MY THOUGHTS ABOUT HONESTY, COMMON SENSE, MAGICKIND, RELIGION, NATURE AND SOME OF THE WORLD’S WORST PROBLEMS.
Revised:
I am not selling or preaching here. Please don’t try to please me by pretending to go along with any of it. Please accept what makes sense only because it makes sense.
Usually, I use the word “magickind” instead of words like Deity, Deities, Magic-Intelligence, God, Gods, Supreme Being, Lord, Brahman, Zeus, Big-Daddy-O, Allah, Intelligent Designer, or anything like these. I do this because the one thing common to all these is magic. Also I do this to mean the real thing if it exists. Exceptions are that I will use the word “God” a little when writing about the Bible or Christian related stuff and when I am quoting.
To me, and a lot of others too, a burning question is: What is the ultimate power throughout all existence? Is it the laws of nature, some sort of magickind, or a combination of the two? The following paragraphs are my conclusions about these things and why I feel this way.
Starting with magickind, either it exists or it doesn’t. Should we say that we believe it exists unless we know for sure? I won’t. I quit lying to please others by saying that I believe magickind exists when I don’t know.
Also, I am convinced that, if there really is some sort of magickind, then no one really knows anything factual about it. I will talk more about this later.
I lied about believing in God a bunch of times, mostly to myself, and to others to a lesser extent, which I regret very much. Many times, when younger, I did try to believe in God. I was really lying to myself in a sense, trying to pretend to myself that I believed it. One reason I tried to force myself to believe it is that, as a child gowning up, I got the notion in my head that we were not worthy and decent people unless they believed in God. That notion is built into many stories, movies and religious sources, so it is understandable why a child would be worried about it.
Even though I honestly don’t know if there is some sort of magickind, I have strong doubts that it exists because it involves magic.
The word “believe” is a tough word to include here in my essay, but I can’t leave it out. The word can mean different things to different people under different conditions. It is used to mean “guess” sometimes. For example if someone asks if it is going to rain, and gets the reply “I believe so”, then can be the same as saying “I guess” If the person being asked, knows a lot about the weather in general, it can mean an educated guess. It can mean that the person gives something a lot of credence, but they are not positive. For believing in God, to be honest, those who separate out believers and agnostics should not use “believe” and “know” interchangeable when they are talking about magickind. If someone feels strongly that magickind exists, but is not totally positive, then he/she is an agnostic, even if they say that he/she is a believer.
This is a good time to mention wishful thinkers, those who wish very much there is a magickind who would make everything all OK for us, and call themselves believers. I am nearly that way at times, but won’t call myself a believer, because wishing for a magickind to make everything OK does not create it.
I am convinced that there are very few people who actually believe or disbelieve that there is a magickind, and that most people really don’t know, regardless of what they say. That is not to say that most of us lean either way, even though we don’t know.
I have not thought about those who really disbelieve (honest atheists) much except that I envy them because disbelieving would have been a lot simpler for me than not knowing and trying to sort this out.
There are those who are so terrified about this that they can’t contact their own feelings about it, and that they say that they believe, really out of fear for their life. This surely happens in locations where disbelievers are murdered or executed as examples for others to notice.
Many people, who pretend to believe in magickind, try to gain a sense of self worth by trying to convince others that there is a magickind which will supposedly make everything wonderful for them, if they would just believe it. If someone thinks that they can help others this way, then perhaps they think that they can find value in lying about it and avoid the embarrassment of ever squaring with others about this.
Also a lot of those who don’t know if there is some sort of magickind, but are afraid of the threats posed by the various religions, even though they don’t know if these threats are real or not. This is a basis of paranoia for many people.
Some Christian religions promote the notion of eternal hell as God’s punishment, and promote that God loves us, and that God is perfect. Then they promote that God will punish us if we don’t forgive others. Naturally this makes no sense, and a good reason to question the credibility of these notions.
Some people say things like “God will punish you for that” to scare you. Some want to gain a sense of revenge for something that scared or angered them. As a small child, I was pretty scared about the possibility of there being a cruel magickind, so I have some idea how some people might feel.
