911 and 77 (21)

The two schools I attended from age five to my last day in school aged fourteen, were both christian, catholic, schools and this is just three short memories that still stand out in my mind because of what they teach and in particular how they teach something important that puts the dogma into perspective.

When I was about eight or nine years old I asked the question "Miss, what happens to us after we die?" to which she replied "No one knows because no one has come back to tell us" prompting the class to laugh.

I had expected a catechism answer such as "Well, you already know that, you'll be spending the rest of eternity sitting on the right hand of God" so to have not even brought any kind of catechism answer in was actually a revelation to me and it helped me to put that into proper perspective - it wasn't the be-all and end-all that it was made out to be; it was just pretence made out to be absolute. Why else ignore it?

So although it cost me some dignity or loss of dignity -- the class responding to her mocking tone at my 'stupid' question by laughing at me -- it was a price well worth it.

A year or two later we were waiting to have school dinner and one of the girls pointed out to the same teacher that it was Friday and we had been sent sausages. The girl was rightly serious. This was a challenge. If I remember rightly it was a serious matter, a "mortal sin" to eat meat on a Friday and we all knew it, the teacher of course would have known it too. "It's better to eat them than to waste them" was her dismissal of the absolute rule packed into our receptive minds.

Once again, a demonstration that we were being told one thing very gravely and seriously but being shown that they were of no consequence too at other times!

To me as a child who took things literally and at face value as children are supposed to do this shone a somewhat enlightening beam upon the strict catechism values, literal parrotting of question and answer sessions pumped into us as five years olds.

These snippets, these tidbits of the real truth, I think they serve as jewels, jewels of knowledge or hints of the fact that some "knowledge" is just ignorance and complete rubbish dressed up and treated as if it were real and important while all the time it is all really just nonsense and utter trash of the mind and emotion.

It's such a shame then, isn't it, that these people, good people really in my case, my examples, are so deluded or so blinded or so willing to misrepresent the truth, so willing to indulge in planting rubbish and dangerous nonsense into young minds.

A few years later and at my second school and with a male teacher this time, and again a nice, decent, good person, who never subjected us to all that is nasty in and with religion -- and I stress that this stuff is nasty and is dangerous, partly because we are so easily blinded by it all -- but happeded to be talking about various things that other people believe and the one I remember in particular is this. He said that some people believed in reincarnation and went on to mock the idea by suggesting that it is possible to come back as a goat. I am actually grateful to have this memory because it is quite fashionable to be a reincarnationist, a budhist and to have any kind of eastern religious ideas as part of one's philosophy and so it acts as a kind of reminder to me that I have never been swayed by fashion but was always inclined to this way of thinking, this way that is to some degree now fashionable in the west. My reaction to his mockery of reincarnation was disappointment that he would dismiss the idea so readily.

I'm afraid that is how things are with humans though, we tend to dismiss what we do not understand rather than to try and understand it.

Many people have, in fact, returned from the dead to tell us what it is like and what lies ahead for us. If people had been interested to find out then they could have done so. Now, really since the 1970s, this is so readily available, this information, that it is hard to believe that anyone could still be fooled by all the rubbish stuff, but they are and while that is sad to see it is just a facet of humans that they prefer easy off-the-shelf ideas that others around them accept or apparently accept rather than make their own enquiries and break away from the herd and group mentality. But before the 1970s the accounts of people who have had a near death experience were much rarer, rarer but still available to anyone who cared to search for the information. I was aware before the 1970s for instance.

The irony is, I suppose, that there is now so much information whereas before, say before the 1970s, there was less of it around. And yet ignorance still abounds. It isn't the paucity or abundance of knowledge or good information that decides our general state of wisdom. People are just as ignorant in some of the most important aspects of reality now as they have always been.

Even the very simple idea of reincarnation is largely one that is still mocked and yet, I would say, it is more a matter of proven fact than of belief because so much good research and so many reliable accounts have become available that it is only by self blindness that it can be dismissed as not real.

And that is a great shame because the realization that reincarnation is true soon leads an intelligent, thinking, person to consider what it means and soon the idea of karma crops up. I suspect it is this, really, that is a strong reason for casually dismissing reincarnation. If karma is true also, as it almost certainly has to be accepted as the case, then it means of course that the fatherly or parently figure of god who forgives us our sins (except of course, for all catholics, our mortal sins, like eating meat on a Friday) is replaced by a sense of personal responsibility.

I have noted that some people like to dismiss the idea of reincarnation by denouncing those who believe it with a cursory assessment that they are wishful thinking. But the idea of personal responsibility is the last thing one wants to wish for! Far better if one is to be wishful thinking (maybe that's actually an oxymoron by the way: wishful thinking?) to believe in a loving parent figure god who says "There, there, don't you fret, all is forgiven." Personal responsibility is actually how it is. Don't take my word for it though, just check out the evidence.

In part I am writing this article because I was trying to understand why those who committed the Inside Job atrocities of 9/11 and 7/7 and have gone on to commit other extreme criminality, war atrocities and torture and other horrors, why it is that it does not occur to them simply that what they are doing is very wrong.

I, personally, believe that they are all people who are intelligent and have a christian philosophy. They do not actually believe in personal accountability any more than the nazis who preceded them had but are equally very christian.

I know a lot of people will object to that on several grounds but if such thinking is ever to be tackled and dealt with then it has to be studied and it has to be understood. I would say it is not actually a difficult matter to understand this. But what is difficult is to do it from within the same system, christianity, because part of the mind-set is to see it as benign and unquestionably good. Only outsiders like myself can be capable of seeing through it and only then can you grasp just how really nasty it is.

Christianity should be studied objectively on many fronts -- it's history, it's psychology for two examples -- and I believe it is only when this happens can we rid the world of such evil systems. But even then, man has a tendency, woman too for that matter, to invent systematic thinking that is truly terrible. Take the old Chinese tradition of smashing a little girls feet bones to force them into tiny distorted and very painful appendages. As far as I am aware there was no religious justification for it.

Thus even when all the religions are dealt with the problem won't go away. Can you see why I don't get too worked up about any particular one of the several very important issues I write about? This is it. The realization that the final solution is, afer all, just another quasi political idea probably destined to be quite short lived rather than final.

In a way despite the more than four decades even since the most recent of those three personal memories of my christian childhood, nothing much seems to change. And yet we have it within each of us to make great changes.

By Paul E. Coughlin
SaneThinking.com
18 June 2007

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