Up Front Comment
The Irony of the Cassandra Quandary
In modern usage the name of Cassandra, the legendary prophetess of Troy in Greek mythology, is employed as a rhetorical device to indicate someone whose accurate prophecies are not believed by those around them. This is the dilemma of The Urantia Book, whose authors' mission is revelation of truth to mankind.
There is a series of You Tube videos about the origin, history, and introduction of The Urantia Book that may be of interest to seekers of knowledge and truth. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHht8VeSFAc, or
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmyqQLXNPtI.
The content of this blog is excerpted primarily from The Urantia Book unless credited to other authors. Some conclusions are interpretive. [Urantia is the cosmic name for Earth.]
To read The Urantia Book, go to: http://www.urantia.org/urantia-book/read-urantia-book-online.
Introduction
The most contentious problems of mortal society are caused by differences in race; gender; religion; and ownership of property.
These problems will be resolved only when mankind achieves the goals of one race, gender equality, one language, one religion, one global government, the shared distribution of wealth and Earth's resources, and the segregation or elimination of inferior humans until the gene pool is purged of defectives.
Simply put, defective humans are characterized by sub normal intelligence or behavior. Others are too materialistic or animalistic, not spiritual.
God has commanded men to be perfect as he is perfect. That is the distant objective. Mortals are expected to be perfect to the degree of transforming themselves individually and collectively from the animal state. This is necessary to advance to the mansions' level following human death.
Where the source for the content of this site is not noted, it is excerpted primarily from The Urantia Book. Some conclusions are interpretive. [Urantia is the cosmic name for Earth.]
Life at the Top of the Chain
The creatures of Havona (the Central Universe surrounding Paradise) are naturally brave, but they are not courageous in the human sense. They are innately kind and considerate, but hardly altruistic in the human way. They are expectant of a pleasant future, but not hopeful in the exquisite manner of the trusting mortal of the uncertain evolutionary spheres. They have faith in the stability of the universe, but they are utter strangers to that saving faith whereby mortal man climbs from the status of an animal up to the portals of Paradise.
Havona creatures love the truth, but they know nothing of its soul-saving qualities. They are idealists, but they were born that way; they are wholly ignorant of the ecstasy of becoming ideal (perfect) by exhilarating choice. They are loyal, but they have never experienced the thrill of wholehearted and intelligent devotion to duty in the face of temptation to default. They are unselfish, but they never gained such levels of experience by the magnificent conquest of a belligerent self. They enjoy pleasure, but they do not comprehend the sweetness of the pleasure escape from the pain potential.
The creatures of Havona (the Central Universe surrounding Paradise) are naturally brave, but they are not courageous in the human sense. They are innately kind and considerate, but hardly altruistic in the human way. They are expectant of a pleasant future, but not hopeful in the exquisite manner of the trusting mortal of the uncertain evolutionary spheres. They have faith in the stability of the universe, but they are utter strangers to that saving faith whereby mortal man climbs from the status of an animal up to the portals of Paradise.
Havona creatures love the truth, but they know nothing of its soul-saving qualities. They are idealists, but they were born that way; they are wholly ignorant of the ecstasy of becoming ideal (perfect) by exhilarating choice. They are loyal, but they have never experienced the thrill of wholehearted and intelligent devotion to duty in the face of temptation to default. They are unselfish, but they never gained such levels of experience by the magnificent conquest of a belligerent self. They enjoy pleasure, but they do not comprehend the sweetness of the pleasure escape from the pain potential.
Crimes Against the Self (Mankind and all Creation)
(Material World Crimes = Spiritual Sins)
(Material World Crimes = Spiritual Sins)
Mortal Education
The Importance of Education for Mortals
An enduring nation is founded on culture, dominated by ideals, and motivated by service. The purpose of education in a lasting state should be acquirement of a skill, pursuit of wisdom, realization of self-hood, and attainment of spiritual values.
This advice essentially reflects Plato's twin ladders prescribed for individuals – education for both earning a living and the humanities, nourishment for both the body and the soul.
In the ideal state, education continues throughout life, and philosophy sometimes becomes the chief pursuit of its citizens. The citizens of such a commonwealth pursue wisdom as an enhancement of insight into the significance of human relations, the meanings of reality, the nobility of values, the goals of living, and the glories of cosmic destiny. (Study of The Urantia Book should be a life long pursuit for today's humans.)
The people of Earth should get a vision of a new and higher cultural society. Education will jump to new levels of value with the demise of the purely profit-motivated system of economics. Education has too long been parochial, militaristic, ego exalting, and success seeking. It must eventually become world-wide, idealistic, self-realizing, and cosmic grasping.
Evolution of Education on Earth
Education recently passed from the control of the clergy to that of lawyers and businessmen. Eventually it must be given over to the philosophers and the scientists. Teachers must be free beings, real leaders, to the end that philosophy, the search for wisdom, may become the chief educational pursuit.
Education is the business of living; it must continue throughout a lifetime so that mankind may gradually experience the ascending levels of mortal wisdom, which are:
1. The knowledge of things.
2. The realization of meanings.
3. The appreciation of values.
4. The nobility of work - duty.
5. The motivation of goals - morality.
6. The love of service - character.
7. Cosmic insight - spiritual discernment.
And then, by means of these achievements, many will ascend to the mortal ultimate of mind attainment, God-consciousness.
The Plan of Earth's Spiritual Ruler
1. One Global Government
2. Brotherhood (the collective expression of Self)
The most contentious problems of mortal society are caused by differences in race; gender; religion; and ownership of property.
These problems will be resolved only when mankind achieves the goals of one race, gender equality, one language, one religion, one global government, the shared distribution of wealth and Earth's resources, and the segregation or elimination of inferior humans (at all levels of intelligence) until the gene pool is purged of defectives. (Ambition when manifest as greed is an unrecognized defect.)
Realization of these goals will require millenniums of growth in man's outreach for brotherhood.
The Objectives of the Most High for Earth
Steps to Achieve One Global Government and Brotherhood
1. One language
2. One religion (an individual religion of Self)
3. One race (accomplished through migration, immigration, and intermarriage)
4. No territorial borders
5. World law and enforcement
6. All citizens sharing benefits and profits of Earth's resources
7. Purging of defective humans (wickedly irredeemable materialists, and mental defectives).
The Role of the Most High
Every quarantined or isolated world (such as Earth) has a Vorondadek Son acting as an observer. (The rulers of the constellations are of the Vorondadek order of local universe son-ship.) When commissioned to active duty in the universe as constellation rulers or otherwise, these Sons are known as the Most Highs since they embody the highest administrative wisdom, coupled with the most farseeing and intelligent loyalty, of all the orders of the Local Universe Sons of God.
It is Earth's Most High observer who “rules in the kingdoms of men.” Earth's Most High observer has been stationed on Earth ever since the betrayal of Caligastia (Earth's deposed planetary prince).
The Most High observer and his staff support the actions of Earth's intellectual elite (the Reserve Corps of Destiny) in global evolutionary progress.
The Reserve Corps of Destiny
The Reserve Corps of Destiny consists of living mortals who have (unknown to them) been admitted to the special service of the superhuman administration of world affairs.
This corps is made up of the men and women of each generation who are chosen by the spirit directors of the realm to assist in the conduct of the ministry of mercy and wisdom to the “children of time” on the evolutionary worlds. It is the general practice in the conduct of the affairs of the ascension plans to begin this liaison utilization of mortal will creatures as soon as they are competent and trustworthy enough to assume such responsibilities.
Accordingly, as soon as men and women appear on the stage of temporal action with sufficient mental capacity, adequate moral status, and requisite spirituality, they are quickly assigned to the appropriate celestial group of planetary personalities as human liaisons.
The elite humans of the Reserve Corps of Destiny work for the spiritual betterment of society against the greed and avarice of the financial elites.
The Importance of Education for Mortals
An enduring nation is founded on culture, dominated by ideals, and motivated by service. The purpose of education in a lasting state should be acquirement of a skill, pursuit of wisdom, realization of self-hood, and attainment of spiritual values.
This advice essentially reflects Plato's twin ladders prescribed for individuals – education for both earning a living and the humanities, nourishment for both the body and the soul.
In the ideal state, education continues throughout life, and philosophy sometimes becomes the chief pursuit of its citizens. The citizens of such a commonwealth pursue wisdom as an enhancement of insight into the significance of human relations, the meanings of reality, the nobility of values, the goals of living, and the glories of cosmic destiny. (Study of The Urantia Book should be a life long pursuit for today's humans.)
The people of Earth should get a vision of a new and higher cultural society. Education will jump to new levels of value with the demise of the purely profit-motivated system of economics. Education has too long been parochial, militaristic, ego exalting, and success seeking. It must eventually become world-wide, idealistic, self-realizing, and cosmic grasping.
Evolution of Education on Earth
Education recently passed from the control of the clergy to that of lawyers and businessmen. Eventually it must be given over to the philosophers and the scientists. Teachers must be free beings, real leaders, to the end that philosophy, the search for wisdom, may become the chief educational pursuit.
Education is the business of living; it must continue throughout a lifetime so that mankind may gradually experience the ascending levels of mortal wisdom, which are:
1. The knowledge of things.
2. The realization of meanings.
3. The appreciation of values.
4. The nobility of work - duty.
5. The motivation of goals - morality.
6. The love of service - character.
7. Cosmic insight - spiritual discernment.
And then, by means of these achievements, many will ascend to the mortal ultimate of mind attainment, God-consciousness.
The Plan of Earth's Spiritual Ruler
1. One Global Government
2. Brotherhood (the collective expression of Self)
The most contentious problems of mortal society are caused by differences in race; gender; religion; and ownership of property.
These problems will be resolved only when mankind achieves the goals of one race, gender equality, one language, one religion, one global government, the shared distribution of wealth and Earth's resources, and the segregation or elimination of inferior humans (at all levels of intelligence) until the gene pool is purged of defectives. (Ambition when manifest as greed is an unrecognized defect.)
Realization of these goals will require millenniums of growth in man's outreach for brotherhood.
The Objectives of the Most High for Earth
Steps to Achieve One Global Government and Brotherhood
1. One language
2. One religion (an individual religion of Self)
3. One race (accomplished through migration, immigration, and intermarriage)
4. No territorial borders
5. World law and enforcement
6. All citizens sharing benefits and profits of Earth's resources
7. Purging of defective humans (wickedly irredeemable materialists, and mental defectives).
The Role of the Most High
Every quarantined or isolated world (such as Earth) has a Vorondadek Son acting as an observer. (The rulers of the constellations are of the Vorondadek order of local universe son-ship.) When commissioned to active duty in the universe as constellation rulers or otherwise, these Sons are known as the Most Highs since they embody the highest administrative wisdom, coupled with the most farseeing and intelligent loyalty, of all the orders of the Local Universe Sons of God.
It is Earth's Most High observer who “rules in the kingdoms of men.” Earth's Most High observer has been stationed on Earth ever since the betrayal of Caligastia (Earth's deposed planetary prince).
The Most High observer and his staff support the actions of Earth's intellectual elite (the Reserve Corps of Destiny) in global evolutionary progress.
The Reserve Corps of Destiny
The Reserve Corps of Destiny consists of living mortals who have (unknown to them) been admitted to the special service of the superhuman administration of world affairs.
This corps is made up of the men and women of each generation who are chosen by the spirit directors of the realm to assist in the conduct of the ministry of mercy and wisdom to the “children of time” on the evolutionary worlds. It is the general practice in the conduct of the affairs of the ascension plans to begin this liaison utilization of mortal will creatures as soon as they are competent and trustworthy enough to assume such responsibilities.
Accordingly, as soon as men and women appear on the stage of temporal action with sufficient mental capacity, adequate moral status, and requisite spirituality, they are quickly assigned to the appropriate celestial group of planetary personalities as human liaisons.
The elite humans of the Reserve Corps of Destiny work for the spiritual betterment of society against the greed and avarice of the financial elites.
Evolution of the Most High's Unstoppable Plan
Recognition of the Most High's Grand Design
The Twilight of Sovereignty: How the Information Revolution Is Transforming Our World – September, 1992. Walter B. Wriston.
Walter B. Wriston, the former chairman of Citicorp Bank is among the most innovative financiers of our time. In The Twilight of Sovereignty, he reveals the vast geopolitical implications of the massive information revolution in progress around the globe.
Wriston shows human intelligence and intellectual resources are now the world's prime capital. Instant global communication - the marriage of satellites, television, fax, cellular telephones, and worldwide computer networks - has had and will continue to have world-shaking consequences. The fundamental result is that national boundaries are increasingly irrelevant, and the traditional power and perquisites of sovereignty are disappearing.
Wriston says the effect of this revolution is the formation of a new global democratic order. In today's world there can be no more unreported Chernobyl disasters. There can be no more Pearl Harbor-like surprises. The vast migrations on every continent; the drive of informed peoples for self-determination; the collapse of the Soviet empire; the democratization of Latin America; the outburst of ethnic rivalries - all become understandable in the light of Wriston's analysis.
Wriston stresses that in the information revolution, technology itself is of secondary importance. His larger vision is of the transformation of our public and private institutions. Within the corporation, too, the twilight of sovereignty is near. The immediate and simultaneous availability of data to those at every level of authority within the corporation means that in today's business world, traditional executive power is ended.
Looking to the future, Wriston outlines the new management philosophies and radically changed managerial structures that will follow the end of capitalistic sovereignty.
One in a Million People
Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making, Rothkopf, David (Edited.)
As uncommon as they are, everyone is familiar with the extraordinary people among us. In almost every human pursuit, levels of talent and accomplishment seldom ascend in smooth, small increments. In sports, for example, the levels of proficiency are like the quantum levels of an atom, representing substantial, geometrical leaps in capability.
The gap between the average amateur and the top amateurs is enormous. The gap between top amateurs and average professionals is typically very great as well. The gap between average professionals and those who can play at the top level of their sport year in and year out is yet again exponentially greater. And finally, most strikingly, there is the chasm that separates the top ten or twenty in any sport, and the once-in-a-generation best of the best who appear in ones and twos sprinkled through history.
The pattern persists from sport to other human pursuits, from art to literature to politics to business: Tolstoy and Dickens, Rothschild and Rockefeller, Mao and Mandela. These are the few who define the direction for their professions and their eras. They are emulated, become beacons, and very often serve as drivers or catalysts for change. In every era, in every pursuit, there are clusters of such individuals atop their fields - some well-known, some invisible - who dominate the worlds around them.
The Super Class of Mortals
Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making, Rothkopf, David (Edited.)
This book is about the power that is concentrated in the hands of a very small number of people around the world. It is about who the people of the super class are, and how they differ from the rest of us.
Most of all, this book is about the profound impact this group has on the lives of most people, and how they are shaping our times.
To some, the members of the super class are the heroes of the process of globalization that will, someday help the poorest out of poverty. To others, they are the new robber barons.
They are either pioneers who earn the benefits they reap, or they are exploiters who should beware the impending backlash of a global revolution incited by global inequality.
Differentiating Reserve Corps of Destiny Workers and Materialists
Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making, Rothkopf, David (Edited.)
None among the world’s super class - the most powerful of the world’s most powerful people - have prospered more than the financial elites during the modern globalization process. These materialist people selfishly work in direct opposition to the unselfish efforts of the Most High's Reserve Corps of Destiny.
To their dubious credit, the financial elite played a large role in fostering globalization. No group more effectively disregarded the bounds of national regulatory regimes and flourished in the territory above national borders. Unintentionally, the financial elites laid the groundwork for the destined globalization of the world.
The financial elites created great fortunes among themselves and the businesses they served.
The financial elites operate effectively against the policies of nations and influence political leaders as once only electorates or armies could do.
The “best” of the financial elite, the heads of great financial institutions and funds, billionaire traders and commodity market czars, strode like titans through the first years of the global era. They were enablers and beneficiaries of a new system that concentrated more economic power into the hands of fewer and fewer people and that, in the eyes of many, deepened and widened the great chasm that separates the haves of this world from the rest of the population.
The Urantia (Earth) Problem
The mission of Adam and Eve on experimental, rebellion-seared, and isolated Urantia was a formidable undertaking. And the Material Son and Daughter early became aware of the difficulty and complexity of their planetary assignment. Nevertheless, they courageously set about the task of solving their manifold problems. But when they addressed themselves to the all-important work of eliminating the defectives and degenerates from among the human strains, they were quite dismayed.
Under normal conditions the first work of a Planetary Adam and Eve would be the coordination and blending of the races. But on Urantia such a project seemed just about hopeless, for the races, while biologically fit, had never been purged of their retarded and defective strains.
Adam and Eve found themselves on a sphere wholly unprepared for the proclamation of the brotherhood of man, a world groping about in abject spiritual darkness and cursed with confusion confounded by the miscarriage of the mission of the preceding administration of the Planetary Prince.
Mind and morals were at a low level, and instead of beginning the task of effecting religious unity, they had to begin anew the work of converting the inhabitants to the most simple forms of religious belief. Instead of finding one language ready for adoption, they were confronted by the world-wide confusion of hundreds upon hundreds of local dialects. No Adam of the planetary service was ever set down on a more difficult world; the obstacles seemed insuperable and the problems beyond creature solution.
Caligastia, the Prince of Urantia and Lucifer's associate, facilitated their failure by tricking Eve into default.
Dealing with Crime on a Neighboring Planet
The methods of this people in dealing with crime, insanity, and degeneracy, may prove shocking to many Urantians. Ordinary criminals and the defectives are placed, by sexes, in different agricultural colonies, which are self-supporting. The more serious habitual criminals and the incurably insane are sentenced to death in the lethal gas chambers by the courts. Numerous crimes aside from murder, including betrayal of governmental trust, also carry the death penalty, and the visitation of justice is sure and swift.
These people are passing out of the negative into the positive era of law. Recently they have gone so far as to attempt the prevention of crime by sentencing those who are believed to be potential murderers and major criminals to life service in the detention colonies. If such convicts subsequently demonstrate that they have become more normal, they may be either paroled or pardoned. The homicide rate on this continent is only one per cent of that among the other nations.
Efforts to prevent the breeding of criminals and defectives were begun over one hundred years ago and have already yielded gratifying results. There are no prisons or hospitals for the insane. There are only about ten per cent as many defectives and degenerates as are found on Urantia.
The Illusion of “Natural Rights”
When rights are old beyond knowledge of their origin, they are often called natural rights. But human rights are not really natural; they are entirely social. They are relative and ever changing, they are simply the rules of the game - recognized adjustments of relations governing the ever-changing phenomena of humans competing.
What may be regarded as right in one age may not be regarded as such in another age. The survival of large numbers of defectives and degenerates is not because they have any natural right to encumber twentieth-century civilization, but simply because the society of the age, the mores, decrees it so.
Few human rights were recognized in the European Middle Ages. Then, every man belonged to someone else, and rights were only privileges or favors granted by the state or church. The revolt from this error was equally erroneous in that it led to the belief that all men are born equal.
The weak and the inferior have always contended for equal rights. They have always insisted that the state compel the strong and superior to supply their wants and otherwise make good those deficiencies which all too often are the natural result of their own indifference and indolence.
Public sentiment is opposed to purging defectives, but there would be far fewer defectives in the world today if Adam had had the time to cleanse the more animal-like tribes by not allowing them to reproduce.
The Ideal of Equality
The equality ideal is the product of civilization. It is not found in nature.
Even culture itself demonstrates conclusively the inherent inequality of men by their very unequal physical and mental capacities.
Society cannot offer equal rights to all, but it can promise to administer the varying rights of each person with fairness and equity. It is the business and duty of society to provide competent men and women with a fair and peaceful opportunity to pursue self-maintenance, participate in self-perpetuation, while at the same time enjoying some measure of self-gratification. The sum of all three constitutes human happiness.
Offensive Super Class Members
Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making, Rothkopf, David (Edited.)
A century ago there were only a few hundred people in the world who met the definition for inclusion in the super class - the ability to affect millions across borders on a regular basis. Today there are thousands of elites in the super class, and a greater percentage than ever before owe their power to their work in the private sector. Most earned their positions, compared to the elites of the past, who often inherited them. Further, the role of military leaders among international elites receded as the cost of modern warfare became too high.
The financial crises of 2008 transformed the super class. Now, the interests of the super class are a network linked by their great power and the fact that members of this group, or subsets of the group, have broader aligned interests.
The transient nature of the super class members does not diminish the reality or the significance of their players. When power is linked to position or an institutional affiliation, different individuals play roughly identical roles, acting as they do in the interests of the institution by their roles within that institution. That does not diminish their power, but it does mean that it is appropriate when considering the world’s most powerful people to include whoever is currently the chief executive of ExxonMobil or Deutsche Bank or Saudi Aramco, regardless of who that individual may be.
Super Class Advantages
Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making, Rothkopf, David (Edited.)
The super class as a group of people are a quantum level more powerful than any other on the planet. The implications of that power are very significant for average people and their collective future.
The great institutions no longer have any national identity, operating as they do in markets worldwide with no regard for borders and with a primary allegiance only to the interests of their stakeholders. Further, they operate above and beyond national regulatory structures. When they use the freedom this brings to create wealth and to provide easy access to capital, this is a great advantage under existing laws.
In fact, the super class members themselves prescribe the laws through their lobbying and financial support of the law makers.
The Need to Control Capitalistic Entitlements
Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making, Rothkopf, David (Edited.)
When the super class overreach, as those in power and in markets inevitably do, their existence beyond the reach of regulators creates significant problems with very real and grim consequences for average citizens.
That means that we need multilateral institutions and mechanisms to ensure that the minimum basic protections for the governed are not undercut while the world’s most powerful pursue their narrow self-interests in the arena of the global marketplace.
The financial crises of 2007 and 2008 revealed the power of the financial super class. The leaders of the financial world, despite their history of greed-driven bubbles that burst and crushed the lives and hopes of countless innocent bystanders, were able to use their influence to ensure that new financial instruments could be “self-regulating.”
When such an argument is so indefensible on its face and it succeeds, is testimony to the power of those making the case. The stark power of the financial super class group is illustrated by the fact that when markets did crash on the rocks of greed, mismanagement, minimization and misunderstanding of complex new risks, these same financial titans who told government to stay out of their business were able to force government to rescue them.
As Juan Perón (former president of Argentina) said: “The nation does not exist for the benefit of the economy. The economy must serve the nation [world].”
Elite Criminals Should Not Operate with Impunity
Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making, Rothkopf, David (Edited.)
The same financial super class people who gave the world, “Too Global to Regulate,” also gave the world, “Too Big to Fail,” and both times the political class, many of whom came from the financial super class or saw their political fortunes supported by its donations, said, “We Can Help.” That is raw power operating.
The economic crises revealed the public’s opinion of the super class - resentment at their pattern of gaming the system, of getting rich on the way up and on the way down, of making the taxpayer pay for their mistakes while they were the primary beneficiaries of their gains.
After 2009, the political drum began beating for more aggressive and vigilant regulation and for an end to obscene pay packages that reward private sector leaders, even while they bilk their shareholders, their customers, their employees, and the public at large. Some optimists thought it could be the beginning of the end of the era of greed and excess.
While changes were proposed, the effort to rein in the financial overlords only amounted to a new group of super class players assuming, and abusing, their power.