Perhaps those who created the notion of original sin, as written about in the Bible, wanted to perpetuate the notion that God is cruel. God is presented so cruel that it views everyone in the human race as criminals because of something that Adam and Eve did. Look at the story of Adam and Eve. According to this story, we have to redeem ourselves because God is holding a grudge.
It is bad enough for a child to be mistreated by its parents. It does not help the situation if a child is frightened about being a criminal in magickind’s eyes too. It is better children to grow up understanding they were not criminals just by being born.
It only makes sense that if there is a magickind that loves us, then it does not blame any one of us for anything that someone else did. By the way, I am only talking from a common sense point of view, so don’t get me wrong. I don’t know if there is a magickind and I don’t know anything about it if it exists. Also, if it exists, I don’t know if it considers blame or not.
My wife once said something about God that makes sense. She said that we must seem like Gods to our cat and dog because they are totally dependent on us. I can’t remember the whole conversation. In the same way, a baby’s parents seem like Gods to it.
As a child, my mother was something like a God to my brother and me. She rewarded us and punished us. She cooked, shopped, and took care of almost everything. She played God by trying to shape how we viewed other people and life in general. She told me how I should feel about each of our relatives and how I should feel about myself.
As I became acquainted with religion, I made strong emotional associations between God as I imagined it, religion, and my mother, without intending to. I am afraid that many of my interpretations of Bible stories were influenced by the ways my mom raised me. So in a sense, some of my early fears about God and religion were tied to my upbringing. Keep in mind that I did not know if there really is a God; I just was afraid of the possibility of a terribly cruel one.
I regret that I was a disciple for some of my mother’s views at different times in my life. For example, she seemed to hate anyone who got angry with her. I grew up thinking that getting angry was doing a terrible thing and sometimes I even said so. I tried not to show anger and this got me bullied terribly at times. It has been hard to get it gut level that it is perfectly natural for people to get angry at times, and sometimes I forget it.
One passage from a version of the Bible, Matthew 5:22, is supposed to be a quote from Jesus. It states: “But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment.” As a child, I interpreted this as meaning that getting angry was a terrible thing, so terrible that if we get angry, God will hold it against us somehow. This reinforced my mom’s influence on me about it, and how I thought I should view it.
Surely there are many interpretations of Matthew 5:22. A less vague and sensible viewpoint is that it is better to be honest and express yourself when you first get angry so that you don’t build up resentment towards someone and carry anger around with you.
Now I realize that Matthew 5:22 started out as someone’s creation, and what it is now probably is not what it started out to be. The way it is written seems to be just an idle threat to me. If the original author had a real insight, we can only guess what it was. There are many ways of interpreting Matthew 5:22. Here are some examples: Some people might interpret it as meaning that we would be subjected to the judgment of others if we get angry. Some people could interpret this as meaning that we are subjected to God’s judgment. Some might interpret this as experiencing anger is the problem, and others might interpret it as holding anger is the problem. So it is best not to take this as an absolute rule for living, if only because it is not clearly stated.
So, how about everyone else? Surely some religious people, if not most, have confused or merged their feelings about specific people with their view of religion and magickind. Someone’s magickind could be a merger between what they learned about the magickind of their religion and one or, both parents, a relative, a teacher, a friend, a sport hero, a movie star, a fictional character, or whatever. I have known this for a long time. In fact, when I get to know a specific politician from the news, I try to imagine what his/her worldly magickind(s) is like.
In the Christian religions, God is often termed “Father” or “our Father”. Surely those who started this wanted us to make this emotional connection. I don’t know much about the non-Christian religions but I suspect that some, if not most, have one or more magickind/person connections too.
Now I will talk about magickind purely, and not as an emotional connection to special people in a person’s life:
I sympathize with those who consider that nature is so incredibly complicated, especially anything living, that only a magickind could have created it all using magic. The more I learn about the human body and how complex it is, the more it seems miraculous to me.
Also, I sympathize with those us who have trouble grasping the billions of years that it took for all living things to evolve to what they are now, because we cannot experience this sort of time. It is hard for me to grasp it. It is hard enough to imagine the passage of time, second by second, for even a lifetime, but billions of years, wow!
