labor of masses of people who had been coerced into yielding it up. Thomas Jefferson memorably said that no government should “take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned,” but these numbers make a mockery of that wish! No assembly organized on the top-down model can be of any use to us as we work to build a healthier and more sustainable future for all the world.

So to answer our friend who wonders why I keep talking about the United States and I never mention our need to be good citizens of the world, I say this: Unless we can perfect and spread the Founders’ brilliant governmental model, we are going to have no hope at all of uplifting the rest of suffering humankind.

The world over the past two hundred years has been a wondrous laboratory! Alternative forms of government have been extensively tried, so it is easy now to say what works fairly well and what cannot work at all. To judge the relative success of governmental models, we will need some objective measures. I propose these four:

  • Responsiveness to the people being governed;
  • An emphasis on person freedom;
  • Broad-based economic prosperity; and
  • Long-term internal stability and peace.

When considered in these terms, there never is going to be a perfect government. What we are seeking, therefore, is a governmental design that will make good government possible, and in that sweepstakes there is one clear winner! Any form of class-based, non-elective rule is destructive of prosperity for the masses, which is why for most of human history nearly all people have lived miserable lives. A century ago we might have thought that the high ideals inherent in collectivist models like communism and socialism stood some chance of doing better, but in practice collectivist governments have been disastrous whenever they have been tried. Just the process of collectivization in the 20th century resulted in at least a hundred million deaths, and the sort of top-down planning that collectivist governments depend on is anathema to personal happiness and an absolute barrier to real prosperity! It is only governments directed and controlled by the people being governed that make universal happiness and prosperity even possible.

And of all historical attempts at establishing government by and for the people, none has approached the long-term success and stability of the American model. Our Founders’ core insight was the fact that, as later was said by British historian Lord Acton, “Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” So the American Founders put all governmental power into the hands of the people, and they designed a stable, universally responsive, and remarkably resilient governmental model. The federal government of the United States has withstood every abuse that power-hungry politicians could heap upon it over the past two hundred years! It has become bloated and distorted to the point where the Founders would be appalled to see it now, but it retains at its core that perfect model that Thomas Jefferson described as ideal. He called it a design for “a wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.”

After two hundred years of imperfect management, the American model still has produced a level of unprecedented individual prosperity. The U.S. Gross Domestic Product is now in the $20 trillion range, which is larger than the next three largest GDPs combined (China, Japan, and Germany). And of course, considering population differences makes our success even more dramatic. The median annual household income in the United States is just over $62,000, while in China it is about $1,100. In historical terms, modern middle-class Americans are as rich as once were kings.

The American Founders’ governmental design based on personal freedom and empowerment has been proven to be by far the greatest engine for producing the most prosperity for the greatest number that ever has been tried! That being true, it would be unconscionable for us not to be willing to to share it now. Let’s clean it up and tune it up, work out a few remaining bugs, and make it our gift to all the world!

The American people still retain the power to wrest control of their government back from politicians who use dishonest tactics like inspiring righteous indignation to keep us at one another’s throats and distract us from their manifold failures! You and I can see past that now. Once we calmly demand all the facts about every issue in contention, the political charades that are currently tearing this nation apart are going to sputter and die. Then the people will be back in control. And once we have reclaimed our nation, we will be able to make of it the shining example to the world’s oppressed people that our Founders long ago hoped it would be. Then over time, with our help, all the people on earth can begin to live in their own free and prosperous republics based upon the only governmental model that ever has been shown to produce stability, prosperity, flexibility, resilience, and the protection of the weak against the strong.

The Founders very well understood that a free and empowered people were going to need a solid spiritual grounding. John Adams said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious (sic) people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Benjamin Franklin said, “[O]nly a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.” And Thomas Jefferson was two centuries ahead of his time when he said, “To the corruptions of Christianity I am indeed opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian, in the only sense that he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence; & believing he never claimed any other.” It is those perfect non-religious teachings of Jesus that will provide the solid spiritual grounding that can make uniting all the world even possible.

Abraham Lincoln memorably said in the midst of a crisis that also split this nation, “We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.” Unless we will resolve to focus now on what is really important, and stop allowing political squabbling to keep splitting us apart over trivial nonsense, we are going to find it impossible to be of any use to a desperate world. So we have our work cut out for us! It is only all Americans together, reared from birth to be comfortable with personal freedom and empowerment, who have the means and the will to form that ultimate worldwide neighborhood. Billions of people are even now turning their hopeful eyes to us. And we can do this! Let’s roll!                        

 

photo credit: Jason K. Scott-Taggart <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/49585574@N08/44970347131″>Brooklyn Bridge westward view New York 2001</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>

 

 

 

The Truth Will Set Us Free

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Political divisions in America are worse now than they ever before have been, which makes it hard for us to see that we are witnessing the dawning fulfillment of the greatest dream ever dreamed in all of human history. After ten millennia during which humankind groveled beneath the swords of despots and the awful reign of capricious gods, we are about to state with a single voice that we refuse to bow to any earthly power. From now on all the power is our own! This ultimate liberation of all the world will have to begin in the United States, since it is only here that we possess the tools that can make it possible.

But it will not end here! Abraham Lincoln called this nation “The last best hope of earth,” and in that he was prescient. Now it begins! And since our old habit of fearing is strong, we will need to begin with the certain assurance that what comes after the rapine of political parties will be government by and for the people; and what will replace a capricious God will be personal intimacy with Spirit.

You may never have thought about the fact that politics and religion are the same breed of cat. Each claims to be able to help us relate to a great Authority – to government or to God – but demonstrably, both do that very poorly. And neither has any power of its own! Furthermore:

  • Both constitute blind faith in old ideas and are not based in present facts. This problem alone means that neither politics nor religion can help us build a better tomorrow.
  • Both are based in rule by fear. Fear is divisive and counterproductive. It is little wonder that Christianity has splintered into more than forty thousand competing versions, while politics so often has us at one another’s throats over trivial nonsense!
  • In America, each of these failed institutions contains the seed of a much better future. This is not true in other countries, which is why humanity’s next stage must begin here.

Americans alone possess the tools that can transform this nation and transform the world! And it seems to me that we no longer have the right not to use these tools, since unless we can make of this nation a model of freedom and personal empowerment, the rest of the world has little hope. The United States as a shining exemplar always has been our greatest vision!

  • “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden” (Jesus, MT 5:14).
  • “For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us” (John Winthrop, 1630).
  • “‘We must always consider,’ he said, ‘that we shall be as a city upon a hill—the eyes of all people are upon us’” (John F. Kennedy, 1961).
  • “I’ve spoken of the Shining City all my political life” (Ronald Reagan, 1989).

We can do this! In matters both temporal and spiritual, we can dispense with all the old human masters and learn as united individuals how to much better govern and enlighten ourselves. Let’s look at each area separately.

Politics

George Washington best expressed the general sentiment of America’s Founders. He said, “Government is not reason, it’s not eloquence; it is force. Like fire, it’s a dangerous servant and a fearful master.” The Founders concluded that the only ones who could be entrusted with so much power would be the people who were being governed, and the Constitution they drafted is a masterwork! For 229 years it has survived all attempts by power-hungry politicians to subvert it. Yes, our Founders would be appalled by our present bloated and overbearing federal government, but there remains inside the mess that political battling has created that original design for a much better nation that is governed by and for the people. Far from being in any way outmoded, the original design of this nation’s Constitution would work better now than it could have worked when it was first drafted! Consider:

  • The Internet makes government by the people much easier. What those who are doing the governing need is information, and in the 1700s it was hard to keep the public reliably informed. With the Internet, every interested citizen easily can be up-to-the-minute!
  • Government can be most responsive when it is as close as possible to the people being governed. This was difficult when the states were sparsely settled, but today many individual states could function well as independent countries. California’s economy is the fifth largest in the world, while Texas ranks tenth. They don’t even need that extra federal layer!
  • The Constitution intends for the federal government to do only what the states cannot do. This whole modern bloat of federal agencies and regulations imposing one-size-fits-all rule on all the people in every state is anathema to what our Founders intended.

