Faith Versus Fact

Posted on July 13, 2015November 10, 2018 by Roberta Grimes

The most important thing for us to understand about the spurious battle between Christianity and science is that it is a battle that neither can win because neither of them is the open-minded pursuit of the truth. Both Christianity and modern mainstream science are belief-systems. And if you look at only what you want to see, always through a blur of pre-conceived notions, it is impossible for you to see anything clearly.

Neither Christianity nor science can serve us well until each of them loses its fear that its world-view might be wrong and begins an open-minded pursuit of the truth.

I was forcefully reminded of this problem when I read a review in the current Atlantic of a self-satisfied new book by evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne called Faith Versus Fact. A review of the same book from a Christian perspective is here.

The book’s very title – Faith Versus Fact – sums up the primary problem with science. Christians understand that their religion is a belief-system, while scientists have made the belief that they are pursuing the entire truth a tenet of their particular religion. They don’t even realize they are practicing a religion! And when your vision is so altogether distorted that you cannot recognize that those distortions exist, then it is hard to see where you go from there.

Science prior to the twentieth century seems to have had a more open-minded investigative function. There was then less fear of finding God, and more of a hopeful sense that reality could be objectively investigated and better understood. But the start of the twentieth century brought the advent of quantum mechanics, and at the same time it saw the production of some phenomenal communications delivered through deep-trance mediums by teams of dead researchers who were trying to give us proof of their survival. Rather than having to deal with the dead while at the same time they were digesting quantum mechanics, university departments and peer-reviewed journals adopted materialism as science’s “fundamental dogma.” They made the study of afterlife evidence and anything related to spirituality off-limits for anyone who wanted to work in a university setting.

Mainstream science’s fundamental dogma of materialism remains in place. To this day, no scientist who wants a university career or hopes to be published in a peer-reviewed journal can work in any area of research where he might discover that reality is based in an underlying intelligence. By strictly limiting what scientists can and cannot legitimately study, the scientific gatekeepers of the past century have turned science into as much of a deluded belief-system as Christianity ever could be. Both are built upon faith, whether in God or in not-God. And Dr. Coyne is right about one thing. Faith is no substitute for facts.

Into the void left by science during the past hundred years have stepped earnest laypeople bent upon studying the afterlife evidence and the nature of reality without any beliefs-based limitations. These folks are currently the only people who are doing science as Sir Isaac Newton understood science. And over a century of effort they have learned a great many things that would be useful to both Christianity and science, if either had any interest in stepping outside its own beliefs-based boundaries. For example:

No judgmental Jehovah-God exists. Christianity is a first-century belief-system, and as you would expect, its tenants are first-century beliefs. Early in its history it decided that its whole Bible is “the inspired word of God,” but except for the Gospels, the God that inspired those writings has no objective reality.

Jesus of Nazareth is genuine. Christians can be assured that we now can demonstrate the reality and the extraordinary nature of the historical Jesus. Much of what Jesus says in the Gospels is amazingly consistent with things that afterlife researchers have only recently established through independent research.

Nothing is solid matter as physicists in the nineteenth century envisioned solid matter. The only thing that exists is energy that can manifest as matter with the illusion of solidity. By now, every physicist knows this is true. Max Planck won the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics as the father of quantum mechanics. He said in 1944, “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.”

What we think of as human consciousness is primary and must pre-exist matter. Planck said as far back as 1931, ”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.”

The only thing that exists is an energy-like potentiality that manifests as consciousness. Everything that we think of as solid is an artifact of consciousness. Our minds are part of that consciousness, so our minds are by definition eternal. To call that base consciousness “God” is not wrong, but since it bears little resemblance to the rather nasty fellow that Christians have dreamed up and named “God,” we might follow Planck’s lead and call it “Mind.” God – or Mind – is more loving, more powerful, and more protective of each precious human mind than you can possibly imagine.

As you can see, the greatest discoveries of the past century have been made in the yawning gap between the two belief-systems, science and Christianity. It is only in the open-minded study of everything that humankind can find a way forward that is based in what is actually real.

So now we have Christians stuck in a much-beloved but altogether outmoded belief-system and worried that scientists might find that God does not exist, and scientists stuck in another much-beloved but altogether outmoded belief-system and worried that they might find that God DOES exist. Both of our most trusted institutions are caught up in a useless, spurious battle which Dr. Coyne attempts in his book to keep us focused on for just awhile longer. He and his fellows are trying to prevent our noticing that the scientific emperor has no clothes until they can finish out their careers. It is hard to be sympathetic with these scientists, the pleasures of tenure notwithstanding. As a result of its intransigent insistence on the notion that a century-old world view is still relevant, science is keeping humankind mired in ignorance.

The whole faith vs. fact dichotomy is altogether spurious. Dear friends, there is only one reality. There is not a “faith” reality and a “facts” reality, with the facts version obviously superior. In order to lay claim to knowing the “facts” and to be justified in calling itself superior to Christianity, science would have to study all the evidence on which facts might be based, including nearly two hundred years of abundant and consistent afterlife evidence. Dr. Coyne in his nineteenth-century artifact of a book condemns Christianity for “thinking that an adequate explanation can be based on what is personally appealing rather than on what stands the test of empirical study.” He would be well advised to look in a mirror.

Actually, and not for the first time, the only one who comes through all of this looking smart is Jesus. Unlike either science or Christianity, the thought of our seeking the whole truth does not scare Him. He is not afraid to urge us to “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks the door is opened.” (MT 7:7-8) Even after two thousand years, He still is hoping that you will at last “know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (JN 8:32)

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Fruit of the Lord’s Tree

Posted on July 2, 2015July 2, 2015 by Roberta Grimes

Someone who had read my post of June 6^th, By Their Fruit You Will Recognize Them, has asked what I think is a wonderful question. If Christianity abandoned the rest of the Bible and began now to follow only the Gospels, how would things be any different?

