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Commentary

On Life After Death

In the beginning, our ancestors died. And as it was in the beginning, it is now and forever shall be. But fear not, we are not alone; the indisputable evidence of Creation is that every living thing dies. We might as well get used to the idea because that's just the way it is, and there's nothing we can do about it. Our individual lives have no meaning other than that which we give it. If you have something you need to accomplish, you have only the balance of a lifetime to accomplish it; direct all your energies and resources to getting it done, don't end up on your deathbed crying and pleading for more time.

Our fear of death is not innate, we learn it from our support group when we're very young, and the institutions we grow up with support and refine it. Eventually it becomes strong enough for scam artists, charlatans, and false prophets to sniff out, and then they take us for all we're worth by calling on the name Jesus.

I believe this fear stems, in part, from a distorted understanding of life. A human lifetime is short; a mere blink of the eye in the history of mankind. However, humans have walked upright across the face of this planet for 500 thousand years if we start counting with Homo Sapiens and 3 million years if we want to embrace Lucy as ancestor. The shorter time is over 6 thousands human lifetimes long based on the current life expectancy in the U.S. The great mystery of life is not that individuals don't live very long, it's that we can mate and create another individual who is very much like us and who will preserve our place in the history of our species.

Christians claim that humans will have another life after they are dead if they qualify for it. And pursuit of this second life seems to be the whole of Christianity. It's not clear exactly what one has to do to qualify. And it's not clear exactly what type of existence it is. However, the 60+ Christian denominations disagree on these fundamental elements of their faith, and this makes it impossible for them to tell others what this thing they so passionately desire is. However, we may, of course, assume they don't believe it's anything like Hades or Sheol.

In the interest of full disclosure, I don't know what Islam and Judaism claim on this issue.

Life's Message doesn't support the belief that a human being can have another physical existence with all of his or her memories intact after his or her death. Life's Message finds no fault in and has no problem with people who believe otherwise because it doesn't attach moral, legal, or religious responsibility to what people think. However, when someone uses his or her personal beliefs of a life after death as an excuse to denigrate or otherwise make life difficult for people who don't share those beliefs, Life's Message condemns that as a premeditated and unjustifiable act of disrespect for other human beings. Besides, any afterlife that would require such behavior as a condition for admission isn't worth having; it sounds more like something Lucifer would want than anything Jesus would impose.

No one has either a Constitutional right or an inalienable right to persecute people who don't accept their myths and superstitions, and I submit that no one has a religious right either. Life's Message categorically rejects the notion that there can be a wonderful life or existence of any kind after death for anyone who violates the basic principles presented in The Message. And it doesn't matter how many creeds they mouthed, candles they burned, or rituals they participated in.

This still leaves open the question of whether there is any kind of existence after death for people who didn't violate the basic principles of The Message. The truth is, The Message doesn't answer this question. And my commission is not to speculate about what may or may not be possible in some hypothetical creation; it's, as I have said throughout, to show how to build Paradise here on Earth, a wonderful life for everybody within the constraints of the Creation we are part of.

On The Meaning Of Moral And Other Values

The religious right and the Republican party used the term "moral values" extensively and to great advantage to vilify Democrats during the '04 presidential campaign. The strategy worked, and they never had to say what they meant by the term. We can't know what they meant, but we can derive the commonsense meaning of the term by examining the individual words. For example:

If the Republicans and religious right meant anything other than this, they should have defined the term themselves.

The people who claimed most often to believe in moral values totally ignored the fundamental truth of moral values. Which is, to claim that we believe in moral values does not, in and of itself, give us a right to the moral high ground; it doesn't even make us good or desirable people. The only virtue of moral values is in internalizing them such that they are apparent in our usual and customary behavior. If we really care about moral values, we don't claim to believe in them, we practice them. Anything less is just giving lip service to an ideal we don't practice. And the only lesson our children can learn from this inconsistent behavior is that after all is said and done, moral values aren't really important.

Anybody who has read the Gospels, knows that the first and foremost moral value for Jesus was concern for the poor, the sick, the orphan, the widow, and the stranger. In spite of the facts that we are the wealthiest nation in the world and 76% of us identify ourselves as Christians for polls and censuses, the following and similar facts cry out that there is little concern for the values of Jesus in the U.S. today.

Everyone should be concerned about standards of right behavior because conformance with some of them is essential for social order, and social order is essential for the survival of the nation. Our criminal statutes are the standards of right behavior for the individual with respect to the state, and moral behavior is, in part, behavior that conforms to the criminal statutes. Our civil statutes are the standards of right behavior for the individual with respect to other individuals, and conforming to the civil statutes is another part of moral behavior. Both the criminal and civil standards of right behavior fall within the essential for social order category.