James Madison, the lead architect of the Constitution, said, “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation and foreign commerce. … The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives and liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement and prosperity of the State.” If we were inventing our federal and state governments today, wouldn’t this design make a lot more sense?

We cannot in a day peel back two centuries of beyond-constitutional federal bloat, but we can begin our peaceful people’s revolution by doing three things now:

  • Teach every American to know our Constitution. We tend to be independent by nature, and if we all understood that the Founders long ago gave us the power to throw off every political master and come together to govern ourselves, I am betting we would seize that power.
  • Teach Americans to recognize and reject political demagoguery. Politicians will lose their power to distract us into righteous indignation when we refuse to react to their fiery words, and instead we always calmly demand just the facts.
  • Give Americans an unbiased and carefully policed source of information. A website something like the FindFacts.org that was proposed here two weeks ago might be a good start!

Simply making these three changes can begin our powerful transformation. What will emerge if we are resolute will be a more informed and independent electorate with the power to insist that politicians stop their counterproductive political games, and to further insist that those to whom we have delegated governmental power must serve us well or they will be replaced. It will take us back closer to the Founders’ vision of government by and for the people. And as we better define what works in empowering all Americans now, we can begin to establish a model that can be used to help to empower and improve the lives of everyone on earth.

Religion

Christianity does not remotely resemble what Jesus tells us he meant to begin. I have written about this fact, and about my worry that unless we begin now to separate the false religion from the genuine Man we risk losing what Jesus came to give us. Jesus is an extraordinary and entirely non-religious Teacher who brought to us what is in fact the next stage of human spiritual development! If this is not yet clear to you, give it time. As Jesus wisely said, “you will know them by their fruits” (MT 7:20), and Christianity is rotting all around us as the bad fruit that it always was. And wonderfully, as Christianity rots away we are finding within it the glorious seed of a very much better tomorrow that has been there waiting for us to find it and plant it!

Like the American Constitution, the Gospel teachings of Jesus have been honored mostly in the breach. And like the American Constitution, those Gospel teachings are going to be what will empower us to make of this nation the shining city that our Founders hoped would begin a better world! We are going to have to shed politics in order to form a government of the people, and in the same way a spiritually empowered nation is going to be possible for us only when we have shed the Christian wrapper that still hides and subverts the teachings of Jesus.

The Lord could see that despite his protestation that “Nor do people put new wine into old wineskins; otherwise the wineskins burst, and the wine pours out and the wineskins are ruined” (MT 9:17), a religious cult was developing around him even before his death. So he wisely instructed us to “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you” (MT 7:6-8). And he said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (JN 8:31-32). It is Jesus himself who tells us that just as our insisting upon unbiased facts will free us from beliefs-based political squabbling, so also will insisting upon unbiased facts free us at last from beliefs-based Christianity and enable each of us to build an individual relationship with Spirit!

As we begin to insist upon facts alone, we can expect to weather even more righteous indignation. Fearful Christians will brandish their get-out-of-hell-free cards at us, and people now living off government spoils will fight to remain at a shrinking trough. But we can win this battle! And once we win it, we will be able at last to begin the glorious process of freeing and uplifting all the world….

 

 

photo credit: Daveography.ca <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/71482738@N00/42728142941″>Vivid Cranes</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
photo credit: AGrinberg <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/66014106@N00/41014813781″>The Red, White and Blue</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
photo credit: byronv2 <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/7512717@N06/42717990461″>Processions Edinburgh 2018 045</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Faith vs. Facts

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

It may not at first be obvious to you that the reason why righteous indignation is such a deadly plague in America now is the insidious influence of faith-based thinking.

Theories abound that the decline of Christianity may be behind the increase in political extremism in America, but they vary as to why. It is obvious that modern politics has about it some of the trappings of a religion! For example, America’s current President has by objective measures had one of the most successful starts to his first term in our history, but still his opponents view him pretty much the way Christians view the Antichrist. They are so certain that in opposing this President they are fighting evil that they believe they are working in the service of truth when they use against him emotional language based on bits taken out of context, and pictures of alarming events that happened before his administration began. In the Kavanaugh hearings, and no matter what your own position on the nominee might have been, you were watching centuries of this nation’s protections of fundamental rights being destroyed in the service of political beliefs. For an august publication like the Wall Street Journal, the morphing of American politics into a religion is so obvious that the newspaper actually refers to one political thinker as a “prophet.”

All of this might seem curious and alarming to those who recall when political ideas had to be expressed with at least some color of facts-based argument behind them, but it is wonderfully clarifying now. We can ever more clearly see that what lies at the root of the righteous indignation that is tearing America apart is the very vice – having faith without facts – that we always have thought of as a virtue!

Humankind has been trained for millennia to espouse beliefs that cannot be supported by facts. Without our ease with having faith alone, no religion on earth could have survived for long! But our recent divorcing of politics, too, from any need to rely on facts is alarming. The only way to solve any real-world problem is to carefully study all the facts, and then to devise a set of solutions that are tailored precisely to address those facts. If we espouse a purely beliefs-based politics, it will be impossible for this nation ever again to accomplish much of anything.

Our system of political decision-making always has been clumsy. As I have studied the history of race in America, I have come to see that all of our present racial problems can be traced to specific facts-free and entirely beliefs-based political decisions! If we had insisted from our nation’s founding that every political decision must be carefully researched and based in all the facts, it is likely that none of our present racial problems even would have gotten started. Political parties in America always have used minimal facts as window-dressing as they proposed what were purely beliefs-based solutions that often made our problems worse! So now we add righteous indignation to fire up what has always been a dysfunctional political system, and our nation slides into chaos.

 I have written about the abundant evidence that Christianity is wrong but Jesus is right, so we won’t rehash that here. Traditional Christianity is in rapid decline, and wonderfully now a movement that is based on the genuine teachings of Jesus is beginning to take its place. I will be using Christianity to illustrate the insidious influence of faith-based thinking, but Christianity’s habit of building its worldview around strictly enforced but unsupported beliefs is consistent across all religions.

If you hold to the hope that religious practice has to be on balance a good thing, then reading the list below might pain you. But if loving God means anything, it means being true to the genuine God and refusing to settle for lies and pap! As Jesus said, “Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes nor figs from thistles, are they? So every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.  So then, you will know them by their fruits” (MT 7:15-20). And what are the fruits of modern Christianity?

  • Dogmas. No major Christian denomination urges us to relate to God directly, even though the Jesus of the Gospels wants us to do precisely that. Instead, each of the more than forty thousand versions of Christianity requires us to believe just its own set of dogmas.
  • Enforcement of Ancient Beliefs. What is even worse than basing our relationship with God on dogmas is the fact that every significant Christian dogma is more than a thousand years old! In what other area of our lives do we limit ourselves to believing just what was believed back in the days when most people thought the earth was flat?
  • Demanding Adherence to a Slate of Beliefs. The dogmas of your particular sect of Christianity are not offered as a menu, but rather you must believe them all. Whatever might not appeal to you still must be taken and believed “on faith.”
  • Self-Righteousness. Many Christian denominations use their ability to make you feel self-righteous as a selling point! If you say particular words or do certain things, then you are “saved” and God loves you. Anyone who rejects the deal that your Christian denomination offers in God’s name can literally go to hell as far as you’re concerned.
  • Rejection of Those Outside Your Tribe. Tribalism is such an insidious problem that it is going to need a separate discussion, but suffice it to say that human beings are extremely tribal. And many of the forty-thousand-odd Christian tribes encourage their flocks to look down on non-Christians, and even on Christians who are not member of their own tribe.
  • Monstrous Deeds. To my mind, just the Crusades and the Inquisition should have been enough to strip Christianity of whatever franchise it might have had! Then add the recent news that the largest Christian denomination still refuses to condemn and aggressively end the sexual abuse of children in its care, and you see a profoundly immoral institution that has divorced itself from the genuine God.
  • Empty Promises. There is sufficient objective evidence now to demonstrate that there is nothing factual about Christianity’s enforced beliefs. In fact, following fear-based Christian dogmas actually makes it harder for people to grow spiritually!