Evolution is so slow that we can’t see any evolutionary change in the human race during our lifetime. It probably takes tens of thousands of years for a detectable change. When you consider millions of years, then the tiny changes can add up significantly. We evolved from something that started out billions of years ago and has evolved very, very slowly ever since, and evolution is still going on.
Clearly evolution is a basis for life, magickind or no magickind. If there is something we might call magickind, and if it is in control of what is happening throughout the universe in some way, then I would expect that evolution must relate to it somehow.
It is my opinion that many people who have declared that they believe in magickind, and say that only a magickind could have engineered life, do this just as an argument to rebut anyone who disagrees with them, like trying win an argument, just for the sake of winning it. Also they do this to rebut atheists. I expect that most of these individuals have not really thought about it.
Back to my mom: Once, when she realized that I was caught up trying to be religious, and she said that God is like a Santa Claus for adults. She must have had some insight into me and was trying to help. Having thought about what she said a lot, I know that it is very true. All our concepts of magickind are human creations, just like Santa Claus is. I will talk more about this later.
Another thing my mom said is that she could make up a religion and if everyone followed it, they would all be happy. (I should have told her that if this is true, she should make up one and be happy by following it herself.) She obviously was very arrogant at times.
This notion also has provoked a lot of thought on my part since then: Maybe that is the motive that some individuals have when they invent, change, embellish and perpetuate various religions. Maybe they think that if everyone believes what they are promoting, everyone would be happy.
Because all the different religions related to magickind were invented, changed, embellished and perpetuated by different people who did not coordinate their inventions and developments, their religions conflict with one another. This is all the more reason that the way magickind is presented in any of our religions can’t represent the real thing. If it exists, it is only coincidental if there is any similarity between it and any concept we have of it.
Just for argument, pretend that there definitely is a magickind and pretend that someone once had an accurate understanding of it, centuries ago, and this person passed it on. Then let’s pretend that this description was passed on from person to person, on and on and so on. Eventually it was transcribed. Then the transcriptions were copied and passed on and copied etc.
Each of us is likely to interpret what we hear, and read about magickind differently. Surely what we would read about it centuries later is something very different from what it would have started out to be. What am getting at is that we can’t possibly have an accurate written description of magickind today, even if someone started with one.
Also, if there is a magickind, that had the powers necessary and it wanted us all to understand it, it would not have its description passed on from person to person. It would have found some other means. By the way, I am not suggesting that anyone ever had an accurate understanding at all. I am just using common sense to show another reason why religious documents about God or any sort of magickind can’t possibly be factual. I am being logical.
“Does magickind really exist?”; is an enormously important question; so important, that we should be absolutely positive before we perpetuate the notion as fact. Wars have been fought over religious differences related to concepts of magickind. Perpetuating something false about a magickind is a terrible lie to pass onto anyone who might take you seriously. Even if a magickind exists, we are lying when we say that it exists if we really don’t know that it exists.
As a reminder, the word “believe” is used by a lot of us in different ways. For example, when someone says “I believe so”, it could mean that they give it a lot of credence without knowing if it is a fact. When someone says that they believe in God, could mean that they give it a lot of credence that God exists. That is not knowing.
Something potentially more dangerous than perpetuating a notion of magickind as fact, when we don’t know if it exists, is perpetuating anything we imagine, make up, hear, read, see in a movie, see on TV or on a video clip, as a message from magickind, or a message supposedly endorsed by magickind. It is very dangerous when something like this is promoted as being absolute truth, when we honestly don’t know that it is the truth. Isn’t this playing God?
Aren’t many of the problems we face today related to individuals cruelly enforcing what they say are absolute laws from magickind, as if each of these individuals are a whole judicial system for their religion? Some people have been killed for disagreeing with their religious promoters.
Surely many people can’t possibly live by the impossible standards of their religion and their view of magickind — standards that don’t take human limitations into consideration. As a result, some people get very resentful when they can’t possibly comply. Surely some people think that if they are compelled to live by absolute religious standards, then everyone else better damn well live by them too. That makes matters even worse.
Why is God’s name used in vain so often when some people get angry? Surely some of this is learned from others. Some individuals have been trying to live by impossible or frustrating religious principles, and they have been doing this for God alone, not for themselves or for anyone else. Perhaps these individuals have been accumulating frustration, and then the day comes when they hit a finger with a hammer by mistake or someone cuts in front of them in traffic or whatever, and some of the accumulated frustration comes out as cursing God.