As you may recall, in that earlier post we applied to modern-day Christianity the Lord’s own standard for any organization that purports to be of God:

“Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves.By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles?Likewise, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit.A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit.Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them.” (MT 7:15-20)

It isn’t necessary to again point out the many ways in which Christianity has let down the Lord of whose teachings it remains the custodian. If necessary, please review my blog post of June 6^th. So, what did Jesus actually teach? How might things be different if we took His teachings seriously?

The First Requirement For Spiritual Growth is Humility

The dead tell us that our earth-status counts for nothing in the afterlife levels. Jesus agrees with them. “Many who are first will be last, and the last first.” (MK 10:31) “The greatest among you will be your servant. For whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.” (MT 23:11-12)

Spiritual Growth is Based in Love

We can’t say for certain that spiritual growth is only love, but we can say that loving perfectly is at its core. And universal love is not just another religious rule to be mechanically followed. Rather, it is a way of thinking that must altogether fill our minds so we never again have any thought nor do even the smallest thing that is not the fruit of a heart full of love.

“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” (JN 13:34) “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” (MT 22:37-40)

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that?Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (MT 5:43-48)

We have learned from the dead that perfection in loving God and loving others really is the standard. We are meant to become like Jesus.

Unless We Continue to Make Spiritual Progress, We Will Fall Backward

Jesus says some things in the Gospels that seem incomprehensible and even cruel until we realize that He is referring to not earthly riches, but spiritual ones.

“For everyone who has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him. And throw that worthless servant outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” (MT 29:30)

“For there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be known or brought out into the open. Therefore consider carefully how you listen. Whoever has will be given more; whoever does not have, even what he thinks he has will be taken from him.” (LK 8:17-18)

When Jesus mentions “having” in these places, He isn’t talking about material wealth. He is referring to spiritual growth, which from His perspective is the one thing worth having. And these are not God’s arbitrary rules. Rather, they are spiritual laws in a reality governed by the physics of consciousness. As inevitable as the tug of gravity and as inexorable as the temperature at which water freezes is the fact that either we continue to progress spiritually, or we risk losing whatever spiritual progress we may already have made.

We Are Meant to be Good Stewards of Our Own Spiritual Growth

It isn’t up to God to magically bestow upon us the gift of spiritual progress. Whether we make progress or not is in our own hands, and there are no shortcuts. Jesus tells parables to help His followers grasp this essential point. He is talking here of our attainment of the Kingdom of Heaven, by which He means the upper afterlife levels where we live in joyous proximity to our Source.

“Again, it will be like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted his wealth to them. To one he gave five bags of gold, to another two bags, and to another one bag, each according to his ability. Then he went on his journey. The man who had received five bags of gold went at once and put his money to work and gained five bags more. So also, the one with two bags of gold gained two more. But the man who had received one bag went off, dug a hole in the ground and hid his master’s money.

“After a long time the master of those servants returned and settled accounts with them. The man who had received five bags of gold brought the other five. ‘Master,’ he said, ‘you entrusted me with five bags of gold. See, I have gained five more.’

“His master replied, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!’

“The man with two bags of gold also came. ‘Master,’ he said, ‘you entrusted me with two bags of gold; see, I have gained two more.’

“His master replied, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!’

“Then the man who had received one bag of gold came. ‘Master,’ he said, ‘I knew that you are a hard man, harvesting where you have not sown and gathering where you have not scattered seed. So I was afraid and went out and hid your gold in the ground. See, here is what belongs to you.’

“His master replied, ‘You wicked, lazy servant! So you knew that I harvest where I have not sown and gather where I have not scattered seed? Well then, you should have put my money on deposit with the bankers, so that when I returned I would have received it back with interest.

“‘So take the bag of gold from him and give it to the one who has ten bags. For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them. And throw that worthless servant outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’” (MT 25:14-30)

This is an important parable! Our spiritual nature can be seen as an extraordinary opportunity given to us by God, but it is only the beginning of what is possible for us. Our task is to nurture our spiritual nature and build upon it throughout our lives, so when we graduate back to where we live eternally we will hear those beautiful words: “Well done, good and faithful servant!”

Can you imagine a world in which everyone who professes to be a Christian starts to follow the Gospel teachings of Jesus, and only the Gospel teachings of Jesus? The very contemplation of such a world makes me giggle with joy. I would love to have your thoughts!

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Stumbling Toward Consciousness

Posted on June 19, 2015November 16, 2019 by Roberta Grimes

A frustrating but still amusing hobby is watching scientists who are bound by a “fundamental dogma” of atheistic materialism continue to stumble toward a consciousness-based understanding of reality… by exhausting every other possible theory. Some readers of this blog have reproached me for being too hard on mainstream science. How is it possible that universities in the twenty-first century still are enforcing something so inane as a fundamental dogma about anything?

It is, sadly, all too possible. Watch a brilliant professor who is on the cusp of actually discovering how consciousness interacts with the brain take on a deer-in-the-headlights look when someone suggests to him that his theory of reality is rather close to one that was first advanced by an eighteenth-century bishop.

Donald D. Hoffman Ph.D. is a Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California, Irvine. His TED Talk on the fact that we are not perceiving an accurate and objective reality is simple and enlightening, and I urge you to watch it all; but if your time is short, I’ll summarize what for our purposes are the important parts and then urge you to watch the last few minutes.

Dr. Hoffman begins by asking, “What is the relationship between your brain and your conscious experiences?” He believes that the reason this problem has so far proven to be insoluble is not that its solution is beyond our capability. He suggests instead that we can’t solve what scientists call the “hard problem” of consciousness simply because we have made an incorrect assumption. We have assumed that we are perceiving reality accurately.