The people of the world need to determine what is in the world's interests and what is not. The grotesque income and power inequities that have resulted from a global system lacking the governance structures and balancing mechanisms expected in honorable societies is not in the world's best interests.
[Just as today, we are appalled that the institution of slavery ever existed, someday the world will be appalled that capitalistic greed was allowed to exist.]
The Cognitive Elite
In his book. Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010, the social scientist Charles Murray described how society has become stratified by intelligence, and ruled by the “cognitive elite.”
A few decades ago, prestigious colleges became more meritocratic, admitting people on the basis of grades and test scores, instead of other criteria such as social class. Gifted and talented youth of every economic status were invited to attend summer camps. The smartest students from the summer camps got accepted by the best schools, where they established connections with other cognitive elites.
The gifted students of summer camps such as Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Sergey Brin (Google), and (performer Lady Gaga) went on to prestigious schools. Many of the more broadly socially representative cognitive elite graduated to have monetarily modest careers in academia, journalism, technology, and politics. They now run the country. Many are serving the world. Many are clustered in the financial elite, very wealthy and self-serving.
The cognitive elite model is self-reinforcing. The most intelligent people from the best schools married each other and are having smart children. Those smart children also get into the best schools.
The ironic result is America has become in many ways a more classicist society. The underlying assumption within the wealthy upper one percent is if you aren't rich, you probably aren't capable of making worldly success decisions.
People don’t talk about rule by the intelligentsia. Instead, Americans are obsessed with racial issues, but the fact is, people of different socioeconomic status and race don't normally mix. This came to a head in the 2016 election, when the ordinary people revolted at the ballot box and ejected much of the cognitive elite people in government, and indirectly academia and journalism.
The financial elite have begun to rule America again.
The Dilemma of Democracy and Representative Government
It may seem like a good idea having the cognitive elite make all the decisions.
But it also may be safe to assume that smart people focus primarily on the interests of smart people, as opposed to those of the general public.
However, Mark Zuckerberg made a splash in his Harvard commencement speech when he called for a universal basic income. But will it help anyone simply by giving them unearned money to sit home and watch television?
Cognitive stratification is a fact of life. Some companies such as Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google (Alphabet) will become ever more powerful. The best technology companies hire the smartest people and put them to work solving the hardest problems for their corporate interests.
It is not an illusion if ordinary people get the feeling that they don’t have any voice in making the decisions that affect their lives and welfare, regardless of which political party is in power.
Income Inequality
Wikipedia, (Edited.)
The U.S. ranks around the 30th percentile in income inequality globally, meaning 70% of countries have a more equal income distribution.
While there is strong evidence that income inequality has increased since the 1970s, there is active debate in the United States regarding the appropriate measurement, causes, effects and solutions to income inequality.
The two major political parties have different approaches to the issue. Democrats historically emphasize that economic growth should result in shared prosperity (a pro-labor argument advocating income redistribution). Republicans tend to downplay the validity or feasibility of influencing the issue (a pro-capital argument against redistribution).
Concentration of Power
Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making, Rothkopf, David (Edited.)
It is lamentable that big decisions are made without public debate (a sentiment easy to understand in the wake of America’s decision to enter a war in Iraq without benefit of a congressional declaration of war or any national deliberation).
Within the American government, there is only one commander in chief of what is by far the world’s most powerful military. He or she is the chief executive of the world’s richest nation. The president of the United States has extraordinary power to conduct the business of the United States as he or she sees fit, despite the carefully constructed checks and balances prescribed by the Constitution.
In addition, presidents have the option of changing the structure of the cabinet, of firing and hiring new members, and of determining who serves on influential advisory committees like the National Security Council, the Homeland Security Council, or the National Economic Council. Today there are more than three thousand such presidential appointees, a number that has swelled from roughly six hundred in the past thirty years or so.
The Power Vacuum
Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making, Rothkopf, David (Edited.)
The pattern of seizure of authority by the president and the abrogation of responsibility by Congress is not only repeated throughout history; it also echoes patterns that have led to the concentration of political power among the few, especially when it comes to shaping America’s global role.
The void created by congressional abandonment of their political powers was filled by those who wanted to control these issues. Not surprisingly, the new power group contains a far higher concentration of those with global interests and is able to use their tools of power and influence to appropriate disproportionate influence to themselves.
One such group is the international policy community in Washington. This is a very small, tightly knit group of influential individuals, who have known each other and worked together for most of their careers. This group serves or is likely to serve in top foreign policy and national security positions.
The Making of a President
Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making, Rothkopf, David (Edited.)
Presidential candidates need teams of top advisers, who can simulate the candidate’s competence in, for example, international affairs.
Not surprisingly, the best people are those who have held high positions in the past. (The best credential for entry into this group is already being a member.) The result is a highly interconnected group of decision makers and a remarkable concentration of power in a small circle. This power extends far beyond the executive branch.
Firms like Goldman Sachs place their executives in the top echelons of the U.S. Government. A revolving door policy allows these decision makers to leave their firms, go into government, and then return to their firms. This is how the financial community maintains its influence. This is “the Deep State.”
Recognition of the Most High's Grand Design
The Twilight of Sovereignty: How the Information Revolution Is Transforming Our World – September, 1992. Walter B. Wriston.
Walter B. Wriston, the former chairman of Citicorp Bank is among the most innovative financiers of our time. In The Twilight of Sovereignty, he reveals the vast geopolitical implications of the massive information revolution in progress around the globe.
Wriston shows human intelligence and intellectual resources are now the world's prime capital. Instant global communication - the marriage of satellites, television, fax, cellular telephones, and worldwide computer networks - has had and will continue to have world-shaking consequences. The fundamental result is that national boundaries are increasingly irrelevant, and the traditional power and perquisites of sovereignty are disappearing.
Wriston says the effect of this revolution is the formation of a new global democratic order. In today's world there can be no more unreported Chernobyl disasters. There can be no more Pearl Harbor-like surprises. The vast migrations on every continent; the drive of informed peoples for self-determination; the collapse of the Soviet empire; the democratization of Latin America; the outburst of ethnic rivalries - all become understandable in the light of Wriston's analysis.
Wriston stresses that in the information revolution, technology itself is of secondary importance. His larger vision is of the transformation of our public and private institutions. Within the corporation, too, the twilight of sovereignty is near. The immediate and simultaneous availability of data to those at every level of authority within the corporation means that in today's business world, traditional executive power is ended.
Looking to the future, Wriston outlines the new management philosophies and radically changed managerial structures that will follow the end of capitalistic sovereignty.
One in a Million People
Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making, Rothkopf, David (Edited.)
As uncommon as they are, everyone is familiar with the extraordinary people among us. In almost every human pursuit, levels of talent and accomplishment seldom ascend in smooth, small increments. In sports, for example, the levels of proficiency are like the quantum levels of an atom, representing substantial, geometrical leaps in capability.
The gap between the average amateur and the top amateurs is enormous. The gap between top amateurs and average professionals is typically very great as well. The gap between average professionals and those who can play at the top level of their sport year in and year out is yet again exponentially greater. And finally, most strikingly, there is the chasm that separates the top ten or twenty in any sport, and the once-in-a-generation best of the best who appear in ones and twos sprinkled through history.
The pattern persists from sport to other human pursuits, from art to literature to politics to business: Tolstoy and Dickens, Rothschild and Rockefeller, Mao and Mandela. These are the few who define the direction for their professions and their eras. They are emulated, become beacons, and very often serve as drivers or catalysts for change. In every era, in every pursuit, there are clusters of such individuals atop their fields - some well-known, some invisible - who dominate the worlds around them.
The Super Class of Mortals
Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making, Rothkopf, David (Edited.)
This book is about the power that is concentrated in the hands of a very small number of people around the world. It is about who the people of the super class are, and how they differ from the rest of us.
Most of all, this book is about the profound impact this group has on the lives of most people, and how they are shaping our times.
To some, the members of the super class are the heroes of the process of globalization that will, someday help the poorest out of poverty. To others, they are the new robber barons.
They are either pioneers who earn the benefits they reap, or they are exploiters who should beware the impending backlash of a global revolution incited by global inequality.
Differentiating Reserve Corps of Destiny Workers and Materialists
Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making, Rothkopf, David (Edited.)
None among the world’s super class - the most powerful of the world’s most powerful people - have prospered more than the financial elites during the modern globalization process. These materialist people selfishly work in direct opposition to the unselfish efforts of the Most High's Reserve Corps of Destiny.
To their dubious credit, the financial elite played a large role in fostering globalization. No group more effectively disregarded the bounds of national regulatory regimes and flourished in the territory above national borders. Unintentionally, the financial elites laid the groundwork for the destined globalization of the world.
The financial elites created great fortunes among themselves and the businesses they served.
The financial elites operate effectively against the policies of nations and influence political leaders as once only electorates or armies could do.
The “best” of the financial elite, the heads of great financial institutions and funds, billionaire traders and commodity market czars, strode like titans through the first years of the global era. They were enablers and beneficiaries of a new system that concentrated more economic power into the hands of fewer and fewer people and that, in the eyes of many, deepened and widened the great chasm that separates the haves of this world from the rest of the population.
The Urantia (Earth) Problem
The mission of Adam and Eve on experimental, rebellion-seared, and isolated Urantia was a formidable undertaking. And the Material Son and Daughter early became aware of the difficulty and complexity of their planetary assignment. Nevertheless, they courageously set about the task of solving their manifold problems. But when they addressed themselves to the all-important work of eliminating the defectives and degenerates from among the human strains, they were quite dismayed.
Under normal conditions the first work of a Planetary Adam and Eve would be the coordination and blending of the races. But on Urantia such a project seemed just about hopeless, for the races, while biologically fit, had never been purged of their retarded and defective strains.
Adam and Eve found themselves on a sphere wholly unprepared for the proclamation of the brotherhood of man, a world groping about in abject spiritual darkness and cursed with confusion confounded by the miscarriage of the mission of the preceding administration of the Planetary Prince.
Mind and morals were at a low level, and instead of beginning the task of effecting religious unity, they had to begin anew the work of converting the inhabitants to the most simple forms of religious belief. Instead of finding one language ready for adoption, they were confronted by the world-wide confusion of hundreds upon hundreds of local dialects. No Adam of the planetary service was ever set down on a more difficult world; the obstacles seemed insuperable and the problems beyond creature solution.
Caligastia, the Prince of Urantia and Lucifer's associate, facilitated their failure by tricking Eve into default.
Dealing with Crime on a Neighboring Planet
The methods of this people in dealing with crime, insanity, and degeneracy, may prove shocking to many Urantians. Ordinary criminals and the defectives are placed, by sexes, in different agricultural colonies, which are self-supporting. The more serious habitual criminals and the incurably insane are sentenced to death in the lethal gas chambers by the courts. Numerous crimes aside from murder, including betrayal of governmental trust, also carry the death penalty, and the visitation of justice is sure and swift.
These people are passing out of the negative into the positive era of law. Recently they have gone so far as to attempt the prevention of crime by sentencing those who are believed to be potential murderers and major criminals to life service in the detention colonies. If such convicts subsequently demonstrate that they have become more normal, they may be either paroled or pardoned. The homicide rate on this continent is only one per cent of that among the other nations.
Efforts to prevent the breeding of criminals and defectives were begun over one hundred years ago and have already yielded gratifying results. There are no prisons or hospitals for the insane. There are only about ten per cent as many defectives and degenerates as are found on Urantia.
The Illusion of “Natural Rights”
When rights are old beyond knowledge of their origin, they are often called natural rights. But human rights are not really natural; they are entirely social. They are relative and ever changing, they are simply the rules of the game - recognized adjustments of relations governing the ever-changing phenomena of humans competing.
What may be regarded as right in one age may not be regarded as such in another age. The survival of large numbers of defectives and degenerates is not because they have any natural right to encumber twentieth-century civilization, but simply because the society of the age, the mores, decrees it so.
Few human rights were recognized in the European Middle Ages. Then, every man belonged to someone else, and rights were only privileges or favors granted by the state or church. The revolt from this error was equally erroneous in that it led to the belief that all men are born equal.
The weak and the inferior have always contended for equal rights. They have always insisted that the state compel the strong and superior to supply their wants and otherwise make good those deficiencies which all too often are the natural result of their own indifference and indolence.
Public sentiment is opposed to purging defectives, but there would be far fewer defectives in the world today if Adam had had the time to cleanse the more animal-like tribes by not allowing them to reproduce.
The Ideal of Equality
The equality ideal is the product of civilization. It is not found in nature.
Even culture itself demonstrates conclusively the inherent inequality of men by their very unequal physical and mental capacities.
Society cannot offer equal rights to all, but it can promise to administer the varying rights of each person with fairness and equity. It is the business and duty of society to provide competent men and women with a fair and peaceful opportunity to pursue self-maintenance, participate in self-perpetuation, while at the same time enjoying some measure of self-gratification. The sum of all three constitutes human happiness.
Offensive Super Class Members
Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making, Rothkopf, David (Edited.)
A century ago there were only a few hundred people in the world who met the definition for inclusion in the super class - the ability to affect millions across borders on a regular basis. Today there are thousands of elites in the super class, and a greater percentage than ever before owe their power to their work in the private sector. Most earned their positions, compared to the elites of the past, who often inherited them. Further, the role of military leaders among international elites receded as the cost of modern warfare became too high.
The financial crises of 2008 transformed the super class. Now, the interests of the super class are a network linked by their great power and the fact that members of this group, or subsets of the group, have broader aligned interests.
The transient nature of the super class members does not diminish the reality or the significance of their players. When power is linked to position or an institutional affiliation, different individuals play roughly identical roles, acting as they do in the interests of the institution by their roles within that institution. That does not diminish their power, but it does mean that it is appropriate when considering the world’s most powerful people to include whoever is currently the chief executive of ExxonMobil or Deutsche Bank or Saudi Aramco, regardless of who that individual may be.
Super Class Advantages
Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making, Rothkopf, David (Edited.)
The super class as a group of people are a quantum level more powerful than any other on the planet. The implications of that power are very significant for average people and their collective future.
The great institutions no longer have any national identity, operating as they do in markets worldwide with no regard for borders and with a primary allegiance only to the interests of their stakeholders. Further, they operate above and beyond national regulatory structures. When they use the freedom this brings to create wealth and to provide easy access to capital, this is a great advantage under existing laws.
In fact, the super class members themselves prescribe the laws through their lobbying and financial support of the law makers.
The Need to Control Capitalistic Entitlements
Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making, Rothkopf, David (Edited.)
When the super class overreach, as those in power and in markets inevitably do, their existence beyond the reach of regulators creates significant problems with very real and grim consequences for average citizens.
That means that we need multilateral institutions and mechanisms to ensure that the minimum basic protections for the governed are not undercut while the world’s most powerful pursue their narrow self-interests in the arena of the global marketplace.
The financial crises of 2007 and 2008 revealed the power of the financial super class. The leaders of the financial world, despite their history of greed-driven bubbles that burst and crushed the lives and hopes of countless innocent bystanders, were able to use their influence to ensure that new financial instruments could be “self-regulating.”
When such an argument is so indefensible on its face and it succeeds, is testimony to the power of those making the case. The stark power of the financial super class group is illustrated by the fact that when markets did crash on the rocks of greed, mismanagement, minimization and misunderstanding of complex new risks, these same financial titans who told government to stay out of their business were able to force government to rescue them.
As Juan Perón (former president of Argentina) said: “The nation does not exist for the benefit of the economy. The economy must serve the nation [world].”
Elite Criminals Should Not Operate with Impunity
Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making, Rothkopf, David (Edited.)
The same financial super class people who gave the world, “Too Global to Regulate,” also gave the world, “Too Big to Fail,” and both times the political class, many of whom came from the financial super class or saw their political fortunes supported by its donations, said, “We Can Help.” That is raw power operating.
The economic crises revealed the public’s opinion of the super class - resentment at their pattern of gaming the system, of getting rich on the way up and on the way down, of making the taxpayer pay for their mistakes while they were the primary beneficiaries of their gains.
After 2009, the political drum began beating for more aggressive and vigilant regulation and for an end to obscene pay packages that reward private sector leaders, even while they bilk their shareholders, their customers, their employees, and the public at large. Some optimists thought it could be the beginning of the end of the era of greed and excess.
While changes were proposed, the effort to rein in the financial overlords only amounted to a new group of super class players assuming, and abusing, their power.
The people of the world need to determine what is in the world's interests and what is not. The grotesque income and power inequities that have resulted from a global system lacking the governance structures and balancing mechanisms expected in honorable societies is not in the world's best interests.
[Just as today, we are appalled that the institution of slavery ever existed, someday the world will be appalled that capitalistic greed was allowed to exist.]
The Cognitive Elite
In his book. Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010, the social scientist Charles Murray described how society has become stratified by intelligence, and ruled by the “cognitive elite.”
A few decades ago, prestigious colleges became more meritocratic, admitting people on the basis of grades and test scores, instead of other criteria such as social class. Gifted and talented youth of every economic status were invited to attend summer camps. The smartest students from the summer camps got accepted by the best schools, where they established connections with other cognitive elites.
The gifted students of summer camps such as Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Sergey Brin (Google), and (performer Lady Gaga) went on to prestigious schools. Many of the more broadly socially representative cognitive elite graduated to have monetarily modest careers in academia, journalism, technology, and politics. They now run the country. Many are serving the world. Many are clustered in the financial elite, very wealthy and self-serving.
The cognitive elite model is self-reinforcing. The most intelligent people from the best schools married each other and are having smart children. Those smart children also get into the best schools.
The ironic result is America has become in many ways a more classicist society. The underlying assumption within the wealthy upper one percent is if you aren't rich, you probably aren't capable of making worldly success decisions.
People don’t talk about rule by the intelligentsia. Instead, Americans are obsessed with racial issues, but the fact is, people of different socioeconomic status and race don't normally mix. This came to a head in the 2016 election, when the ordinary people revolted at the ballot box and ejected much of the cognitive elite people in government, and indirectly academia and journalism.
The financial elite have begun to rule America again.
The Dilemma of Democracy and Representative Government
It may seem like a good idea having the cognitive elite make all the decisions.
But it also may be safe to assume that smart people focus primarily on the interests of smart people, as opposed to those of the general public.
However, Mark Zuckerberg made a splash in his Harvard commencement speech when he called for a universal basic income. But will it help anyone simply by giving them unearned money to sit home and watch television?
Cognitive stratification is a fact of life. Some companies such as Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google (Alphabet) will become ever more powerful. The best technology companies hire the smartest people and put them to work solving the hardest problems for their corporate interests.
It is not an illusion if ordinary people get the feeling that they don’t have any voice in making the decisions that affect their lives and welfare, regardless of which political party is in power.
Income Inequality
Wikipedia, (Edited.)
The U.S. ranks around the 30th percentile in income inequality globally, meaning 70% of countries have a more equal income distribution.
While there is strong evidence that income inequality has increased since the 1970s, there is active debate in the United States regarding the appropriate measurement, causes, effects and solutions to income inequality.
The two major political parties have different approaches to the issue. Democrats historically emphasize that economic growth should result in shared prosperity (a pro-labor argument advocating income redistribution). Republicans tend to downplay the validity or feasibility of influencing the issue (a pro-capital argument against redistribution).
Concentration of Power
Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making, Rothkopf, David (Edited.)
It is lamentable that big decisions are made without public debate (a sentiment easy to understand in the wake of America’s decision to enter a war in Iraq without benefit of a congressional declaration of war or any national deliberation).
Within the American government, there is only one commander in chief of what is by far the world’s most powerful military. He or she is the chief executive of the world’s richest nation. The president of the United States has extraordinary power to conduct the business of the United States as he or she sees fit, despite the carefully constructed checks and balances prescribed by the Constitution.
In addition, presidents have the option of changing the structure of the cabinet, of firing and hiring new members, and of determining who serves on influential advisory committees like the National Security Council, the Homeland Security Council, or the National Economic Council. Today there are more than three thousand such presidential appointees, a number that has swelled from roughly six hundred in the past thirty years or so.
The Power Vacuum
Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making, Rothkopf, David (Edited.)
The pattern of seizure of authority by the president and the abrogation of responsibility by Congress is not only repeated throughout history; it also echoes patterns that have led to the concentration of political power among the few, especially when it comes to shaping America’s global role.
The void created by congressional abandonment of their political powers was filled by those who wanted to control these issues. Not surprisingly, the new power group contains a far higher concentration of those with global interests and is able to use their tools of power and influence to appropriate disproportionate influence to themselves.
One such group is the international policy community in Washington. This is a very small, tightly knit group of influential individuals, who have known each other and worked together for most of their careers. This group serves or is likely to serve in top foreign policy and national security positions.
The Making of a President
Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making, Rothkopf, David (Edited.)
Presidential candidates need teams of top advisers, who can simulate the candidate’s competence in, for example, international affairs.
Not surprisingly, the best people are those who have held high positions in the past. (The best credential for entry into this group is already being a member.) The result is a highly interconnected group of decision makers and a remarkable concentration of power in a small circle. This power extends far beyond the executive branch.
Firms like Goldman Sachs place their executives in the top echelons of the U.S. Government. A revolving door policy allows these decision makers to leave their firms, go into government, and then return to their firms. This is how the financial community maintains its influence. This is “the Deep State.”
The Kings of Materialism
The Profit Motive
The profit motive of economic activities is altogether base and wholly unworthy of an advanced order of society.
Nevertheless, the profit motive is an indispensable factor throughout the earlier phases of civilization.
Profit motivation must not be taken away from men until they possess superior types of nonprofit motives for economic striving and social service (the transcendent urges of wisdom, brotherhood, and spiritual attainment).
Life's Big Decision – Spirit or Matter
As a personality, each human has the potential of taking a fragment of the Unqualified Absolute to the next level. This is the quintessential plan of the Universal Father.
Defective humans at every level of society choose to cling to matter, thereby voiding their spiritual destinies.
The Universal Father's divine decree (“Be you perfect, as I am perfect” at each stage of existence) is this lifetime's choice of marshaling the forces of the self to oppose the crimes against the self (Oneness).
The Greed Is Good Philosophy
The film “Wall Street” tells the story of Bud Fox, a young stock broker who becomes involved with Gordon Gekko, a wealthy, unscrupulous corporate raider.
“The point is, ladies and gentleman,” announces Gordon Gekko to the shareholders of a takeover target, “that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit….And greed – you mark my words – will save the USA.”
Apparently, lacking a more spiritual model, politicians and religious leaders all over the world have cited fictional Gordon Gekko’s “greed is good” movie message in their condemnations of the behavior that led to the Global Financial Crisis and the Great Recession.
The Capitalistic Argument
Economist Joseph Schumpeter (1883–1950) popularized the term “creative destruction” in 1942.
For Schumpeter, capitalism was the “perennial gale” of creative destruction.
Capitalism demolishes the old and inefficient replacing it with the new and improved.
Because of capitalism’s perennial gale, today’s common person lives better than the kings of the past. The French king, Louis XIV lived in constant fear of dying from smallpox and many other diseases that are now cured quickly by antibiotics. His palace at Versailles had 700 rooms but no bathrooms, and no central heating or air conditioning.
Economist Richard Rahn of the Cato Institute, a Washington think tank points out that the average low-income American, who makes $25,000 per year, lives in a home that has air conditioning, color TV, a dishwasher, owns an automobile, and eats more than he should from a broad selection of food.
