A Lawyer on “Stubborn Skeptics”

Posted on June 21, 2016June 21, 2016 by Roberta Grimes

GUEST POST: Victor and Wendy Zammit are the world’s leading afterlife experts. For decades they have fearlessly battled all who would deny humankind these truths, and they even have posted a million-dollar challenge for anyone who can prove that the afterlife evidence in their wonderful book, A Lawyer Presents the Evidence for the Afterlife, is either misinterpreted or bogus. Their indispensable Friday Afterlife Report is available for free at victorzammit.com. This article by Victor will help you better understand why so many otherwise intelligent people, both scientists and religionists, are still so unable to accept what is by now incontrovertibly true. Having also long fought this battle against ignorance, I think what Victor has to say is brilliant!

AFTER DECADES of dealing with all kinds of paranormal skeptics, I can relate to you that there are at least nine reasons why closed-minded skeptics tend to remain stubborn about their skeptical beliefs – and why some of them unreasonably attack those who scientifically and empirically investigate evidence for the paranormal. The nine reasons below can apply to any person who inflexibly holds strictly subjective, personal beliefs, whether those beliefs are religious or secular.

My experience with closed-minded skeptics is that they do not investigate the evidence. They completely reject any information that is not consistent with their own cherished beliefs, even if that evidence is scientifically supported. And they lack the skills, competence, and objectivity to perceive new evidence in a scientific and balanced way. Here are some of the reasons why:

RATIONALIZATION THROUGH COGNITIVE DISSONANCE. “Cognitive dissonance” is a term used by psychologists to describe the discomfort that arises when people are confronted with information that is fundamentally inconsistent with their own beliefs. When a materialist is confronted with highly persuasive evidence for the paranormal, that evidence will elicit in him extreme anxiety. Denial must follow. The materialist will become angry, hostile, even aggressive. He will feel forced to reduce his anxiety by rationalizing his beliefs and going into extreme denial.
CATHEXIS. This is a psychological term for the fact that some people develop a very powerful – and usually unconscious – super-glue connection with an idea or a thing. Some of those who call themselves skeptics are “cathexed” to ideas which are incompatible with the possibility of an afterlife. Because the connection can be powerful and unconscious, sufferers often will attack their source of anxiety, which can be anyone who puts forward evidence that contradicts their beliefs. So these individuals are immune to logic, science, and any kind of repeatable and objective evidence that threatens to reverse their cathexis.
NEUROLINGUISTIC PROGRAMMING (NLP). When some skeptics are confronted with information that is fundamentally inconsistent with their own deeply cherished beliefs, the mind of the skeptic will DELETE that information. As with “cognitive dissonance” above, this kind of skeptic will experience unbearable anxiety, a disturbance of his “comfort zone,” and will go into complete DENIAL. The most aggressive skeptics who are affected this way will even cheat, mislead, and lie about the real situation.
ENVIRONMENTAL PROGRAMMING. “Environment determines perception.” It is known that, by and large, the environment you were born in will shape how you will see the world. If a Western skeptic from New York had instead been born in India, more likely than not the skeptic would be a Hindu. If he were born to a radical, extremist Islamic family, the skeptic would be a Moslem. If born to an orthodox Jewish family, the skeptic would be an orthodox Jew. And in secular Western countries, many people today grow up with an atheistic bias. One needs to have skills and considerable resolve to rise above such environmental conditioning and programming.
BRAIN-EXPLANATION FOR “CLOSED-MINDED SKEPTICISM.” Skepticism can even be biologically based. When we have a rigid belief system, the neurons in the brain fire in a certain defined network. So if information (e.g. afterlife evidence) comes into the brain and contradicts our rigid belief system (which in this case is skepticism), those neural pathways will fire in the same old way and will not decode the new information. This functions just like a filter. It is only when the skeptic has a dramatic experience that a new neural pathway will be established, and then the old one gradually falls into disuse. Our belief systems are fundamental to filtering our perceptions of reality.
PRIMARY MOTIVATIONS: MONEY, POWER, STATUS – AND A JOB. Some people choose to be closed-minded skeptics for career advancement and/or to make money, to attain influence, and even for celebrity status. Those who are scientists may want to continue to work in science. Most scientific funding comes from big corporations, and it tends to go only to those scientists and researchers who have the potential to increase their profits. For example, you may get a scientist who will reject the paranormal outright because he/she can get funding for taking that position. These scientists-come-skeptics will never listen to logic, to science, or to intelligent reasoning. They can’t move from their positions because they would lose money, power, status, and even their careers. Do you remember those negatively prejudiced scientists and medical doctors we once saw in glossy magazines in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world, and also on television, stating as scientists that smoking is good, and even is healthy for you? Or those scientists who once stated that certain pharmaceutical drugs were healthy, when subsequently it was shown that these drugs might have killed hundreds or even thousands of people – a drug like vioxx? To this day there are scientists in Germany who still insist that smoking is safe.
THE SMORGASBORD ARGUMENT. Professor Stephen Hawking is most notorious for using this “smorgasbord” approach, picking and using only the information that substantiates his own negative prejudices. This closed-minded skeptical professor does not know that in a courtroom situation his smorgasbord arguments would be torn to shreds. Why? Because he would be cross-examined on the critical, most vital evidence that he ignores because it fundamentally contradicts his deeply entrenched negative prejudices. He makes a huge error in thinking that he is an expert in the use of evidence! A litigation lawyer has exclusive technical knowledge of what is relevant, what is evidentiary, and what is essential admissible as evidence, and won’t let anyone get away with picking and choosing only whatever evidence supports his own position.
THE HYPNOTIC EFFECT. Those skeptics who are blatantly irrational, illogical, and unreasonable about the paranormal or the afterlife evidence could be suffering from a powerful negative hypnotic effect. Some years ago I sent clear, easily identifiable afterlife evidence in rebuttal to a couple of hard-line skeptics. Their reply was, “where is the evidence?” Yet non-aligned scientists easily identified the evidentiary value in the same evidence when it was sent to them. It is possible that skeptics at some time in their lives experienced a “parallel hypnotic directive” that there is no afterlife or paranormal evidence. This is exactly what happens when we see a hypnotist on stage telling a couple of our hypnotized friends that they will be eating an apple. But the hypnotist then gives them an onion to eat, not an apple, and the hypnotized subjects CANNOT IDENTIFY THE EVIDENCE and refuse to believe they each have eaten an onion! Even after they have been taken out of the hypnotic state, they still insist that “the apple was really delicious.” Hypnotic suggestion can be so powerful that it can be almost impossible for people to overcome it.
BEING SPIRITUALLY RETARDED. There is no link between intelligence and being spiritual (you will notice that I said “spiritual,” NOT “religious.”) An atheist could be “spiritual” (or highly ethical) when he/she does voluntary work for the benefit of others without a thought of making some kind of profit for him/herself. But there is a class of closed-minded skeptics who may be highly intelligent but are spiritually retarded, meaning that they have not reached a stage in life where they can perform secular spiritual work for the benefit of others in selfless service. Nor can these spiritually deficient folks objectively identify legitimate afterlife evidence.