Dr. Hoffman has done simulations based on the theory of evolution, and has found that evolution does not favor our seeing an accurate objective reality. He tells us that one-third of our brain’s cortex is engaged in vision, which is an astonishing fact all by itself when you consider all the other functions that traditional scientists ascribe to the brain. But “Is it true that accurate perceptions are fitter perceptions”? “Does natural selection favor seeing reality as it is?” Dr. Hoffman reminds us that fitness, and not objective perception, is the key to our evolutionary survival. He has run hundreds of thousands of evolutionary game simulations, and he has discovered that accuracy of perception of an organism’s surroundings seems to be beside the point: nearly always it is fitness alone that is most evolutionarily successful. We are the product of our evolution, so he concludes that we – like all other animals – are not perceiving reality as it objectively is.

So calculations based in the theory of evolution reveal that “Perception is not like reality, and reality is not like our perceptions.” “There is something that exists when we don’t look, but it’s not space-time and physical objects.” “That reality – whatever it is – is the real source of cause and effect in the world. Not brains or neurons. Brains and neurons have no causal powers.” “What does this mean for the mystery of consciousness?”

Now we come to his point, and it’s a wonderful one. “Perhaps reality is some vast interacting network of conscious agents, simple and complex, that cause each other’s conscious experiences.” This is an insight very close to what we have learned about reality from the afterlife evidence, which is simply that all that exists is infinitely creative Mind, and each of our minds is a part of that Mind. Eureka!

Or… maybe not. As you will shortly see, there are places where this earnest fellow feels that he cannot go, even though he is touchingly enthusiastic about his liberating insight. “Once we let go of our massively intuitive, but massively false assumption about the nature of reality, it opens up new ways to think about life’s greatest mystery.” “I bet that reality will turn out to be more fascinating and unexpected than we ever imagined!”

Then at the end of Dr. Hoffman’s talk, he is asked whether his work doesn’t support the work of Bishop George Berkeley (12 March 1685 – 14 January 1753), who supposed that consciousness causes matter and not the other way around. The question comes just after 21:00 on the clip linked above, and I urge you to watch it so you can see the horror with which this heretofore confident and cheerful scientist greets this dread suggestion. Dr. Hoffman fumbles that Bishop Berkeley was a “deist” while the look on his face says, No! Can’t go there! The theory that consciousness does not arise in the brain is something close to a third rail of science: you touch it, and your career dies. So Dr. Hoffman recovers with the statement that what he is talking about here is “conscious realism – quite a different approach.” Although why it is different is a puzzler to me.

Dr. Hoffman is a brilliant and thoughtful research scientist. And what he is working on is close to the same insight – but arrived at from a different direction – that was advanced by Max Planck, who was the father of quantum mechanics. In 1931 Dr. Planck said, ”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.”

He said in 1944, “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.”

Consciousness is the water in which we swim like fish, so immersed in it that we know no other reality. The evidence that it does not and could not arise from a material brain is so manifold at this point that the fact that serious scientists stuck with the foolish dogma of atheistic materialism still waste their time trying to figure out how consciousness arises in the brain makes me sad. What a waste of time and talent! We can take heart, though, from the work of pioneering researchers like Donald Hoffman, whose curiosity is such that no amount of peer-pressure bullying will entirely silence them. Dr. Hoffman is right. And he will win.

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By Their Fruit You Will Recognize Them

Posted on June 6, 2015June 6, 2015 by Roberta Grimes

Jesus in the Gospels warns us that wrong religious teachings can be recognized by the evils they bring. He says:

Christianity is based in a very long book called the Bible. The entire Christian Bible, composed of ancient Jewish and early Christian writings, is considered by Christians somewhat magically to be the Inspired Word of God. Given the way the books of the Bible were assembled by the early Church, this seems to me to be a dubious claim. Who are we to be putting words into God’s mouth? I once asked a fundamentalist friend how he could be so sure that a canon put together by a committee in the equivalent of smoke-filled rooms was absolutely all inspired by God. He told me confidently that God had worked through all the participants in those synods. No doubt! His answer reminded me of what had been said by a priest of a religion whose certain belief was that the world rides on the back of a turtle. When asked what the turtle was standing on, the priest had said confidently, “It’s turtles all the way down.”

In the same way, the Christian Bible is said to be God’s Word all the way down. And this seems to me to be the fatal flaw of modern Christianity.

I have read the whole Bible from cover to cover perhaps a dozen times. For decades I would read two or three pages every night, beginning with Genesis and going through to Revelation. Then I would go back to Matthew and read the New Testament through a second time before I began again with Genesis. It is this exercise of having actually read the Bible repeatedly that makes me confident that the entire Bible could not possibly be the Inspired Word of a loving and internally consistent God. Or even of a sane and rational God.

The fact that the Christian Bible doesn’t hold together as a coherent unit is a problem that Christianity could have addressed by declaring as a fundamental tenet that the Gospel words of Jesus are primary. Where there is a conflict – and there are many! – the teachings of Jesus should control. But perhaps because the Inspired Word of God cannot be seen to have inconsistencies, and because the teachings of Jesus are post-legal and require a lifelong personal commitment, Christians have solved what should have been a big problem by making the teachings of Jesus in the Gospels no more than suggestions about how we should live. To Christians, Jesus is not their Teacher, but instead Jesus is the Lamb of God, sacrificed to redeem us from God’s judgment for our sins.

This distortion at the root of the Christian tree has stunted its growth in peculiar ways:

No one who actually reads the Gospels can believe that Jesus meant his teachings to be mere suggestions. By treating them that way, Christians betray the life’s work of the Teacher upon whom the religion is supposed to be based.
The core Christian doctrine of sacrificial redemption paints a terrible picture of what God is. Would you enjoy watching the murder of your own child? Of course not! What on earth kind of a monstrous Father could require the brutal murder of His beloved Son?

The Old Testament Books are full of a wrathful and often petty Jehovah God. Calling the Old Testament the Inspired Word of God teaches Christians to fear the genuine God. Since fear is the opposite of love, this emphasis makes it difficult for Christians to develop the loving relationship with God that is essential to a life of spiritual growth. Christianity distances its followers from the infinite and perfect love of God. For a religion to do that is inexcusable.

