The total number of deaths during the World War 2 has been calculated at between 50 and 70 million. The best known and by far the most often repeated figures are those of some 6,000,000 Jews having died in the Holocaust. According to the Jewish Virtual Library of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, the Holocaust account for 5,860,000 deaths, which the Library rounds off to 6,000,000.
That leaves some 54,000,000 non-Jews, who are seldom mentioned. But even those figures pale in comparison to total number of deaths during the 20th century. According to Piero Scaruffi (URL provided below), 160 million people died in a variety of wars during the 20th century. Further references are provided for your personal research.
http://www.scaruffi.com/politics/massacre.html
http://necrometrics.com/20c5m.htm
http://necrometrics.com/pre1700a.htm - 20worst
Other statisticians cheer us on with the thought that in the present millennium we are likely to break all previous records. Of course, there are more of us to kill. Since 1999, we are in danger of adding a cool billion ‘live’ people before the end of 2011. We are encouraged in this endeavour by all religions and other tax-collecting organizations. They are both encouraging the masses to increase their number, to go forth and multiply, in order to increase the numbers on their collection plates, and of their tax base. After all, someone has to pay for those who produce nothing, right? And don’t forget their pensions. Perhaps Einstein was right about the only infinity we could really be sure of.
I’d suggest that science, or scientists, who through the invention of masses of mass-destruction weapons greatly contributed to the efficacy with which one human can kill another, contributed in some measure to this progress. Or is it to evolution? Perhaps, in their wisdom, they were just trying to keep down the population explosion. If so, then they failed. Is this what Natural Selection led us to?
Dawkins states: “Natural Selection (is): the process which, as far as we know, is the only process ultimately capable of generating complexity out of simplicity.”
I beg to differ. Well, sir, perhaps you ought to have a chat with my wife regarding the menu, when we expect friends for dinner; or listen to any politician delivering his address on economy; or anyone trying to explain poetry.
Seriously, though, let us try the human mind. Not brain—mind. Simple ideas seem to originate in simple minds—like one belonging to the son of a carpenter—and grow, without the aid of natural selection, to sweep the world. Ideas like ‘love your neighbour’. Or ‘do unto others as you’d have them do unto you.’ Are these simple ideas or complex ones. How come so few people can understand them?
Or one might try listening to some Mozart piano progressions. Or Bach’s counterpoint. Or it would not hurt anyone to read “Complexity—The Emerging science at the edge of Order and Chaos” by M. Mitchell Waldrop. A most excellent book. Of course, most people I know are concerned more with the evolution of human thought than with a bug becoming buggier. Or aren’t humans allowed to evolve any more? Perhaps the biologists have joined the ranks of the followers of Esoteric Buddhism. However, chacun à son goût.
Frankly, if evolution is to explain to us the nature of things, I’d rather side with Lucretius, (Titus Lucretius Carus, ca. 99BCE—ca. 55BCE), a Roman poet and philosopher. His epic poem “De rerum natura,” (On the Nature of Things), appeals to the inherent Epicureanism in my Hedonistic nature. And let us never forget that Lucretius followed in the footsteps of Democritus, who seemed to admire empty space as much as the nearly ‘empty’ atoms thinly dispersed within it. And you’ll soon learn (in Chapter 7) how I feel about empty space.
While I share profound distaste for all the sacerdotal classes which under the guise of religious precepts attempt, all too often successfully, to dictate and impose their beliefs on others, I cannot, in good faith, dismiss some, albeit few and far between exceptions, such as St. Francis of Assisi, Father Pio and a number of mystics, as having any ambition in mind other then to serve humanity by their own example. They, those few, didn’t tell others what to do—they showed them. And until I shall find an equal number of atheists who do likewise, I shall reserve my judgment as to the superiority of philosophy espoused by the opposing parties.
Having said that, we have the glaring problem of a number of people who have been nominated as the originators of myths, which later became distorted into religious beliefs. Contrary to the advocates of atheism (in the religious sense myself among them), I share the ancient adage attributed to Socrates, that “unexamined life is not a life worth living”. If there are atheists who espouse this sentiment, I am not aware of them. To do so one would have to define life as more than a biological entity. For the most part, the few I’ve met seem much too busy fighting that which they don’t believe in. Which that which they don’t believe exists. They seem inspired by Don Quichotte.
But we must be careful.
Krishamurti warns us that, “Self-knowledge is not knowing oneself, but knowing every movement of thought… So watch every movement of thought, never letting one thought go without realizing what it is. Try it. Do it and you will see what takes place.”
Nevertheless, to paraphrase Socrates, until atheists’ lives are examined, I shall refrain from assigning my opinion. Since I am essentially a Hedonist, (my only restriction being that I do not, knowingly, derive my pleasure at someone else’s expense), and I freely admit that scientists have contributed somewhat (oh, all right, a great deal) to my everyday comfort, I am still more impressed with the man who said, “These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full.” He taught us how to live.
Now we come to the real problem that might appear to contradict a lot of what I said in my preceding paragraphs. While it is true that Paul of Tarsus should be accorded the authorship of the Christian religions, the same cannot be said of Yeshûa, (or Yehoshûa—meaning Jah is salvation), who became known in the West, under the Greek influence, as Jesus.