Life for many people today reflects great progress beyond the wealthy life style of Louis XIV. This progress happened because the creative gales of capitalism flattened everything.
The benefits of capitalism are why many arbiters focus only on the “creative” side of the capitalistic equation and ignore the negative side.
The Indifference of Capitalism
Capitalism thumbs its nose at convention and culture. Progress uproots communities. It sends human beings careening through social and technological changes for which they are unprepared.
For example, within a generation, centuries-old farming communities succumbed to the assembly line.
A generation later the factory itself went dark as the gales of creative destruction blew those jobs to China where labor was cheaper.
Each generation of Americans must uproot themselves to follow the jobs. Advancing technology makes today’s jobs obsolete tomorrow. And not everyone can take up new lines of employment. Many are simply left behind, broken, and with no hope of catching up.
Capitalism couldn't care less.
The River of Progress
The river of progress carries everything forward. “Onward,” shout those who profit from the social upheaval. “The world will be a better place.” Little thought is given to the collateral social damage.
It is generally acknowledged that robots will replace half of all jobs in 20 years. The jobs robots will replace are not just in computerized commercial driving or blue-collar manufacturing and construction jobs, but will also impact white-collar jobs in law, finance, medicine, and accounting as well.
But that may be just the beginning. What happens if robots grow “smart” enough one day to do it all? A robot arm that can rivet a car door is one thing. A genius robot that can do anything better than a human is quite another.
Will humans find new sources of labor as they have before? Is the world ready for such a future?
When the world becomes more spiritually oriented and disposed to provide for one another, it will be ready for any future.
Life – The Test of Survival
The human body (a Temple of God) is an assimilation of countless energy forms, fragments of the non-god and non-personified Unqualified Absolute. Each energy form is progressing through the process of evolutionary development seeking transformation from matter to spirit.
The Thought Adjuster, which indwells the human mind, is a fragment of the Father. More specifically, the Thought Adjuster is within the Universal Father's Absolute Oneness, an advanced fragment of the Unqualified Absolute, the fountain of all energy (matter), that is seeking personality and Oneness of deity.
Deity, of course, is person. Humans are temporarily endowed with personality by the Universal Father. Personality is one-half of the equation required for survival of the human soul, which is birthed by the human personality and the Thought Adjuster fragment of the Unqualified Absolute during the probationary life of the human.
Humans are attended by multitudes of highly motivated spirits including the Thought Adjusters who hope the humans will volitionally choose to survive and advance into the worlds of spirit where they and the fragments of the Unqualified Absolute eventually fuse to continue on to Paradise as spirits thereby losing the mark of matter and beast.
When material life has run its course, if no positive choice has been made for the ascendant life, or if the human child of time decides against the spiritual adventure, death automatically terminates the probationary career. There is no resurrection. The personality becomes as though he or she had not been. The Thought Adjuster fragment of the Universal Father / Unqualified Absolute receives further training and must await another prospective personality.
The Profit Motive
The profit motive of economic activities is altogether base and wholly unworthy of an advanced order of society.
Nevertheless, the profit motive is an indispensable factor throughout the earlier phases of civilization.
Profit motivation must not be taken away from men until they possess superior types of nonprofit motives for economic striving and social service (the transcendent urges of wisdom, brotherhood, and spiritual attainment).
Life's Big Decision – Spirit or Matter
As a personality, each human has the potential of taking a fragment of the Unqualified Absolute to the next level. This is the quintessential plan of the Universal Father.
Defective humans at every level of society choose to cling to matter, thereby voiding their spiritual destinies.
The Universal Father's divine decree (“Be you perfect, as I am perfect” at each stage of existence) is this lifetime's choice of marshaling the forces of the self to oppose the crimes against the self (Oneness).
The Greed Is Good Philosophy
The film “Wall Street” tells the story of Bud Fox, a young stock broker who becomes involved with Gordon Gekko, a wealthy, unscrupulous corporate raider.
“The point is, ladies and gentleman,” announces Gordon Gekko to the shareholders of a takeover target, “that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit….And greed – you mark my words – will save the USA.”
Apparently, lacking a more spiritual model, politicians and religious leaders all over the world have cited fictional Gordon Gekko’s “greed is good” movie message in their condemnations of the behavior that led to the Global Financial Crisis and the Great Recession.
The Capitalistic Argument
Economist Joseph Schumpeter (1883–1950) popularized the term “creative destruction” in 1942.
For Schumpeter, capitalism was the “perennial gale” of creative destruction.
Capitalism demolishes the old and inefficient replacing it with the new and improved.
Because of capitalism’s perennial gale, today’s common person lives better than the kings of the past. The French king, Louis XIV lived in constant fear of dying from smallpox and many other diseases that are now cured quickly by antibiotics. His palace at Versailles had 700 rooms but no bathrooms, and no central heating or air conditioning.
Economist Richard Rahn of the Cato Institute, a Washington think tank points out that the average low-income American, who makes $25,000 per year, lives in a home that has air conditioning, color TV, a dishwasher, owns an automobile, and eats more than he should from a broad selection of food.
Life for many people today reflects great progress beyond the wealthy life style of Louis XIV. This progress happened because the creative gales of capitalism flattened everything.
The benefits of capitalism are why many arbiters focus only on the “creative” side of the capitalistic equation and ignore the negative side.
The Indifference of Capitalism
Capitalism thumbs its nose at convention and culture. Progress uproots communities. It sends human beings careening through social and technological changes for which they are unprepared.
For example, within a generation, centuries-old farming communities succumbed to the assembly line.
A generation later the factory itself went dark as the gales of creative destruction blew those jobs to China where labor was cheaper.
Each generation of Americans must uproot themselves to follow the jobs. Advancing technology makes today’s jobs obsolete tomorrow. And not everyone can take up new lines of employment. Many are simply left behind, broken, and with no hope of catching up.
Capitalism couldn't care less.
The River of Progress
The river of progress carries everything forward. “Onward,” shout those who profit from the social upheaval. “The world will be a better place.” Little thought is given to the collateral social damage.
It is generally acknowledged that robots will replace half of all jobs in 20 years. The jobs robots will replace are not just in computerized commercial driving or blue-collar manufacturing and construction jobs, but will also impact white-collar jobs in law, finance, medicine, and accounting as well.
But that may be just the beginning. What happens if robots grow “smart” enough one day to do it all? A robot arm that can rivet a car door is one thing. A genius robot that can do anything better than a human is quite another.
Will humans find new sources of labor as they have before? Is the world ready for such a future?
When the world becomes more spiritually oriented and disposed to provide for one another, it will be ready for any future.
Life – The Test of Survival
The human body (a Temple of God) is an assimilation of countless energy forms, fragments of the non-god and non-personified Unqualified Absolute. Each energy form is progressing through the process of evolutionary development seeking transformation from matter to spirit.
The Thought Adjuster, which indwells the human mind, is a fragment of the Father. More specifically, the Thought Adjuster is within the Universal Father's Absolute Oneness, an advanced fragment of the Unqualified Absolute, the fountain of all energy (matter), that is seeking personality and Oneness of deity.
Deity, of course, is person. Humans are temporarily endowed with personality by the Universal Father. Personality is one-half of the equation required for survival of the human soul, which is birthed by the human personality and the Thought Adjuster fragment of the Unqualified Absolute during the probationary life of the human.
Humans are attended by multitudes of highly motivated spirits including the Thought Adjusters who hope the humans will volitionally choose to survive and advance into the worlds of spirit where they and the fragments of the Unqualified Absolute eventually fuse to continue on to Paradise as spirits thereby losing the mark of matter and beast.
When material life has run its course, if no positive choice has been made for the ascendant life, or if the human child of time decides against the spiritual adventure, death automatically terminates the probationary career. There is no resurrection. The personality becomes as though he or she had not been. The Thought Adjuster fragment of the Universal Father / Unqualified Absolute receives further training and must await another prospective personality.
The Irish Famine and Grotesque Greed
The Human Devastation of the Irish Potato Famine in 1842
https://learnodo-newtonic.com/irish-potato-famine-facts (Edited.)
The Irish Potato Famine, also known as the Great Famine, took place in Ireland between 1845 and 1852. It caused a million deaths due to starvation and disease and led to the emigration of two million people from Ireland.
The effects of the Great Famine were greatly exacerbated by the ruling class in England. The British elite fanned a relatively minor food shortage in Ireland into a huge profit-making opportunity for themselves.
The Brink of Disaster
https://learnodo-newtonic.com/irish-potato-famine-facts (Edited.)
In the early 18th century, the “middleman system” was introduced into Ireland to manage the land for the English overlords. This legislation granted the task of rent collection to agents or middlemen. The work performance of the middlemen was judged by the amount of money they extracted from tenants for the landlords.
The law was heavily biased in favor of the landowners, as they dominated Irish representation in the British parliament. The Irish tenants of the British landowners lived in abject poverty.
With the population of Ireland rising, with widespread unemployment among laborers, and the majority of the population living in poverty, Ireland was teetering on the edge of an economic calamity before the Famine.
Forced Reliance upon the Potato Crop
https://learnodo-newtonic.com/irish-potato-famine-facts (Edited.)
The rent collection agents or “middlemen” split the land holdings of landowners into smaller and smaller parts to increase the amount of rent they could extract from the tenants for each parcel.
By the year 1845, when the famine struck, about one-fourth of the Irish “farms” were 1 to 5 acres in size and about forty percent were 5 to 15 acres.
Since the land holdings were so small, the only crop that would suffice to feed the families of the tenants was potatoes.
Poverty was so widespread that one-third of the tenants that held the small plots of land could not support their families after paying rent to the owners.
Irish Exploitation by the English Oligarchy
http://www.bahs.org.uk/AGHR/ARTICLES/53n1a2.pdf (Edited.)
[An oligarchy is a government in which all power is vested in a few persons or in a dominant class or clique.]
The Irish land agents, Stewart and Kincaid, were the most important land agency (middlemen) in Ireland. Stewart and Kincaid supervised major “agricultural improvements” to clear tenant farmers from the land.
Preserved Stewart and Kincaid correspondence from the 1840's discloses that even before 1846, the landlord's agents realized that financial assistance for the tenants to emigrate was desirable, and they facilitated such departures as there was little or no net cost imposed on the landlord.
However, in 1847 and 1848 maximizing the profit of their client landlords became the paramount goal of the firm. Population growth was to be reduced, not through occasional assistance to emigrate on a case-by-case basis, but through substantive programs of estate clearance that involved “voluntary” surrender of land on the part of the tenants, most of whom appear to have been “compensated” before leaving an estate or “assisted” to leave the British Isles entirely.
Conversion of Farm Land to Pasture
https://learnodo-newtonic.com/irish-potato-famine-facts (Edited.)
England had a huge consumer's market for beef, and due to the demand for cattle, large parts of land in Ireland were used for grazing cattle.
Due to the diminishing size of their plots of land (brought about by both converting land to pasture, and the high cost of land rental), the Irish people turned to potato farming as no other crop could be grown abundantly in the available poor soil.
By the 18th century the potato became the staple food of the farmers year around. An average Irish
worker ate 10 pounds of potatoes every day and about 40 % of the population of Ireland lived entirely on potatoes.
Irish Tenant Farmers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenant_farmer (Edited.)
Until 1900, the majority of Ireland was held by English landlords (97% in 1870), who rented parcels to tenant farmers who had to pay rent to the landlords in addition to paying taxes to the State while supporting the Church.
The great majority of the Irish people had no access to land. One and a half percent of the population owned over one-third of the land in Ireland. Fifty percent of the country was owned by just 750 families. Absentee ownership of the land was the norm.
Tenants rented small plots on an annual basis from the land owners paying with their labor service in a system known as conacremost without either lease or land rights.
The abuse of tenant farmers compelled widespread emigration to the United States and the British colonies. It also accentuated a deterioration in Protestant (landlord) and Catholic (tenant) relationships.
Potato Blight
https://learnodo-newtonic.com/irish-potato-famine-facts (Edited.)
A potato disease commonly known as Potato Blight destroyed potato crops across Europe, which when combined with the eviction of tenants from the land, led to the Great Irish Potato Famine.
In 1845, between one-third to half of the cultivated potato crop was lost in Ireland.
The blight continued in 1846 when three quarters of the crop was destroyed and the first starvation deaths were reported.
The effect of the potato crop failure was felt throughout Europe, but it was more devastating in Ireland because over three million Irish people were totally dependent on potatoes for food.
25% of Irish Population Perished
https://learnodo-newtonic.com/irish-potato-famine-facts (Edited.)
By the time the famine ended in 1852 approximately1 million people had died in Ireland due to starvation or disease.
By 1855 about 2 million people had fled from Ireland. Overcrowded and poorly managed vessels called “coffin ships” caused many additional deaths of the emigrating Irish people.
Today, more than 150 years later, Ireland’s population still has not recovered its pre-famine population level.
Britain's Governance
https://learnodo-newtonic.com/irish-potato-famine-facts (Edited.)
Britain’s Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel initially took steps to provide relief to the Irish during the famine.
However, when Lord John Russell assumed power in June 1846 the emphasis shifted to reliance on the free market (the laissez faire or do nothing policy).
Britain was the wealthiest nation in the world at the time and after 1847 there was sufficient food to prevent starvation. However, ineffective governance and ruthless inhumane management made the situation far worse than necessary and mass starvation continued in Ireland till 1852.
Food Exports from Ireland During the Famine
https://learnodo-newtonic.com/irish-potato-famine-facts (Edited.)
Throughout the Great Famine, Ireland was exporting large quantities of food. A wide variety of commodities left Ireland during the worst years of the famine.
The food exports from Ireland strained the relationship between England and Ireland and still remain a matter of contention.
Irish scholars claim that although the potato crop failed, the country was still producing and exporting more than enough grain crops to feed the Irish population.
Turning Point
https://learnodo-newtonic.com/irish-potato-famine-facts (Edited.)
The Irish Potato Famine was a turning point in the history of Ireland, and modern historians consider it a dividing line in the narrative of Irish history.
The Great Famine permanently changed Ireland's demographic, political and cultural landscape.
The famine led to various nationalist movements, and it is considered the trigger for the Irish War of Independence, which eventually led to Irish self-rule.
The great exodus of young people from Ireland following the famine and the estate clearance programs, resulted in the expedited expansion of the North American continent. Today, according to the census, there are 34.5 million Americans who list their heritage as either primarily or partially Irish. That number is seven times larger than the population of Ireland itself (4.68 million). Irish is the second-most common ancestry among Americans, falling just behind German.
Major Contributor to Famine Relief
https://learnodo-newtonic.com/irish-potato-famine-facts (Edited.)
The Great Famine is memorialized in numerous locations not only in Ireland but also in other parts of the world where large populations have descended from Irish immigrants.
In the 1990's, Ireland commemorated the 150th anniversary of the Great Famine, and British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, apologized for the failure of past British governments to adequately address the crisis.
Ireland has been at the forefront of famine relief and its people have given more to the fundraising efforts of Live Aid proportionately than any other nation in the world.
The Human Devastation of the Irish Potato Famine in 1842
https://learnodo-newtonic.com/irish-potato-famine-facts (Edited.)
The Irish Potato Famine, also known as the Great Famine, took place in Ireland between 1845 and 1852. It caused a million deaths due to starvation and disease and led to the emigration of two million people from Ireland.
The effects of the Great Famine were greatly exacerbated by the ruling class in England. The British elite fanned a relatively minor food shortage in Ireland into a huge profit-making opportunity for themselves.
The Brink of Disaster
https://learnodo-newtonic.com/irish-potato-famine-facts (Edited.)
In the early 18th century, the “middleman system” was introduced into Ireland to manage the land for the English overlords. This legislation granted the task of rent collection to agents or middlemen. The work performance of the middlemen was judged by the amount of money they extracted from tenants for the landlords.
The law was heavily biased in favor of the landowners, as they dominated Irish representation in the British parliament. The Irish tenants of the British landowners lived in abject poverty.
With the population of Ireland rising, with widespread unemployment among laborers, and the majority of the population living in poverty, Ireland was teetering on the edge of an economic calamity before the Famine.
Forced Reliance upon the Potato Crop
https://learnodo-newtonic.com/irish-potato-famine-facts (Edited.)
The rent collection agents or “middlemen” split the land holdings of landowners into smaller and smaller parts to increase the amount of rent they could extract from the tenants for each parcel.
By the year 1845, when the famine struck, about one-fourth of the Irish “farms” were 1 to 5 acres in size and about forty percent were 5 to 15 acres.
Since the land holdings were so small, the only crop that would suffice to feed the families of the tenants was potatoes.
Poverty was so widespread that one-third of the tenants that held the small plots of land could not support their families after paying rent to the owners.
Irish Exploitation by the English Oligarchy
http://www.bahs.org.uk/AGHR/ARTICLES/53n1a2.pdf (Edited.)
[An oligarchy is a government in which all power is vested in a few persons or in a dominant class or clique.]
The Irish land agents, Stewart and Kincaid, were the most important land agency (middlemen) in Ireland. Stewart and Kincaid supervised major “agricultural improvements” to clear tenant farmers from the land.
Preserved Stewart and Kincaid correspondence from the 1840's discloses that even before 1846, the landlord's agents realized that financial assistance for the tenants to emigrate was desirable, and they facilitated such departures as there was little or no net cost imposed on the landlord.
However, in 1847 and 1848 maximizing the profit of their client landlords became the paramount goal of the firm. Population growth was to be reduced, not through occasional assistance to emigrate on a case-by-case basis, but through substantive programs of estate clearance that involved “voluntary” surrender of land on the part of the tenants, most of whom appear to have been “compensated” before leaving an estate or “assisted” to leave the British Isles entirely.
Conversion of Farm Land to Pasture
https://learnodo-newtonic.com/irish-potato-famine-facts (Edited.)
England had a huge consumer's market for beef, and due to the demand for cattle, large parts of land in Ireland were used for grazing cattle.
Due to the diminishing size of their plots of land (brought about by both converting land to pasture, and the high cost of land rental), the Irish people turned to potato farming as no other crop could be grown abundantly in the available poor soil.
By the 18th century the potato became the staple food of the farmers year around. An average Irish
worker ate 10 pounds of potatoes every day and about 40 % of the population of Ireland lived entirely on potatoes.
Irish Tenant Farmers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenant_farmer (Edited.)
Until 1900, the majority of Ireland was held by English landlords (97% in 1870), who rented parcels to tenant farmers who had to pay rent to the landlords in addition to paying taxes to the State while supporting the Church.
The great majority of the Irish people had no access to land. One and a half percent of the population owned over one-third of the land in Ireland. Fifty percent of the country was owned by just 750 families. Absentee ownership of the land was the norm.
Tenants rented small plots on an annual basis from the land owners paying with their labor service in a system known as conacremost without either lease or land rights.
The abuse of tenant farmers compelled widespread emigration to the United States and the British colonies. It also accentuated a deterioration in Protestant (landlord) and Catholic (tenant) relationships.
Potato Blight
https://learnodo-newtonic.com/irish-potato-famine-facts (Edited.)
A potato disease commonly known as Potato Blight destroyed potato crops across Europe, which when combined with the eviction of tenants from the land, led to the Great Irish Potato Famine.
In 1845, between one-third to half of the cultivated potato crop was lost in Ireland.
The blight continued in 1846 when three quarters of the crop was destroyed and the first starvation deaths were reported.
The effect of the potato crop failure was felt throughout Europe, but it was more devastating in Ireland because over three million Irish people were totally dependent on potatoes for food.
25% of Irish Population Perished
https://learnodo-newtonic.com/irish-potato-famine-facts (Edited.)
By the time the famine ended in 1852 approximately1 million people had died in Ireland due to starvation or disease.
By 1855 about 2 million people had fled from Ireland. Overcrowded and poorly managed vessels called “coffin ships” caused many additional deaths of the emigrating Irish people.
Today, more than 150 years later, Ireland’s population still has not recovered its pre-famine population level.
Britain's Governance
https://learnodo-newtonic.com/irish-potato-famine-facts (Edited.)
Britain’s Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel initially took steps to provide relief to the Irish during the famine.
However, when Lord John Russell assumed power in June 1846 the emphasis shifted to reliance on the free market (the laissez faire or do nothing policy).
Britain was the wealthiest nation in the world at the time and after 1847 there was sufficient food to prevent starvation. However, ineffective governance and ruthless inhumane management made the situation far worse than necessary and mass starvation continued in Ireland till 1852.
Food Exports from Ireland During the Famine
https://learnodo-newtonic.com/irish-potato-famine-facts (Edited.)
Throughout the Great Famine, Ireland was exporting large quantities of food. A wide variety of commodities left Ireland during the worst years of the famine.
The food exports from Ireland strained the relationship between England and Ireland and still remain a matter of contention.
Irish scholars claim that although the potato crop failed, the country was still producing and exporting more than enough grain crops to feed the Irish population.
Turning Point
https://learnodo-newtonic.com/irish-potato-famine-facts (Edited.)
The Irish Potato Famine was a turning point in the history of Ireland, and modern historians consider it a dividing line in the narrative of Irish history.
The Great Famine permanently changed Ireland's demographic, political and cultural landscape.
The famine led to various nationalist movements, and it is considered the trigger for the Irish War of Independence, which eventually led to Irish self-rule.
The great exodus of young people from Ireland following the famine and the estate clearance programs, resulted in the expedited expansion of the North American continent. Today, according to the census, there are 34.5 million Americans who list their heritage as either primarily or partially Irish. That number is seven times larger than the population of Ireland itself (4.68 million). Irish is the second-most common ancestry among Americans, falling just behind German.
Major Contributor to Famine Relief
https://learnodo-newtonic.com/irish-potato-famine-facts (Edited.)
The Great Famine is memorialized in numerous locations not only in Ireland but also in other parts of the world where large populations have descended from Irish immigrants.
In the 1990's, Ireland commemorated the 150th anniversary of the Great Famine, and British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, apologized for the failure of past British governments to adequately address the crisis.
Ireland has been at the forefront of famine relief and its people have given more to the fundraising efforts of Live Aid proportionately than any other nation in the world.
Scars and Consequences of Ireland's Great Famine
National Tragedies Impact Authors
Crimes Against Fecundity – Joyce and Population Control, 1989, Mary Lowe-Evans (Edited.)
Just as the American Civil War helped to author the Faulkner books, the Great Famine, which
began in Ireland in 1845, contributed to the authorship of James Joyce's literary works.
The Famine established a certain mode of thinking, writing, and speaking in Ireland - a rhetoric and a set of attitudes distinguishable from anything prior - mainly because the Famine uniquely combined natural and economic methods of population control.
James Joyce
Crimes Against Fecundity – Joyce and Population Control, 1989, Mary Lowe-Evans (Edited.)
The Irish novelist, James Joyce, was acutely aware and outspoken in his writing about the crimes Western civilization committed against the physical, artistic, and spiritual lives of Irish citizens by attempting to modify the Irish demographic behavior for financial and ideological reasons.
Joyce's allusions to the famine commented satirically on a political economy that justified the famine of mid-nineteenth century Ireland to reduce the surplus population and to support eugenicist views.
The eugenicists insisted that the purity of the race required close monitoring of those who gave birth.
In Ireland, discussions of population control inevitably became associated with responses to the Famine that have influenced patterns and attitudes toward emigration, marriage, and celibacy ever since.