You will notice that this list of poisonous fruit applies just as well to our political parties. They also are beliefs-based, facts-free, aggressively tribal, grimly self-righteous, and mostly devoid of the ability to produce whatever might be useful to humankind. That American politics has devolved into a beliefs-based system almost devoid of facts is incontrovertible. And knowing that is so liberating!

It is time for all Americans of good will to abandon not only traditional religions, but also traditional politics. Assume that whatever the political leaders are saying on both sides is empty dogmas, and begin to insist that in every case their proposals must be supported by facts. And not just window-dressing facts being used as political parties always have used a few well-chosen facts, but thorough and well-supported facts from which has been developed what can be demonstrated will be the best way to solve the problem at hand. For all of us to insist on, support, and police one unbiased source of information would be a wonderful first step!

I wish I could tell you there has been a time when American politics was sufficiently facts-based to be of any positive use. Sadly, though, what we see in modern politics is just a logical endpoint of the slow devolution over centuries of a dysfunctional and almost entirely faith-based system. Rather than being able to return to a better form of government, our insisting that governmental decisions now be based on facts will require that we invent something new. And thanks to the resilient framework of our precious Constitution, we can do exactly that!

America’s primary religion is dying just as its political process rots away. It is time now for us to say good riddance to institutions that never worked very well, and for all Americans of good will to create together a happier, stronger, more equal, and much more productive future….

Moving Toward Political Peace

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Elissa Slotkin is the Democratic candidate in Michigan’s 8th District Race. She had “assumed that her campaign for Congress would be built around pocketbook issues such as the rising cost of health care, stagnant wages and unaffordable college tuition.” Instead, her campaign events are “therapy sessions.” “Voters say they are tired of the anger and polarization emanating from Washington. They say they crave compromise. Yet these same voters view the rival party with disdain and frequently punish politicians for reaching across partisan lines. They want the anger to stop but can’t stop being angry.”

 The two malignant centers of righteous indignation in the United States are politics and religion. American politics has devolved from what once was a cordial biennial sport into continuous all-out warfare! As one of Ms. Slotkin’s supporters said, “How do you deal with friends and family that are constantly posting things that are not accurate or that go blatantly against what you believe?” How, indeed?

America’s Founders warned us against allowing political parties to form. George Washington said it best: “However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.” It was as if he could foresee today!

When you study America’s racial problems, you find that all of them were caused by politically-motivated blunders over the past two centuries. Every one of them. Seeing how that tragedy unfolded has made me realize that politics has to be the worst way to manage any country! It isn’t only that political fighting can poison our personal relationships; and it isn’t so much that having political parties makes it easier for George Washington’s posited “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men” to seize power. No, the worst thing about having political parties is the way their battling obscures the facts and makes wise decision-making nearly impossible.

 You cannot expect to hear facts from politicians. Informing you is not their job! Our system of government assumes that all citizens will inform themselves, and we will then choose our leaders based on what we know about our problems and which candidates seem best able to solve them. Back when voters understood their responsibility to inform themselves, our political system did kind of pretty much more or less work a lot of the time. Now, however, it does not work at all. The big difference between politics today and politics decades ago is that in recent years two political parties have taken over the dissemination of information in the United States. Isn’t “the news” supposed to be about facts? Yet if you watch MSNBC and Fox News on the same evening and attempt to reconcile their different sets of facts, your head could explode. Each of them calls the other “fake news,” and on that one point they both are right! As was said by the woman quoted above, “friends and family… are constantly posting things that are not accurate or that go blatantly against what you believe.” Since most of us now depend on a few politically biased sources of information, for Americans to suffer repeated bouts of righteous indignation against those who happen to live in a different political reality is inevitable!

One of the wisest politicians of the past century was Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He said, “You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.” One of the few things on which most people still agree is the fact that facts are factual. Somewhere there is an objective truth! The problem is that neither political party and no other major source of information really focuses on discovering that truth. For example, in the area of race in America here are two spectacular facts!

  • Scientists can now confirm that black and white Americans are all one race. There cannot be any differences at all between people based on skin color.
  • Racism is not a human trait. We inadvertently teach it to our children, so we can stop teaching it and soon bring an end to it.

If either of these facts surprises you, then you have discovered our urgent need for a source of objective, nonpartisan truth!

Building a repository of unbiased information about political issues should be easy. Voters might go to a website called, for example, SeekFacts.org, and look up any point of political differences. There they would find independently verifiable information, and also information on the political positions of both the Democratic and Republican parties. Surely there is an American philanthropist who sees a well-informed electorate to be our most urgent need of all?

Nearly all decisions that are made politically can be demonstrated to do more harm than good. Politics has nothing to do with actually solving complex problems! And the more we have politicized the decision-making process in this country, the more we have obscured the truth. For example, here are four highly politicized areas where I would love to have better information:

  • Gun control. I am open to the possibility that stricter gun control laws might be a good idea, but I will need to see solid evidence because the fact that Hitler first disarmed his victims to make the Holocaust possible was drummed into me in childhood. Why do we need more gun control? And what methods should work best?
  • Climate Change. I have done some research on possible human influences on the climate, and now I am even more confused. There are studies that show us soon frying eggs on the pavement in December. Other studies make an ice age seem to be more likely, while still others convincingly present a case for very little change at all. There is even some evidence that man-made global warming might be a wonderful thing! Surely there are scientists who can provide objectively verifiable information and help voters start to clear this fog?
  • Transgenderism. As someone who before the age of fifteen would have given my right arm to be a boy, I have followed this issue with interest. Some say that childhood sex change is a kindness, while others cite high rates of suicide following youthful gender transitions. There even is the disturbing possibility that experimenting with changing genders has become a teen fad. Where the lives of our children are concerned, we need the most objective information we can get!
  • Socialism vs. Capitalism. We are in the midst of a political debate about whether the United States should become a more socialist nation. Having lived through most of the twentieth century, I have seen enough history unfold to have developed a pretty strong opinion on this one, but younger voters need objective facts. As was probably said by George Santayana, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

On each of these topics, FindFacts.org might provide a Factual Summary, links to sources on which that summary is based, and both Blue Corner and Red Corner sections that would showcase each political party’s positions. The parties would be invited to write their own Corner statements, and they even could devote their Corners to political refutations of the Factual Summary. If they found new information to share that would pass FindFacts.org’s rigorous vetting, then of course the website’s Curators would accordingly revise their Factual Summary. In this way the political parties could use facts-based advocacy for their own positions as a way to help us better zero in on what is actually true. And with FindFacts.org available to them, voters could efficiently learn enough to develop their own informed opinions and head to the polls as more confident and much more open-minded voters.

Thomas Jefferson had a contentious relationship with the heavily politicized press of his day, but still he said, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” On the topic of political parties he said, “The greatest good we  can do our country is to heal its party divisions and make them one people.”  Perhaps foreseeing our present rabidly partisan moment, he also said, “He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors.”

Political battling is a terrible way to make any kind of decision. And while we may not be able to move at once from a politics of destructive rage to a wise and benevolent form of government that is based in thorough study of objective facts, at least we can improve our political process and tone down the current level of righteous indignation by making it easier for all citizens to inform ourselves. It would be good, too, if we all realized that adamantly holding to our own beliefs is always a vice and never a virtue. Next week we will talk about the poisonous role of holding a deeply-held faith in anything….

 

photo credit: Johnny Silvercloud <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/116193477@N08/31976748254″>Divided</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
photo credit: Thomas Hawk <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/51035555243@N01/41758252662″>Corporations Are Not People</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Fighting Righteous Indignation

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

A vile plague of fear, anger, and hatred increasingly oppresses the world, and it especially bedevils the United States. What may not be obvious at first is the fact that most of what is behind all this strife is people’s adamantly held and forcefully expressed personal beliefs. In other words, their righteous indignation. Because these emotions feel righteous to us, we are sure expressing them must be a virtue! And indignation is anger at injustice. What could be a more saintly emotion than wholehearted righteous indignation?