Having read Victor’s wisdom, now I better understand how it is possible that in the twenty-first century we still get such nonsense as scientists attempting to preserve the minds of those we love inside computers so we’ll be able to talk with them after they die. The next time I hear from someone who is stuck in close-minded skepticism, I’m just going to send him Victor’s wonderful words!

God and the Materialist Delusion

Posted on June 14, 2016June 9, 2023 by Roberta Grimes

By now we can be certain that the Christian God does not exist. After decades of doing afterlife research and collaborating extensively with other researchers, I can state without equivocation that there is no anthropomorphic God that judges us and condemns us to hell. Wonderfully, though, what exists instead is the loving Spirit that Jesus describes in the Gospels.

God is 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. All our minds are inextricably part of this one overriding consciousness; and we can be certain now that each of us is loved beyond our fondest imaginings. Each of us is God’s best-beloved child.

There isn’t just a little bit of evidence that this genuine God of the Gospels actually exists. Instead, the evidence is consistent and overwhelming to the point where to deny it anymore is just an embarrassing profession of ignorance.

So, now we know that God is real. And we can demonstrate that this genuine God is the perfect God of the Gospels. It appears that a theoretical physicist, too, believes he is edging closer to discovering God, although of course for a physicist to discover God is nothing new. The two greatest physicists of the 20^th century didn’t care much for the Christian God, but the genuine Spirit which is all that exists was certainly well within their ken.

Max Planck won the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics as the father of quantum mechanics. In 1944 he said, “As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.”

And although Albert Einstein is widely believed today to have been an atheist, his whole aversion seems to have been to just the Christian version of God. Of atheism he said, “I’m not an atheist and I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangements of the books, but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God.”

His inability to know more about God seemed to frustrate him. He said, “I want to know how God created this world. I’m not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts, the rest are details.”

Scientific geniuses like Einstein and Planck saw their heyday early in the twentieth century. But unfortunately, their hopeful successors have been detoured deep into the weeds because at about the turn of the twentieth century the scientific gatekeepers adopted materialism as what was then called “the fundamental dogma of science.”

As the brilliant scholar Rupert Sheldrake observes, “Since the nineteenth century, (materialism’s) advocates have promised that science will explain everything in terms of physics and chemistry; science will show that there is no God and no purpose in the universe; it will reveal that God is a delusion inside human minds and hence in human brains; and it will prove that brains are nothing but complex machines.

“Materialists are sustained by the faith that science will redeem their promises, turning their beliefs into facts. Meanwhile, they live on credit.”

After more than a hundred years of precious little to show for it, Sheldrake tells us that “Confidence in materialism is draining away. Its leaders, like central bankers, keep printing promissory notes, but it has lost its credibility as the central dogma of science. Many scientists no longer want to be 100% invested in it.”

He adds that “Materialism’s credit crunch changes everything. As science is liberated from this nineteenth-century ideology, new perspectives and possibilities will open up, not just for science, but for other areas of our culture that are dominated by materialism.”

But still the materialist nonsense continues! More and more, it seems that frustrated researchers are just going through the motions now, publishing peer-reviewed papers so sloppy that surprisingly few of their results can be replicated. Physicists who might have been as great as this century’s Albert Einstein or Max Planck are reduced to fiddling with subatomic particles that are really just vortices of energy. And this morning I read a review of an amazingly pathetic book. One of its authors actually claims that soon we will be able to “scan a human brain at a fine enough spatial and chemical resolution . . . combine that scan with good enough models of how individual brain cells achieve their signal processing functions, to create a cell-by-cell . . . model of the full brain in artificial hardware, a model whose . . . behavior is usefully close to that of the original brain.” Since the human brain is nothing more than a receiver and transmitter of information, this claim is as silly as the notion that reverse-engineering a CD player will allow us to reanimate Elvis. But still, the authors say that these theoretical fake extra brains (called “Ems”) would be able to have experiences that we then could take as our own, as is suggested by the review’s playful title: “Your Em Goes to Bermuda.”