These discussions were given economic overtones by the various editions and interpretations of Thomas Robert Malthus's Essay on Population.
Malthus's Essay on Population
Crimes Against Fecundity – Joyce and Population Control, 1989, Mary Lowe-Evans (Edited.)
Malthus's Essay on Population defined the influence of population control in terms of the famine, the Malthusian doctrine, the birth control movement, and the Catholic church.
Population control was endlessly discussed during Joyce's lifetime (1882 - 1941). Joyce's works were largely inspired by that debate.
By “population control” is meant pressures (incentives or force) exerted to radically change the size or makeup of some segment of the population.
Echoes of the Famine in James Joyce
Crimes Against Fecundity – Joyce and Population Control, 1989, Mary Lowe-Evans (Edited.)
The Great Famine was a demographic and well documented benchmark in Irish history. The controversy surrounding emigration accumulated so much force during the Famine that the attitudes of the Irish are colored by it to this day.
Marriage patterns and fertility rates altered so drastically in the years following the Famine that celibate middle-aged bachelors and prolific, exhausted young mothers became the embodiment of Irish life.
Evidence of the pressures created by the force of the Famine appear throughout Joyce's work, such as in Eveline. This story in The Dubliners, is about a young woman's anguish while considering elopement. Her decision poses both positive and negative effects that make the choice simultaneously appealing and repulsive.
The main themes in “Eveline” are paralysis, Irish social conditions, and emigration. Eveline, the protagonist, stares through a window weighing her decision to marry and flee Ireland with a sailor. At the end, Eveline experiences her epiphany.
She decides not to marry.
Sexual Liberties
Crimes Against Fecundity – Joyce and Population Control, 1989, Mary Lowe-Evans (Edited.)
The birth control movement made sexual intercourse without the fear of pregnancy a public issue in Ireland. Between 1876 and 1931, birth control became legitimate, respectable, and, to some extent, a civic duty.
However, the freedom promised by choosing to conceive became conventionalized within a system that included racist and eugenicist attitudes that was as restrictive as the moral sanctions imposed by the Catholic church.
The various sexual liberties taken in Joyce's Ulysses by Bloom, his wife Molly's infidelity, and the recurring sexual indiscretions in Finnegans Wake, most of which are inconclusive and unsatisfying, incorporate conflicting values about reproduction and sexuality established in part by the birth control movement and its opponents.
Finnegans Wake places the whole complex issue of population control on trial just as real-life birth control advocates were placed on trial (like the obscenity trial of Margaret Sanger in the United States).
The characters in Joyce's novels personify the many arguments of the birth control issue.
Margaret Sanger
Wikipedia (Edited.)
Margaret Higgins Sanger (born Margaret Louise Higgins), September 14, 1879 - September 6, 1966, was an American birth control activist, sex educator, writer, and nurse. Sanger popularized the term "birth control." She opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, and established organizations that evolved into the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
Sanger used her writings and speeches primarily to promote her views on birth control. She was prosecuted for her book Family Limitation under the Comstock Act in 1914.
The Comstock Law was a federal act passed by the United States Congress under the Grant Administration on March 3, 1873, as an Act for the "Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use."
Mrs Sanger fled to Britain until it was safe to return to the US. Sanger's efforts contributed to several judicial cases that helped legalize contraception in the United States.
The Birth Control Argument
Crimes Against Fecundity – Joyce and Population Control, 1989, Mary Lowe-Evans (Edited.)
The voices of two powerful authorities in the debate on birth control were the Roman Catholic church and Thomas Robert Malthus.
The Church has influenced attitudes on every aspect of life in Ireland, including emigration and birth control.
Worldwide, the Catholic Church has insisted that birth control is a religious issue, the legitimacy of which must be determined by an institution appointed by God, like itself. (The naively self-delusional belief that the Church was appointed by God to rule in the lives of men will be discussed in a later segment.)
Malthus' proposals challenged the Church's position, making population control an economic issue, bringing the subject of birth control into the public domain.
Joyce's work responds to the ongoing conflict between Malthus and the Catholic Church. In many ways, the debate carried on by these two forces about controlling reproductive acts becomes rather absurd when carried out in the arenas of famine and world wars.
Studying Population Control
Crimes Against Fecundity – Joyce and Population Control, 1989, Mary Lowe-Evans (Edited.)
The idea that population can and must be manipulated became fixed in the mind of Western civilization with the dissemination of Thomas Malthus's first "Essay on Population," which was published in 1798.
The two postulates set forth by Malthus in that essay have influenced the thinking on population control ever since. Malthus proposed that food is necessary to the existence of man, and that the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain so.
From these two apparently innocent pronouncements arose a plethora of arguments, pro and con, about the need to control human fertility in relation to the availability of resources. Frequently, the discourse has been transformed into policy, and policy into either action or inaction.
Population control gained acceptance as a doctrine during the nineteenth century. Population was scrutinized by birth and death rates, marriage patterns, genetic characteristics, and migration.
However, sexual freedom was always at the center of the economic and political problem of population control.
Irish Resentment
Crimes Against Fecundity – Joyce and Population Control, 1989, Mary Lowe-Evans (Edited.)
An Irish newspaper noted that Ireland has a greater Ireland beyond the sea. The Irish were driven out of their homes in 1847. Their mud cabins were leveled by the battering ram.
The paper continued saying there would soon be as few Irish in Ireland as Indians in America. The paper noted that the Sassenach (a term the Gaelic inhabitants of the British Isles use to refer to the English inhabitants) tried to starve the nation at home while the land was full of crops that the British hyenas bought and then sold in Rio de Janeiro. “Ay, they drove out the peasants in hordes. Twenty thousand of them died in the coffin ships. But the evicted Irish remember the land of bondage. And they will come again and with a vengeance.”
The prophecy, implicit in the paper's tirade, that vengeance would come from America, was already being fulfilled: the avowedly violent Fenian movement, begun during the 1860s, was begun by Irishmen who had emigrated to America during the Famine.
Specific references to the Famine in his works demonstrate Joyce's thorough familiarity with its circumstances.
Two demographic characteristics that are considered typical of Ireland became evident after the Great Famine. These are postponed marriages and permanent celibacy. They reoccur frequently in Joyce's stories and writings.
Deferral of Marriages
Crimes Against Fecundity – Joyce and Population Control, 1989, Mary Lowe-Evans (Edited.)
A great change occurred between 1841 and 1851 in the proportion of Irish persons willing to postpone marriage, a change associated with events surrounding the 1845-48 famine. As a result of the Famine, the Irish began to take their economic plight more seriously and to respond to it at every level of life.
Underlying those responses was a perception, inculcated by the British, that the Famine was a Malthusian reproach, a "lesson about the tragedy of a population outstripping its means of existence."
The patterns of late marriage and celibacy have been maintained in Ireland, not for religious reasons, as many believe, but for economic ones. As a way of improving and maintaining one's standard of living, postponed marriage or celibacy was chosen as an alternative to emigration.
The high birthrate among Irish married couples is attributed to the sanctions against contraception imposed by the Catholic church and enforced (until very recently) by the government.
An Ineradicable Mark
Crimes Against Fecundity – Joyce and Population Control, 1989, Mary Lowe-Evans (Edited.)
The Great Famine left deep lingering effects on the Irish. Ireland had suffered many previous famines. But the Famine of the mid-nineteenth century was different, extending farther, lasting
longer, killing or driving out more people, and being better chronicled.
Most horrifying was the realization that the causes of the Great Famine were largely contrived.
The Famine of 1845-1851 was allowed to happen to carry out the accepted standards of an English economic philosophy regarding Ireland's population.
The Irish people were subjected to a devastating and humiliating national experience to comply with the tenets of a doctrine that relegated human beings to economic policies. According to Cecil Blanche Woodham-Smith (who wrote four popular history books, each dealing with a different aspect of the Victorian era), "the influence of laissez-faire on the treatment of Ireland during the famine is impossible to exaggerate .... the behavior of the British authorities only becomes explicable when their fanatical belief in private enterprise [is] borne in mind.”
Deaths and Trauma
Crimes Against Fecundity – Joyce and Population Control, 1989, Mary Lowe-Evans (Edited.)
The number of people who actually starved to death in the Famine was estimated to be 729,033.
With limited relief offered by soup kitchens and boiled mush, the emaciated victims were left to eat whatever was available, including rats and docile dogs. Ironically, ravenous dogs ate the flesh of the unburied human bodies.
Joyce's Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses muses about dogs and bones and grandmothers' bodies.
In addition to those who starved to death, 1,180,409 emigrants left Ireland between 1846 and 1851, and 17 per cent of them died on the ocean voyages to their destinations. The countless numbers who died of typhoid and cholera must be added to the emigration and starvation figures.
Evolution of the Famine
Crimes Against Fecundity – Joyce and Population Control, 1989, Mary Lowe-Evans (Edited.)
At the outbreak of the potato blight no one thought of accusing England of a lack of concern about the potato disease, but as the Famine spread and official relief was not forthcoming, it became clear that England had adopted a policy of doing nothing.
The English government credited the Famine for reducing the "surplus" population of Ireland, which the English government desired. Invoking the Malthusian doctrine, the Famine provided England with an opportunity to lower the population of Ireland - a plot it had been attempting to carry out since 1829, when its land clearance policies began to be enforced. The English maintained the famine was providential.
The "docility" of the people was guaranteed by their indebtedness to their landlords, their colonial status, the subjugation of the Irish people by the Catholic Church, and their starving condition.
Duplicity of the Land Owners
Crimes Against Fecundity – Joyce and Population Control, 1989, Mary Lowe-Evans (Edited.)
The most salient feature of the Famine was its hypocrisy. While the potato crop had failed, it was not the only crop grown in Ireland. However, it was the only crop that could sustain the Irish year after year given the minimal amount of land allotted for their personal use.
The remainder of the land was dedicated to crops used to pay the land rental fees to the English landlords. Those crops remained healthy during the Famine. It was not a lack of foodstuffs that caused the famine. The produce of most of the tenant leased land was used to pay the landlords' rent.
There was famine in the midst of plenty. This was the same race of landlords to whom Swift
made his modest proposal (in 1729) to roast Irish babies for English consumption.
Contemptuous and Deliberate
Crimes Against Fecundity – Joyce and Population Control, 1989, Mary Lowe-Evans (Edited.)
Added to the insult of feeding the English while its own people starved was the injury to Ireland of the land clearances.
Beginning about 1829, when tillage had ceased to pay the absentee landlords (70 percent of the landlords did not live in Ireland) as much as they desired, the English inaugurated a campaign calling for the expulsion of the Irish peasants from the land, the razing of their houses, and the conversion of agricultural lands into pasture.
Ireland was transformed from a granary to a stockyard and dairy for Great Britain. During the Famine, the number of clearances increased.
The Irish peasants, desperate to keep at least a roof over their heads, dared not touch the produce "marked" by the landlords for rent. That produce - enough cattle, wheat, oats, and barley to feed twice the population of Ireland - was used to maintain the economic and physical health of England.
Speranza's “The Famine Year”
http://ireland-calling.com/the-famine-year/
“The Famine Year” is a poem, written by Lady Wilde (1824-1896). Lady Wilde was the mother of Oscar Wilde, Irish playwright, novelist, essayist and poet. Lady Wilde used the pseudonym, Speranza (Italian for hope). The following is the first verse of “The Famine Year.”
“Weary men, what reap ye? - Golden corn for the stranger.
What sow ye? - Human corpses that wait for the avenger.
Fainting forms, hunger‐stricken, what see you in the offing?
Stately ships to bear our food away, amid the stranger's scoffing.
There's a proud array of soldiers - what do they round your door?
They guard our masters' granaries from the thin hands of the poor.
Pale mothers, wherefore weeping? - Would to God that we were dead
Our children swoon before us, and we cannot give them bread.”
Lady Wilde published her poem in “The Nation,” which is the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the United States, and the most widely read weekly journal of liberal progressive political and cultural news, opinion, and analysis. It was founded in1865 with the stated mission to "make an earnest effort to bring to the discussion of political and social questions a really critical spirit, and to wage war upon the vices of violence, exaggeration, and misrepresentation by which so much of the political writing of the day is marred."
Genocide for Profit
Crimes Against Fecundity – Joyce and Population Control, 1989, Mary Lowe-Evans (Edited.)
Responses to the condition of the Irish ran the gamut from sympathy to scorn. Philanthropic and religious groups in America, the British colonies, and even England sent help.
The official British response was largely judgmental, and profoundly economic. In 1847, Sir Charles Trevelyan declared in Parliament that "being altogether beyond the power of man, the cure [for the Irish Question and overpopulation] had been applied by the direct stroke of an all-wise Providence in a manner as unexpected and as unthought of as it is likely to be effectual."
Based on the comments of Trevelyan and other public officials, it was concluded that "in the eyes of most of the members of Parliament, England was exonerated ... because all agreed that there must be no interference with the natural course of trade."
Basically, the Famine was genocide by the British against the Irish, meaning that the famine was part of a deliberate policy of planned extermination.
Michael Davitt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Davitt (Edited.)
Michael Davitt, whose family had been evicted from their cottage in County Mayo in 1851, gives one of the most scathing of the turn-of-the-century accounts of the Famine. Davitt quotes a
Catholic bishop speaking from his pulpit in New York at this time:
"They call it God's famine .... No! God's famine is known by the general scarcity of food which is its consequence. There is no general scarcity....But political economy, finding Ireland too poor to buy the produce of its own labor, exported that harvest to a better market, and left the people to die of famine or live by alms."
What money the government did provide for the relief of Ireland was either tied up in so much official red tape that little of it benefited the people or was designated for the building of useless roads which led nowhere.
Financially Assisted Emigration
Crimes Against Fecundity – Joyce and Population Control, 1989, Mary Lowe-Evans (Edited.)
It became clear that an effective way for England to relieve its conscience publicly while simultaneously profiting from the Famine was to provide assistance for the evicted tenants to emigrate.
One Irishman said the landlords discovered that the best plan would be to get rid of those who were a burden upon them while at the same time publishing to the world, as an act of brotherly love and kindness, a deal of crafty, calculating selfishness.
Financially assisted emigration became both penance and absolution for England. It made it appear the people forced to leave Ireland were doing so for money.
[Emigrants were given free passage and suitable clothing for the journey. They were also provided with a small amount of financial assistance.]
The Soup Kitchens
Crimes Against Fecundity – Joyce and Population Control, 1989, Mary Lowe-Evans (Edited.)
A charitable gesture made by the British was the establishment of soup kitchens, the most notorious of which was erected in Dublin.
Perhaps nothing during the famine years more appropriately symbolized England's "helping hand" to Ireland than Soyer's Dublin soup kitchen established for the starving masses who flocked into urban areas in search of employment and food.
“On April 5, 1847, with the beating of drums, the sounding of horns, the Union Jack proudly flying from the kitchen's smoking chimney, and a splendidly attired gentry nodding its approval, the British government fed the Irish a soup incapable of keeping a newborn cat alive.” (Paddy's Lament, Ireland 1846-1847: Prelude to Hatred by Thomas Gallagher.)
[Alexis Soyer, born in 1809, was a high-profile French chef. It has been argued that he was among the first “celebrity chefs.” In The Great Famine and the Irish Diaspora in America, Jillian Strang and Joyce Toomre note that Soyer was an “affable and eccentric chef with a strong sense of showmanship and a flair for publicity."]
Catholic Church Teaching
Crimes Against Fecundity – Joyce and Population Control, 1989, Mary Lowe-Evans (Edited.)
The Catholic Church had instilled a scrupulousness of conscience into Irish thinking that undermined secular life and individuality.
This scrupulousness manifested itself in docility, passivity, apathy, and a submissiveness to the Church (that threatened eternal burning in Hell for any transgressions of the Church's teachings).
The Church's rigidity, especially with regard to sexual matters demanded celibacy in young people, unrestricted large families on married couples (who could not afford them), and driving the most robust and independent thinking members of the population out of the country.
As a youth, James Joyce was a poor Irish Catholic, the son of a woman who experienced seventeen pregnancies and died at the age of forty-five. Like many Irish fathers, Joyce's father was an alcoholic, mired in a hopeless social and economic situation.
At age 22, James Joyce fled Ireland into self-imposed exile late in 1904, taking with him Nora Barnacle, a young woman from Galway who was working as a hotel chambermaid in Dublin.
Joyce had two children with Nora. They eventually married in 1931.
Stiffening of the Church's Position
Crimes Against Fecundity – Joyce and Population Control, 1989, Mary Lowe-Evans (Edited.)
When the Malthusian League disbanded in 1927, it had published well over three million pieces of literature and delivered thousands of lectures. Evidence of the League's success might be seen in the acceptance of methods other than sexual abstinence to avoid parenthood, which was granted by the Anglican Church at the Lambeth Conference of 1930.
Meanwhile, in Ireland, the Censorship of Publications Act of 1929 made it a crime to print, publish, sell, or distribute any book or periodical that advocated or might be supposed to advocate the unnatural prevention of conception.
On December 31, 1930, Pope Pius XI responded to the Resolutions of the Lambeth Conference with Casti Connubii, an encyclical that adamantly reasserted the Church's stand against artificial contraception.
Non-Sacred Pursuits of the Catholic Church
Crimes Against Fecundity – Joyce and Population Control, 1989, Mary Lowe-Evans (Edited.)
Joyce fortified his case against the Church as a cause of emigration by depicting the "spectacle of the world in thrall" to the Church. This bewildering awe of the Church fills Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses with "the fire of courage" to leave Ireland.
The Church that Joyce portrays lives parasitically on the meager earnings of the faithful who would be better off to forsake their faith or practice it elsewhere.
The connection Joyce makes between emigration and expenditures for Church structures may owe something to Horace Plunkett's, Ireland in the New Century. Plunkett noted that in Ireland the multiplication (in inverse ratio to a declining population) of costly and elaborate monastic and convent institutions, involved enormous annual expenditures.
The Beginning of the English-Irish Religious War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AntiCatholicism_in_the_United_Kingdom#Ireland_under_British
control (Edited.)
Ireland's Catholic majority was subjected to persecution from the time of the English Reformation under Henry VIII. [The break with the Vatican was effected by a series of acts of Parliament passed between1532 and 1534, among them the 1534 Act of Supremacy, which declared that Henry was the "Supreme Head on earth of the Church of England".]
The persecution of Catholics in Ireland intensified when the Gaelic clan system was completely destroyed by the governments of Elizabeth I and her successor, James I. Land was appropriated either by the religious conversion of native Anglo-Irish aristocrats from Catholic to Anglican or by forcible seizure.
Much of the land of the dispossessed Catholics was given to Anglican and Protestant settlers from Britain.
[The English reformation in England, coincided with Martin Luther's posting of his 95 Theses on the door of a church in Wittenberg, Germany on October 31, 1517, which formally began the Protestant Reformation.]
Institutional Anti-Catholicism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Catholicism_in_the_United_Kingdom#17th_and_18th_century_polemics (Edited.)
The Act of Supremacy in 1534 declared the English crown to be the only supreme head on earth of the Church in England in place of the pope. Any act of allegiance to the pope was considered treasonous because the papacy claimed both spiritual and political power over its followers.
The beliefs that underlie the sort of strong anti-Catholicism once seen in the United Kingdom were summarized by William Blackstone in his Commentaries on the Laws of England:
“As to papists, what has been said of the Protestant dissenters would hold equally strong for a general toleration of them; provided their separation was founded only upon difference of opinion in religion, and their principles did not also extend to a subversion of the civil government. If once they could be brought to renounce the supremacy of the pope, they might quietly enjoy their seven sacraments, their purgatory, and auricular confession; their worship of relics and images; nay even their transubstantiation. But while they acknowledge a foreign power, superior to the sovereignty of the kingdom, they cannot complain if the laws of that kingdom will not treat them upon the footing of good subjects....”
Anti-Irish Prejudice in America
https://longislandwins.com/news/national/why-did-the-irish-fight-when-they-were-so-despised-2/ (Edited.)
In the mid-1800s, the abuse that newly arrived Irish in the US received from the anti-immigrant “Know Nothings” was criminal.
[The Know Nothing or American Party (called nativists) was a political party active in the 1850s to keep power out of the hands of immigrants and Roman Catholics.]
Mob attacks, vandalized churches, and bars to employment (“No Irish Need Apply”) were all used to keep Irish immigrants out of the American mainstream. But the worst abuse came from the press. The Irish immigrants - poor, dislocated from their homeland, tortured by the memories of families members starving to death during the Famine - read about their sub-human character in popular newspapers.
Typical of the invective carried in major newspapers was a piece from the Chicago Tribune published in 1855: “Who does not know that the most depraved, debased, worthless and irredeemable drunkards and sots which curse the community are Irish Catholics?”
Irish Service to the Union
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Americans_in_the_American_Civil_War (Edited.)
Seven Union Army generals were Irish-born. An estimated 150,000 Irish-Americans fought for the Union during the Civil War.
Irish-Americans living in the Union states often formed their own regiments, notably the 69th New York State Volunteers. The Volunteers flew a green flag with a golden harp on it, symbolizing Ireland. The green flag was carried in addition to the normal regimental and national colors. The 69th was probably the only regiment to carry five colors into battle during the American Civil War.
At the 1862 Battle of Fredericksburg (Virginia), the 69th Regiment suffered 41.4% casualties while charging up Marye's Heights.
After the First Battle of Bull Run, the 69th New York Infantry was incorporated into a larger unit, the Irish Brigade.
The Hubris of Churches
Religious Peace
Religious peace (brotherhood) cannot exist unless all religions are willing to completely divest themselves of all ecclesiastical authority by surrendering any concept of spiritual supremacy.
Humans will not experience religious liberty (equality among religions) without religious wars unless all religions consent to the transfer of all religious domination to the superhuman level - to God himself.
The kingdom of heaven in the hearts of men will create religious unity (not necessarily uniformity) because any and all religious groups composed of such religious believers will be free from all notions of ecclesiastical authority.
Origin of the Christian Church
In the enthusiasm of Pentecost, (the Christian festival celebrating the descent of the Holy Spirit on the disciples of Jesus after his Ascension), Peter unintentionally inaugurated a new religion, the religion of the risen and glorified Christ.
The Apostle Paul later transformed Peter's new gospel into Christianity, a religion embodying Paul's own theological views and portraying his own personal experience on the road to Damascus.
[On the road to Damascus, Paul was knocked from his horse by a bright flash of light, and he heard a voice say to him, "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting." Prior to that moment, he had been called Saul, and he was a Pharisee who persecuted the followers of Jesus.]
The New Testament
The Gospel of the Kingdom (sparsely documented by the apostles) is founded on the personal religious experience of the incarnated Jesus of Galilee.
Conversely, the New Testament of Christianity is founded almost exclusively on the personal religious experience of the Apostle Paul. Almost all of the New Testament is devoted, not to the portrayal of the significant and inspiring religious life of Jesus, but to a discussion of Paul’s religious experience and his personal religious convictions.
The only notable exceptions to this statement, aside from certain parts of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, are the Book of Hebrews and the Epistle of James. Even Peter, in his writing, only discussed the personal religious life of Jesus one time.
The Religion of Jesus
Some day a reformation in the Christian church may strike deep enough to get back to the unadulterated religious teachings of Jesus, the true author and apogee of our faith.