Well, as it turns out, just about everything.

Righteous indignation is the primary source of all the negativity that now plagues our world! I will give you two examples from today’s news. Once you begin to look for it, though, you will see that it is everywhere:

  • The Pope now blames the thousands of childhood victims of clergy sexual abuse for the sin of calling out their abusers. Reading his words feels like entering a parallel universe! “Among us is the great accuser, who always goes to accuse us before God, in order to destroy us. Satan … The only legitimate accusation that we Christians have is to accuse ourselves. For others there is only mercy.” So for victims to work to purify their religion of its horrific and widespread sexual abuse means they are aligning themselves with Satan?
  • A biology teach in my grandson’s high school has been suspended for verbally abusing a student. Apparently the student did nothing to provoke her, but only knowing his political views made her feel compelled to taunt him. “Hey, Trumpy, do you have an answer to this?” and “What do you think, Trumpy?” She actually added, “By the way, I hate Donald Trump with a burning passion and he is a complete douchebag.”

Do you see what these news stories have in common?

  • The Pope takes what most of us see as an entirely indefensible position because in his mind he is defending God’s representatives on earth. True, they aren’t perfect, but their peccadilloes cannot be allowed to harm the Church of God! He is righteously indignant that anyone would challenge divine authority.
  • The teacher has allowed a mainstream media that is heavily negative about this President to fill her with righteous indignation to the point of rage that anyone could support him.

I urge you to try this yourself! Take any recent news story about any kind of disruptive strife and look behind it, and you are likely to find that one or a few people caused that strife out of their own righteous indignation.

Righteous indignation is so insidious and so pervasive that it is not an exaggeration to say that it has become the single biggest threat to the long-term survival of humankind. Please bear with me on this! The reasons why righteous indignation is so destructive are inherent in what are actually positive aspects of human nature:

  • All good people crave to make the world a better place.
  • Each of us constructs a worldview that is based upon what we see as the highest good.
  • When we see what our worldview tells us is evil happening right in front of us, we suffer what feels like the saintliest possible need to actively fight that evil.

Even Jesus was not immune to a sudden impulse to attack the temple money-changers!

Many of us see reality as essentially a fight between good and evil, and that awareness only ramps up our craving to battle for what we believe is right. But evil seldom presents itself wearing horns and a spiked tail! Rather, nowadays evil often comes to us cloaked in angel robes. Righteous indignation actually afflicts most severely the very people who are most determined to do what is right. Consider:

  • People in the grip of righteous indignation are insidiously immune to reason. They see their views as good because they formed those views with the purest of intentions, so any attempt you or I might make to share with them our different views only makes them see us as ambassadors of evil.
  • People in the grip of righteous indignation are sure they are defending all that is good. So they aren’t just fighting for their own beliefs. No, they see themselves as fighting for the very survival of goodness and truth! The stakes in their own minds could not be higher.

As I have begun to write about the fact that righteous indignation is the primary source of the world’s increasing fear and hatred, some people have written to say, “Aha! But what about righteous wars?” They may have a point! But even wars that seem righteous to us still have righteous indignation as their source. For example:

  • The American Civil War was fought because a side that saw slavery as the ultimate evil and a side that believed the states had rights were both seized by fits of righteous indignation.
  • World War I began when someone inspired by righteous indignation killed a nobleman, whereupon the German Kaiser’s righteous indignation inspired him to trigger his alliances.
  • World War II was the direct result of Germany’s righteous indignation at onerous strictures imposed on it following World War I.
  • The Vietnam War was the result of righteous indignation in the U. S. government based on the then-current “domino theory” that the advance of Communism had to be stopped.
  • Recent Mid-East wars have been the result of religious battling and terrorist attacks all inspired by righteous indignation, and then responses based in the righteous indignation of some of the victims of those attacks.

I have come to believe that no war that does not defend against an attack on the homeland can be justified. It may be that even such a purely defensive war should still be seen as wrong, but surely that very limited case would be the only legitimate exception to an outright condemnation of all wars!

How can we end this plague of righteous indignation before it tears our nation and the world apart? Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., put it simply: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

The key to ending all the chaos and pain that righteous indignation is causing is to help as many people as possible realize this emotion is the opposite of love! You cannot fight righteous indignation in someone else, since any mild defense that you might mount against someone who is deep in its throes will be seen as a personal attack based in evil. So if you try to dispute with such a person, not only will you achieve nothing good, but also you will risk increasing the world’s sorry burden of fear and rage. Your only useful course is to disengage! Send your attacker sincere love and blessings, and then withdraw. Agree to return only when productive discussions are again possible.

The only way to end this plague will be to eradicate righteous indignation as a respectable human impulse. When sufficient people have gotten to the point where they see righteous indignation as the vice that it is, then those who are using it now are going to be shamed into giving it up. And the first place from which to rout it must be ourselves! You are suffering from righteous indignation if you experience any of these symptoms:

  • You see things in terms of an obviously clear right and wrong. Nothing whatsoever is all right or wrong! Your refusal to respect and listen to someone who holds a view contrary to your own is a massive warning that you are not as sure about the truth as you think you are.
  • You are so adamant about your position that encountering a contrary view enrages you. These are just competing ideas, for heaven’s sake. They are not drawn swords!
  • You have let a purely factual argument feel like a personal attack. I have been the target of a recent campaign of righteous indignation, and both of the people who were most rigorous in their attacks on me said the same telltale words: “Do you know who I am?” My dear friend, if you ever so much as think those words, it is time to give yourself a time-out!

What should you do if you find that you yourself are suffering from righteous indignation? First, know that you have become a cause of much greater problems for the world than are whatever wrongs you may have thought you were fighting. So get yourself out of the fray! If your righteous indignation has made you angry with someone, make a point of healing that relationship. And make a big point of open-mindedly studying the points of view of others that most directly oppose your own! Only when you can articulate the best positions that oppose your own beliefs can you trust yourself to speak again in the arena of ideas.

It may be that our only cure for the fear and hatred that are the bitter fruits of righteous indignation will be to change the way we address both spiritual and temporal matters. It is devoutly-held political and religious beliefs that underlie nearly all righteous indignation, so it may be that both institutions have become sources of such monstrous evil that our only choice will be to give them up. It may at last be time to seek out more productive ways to govern ourselves, and more love-based ways to relate to God! Let’s begin to talk about that….

 

photo credit: Free For Commercial Use (FFC) <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/156555495@N04/36326715251″>Anger! A couple arguing :(</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>
photo credit: amslerPIX <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/20777644@N05/38959278830″>Angry group of seniors protesting with signs, old lady with a megaphone</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>
photo credit: Stanley Zimny (Thank You for 32 Million views) <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/82256086@N00/24484887223″>Union Soldiers on the March</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>
photo credit: osseous <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/10787737@N02/39053535022″>August 31, 2017</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>
photo credit: Knox O (Wasi Daniju) <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/7873992@N02/35204670562″>GT-22</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Triumphing Over the Tribulation

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

(Before you read this, please read The Tribulation and The Role of Evil in History)

What Jesus says about the coming Tribulation is awful. And since we can see now why He is right, we cannot ignore His warning! Perhaps you think the evil we face is actual demons, or you might prefer to blame some aspect of ourselves for persuading so many people to choose fear-based emotions over love. Whatever it is, let’s call it “the nasties.” Whatever is fighting the raising of this planet’s vibration away from fear and toward love, there is an epic battle brewing. And Jesus tells us its effects on us and on those we love will be horrific:

“Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child; and children will rise up against parents and cause them to be put to death” (MT 10:20-21).

 “For those days will be a time of tribulation such as has not occurred since the beginning of the creation which God created until now, and never will” (MK 13:19).