The Old Testament contains a host of cultural commands that Christians do not follow. From not wearing clothing blended of two kinds of fibers and not eating pork and separating meat from milk right through to the rules about how men can wear their hair and beards and harsh punishments for what we see as trivial infractions, a lot of the Old Testament is not followed by Christians. And indeed, it should not be followed now. These were rigid cultural rules for a harsher time thousands of years gone by. But by calling the Old Testament the Inspired Word of God and then not following parts of it, Christians are disrespecting their Deity. If it’s okay to disrespect God by ignoring parts of the Divinely-Inspired Old Testament, then what is to keep us from disrespecting God in other ways?

Catholics and Fundamentalist Christians take some of the Bible’s cultural rules as God’s Inerrant Word. For example, Fundamentalist Christians insist that creation has to have happened over only six days, that homosexuality is a grievous sin, that sexual contact outside marriage always is sinful, and that women must submit to men. Catholics historically have not allowed divorce or the use of birth control, and they have required priests to be celibate males and women to cover their heads in church. In being so adamant about enforcing these lesser and arguably outmoded cultural rules, Christians are ignoring the warnings of Jesus against enforcing unloving religious rules and also against self-righteously judging others.

I would argue that the religion that was founded in the name of Jesus bears so little relationship to what he taught that it is time either to change it radically or to begin to call it something else.

The greatest proof that Christians are wrong in building their religion around the whole Christian Bible is that – as our beloved Teacher warns us – Christianity today bears some terrible fruit:

Rather than spreading the teachings of Jesus about love and forgiveness, Christians battle only for cultural views. From the fight against homosexuality to the insistence that only the death of Jesus on the cross can get us into heaven, Christians share their religion’s misshapen fruit. In doing this, they give Jesus a terrible name before a world that badly needs his Gospel teachings.

Rather than demonstrating Jesus’s perfect love and forgiveness in their own lives, the most devout Christians try to live their lives by Old Testament rules. The Duggars of the longstanding TLC TV reality show, “19 Kids and Counting,” live by Biblical commands that require them to have as many children as possible because “Children are a heritage from the Lord, offspring a reward from him. Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are children born in one’s youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them.” (Psalm 127:3-5) Other elements of the Duggars’ lifestyle, so peculiar to modern-day people, are similarly based in Biblical cultural rules. Their living this way does not advance God’s truth. Instead, it teaches modern people that Jesus must be outmoded, too.

Rather than focusing upon spreading awareness of the perfect love of God, the strictest Christians instead teach only their own culture-based beliefs. When it was lately revealed that the oldest Duggar son had years ago sexually molested his own sisters, there was another misshapen fruit of Christianity plain for us to see. But because their religion is not based in the teachings of Jesus, the Duggars exhibit no awareness of this core problem. Indeed, the news about Josh Duggar brought to light the fact that other fundamentalist Christians have been caught molesting children and in other ways behaving despicably by modern standards. More disgusting fruit of the very sort that Jesus in the Gospels suggests that we watch for so we can avoid false prophets. In burying the eternal Teachings of Jesus inside teachings and behavior that modern people find repugnant, Christianity continues to deny to the world the most essential set of truths that God has ever given to us.

I am sorry to be so blunt. I still fondly remember all the comforts of that old-time religion that for most of my life was good enough for me. But I have come to understand that for us to be comfortable in a religion that we believe gives us personal salvation while we ignore the Gospel words of Jesus that the afterlife evidence now show us are true, we betray God. And we cheat our fellow man. Until Christianity reforms itself and begins to follow Jesus – and only Jesus! – we continue to delay the heaven on earth that is possible only when we live by God’s truth.

Lovingly, patiently, Jesus still calls to us. “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations… teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” (MT 28:19)

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Is There Life After Birth?

Posted on May 31, 2015 by Roberta Grimes

Victor and Wendy Zammit produce a wonderful free weekly newsletter that covers the whole range of death and afterlife topics. You can subscribe at VictorZammit.com. The depth and range of the information they share will amaze you!

As a break from this heavy but essential discussion of the meaning and the message of Jesus, I want to share with you a recent piece from the Zammits’ Friday Afterlife Report. Wendy tells me the author is unknown.

In a mother’s womb were two babies. One asked the other:

“Do you believe in life after delivery?” The other replied, “Why, of course. There has to be something after delivery. Maybe we are here to prepare ourselves for what we will be later.”

“Nonsense,” said the first. “There is no life after delivery. What kind of life would that be?”

The second said, “I don’t know, but there will be more light than here. Maybe we will walk with our legs and eat from our mouths. Maybe we will have other senses that we can’t understand now.”

The first replied, “That is absurd. Walking is impossible. And eating with our mouths? Ridiculous! The umbilical cord supplies nutrition and everything we need. But the umbilical cord is so short. Life after delivery is to be logically excluded.”

The second insisted, “Well I think there is something and maybe it’s different than it is here. Maybe we won’t need this physical cord anymore.”

The first replied, “Nonsense. And moreover if there is life, then why has no one ever come back from there? Delivery is the end of life, and in the after-delivery there is nothing but darkness and silence and oblivion. It takes us nowhere.”

“Well, I don’t know,” said the second, “but certainly we will meet Mother and she will take care of us.”

The first replied “Mother? You actually believe in Mother? That’s laughable. If Mother exists, then where is She now?”

The second said, “She is all around us. We are surrounded by her. We are of Her. It is in Her that we live. Without Her this world would not and could not exist.”

Said the first: “Well, I don’t see Her, so it is only logical that She doesn’t exist.”

To which the second replied, “Sometimes, when you’re in silence and you focus and you really listen, you can perceive Her presence. You can hear Her loving voice calling down from above.”

Dear friends, out of the mouths of babes….