Jesus’ life in the flesh portrays a transcendent religious growth from his childhood ideas of primitive awe and human reverence up through years of personal spiritual communion until he arrived at that advanced and exalted status of the consciousness of his oneness with the Father.
In one short life as a human, Jesus traversed the experience of religious spiritual progression which man begins on earth and ordinarily achieves only at the conclusion of his long sojourn in the spirit training schools of the successive levels of the pre-Paradise career.
This progressing ascent from the human to the divine was an exclusively mortal achievement. And when he had attained divinity, he was still the same human Jesus, the Son of Man as well as the Son of God.
The Human Jesus
Paul’s Christianity made sure of the adoration of the divine Christ, but it lost sight of the struggling and valiant human Jesus of Galilee, who, by the valor of his personal religious faith and the heroism of his indwelling Adjuster, ascended from the lowly levels of humanity to become one with divinity.
The life experience of the human Jesus is the new and living way whereby all mortals may ascend from humanity to divinity.
Mortals in all stages of spirituality and on all worlds may find in the personal life of Jesus that which will strengthen and inspire them as they progress from the lowest spirit levels up to the highest divine values, from the beginning to the end of all personal religious experience.
The Religion of Personal Experience
Paul founded a religion in which the glorified Jesus became the object of worship and the brotherhood consisted of only fellow believers in the divine Christ.
Jesus founded a religion of personal experience based upon: 1. doing the will of God; and 2. serving the entire human brotherhood.
Jesus was a wholly consecrated mortal dedicated to doing his Father’s will. It was this very singleness of purpose and unselfish devotion that enabled him to effect such extraordinary progress in the conquest of the human mind (personality) in his short life.
Jesus blessed the poor because they were usually sincere and pious; he condemned the rich because they were usually wanton, materialistic, and irreligious. Of course, he would equally condemn the irreligious pauper and commend the consecrated and worshipful man of wealth.
Jesus delivered men from the slavery of superstitious taboos. Also, Jesus did not share Paul’s pessimistic view of humankind. The Master looked upon men as the sons of God and foresaw a magnificent and eternal future for those who chose survival.
Jesus offered no advice for social advancement. His was a religious mission, and religion is an exclusively individual experience. The spirit indwelling each individual's mind is the only priest required.
Rituals and Priests
It is only when a ritual has been correctly carried out that the ceremony possesses compelling power over spirits. Man’s slowly evolving mind conceived that the technique of ritual was the decisive factor in its efficacy. Therefore, it was inevitable that the early shamans would evolve into a priesthood trained to direct the meticulous practice of the ritual.
Rituals are often at first social, later becoming economic and finally acquiring the righteousness and dignity of religious ceremony.
Priests evolved from shamans up through oracles, diviners, singers, dancers, weather makers, guardians of religious relics, and temple custodians, to the status of actual directors of religious worship.
The priesthoods have done much to delay scientific development and to hinder spiritual progress, but they have contributed to the stabilization of civilization and to the enhancement of certain kinds of culture. Many modern priests have ceased to function as directors of the ritual of the worship of God, having turned their attention to theology - the attempt to define God.
Priests have been a millstone about the neck of the races, but the true religious leaders have been invaluable in pointing the way to higher and better realities.
The Christian Religion
The Christian religion arose through the commingling of the following teachings, influences, beliefs, cults, and personal individual attitudes:
1. The Melchizedek teachings, which are the basis for all the religions of The West and Near East that have arisen in the last four thousand years.
2. The Hebraic system of morality, ethics, theology, and belief in both Providence and the supreme Yahweh.
3. The Zoroastrian conception of the struggle between cosmic good and evil, which influenced both Judaism and Mithraism. The doctrines of the Iranian prophet, Zoroaster, became a potent factor in determining the theologic and philosophic cast and structure of the dogmas, tenets, and cosmology of the Greek and Roman versions of the teachings of Jesus.
4. The mystery cults, especially Mithraism and the Phrygian worship of the Great Mother shaped Christian beliefs. Even the legends of the birth of Jesus on Earth became tainted with the Roman version of Mithras. Mithra was believed to have been born on December 25, circa 500 BC. His birth was witnessed by shepherds and by Magi who carried gifts.
5. The fact of the human life and reality of Jesus of Nazareth as the glorified Christ, the Son of God.
6. The personal viewpoint of Paul of Tarsus. Mithraism was the dominant religion of Tarsus during his adolescence. (Paul never dreamed that his letters to his converts would someday be regarded by later Christians as the “word of God.”)
7. The philosophy of the Greeks, which was more in harmony with Paul’s version of Christianity and became an important factor in the success of Christianity in the West. Greek philosophy, coupled with Paul’s theology, still forms the basis of European ethics.
The original teachings of Jesus have lost their potentially universal appeal. Christianity is not the religion of Jesus. It has largely forgotten the Master’s personal gospel: the Fatherhood of God and the universal brotherhood of all men.
Crimes of the Catholic Church Against the Self
Human Institutions
God has not appointed any human institutions to act in his name.
The justification of the Roman Catholic Church for its claim that the church was appointed by God to be his divine representative on Earth is the statement in the New Testament attributed to Matthew: “Peter thou art rock and upon this rock I will build my church.” (Matt. 16:18.)
The so-called Gospel according to Matthew is the record of the Master’s life written for the edification of converted Jewish Christians. Matthew's Gospel portrays Jesus as a son of David, picturing him as showing great respect for the law and the Jewish prophets.
However, the Apostle Matthew did not write this Gospel. It was written by Isador, one of his disciples. Matthew wrote his notes about Jesus in Aramaic in AD 40. Isador wrote the Gospel according to Matthew in the year 71 AD in Greek.
It is difficult to credit authenticity to the Catholic Church's reliance upon “Matthew's” alleged statement since it was written seventy one years after the death of Jesus and it was “filtered” to fit the intended Jewish audience.
The Rock
When Jesus accepted Simon Zebedee as one of his apostles, he gave him the nickname “Peter” (meaning rock) in jest because Simon was well known to Jesus and Simon's friends as an erratic and impulsive individual.
Just as human marriage is conceived of by some groups of mortals as being consummated by divine intervention, this belief lead to the concept of the indissolubility of the marital state regardless of the circumstances or wishes of the contracting parties. (“What God has joined together let no man put asunder.”) But the very existence of divorce argues that Deity does not bind marital unions together. If God actually joined any two things or persons together, they would remain joined until the divine will decreed their separation.
Similarly, the the crimes of the Roman Catholic Church negate any possibility that God appointed the church as his divine institution. It is unlikely that God would tolerate the Church's misconduct performed under his auspices. The “rock” explanation does not support the divinely appointed claim of the Catholic Church.
Indoctrination of Catholic Children
Saint Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556), was the principal founder of the Society of Jesus, a religious order of the Catholic Church serving the Pope. Members of the order are called Jesuits.
A Jesuit maxim widely attributed to Ignatius Loyola is, “Give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the man [or woman].”
Catholic children were taught that sins that broke the Church's rules were “mortal” meaning these sins killed the soul and earned punishment in the eternal fires of Hell.
Such sins could consist of being late for Mass on Sunday, or missing Mass, or breaking the Holy Communion fast from midnight until after orally receiving the sacred host.
In addition, children were taught that impure thoughts, words and deeds - such as touching their private parts, or having “dirty thoughts” were mortal sins. Catholics became bound in the chains of an arbitrary morality through fear.
Teach Love not Fear
Jesus taught his apostles that fear of punishment was not the way to instruct people about God.
“I have come into the world to put love in the place of fear, joy in the place of sorrow, confidence in the place of dread, loving service and appreciative worship in the place of slavish bondage and meaningless ceremonies.”
But, it is true of those who sit in darkness that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. But when their light is brighter, the sons of God are led to praise the Infinite for what he is rather than to fear him.
Persecution of the Jews
https://www.ushmm.org/research/the-center-for-advanced-holocaust-studies/programs-ethics-religion-the-holocaust/articles-and-resources/christian-persecution-of-jews-over-the-centuries/christian-persecution-of-jews-over-the-centuries (Edited.)
The correspondence of Pope Gregory I tells about attempts to force the conversion of the Jews. From his letters we learn a few things about Jews in the empire around the year 600 AD. Some were deeply involved in the slave trade. Jews lived untroubled lives among Christians in certain regions and were dealt with cruelly in others. The papal correspondence was, by and large, protective of Jewish rights, while assuming their subordinate position in society.
In the century following Gregory’s papacy, the expulsion of Jews began in Europe; from France under King Dagobert (626) and under the Spanish monarchy (with church collusion) when in 694 the Jews were required to choose between conversion and slavery.
Christians assumed that the Jews were being divinely punished for not converting to the Christian belief.
In the years 500-1500 the Jews, as a religious and a cultural minority, were often preyed upon by the Christian majority. The Jews were deemed guilty of Jesus’ crucifixion.
Still, these infringements of civil and social liberty never approached the point of the elimination of the Jewish people entirely. This “Final Solution” was developed in the Nazi era.
Jews, Usury, and Expulsion
https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/23845403/DORIN-DISSERTATION-2015.pdf?sequence=1 (Edited.)
In 1231, Simon de Montfort (Earl of Leicester, England) ordered the expulsion of the Jews of Leicester. Although the charter ordering the expulsion declares Montfort made the decision for the sake of his soul, Robert Grosseteste, then the archdeacon of Leicester, praised the expulsion as an effort to liberate Christians from the oppression of Jewish usury.
Montfort’s action should probably be seen not so much as a reflection of prevailing English sentiments, but “as an extension of his family’s earlier anti-Semitism crusading in the south of France. Montfort’s action resonated among his contemporaries, and it was followed by a series of expulsions from other English towns.
The Crusades – “Holy War”
The Crusades were the series of wars in which European Christians sought to capture the holy places under Muslim control between the 11th and 13th centuries AD. The series of Crusade battles continued for nearly two hundred years.
The Crusades began when the Turks, who had previously converted to Islam, occupied land near Constantinople (now Istanbul) as well as regions of the Middle East, including Jerusalem.
Alexios, the Byzantine emperor, viewed the Muslim conquest as a threat to Christianity, and called on Pope Urban II for support in repelling the invaders.
Pope Urban II urged Christian knights and noblemen to win back the Holy Land for which they would receive remission of their sins and save their souls by becoming "Soldiers of Christ."
The Inquisitions – Suppressing Threats to Church Authority
From Wikipedia (Edited.)
The Roman Inquisition (formally the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition), was a system of tribunals developed by the Holy See (the office of the pope) during the second half of the 16th century.
The Roman Inquisition was responsible for prosecuting individuals accused of a wide array of crimes relating to religious doctrine or alternate religious doctrines or beliefs. Catholic dogma was the only measure required as proof of guilt.
In the period after the Medieval Inquisition, the Roman Inquisition was one of three different manifestations of the wider Catholic Inquisition along with the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions.
Pope Alexander VI – Root Source of Protestant Reformation
http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1981842_1981844_1981863,00.html (Edited.)
Pope Alexander VI, born Rodrigo de Borja, was Pope from 11 August 1492 until his death in 1503. He is one of the most controversial of the Renaissance popes. Hardly celibate, he acknowledged fathering several children by his mistresses.
Alexander VI was a member of the prominent and wealthy Borgia family. He bought his papacy and then he appointed family members to powerful positions, including his sons and family members of his mistress.
While some of the controversy surrounding Alexander VI is well-founded, other accusations like his arranging murders or hosting wild orgies inside the papal palace may be inventions. He did, however, father four children with his mistress. He used his daughter Lucrezia as a political pawn - marrying her off three times in the hope of securing alliances and power. There is speculation that Alexander VI fathered one of Lucrezia's children.
Pope Stephen VI – A Vindictive Christian
http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1981842_1981844_1981863,00.html (Edited.)
Pope Stephen VI (sometimes known as Stephen VII) despised his predecessor, Pope Formosus, so much that even his death did not satisfy him. Stephen VI had Formosus' nine-month-old corpse dug up, redressed in his papal vestments, and seated on the papal throne so he could be tried.
Formosus was found guilty. As punishment, three fingers of Formosus' corpse were cut off (the three fingers on the right hand used to give blessings). The corpse was then stripped of his sacred vestments, dressed as a layman, dragged through the streets and dumped in the Tiber River.
Pope John XII – Disgraced the Papacy
http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1981842_1981844_1981863,00.html (Edited.)
Octavian, Pope John XII, was the only son of Duke Alberic II of Spoleto, then ruler of Rome, who ordered Octavian's election to pope (Dec. 16, 955) when he was only 18 years of age.
Octavian changed his name to John, becoming the first pope to change his name upon taking office.
With his election to the highest office of the western church, Pope John XII proved himself totally inept at the task of leading Christendom. His interests were worldly, not spiritual, preferring military battles and hunting. He was a notorious adulterer and liar.
The prestige of the papacy suffered enormously during the reign of John XII (955 until his assassination in 964).
Pope Urban VI – Splintered the Church
http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1981842_1981844_1981863,00.html (Edited.)
Urban VI (Bartolomeo Prignano), an Italian, was elected to succeed Pope Gregory XI in April 1378 in a move intended to placate Romans who were angry about the decades of French domination of the papacy.
Once installed, Urban VI alienated his followers with his harsh leadership style. Thirteen French Cardinals, who feared that their new leader would favor his fellow Italians fled Rome, declaring within months that Urban VI's election was "null because it was not made freely but under fear."
On Sept. 20, 1378, the French Cardinals chose their own Pope, French Cardinal Robert of Geneva, who became the Anti-pope Clement VII. The competing papacies launched a schism that lasted for four decades.
Pope Benedict IX – Sold the Papacy
http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1981842_1981844_1981863,00.html (Edited.)
Pope Benedict IX was not respected. St. Peter Damian called him a "demon from hell in the disguise of a priest." In his third book of Dialogues, Pope Victor III wrote of Benedict IX as having a "life as a pope so vile, so foul, so execrable, that I shudder to think of it."
Benedict IX resigned in 1045 becoming the first pope in history to sell the papacy. The buyer was the priest John Gratian (Pope Gregory VI). Benedict IX later refused to face charges of simony (making a profit out of selling sacred things) and was excommunicated.
Pope Leo X – Sold Pardons from Purgatory
http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1981842_1981844_1981863,00.html (Edited.)
Pope Leo X (of the Medici family) had expensive tastes. He built up the Vatican Library, accelerated the construction of St. Peter's Basilica and spent money extravagantly on works of art. (The Medici family were patrons of Michelangelo, painter of the Sistine Chapel ceiling.)
Within two years of becoming pope, Leo X completely drained the papal treasury. To recoup, Leo X began selling off pieces of the Vatican palace - furniture, dishes, jewels and statues of the apostles. He also commissioned the sale of indulgences, which allowed Catholics to buy their way out of Purgatory.
[Purgatory is a belief of Roman Catholics in a condition or place in which the souls of those dying repentant undergo a temporal punishment that remains to be served by the sinner.]
The Catholic priest, Martin Luther, objected to what he considered the selling and buying of salvation. Leo X was dismissive of Luther's complaints. By failing to take Luther's complaint seriously, Leo X contributed greatly to the dissolution of the Western church and the rise of the Protestant Reformation.
Pope Nicholas III- Family Favoritism
http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1981842_1981844_1981863,00.html (Edited.)
Giovanni Gaetano Orsini, was a member of the prominent and influential Orsini family of Italy.
The Orsini family begot three other popes: Stephen II (752-757), succeeded by Paul I (757-767), and Celestine III (1191-1198).
Pope Nicholas III appeared to lack a religious vocation. He did not become a priest until he became pope.
For the three years of Nicholas III's reign (1277-1280), he distributed principalities in the Papal States among members of his family, providing them with land and political power.
[The Papal States were territories of central Italy over which the pope had sovereignty. The nepotism of Pope Nicholas III earned him a place in Dante's eighth circle of Hell. Dante's “Inferno” describes Dante's journey through Hell. “Inferno” is the first part of Dante Alighieri's 14th-century epic poem, The Divine Comedy.]
Pope Boniface VIII – Seized Temporal Powers
http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1981842_1981844_1981863,00.html (Edited.)
Boniface VIII was Pope from 24 December 1294 to his death in 1303. He was one of the most ardent advocates of papal authority. What started as a minor squabble with King Philip IV of France over a government's ability to tax clergy members escalated until Boniface VIII excommunicated King Phillip.
Pope Boniface then issued a decree declaring that both spiritual and temporal power were under the pope's jurisdiction, and that kings were subordinate to the power of the Roman pontiff.
In addition, Boniface VIII sent mercenaries to destroy people's castles, declared all of the prominent Italian Colonna family's property forfeited and proceeded to parcel their land out among his family members. In September 1303, an army led by the Colonna family kidnapped the Pope and demanded that he abdicate. Held in captivity for many days, Boniface refused. He survived the captivity experience and returned to Rome, but died a month later.
Clement V – The Great Disruptor
http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1981842_1981844_1981863,00.html (Edited.)
Clement V (1305-1314) reversed Boniface VIII's anti-France decrees and appointed 23 new French Cardinals, but his attempts to make amends were short-lived.
When France's King Phillip IV charged the Knights Templar with heresy, Clement V abolished them before King Phillip could (thereby retaining the guise of the pope's supreme power).
Clement V played countries against one another, instituted oppressively high taxes and openly gave land to his supporters and family. Clement V had no qualms about his willingness to be bribed. For this reason, Dante also placed him in his inferno.
The Knights Templar
From Wikipedia (Edited.)
The Knights Templar was a Catholic military order founded in 1119 and active from about 1129 to 1312. It was officially recognized in 1139 by the papal bull “Omne Datum Optimum of the Holy See.”
The Knights Templar became a favorite charity throughout Christendom and grew rapidly in membership and power.
Templar knights were among the most skilled fighting units of the Crusades. They built fortifications across Europe and the Holy Land. Non-combatant members of the order managed a large economic infrastructure throughout Christendom. They developed innovative financial techniques that were an early form of banking.
When the Holy Land was lost, support for the Templars faded. Rumors about the Templars' secret initiation ceremony created distrust, and King Phillip IV of France (who was deeply in debt to the order) took advantage of the situation to gain control over them. In 1307, he had many of the order's members in France arrested, tortured them to give false confessions, and burned them at the stake.
Pope Pius X - Empowered Priests
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2554748/How-Pope-called-Pius-turned-confessional-box-paradise-paedophiles-From-leading-Catholic-writer-devastating-expos-Vatican-ruling.html
Pius X, Pope from 1903-1914, decreed in 1910 that children must make their first confession at the age of seven.
Pius also declared that all Catholics, including children, should confess weekly rather than once or twice a year, as was traditional.
That papal decision proved lamentable. Constant confession created ideal opportunities for salacious priests to seduce females, to sexually abuse children, and to stay abreast of activities in the community.
Pope Pius XII – Betrayed the Jews
https://www.vanityfair.com/style/1999/10/pope-pius-xii-199910, by John Cornwell. (Edited.)
Pius XII reigned as Pope from 2 March 1939 to his death in 1958.
In 1964, a play by a young German named Rolf Hochhuth. Der Stellvertreter (The Deputy), was staged on Broadway. The play depicted Eugenio Pacelli (Pope Pius XII) as a ruthless cynic, interested more in the Vatican’s stock portfolio than in the fate of the Jews.
To exonerate Pope Pius XII, writer John Cornwell obtained permission of the Vatican to review depositions given under oath gathered to support the process for Pacelli’s canonization, as well as the archives of the Vatican Secretariat of State (the foreign office of the Holy See). He also drew on German sources relating to then Cardinal Secretary of State Pacelli’s activities as the negotiator of the Reichskonkordat, a treaty negotiated between the Vatican and the emergent Nazi party in 1933.
The material amounted to an indictment more scandalous than Hochhuth’s play. The evidence showed Pacelli was by the proof of his own words, anti-Jewish. It revealed that he had helped Hitler to power by undermining potential Catholic resistance in Germany. It further showed that he had implicitly denied and trivialized the Holocaust, despite having reliable knowledge of its true extent.
Crimes Against Humanity
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/the-pope/8760103/Pope-accused-of-crimes-against-humanity.html
In modern times, in formal complaints to the International Criminal Court, the Pope and top Vatican cardinals have been accused of crimes against humanity for sheltering guilty Catholic priests.
In the 20th and 21st centuries, cases of child sexual abuse by Catholic priests, nuns and members of religious orders have led to numerous allegations, investigations, trials and convictions.
The sexually abused children include boys and girls with the majority between the ages of 11 and 14. The accusations began to receive wide publicity in the late 1980s. In many cases, the molester was accused of abuse for decades. Such allegations were frequently made by mature adults and older youths years after the abuse occurred.
Cases have also been brought against members of the Catholic hierarchy who covered up sex abuse allegations and moved abusive priests to other parishes where the abuse continued.
The crimes of the Catholic Church against the Self noted in this segment should suffice to show that the Church is a human organization. It is not divinely appointed. Nor is any other organized church on Earth divinely appointed. Organized religions may have social benefits, but true religion is a personal experience.
Catholic Church Sacraments – Doctrinal
The sacraments of the Catholic Church are religious ceremonies - rites of passage that infer a blessing or grace on people who receive the sacraments.
The Church administers seven sacraments. They consist of:
The sacraments were developed through theology (religious theory). Allusions to the “sacraments” in the bible were Jesus speaking metaphorically or honoring Jewish tradition (such as baptism with water to symbolically wash away sin).
No proof of credibility is required if belief is required as an article of faith.
The Remembrance Supper
Knowing his arrest and death were imminent, Jesus planned the Remembrance Supper as a commemorative final meal with his twelve apostles. It was a final night of instruction to summarize the lessons he taught them during their time together. He began by washing the feet of the apostles – teaching that the Master willingly does that service which his apostles were unwilling to do for one another earlier in the evening. Next, Jesus dismissed his betrayer, the apostle, Judas.
Later, when they brought Jesus the third cup of wine, the “cup of blessing,” Jesus arose from the couch and, taking the cup in his hands, blessed it, saying:“Take this cup, all of you, and drink of it. This shall be the cup of my remembrance. This is the cup of the blessing of a new dispensation [the divine re-ordering of the affairs of the world] of grace and truth. This shall be to you the emblem of the bestowal and ministry of the divine Spirit of Truth.” [The Spirit of Truth replaces the physical presence of Jesus.]
When they had finished drinking this new cup of remembrance, the Master took up the bread and, after giving thanks, broke it in pieces and, directing them to pass it around, said: “Take this bread of remembrance and eat it. I have told you that I am the bread of life. And this bread of life is the united life of the Father and the Son in one gift. The word of the Father, as revealed in the Son, is indeed the bread of life.”
The Lost Purpose of the Remembrance Supper
In instituting this remembrance supper, the Master resorted to parables and symbols. He employed symbols (wine and bread) because he wanted to teach certain great spiritual truths in a manner to make it difficult for men to attach precise interpretations and definite meanings to his words. In this way he sought to prevent successive generations from crystallizing his teaching and binding down his spiritual meanings with the chains of tradition and dogma.
In the establishment of the only ceremony or sacrament associated with his whole life mission, Jesus took great pains to suggest his meanings rather than to commit himself to precise definitions. He did not wish to destroy the individual’s concept of divine mental communion by establishing a precise format. Neither did he desire to limit the believer's spiritual imagination by formally restraining it.