Our federal and state statutes supercede religious laws for defining and enforcing standards of right behavior, and this is as it should be. Religion is a tribal thing, and it's a very poor mechanism for behavioral control within large diverse populations. The insurmountable problem is there are 60-plus mutually exclusive denominations that comprise Christianity, and no nation could survive with that many conflicting statements of what the standards of right behavior are. Statutes aren't perfect, but they can be amended or repealed if they don't provide the desired benefit, and we have the Supreme Court as our designated arbiter when all else has failed.

The extralegal facets of interpersonal relationships that improve the quality of life for everyone should be included in a "nice to have category." The ones I mean are a direct consequence of widespread conformance to sociable and civil standards of right behavior, and the indisputable models or examples of the right manner of conducting oneself in this regard are, of course, apparent in the behavior of caretakers within Creation.

On The Theocratic Wing Of The Religious Right

-- theocracy (n): government of a state by immediate divine guidance or by officials who are regarded as being divinely guided.

Several web sites say the right wing theocrats have co-opted the Republican Party and intend to establish a theocracy in the U.S. headed by the Christian Coalition of America (CCA). [Google search on either religious right or republican party]

This is the worst idea I've ever heard, and if it doesn't breach the Constitutional wall between church & state, it surely ought to. Our founding fathers were very concerned about the state controlling the church, but they probably didn't think of the church being able to take over the legislative, executive, and judicial functions of the state.

The desire to establish a theocracy here is interesting because that's what the Taliban had going in Afghanistan before we destroyed them. There are bound to be a lot of differences in the details, but a theocracy based on a radical branch of Christianity will be every bit as repressive as one based on a radical branch of Islam. The CCA probably won't mandate burkas, but it will certainly have dress codes and school uniforms for children, and a lot of restrictions on women's freedoms. It will very likely have word-police and censorship. Some of the laws will require citizens to spy on their neighbors and report anything that looks suspicious, and it will be a crime to see and not report. The CCA might even reinvent the Inquisition or the Salem, MA witch trials.

I'll leave it to the Arabs to say what type of government works best for them; however, I'm positive theocracy will not work in the U.S. Theocratic governments are not and can not be democracies because people who claim to speak for God cannot compromise or negotiate, and they can't allow their opinions to be put to a vote. In fact, democratic theocracy is a contradiction in terms.

On This Thing Called Sin.

In very general terms, sin means disobedience to a personal God as in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. The Message doesn't have a personal God like these religions, and it doesn't use the word sin.

A religion is a set of beliefs and practices for establishing and maintaining a beneficial relationship with a supernatural entity, usually one with great knowledge and power. The monotheistic religions are a detailed set of beliefs and practices for establishing and maintaining a beneficial relationship with God based on the founders' beliefs of God. Each of the three great monotheistic religions claims that the God who prescribed its beliefs and practices is the one and only God. However, there are many irreconcilable differences among these religions, and specifically to the point here, each has a totally different concept of sin and atonement. Therefore, we will never have universal agreement on anything but a top level or vanilla flavored definition of sin.

There is nothing in The Message comparable to "law of God", "God's will", or "God's commandments" through or by which humans can be found to be disobedient to God. Therefore, the concepts of disobedience to God and atonement for sins don't really belong in The Message. Life's Message talks at length of the Immutable Universal Laws; however, they are a road map to Creation and do not provide behavioral or moral guidance to humans.

The Message maintains that everything humans can know of and about God can be discovered by using all of God's gifts to study the Immutable Universal Laws and Creation. It also declares that the deducible message from God to humanity is: If you want to develop the full potential of humanity and make a paradise for yourselves here on Earth, be a friend and good neighbor to everyone and refrain from pursuing self-interests to the point of depraved indifference to or callous disregard for anyone .

This proclamation is not a law, rule, or commandment, it isn't even a recommendation; it's simply a fact of life within Creation. We have the capability to ignore facts if we wish, but some facts can't be ignored with impunity, and this fact we ignore at our own peril.

On Mortality.

The Message maintains that we can't know why God does what He does. We can't know why we are thinking, reasoning bipeds with opposed thumbs. However, we can see that God has treated us very well in His Creation, and that He has given us everything we need to live in harmony with each other and the rest of Creation. Since all His gifts work in concert toward these ends and only get in the way if we want to travel a different path, we can conclude, or at least surmise, that this is what God wants us to do; that these are His will and His law for us.