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Christianity vs. Jesus

Posted on May 23, 2015May 24, 2015 by Roberta Grimes

Not long ago while stopped in traffic I noticed that the driver of the truck ahead had adamant religious views. His bumper stickers, plastered high on the back of the truck so they would not be missed, read, “If you’re living as if there is no God you had better hope you’re right!” And, “If It Ain’t James 1611 It Ain’t Bible.” And, “Are You Saved?” There was a fourth sticker that quoted Old Testament passages in tiny print that you could not make out. But that was just as well.

A recent Pew poll announcing the decline of Christianity has been much in the news. Christianity seems to be in particular trouble in Great Britain. A Yahoo study finds that Christianity is on the decline in the United States as well, and there are those who think that American Christianity is altogether doomed.

It’s hard to know what is going on, but that truck plastered with clinically insane bumper stickers might be a clue. The old-time Christianity of hellfire and damnation centered around a God so lacking in love that he needs to watch his Son’s murder before he can bring himself to forgive us may have been appealing in the nineteenth century, but fear does not feed the human spirit. More to the point, it turns out that old-time Christianity is wrong.

I have spent decades studying nearly two hundred years of abundant and consistent communications from the dead. Together they paint a detailed picture of what happens at and after death, and – more to the point – they show us what does not happen. Nowhere has anyone found evidence that any of these traditional Christian teachings is true:

There is no evidence that God or any religious figure ever has judged anyone

There is no evidence that the death of Jesus on the cross ever has “saved” anyone

There is no evidence for a separate devil, a fiery hell, or permanent damnation

There is no evidence that you’ve got to be a Christian to get into heaven

There isn’t even any evidence for an anthropomorphic God, with or without a throne

So Christianity is wrong. It’s wrong!

I was an ardent Christian for most of my life. I can sing so many hymns by heart! But when I realized how wrong Christianity is, and how damaging to the human spirit and to the message of Jesus it continues to be, I left the Church without regret.

Although a tremendous body of afterlife evidence demonstrates that Christianity is wrong, at the same time the dead are proving to us that the Jesus of the Gospels is right. About ninety-five percent of what Jesus is quoted as saying in a modern translation of the Gospels is entirely consistent with what the dead are telling us, even in small details.

So now we can prove that Jesus is right! Unfortunately, however, none of the Christian teachings refuted above came from Jesus. And because that is true, Christians are reduced to insisting without evidence that the whole Bible is “the Inspired Word of God.”

What would Jesus say about that?

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.” (MT 5:17)

What does Jesus mean by whatever he says that has been translated as the word “fulfill”? Might he mean that since we have his teachings, we don’t need the Old Testament anymore? When asked about the most important commandments, Jesus is quoted repeatedly as saying some variant of:

“‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” (MT 22:37-40)

“The Law and the Prophets” was what the Jews of Jesus’s day called the Old Testament. Far from suggesting that the Old Testament is the Inspired Word of God, a reasonable interpretation of the Gospel words of Jesus is that his teachings supersede the Old Testament.

Those traditional Christian teachings that we now can demonstrate are not true come from that same Old Testament – arguably now superseded by Jesus – and from the Apostle Paul, who was a first-century man without the least understanding of the miracle his generation had witnessed. Yet modern Christianity asserts that its own traditions based in the Old Testament and in the teachings of Paul have to be the Inspired Word of God?

What might Jesus say about that?

“And why do you break the command of God for the sake of your tradition?…You hypocrites! Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you: ‘These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are but rules taught by men.’” (MT 15:3-9)

“Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I say?” (LK 6:46)

“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)

From what is the truth going to set us free?

When you read the words of Jesus, you find that the only people this perfectly gentle and loving man could not stand were clergymen.

“Watch out for the teachers of the law. They like to walk around in flowing robes and be greeted in the marketplaces, and have the most important seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at banquets. They devour widows’ houses and for a show make lengthy prayers. Such men will be punished most severely.” (MK 12:38-40)

Jesus actually comes out and tells us that we don’t need religious traditions and we don’t need clergymen. We can relate to God as Spirit, without a religious middleman between:

“When you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.” (MT 6:6)

I think that any unbiased person reading Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John is going to come away as I have, with the strong suspicion that what Jesus came to set us free from was… religions.

Now, how about this:

“Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves.By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles?Likewise, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit.A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them.” (MT 7:15-20)

Many Christians would love to beat me over the head with that passage for having dared to write this post. But after two thousand years and more than ten thousand separate denominations, what really is the fruit of Christianity as the Apostle Paul designed it? Think about the “strict Christians” you know who are petty and judgmental and holier-than-thou. Speak to people who are living their lives according to their own consciences and are told by Christian family members that they are going straight to hell. Go into any hospice and hear from the volunteers how many Christians die in fear of God’s judgment.

By their fruit you will recognize them.

I have no doubt that Jesus is the only begotten Son of God, miraculously born of a virgin. I am confident that he came to bring us God’s truth, that he performed miracles and healed the sick, and that he died a martyr and miraculously rose from the dead. I love Jesus with everything that’s in me. What I altogether reject are the ten-thousand-plus Christian denominations that honor him with their lips while their hearts are far from him.

Jesus is right! And his prescription for how we must live our lives is such an essential message for all of us to hear as the world falls apart around us that if it takes the end of Christianity to force us to actually listen to Jesus, then I say, bring it on! The hour is late. Christianity’s false traditions have done nothing to elevate a fallen world, so it seems past time for us to cast aside the religion and listen to the Man.

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Consciousness Does Not Compute

Posted on May 15, 2015May 15, 2015 by Roberta Grimes

What is consciousness? Where does it come from? What does it do? Even a decade and a half into the twenty-first century, mainstream scientists still insist that consciousness has to come from the brain.

But your consciousness is not generated by your brain. We have discussed elsewhere the many reasons why you can be certain that this is true. By now it is well established that human consciousness pre-exists the universe and is inextricably a part of the Source energy that manifests everything that we think of as real. Your brain, as important as it seems, is nothing more than the way that your eternal consciousness connects to your body during this brief lifetime.