Notwithstanding the Master’s effort to establish this new sacrament of the remembrance, those who followed after him in the intervening centuries saw to it that his express desire was effectively thwarted. His simple spiritual symbolism of that last night in the flesh has been reduced to precise interpretations and subjected to the nearly mathematical precision of a set formula called transubstantiation. [Transubstantiation is the changing of the elements of the bread and wine, when they are consecrated in the Eucharist, into the body and blood of Christ (a doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church).]
The Divine Presence
The “supper of remembrance,” when it is partaken of by those who are Son-believing and God-knowing, does not need any of man’s symbolism or childlike beliefs regarding the method of the divine presence, for the Master is really present on all such occasions.
The remembrance supper is the devotee's personal rendezvous with Michael, the Creator Son of this Universe. When you become spirit-conscious, the Son is actually present, and his spirit (the Spirit of Truth) fraternizes with the personality's indwelling fragment of his Father, the Thought Monitor/Adjuster.
Pentecost - The Bestowal of the Spirit of Truth
As the one hundred and twenty believers in Jesus were engaged in prayer, they became aware of a strong presence in the room. At the same time, these disciples all became conscious of a new and profound sense of spiritual joy, security, and confidence. This consciousness of spiritual strength was immediately followed by a powerful urge to publicly proclaim the gospel of the kingdom and the wonderful news that Jesus had risen from the dead.
Peter stood up and declared that this compelling feeling must be the coming of the Spirit of Truth that the Master had promised them, and he proposed that they go immediately to the temple and begin the proclamation of the good news committed into their hands. They did.
These men had been trained and instructed that the gospel that they should preach was the fatherhood of God and the son-ship of man, but in this moment of spiritual ecstasy and personal triumph, the best tidings, the greatest news, these men could think of was the fact that the Master had risen. And so they went forth, endowed with power from on high, preaching the glad tidings to the people and salvation through Jesus.
Quite unintentionally, they stumbled into the error of substituting some of the facts related to the gospel for the gospel message itself. Peter unwittingly led off in this mistake, and others followed after him on down to Paul, who created a new religion out of his altered version of the good news.
Considering their elation, it is easy to understand how these men came to preach a new gospel about Jesus in place of their prescribed message of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of men.
The Mission of the Spirit of Truth
The primary mission of the Spirit of Truth is to foster and personalize truth, because it is the comprehension of truth that constitutes the highest form of human liberty.
This bestowal of the Son’s spirit effectively prepared all normal men’s minds for the subsequent universal bestowal of the Father’s spirit (the Thought Adjuster) upon all mankind.
Do not expect to become intellectually conscious of the Spirit of Truth. The spirit creates only a consciousness of Michael, our universe Creator Son (incarnated as Jesus).
The Spirit of Truth came to help men recall and understand the words of the Master as well as to illuminate and reinterpret his life on earth for all generations.
Michael's Spirit of Truth teams with the Thought Adjusting Father Fragment and the Holy Spirit (the Universal Mother Spirit and her Seven Mind Spirits and angels) to encourage spiritual decisions by the personality (mentally and environmentally).
This spiritual assistance is greatly augmented when the personality voluntarily commits to salvation.
Rebirth in the Spirit
Jesus declared: “Unless you are born again, born of the spirit, you cannot enter the kingdom of God.”
To all who are honest of heart and sincere in faith, it remains eternally true: “Behold, I stand at the doors of men’s hearts and knock, and if any man will open to me, I will come in and sup with him and will feed him with the bread of life; we shall be one in spirit and purpose, and so shall we ever be brethren in the long and fruitful service of the search for the Paradise Father.”
Even the apostles did not fully comprehend Jesus' teaching of the necessity of using spiritual force to overcome the material impediments that obstruct the light of understanding life in the spirit.
Spiritual liberation from matter frees man from a life in material social and economic captivity - especially ignorance, superstition, and material ambitions.
World Population
Industrial Quality Control – An Analogy
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/q/quality-control.asp
Quality control is a process through which industry seeks to ensure that product quality is maintained or improved and manufacturing errors are reduced or eliminated. Quality control requires manufacturers to create an environment in which both management and employees strive for perfection. This is done by training personnel, creating standards for product quality, and testing products to check for statistically significant variations.
A major aspect of quality control is the establishment of well-defined controls. These controls help standardize both production and reactions to quality issues. Limiting room for error by specifying which production activities are to be completed by which personnel reduces the chance that employees will be involved in tasks for which they do not have adequate training.
Quality control involves testing of units and determining if they are within the specifications for the final product. The purpose of the testing is to determine any needs for corrective actions in the manufacturing process. Good quality control helps companies meet consumer demands for better products.
Overpopulation
From a world standpoint, overpopulation has never been a serious problem in the past, but if war is lessened and science increasingly controls human diseases, it may become a serious problem in the future. The problem is not so much overpopulation, as it is preserving the best of the gene pool.
The future will provide a great test for the wisdom of the world's leadership. Will Earth's rulers have the insight and courage to cultivate the multiplication of the average or stabilized human being instead of the extremes of the super normal and the enormously increasing groups of the subnormal?
The normal man should be fostered. He is the backbone of civilization and the source of the mutant geniuses of the race.
The subnormal man should be kept under society’s control; he should produce no more citizens than are required to administer the lower levels of industry, those tasks requiring intelligence above the animal level while not becoming so much of a burden as to prove veritable slavery and bondage for the higher types of mankind caring for him.
Enlightened Perspectives on Population Control
The Pivot of Civilization, by Margaret Sanger - Project Gutenberg. See Sanger's book at:
www.gutenberg.org/files/1689/1689-h/1689-h.htm (Edited.)
Unless sexual science is incorporated as an integral part of world statesmanship and the importance of birth control is recognized, effective efforts to create a more spiritual civilization are fated to failure.
Margaret Sanger championed birth control concepts in the United States. She started the American Birth Control League in 1921, which became part of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1942.
Planned Parenthood praises Sanger for “providing contraception and other health services” and “advancing access to family planning in the United States and around the world.”
In addition to Planned Parenthood, Sanger also founded the Birth Control Review, a journal about contraception and population control.
A Parliament of Population
http://dailysignal.com/2015/07/22/13-things-you-probably-dont-know-about-planned-parenthood-founder-margaret-sanger/ (Edited.)
Margaret Sanger proposed allowing Congress to solve “population problems” by appointing a “Parliament of Population.”
The Parliament of Population would be composed of directors representing the various branches of science who would direct and control population through birth rates and immigration, and direct the distribution through out the country according to national needs consistent with taste, fitness and interest of the individuals.
Sanger referred to the various methods of population control, including abortion as, “defending the unborn against their own disabilities.”
Sanger also believed that the United States should “keep the doors of immigration closed to the entrance of certain aliens whose condition is known to be detrimental to the stamina of the race, such as feeble minded, idiots, morons, insane, syphilitic, epileptic, criminal, professional prostitutes, and others in this class barred by the immigration laws of 1924.”
Sterilization and Segregation
http://dailysignal.com/2015/07/22/13-things-you-probably-dont-know-about-planned-parenthood-founder-margaret-sanger/ (Edited.)
Sanger advocated “a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is already tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.”
People judged defective should be sent to “farm lands and homesteads” where “they would be taught to work under competent instructors for the period of their entire lives.”
Sanger also advocated a proposal called the American Baby Code. “The results desired are obviously selective births,” she wrote. The code would “protect society against the propagation and increase of the unfit.”
Parental Licensing
http://dailysignal.com/2015/07/22/13-things-you-probably-dont-know-about-planned-parenthood-founder-margaret-sanger/ (Edited.)
Sanger argued that marriage licenses should provide couples with the right to “a common household” but not parenthood. Couples should have to obtain a permit to become parents:
A marriage license shall in itself give husband and wife only the right to a common household and not the right to parenthood.
No woman shall have the legal right to bear a child, and no man shall have the right to become a father, without a permit [including training] for parenthood.
Permits for parenthood shall be issued upon application by city, county, or state authorities to married couples, providing they are financially able to support the expected child, have the qualifications needed for proper rearing of the child, have no transmissible diseases, and, on the woman’s part, no medical indication that maternity is likely to result in death or permanent injury to health.
Each permit for parenthood shall be valid for no more than one birth.
Affordable Families and Efficient Motherhood
http://dailysignal.com/2015/07/22/13-things-you-probably-dont-know-about-planned-parenthood-founder-margaret-sanger/ (Edited.)
Margaret Sanger believed that large families are detrimental to society.
The most immoral practice today is breeding too many unwanted children.
Sanger also pleaded that mothering must be “efficient” and well organized.
Birth control is nothing more or less than preventing the birth of defectives.
A Spiritual Race
http://dailysignal.com/2015/07/22/13-things-you-probably-dont-know-about-planned-parenthood-founder-margaret-sanger/ (Edited.)
Margaret Sanger wrote that population control would bring about the “materials of a new race.”
She continued saying that if we are to develop a new spiritual race in America, we must keep the birth rate within the scope of our ability as a society to learn and to teach. We must not encourage reproduction beyond our capacity to assimilate our population to make the next generation physically fit, mentally capable, and socially aware.
Sanger also wrote that an excess of population must be avoided because “war, famine, poverty and oppression of workers will continue while woman makes life cheap.”
In an interview in 1957, Sanger stated that the greatest sin in the world is bringing children into the world that have disease [including addictions] from their parents, and have practically no chance to be normal human beings.
Most delinquents and prisoners were already predestined at birth.
Sanger and the Eugenicists
After World War I, Sanger increasingly addressed society's need to limit births by those least able to afford children.
The affluent and educated already limit their child-bearing, while the poor and naive lack access to contraception and information about birth-control.
On this point, Sanger found an area of overlap with eugenicists. She believed that they both sought to assist society in minimizing the numbers of the unfit, but they differed in that eugenicists insisted that a woman's first duty was to the state while Sanger contended that a woman's first duty was to herself, which is the same as her duty to the state.
Conclusion
Review
Planet Earth is undergoing massive changes now as the execution of the plan of the Most high is accelerating.
The Objectives of the Most High for Earth are:
1. One Global Government
2. Brotherhood (the collective expression of Self).
The most contentious problems of mortal society are caused by differences in race, gender, religion, and ownership of property.
These problems will be resolved only when mankind achieves the goals of one race, gender equality, one language, one religion, one global government, the shared distribution of wealth and of Earth's resources, and the segregation or elimination of inferior humans (at all levels of intelligence) until the gene pool is purged of human defectives (including amoral materialists). Ambition when manifested as greed is at yet an unrecognized defect.
Realization of these goals will require millenniums of spiritual growth as man reaches for brotherhood.
Preview
Cosmically, the plan of the Universal Father is also in the process of execution.
Read more about the plan of the Universal Father in the next page of this blog, “The Quintessential Quest.” Everyone should be aware of their potential personal role in this grandiose scheme.
National Tragedies Impact Authors
Crimes Against Fecundity – Joyce and Population Control, 1989, Mary Lowe-Evans (Edited.)
Just as the American Civil War helped to author the Faulkner books, the Great Famine, which
began in Ireland in 1845, contributed to the authorship of James Joyce's literary works.
The Famine established a certain mode of thinking, writing, and speaking in Ireland - a rhetoric and a set of attitudes distinguishable from anything prior - mainly because the Famine uniquely combined natural and economic methods of population control.
James Joyce
Crimes Against Fecundity – Joyce and Population Control, 1989, Mary Lowe-Evans (Edited.)
The Irish novelist, James Joyce, was acutely aware and outspoken in his writing about the crimes Western civilization committed against the physical, artistic, and spiritual lives of Irish citizens by attempting to modify the Irish demographic behavior for financial and ideological reasons.
Joyce's allusions to the famine commented satirically on a political economy that justified the famine of mid-nineteenth century Ireland to reduce the surplus population and to support eugenicist views.
The eugenicists insisted that the purity of the race required close monitoring of those who gave birth.
In Ireland, discussions of population control inevitably became associated with responses to the Famine that have influenced patterns and attitudes toward emigration, marriage, and celibacy ever since.
These discussions were given economic overtones by the various editions and interpretations of Thomas Robert Malthus's Essay on Population.
Malthus's Essay on Population
Crimes Against Fecundity – Joyce and Population Control, 1989, Mary Lowe-Evans (Edited.)
Malthus's Essay on Population defined the influence of population control in terms of the famine, the Malthusian doctrine, the birth control movement, and the Catholic church.
Population control was endlessly discussed during Joyce's lifetime (1882 - 1941). Joyce's works were largely inspired by that debate.
By “population control” is meant pressures (incentives or force) exerted to radically change the size or makeup of some segment of the population.
Echoes of the Famine in James Joyce
Crimes Against Fecundity – Joyce and Population Control, 1989, Mary Lowe-Evans (Edited.)
The Great Famine was a demographic and well documented benchmark in Irish history. The controversy surrounding emigration accumulated so much force during the Famine that the attitudes of the Irish are colored by it to this day.
Marriage patterns and fertility rates altered so drastically in the years following the Famine that celibate middle-aged bachelors and prolific, exhausted young mothers became the embodiment of Irish life.
Evidence of the pressures created by the force of the Famine appear throughout Joyce's work, such as in Eveline. This story in The Dubliners, is about a young woman's anguish while considering elopement. Her decision poses both positive and negative effects that make the choice simultaneously appealing and repulsive.
The main themes in “Eveline” are paralysis, Irish social conditions, and emigration. Eveline, the protagonist, stares through a window weighing her decision to marry and flee Ireland with a sailor. At the end, Eveline experiences her epiphany.
She decides not to marry.
Sexual Liberties
Crimes Against Fecundity – Joyce and Population Control, 1989, Mary Lowe-Evans (Edited.)
The birth control movement made sexual intercourse without the fear of pregnancy a public issue in Ireland. Between 1876 and 1931, birth control became legitimate, respectable, and, to some extent, a civic duty.
However, the freedom promised by choosing to conceive became conventionalized within a system that included racist and eugenicist attitudes that was as restrictive as the moral sanctions imposed by the Catholic church.
The various sexual liberties taken in Joyce's Ulysses by Bloom, his wife Molly's infidelity, and the recurring sexual indiscretions in Finnegans Wake, most of which are inconclusive and unsatisfying, incorporate conflicting values about reproduction and sexuality established in part by the birth control movement and its opponents.
Finnegans Wake places the whole complex issue of population control on trial just as real-life birth control advocates were placed on trial (like the obscenity trial of Margaret Sanger in the United States).
The characters in Joyce's novels personify the many arguments of the birth control issue.
Margaret Sanger
Wikipedia (Edited.)
Margaret Higgins Sanger (born Margaret Louise Higgins), September 14, 1879 - September 6, 1966, was an American birth control activist, sex educator, writer, and nurse. Sanger popularized the term "birth control." She opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, and established organizations that evolved into the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
Sanger used her writings and speeches primarily to promote her views on birth control. She was prosecuted for her book Family Limitation under the Comstock Act in 1914.
The Comstock Law was a federal act passed by the United States Congress under the Grant Administration on March 3, 1873, as an Act for the "Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use."
Mrs Sanger fled to Britain until it was safe to return to the US. Sanger's efforts contributed to several judicial cases that helped legalize contraception in the United States.
The Birth Control Argument
Crimes Against Fecundity – Joyce and Population Control, 1989, Mary Lowe-Evans (Edited.)
The voices of two powerful authorities in the debate on birth control were the Roman Catholic church and Thomas Robert Malthus.
The Church has influenced attitudes on every aspect of life in Ireland, including emigration and birth control.
Worldwide, the Catholic Church has insisted that birth control is a religious issue, the legitimacy of which must be determined by an institution appointed by God, like itself. (The naively self-delusional belief that the Church was appointed by God to rule in the lives of men will be discussed in a later segment.)
Malthus' proposals challenged the Church's position, making population control an economic issue, bringing the subject of birth control into the public domain.
Joyce's work responds to the ongoing conflict between Malthus and the Catholic Church. In many ways, the debate carried on by these two forces about controlling reproductive acts becomes rather absurd when carried out in the arenas of famine and world wars.
Studying Population Control
Crimes Against Fecundity – Joyce and Population Control, 1989, Mary Lowe-Evans (Edited.)
The idea that population can and must be manipulated became fixed in the mind of Western civilization with the dissemination of Thomas Malthus's first "Essay on Population," which was published in 1798.
The two postulates set forth by Malthus in that essay have influenced the thinking on population control ever since. Malthus proposed that food is necessary to the existence of man, and that the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain so.
From these two apparently innocent pronouncements arose a plethora of arguments, pro and con, about the need to control human fertility in relation to the availability of resources. Frequently, the discourse has been transformed into policy, and policy into either action or inaction.
Population control gained acceptance as a doctrine during the nineteenth century. Population was scrutinized by birth and death rates, marriage patterns, genetic characteristics, and migration.
However, sexual freedom was always at the center of the economic and political problem of population control.
Irish Resentment
Crimes Against Fecundity – Joyce and Population Control, 1989, Mary Lowe-Evans (Edited.)
An Irish newspaper noted that Ireland has a greater Ireland beyond the sea. The Irish were driven out of their homes in 1847. Their mud cabins were leveled by the battering ram.
The paper continued saying there would soon be as few Irish in Ireland as Indians in America. The paper noted that the Sassenach (a term the Gaelic inhabitants of the British Isles use to refer to the English inhabitants) tried to starve the nation at home while the land was full of crops that the British hyenas bought and then sold in Rio de Janeiro. “Ay, they drove out the peasants in hordes. Twenty thousand of them died in the coffin ships. But the evicted Irish remember the land of bondage. And they will come again and with a vengeance.”
The prophecy, implicit in the paper's tirade, that vengeance would come from America, was already being fulfilled: the avowedly violent Fenian movement, begun during the 1860s, was begun by Irishmen who had emigrated to America during the Famine.
Specific references to the Famine in his works demonstrate Joyce's thorough familiarity with its circumstances.
Two demographic characteristics that are considered typical of Ireland became evident after the Great Famine. These are postponed marriages and permanent celibacy. They reoccur frequently in Joyce's stories and writings.
Deferral of Marriages
Crimes Against Fecundity – Joyce and Population Control, 1989, Mary Lowe-Evans (Edited.)
A great change occurred between 1841 and 1851 in the proportion of Irish persons willing to postpone marriage, a change associated with events surrounding the 1845-48 famine. As a result of the Famine, the Irish began to take their economic plight more seriously and to respond to it at every level of life.
Underlying those responses was a perception, inculcated by the British, that the Famine was a Malthusian reproach, a "lesson about the tragedy of a population outstripping its means of existence."
The patterns of late marriage and celibacy have been maintained in Ireland, not for religious reasons, as many believe, but for economic ones. As a way of improving and maintaining one's standard of living, postponed marriage or celibacy was chosen as an alternative to emigration.
The high birthrate among Irish married couples is attributed to the sanctions against contraception imposed by the Catholic church and enforced (until very recently) by the government.
An Ineradicable Mark
Crimes Against Fecundity – Joyce and Population Control, 1989, Mary Lowe-Evans (Edited.)
The Great Famine left deep lingering effects on the Irish. Ireland had suffered many previous famines. But the Famine of the mid-nineteenth century was different, extending farther, lasting
longer, killing or driving out more people, and being better chronicled.
Most horrifying was the realization that the causes of the Great Famine were largely contrived.
The Famine of 1845-1851 was allowed to happen to carry out the accepted standards of an English economic philosophy regarding Ireland's population.
The Irish people were subjected to a devastating and humiliating national experience to comply with the tenets of a doctrine that relegated human beings to economic policies. According to Cecil Blanche Woodham-Smith (who wrote four popular history books, each dealing with a different aspect of the Victorian era), "the influence of laissez-faire on the treatment of Ireland during the famine is impossible to exaggerate .... the behavior of the British authorities only becomes explicable when their fanatical belief in private enterprise [is] borne in mind.”
Deaths and Trauma
Crimes Against Fecundity – Joyce and Population Control, 1989, Mary Lowe-Evans (Edited.)
The number of people who actually starved to death in the Famine was estimated to be 729,033.
With limited relief offered by soup kitchens and boiled mush, the emaciated victims were left to eat whatever was available, including rats and docile dogs. Ironically, ravenous dogs ate the flesh of the unburied human bodies.
Joyce's Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses muses about dogs and bones and grandmothers' bodies.
In addition to those who starved to death, 1,180,409 emigrants left Ireland between 1846 and 1851, and 17 per cent of them died on the ocean voyages to their destinations. The countless numbers who died of typhoid and cholera must be added to the emigration and starvation figures.
Evolution of the Famine
Crimes Against Fecundity – Joyce and Population Control, 1989, Mary Lowe-Evans (Edited.)
At the outbreak of the potato blight no one thought of accusing England of a lack of concern about the potato disease, but as the Famine spread and official relief was not forthcoming, it became clear that England had adopted a policy of doing nothing.
The English government credited the Famine for reducing the "surplus" population of Ireland, which the English government desired. Invoking the Malthusian doctrine, the Famine provided England with an opportunity to lower the population of Ireland - a plot it had been attempting to carry out since 1829, when its land clearance policies began to be enforced. The English maintained the famine was providential.
The "docility" of the people was guaranteed by their indebtedness to their landlords, their colonial status, the subjugation of the Irish people by the Catholic Church, and their starving condition.
Duplicity of the Land Owners
Crimes Against Fecundity – Joyce and Population Control, 1989, Mary Lowe-Evans (Edited.)
The most salient feature of the Famine was its hypocrisy. While the potato crop had failed, it was not the only crop grown in Ireland. However, it was the only crop that could sustain the Irish year after year given the minimal amount of land allotted for their personal use.
The remainder of the land was dedicated to crops used to pay the land rental fees to the English landlords. Those crops remained healthy during the Famine. It was not a lack of foodstuffs that caused the famine. The produce of most of the tenant leased land was used to pay the landlords' rent.
There was famine in the midst of plenty. This was the same race of landlords to whom Swift
made his modest proposal (in 1729) to roast Irish babies for English consumption.
Contemptuous and Deliberate
Crimes Against Fecundity – Joyce and Population Control, 1989, Mary Lowe-Evans (Edited.)
Added to the insult of feeding the English while its own people starved was the injury to Ireland of the land clearances.
Beginning about 1829, when tillage had ceased to pay the absentee landlords (70 percent of the landlords did not live in Ireland) as much as they desired, the English inaugurated a campaign calling for the expulsion of the Irish peasants from the land, the razing of their houses, and the conversion of agricultural lands into pasture.
Ireland was transformed from a granary to a stockyard and dairy for Great Britain. During the Famine, the number of clearances increased.
The Irish peasants, desperate to keep at least a roof over their heads, dared not touch the produce "marked" by the landlords for rent. That produce - enough cattle, wheat, oats, and barley to feed twice the population of Ireland - was used to maintain the economic and physical health of England.
Speranza's “The Famine Year”
http://ireland-calling.com/the-famine-year/
“The Famine Year” is a poem, written by Lady Wilde (1824-1896). Lady Wilde was the mother of Oscar Wilde, Irish playwright, novelist, essayist and poet. Lady Wilde used the pseudonym, Speranza (Italian for hope). The following is the first verse of “The Famine Year.”