This baseless insistence of scientific gatekeepers that consciousness must come from our brains has blighted more than a century of what should instead have been open-minded scientific inquiry with the potential to bring to humankind riches beyond measure. And what may be worse is that scientists’ insistence that when our brains die we must die as well has caused so much unnecessary fear and pain. But the time is now! As pioneering engineer and inventor Nicola Tesla wisely 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.”

photo credit: <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/67734410@N00/27025776942″>New Jersey & New York, May-2016</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>

“The Men of Her City Shall Stone Her”

Posted on June 5, 2016June 5, 2016 by Roberta Grimes

I have just read a blog-rant by someone who calls himself a Christian against Jan Crouch, the co-founder of Trinity Broadcasting Network, who recently died. I have no idea what a woman who spent forty years building the largest Christian broadcasting network on earth might have done to offend this Bible-thumper! But he used a lot of Biblical quotations to assure his readers that Ms. Crouch is at this moment frying in a fiery hell.

I’m sorry, but this has done it for me. I am going to tell you now categorically that not only is the entire Christian Bible not the Inspired Word of God, but anyone who uses pieces of it to beat down someone who has tried to serve God is himself enmired in deepest evil. We have been assured by those we used to think were dead that no powerful evil entity exists, but if there were a Satan, those who wield such hate-filled nonsense would be his disciples!

The strictest Christians insist to us that the entire Christian Bible is the inspired word of God, and it still applies today. Okay. Fair enough. Let’s take just a glimpse at what they claim that God is saying to us. So you won’t have to spend your whole day reading, what follows is just a tiny sample of God’s purported Old Testament Words that no loving God could conceivably utter:

If a girl is taken to wife and found to be not a virgin, ^“then they shall bring out the girl to the doorway of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her to death.” (Deuteronomy 22: 21)

If your brother, your child, your wife, or your friend tries to persuade you to serve a different god, “you shall not yield to him or listen to him; and your eye shall not pity him, nor shall you spare or conceal him. But you shall surely kill him; your hand shall be first against him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people.” (Deuteronomy 13:8-9)

If a son is rebellious and resists correction, “then his father and mother shall seize him, and bring him out to the elders of his city at the gateway of his hometown. They shall say to the elders of his city, ‘This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey us, he is a glutton and a drunkard.’ Then all the men of his city shall stone him to death.” (Deuteronomy 21:19-21)

And if someone breaks any of God’s commandments, or even falls away from the approved religion, “then you shall bring out that man or that woman who has done this evil deed to your gates, that is, the man or the woman, and you shall stone them to death.” (Deuteronomy 17:5)

They must have had piles of rocks all over, just waiting for someone to slip up! Even back three thousand years ago, this all must have seemed a bit over-the-top, so the Old Testament contains such further exhortations as, “Thus you shall not show pity: life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.” (Deuteronomy 19:21)

For heaven’s sake, even eating shellfish (Deut 14:9-10), wearing blended fabrics (Leviticus 19:19), or cutting your hair or beard, shaving, or wearing a tattoo (Leviticus 26-28) is a detestable Biblical crime! So whenever you look at a well-dressed and nicely coifed woman, or at a barbered and clean-shaven man, you are seeing someone who is not a strictly Biblical Christian. Or if he or she insists to you that the whole Bible is the Inspired Word of God, then you are looking at a hypocrite. There can be no getting around that.

Yet there are some few Biblical rules that these strict Bible-thumpers delight in enforcing! For example, “If there is a man who lies with a male as those who lie with a woman, both of them have committed a detestable act; they shall surely be put to death.” (Leviticus 20:13) Let’s all be true Christians and destroy those gays! Can you imagine anyone less Christian than someone who selectively ignores parts of Holy Scripture that he doesn’t like while he delights in battering other people and ruining their lives with the parts that he does like?

What would Jesus say about all of this? We don’t need to wonder. He tells us in the Gospels that He came to bring us God’s new law of love, with which He intended to replace the whole of what later became the Christian Old Testament:

“‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment. The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (MT 22:37-40).

He even tells us plainly not to package His teachings with what became the Old Testament:

“But no one puts a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment; for the patch pulls away from the garment, and a worse tear results. Nor do people put new wine into old wineskins; otherwise the wineskins burst, and the wine pours out and the wineskins are ruined; but they put new wine into fresh wineskins, and both are preserved” (MT 9:16-17).

Dear friends, either every word of the Christian Bible is the Inspired Word of God, or none of it is except for any parts that we can somehow corroborate. Thanks to nearly two hundred years of testimony from people we used to think were dead, we can now abundantly confirm that indeed the Gospel words of Jesus on love, forgiveness, and the meaning and purpose of our lives were spoken by the genuine God Who came to earth in the person of Jesus. Those parts of the Gospels are indeed holy scripture! So the fact that so many modern Christians ignore the Gospel teachings is a tragedy of cosmic proportions. If any Christians remain who love Jesus and want to serve Him first of all, it is time now for all of us to speak out and defend the Lord from everyone who insists on using the Old Testament to diminish His message and to sully His name.