But still, you and I have no choice but to fight for the triumph of love over fear. Those at the highest levels tell us the earth is so deeply negative now that wars and disasters will proliferate and humankind may not survive! So they are working through us to turn the tide. As is Jesus:

“These things I have spoken to you, so that in Me you may have peace. In the world you have tribulation, but take courage; I have overcome the world” (JN 16:33).

“And lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age” (MT 28:20).

We come to earth with amnesia about the fact that we will never die. Our ignorance has helped us take our spiritual lessons seriously, but it also has made it much too easy for people to choose fear, anger, and hatred over love. As a remedy, two hundred years ago those at the highest eternal levels decided to reveal some afterlife truths so we can be confident our lives are eternal. Apparently this new knowledge is going to sharpen our focus on our need to choose love, while still preserving enough negativity to maintain the earth’s usefulness as a spiritual school. In the first part of the nineteenth century, those at the highest levels began to seek ideal ways to reveal to us some important afterlife facts. And their doing this seems to have been treated by the nasties that feed on fear as such a threat to their survival that they rolled out their biggest gun! They had long ago tested their temptation options on the most loving man who ever lived, and they had found one weapon that worked. Jesus vibrated so completely in love that none of the nasties could provoke Him to rage… until eventually one managed to do it:  

 “And Jesus entered the temple and drove out all those who were buying and selling in the temple, and overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who were selling doves. And He said to them, ‘It is written, My house shall be called a house of prayer”; but you are making it a robbers’ den’” (MT 21:12-13).

And thus the nasties long ago learned the disruptive power of righteous indignation. Show a person whose whole life is love an obvious wrong being committed in front of him, and his first impulse is to attack that wrong, even though his doing that would be a fear-based mistake! What Jesus did in the temple that day was counterproductive. He could have sat with the money-changers and pigeon-sellers and patiently taught them in perfect love! Instead, in a fit of righteous indignation He increased the world’s negativity while He taught no one anything.

Righteous indignation is the greatest weapon the nasties can use against spiritually advanced people. I really understand that now! I have been a target of righteous indignation for months, and I have come to see that this exposure to such extreme negativity has been a wonderful gift. If it hadn’t happened, I would not have done the research and come to realize with awe what is beginning to unfold. And without this new awareness, I could not know how essential it is that we forearm as many love-based people as we can!

 I may be the only one living who has extensively studied the afterlife evidence, the Gospel teachings, the history of Christianity, and information derived from mainstream science. If you have shared all my obsessions, please get in touch with me; but insofar as I have been able to tell, mine has been a singular set of hobbies. This means I am one of the few who can see how well evidence from all four of these sources amazingly and in small details fits together! And of course, such extensive correspondences among four different disciplines simply could not arise by chance. What is more, five years of doing Seek Reality has put me in contact with people who are important to the future of this work, and who otherwise might have no easy way to network with one another. I am not important, but I can see now that I am being positioned to become a nexus among people who really are important! So it should not be a surprise to find that I am an early target of the Tribulation. The nasties first target people who are being positioned to be the glue; then with them gone, whatever effort is ongoing tends to fall apart. So I should have been less surprised than I was when negative entities tried to wreck my life.

I have made some cherished friends among the people now working to raise the planet’s vibration. And early this year one beloved friend altogether lost her mind in front of me. Someone whose friendship I treasure switched in a moment from also treasuring my friendship to a fit of righteous indignation because I would not follow her lead in attacking another of my friends. When I would not yield to her demands, she set about trying to destroy as many of my other friendships as she could!

It was only when I saw the connection between what my friend was doing and the Lord’s temple tantrum that I realized it has been righteous indignation that has derailed all the many attempts that were made over the past two centuries to teach us that our minds are eternal. For example:

  • Efforts made to reach us in the nineteenth century were the easiest ones to thwart. The nasties inspired righteous indignation in adherents of fear-based Christianity, and thereby they persuaded the Christian world that these revelations were the Devil’s work.
  • Those not now in bodies then created an amazing flowering of afterlife communications. Around the start of the twentieth century they worked by various means to give us amazing information, and they induced scholars to document their work for study by scientists. Here, of course, all the nasties had to do was to inspire righteous indignation in the scientific gatekeepers by making them believe they were fighting superstitious interference in their work. Again, all this great new information was discredited and ignored.
  • During the twentieth century repeated attempts were made to enlighten us, from Edgar Cayce and Leslie Flint through near-death experiences and A Course in Miracles. But just the nasties inspiring righteous indignation in a few key people was enough to disrupt the work of Spirit and keep these thrilling revelations from enlightening more than just a few.
  • Easy electronic communication with the afterlife will be what will finally bring the truth of our survival to everyone on earth. So in the 1990s the nasties sowed righteous indignation in the most successful groups of researchers in this field, and as a result those groups stumbled. Most broke apart. The forces of evil have by now perfected their horrific shtick!

Righteous indignation has the power to turn good people into agents of the negativity that now threatens the survival of humankind. Even Jesus was not immune to it! Fortunately, though, He saw the risk, and He zealously warned us against it. His teaching that we must never fight back and His teachings on the role of forgiveness are the most essential Gospel words of all, since unless we follow them closely it will be impossible for love to prevail:

“But I say to you, do not resist an evil person; but whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also” (MT 5:39).

Peter asked him, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Up to seven times?” Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven” (MT 18:21-23).

There are such powerful forces now working to raise the consciousness vibration of this planet that even my spirit guide, although still a realist, has begun to think that love will win. The best spiritual medium I ever have known calls the ascended beings leading this effort “the Unity.” And the more of us who will work with the Unity, the easier it will be for love to prevail. If you have read this far, then perhaps you are being called to help advance this world-saving work! But how can you protect yourself against righteous indignation? Here are a few tips:

  • Raise your own spiritual vibration until you live and breathe only love. And follow the Gospel teachings on forgiveness and turning the other cheek, no matter what!
  • Never forget that love is our only defense against evil. If you actively fight anything, you only will strengthen and empower whatever evil you are trying to fight!
  • Be aware that an attack on you may come from someone you love. The easiest way for nasties to derail the dawning of universal love is to cause a susceptible person in a group of love-based people to feel righteous indignation against someone else in the group. How can you counter that? You can’t. All you can do is to love and bless the one now being controlled by nasties, and withdraw. Let Spirit manage it all.

We will need to know more about righteous indignation if we are to defuse its destructive power, so we’ll continue this discussion next week. Meanwhile, only know that love will win! We will all come together in love as we follow the Unity’s perfect guidance. If well-intentioned people everywhere can just hold true to universal love, the Kingdom of God begins to dawn today.

 

photo credit: Thomas_Cat <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/118292646@N06/29123259213″>The evil dragon</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
 

The Role of Evil in History

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

(Before you read this, please read The Tribulation)

We all see ourselves as fighting evil, but we cannot agree on what evil is or why evil even exists at all. Gather a group of sincere and earnest people – say, a Christian, a Muslim, an atheist, a Democrat, a Republican, and a political Independent. Ask them to come up with a definition for evil and an agreement about why evil exists, and you will soon find they can agree on nothing. Worse, they may well come to blows!

In order for us to fight evil and win, we first must understand what evil is and where it comes from. I am going to give you core definitions for “good” and “evil” that may surprise you now, but as we further explore how reality operates you will come to see why these definitions are the only ones that work. You also will begin to understand why evil is so sadly persistent.

  • Good is perfect love and its related high-vibration emotions.
  • Evil is abject fear and its related low-vibration emotions.

Simple, right? It should be simple! So then, where does evil come from?