“Weary men, what reap ye? - Golden corn for the stranger.
What sow ye? - Human corpses that wait for the avenger.
Fainting forms, hunger‐stricken, what see you in the offing?
Stately ships to bear our food away, amid the stranger's scoffing.
There's a proud array of soldiers - what do they round your door?
They guard our masters' granaries from the thin hands of the poor.
Pale mothers, wherefore weeping? - Would to God that we were dead
Our children swoon before us, and we cannot give them bread.”
Lady Wilde published her poem in “The Nation,” which is the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the United States, and the most widely read weekly journal of liberal progressive political and cultural news, opinion, and analysis. It was founded in1865 with the stated mission to "make an earnest effort to bring to the discussion of political and social questions a really critical spirit, and to wage war upon the vices of violence, exaggeration, and misrepresentation by which so much of the political writing of the day is marred."
Genocide for Profit
Crimes Against Fecundity – Joyce and Population Control, 1989, Mary Lowe-Evans (Edited.)
Responses to the condition of the Irish ran the gamut from sympathy to scorn. Philanthropic and religious groups in America, the British colonies, and even England sent help.
The official British response was largely judgmental, and profoundly economic. In 1847, Sir Charles Trevelyan declared in Parliament that "being altogether beyond the power of man, the cure [for the Irish Question and overpopulation] had been applied by the direct stroke of an all-wise Providence in a manner as unexpected and as unthought of as it is likely to be effectual."
Based on the comments of Trevelyan and other public officials, it was concluded that "in the eyes of most of the members of Parliament, England was exonerated ... because all agreed that there must be no interference with the natural course of trade."
Basically, the Famine was genocide by the British against the Irish, meaning that the famine was part of a deliberate policy of planned extermination.
Michael Davitt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Davitt (Edited.)
Michael Davitt, whose family had been evicted from their cottage in County Mayo in 1851, gives one of the most scathing of the turn-of-the-century accounts of the Famine. Davitt quotes a
Catholic bishop speaking from his pulpit in New York at this time:
"They call it God's famine .... No! God's famine is known by the general scarcity of food which is its consequence. There is no general scarcity....But political economy, finding Ireland too poor to buy the produce of its own labor, exported that harvest to a better market, and left the people to die of famine or live by alms."
What money the government did provide for the relief of Ireland was either tied up in so much official red tape that little of it benefited the people or was designated for the building of useless roads which led nowhere.
Financially Assisted Emigration
Crimes Against Fecundity – Joyce and Population Control, 1989, Mary Lowe-Evans (Edited.)
It became clear that an effective way for England to relieve its conscience publicly while simultaneously profiting from the Famine was to provide assistance for the evicted tenants to emigrate.
One Irishman said the landlords discovered that the best plan would be to get rid of those who were a burden upon them while at the same time publishing to the world, as an act of brotherly love and kindness, a deal of crafty, calculating selfishness.
Financially assisted emigration became both penance and absolution for England. It made it appear the people forced to leave Ireland were doing so for money.
[Emigrants were given free passage and suitable clothing for the journey. They were also provided with a small amount of financial assistance.]
The Soup Kitchens
Crimes Against Fecundity – Joyce and Population Control, 1989, Mary Lowe-Evans (Edited.)
A charitable gesture made by the British was the establishment of soup kitchens, the most notorious of which was erected in Dublin.
Perhaps nothing during the famine years more appropriately symbolized England's "helping hand" to Ireland than Soyer's Dublin soup kitchen established for the starving masses who flocked into urban areas in search of employment and food.
“On April 5, 1847, with the beating of drums, the sounding of horns, the Union Jack proudly flying from the kitchen's smoking chimney, and a splendidly attired gentry nodding its approval, the British government fed the Irish a soup incapable of keeping a newborn cat alive.” (Paddy's Lament, Ireland 1846-1847: Prelude to Hatred by Thomas Gallagher.)
[Alexis Soyer, born in 1809, was a high-profile French chef. It has been argued that he was among the first “celebrity chefs.” In The Great Famine and the Irish Diaspora in America, Jillian Strang and Joyce Toomre note that Soyer was an “affable and eccentric chef with a strong sense of showmanship and a flair for publicity."]
Catholic Church Teaching
Crimes Against Fecundity – Joyce and Population Control, 1989, Mary Lowe-Evans (Edited.)
The Catholic Church had instilled a scrupulousness of conscience into Irish thinking that undermined secular life and individuality.
This scrupulousness manifested itself in docility, passivity, apathy, and a submissiveness to the Church (that threatened eternal burning in Hell for any transgressions of the Church's teachings).
The Church's rigidity, especially with regard to sexual matters demanded celibacy in young people, unrestricted large families on married couples (who could not afford them), and driving the most robust and independent thinking members of the population out of the country.
As a youth, James Joyce was a poor Irish Catholic, the son of a woman who experienced seventeen pregnancies and died at the age of forty-five. Like many Irish fathers, Joyce's father was an alcoholic, mired in a hopeless social and economic situation.
At age 22, James Joyce fled Ireland into self-imposed exile late in 1904, taking with him Nora Barnacle, a young woman from Galway who was working as a hotel chambermaid in Dublin.
Joyce had two children with Nora. They eventually married in 1931.
Stiffening of the Church's Position
Crimes Against Fecundity – Joyce and Population Control, 1989, Mary Lowe-Evans (Edited.)
When the Malthusian League disbanded in 1927, it had published well over three million pieces of literature and delivered thousands of lectures. Evidence of the League's success might be seen in the acceptance of methods other than sexual abstinence to avoid parenthood, which was granted by the Anglican Church at the Lambeth Conference of 1930.
Meanwhile, in Ireland, the Censorship of Publications Act of 1929 made it a crime to print, publish, sell, or distribute any book or periodical that advocated or might be supposed to advocate the unnatural prevention of conception.
On December 31, 1930, Pope Pius XI responded to the Resolutions of the Lambeth Conference with Casti Connubii, an encyclical that adamantly reasserted the Church's stand against artificial contraception.
Non-Sacred Pursuits of the Catholic Church
Crimes Against Fecundity – Joyce and Population Control, 1989, Mary Lowe-Evans (Edited.)
Joyce fortified his case against the Church as a cause of emigration by depicting the "spectacle of the world in thrall" to the Church. This bewildering awe of the Church fills Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses with "the fire of courage" to leave Ireland.
The Church that Joyce portrays lives parasitically on the meager earnings of the faithful who would be better off to forsake their faith or practice it elsewhere.
The connection Joyce makes between emigration and expenditures for Church structures may owe something to Horace Plunkett's, Ireland in the New Century. Plunkett noted that in Ireland the multiplication (in inverse ratio to a declining population) of costly and elaborate monastic and convent institutions, involved enormous annual expenditures.
The Beginning of the English-Irish Religious War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AntiCatholicism_in_the_United_Kingdom#Ireland_under_British
control (Edited.)
Ireland's Catholic majority was subjected to persecution from the time of the English Reformation under Henry VIII. [The break with the Vatican was effected by a series of acts of Parliament passed between1532 and 1534, among them the 1534 Act of Supremacy, which declared that Henry was the "Supreme Head on earth of the Church of England".]
The persecution of Catholics in Ireland intensified when the Gaelic clan system was completely destroyed by the governments of Elizabeth I and her successor, James I. Land was appropriated either by the religious conversion of native Anglo-Irish aristocrats from Catholic to Anglican or by forcible seizure.
Much of the land of the dispossessed Catholics was given to Anglican and Protestant settlers from Britain.
[The English reformation in England, coincided with Martin Luther's posting of his 95 Theses on the door of a church in Wittenberg, Germany on October 31, 1517, which formally began the Protestant Reformation.]
Institutional Anti-Catholicism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Catholicism_in_the_United_Kingdom#17th_and_18th_century_polemics (Edited.)
The Act of Supremacy in 1534 declared the English crown to be the only supreme head on earth of the Church in England in place of the pope. Any act of allegiance to the pope was considered treasonous because the papacy claimed both spiritual and political power over its followers.
The beliefs that underlie the sort of strong anti-Catholicism once seen in the United Kingdom were summarized by William Blackstone in his Commentaries on the Laws of England:
“As to papists, what has been said of the Protestant dissenters would hold equally strong for a general toleration of them; provided their separation was founded only upon difference of opinion in religion, and their principles did not also extend to a subversion of the civil government. If once they could be brought to renounce the supremacy of the pope, they might quietly enjoy their seven sacraments, their purgatory, and auricular confession; their worship of relics and images; nay even their transubstantiation. But while they acknowledge a foreign power, superior to the sovereignty of the kingdom, they cannot complain if the laws of that kingdom will not treat them upon the footing of good subjects....”
Anti-Irish Prejudice in America
https://longislandwins.com/news/national/why-did-the-irish-fight-when-they-were-so-despised-2/ (Edited.)
In the mid-1800s, the abuse that newly arrived Irish in the US received from the anti-immigrant “Know Nothings” was criminal.
[The Know Nothing or American Party (called nativists) was a political party active in the 1850s to keep power out of the hands of immigrants and Roman Catholics.]
Mob attacks, vandalized churches, and bars to employment (“No Irish Need Apply”) were all used to keep Irish immigrants out of the American mainstream. But the worst abuse came from the press. The Irish immigrants - poor, dislocated from their homeland, tortured by the memories of families members starving to death during the Famine - read about their sub-human character in popular newspapers.
Typical of the invective carried in major newspapers was a piece from the Chicago Tribune published in 1855: “Who does not know that the most depraved, debased, worthless and irredeemable drunkards and sots which curse the community are Irish Catholics?”
Irish Service to the Union
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Americans_in_the_American_Civil_War (Edited.)
Seven Union Army generals were Irish-born. An estimated 150,000 Irish-Americans fought for the Union during the Civil War.
Irish-Americans living in the Union states often formed their own regiments, notably the 69th New York State Volunteers. The Volunteers flew a green flag with a golden harp on it, symbolizing Ireland. The green flag was carried in addition to the normal regimental and national colors. The 69th was probably the only regiment to carry five colors into battle during the American Civil War.
At the 1862 Battle of Fredericksburg (Virginia), the 69th Regiment suffered 41.4% casualties while charging up Marye's Heights.
After the First Battle of Bull Run, the 69th New York Infantry was incorporated into a larger unit, the Irish Brigade.
The Hubris of Churches
Religious Peace
Religious peace (brotherhood) cannot exist unless all religions are willing to completely divest themselves of all ecclesiastical authority by surrendering any concept of spiritual supremacy.
Humans will not experience religious liberty (equality among religions) without religious wars unless all religions consent to the transfer of all religious domination to the superhuman level - to God himself.
The kingdom of heaven in the hearts of men will create religious unity (not necessarily uniformity) because any and all religious groups composed of such religious believers will be free from all notions of ecclesiastical authority.
Origin of the Christian Church
In the enthusiasm of Pentecost, (the Christian festival celebrating the descent of the Holy Spirit on the disciples of Jesus after his Ascension), Peter unintentionally inaugurated a new religion, the religion of the risen and glorified Christ.
The Apostle Paul later transformed Peter's new gospel into Christianity, a religion embodying Paul's own theological views and portraying his own personal experience on the road to Damascus.
[On the road to Damascus, Paul was knocked from his horse by a bright flash of light, and he heard a voice say to him, "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting." Prior to that moment, he had been called Saul, and he was a Pharisee who persecuted the followers of Jesus.]
The New Testament
The Gospel of the Kingdom (sparsely documented by the apostles) is founded on the personal religious experience of the incarnated Jesus of Galilee.
Conversely, the New Testament of Christianity is founded almost exclusively on the personal religious experience of the Apostle Paul. Almost all of the New Testament is devoted, not to the portrayal of the significant and inspiring religious life of Jesus, but to a discussion of Paul’s religious experience and his personal religious convictions.
The only notable exceptions to this statement, aside from certain parts of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, are the Book of Hebrews and the Epistle of James. Even Peter, in his writing, only discussed the personal religious life of Jesus one time.
The Religion of Jesus
Some day a reformation in the Christian church may strike deep enough to get back to the unadulterated religious teachings of Jesus, the true author and apogee of our faith.
Jesus’ life in the flesh portrays a transcendent religious growth from his childhood ideas of primitive awe and human reverence up through years of personal spiritual communion until he arrived at that advanced and exalted status of the consciousness of his oneness with the Father.
In one short life as a human, Jesus traversed the experience of religious spiritual progression which man begins on earth and ordinarily achieves only at the conclusion of his long sojourn in the spirit training schools of the successive levels of the pre-Paradise career.
This progressing ascent from the human to the divine was an exclusively mortal achievement. And when he had attained divinity, he was still the same human Jesus, the Son of Man as well as the Son of God.
The Human Jesus
Paul’s Christianity made sure of the adoration of the divine Christ, but it lost sight of the struggling and valiant human Jesus of Galilee, who, by the valor of his personal religious faith and the heroism of his indwelling Adjuster, ascended from the lowly levels of humanity to become one with divinity.
The life experience of the human Jesus is the new and living way whereby all mortals may ascend from humanity to divinity.
Mortals in all stages of spirituality and on all worlds may find in the personal life of Jesus that which will strengthen and inspire them as they progress from the lowest spirit levels up to the highest divine values, from the beginning to the end of all personal religious experience.
The Religion of Personal Experience
Paul founded a religion in which the glorified Jesus became the object of worship and the brotherhood consisted of only fellow believers in the divine Christ.
Jesus founded a religion of personal experience based upon: 1. doing the will of God; and 2. serving the entire human brotherhood.
Jesus was a wholly consecrated mortal dedicated to doing his Father’s will. It was this very singleness of purpose and unselfish devotion that enabled him to effect such extraordinary progress in the conquest of the human mind (personality) in his short life.
Jesus blessed the poor because they were usually sincere and pious; he condemned the rich because they were usually wanton, materialistic, and irreligious. Of course, he would equally condemn the irreligious pauper and commend the consecrated and worshipful man of wealth.
Jesus delivered men from the slavery of superstitious taboos. Also, Jesus did not share Paul’s pessimistic view of humankind. The Master looked upon men as the sons of God and foresaw a magnificent and eternal future for those who chose survival.
Jesus offered no advice for social advancement. His was a religious mission, and religion is an exclusively individual experience. The spirit indwelling each individual's mind is the only priest required.
Rituals and Priests
It is only when a ritual has been correctly carried out that the ceremony possesses compelling power over spirits. Man’s slowly evolving mind conceived that the technique of ritual was the decisive factor in its efficacy. Therefore, it was inevitable that the early shamans would evolve into a priesthood trained to direct the meticulous practice of the ritual.
Rituals are often at first social, later becoming economic and finally acquiring the righteousness and dignity of religious ceremony.
Priests evolved from shamans up through oracles, diviners, singers, dancers, weather makers, guardians of religious relics, and temple custodians, to the status of actual directors of religious worship.
The priesthoods have done much to delay scientific development and to hinder spiritual progress, but they have contributed to the stabilization of civilization and to the enhancement of certain kinds of culture. Many modern priests have ceased to function as directors of the ritual of the worship of God, having turned their attention to theology - the attempt to define God.
Priests have been a millstone about the neck of the races, but the true religious leaders have been invaluable in pointing the way to higher and better realities.
The Christian Religion
The Christian religion arose through the commingling of the following teachings, influences, beliefs, cults, and personal individual attitudes:
1. The Melchizedek teachings, which are the basis for all the religions of The West and Near East that have arisen in the last four thousand years.
2. The Hebraic system of morality, ethics, theology, and belief in both Providence and the supreme Yahweh.
3. The Zoroastrian conception of the struggle between cosmic good and evil, which influenced both Judaism and Mithraism. The doctrines of the Iranian prophet, Zoroaster, became a potent factor in determining the theologic and philosophic cast and structure of the dogmas, tenets, and cosmology of the Greek and Roman versions of the teachings of Jesus.
4. The mystery cults, especially Mithraism and the Phrygian worship of the Great Mother shaped Christian beliefs. Even the legends of the birth of Jesus on Earth became tainted with the Roman version of Mithras. Mithra was believed to have been born on December 25, circa 500 BC. His birth was witnessed by shepherds and by Magi who carried gifts.
5. The fact of the human life and reality of Jesus of Nazareth as the glorified Christ, the Son of God.
6. The personal viewpoint of Paul of Tarsus. Mithraism was the dominant religion of Tarsus during his adolescence. (Paul never dreamed that his letters to his converts would someday be regarded by later Christians as the “word of God.”)
7. The philosophy of the Greeks, which was more in harmony with Paul’s version of Christianity and became an important factor in the success of Christianity in the West. Greek philosophy, coupled with Paul’s theology, still forms the basis of European ethics.
The original teachings of Jesus have lost their potentially universal appeal. Christianity is not the religion of Jesus. It has largely forgotten the Master’s personal gospel: the Fatherhood of God and the universal brotherhood of all men.
Crimes of the Catholic Church Against the Self
Human Institutions
God has not appointed any human institutions to act in his name.
The justification of the Roman Catholic Church for its claim that the church was appointed by God to be his divine representative on Earth is the statement in the New Testament attributed to Matthew: “Peter thou art rock and upon this rock I will build my church.” (Matt. 16:18.)
The so-called Gospel according to Matthew is the record of the Master’s life written for the edification of converted Jewish Christians. Matthew's Gospel portrays Jesus as a son of David, picturing him as showing great respect for the law and the Jewish prophets.
However, the Apostle Matthew did not write this Gospel. It was written by Isador, one of his disciples. Matthew wrote his notes about Jesus in Aramaic in AD 40. Isador wrote the Gospel according to Matthew in the year 71 AD in Greek.
It is difficult to credit authenticity to the Catholic Church's reliance upon “Matthew's” alleged statement since it was written seventy one years after the death of Jesus and it was “filtered” to fit the intended Jewish audience.
The Rock
When Jesus accepted Simon Zebedee as one of his apostles, he gave him the nickname “Peter” (meaning rock) in jest because Simon was well known to Jesus and Simon's friends as an erratic and impulsive individual.
Just as human marriage is conceived of by some groups of mortals as being consummated by divine intervention, this belief lead to the concept of the indissolubility of the marital state regardless of the circumstances or wishes of the contracting parties. (“What God has joined together let no man put asunder.”) But the very existence of divorce argues that Deity does not bind marital unions together. If God actually joined any two things or persons together, they would remain joined until the divine will decreed their separation.
Similarly, the the crimes of the Roman Catholic Church negate any possibility that God appointed the church as his divine institution. It is unlikely that God would tolerate the Church's misconduct performed under his auspices. The “rock” explanation does not support the divinely appointed claim of the Catholic Church.
Indoctrination of Catholic Children
Saint Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556), was the principal founder of the Society of Jesus, a religious order of the Catholic Church serving the Pope. Members of the order are called Jesuits.
A Jesuit maxim widely attributed to Ignatius Loyola is, “Give me the child for the first seven years and I will give you the man [or woman].”
Catholic children were taught that sins that broke the Church's rules were “mortal” meaning these sins killed the soul and earned punishment in the eternal fires of Hell.
Such sins could consist of being late for Mass on Sunday, or missing Mass, or breaking the Holy Communion fast from midnight until after orally receiving the sacred host.
In addition, children were taught that impure thoughts, words and deeds - such as touching their private parts, or having “dirty thoughts” were mortal sins. Catholics became bound in the chains of an arbitrary morality through fear.
Teach Love not Fear
Jesus taught his apostles that fear of punishment was not the way to instruct people about God.
“I have come into the world to put love in the place of fear, joy in the place of sorrow, confidence in the place of dread, loving service and appreciative worship in the place of slavish bondage and meaningless ceremonies.”
But, it is true of those who sit in darkness that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. But when their light is brighter, the sons of God are led to praise the Infinite for what he is rather than to fear him.
Persecution of the Jews
https://www.ushmm.org/research/the-center-for-advanced-holocaust-studies/programs-ethics-religion-the-holocaust/articles-and-resources/christian-persecution-of-jews-over-the-centuries/christian-persecution-of-jews-over-the-centuries (Edited.)
The correspondence of Pope Gregory I tells about attempts to force the conversion of the Jews. From his letters we learn a few things about Jews in the empire around the year 600 AD. Some were deeply involved in the slave trade. Jews lived untroubled lives among Christians in certain regions and were dealt with cruelly in others. The papal correspondence was, by and large, protective of Jewish rights, while assuming their subordinate position in society.
In the century following Gregory’s papacy, the expulsion of Jews began in Europe; from France under King Dagobert (626) and under the Spanish monarchy (with church collusion) when in 694 the Jews were required to choose between conversion and slavery.
Christians assumed that the Jews were being divinely punished for not converting to the Christian belief.
In the years 500-1500 the Jews, as a religious and a cultural minority, were often preyed upon by the Christian majority. The Jews were deemed guilty of Jesus’ crucifixion.
Still, these infringements of civil and social liberty never approached the point of the elimination of the Jewish people entirely. This “Final Solution” was developed in the Nazi era.
Jews, Usury, and Expulsion
https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/23845403/DORIN-DISSERTATION-2015.pdf?sequence=1 (Edited.)
In 1231, Simon de Montfort (Earl of Leicester, England) ordered the expulsion of the Jews of Leicester. Although the charter ordering the expulsion declares Montfort made the decision for the sake of his soul, Robert Grosseteste, then the archdeacon of Leicester, praised the expulsion as an effort to liberate Christians from the oppression of Jewish usury.
Montfort’s action should probably be seen not so much as a reflection of prevailing English sentiments, but “as an extension of his family’s earlier anti-Semitism crusading in the south of France. Montfort’s action resonated among his contemporaries, and it was followed by a series of expulsions from other English towns.
The Crusades – “Holy War”
The Crusades were the series of wars in which European Christians sought to capture the holy places under Muslim control between the 11th and 13th centuries AD. The series of Crusade battles continued for nearly two hundred years.
The Crusades began when the Turks, who had previously converted to Islam, occupied land near Constantinople (now Istanbul) as well as regions of the Middle East, including Jerusalem.
Alexios, the Byzantine emperor, viewed the Muslim conquest as a threat to Christianity, and called on Pope Urban II for support in repelling the invaders.
Pope Urban II urged Christian knights and noblemen to win back the Holy Land for which they would receive remission of their sins and save their souls by becoming "Soldiers of Christ."
The Inquisitions – Suppressing Threats to Church Authority
From Wikipedia (Edited.)
The Roman Inquisition (formally the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition), was a system of tribunals developed by the Holy See (the office of the pope) during the second half of the 16th century.
The Roman Inquisition was responsible for prosecuting individuals accused of a wide array of crimes relating to religious doctrine or alternate religious doctrines or beliefs. Catholic dogma was the only measure required as proof of guilt.
In the period after the Medieval Inquisition, the Roman Inquisition was one of three different manifestations of the wider Catholic Inquisition along with the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions.
Pope Alexander VI – Root Source of Protestant Reformation
http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1981842_1981844_1981863,00.html (Edited.)
Pope Alexander VI, born Rodrigo de Borja, was Pope from 11 August 1492 until his death in 1503. He is one of the most controversial of the Renaissance popes. Hardly celibate, he acknowledged fathering several children by his mistresses.
Alexander VI was a member of the prominent and wealthy Borgia family. He bought his papacy and then he appointed family members to powerful positions, including his sons and family members of his mistress.