God made us mortal; there can be no doubt of that. If god is all powerful as we want to believe, we must accept that he could just as easily made us immortal had He wanted to. It is easy to conclude, or at least surmise, that God made us individually mortal to give our species a new chance to change direction every two or three generations in case we get it all wrong somewhere along the way. I submit that we got it all wrong many times in the past, and so far we only managed to get it wronger and wronger each time the old generation died out. I believe that mortality is humanity's salvation; it is the only sword and the only shield between us and extinction.

On The War On Terror.

The worse side effect of the war on terror is the permanent damage we're doing to ourselves. We behave like a flock of chickens under the shadow of a chicken hawk. We have surrendered to fear and run around blindly in all directions trampling our neighbors under foot and demolishing long established sacred boundaries. It's apparent even to the most casual observers all over the world that many of us, perhaps even a majority, don't care how many brown-skin Iraqis we kill as long as someone tells us their deaths will make us safer here at home. We've sold our national soul for a hollow promise, and it's not a certainty that we have what it takes to overcome our fear and find the polestar that will show us the way out of Hades and back into the sunlight. If we get stuck down there, history will deal with us as a footnote, to wit, United States of America, the nation that developed the most powerful military machine of all time but overplayed its hand and collapsed in the 21st century.

On Truth, Lies, and Self-serving Propaganda In Politics.

-- Truth: the property of a statement of being in accord with fact or reality.
-- Lie: an assertion of something known or believed to be untrue with intent to deceive.
-- Self-serving Propaganda: an assertion that something is true which is not true in the context stated or implied with intent to deceive or gain advantage.

Please note, truth is binary. An assertion is either in accord with fact or reality, or it is not; there is no allowance for the preferences, hopes, feelings, wishes, or party affiliation of the individual making the assertion. There is no such thing as the Republican truth, or the Democratic truth. There is truth, and there are lies and self-serving propagandas. A lie by omission or judicious editing is a lie. Self-serving propaganda is just another type of lie because context is everything when determining the truth of an assertion.

Lies and self-serving propaganda are weapons of deceivers, the present incarnation of wizards, charlatans, magicians, and others who sought to gain trust and support through trickery rather than through truth. Beware of these; they have large followings and great power in this busy age. The masses are easily swayed by sound bites and headlines because they don't want to spend the time and energy required to know the truth. However, being busy is not an excuse for trying to appear well informed by repeating lies in any of their forms or disguises.

It is unfortunate, but the reality is that our national leaders care nothing for the truth; they have made politics a blood sport; they are like vampires forever in need of fresh blood and headhunters who consider the head of anyone who opposes them to be a legitimate trophy. It's a national disgrace that so many of us take part in this rabid partisan rivalry and thereby are accomplices in what is happening to our nation. While it is true that many people will believe a lie that is repeated often enough, that doesn't make it true.

The inability or unwillingness to distinguish among truth, lies, and self-serving propaganda is not a strength. On the contrary, a nation that has no sense of reality is like a ship at sea without a rudder. Its people are only flotsam with no control over their course or ultimate destination, and the only possible outcome is decay from within and ultimate implosion. The truth is there for anyone to see who cares enough to take the time to look. However, it may not be there much longer; truth is always an early casualty in a nation in decline, but it is by no means the only casualty. We have been judged, and we were found wanting, and our precious rights and freedoms are the stakes we have flung upon the gaming table.

On Dangerous Misconceptions.

Since 09/11/01, many Americans are saying, "If you have nothing to hide, you'll have nothing to fear if you give up your civil rights." The only thing all of these people have in common is that each and every one of them is wrong.

The truth is, everyone has a great deal to fear if we give up our civil rights, and it should be no surprise that those who have nothing to hide will stand in the greatest jeopardy. Our civil rights exist to protect everyone from governmental errors and excesses, but they leave plenty of room for identifying and punishing the guilty. If we give up our civil rights, the guilty can still be rooted out and punished, but the innocent can not be protected. And it is a certainty that many innocent will be punished along with or in lieu of the guilty.

The meaning of our laws is established by hundreds of years of legal precedence, and ignorance of the law is not a defense against a violation of the law. Now that laws are changing faster than the eye can follow, it's not always clear at any given moment what is right and what is wrong or, even worse, who can say for sure which is which. However, ignorance of the law is still no defense.