“There is Nothing New to be Discovered”

Posted on May 23, 2016 by Roberta Grimes

There are times when we encounter willful ignorance so spectacular that we stand in humble awe of it. How is it possible for an adult human being in the year 2016 to remain entirely unaware of every bit of modern afterlife evidence?

Incredibly, there is one physicist who claims to be so unaware. According to a recent interview in Scientific American, Sean Carroll of the California Institute of Technology argues in his new book, The Big Picture: On the Origin of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself that “There is just no such thing as God, or ghosts, or human souls that reside outside of the body. Everything in existence belongs to the natural world and is accessible to science.”

This interview is prickly with bogus assumptions introduced by both interviewer and interviewee. That the only alternative to materialist science is religion; that “natural” and “supernatural” are meaningfully distinct; that the “natural world” cannot be greater than what modern science considers to be natural; that “natural” and “material” are therefore rough synonyms; and that the mere refusal to notice phenomena must mean that they probably do not exist are all cheerfully assumed to be fact. It is on some level adorable to watch educated adults conversing this way, pretending a narrow naivety, in much the same way that it is adorable to watch a tea party of children pretending to be grownups.

And their resolute ignorance runs deep. To quote Dr. Carroll, “I would make the argument that if there were a supernatural element that played a role in our everyday life in some noticeable way, it’s very, very likely we would have noticed it. It just seems weird that this kind of thing would be so crucial and yet so difficult to notice in any controlled scientific way. I would make the case that it is sufficiently unlikely in a fair Bayesian accounting that we don’t need to spend any time thinking about it anymore. Five hundred years ago it would have been a possibility. I think these days we’re ready to move on.” His worry is that if we give up on God, we might then give up on finding meaning in life, so he has written a book on how we might find that meaning within a materialist framework. It is an undertaking at once well-meant and ridiculous.

Even Dr. Carroll must be aware, as Albert Einstein said decades ago, that “Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.” Max Planck, the father of quantum mechanics, agrees that “there is no matter as such.” Dr. Planck goes further, asserting in 1931 that “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” So Max Planck actually said that consciousness must pre-date matter? And this is not a red flag for Dr. Carroll?

Apparently not. And he remains so cheerily oblivious to any sort of afterlife-related phenomena that he feels safe enough within the echo chamber that is modern materialist science to advocate for the party line without fearing that he will be made to look foolish.

Dr. Carroll is in good company. At the turn of the previous century there was the same sort of tribal certainty among physicists that they had it all figured out. For example, in an address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science held in 1900, William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, reportedly said, “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.”

Albert Michelson, winner of the 1931 Nobel Prize in Physics, echoed Lord Kelvin in 1903, saying, “The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote…. [I]nstances might be cited, but these will suffice to justify the statement that ‘our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals’.”

Obviously Dr. Michelson’s Nobel Prize was for his work with light and not for his skills at prognostication! Fifteen years after he uttered those words, Max Planck won the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics as the father of quantum mechanics. And all those physicists who had assumed that everything already had been discovered were left to try to live down their words.

Sadly, so it also will be for our poor friend, Sean Carroll. It won’t be more than a decade or two before his book makes him a laughingstock, since we are confidently told by those we used to think were dead that there will soon be good electronic communication between their level of reality and our own. And meanwhile, beyond the ken of dogma-bound types like Dr. Carroll, scientists who retain their curiosity continue to make progress in building bridges between our benighted present and that glorious, unfettered future that begins when scientists will no longer be forced to constrain what they investigate in order to avoid inadvertently finding God.

photo credit: <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/48590810@N04/4904546716″>Little A – 4</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Apocalyptic Nonsense

Posted on May 9, 2016March 13, 2021 by Roberta Grimes

If you are reading this, then you have survived another predicted Apocalyptic demise. Incredibly, there is a growing movement that takes seriously the Biblical Book of Revelation, and many Christians are so sure the end is nigh they say they won’t bother to vote in November.

For those unfamiliar with the Christian Bible, Revelation is its final book. It describes a vision of someone named John, who in about the year 95 A.D. wrote up his vision and circulated it as assurance to other persecuted Christians that Jesus was about to save them. If you are curious, here is a narrative attempt to make sense of the Book of Revelation. There is a lot going on, but in the climactic scene Jesus returns on a horse and defeats the enemies of Christianity in the Battle of Armageddon. Revelation quotes Jesus as saying, “Behold, I am coming quickly, and My reward is with Me, to render to every man according to what he has done.” (Rev 22:12)

Let us be absolutely clear about this. John was born after Jesus died. He knew nothing about Him beyond hearsay. Certainly he never read a finished Gospel. And please read what John quotes Jesus as saying! The words that he ascribes to Jesus could not have been spoken by the Jesus of the Gospels, which all by itself refutes the possibility that John was reporting a vision from God. Then too, think about the timing! Sixty-five years earlier the genuine Jesus was teaching us how to love and forgive so we could bring the Kingdom of God on earth, and then almost at once he decided to chuck it all and take us to final judgment? The words ascribed to Jesus in Revelation contradict the words that we can confirm that Jesus actually spoke. In the face of all this, how did John’s ravings come to occupy such a central place in Christian theology?

The Christian Bible was assembled by fourth-century clerics. They believed themselves to be inspired by God, but the Bible they produced is full of contradictions. The Christian Bible as it stands could not possibly be the inspired word of a loving and internally consistent God, or even of a sane and rational God. And even among all the Bible’s contradictions, John’s ravings stand out as utterly averse to the Gospels being written at about the same time. Worse, John’s quoting of his guy on a horse has distorted or replaced for many Christians the genuine words of the living Jesus!