While some of the controversy surrounding Alexander VI is well-founded, other accusations like his arranging murders or hosting wild orgies inside the papal palace may be inventions. He did, however, father four children with his mistress. He used his daughter Lucrezia as a political pawn - marrying her off three times in the hope of securing alliances and power. There is speculation that Alexander VI fathered one of Lucrezia's children.
Pope Stephen VI – A Vindictive Christian
http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1981842_1981844_1981863,00.html (Edited.)
Pope Stephen VI (sometimes known as Stephen VII) despised his predecessor, Pope Formosus, so much that even his death did not satisfy him. Stephen VI had Formosus' nine-month-old corpse dug up, redressed in his papal vestments, and seated on the papal throne so he could be tried.
Formosus was found guilty. As punishment, three fingers of Formosus' corpse were cut off (the three fingers on the right hand used to give blessings). The corpse was then stripped of his sacred vestments, dressed as a layman, dragged through the streets and dumped in the Tiber River.
Pope John XII – Disgraced the Papacy
http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1981842_1981844_1981863,00.html (Edited.)
Octavian, Pope John XII, was the only son of Duke Alberic II of Spoleto, then ruler of Rome, who ordered Octavian's election to pope (Dec. 16, 955) when he was only 18 years of age.
Octavian changed his name to John, becoming the first pope to change his name upon taking office.
With his election to the highest office of the western church, Pope John XII proved himself totally inept at the task of leading Christendom. His interests were worldly, not spiritual, preferring military battles and hunting. He was a notorious adulterer and liar.
The prestige of the papacy suffered enormously during the reign of John XII (955 until his assassination in 964).
Pope Urban VI – Splintered the Church
http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1981842_1981844_1981863,00.html (Edited.)
Urban VI (Bartolomeo Prignano), an Italian, was elected to succeed Pope Gregory XI in April 1378 in a move intended to placate Romans who were angry about the decades of French domination of the papacy.
Once installed, Urban VI alienated his followers with his harsh leadership style. Thirteen French Cardinals, who feared that their new leader would favor his fellow Italians fled Rome, declaring within months that Urban VI's election was "null because it was not made freely but under fear."
On Sept. 20, 1378, the French Cardinals chose their own Pope, French Cardinal Robert of Geneva, who became the Anti-pope Clement VII. The competing papacies launched a schism that lasted for four decades.
Pope Benedict IX – Sold the Papacy
http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1981842_1981844_1981863,00.html (Edited.)
Pope Benedict IX was not respected. St. Peter Damian called him a "demon from hell in the disguise of a priest." In his third book of Dialogues, Pope Victor III wrote of Benedict IX as having a "life as a pope so vile, so foul, so execrable, that I shudder to think of it."
Benedict IX resigned in 1045 becoming the first pope in history to sell the papacy. The buyer was the priest John Gratian (Pope Gregory VI). Benedict IX later refused to face charges of simony (making a profit out of selling sacred things) and was excommunicated.
Pope Leo X – Sold Pardons from Purgatory
http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1981842_1981844_1981863,00.html (Edited.)
Pope Leo X (of the Medici family) had expensive tastes. He built up the Vatican Library, accelerated the construction of St. Peter's Basilica and spent money extravagantly on works of art. (The Medici family were patrons of Michelangelo, painter of the Sistine Chapel ceiling.)
Within two years of becoming pope, Leo X completely drained the papal treasury. To recoup, Leo X began selling off pieces of the Vatican palace - furniture, dishes, jewels and statues of the apostles. He also commissioned the sale of indulgences, which allowed Catholics to buy their way out of Purgatory.
[Purgatory is a belief of Roman Catholics in a condition or place in which the souls of those dying repentant undergo a temporal punishment that remains to be served by the sinner.]
The Catholic priest, Martin Luther, objected to what he considered the selling and buying of salvation. Leo X was dismissive of Luther's complaints. By failing to take Luther's complaint seriously, Leo X contributed greatly to the dissolution of the Western church and the rise of the Protestant Reformation.
Pope Nicholas III- Family Favoritism
http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1981842_1981844_1981863,00.html (Edited.)
Giovanni Gaetano Orsini, was a member of the prominent and influential Orsini family of Italy.
The Orsini family begot three other popes: Stephen II (752-757), succeeded by Paul I (757-767), and Celestine III (1191-1198).
Pope Nicholas III appeared to lack a religious vocation. He did not become a priest until he became pope.
For the three years of Nicholas III's reign (1277-1280), he distributed principalities in the Papal States among members of his family, providing them with land and political power.
[The Papal States were territories of central Italy over which the pope had sovereignty. The nepotism of Pope Nicholas III earned him a place in Dante's eighth circle of Hell. Dante's “Inferno” describes Dante's journey through Hell. “Inferno” is the first part of Dante Alighieri's 14th-century epic poem, The Divine Comedy.]
Pope Boniface VIII – Seized Temporal Powers
http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1981842_1981844_1981863,00.html (Edited.)
Boniface VIII was Pope from 24 December 1294 to his death in 1303. He was one of the most ardent advocates of papal authority. What started as a minor squabble with King Philip IV of France over a government's ability to tax clergy members escalated until Boniface VIII excommunicated King Phillip.
Pope Boniface then issued a decree declaring that both spiritual and temporal power were under the pope's jurisdiction, and that kings were subordinate to the power of the Roman pontiff.
In addition, Boniface VIII sent mercenaries to destroy people's castles, declared all of the prominent Italian Colonna family's property forfeited and proceeded to parcel their land out among his family members. In September 1303, an army led by the Colonna family kidnapped the Pope and demanded that he abdicate. Held in captivity for many days, Boniface refused. He survived the captivity experience and returned to Rome, but died a month later.
Clement V – The Great Disruptor
http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1981842_1981844_1981863,00.html (Edited.)
Clement V (1305-1314) reversed Boniface VIII's anti-France decrees and appointed 23 new French Cardinals, but his attempts to make amends were short-lived.
When France's King Phillip IV charged the Knights Templar with heresy, Clement V abolished them before King Phillip could (thereby retaining the guise of the pope's supreme power).
Clement V played countries against one another, instituted oppressively high taxes and openly gave land to his supporters and family. Clement V had no qualms about his willingness to be bribed. For this reason, Dante also placed him in his inferno.
The Knights Templar
From Wikipedia (Edited.)
The Knights Templar was a Catholic military order founded in 1119 and active from about 1129 to 1312. It was officially recognized in 1139 by the papal bull “Omne Datum Optimum of the Holy See.”
The Knights Templar became a favorite charity throughout Christendom and grew rapidly in membership and power.
Templar knights were among the most skilled fighting units of the Crusades. They built fortifications across Europe and the Holy Land. Non-combatant members of the order managed a large economic infrastructure throughout Christendom. They developed innovative financial techniques that were an early form of banking.
When the Holy Land was lost, support for the Templars faded. Rumors about the Templars' secret initiation ceremony created distrust, and King Phillip IV of France (who was deeply in debt to the order) took advantage of the situation to gain control over them. In 1307, he had many of the order's members in France arrested, tortured them to give false confessions, and burned them at the stake.
Pope Pius X - Empowered Priests
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2554748/How-Pope-called-Pius-turned-confessional-box-paradise-paedophiles-From-leading-Catholic-writer-devastating-expos-Vatican-ruling.html
Pius X, Pope from 1903-1914, decreed in 1910 that children must make their first confession at the age of seven.
Pius also declared that all Catholics, including children, should confess weekly rather than once or twice a year, as was traditional.
That papal decision proved lamentable. Constant confession created ideal opportunities for salacious priests to seduce females, to sexually abuse children, and to stay abreast of activities in the community.
Pope Pius XII – Betrayed the Jews
https://www.vanityfair.com/style/1999/10/pope-pius-xii-199910, by John Cornwell. (Edited.)
Pius XII reigned as Pope from 2 March 1939 to his death in 1958.
In 1964, a play by a young German named Rolf Hochhuth. Der Stellvertreter (The Deputy), was staged on Broadway. The play depicted Eugenio Pacelli (Pope Pius XII) as a ruthless cynic, interested more in the Vatican’s stock portfolio than in the fate of the Jews.
To exonerate Pope Pius XII, writer John Cornwell obtained permission of the Vatican to review depositions given under oath gathered to support the process for Pacelli’s canonization, as well as the archives of the Vatican Secretariat of State (the foreign office of the Holy See). He also drew on German sources relating to then Cardinal Secretary of State Pacelli’s activities as the negotiator of the Reichskonkordat, a treaty negotiated between the Vatican and the emergent Nazi party in 1933.
The material amounted to an indictment more scandalous than Hochhuth’s play. The evidence showed Pacelli was by the proof of his own words, anti-Jewish. It revealed that he had helped Hitler to power by undermining potential Catholic resistance in Germany. It further showed that he had implicitly denied and trivialized the Holocaust, despite having reliable knowledge of its true extent.
Crimes Against Humanity
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/the-pope/8760103/Pope-accused-of-crimes-against-humanity.html
In modern times, in formal complaints to the International Criminal Court, the Pope and top Vatican cardinals have been accused of crimes against humanity for sheltering guilty Catholic priests.
In the 20th and 21st centuries, cases of child sexual abuse by Catholic priests, nuns and members of religious orders have led to numerous allegations, investigations, trials and convictions.
The sexually abused children include boys and girls with the majority between the ages of 11 and 14. The accusations began to receive wide publicity in the late 1980s. In many cases, the molester was accused of abuse for decades. Such allegations were frequently made by mature adults and older youths years after the abuse occurred.
Cases have also been brought against members of the Catholic hierarchy who covered up sex abuse allegations and moved abusive priests to other parishes where the abuse continued.
The crimes of the Catholic Church against the Self noted in this segment should suffice to show that the Church is a human organization. It is not divinely appointed. Nor is any other organized church on Earth divinely appointed. Organized religions may have social benefits, but true religion is a personal experience.
Catholic Church Sacraments – Doctrinal
The sacraments of the Catholic Church are religious ceremonies - rites of passage that infer a blessing or grace on people who receive the sacraments.
The Church administers seven sacraments. They consist of:
- the sacraments of initiation into the Church - Baptism, Confirmation of membership in the Church, and Eucharist (ingestion of the actual body of Christ transformed by the priest from bread and wine);
- the sacraments of healing - Penance (cleansing of sins through Confession), and Anointing of the Sick (formerly called Extreme Unction);
- the sacraments of service - Holy Orders (ordination to priesthood) and Matrimony.
The sacraments were developed through theology (religious theory). Allusions to the “sacraments” in the bible were Jesus speaking metaphorically or honoring Jewish tradition (such as baptism with water to symbolically wash away sin).
No proof of credibility is required if belief is required as an article of faith.
The Remembrance Supper
Knowing his arrest and death were imminent, Jesus planned the Remembrance Supper as a commemorative final meal with his twelve apostles. It was a final night of instruction to summarize the lessons he taught them during their time together. He began by washing the feet of the apostles – teaching that the Master willingly does that service which his apostles were unwilling to do for one another earlier in the evening. Next, Jesus dismissed his betrayer, the apostle, Judas.
Later, when they brought Jesus the third cup of wine, the “cup of blessing,” Jesus arose from the couch and, taking the cup in his hands, blessed it, saying:“Take this cup, all of you, and drink of it. This shall be the cup of my remembrance. This is the cup of the blessing of a new dispensation [the divine re-ordering of the affairs of the world] of grace and truth. This shall be to you the emblem of the bestowal and ministry of the divine Spirit of Truth.” [The Spirit of Truth replaces the physical presence of Jesus.]
When they had finished drinking this new cup of remembrance, the Master took up the bread and, after giving thanks, broke it in pieces and, directing them to pass it around, said: “Take this bread of remembrance and eat it. I have told you that I am the bread of life. And this bread of life is the united life of the Father and the Son in one gift. The word of the Father, as revealed in the Son, is indeed the bread of life.”
The Lost Purpose of the Remembrance Supper
In instituting this remembrance supper, the Master resorted to parables and symbols. He employed symbols (wine and bread) because he wanted to teach certain great spiritual truths in a manner to make it difficult for men to attach precise interpretations and definite meanings to his words. In this way he sought to prevent successive generations from crystallizing his teaching and binding down his spiritual meanings with the chains of tradition and dogma.
In the establishment of the only ceremony or sacrament associated with his whole life mission, Jesus took great pains to suggest his meanings rather than to commit himself to precise definitions. He did not wish to destroy the individual’s concept of divine mental communion by establishing a precise format. Neither did he desire to limit the believer's spiritual imagination by formally restraining it.
Notwithstanding the Master’s effort to establish this new sacrament of the remembrance, those who followed after him in the intervening centuries saw to it that his express desire was effectively thwarted. His simple spiritual symbolism of that last night in the flesh has been reduced to precise interpretations and subjected to the nearly mathematical precision of a set formula called transubstantiation. [Transubstantiation is the changing of the elements of the bread and wine, when they are consecrated in the Eucharist, into the body and blood of Christ (a doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church).]
The Divine Presence
The “supper of remembrance,” when it is partaken of by those who are Son-believing and God-knowing, does not need any of man’s symbolism or childlike beliefs regarding the method of the divine presence, for the Master is really present on all such occasions.
The remembrance supper is the devotee's personal rendezvous with Michael, the Creator Son of this Universe. When you become spirit-conscious, the Son is actually present, and his spirit (the Spirit of Truth) fraternizes with the personality's indwelling fragment of his Father, the Thought Monitor/Adjuster.
Pentecost - The Bestowal of the Spirit of Truth
As the one hundred and twenty believers in Jesus were engaged in prayer, they became aware of a strong presence in the room. At the same time, these disciples all became conscious of a new and profound sense of spiritual joy, security, and confidence. This consciousness of spiritual strength was immediately followed by a powerful urge to publicly proclaim the gospel of the kingdom and the wonderful news that Jesus had risen from the dead.
Peter stood up and declared that this compelling feeling must be the coming of the Spirit of Truth that the Master had promised them, and he proposed that they go immediately to the temple and begin the proclamation of the good news committed into their hands. They did.
These men had been trained and instructed that the gospel that they should preach was the fatherhood of God and the son-ship of man, but in this moment of spiritual ecstasy and personal triumph, the best tidings, the greatest news, these men could think of was the fact that the Master had risen. And so they went forth, endowed with power from on high, preaching the glad tidings to the people and salvation through Jesus.
Quite unintentionally, they stumbled into the error of substituting some of the facts related to the gospel for the gospel message itself. Peter unwittingly led off in this mistake, and others followed after him on down to Paul, who created a new religion out of his altered version of the good news.
Considering their elation, it is easy to understand how these men came to preach a new gospel about Jesus in place of their prescribed message of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of men.
The Mission of the Spirit of Truth
The primary mission of the Spirit of Truth is to foster and personalize truth, because it is the comprehension of truth that constitutes the highest form of human liberty.
This bestowal of the Son’s spirit effectively prepared all normal men’s minds for the subsequent universal bestowal of the Father’s spirit (the Thought Adjuster) upon all mankind.
Do not expect to become intellectually conscious of the Spirit of Truth. The spirit creates only a consciousness of Michael, our universe Creator Son (incarnated as Jesus).
The Spirit of Truth came to help men recall and understand the words of the Master as well as to illuminate and reinterpret his life on earth for all generations.
Michael's Spirit of Truth teams with the Thought Adjusting Father Fragment and the Holy Spirit (the Universal Mother Spirit and her Seven Mind Spirits and angels) to encourage spiritual decisions by the personality (mentally and environmentally).
This spiritual assistance is greatly augmented when the personality voluntarily commits to salvation.
Rebirth in the Spirit
Jesus declared: “Unless you are born again, born of the spirit, you cannot enter the kingdom of God.”
To all who are honest of heart and sincere in faith, it remains eternally true: “Behold, I stand at the doors of men’s hearts and knock, and if any man will open to me, I will come in and sup with him and will feed him with the bread of life; we shall be one in spirit and purpose, and so shall we ever be brethren in the long and fruitful service of the search for the Paradise Father.”
Even the apostles did not fully comprehend Jesus' teaching of the necessity of using spiritual force to overcome the material impediments that obstruct the light of understanding life in the spirit.
Spiritual liberation from matter frees man from a life in material social and economic captivity - especially ignorance, superstition, and material ambitions.
World Population
Industrial Quality Control – An Analogy
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/q/quality-control.asp
Quality control is a process through which industry seeks to ensure that product quality is maintained or improved and manufacturing errors are reduced or eliminated. Quality control requires manufacturers to create an environment in which both management and employees strive for perfection. This is done by training personnel, creating standards for product quality, and testing products to check for statistically significant variations.
A major aspect of quality control is the establishment of well-defined controls. These controls help standardize both production and reactions to quality issues. Limiting room for error by specifying which production activities are to be completed by which personnel reduces the chance that employees will be involved in tasks for which they do not have adequate training.
Quality control involves testing of units and determining if they are within the specifications for the final product. The purpose of the testing is to determine any needs for corrective actions in the manufacturing process. Good quality control helps companies meet consumer demands for better products.
Overpopulation
From a world standpoint, overpopulation has never been a serious problem in the past, but if war is lessened and science increasingly controls human diseases, it may become a serious problem in the future. The problem is not so much overpopulation, as it is preserving the best of the gene pool.
The future will provide a great test for the wisdom of the world's leadership. Will Earth's rulers have the insight and courage to cultivate the multiplication of the average or stabilized human being instead of the extremes of the super normal and the enormously increasing groups of the subnormal?
The normal man should be fostered. He is the backbone of civilization and the source of the mutant geniuses of the race.
The subnormal man should be kept under society’s control; he should produce no more citizens than are required to administer the lower levels of industry, those tasks requiring intelligence above the animal level while not becoming so much of a burden as to prove veritable slavery and bondage for the higher types of mankind caring for him.
Enlightened Perspectives on Population Control
The Pivot of Civilization, by Margaret Sanger - Project Gutenberg. See Sanger's book at:
www.gutenberg.org/files/1689/1689-h/1689-h.htm (Edited.)
Unless sexual science is incorporated as an integral part of world statesmanship and the importance of birth control is recognized, effective efforts to create a more spiritual civilization are fated to failure.
Margaret Sanger championed birth control concepts in the United States. She started the American Birth Control League in 1921, which became part of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1942.
Planned Parenthood praises Sanger for “providing contraception and other health services” and “advancing access to family planning in the United States and around the world.”
In addition to Planned Parenthood, Sanger also founded the Birth Control Review, a journal about contraception and population control.
A Parliament of Population
http://dailysignal.com/2015/07/22/13-things-you-probably-dont-know-about-planned-parenthood-founder-margaret-sanger/ (Edited.)
Margaret Sanger proposed allowing Congress to solve “population problems” by appointing a “Parliament of Population.”
The Parliament of Population would be composed of directors representing the various branches of science who would direct and control population through birth rates and immigration, and direct the distribution through out the country according to national needs consistent with taste, fitness and interest of the individuals.
Sanger referred to the various methods of population control, including abortion as, “defending the unborn against their own disabilities.”
Sanger also believed that the United States should “keep the doors of immigration closed to the entrance of certain aliens whose condition is known to be detrimental to the stamina of the race, such as feeble minded, idiots, morons, insane, syphilitic, epileptic, criminal, professional prostitutes, and others in this class barred by the immigration laws of 1924.”
Sterilization and Segregation
http://dailysignal.com/2015/07/22/13-things-you-probably-dont-know-about-planned-parenthood-founder-margaret-sanger/ (Edited.)
Sanger advocated “a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is already tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.”
People judged defective should be sent to “farm lands and homesteads” where “they would be taught to work under competent instructors for the period of their entire lives.”
Sanger also advocated a proposal called the American Baby Code. “The results desired are obviously selective births,” she wrote. The code would “protect society against the propagation and increase of the unfit.”
Parental Licensing
http://dailysignal.com/2015/07/22/13-things-you-probably-dont-know-about-planned-parenthood-founder-margaret-sanger/ (Edited.)
Sanger argued that marriage licenses should provide couples with the right to “a common household” but not parenthood. Couples should have to obtain a permit to become parents:
A marriage license shall in itself give husband and wife only the right to a common household and not the right to parenthood.
No woman shall have the legal right to bear a child, and no man shall have the right to become a father, without a permit [including training] for parenthood.
Permits for parenthood shall be issued upon application by city, county, or state authorities to married couples, providing they are financially able to support the expected child, have the qualifications needed for proper rearing of the child, have no transmissible diseases, and, on the woman’s part, no medical indication that maternity is likely to result in death or permanent injury to health.
Each permit for parenthood shall be valid for no more than one birth.
Affordable Families and Efficient Motherhood
http://dailysignal.com/2015/07/22/13-things-you-probably-dont-know-about-planned-parenthood-founder-margaret-sanger/ (Edited.)
Margaret Sanger believed that large families are detrimental to society.
The most immoral practice today is breeding too many unwanted children.
Sanger also pleaded that mothering must be “efficient” and well organized.
Birth control is nothing more or less than preventing the birth of defectives.
A Spiritual Race
http://dailysignal.com/2015/07/22/13-things-you-probably-dont-know-about-planned-parenthood-founder-margaret-sanger/ (Edited.)
Margaret Sanger wrote that population control would bring about the “materials of a new race.”
She continued saying that if we are to develop a new spiritual race in America, we must keep the birth rate within the scope of our ability as a society to learn and to teach. We must not encourage reproduction beyond our capacity to assimilate our population to make the next generation physically fit, mentally capable, and socially aware.
Sanger also wrote that an excess of population must be avoided because “war, famine, poverty and oppression of workers will continue while woman makes life cheap.”
In an interview in 1957, Sanger stated that the greatest sin in the world is bringing children into the world that have disease [including addictions] from their parents, and have practically no chance to be normal human beings.
Most delinquents and prisoners were already predestined at birth.
Sanger and the Eugenicists
After World War I, Sanger increasingly addressed society's need to limit births by those least able to afford children.
The affluent and educated already limit their child-bearing, while the poor and naive lack access to contraception and information about birth-control.
On this point, Sanger found an area of overlap with eugenicists. She believed that they both sought to assist society in minimizing the numbers of the unfit, but they differed in that eugenicists insisted that a woman's first duty was to the state while Sanger contended that a woman's first duty was to herself, which is the same as her duty to the state.
Conclusion
Review
Planet Earth is undergoing massive changes now as the execution of the plan of the Most high is accelerating.
The Objectives of the Most High for Earth are:
1. One Global Government
2. Brotherhood (the collective expression of Self).
The most contentious problems of mortal society are caused by differences in race, gender, religion, and ownership of property.
These problems will be resolved only when mankind achieves the goals of one race, gender equality, one language, one religion, one global government, the shared distribution of wealth and of Earth's resources, and the segregation or elimination of inferior humans (at all levels of intelligence) until the gene pool is purged of human defectives (including amoral materialists). Ambition when manifested as greed is at yet an unrecognized defect.
Realization of these goals will require millenniums of spiritual growth as man reaches for brotherhood.
Preview
Cosmically, the plan of the Universal Father is also in the process of execution.
Read more about the plan of the Universal Father in the next page of this blog, “The Quintessential Quest.” Everyone should be aware of their potential personal role in this grandiose scheme.