It is extremely difficult to think rationally when the loud drums of war are drowning out all other sounds and the foul breath of fear is hot upon the back of your neck. In such a time, to be questioned or detained is sufficient to trigger a presumption of guilt in the minds of many, including close friends, neighbors, and co-workers. And tragically, there is no chance of ever being publicly exonerated from this presumption.

Civil rights are a lot like clean water and fresh air; we won't miss them until they're gone. But when they're gone, it will cost the blood of a lot of good people to gain them anew for our posterity. Don't forget, thousands died to get them for us.

On Abortion in the U.S.

It has been illegal for any state to prohibit abortions for 28 years. During this time, abortion has become the most divisive issue in the country, and a number of groups are working very hard and spending tons of money to reverse or nullify Roe v. Wade, the decision that made this happen. The media refers to this activity as a debate, but it's really a war. The media calls the opposing forces pro-life and pro-choice, but these names are confusing because they sound like the affirmative sides of two different and unrelated debates. If we look behind these names, we find that:

This war would be much easier to understand, and we would all be better served, if the two sides were called anti-abortion and pro-abortion. The anti-abortion forces are the attackers, and their objective is to do away with Roe v. Wade. The pro-abortion forces are the defenders, and their objective is to preserve Roe v Wade and a woman's right to have control of her reproductive system.

The anti-abortion forces claim that God is on their side. By way of justification, they argue that human life is sacred, abortion destroys human life; therefore, abortion is contrary to the will of God. They further argue that human life is sacred because God created mankind apart from and above the rest of Creation as recounted in the Bible. They define human life to be that subset of Creation that contains the things we call human beings, and human fetuses, and human embryos, and they claim that it doesn't matter whether the embryos are in a freezer, a petri dish, or a woman's uterus.

There are many texts that are said to contain the Pre-Existent and Eternal Truth as revealed to mankind by God. These include the Bible, Qur'an, Torah, Vedas, and Buddha's discourses. Christians accept the Bible as the last word; other religions accept other texts, and some people don't believe there is such a thing as Pre-Existent and Eternal Truth. While most people are inclined to believe the life of every human being is special, and perhaps even sacred, few accept the anti-abortion forces' definition of "human life."

Anybody can be a religious bigot, and anybody can turn a blind eye to the fact that all religions do not speak with the same voice. The real challenge for U.S. citizens is to learn to respect and to live with the differences in religions.

Catholicism and the religious-right are perennial violators of this rule of good citizenship. If these organizations don't like the idea of abortion, they are entitled to lay a "Thou shall not have an abortion" commandment on their female members, but they are not entitled to demand that all women regardless of their religion obey that commandment.

Abortion is not a new phenomenon. It was practiced in almost all human societies from the earliest times, even in the ones that had laws against it. And the reversal or nullification of Roe v. Wade would be no more effective in stopping abortion than the 18th Amendment was in stopping the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors. Reversal or nullification would cause a drastic increase in the number of women who suffer permanent damage or die as a result of an abortion, but it would not prevent a single abortion.

There is no logical reason why a woman must, or even should, let an unwanted pregnancy run to term. We don't need to produce babies just for the sake of producing babies, and there is no virtue in bringing unwanted babies into the world. Furthermore, it takes over 20 years of very hard work to raise a child to the point where he or she is emotionally self-sufficient, economically independent, and a contributing member of the community. The federal and state governments have no right to force this job on women who don't want it. Please note: in the U.S., women are not property. Women are not the property of their husbands; women are not the property of any religion; women are not the property of the state. And women are not obligated to be breeding stock. Women have the right to control their reproductive systems, and that right must be acknowledged by every U.S. citizen.

The anti-abortion position tries to make the ability to have a baby more important than the desire to become a mother. This is absolutely the wrong order of things. The ability to have a baby does not guarantee that a woman has the ability or the desire to love and nurture a child. Every child needs to be loved and nurtured, and these fundamental needs are satisfied most often and in greater abundance by women who want to be mothers. We could give the federal and state governments sufficient coercive power to prevent safe abortions, but we can't give them the wisdom, ability, or power to make good mothers of women who don't want to be mothers.

A woman has an inalienable right to an abortion as long as she is essential to the survival of her fetus. However, if she carries it to the point where it can live outside of her body, she shouldn't abort it unless it has been established to a reasonable degree of medical certainty that it is abnormal or threatens her life. A study reported on the Center for Disease Control web site covering abortions from 1972 to 1997 shows that 55% of those performed in 1997 were performed at 8 weeks or less and that 88% were performed before 13 weeks. This tells me that pregnant women are behaving responsibly and that the self-appointed pregnancy police ought to mind their own business.