Using only common sense, I will make the point that if there is some sort of magickind that loves us, it would not put us in a position between a rock and a hard place, like this. It would not expect us live by impossible principles. The fact is, if magickind exists, we can’t know what its expectations are for us, if there are any others than our own ambitions and desires.
Another example: What about someone who goes to church, temple or synagogue a lot and tries to live by what he or she learns there. What might happen if this person fails in a basic area of life such as their love life, job, etc., because this person is not living life in ways that he/she really wants to. If the failure is related to the way this person interprets their religion, he/she might blame magickind, but be too terrified to say so, or even acknowledge it to themselves. Again, only using common sense, it seems to me that if there is some sort of magickind that loves us, it would not demand that we live in conflict with what we want to do with our lives.
We all are free to invent a definition of magickind, and anyone is free to embellish on what was invented in any way, and that is true whether there is a magickind or not. Surely this happens or there would not be so many very different concepts of magickind.
Surely if we put forth the courage, we are free to be honest about anything related to concepts of magickind and religion, too. We don’t have to say something is true if we don’t have a good reason to believe it is true. We are free to say we don’t know and we are free to think carefully about this whole topic, unless we are confused, terribly frightened, or don’t even try.
Many religions are harmful to our views of sex. I think that the Catholic religion is one of the worst in this regard. Instead of viewing sex as a great, wonderful, exhilarating part of life, and encouraging everyone to learn about it and make the best of it, many Catholics teach that sex education is harmful.
Sex is so suppressed and so taboo by a lot of Catholics teachings, that it frustrates some of their clergymen to the extent that a significant number of them become pedophiles. This has been in the news a lot and various parts of the Catholic Church have been sued over this. If there is a magickind that loves us or even if had only good human decency and understanding, it would not authorize anyone in the Catholic Church, or anyone else, to cause all the harm that it does by promoting terribly cruel views of sex.
Actually, if there is a magickind, it is not giving us any rule book about sex. We really only have what we can learn factually about our bodies, our common sense, our concern and love for ourselves and others, and our sexual feelings to go by. Understanding sex is critically important and it is terrible to raise children by making sure that they don’t learn factually about sex and then giving them absolute rules to follow instead.
In the realm of superstition, we should not give credence to any Bible stories as if they really happened as printed, viewed or told. They are fairy-tale like and just do not make sense. Take the Bible story of Noah’s Ark, for example. Many kids’ stories these days include magic of different types, such as Star-Wars, elves, fairy tales, Walt Disney stories and cartoons, but in honesty, they are presented as fiction. In contrast, the Bible is often presented as being absolute truth.
If you tell someone about an event, and it gets passed on from person to person, your message can be very different by the time it comes back to you. Many people add their own spin, exaggeration, interpretation and perhaps their own moral message when they pass along something some told them. Likewise, all the stories in the Bible, and any other religious books or documents passed along over the centuries, have been changed and embellished many times over, as they were passed from person to person, orally or transcribed. Surely many people added their own two cents’ worth, had their own axes to grind and added their own ideas.
It is likely that Bible and other religious stories started out describing some real events, with some real people, and some imaginary characters. Some of the magic could have been put there when the stories were created, and surely more parts were added later, over centuries, as the stories were passed along.
I can only guess some of the motives of people creating, embellishing and changing the religious stories about the nature of God. Perhaps some people wanted to entice, scare, or manipulate others who were superstitious. Maybe some people wanted the stories to perpetuate messages and exaggerations about their own fears and frustrations. Perhaps some people were trying to warn us about how they thought that we could fail. Perhaps some just wanted to play tricks on us. Maybe some people were in a rotten mood and just wanted to take their frustrations out on others by confusing future generations with these stories. Maybe some wanted to entertain us, the way fiction writers do. Perhaps some people had a terrible view of humanity and thought that they could improve it by getting others to believe in specific myths or scare them into behaving differently. There are so many people involved, that I could not possibly guess all their motives.
I am not saying that there is no wisdom in the Bible or other religious books. Surely there are bits of wisdom there, but we need to realize there is largely fiction there too.