The dead give us an answer to this question. First, though, let’s rule out some dead-ends:

  • There can be no powerful evil entity in opposition to God. What we experience as human consciousness is the infinitely creative core energy that continuously manifests everything we perceive to be real, and it exists in a range of vibrations from the lowest (abject fear) to the highest (perfect love). The lower its vibratory rate might be, the less power consciousness possesses, so there cannot be a prince of evil that possesses any power at all.
  • Human nature is perfectly good. All human minds together are intrinsically part of the godhead! As Jesus said, “The kingdom of God is within you” (LK 17:21). There is nothing about you that is evil, but rather your true nature is perfect love.
  • Other people lack the power to make us do evil things. If we know we can’t say “The Devil made me do it,” we might say that a spouse or colleague or even a politician pushed us over the edge and made us do something that we later regret. It is natural to want to excuse our own behavior in this way, but in fact no one else can make you do anything!

So then, where does evil come from? According to those we used to think were dead, evil comes from you and me!

Evil is the result of conscious minds choosing negative emotions over perfect love.

We are eternal minds that experience brief lives on earth as trips to a spiritual gym. We plan our spiritual workouts here because in pushing against the kind of negativity that does not exist in what we call the afterlife, we can rapidly raise our personal vibration toward ever more perfect love. The problem is that in order for us to grow spiritually here, we must have the free will in each instance to choose fear, anger, or hatred instead of love. And many of us face complex choices that might make a negative course seem more appealing, so sometimes good people with the best of intentions will choose to reject the love-based alternative. And thus is more evil born into the world.

Knowing this, we can better understand Jesus! He came to earth to teach us how to always choose love over fear, which would give us the power to vanquish evil and soon bring the Kingdom of God on earth. If only Christianity had not been hijacked by evil as soon as Jesus transitioned, we could have brought the Kingdom of God to earth long ago! I am going to use Christianity as one of two examples of evil working in the world, but first let’s look at some of what Jesus said:

“But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High; for He Himself is kind to ungrateful and evil men. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful” (LK 6:35-36).

“But I say to you, do not resist an evil person; but whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also. If anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, let him have your coat also. Whoever forces you to go one mile, go with him two” (MT 5:39-41).

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.  For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? If you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Therefore you are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (MT 5:43-48).

Do you see a pattern here? Whatever the question might be, love is always the only answer!

For most of my life I have ignored the evidence that conscious negative entities exist. I didn’t want even to think about them! But the word “demon” appears at least sixty times across the four canonical Gospels, and Jesus plainly told us that protecting people from demons was important. He often cast them out of those who were susceptible to them, and He taught His disciples to do the same. Modern Christianity mostly ignores the issue of demons, but if you call yourself a follower of Jesus then what was important to Him surely ought to be important to you!

So, what are demons, anyway? Sadly, some people have made such disastrously bad choices during their earth-lives that they have let fear, anger, and hatred take them over altogether. Many of those who have tragically caused such deeply negative transformations in themselves will resist leaving the earth when they lose their bodies, since it is in their natures now to crave more and more of the negativity that does not exist in the afterlife. And since all our minds are inextricably part of the consciousness that continuously manifests this universe, all these self-created demons need to do to produce more evil is to influence susceptible people to choose fear and other low-vibration emotions over love. It’s that simple!

If your personal vibratory rate is low, then core negative emotions like selfishness, pride, greed, envy, anger, and plain old fear will tempt you to turn away from love. And it may not surprise you to know that people who are vibrating in the fear-and-anger range are especially attracted to situations where they can exercise power over others. This is probably because fear-based people desperately need to feel more in control, but it doesn’t really matter why. What matters is that the two institutions that are most susceptible to influence by negative entities are… you guested it… religions and politics.

You can see this ongoing negative influence in both Christianity and the United States, just as you can see it in every other religion and government on earth. Where Christianity is concerned, all the purveyors of evil needed to do was to persuade the Apostle Paul to package the love-based teachings of Jesus in the ancient fear-based concepts of judgment and blood-sacrifice. So almost immediately after His crucifixion, all the genuine teachings of Jesus had been subsumed in the false notion that He had come to die as a sacrifice to God that would redeem us from God’s wrath. At once, the vibration of the infant religion was lowered so severely that the Council of Nicaea in 325 was able to think itself “inspired by God” as it further depressed the vibration of Christianity with additional false and fear-based teachings, from eternal hell to sheep-and-goats to Armageddon. Christianity has been corrupted with evil from its birth, but fortunately the genuine Gospel teachings remain true. And they are all we need! In similar fashion, the American Founding Fathers formed a love-based governmental model designed to foster personal freedom and produce the greatest good for the greatest number. And those who study our founding decades can see that almost immediately the demons of the day were hard at work creating divisions among the very leaders who had invented that form of government! By now we can see that both Christianity and politics in the United States are tied up in fear-based knots, and they produce little more than the divisions among people that are the very root of evil. Pedophilia in Christianity and the hate-filled ravings current in America’s streets are yet more fruit of what have become two extremely poisonous trees.

The battle to raise the consciousness vibration of this planet has been going on for almost two centuries, so by now most of those on earth who are vibrating primarily in love can see and avoid the obvious traps like fear, greed, and hatred. But for people who are more spiritually advanced there is a much more subtle temptation that can wreck even a lifetime of devotion to love.

Let’s call it righteous indignation. If it feels righteous, then it cannot be wrong!  And indignation feels like permissible anger because it makes us believe we are fighting evil rather than contributing to it. Righteous indignation is so seductive that even Jesus was not immune! As I will show you next week, the false lure of righteous indignation has infiltrated and destroyed nearly all the most promising human efforts to work with those at the highest levels of reality to raise the consciousness vibration of this planet. All of us and the planet are at risk unless we learn to see and avoid this danger. Next time I will show you what is happening now, and how you and I can turn the tide….

The Tribulation

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

People ask me when Armageddon will happen, and on this point the evidence is clear: the Biblical Armageddon never will happen. I wrote on this topic two years ago in a post entitled Apocalyptic Nonsense, so I won’t rehash it here; but you might read that post if you are not yet clear about the fact that the notion of an end-times war is the antithesis of everything Jesus came to teach us.

Until recent events in my own life, I believed that all the Apocalyptic nonsense in the Gospels was only later corruptions that we could just ignore; but I realize now that the Christian councils co-opted and embellished a genuine warning from Jesus. Parts of those Apocalyptic Gospel passages do sound like Him! And in light of modern evidence, it is plain to see that what the councils built upon was a genuine warning about the Tribulation that would attend the coming of the Kingdom of God on earth.

Jesus talks about the Kingdom of Heaven thirty times in the Gospel Book of Matthew, and the Kingdom of God as much as fifty times through all four Gospels. At one time I believed these terms meant different things, but I have been given to understand by those that we used to think were dead that they both refer to the rapid elevation of human consciousness on this planet. And we know that elevation is happening now. So the process of bringing the Kingdom of God on earth has begun in our lifetime! And therefore the Tribulation that Jesus told us would herald its birth is soon upon us.

So I feel now a pressing need to share with you some of what you will need to know in order to navigate this difficult time and assist in the arrival of a glorious new world. I resist doing this! I would rather tell you about the afterlife flowers in colors never seen on earth, and the fact that they give off not just a glorious scent but also loving energies that feed our bodies. There is so much that is beyond-belief wonderful about our universal eternal home that the last thing I want to do is tell you what is coming now on earth. But Jesus warned us. And we have lately come to know enough about how reality works to know why He so urgently warned us! He was preparing us to deal with what he called the “birth pangs” that would be attendant to our raising of the consciousness of this planet sufficiently to accomplish our triumph over negativity and the advent of the Kingdom of God on earth.

As He was sitting on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to Him privately, saying, “Tell us, when will these things happen, and what will be the sign of Your coming, and of the end of the age?”

And Jesus answered and said to them, “See to it that no one misleads you. For many will come in My name, saying, ‘I am the Christ,’ and will mislead many.  You will be hearing of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not frightened, for those things must take place, but that is not yet the end. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and in various places there will be famines and earthquakes. But all these things are merely the beginning of birth pangs. 