As for Paul, there is a quandary. If the Vatican crowded with highly educated clergy are to this day completely incapable, as are their secular Ph.D. counterparts from Oxford, Cambridge, Yale, Harvard, or Sorbonne, of understanding the teaching of Christ, then how can we blame Paul or Tarsus, an ex-Pharisee, whom Yeshûa called, false teachers, hypocrites and offspring of vipers, whose pre-conversion activities included the persecution of Christ’s followers, for getting it wrong?
Since the publication of the documents known as The Nag Hammadi Library, we, “the ordinary people”, no longer have that excuse. Unless we are afraid to read it under the possible threat of anathema. As one of those commoners, I had occasion to offer my commentary on one of the ancient manuscripts, The Gospel of Thomas.
As for myself, having been brought up as a Roman Catholic, later educated by Jesuits, I have not come across anyone who ever knew, or shared their knowledge with me, as to the meaning of the name Jesus. We are, nevertheless, given some hints regarding his nature in the scriptures.
Here are some quotations from the King James Bible, attributed to Yeshûa.
“Why do you call me good? None is good, except one, that is, God.” (Luke 18:19) Perhaps we may have to revise our concept of what we mean by ‘good’?
“Kingdom of God is within you,” (Luke 17:21). This statement defines heaven as a state of consciousness. Also, Kingdom of God is usually referred to as heaven. Thus heaven is within us and, therefore… so is God.
“I am not your master…” (Gospel of Thomas, logion 13). Speaking to Thomas, his disciple.
“My father which is in heaven” (Matthew 12:50) and… “Heaven is within you.” As previously quoted from the Gospel of Thomas. Please note, not just within ‘me’, but also YOU. Yeshûa was not just speaking about himself but about all of us.
And the Gospel of Thomas further assures us that “heaven is within you and without you”. I might add, ‘here and now’.
To confuse the matter thoroughly, once and for all:
Hea
ven is within us.
God is in heaven.
Therefore God is within us.
Or, if you prefer:
God is omnipresent, therefore God is within us, and likewise, therefore we are within God.
This may revise, somewhat, our concept of what is God, but I hope the above makes it reasonably clear what the scriptures have to say about it. If one is a Christian, that’s all one has to believe in. The rest will become easy. Or, you can ignore the Bible and do your own thing. We have freewill, remember? Or… do we?
Thus no one in his or her wildest dreams could possibly accuse Jesus Christ of presenting himself as God. Son of God—yes, not God the son. He hastens to explain that, “all who do the will of the father are children of the most high,” (my italics). In fact the statement stating that, “ye are gods,” dates back to King David’s 82nd psalm. If we are to believe the fundamentalists’ chronological calculations, King David lived between 1037BC and 967BC, thus most psalms must have been written about that time, (although some of them may have been written by others, around 539BC, after Jewish exile in Babylon). Either way, both authors/composers date back to long before Yeshûa was born. By no stretch of imagination can we blame Yeshûa for making up stories about our own aspirations to his or anyone else’s divinity. The idea had been long established, and just as long ignored, by the Jewish/Christian tradition.
Not very pragmatic, but very real.
Thus, you and I, providing we obey the laws, presumably those referred to by Charles Darwin, are the sons and daughters of the same progenitor, or as I prefer to think of it, of the Creative (evolutionary) Force of the Universe, (referred to by Darwin as Laws). Of course, I’d suggest that all these statements refer to our states of consciousness, not our overfed, abused and/or misused physical bodies. Even the most avid atheists no longer think of God as an androgynous anthropomorphic super-animal ‘created’, before the Big Bang, unto the image and likeness of man.
But the problem lies deeper. Like most scientists, religionists invariably tend towards fundamentalism. As they are more or less compelled take the scientific treatises literally, and they are inclined to do likewise with the Bible. The man who inspired this book is no exception. And there lies the fundamental (no pun intended) problem. The Bible deals almost exclusively with our state (s) of consciousness. If taken literally it is indeed a document that doesn’t make much sense. To use Dawkins’s literary interpretation:
“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”
I might mention that the Bible is only fiction to the degree to which all philosophical and/or psychological dissertations that use ‘stories’ to illustrate their theses, are fiction. I might repeat that, in the Bible, any resemblance to historical facts, if any, is purely coincidental.
Indeed, to believe in such a God as described, by my learned hero, in such a fundamentalist manner, one would have to apply and espouse all the adjectives to oneself. After all, aren’t we created unto His image and likeness? If, however, anyone were to spend an hour or two (perhaps a little longer…) studying my “Dictionary of Biblical Symbolism,” none of the above would apply. Perhaps scientists are not disposed towards symbolism.