For your information, there is a book called Misquoting Jesus by Bart D. Ehrman. It has these two ISBN numbers: 13: 978-0-62413-9 and 1-: 0-06-073817-0. I will quote here from the front flap of the book jacket:
“Bart Ehrman first began to study the texts of the Bible in their original languages, he started to discover the multitude of mistakes and intentional alterations that had been made by earlier translators. In Misquoting Jesus, Ehrman tells the story behind the mistakes and changes that the ancient scribes made to the New Testament and shows the great impact they had upon the Bible we use today.”
What Bart Ehrman wrote in Misquoting Jesus is consistent with my own conclusions. I would have expected this to happen even without knowing anything about his book.
Surely the Bible story of Noah’s Ark and its connection to magickind is a fairy-tale like story, that has gotten out of hand and is being taught by some people and church schools as if it were true. If you think about the story, you will realize that there are such a huge number of species of animals in existence, that it would be impossible to get a male and female of each species in a boat of any size that can be built.
For the sake of argument, let’s pretend that I am wrong, and let’s assume that these animals could all be put in a huge boat. By the time a significant number of species were in the boat, some of the animals would have gotten out of control, and some would have died. What about insects? What about dinosaurs? All the nations working together today could not manage this even with modern technology. Think about it!
Also, we know now that just starting out with only one male and one female of each kind of animal to perpetuate a species would force inbreeding before you got significant populations of any kind of animal. That is not healthy or smart. It just did not happen. You don’t have to be a genius to figure this out.
It is cruel to teach children or anyone one this stuff about Noah’s Ark as if it were true. They might mock you, or even worse, pretend that it is true. Sometimes some individuals might believe it, which is a terrible thing to do to a child. A lot of children will imitate what you did by passing a story along as it if was true, knowing all the time it could not be true, like a cruel joke.
Worse yet, some children will pass these stories along, when they grow up, just to keep peace with their friends, family or people who threaten them if they don’t play along with doing this. Perhaps some people are so terrified to question religion and the related stories, that they just don’t question any of this or they question it in complete secrecy.
Here is another example: If there was a real man who started out as the original Jesus Christ, what we read about him in any Bible or any religious document now can’t possibly resemble the original man. Surely what we read is a sort of fairy-tale that was expanded on by many of the individuals who were involved with passing these stories along.
Was Jesus’ mother really a virgin? We know that it is possible that if a man’s sperm went inside her some other way other than with sex, but it is more likely that this story is like a fairy-tale. Jesus could not have walked on water unless it was ice, a trick, or an illusion of some sort. Could he have used magic to cure lepers in a few moments? He could not have died, and then be revived somehow after his heart and breathing had stopped overnight. These things all involve magic and this story is as credible as a fairy-tale. It is cruel to use a made-up character like Jesus Christ, with magic powers, as a role model.
It is a terrible thing to pass along information about magickind as fact unless we know that it is really true. It would not make any difference if there really is a magickind or not. Making up or passing along anything about a possible magickind is a terrible lie unless one knows for fact that it is true. How many bigger lies are there than lying about any sort of magickind?
Think about people, who really don’t know what they are talking about, who have doubts and who have been passing along stories about a magickind most of their lives and calling it the truth. Think about what this could do to this person. I expect that a person could get terribly defensive and paranoid about it. Perhaps one reason that some people want to convince everyone that their stories are fact is that they don’t want to face anyone who disagrees with them.
Surely there are many ways these people might react to their own lying like this, depending on the individual. Maybe some would try to compensate for the mental and emotional pain of their lying with eating disorders, drunkenness, drugs, many sorts of hostility, and ways that I can’t guess. If this kind of liar is a preacher, he might mix some of the hostility and related paranoia that he feels into his sermons by stirring up all sorts of guilt feelings in those who listen. A preacher could take out his frustrations in his sermons by using them to condemn the whole human race. Could some of this be the hostility that some religious people exhibit toward non-religious people?
Surely there are atheists and agnostics who have treated people involved with religions terribly, even violently, so I won’t deny or hide from that here. The few times I received religious training as a child, I heard about this, a lot. I know that non-religious people can take their frustrations out on religious people, and visa-versa.