“Then they will deliver you to tribulation, and will kill you, and you will be hated by all nations because of My name. At that time many will fall away and will betray one another and hate one another. Many false prophets will arise and will mislead many. Because lawlessness is increased, most people’s love will grow cold.” (MT 24:3-12)

It astonishes me now to realize how accurate Jesus is about this, and ours is the first generation that even could have known what He was talking about. I swear, I am hitting my head as I write this! The Lord won’t need to come again, since of course He never left. And the Gospel teachings went through a two-step translation from Aramaic to Greek and from Greek to English so we have to assume some distortions. But still, this passage is right on the money! Consider:

  • Jesus talks in the Gospels about “the end of the age.” What does He mean by that? Since the Lord’s stated reason for coming was to teach us how to raise this planet’s vibration sufficiently to bring the Kingdom of God on earth, quite obviously it will be that event which will free humankind from this age of grief and torment.
  • There are now more than forty thousand Christian denominations, each of them claiming to hold the true Christ, and all of them corrupted by false doctrines. So it is easy to see what Jesus means when He refers to the many who will claim in His name to be the Christ.
  • As for wars, rumors of wars, and natural disasters, we need only look at the entire history of humankind – and especially at the twentieth century – to see what that is all about. Fear and the other low-vibration emotions have dominated civilization ever since it began.

And as for that last frightening paragraph above, in order for you to understand why the Kingdom of God cannot come on earth without these birth pangs, you will need to know more about what we might call the physics of consciousness. There is a lot more to know about how it works, but this much should let us begin our discussion; and if you want more, I have written about consciousness here, here, here, and here. I apologize for having included some snark, but spending your life waiting for mainstream science to start looking at the non-material truth and coming to realize in old age that it won’t happen in your lifetime does tend to make you somewhat cranky!

Our efforts to understand the greater reality have shown us that the base creative energy which continuously manifests this universe is what you and I experience as human consciousness. And our minds are all part of that infinitely creative and infinitely loving base consciousness! Your own mind is central to the mind of God. As Jesus said, “The Kingdom of God is within you.” (LK 17:21)

Consciousness is a form of energy, so it vibrates. Consciousness exists in a range of vibrations, from the lowest (which is fear, anger, hatred, and the other negative emotions) to the highest (which is perfect love). At its highest vibration consciousness has infinite power, while at its lowest vibration it has no power. We come to earth to raise our personal vibrations away from fear and negativity and toward ever more perfect love, and in order to do that we must exercise free will. The problem is that having free will gives us the ability to choose fear and negativity over love, and because in every generation some people have made that choice, apparently humankind has literally created most of the ambient fear and rage that so grievously oppresses us now.

I don’t know much about the low-vibration pollution that some out-of-body travelers tell us can be seen from the higher dimensions as a visible sludge that now coats this planet. Apparently a lot of it is just people who have made such awful choices that they have transformed themselves into something like evil incarnate; but for our purposes it doesn’t matter what these low-vibration entities are. We only know that they exist, and they have little power but they can nevertheless oppress the minds of people who are not guarding themselves against their influence. Jesus called these troublesome negative entities “demons,” and He often removed them from susceptible people.

Our urgent problem now is the fact that low-vibration entities feed on fear, anger, and hatred, so they must at all costs prevent the raising of humankind’s consciousness vibration toward more perfect love. Until recently, these nasties were able to retard most people’s spiritual growth with laughable ease, since no one even knew what we were fighting! But we are told now that the consciousness vibration of this planet has sunk to the point where very advanced beings must intervene to ensure that the end of the age begins now. Without their help, they predict that we face extinction within the next two centuries. And there won’t be a Biblical Apocalypse, with Jesus returning to begin His thousand-year reign; but instead we will bitterly peter out and leave behind a ruined planet.

This is the first of three planned blog posts. Next week I will help you see the interplay between love and fear in human history, and will demonstrate how that war continues in the world and in all our lives. Then in two weeks I will tell you what little I know about the inter-dimensional rescue effort that is now underway. I will point out some of the efforts being made by nasties to foil it, and will show you how you can protect yourself from their influence.

The choice is yours! You may not be convinced that I am right, but since what I will ask you to do to help to bring the Kingdom of God on earth will be spiritually healthy and enjoyable and will vastly improve your life, you have nothing to lose and a world to save if you are willing to gamble that I might be right. And you do have the power to work wonders! The humanity that urgently needs your help is everyone you love and your grandchildren’s grandchildren.

 

photo credit: Roland J. Sims <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/138015205@N08/35630452440″>The Age of grace</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
photo credit: SCFiasco <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/30352125@N00/43011411824″>Warlock Tiger</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>  (IMAGE REMOVED)

Seek Reality

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Five years ago I began an experiment in radio and podcasting that is central to my life in ways more important than the considerable time that it takes. I am only now becoming aware of the extent to which Seek Reality has shaped my life.

  • I have met so many great experts! Some of the authors and researchers I first met when I invited them to be interview guests have become my dear friends and beloved fellow laborers in the field of establishing what is true.
  • I have many friends, too, that I may never meet. Since I encourage communications from listeners, I hear from people every day. Some have questions, some want to add to what a guest has said or to make points based upon their own research, and some simply want to give me a hug and receive a hug in return.
  • My work has broadened to encompass my broadcast name. When Cameron Steele, the head of ctrnetwork.com, asked me what I wanted to call my program, the right name came to mind at once: “Seek Reality.” “What??” He had thought of me as an afterlife researcher! My answer to him felt automatic: “Studying the afterlife is just one part of what we all should be doing, which is trying to understand what is going on.” I heard myself say it. Then I realized that of course it was true, but frankly until that moment it never had occurred to me that seeking to understand reality was my actual mission.

It is imperative now that humankind better understand what actually is going on. Our ongoing ignorance of the nature of reality and the purpose of human life has begun to put the future of life on earth at risk! And until mainstream scientists stop following what is just one more belief-system and begin again to care about understanding a reality that refuses to conform to their materialist beliefs, we are unfortunately stuck as we seek reality with relying on lay researchers like yours truly. Of course, knowing what happens at death is just the beginning of understanding reality, and in the past five years I have made the title of my radio program and podcast my life’s work.

Fortunately, once you clear away all the religious and materialist cobwebs that have kept us from understanding the truth, consistent evidence of what is going on is abundant. And we are seeing a certain softening of the cultural boundaries now. Where once any thought of life after death was consigned to religious beliefs exclusively, now what open-minded researchers are learning is become part of the cultural mainstream. Near-death experiences have led the way, but now even the prevalence of death-bed visitors is becoming unremarkable.

Of course, a mainstream science obsessed with the false god of materialism in a reality that is consciousness-based continues to lead good researchers astray. The “standard model” has become a tyrant now that inhibits further scientific progress. And since for scientists “reality is fundamentally constituted by physical stuff outside and independent of mind… (M)ental states, in turn, should be explainable in terms of the parameters of physical processes in the brain.” What this nonsense means to someone is that Multiple Personality Disorder might be able to explain “Life, the Universe, and Everything.”

Consciousness is the base creative force. Nothing else but consciousness exists! When people like Albert Einstein and Max Planck discovered this to be true close to a hundred years ago, why is science still stuck in 19th-century materialism?