The evidence that all of this is true is consistent and overwhelming. But mainstream scientists have a problem. Still bound by the century-old “fundamental dogma” of materialism, they dare not look at the evidence objectively. They cannot even consider the possibility that consciousness might be anything other than an artifact generated by the brain.

One Nicholas Humphrey, who is emeritus professor of psychology at the London School of Economics and a professor at Darwin College, Cambridge, describes in a recent article in Scientific American Mind the conundrum being faced by true believers. I’m going to do something unusual here and quote extensively from his article, since it so profoundly sums up the Gordian knot into which mainstream science has tied itself by insisting that matter has to be material.

Dr. Humphrey tell us that “(Consciousness) (t)heorists tend to fall into one of two camps. Some assert that the manifestly eerie and ineffable qualities of subjective experience can only mean that these nonphysical qualities are inherent in the fabric of the universe. Others, including me, are more suspicious. They argue that consciousness may be more like a conjuring show, whereby the physical brain is tricking people into believing in qualities that don’t really exist.”

Dr. Humphrey refers to researchers who consider consciousness to be an innate property of the matter of the universe as “realists” because they think that consciousness is real and not illusory. He says, “In their view, if your sensations appear to have qualities that lie beyond the scope of physics, then they really do have such qualities. And these realists explain their reasoning by suggesting that the brain activity underlying sensations already has consciousness latent in it as an additional property of matter—a property as yet unrecognized by physics but one that you, the conscious subject, are somehow able to tap into. The price for this explanation is that it implies that the standard physical description of the world is radically incomplete.” Oops! In other words, it is dangerous to think of consciousness as real because this notion flies in the face of “the standard physical description of the universe.” It challenges our fundamental dogma of materialism. And to those making their livings as physicists, doing that is a very bad thing.

Those who are not “realists” hold that consciousness is a kind of illusion, but Dr. Humphrey thinks he has a better idea. He is of the camp that considers consciousness to be illusory, true, but he says, “While I believe consciousness may indeed be a stage trick by the brain, I want to suggest that it is also a stroke of artistic genius. Consciousness as art is surely a more palatable notion than consciousness as illusion.” He adds, “Consciousness, by placing you at the center of this brilliant and perplexing work of art, encourages you to think of all humans as equally touched by magic. Thus, you end up… as centers of spiritual excellence, spreading the joy.” With apologies to Dr. Humphrey, this is nonsense. What do phrases like “spiritual excellence” and “spreading the joy” even mean in a situation where your consciousness is nothing but an illusion or “art” that disappears with the death of your brain?

Dr. Humphrey does acknowledge that there is a problem with his theory. “How can there be physical matter on one side of the equation and nonphysical consciousness on the other? Philosophers talk about the existence of an ‘explanatory gap’ here. As Colin McGinn has put it, ‘You might as well assert that numbers emerge from biscuits or ethics from rhubarb.’” Just so.

One of our commenters here, Michael A. Williams, shares with us a wonderful article that gives a definitive answer to Dr. Humphrey and to all others who are stubbornly wed to the made-up notion that matter must be material and consciousness has to be generated by the brain. An Oxford-trained South Korean quantum physicist named Daegene Song has shown mathematically that “Among conscious activities, the unique characteristic of self-observation cannot exist in any type of machine… Human thought has a mechanism that computers cannot compute or be programmed to do… The brain and consciousness are linked together, but the brain does not produce consciousness. Consciousness is something altogether different and separate. The math doesn’t lie.”

It is no coincidence that Dr. Song is young. To paraphrase the immortal Max Planck, “science advances by deaths,” as those holding fast to failed ideas give way to those who are free to look at the world with fresh eyes.

Dr. Song is not the first quantum physicist to grasp the fact that human consciousness is primary and it pre-exists the universe. In 1931, Nobel Prize-winning quantum physicist Max Planck said, “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” And Erwin Schrodinger, another Nobel Prize-winning quantum physicist, said many years before Dr. Song’s birth, “Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.”

Science advances by deaths. And it is past time now for the old, failed dogma that matter must be material to give way to the glorious certainty that human consciousness is primary and pre-existing. Not only is consciousness real, dear friends, but it is the ONLY thing that is real!

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Uploading Your Mind

Posted on May 6, 2015May 7, 2015 by Roberta Grimes

Despite extensive evidence that human consciousness is primary and it pre-exists the universe, mainstream scientists still believe that nothing exists that is not material. They are certain that your mind, your personality, all that you are is generated entirely by your brain, so when you die your mind will blink out like a light.

All of this is nonsense, of course. For your material brain to generate your mind is flat-out impossible. But because materialism is a “fundamental dogma” of modern physics, it still permeates all of mainstream science. And it leads researchers to propose ever more lunatic projects. I’ll give you three that have lately come across my desk, and then we’ll talk about some reasons why we can be certain that our brains do not generate our minds.

1) Mind Uploading Will Replace God. http://motherboard.vice.com/read/mind-uploading-will-replace-god The notion that soon we will be digitally uploading the minds that are generated by our meat-brains so we can survive our physical deaths is so deeply nutty that even after having read this article three times I still cannot figure out the sense of it. “Being able to upload our entire minds into a computer is probably just 25-35 years off given Moore’s Law and the current trajectory of technology growth and innovation” the author confidently informs us. How is this possible, when scientists are sure that your mind is just an artifact of your meat-brain? The author says only, “mind uploading is generally considered possible by experts. After all, humans are just material machines, striving to create other machines that mirror ourselves and desires. Ah yes. We’ll translate all the information in your brain into bits and make a copy of you online. But what about your individual awareness? Your emotions? Your sense of being who you are? No mention of how we’re going to transfer all of that. And once this miracle of uploading our minds is achieved? “Expect a much more utopian society for whatever social structures end up existing in virtual reality and cyberspace. But also expect the real world to radically improve.” Utopia!