As someone moves away from religions in response to feeling put on by those who promoted religions, that person can experience a lot of resentment and anger. I have heard about this, and I have experienced it. It is a challenge and important not to be cruel to others just because one is struggling with religious challenges one’s own life.
What about people who have assumed that human beings don’t naturally care about one another? What about those who believe that everyone must have a religion that threatens them into being decent people? What if they ascribe to a faith that encourages fear of magickind, or threats of punishment like hell, or promises of eternal life as a reward for doing good deeds? If someone’s religion leads him to believe that human beings don’t inherently care about one another, then this person is likely to lose confidence in what really is good in human nature, and what is naturally good in himself/herself.
Isn’t a baby born loving its parents and those around him/her naturally? Isn’t it a terrible thing to teach a baby that it is not worthy and not loving unless he/she believes what a religion says. Isn’t it wrong to confuse a child by telling them that no one else worthy too, unless they believe a religion? Which religion should he/she choose? Think of the frustrations and pain a child can go through, getting confused this way.
What about promises of life after death? Surely many, including me, would like to live after death if it is safe, secure, and pleasurable, but how can we know there is a life after death? Knowing that all the religions promising a life after death are made up, contributed to, changed, embellished, and perpetuated by individuals with all sorts of motives - how can we take it as fact from these sources that there is life of any kind after death? To be truthful to our children, or anyone else, we should say that all we know is that we have one life for sure, even though we might wish for more.
To make up something about a life after death is a terrible lie to tell anyone. Perhaps some individuals think that they can comfort others by making up something about a life after death. It is unfortunate not to live this life to the fullest in anticipation of a next supposedly better life after death.
Some individuals involved with various religions try to get us to believe that our life is only a test to see if we deserve a better next life. To me, this sounds like a made up threat to get us to behave differently in this life. Because religions are made up, the terms in the religions to earn a better next life are made up too. Do we want to live our lives by the rules and terms of liars?
If there is no life after death, or if you really don’t know if there is, then the life we live now is most precious. It is our only sure chance we have to accomplish our goals. It is our sure opportunity to be honest with those we love, spend time with them, and do things for them. It is our sure chance to live life to the fullest. It is our sure chance to make this a better world. I won’t perpetuate anything that I hear or read that promotes that there is a life after death unless I am absolutely positive there is and I can tell you why there is. Otherwise, it would be a terrible lie to pass on.
What about attributing something we don’t understand to magic? Using magic as an explanation gets in the way of understanding what is really happening and finding real solutions. For example, a sick person may be under the delusion that his sickness is magickind’s punishment for something that he/she did and may not even seek out medical care.
It is better not to make up an explanation for something we don’t understand to comfort others.
It is better not to give someone something to believe in that we don’t know as fact ourselves.
It is better not make up explanations to manipulate or scare others into behaving the way we might wish them to behave.
It is better not to invent explanations to make others into what we think are better people. It is better to pass on only what we do know so we don’t confuse others - especially kids - because it is important to give them a honest starting place to grow from. It is better to be embarrassed at how little we do know, and not to pass on something we make up that we really don’t know, pretending that we do know.
It is better not to pass wishful thinking as fact.
Isn’t it better to be honest about all this, than trying to be helpful to others with lies or appeasing others by pretending to believe something that we don’t believe ourselves? To try to help someone with lies is likely underestimating their capabilities. If they take you seriously, you are manipulating and confusing them. Lying this way can be teaching others to lie in the same way. Also, if we tell children something that we are not sure of, and say it is true, we give them a bigger task as they grow up, because they have more to sort out to find the truth.
Here are my thoughts about the natural laws, often called laws of nature: I wish that we did not call them natural laws or laws of nature because they really are not laws. We can make up laws, change laws, obey laws, and break laws. We can’t make, change or break the way nature works.
Nature works the way it does regardless of what we think of it or how we describe it.
I prefer to call the way nature works “natural phenomena” or “the characteristics-of-nature”.
It is impossible for any of us to have a complete and clear understanding about the characteristics-of-nature. For one reason, there is just too much of it. There will always be infinite abundance of the characteristics-of-nature for anyone who wants to dig into it, learn about it, and sort it out. Also, much of our understand of nature is really analogies and models of it. No matter how long and hard we try, we will never understand very much of the characteristics-of-nature and some of our understanding will always depend on models and analogies.