The biggest problem for scientists is that when your core belief is wrong, all the research you might build on it has to be wrong. So more and more, scientific research is giving us less and less. Scientific researchers are too often phoning it in. On the other hand, when lay researchers with no core beliefs or boundaries will objectively study all the evidence with the courage to follow wherever it leads, we can arrive at a perfectly consistent view of reality that answers mankind’s greatest questions. Here are a few:

  • Is there intelligent life in the universe? And if there is, why haven’t we found it? Even lay publications are asking these questions now, in puzzlement and despair, when the answers have long since been known. YES, a universe based in consciousness energy teems with intelligent life. But this planet has become so dangerous for aliens that reportedly their motherships nowadays remain cloaked in other dimensions, and most of their modern explorations are done by organic robots that we call “grays.” Modern aliens are careful to be invisible to us, but that level of caution was not always necessary; as a result, mummified grays and parts of grays will occasionally turn up.
  • Why are we here? It is impossible for scientists whose work is based in materialism to answer this question, and when they even try to ask it they look ridiculous. In the greater reality (which is the only reality) we have abundant evidence that we live many material lives on earth and on other planets as well in what is essentially a spiritual school. Simply put, we come here to grow spiritually, to raise our personal vibrations away from fear and toward more perfect love. This is basic stuff!
  • Where did life come from? What is the actual origin of species? This may be the most basic question of all, and because Darwinian evolution via natural selection is a corollary of the scientific dogma of materialism, the answers that scientists are beginning to get are confounding them. Neither religious theories of miraculous creation nor scientific theories that life arose as a fortunate accident and evolved by natural selection are real, nor are they even possible. All happens within consciousness, so scientists are discovering now that complex life must have had a beginning that was guided by intelligence, and that ninety percent of modern species arose simultaneously less than 200,000 years ago. All of this is so contrary to everything that scientists believe that for awhile these wonderful discoveries will go nowhere.
  • Where does consciousness come from? Here is another question that matter-based scientists never will answer. For them, consciousness must arise from matter, which is like insisting that the evening news must arise from your television set. The sad result of the scientific dogma of materialism is that it even distorts the work of wonderful people like those at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS). Someone there is actually speculating that the brain itself doesn’t generate human consciousness at all, but rather since even one-celled organisms exhibit some level of consciousness, it is more likely that “our human consciousness may be an emergent property that is passed upward as a result of fundamental consciousness characteristics of our body’s individual cells themselves.” It is impossible to be more wrong about anything than that! In fact, what we experience as human consciousness is apparently of the same nature as the consciousness that continuously manifests this universe.

The evidence for the primacy of consciousness is so overwhelming now that the scientific obsession with matter and with their old physics models is finally weakening. It does feel peculiar for lay researchers to be able to answer basic question about which materialists will always be clueless! In fact, more scientists are beginning to accept the limitations of their own hobbled discipline. They sadly recognize that there are some areas that materialist science  cannot address, namely the origins of consciousness, the element of free will, and the fundamental nature of God. Of course, my fellow researchers not bound by dogmas have long since worked out preliminary answers to these three questions which will make it easy for scientists who eventually break free of materialism to make progress on them by leaps and bounds. As the great physicist and polymath Nikola Tesla said, “The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.”

Christianity vs. Spiritual Growth

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Christianity is in a worldwide crisis. European countries are full of empty churches, and the United States is not far behind: studies suggest that barely eighteen percent of Americans regularly go to church. Meanwhile, 27% of Americans say they are “spiritual but not religious,” which is an eight-percentage-point increase in that category in just five years. Clearly something big is happening, and from the perspective of my email in-box the problem with Christianity seems to be that people are hungrier now than ever before for genuine spiritual learning. And the practice of traditional Christianity is an active obstacle to spiritual growth.

For people who grew up as Christians, the notion that Christianity is anti-spiritual seems counterintuitive. Isn’t growing spiritually the point of even being a Christian ? Most Americans see it as a cultural equation: Religious = Spiritual. We cannot conceive of what spirituality without religion even might be.

To help you if you are struggling to square that old equation with your needs as a seeker, here is a new set of definitions that is based in what we have been learning from the wiser and more spiritually-developed people that we used to think were dead:

  • Spirit is a vastly expanded and infinitely more powerful version of what we experience as human consciousness. Essentially, Spirit is consciousness! Every human mind is part of Spirit, and therefore our minds are powerful as well.
  • God, the base creative force, is not a cranky humanoid with thunderbolts and a beard, but rather God is the highest level of consciousness. For a long time I thought of God as “an infinitely powerful and infinitely creative energy-like potentiality without size or form, alive in the sense that your mind is alive, highly emotional and therefore probably self-aware.” Now, though, more and more I am coming to like Mikey Morgan’s definition: “God is a unity of infinite pure love, and all that exists.” That does it!
  • Spiritual energy is the base creative force.  Consciousness is energy, Spirit is energy, and God is energy. All are aspects of the same thing. In fact, matter and everything else that we think is real is energy as well: as Einstein said, “What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses.” Because all of this is true, it turns out that what we experience as human emotion is immensely powerful.
  • Vibration is the way we speak about the hierarchy of energy that is all that exists. Spiritual energy vibrates as what we experience as human emotion, and it exists in a range of vibrations, from the lowest (which is fear, hatred, anger, and all the other ishy emotions) to the highest, which is perfect love. So the genuine God is the highest possible consciousness vibration.
  • Spiritual Growth is simply the process of raising our personal consciousness vibration away from fear and toward more perfect love.

So spiritual growth is a function of what we might call spiritual physics. Whatever we do that raises our personal vibration away from fear and toward more perfect love enables us to grow spiritually, while anything we do that makes us fearful, angry, resentful, selfish, ashamed, or even prideful will lower our vibration and make us more unloving.

And therein lies the problem. Christianity as it was first developed nearly two millennia ago is steeped in fear and guilt and in separations between people. We are taught to fear God, to fear the Devil and hell, and to fear being judged and condemned, even for trivial transgressions; and we are taught that we are “the elect,” that other people are condemned, and that we must separate ourselves from them. Horribly, we even are taught that God loves us so little that God cannot forgive  us unless Jesus dies barbarically in order to redeems us. If there is anything more antithetical to spiritual elevation than that particular belief, I cannot imagine what it might be! We now know from those we used to think were dead that not a single one of these teachings is true. Indeed, we now know that these false teachings all are actively un-spiritual. They work powerfully to lower our spiritual vibrations.

This disaster is not Jesus’s fault! His Gospel teachings are the most perfect method ever given to humankind for achieving spiritual growth by the elevation of our personal consciousness vibrations. My book, The Fun of Growing Forever, shows you how well those teachings work, and how quickly! But Christianity doesn’t emphasize the Gospel teachings. Instead, it concentrates on teaching us fear, submission, and separation. That the spiritually hungry are leaving Christianity in droves is really not surprising.

Many disaffected Christians have turned to eastern religious traditions like meditation and yoga. These practices are said to be spiritually helpful, but they take time and effort to learn and to practice; and that turns out to present another problem. One of the effects of genuine spiritual growth is the gradual reduction of the me-me-me selfishness that rings in people’s minds when they are vibrating more toward fear, shame, and separation. We call it the ego, and the fact that we identify with it is part of its trickery: it is not who we are, but rather it is just a very-low-vibration illusion. A Course in Miracles is a powerful tool for vanquishing the ego altogether, which is why I recommend it so highly. Meditation and yoga might be helpful too, but it turns out that the better we are at these practices, the more they bolster that troublesome ego.

So, where does that leave those of us who are eager for rapid spiritual growth so we can make this incarnation our last necessary trip back to earth-school? As we study the afterlife evidence and the truths about the greater reality that have been given to us by elevated beings, eventually we come to realize that no religion can help people to grow spiritually. Wow, it feels amazing to write those words! I was a zealous Christian into my fifties, so coming at last to see how harmful Christian teachings are to the faithful was the most wrenching experience of my life. If you feel betrayed as I felt betrayed, please know that the essence of Christianity is supposed to be Jesus, and Jesus is the best spiritual teacher of all!

You really don’t need to practice a religion. If spiritual growth is your goal, then all you need is a much closer walk with the genuine Jesus of the Gospels. He confirms for us that all the rigid heaviness of Christianity is the wrong path when He says, Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light” (MT 11:29-30). He promises to give us the truth if we will ask Him for it. He says, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened” (MT 7:7-8). And He gloriously affirms for all time the truth of His Gospel teachings on love and forgiveness. “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (JN 8:31-32).

Buy the books:

– Categories –

– Subscribe –

Follow Roberta’s blog for inspiration, book news, and updates!

– Podcast –

Join hundreds of thousands of listeners! Tune in to Roberta’s Podcast. Shows posted each Monday.

Listen

– Get In Touch –

Have a question to ask Roberta? Complete the form below to contact her.

Contact

- Archives -