In case you find this hard to believe, here are some prominent Christian pastors who make preaching about John’s end-times ideas an important part of their spiritual message.

All of this is nonsense! It is evident from the words of Jesus that He never will bring about the end of the world, yet this fake theology has so polluted Christianity that it has made the religion that was named for Jesus the biggest obstacle that we now face in carrying out the Master’s work on earth. Jesus tells us in the Gospels that neither He nor God ever judges us. He tells us that we enter earth-lives in order to learn to better love and forgive so we can grow spiritually. It is a tragedy of cosmic proportions that the ravings of a persecuted madman are now believed by so many Christians to be more important than the Lord’s Gospel message.

Christians can stop waiting for Jesus to return. His teachings have been with us for two thousand years; you might say He never really left. Instead of battling evil with force and negating the value of His own teachings, Jesus and His minions are working now to raise the spiritual awareness of this planet. The dead agree with Jesus that once enough of us embrace His Gospel teachings, the Kingdom of God will overspread the earth. So instead of waiting in their churches to be Raptured before an Apocalypse that never will come, Christians who love Jesus should be out there now, helping the Lord to share the greatest news in all of history. We have His eternal promise that our future will not be an end-times war. Instead, our future will be the spiritual awakening that He came two thousand years ago to share. He says, “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)

photo credit: <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/116417508@N06/14155708667″>Apocalypse storm</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Who Are You?

Posted on April 29, 2016April 29, 2016 by Roberta Grimes

The fundamental question of human existence is this: who and what are human beings? The scientific community is confident that we are only the latest iteration of an evolutionary process that goes back to living cells appearing in primordial soup; while Christians see us as the fallen and inadequate creations of a stern Godhead.

Neither of these beliefs-based views of human nature has ever made sense. Neither has any explanation for the complexities of human experience, for our awareness, emotions, and aspirations. And what may be worse, neither has any corrective nor any predictive power. We want to know who and what we are not so much so we can dwell in our past, but rather so we can improve our present and begin to perfect our future.

Both of our most trusted institutions base their assumptions in faulty core

beliefs. Christianity’s supposition that we must be evil is rooted in Adam’s Biblical sin – even the nature of which is still debated – which got him cast out of the Garden of Eden. Mainstream science, on the other hand, remains enmired in materialism, so it is incapable of making any sense of human nature beyond the study of our anatomy.

So we are nowhere. The Christian explanation makes you wonder how God could have made the mistake of creating us, while the scientific theories remain so lacking that they cannot even be called basic science. For example, recent scientific interpretations of the same ten-thousand-year-old massacre site argue both that at last it proves that warfare is innate to us, and that actually it proves precisely the opposite! So, which is it? Are we warriors by nature, or is warfare a recent cultural artifact? We study photographs of primitive people, as little touched by civilization as possible, hoping to see somehow – perhaps in their eyes – the answer to humankind’s most basic question.

At our core, who and what are human beings?

You will be relieved to learn that at last the answer to our age-old question is emerging. And it comes from what both science and Christianity would consider to be an unlikely source. We who have spent our lives studying nearly two hundred years of abundant and consistent afterlife evidence have learned the following facts, all of which will soon be such common knowledge that they will be taught in grade schools:

The only thing that exists is what quantum physicist Max Planck called Mind. Mind is an infinitely powerful energy-like potentiality without size or form, alive in the sense that your mind is alive, highly emotional and therefore probably self-aware. Everything else that we think of as real exists within Mind as something like a thought. You might with some justification begin to call this base consciousness God; but unlike the Christian God, it is not anthropomorphic and it has no human failings.

Every human mind is inextricably part of Mind. And apparently we never leave it. When I speak on these matters, I jokingly refer to the human brain as “just a two-way radio in the head of a meat-robot.” It’s an oversimplification, but not by much.
While we are in bodies, we experience the consciousness energy that is Mind in a range of vibrations that we perceive as emotions. At its highest vibratory rate, consciousness is pure love; at its lowest, it is fear and all of fear’s derivatives like anger, hatred, grief, and greed. It turns out that what we experience as emotion is the actual creative driver of Mind, and it is the fact that too many people have for too long chosen fear and negativity – especially during the disastrous twentieth century – that has begun to shake the wheels off Western civilization. We are coming to realize what actually is wrong, which is our first step toward figuring out how to fix it.

The fact that mainstream science remains so clueless about the nature of reality has turned the venerable Scientific American into little more than a humor magazine. Every month we find more references there to research and theories being ardently developed in the airless heat of a materialist hothouse, so we know they are going to be yet more dead-ends. While some in other fields not burdened by materialism are beginning to use consciousness tools as the powerful sources of help that they are, my favorite magazine remains stuck with notions that easily could be either refined or exploded if scientists finally gave up on materialism as just a century-long blind alley. Oh, the discoveries soon to come once scientists are allowed to study reality! For example, the question of whether we have free will is one that materialist science doesn’t even have the tools to investigate; but the whole question will be readily answered once scientists are allowed to study how vast and complex our eternal minds really are, and how little of them we can consciously access while we are briefly in these bodies.

The truth about who and what you are is glorious!

You are one with eternal Mind at its highest vibration. You are powerful. You are eternal. You are, in your essence, perfect love.