The characteristics-of-nature are absolute and ever present. You are in tune with characteristics-of-nature, no matter what you do. You are when you cook, burn your toast, drive a car, ride a bicycle, throw a ball, walk, breathe, swim, dance, sing, use a computer, or do anything at all. I feel confident that if everything that anyone has discovered about the characteristics-of-nature were stored in one place, it would only represent a tiny, tiny bit of the total, and we would still depend largely on analogies and models of it.
Even though we can’t ever fully understand the characteristics-of-nature, let’s pretend for a moment that we can. In that case, we could describe what happens naturally with every particle, molecule, planet, star and galaxy, too. Again, the characteristics-of-nature does not govern, the characteristics-of-nature ARE what happens naturally.
Most people learn a lot about the characteristics-of-nature just from experience. We all know that we can live full lives without taking physics, chemistry, or mechanical engineering classes. Some kids, who have not taken any of these classes, can do remarkable tricks on skate boards, for example. Surely they understand some of the characteristics-of-nature from experience and are confident in what they know, but many can’t explain Newton’s principles, which are taught at most high schools. Birds fly, fish swim, and all sorts of animals do remarkable things, yet none ever read a book or took a class that explains any of their behavior.
Getting back to the question: What is the “ultimate power” throughout all existence? I am sure that the characteristics-of-nature are an ultimate power, if not the only power of this magnitude. I am not qualified to just say that there is a magickind that created, supersedes or shares this ultimate power. No one else is qualified to make that declaration either. Even if there is a magickind, it has not given anyone any sort of authority or special knowledge. For example, the Pope really does not represent God, regardless of what he thinks. I feel strongly that not one of us does, ever has or ever will. All the religions and our concepts of magickind are human creations and human alone. We could solve human conflicts better if religion and concepts of magickind didn’t interfere with solving them.
Now I will write about some of the world’s most significant problems. First I must say that I am just one person, and I can’t possibly give solutions to all world’s problems. Finding solutions is going to take a significant effort from people all over the world and carrying out those solutions will take cooperation among even more people. Even so, I am contributing something significant here, and hope it gets others being honest with themselves too about religion and magickind too.
So many people have so much anxiety over making a living, that there is not enough energy left for helping others solve our most serious problems. To these folks, day-to-day survival is such big concern that the problems of the earth’s overpopulation, pollution, and global warming are lesser concerns.
Also, significant numbers of people insist on coercing everyone to agree and participate with their religion, and that is a huge problem. Some individuals try to integrate their own religion into schools and into all branches of government. They want to limit the media to their own religious perspective. The problem with this is that many people involved with different religions are acting as if only their religious instincts are correct, and they demand that everyone conform to them, thus perpetuating dangerous conflicts.
The frustration, anxieties, and conflicts that come out of all these hostilities distract other people who would just as soon be bystanders. Huge numbers of people are so distracted that overpopulation, pollution, and global warming are lesser concerns to them.
Wars related to religious conflicts are difficult barriers to resolving these problems because they distract many people from finding solutions to the other global problems I mentioned above.
We are at a critical time, when human overpopulation is so serious that we are using up natural resources faster than they can be replenished. Cheap petroleum is running out, and our indiscriminate use of petroleum products contribute to global warming. We are affecting the weather, causing droughts, causing fires, and aggravating hurricanes. We are poisoning the air, land, and oceans. Those are just some of the ways global warming is making things worse. Global warming has so much momentum that it will continue to get worse for a while, no matter what we do. It will take enormous effort and cooperation to slow down this man-made disaster, and turn it around.
Millions of people are trying to do something about this all over the world, both individually and through thousands of organizations. However, many political leaders are in the way instead of being an asset to fixing the enormous problems with the earth’s environment.
Unfortunately, a significant number of political leaders all over the world are terrified of one another, and are consumed with trying to manipulate and scare one another for the sake of their national security, their own security, and the security of their families. The distrust among them is enormous. Also, too many political leaders are trying to make their own religious absolutes into absolutes for everyone, everywhere.