Make no mistake. The pro-abortion v. anti-abortion engagement is not a polite debate. It's a war, and it's as dirty as any war the U.S. has ever been engaged in. The outcome will have impacts as significant and far reaching as the Civil War. We are met on this battlefield to determine if women are property. And we are all involved in this struggle whether we want to be or not. Everyone, regardless of his or her persuasion, should step back and take a deep breath and then ask the following questions. Why do the anti-abortion people really want to repeal Roe v. Wade? Are they trying to help God as they claim, or are they trying to be God? Are they possibly motivated by a desire to have power and control over other people's lives?

On Life's Message and Deism

The following statement is the Deistic Assertion. The nature of God is best determined by applying reason to observations of the universe He created. This assertion first appeared in the 17th century, and it's still very much alive today. Life's Message embraces this assertion and some, but not all, of the teachings of Deists. For example:

These few examples may give bystanders and spectators something to talk about, but I don't believe they will be of any value to people who want to understand Life's Message. To these, I say read The Message with an open mind, and you'll know all there is to know about Life's Message. The Message speaks for itself, and Life's Message in its entirety is the only valid comment on Life's Message. The essence of The Message is in The Message and not in summaries or generalizations of The Message.

One of the central beliefs of Life's Message is that humanity is a work in progress, a species with unfulfilled potential to evolve into something worthwhile. This doesn't mean evolution in the Darwinian sense; that ended for humans about 35 millennia ago. Nor does it mean humans can become angels. It means that humans can outgrow or rise above their tendency to pursue self-interests to the point of depraved indifference to and callous disregard for other human beings. For now, this may be the sound of one small voice crying in the wilderness, but someday it will be the resounding sound of the myriad voices of the citizens of Paradise here on Earth. I'd love to hear that choir, but I don't expect it'll be ready to sing within my lifetime.

On Faith-Based Politics in the U.S.A.

Faith-Based Initiatives is a proposal for using federal tax revenues to pay selected religious organizations for performing charitable works and public services. This is a very bad idea. For one thing, it's not obvious that such payments would increase either the amount or quality of charity. It is obvious, however, that such payments would do irrevocable damage to religion by making it subject to government control. If there is a universal truth of politics in the U.S.A., it's that federal rules and controls always follow federal monies. And it follows as the night the day that the federal government will exercise a great deal of control over religion from the moment it accepts federal money for goods and or services. Religion in the U.S.A. has never been broken to the saddle, and it will not survive the full weight of the federal government on it back.

On Death

The Immutable Universal Laws contain all of the conditions that are necessary for a human life to begin and for it to continue at every point after its beginning. Once begun, a life continues until one of the conditions necessary for continuation is no longer satisfied. What we call death is in reality the inability to continue at some point in time. Medical professionals armed with the accumulated knowledge of the last century and modern technology can recognize many of the signs of an approaching inability to continue, and in some instances, they can intervene to the benefit of the patient.

Death has always been a difficult concept for humans to deal with. In this age of science and technology, the topic is still shrouded in primeval beliefs and practices that resulted from ignorance, fear of the unknown, trust in magic, or a false conception of causation. An example of such a belief is the notion that every human death represents a deliberate act of God and contains a message about His will.

The Immutable Universal Laws apply equally to every individual human Life. Therefore, God can not both guarantee them and create exceptions to them for the purpose of sending messages. The only possible message in death is that one of the continue requirements was no longer satisfied.

God will not shield humans from the consequences of their mortality. Nor will He shield them from the adverse consequences of their own behavior. However, He will not deny them the benefits of using their innate ability to control the health and well being of their own bodies. There is growing evidence that people who take care of their health, live in harmony with other people, and know how to give and accept love tend to live longer than people who practice antisocial, disruptive, exploitive, or manipulative behaviors. This could be a self-help option that is provided to humans who are more concerned about their life expectancy than other things.

Based on observations of the recent past, statisticians predicted that roughly 7 per thousand of the people born in the U.S. in the year 2000 will not live to see their first birthday and that half of the people in the U.S. group 2000 will be dead by the year 2077. Considering the wealth, knowledge, and technology available in the U.S., the surprises here are that there are over 20 countries with a lower infant mortality rate than the U.S. and over 30 with a longer life expectancy. These are not the result of a divine judgment, they are the results of different national priorities and personal choices. Obviously, God does not prevent humans from benefiting from what they learn from observations of the Immutable Universal Laws.