2) Thoughts Being Transmitted by Brain-to-Brain Link. In the strictly material world of mainstream science, it is very big news that a readout from someone’s brain can now be interpreted by someone else. “Using noninvasive means, researchers made brain recordings of a person in India thinking the words “hola” and “ciao,” and then decoded and emailed the messages to France, where a machine converted the words into brain stimulation in another person, who perceived the signals as flashes of light. From the sequence of flashes, the French recipient was able to successfully interpret the greetings.” What a great mess of trouble just to say “hello”!

3) We Are About to Experience Everlasting Youthfulness. The idea here is that we can keep on discovering ever more sophisticated ways to turn back the clock on our bodies, over and over again, always keeping just ahead of encroaching old age and therefore never reaching our expiration dates. Aubrey de Grey, who is an expert in this emerging field of trying to outrun the clock, says, “If we ask the question: ‘Has the person been born who will be able to escape the ill health of old age indefinitely?’ Then I would say the chances of that are very high. Probably about 80 per cent.”

All of this is an utter waste of time, money, and wonderful intentions! Here is why:

– There is no need to upload your mind in order to preserve it. Your mind is eternal by its very nature. It is impossible for it ever to die.

– Mind-to-mind communication without the need for mechanical “flashes of light” is already being practiced by those who understand that human minds are inextricable parts of one eternal Mind. And they are saying a lot more than just “hello.”

– Delaying the ills of old age is a laudable goal, but it cannot stave off death. Nor should it. Our post-death home is infinitely more wonderful than this brief, unpleasant afternoon in school!

How can we know for certain that our minds are not generated by our brains? Here are three clues that seem persuasive to me:

1) Our minds can exist apart from our bodies. Even one documented case of someone’s body and mind being in two different locations at the same time would be sufficient to establish this principle, and by now we have hundreds of such cases. The science is settled, if only mainstream scientists were not so afraid to examine the evidence!

2) The dead live happily in a glorious earth-like dimension very close to our own. Here is something else that has been so thoroughly documented that it is only physicists’ clinging to materialism as a fundamental dogma that keeps them from learning what we long have known. The minds of the dead have survived just fine! This seems to me to be conclusive proof that their meat-brains could not possibly have generated their minds.

3) The human genome does not code for the human mind. C. Elegans is an almost microscopic worm of fewer than a thousand cells. Its genome contains about 21,000 genes, which fact gives us a useful benchmark. And to the astonishment of researchers, the human genome turns out to contain only 19,000 genes, nearly all of which predate even primates. So the human genome does not code for the human mind. How then is it even possible for our minds to be generated by our brains?

The goals of all three of the scientific projects outlined above have long since been reached. Our minds are eternal, we cannot die, and since we all are part of eternal mind we can readily communicate at the level of our minds. Well, what do you know? The future is here. It doesn’t need technology. And it is beyond-belief wonderful!

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Ending the Great Stagnation

Posted on April 22, 2015April 23, 2015 by Roberta Grimes

Tech billionaire Peter Thiel warns us that science is in a period of what he calls the “Great Stagnation.” He frets that we are stuck in what he sees as a “culture of conformity” because “innovation depends on individuals who are willing to pursue unconventional, or even controversial, ideas.”

Mr. Thiel, you are exactly right. The Great Stagnation began a century ago, when the scientific community refused to investigate a flood of good afterlife communications that amounted to something close to proof that people easily survive their deaths. Instead of having a look, scientific gatekeepers worried that science might inadvertently find God, so they adopted materialism as what was then called science’s “fundamental dogma.” Materialism has since hardened into a requirement for all mainstream scientific inquiry. Of course, anything that is based in a dogma has become a belief-system and is not a genuine science any longer. All of this results in what you have observed. Physicists have been floundering in the weeds for a century.

Oh, but they still put up a brave front. They have the money to build particle colliders that enable them to earn a living while they discover nothing very useful. The recent run of the Great Hadron Collider failed to find some thirty particles required for important theories of physics that have been in place for decades. And yes, the last run of the GHC did discover what is believed to be the boson that gives subatomic particles their mass; but what physicists still fail to consider is a more important question that goes to the very heart of physics. Why is a Higgs Boson necessary in the first place?

This problem of restricted scientific inquiry has handicapped some brilliant careers. Ethan Siegel, in a terrific book review entitled Einstein, Schrodinger, and the Story You Never Heard: How “Faith” in the Universe Destroyed Two Brilliant Men of Genius, tells us how two of history’s greatest physicists were tripped up by their materialist prejudices reinforced by their need to keep themselves in conformity with the materialist party line. Siegel wonders, “(H)ow many of the ‘best’ theoretical ideas that lack evidence at the present – supersymmetry, extra dimensions, grand unification, string theory – will turn out to be completely wrong?” Since all these theories are attempts to make sense of a universe that is not material while remaining grounded in materialist dogma in order to keep careers alive, my suspicion is that all of these theories are wrong. But we won’t know that for sure until we can turn physics back into a genuine science.

The irony is that by now, research physicists understand that nothing is solid in the sense that Sir Isaac Newton understood the word “solid.” Max Planck is in the same scientific pantheon as Einstein, and as far back as 1944 he said, “There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particles of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together.” Of course, more recently it has become clear that those “particles” are actually vortices of energy. That is why physicists need the Higgs Boson. Mass has to come from somewhere.

So physicists get what is going on, but for public consumption they must hold to the party line of materialism or risk their careers. This zone of silence has led to a massive and appalling level of ignorance in the mainstream culture about such essential matters as human nature and the nature of reality. Rather than understanding by now that these bodies that we briefly wear are about as important as your old Toyota – useful for awhile, but soon abandoned – many of the world’s most sincere people see themselves as waging a desperate fight against their own extinction. Once the car breaks down, they’ll blink out like a light!