Time is running out. If there really is a magickind, obviously it has not prevented us from making our world into a worse place to live in. If we let global warming continue unchecked, it might keep killing off the human population until there are not enough of us left to make it worse anymore??
Those who created, changed, embellished, and perpetuated religions and concepts of magickind (and the related notions of threats and rewards) are not helping. It takes trust to get the kind of cooperation needed, and I don’t know how we can get this kind of trust by lying to motivate others, and lying to our perceived enemies as well.
I know that many people involved with religion think that their involvement makes the world a better place. Some individuals think that their religion is necessary to scare, manipulate and motivate others into being the sort of people they want to be around. People who have used religion all their lives to control the behavior of others will be terrified of doing something different because they have become very dependant on religion, and they will be lost at first without it.
Many people involved with religions donate money to feed starving people and help others. I really don’t want to discourage anyone from helping others. Here is a thought for those in this position: You are most likely helping others from your heart when you’re not scared into it or compelled to do so by a religion. By saying this, I am not denying that some religious people are helping others sincerely from their heart. We are all individuals, so there is no way I can generalize that everyone involved with a religion is helping others only because of feeling coerced by their religion.
I wish that I could end this on a high note saying that if we just do “X” (this being the solution to all these problems), everything will work out and we can solve the global warming problem, the energy problems, the overpopulation problems- and that all wars would end. I don’t have a pat answer to what “X” is. Some reading this may be disappointed, but I am only human, and I alone can’t possibly solve all the world’s problems. I feel very strongly about what I have written here and hope to have more insights later.
I am sure that “X” is not begging a magickind to fix it all for us. When praying is a substitute for action, it is burying one’s head in the sand and hoping that something magic will step in. When we don’t get results, it can be terribly hard on us. Honestly, I begged a possible magickind for much of my life to fix things, and now I see my own begging in prayer was a distraction and regret that ever prayed. It is better to put forth the study, work, courage and honesty necessary to fix things in a way that will make a difference to my own life and life in general. For those of us feeling helpless, praying for magic intervention can be like a narcotic.
Part of “X” involves letting go of the supposed absolutes that we got from various religions, and using integrity, our own natural humanity, caring, and common sense instead. I know that it is extremely hard, because I have had many absolutes to overcome. I judged myself by standards that were inhuman and impossible. In turn, I judged others by the same standards that I could not meet myself. Honestly, I have not been able to clear all the religious attitudes, and absolutes out of my head. That is why I know that it is so hard to do.
Part of “X” is encouraging the younger people to use their own humanity, caring and common sense to solve the worlds problems, and for the older generation to give them the latitude they need to do this. Then they are less likely to make the same mistakes that are habits for some of the older people.
Surely part of “X” involves telling those who are making things better how much that we appreciate it. This is an easier part, but it is important to realize that buttering up to someone by lying to appease them is different from honestly expressing real appreciation.
Part of “X” is accepting that we are all human and not expecting any of us to be super people, or inhuman. We can’t read minds. We can’t use magic. Some people are good at creating an illusion of magic with card tricks and other tricks, but we know this is only entertainment and illusion. Again, we are only human. We all fart, like it or not.
Part of “X” is not blaming anyone for something that someone else did, and making sure that our legal systems don’t perpetuate misguided blame, either.
Surely, thousands of years ago, long before anyone one had significant scientific understanding, a lot of things did not make sense to everyone, and it was natural for individuals to consider that something magical was responsible. Part of “X” is understanding this, and being grateful today that most people have better understanding of the world and of themselves.
Part of “X” is realizing that millions of people today still grow up with very little scientific understanding, and that it is understandable for them to think that there is magic in nature. It is critical to understand this and not use any of these people as scapegoats.
Part of “X” is for us to face the embarrassment by coming clean when we lie as opposed to being liars who remains steadfast, resolute, and secretive about our mistakes in the attempt to maintain a false credibility in the eyes of others.
For sure, part of “X” is not making up a new religion about a magickind and it is not perpetuating something like this that we don’t know as fact.
Rudy Stefenel
PS: I have been working on this write-up for years, and have changed it many times. I will change parts of it and add to it if I learn something new, think more clearly, or discover a mistake in what I wrote. If you find grammar and other errors, please let me know.