The Fun of Growing Forever

Posted on April 18, 2016April 18, 2016 by Roberta Grimes

I apologize for the tardiness of this post, but I’ve been finishing my next book and visiting Santa Barbara to form a new friendship. Jack Canfield needs no introduction! His Chicken Soup for the Soul series has sold many millions of books, and Jack in person is engaging and delightful. Here is a video of our interview.

The Fun of Growing Forever is about to go to its first test-readers. It is scheduled for release in the fall. I have known about this book for six years, but it was only in recent months that I first realized what it was meant to be about. My original title for The Fun of Dying was actually Dying for Idiots, since my first choice – Dying for Dummies – would have been a copyright infringement. But I woke up one morning in the spring of 2010 with three titles in my mind: The Fun of Dying, The Fun of Staying in Touch, and The Fun of Growing Forever. I also woke up knowing that the third book was not supposed to come out until 2017, although I didn’t know why it would be so long delayed. I assumed it was going to be just an update of The Fun of Dying with more afterlife details, since my guides had never shared with me the fact that Liberating Jesus was on the way!

This is what can happen when you give your life to God, as I did a year before I got these titles. Our guides are God’s minions. When we invite God to use our lives, sometimes our guides will do just that! We spend time with them while our bodies sleep, but usually we don’t recall what transpires; my remembering those book-titles was an exception, since The Fun of Dying was about to go to press and they wanted its title to be right.

I understand now that none of what I have done in the past seven years has been my own doing. My guides have co-written all my books, with Thomas leading on the nonfiction side and an intense and highly imaginative guide named Marvina primarily doing my fiction. When people ask me how I can write so many books so fast, I remind them I am just the scribe!

The Fun of Growing Forever lays out the simplest ways to apply the Gospel teachings of Jesus to our daily lives so we can achieve rapid spiritual growth. Christians believe that the death of Jesus has redeemed them from God’s punishment for their sins, so they consider the Gospels to be just aspirational. I have never met a Christian who takes them as seriously as Jesus means them to be taken. And of course, our study of afterlife communications has revealed that God never judges us, that all punishment is by ourselves alone, and that the death of Jesus on the cross has never redeemed anyone from anything. So now we realize that the life of Jesus must have had a different purpose.

It turns out that Jesus tells us in the Gospels exactly why He came to earth. Jesus was, quite literally, God embodied, come to tell us what really is going on and how to turn what was then a civilization built on fear and pain into a heaven on earth. Part of His lesson was that we don’t die, which was why He went through a public death and resurrection; but then, of course, the fear-filled age that He was attempting to enlighten soon packaged the Gospel teachings in their own ideas. As a result, there are now more than forty thousand Christian denominations, and the civilization that two thousand years ago was a small morass of fear and pain has become a worldwide swamp of suffering. Humankind has made not one iota of progress in Christianity’s entire history. So apparently another attempt is being made now, before it really is too late. Unless we can manage to get a clue this time, they tell us that the earth and its inhabitants are on a path to disaster.

But fortunately, the Gospel teachings that Jesus brought two thousand years ago really work! What a pity it is that so few people in all that time have actually read the Gospels. It turns out that the Gospel teachings that are the true meaning and message of Jesus are an integrated system. When properly applied, they work so well that they seem to be able to help almost anyone to make this his last earth-incarnation. And they work so quickly that we can have success with them at any age!

The Fun of Growing Forever is a course in transformation using only the events of our daily lives. These teachings are easy! They are liberating and empowering. And they make you so happy! What more can I say? Only this: if enough of us will at last apply the teachings of Jesus to our lives, within two hundred years our descendants will be born into a literal heaven on earth.

We were given the truth two thousand years ago. Jesus has patiently waited while we have ignored His teachings and tried everything else. Now it’s His turn. This time we will get it right.

The True Meaning of Easter

Posted on March 28, 2016March 28, 2016 by Roberta Grimes

No one who enjoyed last Sunday’s celebrations – all pastel flowers and chocolate eggs and carving a ham on the holiday table – can have given any serious thought to what Easter is supposed to mean. Christians refer to Jesus as our “Savior” and “Redeemer.” Those words so gaily trip off the tongue! God proved His perfect love for us when He sent His only begotten Son to die for our sins. Pass the raisin sauce.

The Easter story makes no sense. How could a loving and rational God do any of the following?

Eternally blame us for whatever Adam might have done in the Garden of Eden;
Demand a blood-sacrifice from us in atonement for Adam’s sins and for our own;
Refuse to be satisfied by any possible sacrifice that we might provide;
Beget a perfect Son on earth specifically to be our sacrifice to Him;
Enjoy the horrible murder of His Son enough that at last He can forgive us.

I submit to you that if any human being did even one of these things, we would judge him pretty harshly! Not a single item on this list could possibly be the rational act of a God that was even half as loving as the meanest human misanthrope.

As I prepared to convert to Catholicism long ago, I took lessons from an indulgent priest who gamely tried to answer my questions. I recall once asking him to please explain the Easter story to me. I gave him a version of the above list, then said, “What does Rome say about that, Father?”

His answer was just, “It’s a sacred mystery.”

In the end, he told me that I would have to accept the Easter story on faith or I could never become a Catholic. For my husband’s sake, I accepted it. I felt as Galileo must have felt when he was forced by the Church to recant his belief that the earth revolves around the sun.