And among those fighting hardest to keep running what in his case is probably a Bentley is our wise and observant friend, Peter Thiel. “(T)he idea he’s most passionate about is using technology to extend human life far beyond what it is now,” so he is funding scientists to look for better ways to tinker under the hood.

What is saddest about all this waste of money and brilliance is that research is now ongoing in the very areas of inquiry that would most interest Peter Thiel. It is being conducted by physicists of stature, and the only thing that it lacks is funding to hasten the day when everyone on earth will know that human minds are eternal. There is no area of inquiry more certain to transform all of human life for the better than the research in electronic communication across dimensions now being conducted by Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and other household names who unfortunately have forgotten that here on earth we need money. The gizmos they keep proposing to their earthly lab assistants tend to be unbelievably expensive.

Still, we will get there eventually. The teams of dead scientists working on this tell us that even without much funding they expect to have a workable “soul phone” in place within the next few years. Of course, with a few million dollars applied to this most important area of scientific research in all of human history, success could happen sooner. So, how about it, Mr. Thiel? There is no better way to invest your wealth in “individuals who are willing to pursue unconventional, or even controversial, ideas” that are certain to transform the world!

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Radical Forgiveness

Posted on April 12, 2015October 12, 2019 by Roberta Grimes

Afterlife studies is a genuine science, which means that it has much to tell us beyond Forgiveness - Gandhi the fact that human minds are eternal. One of its most important revelations is the final answer to that age-old question: What is the purpose of human life? Here the dead agree with most major religions. We are here to learn to love perfectly and learn to forgive completely. Helping us learn to better love and forgive seems to be the reason why the universe exists.

Loving is the easy part. It seems to be innate in people, beginning with the love between mother and child and continuing through making friends and pair-bonding and building families to grandparenthood, the most intense love of all. That we need to love and be loved is a central characteristic of the human condition, and love of all kinds is so vastly rewarding in myriad ways that it is self-reinforcing. Loving is easy. And once we really are doing love well, we need then only to spread our love to all.

But to paraphrase William Shakespeare, there is one big rub. Universal love is impossible to practice until we have learned the art of radical forgiveness. We need to learn to forgive automatically, as if nothing ever even happened. And radical forgiveness is neither easy nor innate. From ISIS and your Ex to your sullen boss and the jerk who cuts you off in traffic, for most of us every day is full of reminders that some acts are unforgivable. Yet not only must all these perpetrators be forgiven, but once they are forgiven, they must be loved!

Whenever I mention forgiveness, I get emails. Some of the stories people tell are Spilled Milk - Sophocles tragic. And the challenge always is, “How could anyone forgive that?”

I used to have the same problem. Only say a nasty word in a store or show me your middle finger on the highway and you could ruin my entire day. But once I understood how essential it is that we practice radical forgiveness, I worked out the process for myself. I will give you my methods below. I want to assure you not only that they work, but that radical forgiveness will change your life! The best thing about learning to forgive to the point where you don’t even notice people’s wrongs is that it makes you feel peaceful and happy as really nothing else ever could. I don’t even have an anger reflex anymore. I cannot begin to tell you how wonderful that feels!

Here is my method for learning radical forgiveness:

1) Study forgiveness as a discipline. A Course in Miracles is a Ph.D.-level course in radical forgiveness. It is the best way to approach the task, but for most of us it takes years of attendance at a study group before we grasp the Course. I did some of that, but I found that simply buying a red-letter New International Version of the Bible and reading the red letters in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John until I had them internalized was sufficient. When you read enough Jesus, you start thinking like Jesus. And whatever your religion might be, that is a good thing.

2) Practice forgiveness when driving. I have a suspicion that God invented cars as the easiest way for us to learn to forgive! When someone cuts you off in traffic, think, “The poor man! I hope he gets to the hospital in time!” And really believe that. Smile and wave. If someone flips you the bird, think, “The poor man! He has only one finger!” Sometimes I’ll add, “He must have the others in a bucket! I hope they can reattach them!” Wave and smile. I felt foolish the first few times I reinvented reality this way, but now I firmly believe it all. No more traffic-stress. And I drive like a saint.

3) Learn the truth about the powers of our minds. Our minds are part of the same eternal Mind that continuously brings forth the universe, and as such they are infinitely creative, for good or ill. Especially in a world still held in the thrall of disastrously erroneous beliefs, people can seize on a religious dogma or some other nonsense and seek to apply it. Every mind is an infinitely creative part of a perfect God, but in their ignorance some creative minds can be led to do terrible things.

4) Understand that this whole lifetime is nothing more than a bad day in school. It is barely a blip in our eternal lives. Very soon those who are doing harm here will be going home to face a life-review in which they will be made to feel every bit of the harm that they have done to others. Whenever I see another ghastly story about ISIS, I keep that fact in mind. The most important reason to learn radical forgiveness is that soon you will face your own life-review, and you will be asked to forgive yourself.

Following these steps worked for me. And it didn’t even take very long. Jesus says so many things that helped me stay centered on my goal of learning radical forgiveness:

“Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles.” (MT 5:39-41)

“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when you yourself fail to see the plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.” (LK 6:41-42)

“But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.” (LK 6:35-36)

And of course,

“Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.” (MT 7:1-2).

What I learned in mastering radical forgiveness is that it isn’t for the other person. He doesn’t care whether you forgive him or not! And forgiveness doesn’t mean condoning bad behavior; it only means accepting what you cannot change. Learning to forgive others automatically is the greatest gift that you can give to yourself.

Roberta Grimes

Author: Roberta Grimes

Faith Versus Fact

Fruit of the Lord’s Tree

Stumbling Toward Consciousness

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By Their Fruit You Will Recognize Them

Is There Life After Birth?

Christianity vs. Jesus

Consciousness Does Not Compute

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Uploading Your Mind

Ending the Great Stagnation

Radical Forgiveness

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