Even a cursory study of the documents of the Nag Hammadi Library would further disband the nonsense perpetrated by the fundamentalists. Here, too, I might refer the reader to my Key to Immortality, which attempts to unravel the wisdom of the Gospel of Thomas. While Bishop Irenaeus (2nd century AD) of Lugdunom (now Lion in France) who had been canonized most probably for his infamous “Adversus Haereses”, or Against Heresies, might be forgiven for attempting to destroy Gnosticism, which I would describe as the subjective equivalent of scientific method of objective observation of the past or dead matter (see later chapters). The critics of today have no such excuse. Irenaeus was fighting for his church. All too often the atheists of today seem to be fighting for their ego, thus displaying equal narrowness of mind. Rather as Irenaeus had. Some later saints, I might add ‘of dubious sanctity’, were no exceptions, as were later scientists.
Chapter 5
The Beginning and the End
Pragmatism asks its usual question. “Grant an idea or belief to be true,” it says, "what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false?
William James, American psychologist and philosopher (1842—1910)
Infinity has neither—beginning nor end. If it had, it would not be infinite. We would live in the past, or future, but not in the present. Not in the NOW. Yet… as William Blake would say in his Auguries of Innocence, would we, (you and I) but, “Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour.”
Ah, yes. Poetry is not an exact science…
We tend to confuse the tangible with the intangible, the visible with the invisible, the manifested with that which is not manifested—as yet. There is a reason for it.
Frankly, we’ve got it all wrong. We, or at least all the scientists I’ve ever met, live in the past. We, or they, ignore the present. The NOW. The true reality.
We study the light of distant stars that, all too often, is already dead—only the light, the information about them, reaches us with delays of, sometimes, millions of years. Yes, many of those stars are very, very dead. We do the same with the galaxies; we try to reach, backwards, to the first nanoseconds after the ‘big bang’ that might have never really taken place. We only think it had. If it had ever taken place, it also died somewhere, in the antiquity of billions of years. And, after all, a big bang would have to be followed by a big crunch. Alas, as already discussed in Chapter 2: Where We Were, there is not enough mass in the universe to pull us together again; to reverse the ‘ever-expanding’ universe. No matter. When we cannot find observations to fit our theories then we invent items like dark matter, or dark energy, to fit our inept concepts of reality. We employ the same method when studying our bodies, our physical bodies, pretending that we are studying reality, and not the shadow that reality has left behind. Alas, even that doesn’t work. Of late, the theoretical scientists had spent billions of our hard earned dollars to ‘prove’ that the universe not only isn’t about to shrink, but that it continues to expand ever-faster. And how do they know this? By studying the past. The long, long dead past. They study light, photons, that left the stars thousands of years ago. To repeat, stars that might well be dead. They study the corpses. Like our physicians. The cells in our bodies are in a continuous process of renewal. All the cells. And what to the physicians study? The cells that are dying, or are already dead. They are studying those left behind.
Yes, we definitely live in the past. This may prove to be a recurrent theme in this book. I often think that we have forgotten more than we shall ever learn. Distant echoes of Golden Age?
So let us look at our past. No, not biblical, or even scientific. Let us look at our lore. Once I wrote yet another essay. I called it Vanishing Worlds. You may find it amusing. It is in Volume I of my Beyond Religion collections. I made a few changes to make it belong in this book. Here’s part of it.
“I had a vision.
In it, each man and woman was a universe interconnected with every other man and woman by that which they each held in common. That shared, or objective, universe was but a tiny fraction of the richness of ideas, thoughts, dreams, hopes, which fomented within their individual minds. But it was objective. It was that which was common to most of them. It was that which they agreed on. It was a point of reference. That’s all. Just a point of reference.
A critical mass of shared ideas determines the nature of the universe detectable to our physical senses.
/> In the past, such old, now dissolved worlds, had been handed down to us as lore: Mu, Lemuria, Atlantis, had all been very real to the men and women who inhabited those conglomerates of ideas, we call an objective universe. As we progress, evolve, the subjective mind rejects the old to make room for the new. Most people find it difficult to accept that Lemuria or Atlantis ever existed.
Well, they did, but not in the way we imagine.
Could our glorious universe cease to exist, as did the worlds of our past? The stars, galaxies... trees, flowers... mountains and oceans... the human heritage of culture, civilizations? Was the earth once flat? Could a sailor fall over the edge––if he believed in it hard enough? Does an adamant, unshakeable faith have the power to create reality? Or is it always the same, tired, polluted, exploited, eternal universe––in which only we are changing....
No, surely this could never be.”
Generations of men speculated on the immortality of soul. Later, when our consciousness became more material, we speculated mostly on possibilities of prolongation of physical life, of our material bodies. From that moment on, we began looking for Ambrosia—for the nectar of immortality. We haven’t stopped to this day. Why?
In my vision... well, judge for yourselves.
First I was shown the ancient civilization of MU where now the barren sands of the Gobi desert guard the primordial secrets. Or so I thought! Later I saw the dissolution of Lemuria (were we, once, the lemuroid primates?) supposedly in or under the Pacific or the Indian Ocean. Finally I saw the mighty Atlantis, where inter-planetary travel was common for all men; yet it, too, had been swallowed beneath the turbulent waves of the Atlantic. Shall we ever be allowed to see a single iota of those past universes? No, my friend, the Gobi desert hides no secrets, the depth of the oceans does not secrete past civilizations.
DELUSIONS — Pragmatic Realism Page 4