The Easter story is not true. I’ve spent decades studying nearly two hundred years of abundant and consistent communications from people we used to think were dead, and I’ve compared notes with other afterlife researchers. I can tell you incontrovertibly that there is not one bit of evidence that God has ever judged a single human being. No evidence that the death of Jesus on the cross has made any afterlife difference. And beyond that, anyone who ever has troubled to study the Gospel words of Jesus can prove that the Easter story is wrong because Jesus tell us that Himself. He says:

“For not even the Father judges anyone, but He has given all judgment to the Son, so all will honor the Son even as they honor the Father” (JN 5:22-23).

Then Jesus assures us that:

“If anyone hears My sayings and does not keep them, I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world, but to save the world” (JN 12:47).

It seems to have been only the notion that Jesus came to save the world that registered with the early Church fathers. Save the world from what? Why, from God, of course! Er… what?

And thus was begun a faulty theology that perverts the meaning and the message of Jesus and makes of the Master’s beautiful gift just a scary and nonsensical mess. What Jesus came to save the world from was the massive spiritual ignorance that still encumbers us to this day.

So, what would the Master Himself tell us is the genuine meaning of Easter?

Jesus was born among Iron Age primitives with the powerful message that God is Spirit, each human mind is part of God, and therefore all our lives are eternal. Try getting people to believe that even now, when we have the evidence to prove it! Back then, there was nothing Jesus could say that would convince His listeners that even when you seem to be dead, you are not dead at all. So He gave them a miracle. He arranged a ghastly public execution so it would be indisputably true that He had become stone-cold, flat dead. Then three days later He reanimated His body.

“Ta-da! I didn’t die, and neither will you!”

The Christian take on Easter is wrong, so our use of an ancient method of execution as a symbol for Jesus is repellent to Him. One elevated being has said in frustration, “The cross is a first-century electric chair! What does that have to do with the Master?” That same communicator has told us that what the Master wants us to use for His symbol is a sunrise. The dead tell us that the symbol of a new day dawning will replace the cross once all of humankind has learned the truth about who and what we are.

photo credit: <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/72422958@N00/450912383″>Eggs</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Scientific Shark-Jumping

Posted on March 14, 2016October 26, 2019 by Roberta Grimes

The fact that mainstream science marries dogmas with what is supposed to be an open-minded pursuit of the truth is tying today’s scientists into knots. Groundbreaking research is being hampered; inventions that make no sense are being touted; and, with it all, a vast new source of expert help is being rejected out of hand. The result is that twenty-first-century science is so altogether stymied that it is blundering into extremes of folly as it hurries up its own blind alleys. The popular term for things that once were great but now are sliding toward absurdity comes from an episode of the TV series “Happy Days,” where the Fonz jumps a shark on water skis. If modern science were as irrelevant as TV fiction, then its shark-jumping would be no problem at all! But as it is, the university departments’ and journals’ ongoing insistence that all scientific inquiry must be material impoverishes us all.

Here are examples of just three areas where those scientific elites are impairing what they should be enabling. These aren’t the only problems being caused for science by its gatekeepers’ insistence on materialism, but they are the ones that come first to mind:

Absurd inventions that are wastes of time and money are being touted as advances. As billionaires age, they begin to worry about their own mortality, and happily there are always scientists cheerfully willing to waste their money. The current vogue is for trying to find ways to keep brains going after bodily death, and to pair those bits of mortal meat with machinery that will mimic an immortal body. I am linking to this article primarily for its creepy illustration, which sums up the absurdity of it all. And this isn’t even the worst bit of nonsense! A Russian magnate plans to “upload his personality” to a robot in order to achieve immortality. No meat-brain now to keep alive, true, but he has another serious problem. If the scientific theory that his brain generates his consciousness turns out to be right, then after his body dies there will be no personality anywhere to be uploaded, will there? And if his personality can live without his brain, then wouldn’t it be better for him to go to the actual glorious afterlife, and not try to live on trapped forever in some infernal earthly machine?

Research scientists are needlessly stymied. If the earnest folks who are studying dark matter had any inkling of what afterlife researchers have learned about the greater reality, then they might investigate more effective ways to integrate dark matter with the material universe. But instead, these folks are reduced to assuming that in a reality of breathtaking efficiency, fully twenty-seven percent of the universe – a mass five times that of traditional matter – is just a garbage of particles.

Potential collaborators are being ignored. There was a time when communication with people we used to think were dead was a hit-or-miss game using mediums whose honesty might be questionable. That day is past. And furthermore, in this new century, actively assisting people on earth is a first priority of many dead scientists. These folks were experts when they were in bodies, and now they know even a whole lot more because from their laboratories in the astral levels their ability to access knowledge is immensely greater. Once mainstream science stops being a belief-system and returns to being an open-minded pursuit of the truth, these dead collaborators are going to be able to help our knowledge to advance by light-years!

The examples given here would be funny if they were not so pathetic. For so long as scientific gatekeepers continue to enforce a false and foolish dogma, well-meaning professional scientists will waste what should be their important careers.

A lot of the scientific work that has been done over the past century is grounded in incomplete information, so eventually it must all be redone. We continue to pay a heavy price for the fact that, a hundred years ago, scientific gatekeepers were so worried about unexpectedly finding God that they stepped over what should have been an iron line and turned science into just another religion.

photo credit: <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/59185417@N04/24783112522″>Yikes!</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

When Children Die

Posted on March 7, 2016March 7, 2016 by Roberta Grimes

(Adapted from an article published in the March newsletter of Helping Parents Heal, a wonderful source of support for bereaved parents. Go to helpingparentsheal.info for information and assistance. You are not alone.)

The death of a child may be the most painful experience that life can bring. For most, the grief is a process to be managed; it isn’t something that you really get over. But many bereft parents find solace in gaining a better understanding of their children’s lives now, and fortunately the afterlife evidence has a lot to say about the deaths of children. From the perspective of the child, early death turns out to be a peaceful time of love and joy.

The Death Process for Children

Those in spirit who are given the special duty of managing childhood transitions already deeply know and love each child. They take special care to make certain that children who are leaving their bodies will never know fear. If beloved relatives have transitioned before the child, then Grandma or Aunt Jane will come to the child’s bedside and playfully lure the child away; or otherwise, the deathbed greeter might be an angel, a Star Wars hero, or even a religious figure. The point is to make that moment of freedom from the body a happy time for the child.

Often, pre-adolescent children will first be given some distracting treat. Tales abound in the afterlife literature of children taken to astral fields so they can play with the lambs, or led to the door of a beautiful child-sized playhouse full of like-aged children. Perhaps a little girl might wake up in a princess castle, or a little boy in the stable of the pony that he always wanted in life. Especially if there are no familiar people there to greet the transitioning child, it is important to ensure that these children – many of whom were very sick before death – will at once feel healthy and distracted and nurtured.

Evidence suggests that the very youngest will be tended by actual angels. Infants and miscarried children, and children who are the victims of abortion, are picked up by angelic beings and carried to the villages where they will grow to young adulthood. It is striking, and important, to realize that those who manage pre-birth deaths make no difference between discarded fetuses and those that had been wanted by their parents.

Growing Up in Heaven

Many parents find comfort in thinking that a child is “with Grandma now.” And indeed, if a familiar relative or friend is already there, then growing up in her Summerland home is often seen by those who oversee this process to be the best option for the child. Too often, though, there is no one really suited to doing what the dead seem to see as the most important task in their world: the gentle rearing of children who are briefly separated from their parents.

For children who have no one close to them already living in the afterlife levels, there are beautiful group homes and villages where they can grow up at their own pace in an atmosphere of perfect love. Apparently even young children will grow to young adulthood in just a few earth-years, but since they are living outside of time they can let their maturing take as long as they like. The children’s homes and villages in the afterlife levels are off-limits to any but a few carefully chosen people who make of the perfect rearing of these children a beautiful and sacred joy.

Nothing can replace the love of their parents. But in the childhood areas of the afterlife levels, children will never again know pain, or fear, or any other negative emotion. They will live immersed in love and joy. We have good recorded communications received through deep-trance mediums in the first decades of the twentieth century, when many of those who had recently died had lived rather hardscrabble lives. I recall reading one communication that was received about 1910 in which the fellow who had died complained about how much he envied those who had died as children because they had enjoyed such happy childhoods. They had no way to understand how painful his own childhood had been!

What About Our Young-Adult Children?

No child should die before we do. The loss of a child at any age can be the cause of agonizing pain, but it is important to understand that every new arrival in the afterlife is similarly greeted and loved. Even if your own child has committed crimes, or has died due to a drug overdose or a suicide, there is no judgment by a religious figure. There is no condemnation. Instead, once our older children are prepared for it, there is a life-review in which our children are helped to see how they might perhaps have acted more lovingly or have made better and more productive choices. Every child of every age is perfectly loved. No matter how their lives went here, they remain eternal beings who receive all the love and understanding and nurturing that their parents wish they still were able to give them.

Reunions

No matter the age at which a child transitions, they await us as beautiful young adults who have loved their parents and been close to them throughout the balance of their lives. Oh, the hugs! The laughter! The tears of joy! Grown children will have been so close to their parents that they know the details of the rest of their lives, but they will have a lot to share about what they have been up to during the separation. Everyone who has recently transitioned is given a party (they seem to party a lot in heaven), and having these children with them again makes the parents’ parties especially joyous.

Communication Across the Dimensions

Many of those who have gone before us will attempt to send us signs of their survival, and this is especially true of children. Deep grief is a negative energy that can act as a barrier to communication, so as difficult as it may be for parents, it is important that they do what they can to manage their grief so it won’t block contacts from their children. And it is important that parents be alert for signs. If anything is noticed that might be a sign – even if there is some doubt – it is important to say aloud, “Thank you! I see that. Please do it again!” Parents who watch for and acknowledge signs can sometimes be deluged with them.

Consulting a good spiritual medium can help to assure you that your child is doing well. Make certain that you check references! But nothing else is quite the same as actually having a conversation, so you will be glad to know that progress in being made on what Dr. Gary Schwartz of the University of Arizona at Tucson calls the Soul Phone. It seems likely that within the next few years, bereaved parents will have this wonderful new way to make certain that their children are not only fine, but they are having the time of their lives.

Roberta Grimes

Author: Roberta Grimes

A Lawyer on “Stubborn Skeptics”

God and the Materialist Delusion

photo credit: <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/67734410@N00/27025776942″>New Jersey & New York, May-2016</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>

“The Men of Her City Shall Stone Her”

“There is Nothing New to be Discovered”

Apocalyptic Nonsense

photo credit: <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/116417508@N06/14155708667″>Apocalypse storm</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Who Are You?

The Fun of Growing Forever

The True Meaning of Easter

Scientific Shark-Jumping

photo credit: <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/59185417@N04/24783112522″>Yikes!</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

When Children Die

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