History of Church as State

Why devote tax dollars to teach children to read? Why do they need to understand how numbers work? What do we benefit from learning about our history, the past 250 years of this nation, the past millennia of human existence? Why not let churches provide education?

Why? Because a review of the past warns us of where religious government can lead. Colonists sailing to these shores in the early 1600s taught reading to support religion, a purpose that continued through the mid-19th century. Warring among themselves over which doctrine would be in control, Protestant-Catholic conflicts were driven by intense religious prejudice, political fears of loyalty to the Pope, and imperial wars against France and Spain. While Maryland was founded as a Catholic refuge, Protestants often took control, passing anti-Catholic laws. Maryland’s 1649 Toleration Act, providing freedom, was twice overturned by Puritans. In 1654, Puritan forces overthrew the proprietary government, outlawing Catholicism. Later, in 1689, “Protestant Associators” led by John Coode defeated Maryland’s Catholic proprietarial government, leading to the prohibition of public Catholic worship and the loss of their political rights.

Needless to say, religious violence didn’t start with American colonists. As far back as you care to examine European history, you find religious wars. The Crusades (11th–13th centuries) were launched by Western European Christians, sanctioned by the Pope, primarily to reclaim the Holy Land (Jerusalem) from Muslim rule, assist the Byzantine Empire against the Seljuk Turks, and reunite Christendom. Total deaths are estimated between two to six million. While exact breakdowns are impossible due to limited records, contemporary estimates suggest hundreds of thousands of Muslims died, while Christian losses included roughly one to two million Europeans.

Perhaps most horrific of these bloody religious wars were the years of the so-called Spanish Inquisition (1478–1834) which used systematic, often bureaucratic, methods to enforce Catholic orthodoxy including secret interrogations, psychological coercion, property confiscation, and calculated torture to extract confessions. Common torture methods included waterboarding, the rack, and pulley-based limb dislocating to force confessions which led to public auto-da-fé ceremonies and executions. Roughly 150,000 people, with an estimated 3,000–5,000 burned alive, were caught up in this religious insanity. As a global power, Spain engaged in religious wars against Protestantism, including conflicts with England, culminating in the 1588 Spanish Armada.

These actions were driven by Spain’s determination to create a uniformly Catholic society. Sound familiar?

Other similar conflicts included:

The Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1639–1653): A series of armed conflicts, including the Bishops’ Wars, the English Civil War (1642–1651), and the Irish Confederate Wars. This involved Anglicans (Royalists/Cavaliers) fighting Puritans (Parliamentarians/Roundheads), who were often allied with Scottish Presbyterians, against a backdrop of Catholic uprising in Ireland.
The English Civil War: A fundamental conflict between Anglicans (supporters of King Charles I) and Puritans (supporters of Parliament), leading to over 100,000 battle deaths and thousands more non-combat deaths.
Cromwellian Conquest of Ireland (1649–1653): Part of the wider civil war, aimed primarily at Catholic forces.
The Glorious Revolution (1688–1689) and Williamite War: A shift in power from Catholic King James II to Protestant forces (Anglicans and others), featuring battles between Anglicans and Catholics, particularly in Ireland.
Persecution of Quakers: Quakers were not an army but faced severe persecution from Puritans in New England (1656–1661) and both Anglicans and Puritans in England.

Other European religious wars included the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) resulting in 4.5 to 8 million deaths, while the French Wars of Religion (1562–1598) caused 2 to 4 million deaths.

The period after “discovery” of the New World featured the slaughter of millions of indigenous people. Upon arriving on these lands, still thriving with wildlife and virgin forests despite 40,000+ years of indigenous settlement, Europeans viewed these peoples as inferior and un-Christian, a view which justified brutal violence. Estimates suggest that roughly 55 to 56 million native people died in the Americas due to European colonization between 1492 and the early 1600s. This mass mortality, known as the “Great Dying,” represented about 90% of the indigenous population and was primarily caused by introduced diseases, alongside warfare, forced labor (slavery), and societal collapse.

Based on a 1493 papal decree, Christian explorers believed they had the right to claim land belonging to non-Christians, often viewing themselves as bringing civilization and God to “pagan populations.”

One wonders, what would Jesus do?

Religious conflicts in colonial America were widespread, characterized by Puritan persecution of Quakers and Baptists in New England, anti-Catholic laws in Maryland, and violence against dissenting evangelicals by Anglican authorities in the South. Conflicts also occurred between “Old Light” traditionalists and “New Light” revivalists during the Great Awakening. Puritans in Massachusetts Bay exiled dissenters like Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, and hanged four Quakers between 1659 and 1661.

Intermingled among these loving brothers and sisters in Christ were the witch hunts driven by Puritan beliefs and fear of the devil, culminating in the 1692–1693 Salem witch trials, which saw 19 people hanged, one pressed to death,[1] and over 200 accused. While Salem is most famous, over 100 cases occurred across New England and Virginia between 1626 and 1730, including a significant 1662 panic in Hartford, Connecticut.

You’ll notice that in all that violent turmoil, it was the Puritans who were the most intolerant, the most determined to force everyone to their chosen faith. The Puritans believed they had a divine mandate to establish a “Holy Commonwealth” that would influence all areas of life, including public morality, law, and social behavior. This strongly parallels the Catholic crown’s effort to create a uniformly Catholic society across Europe.

Nothing could be closer to this four-hundred year old depraved mindset than the present-day reality of the Christian Nationalists’ ongoing determination to force their beliefs on everyone else, that “God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.” They seek secure political power, social dominance, and the implementation of policies based on their religious worldview.

Small wonder that by 1776, the Founding Fathers emphasized the importance of separating the powers of the church and the function of government in writing the new nation’s fundamental governing document and its First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

In the same line of thinking, founders like Thomas Jefferson and later reformers argued that a republic could not survive on ignorance. They viewed tax-supported public education as an insurance premium paid for by the wealthy to ensure political stability, create good citizens, and prevent social unrest. Nativism, driven by fears that newcomers would steal jobs, lower wages, threaten national identity, bring crime, and fail to assimilate particularly targeted Catholicism in the 19th century and non-northern European immigrants later. As immigration increased, particularly in the mid-19th century, public schools were viewed as a mechanism for assimilating children from diverse cultural and religious backgrounds into a shared “American” culture.

Education’s role today is all that and more, critical to our role as citizens of a nation meant to be governed by the people. We are tasked with self-governance as well as developing our moral character, intellectual growth, science-based literacy, and academic proficiency. Few would argue that most modern employment would be possible without these skills.

The chaos permeating United States society today is a primary outcome of our compromised educational system. It’s only going to get worse as budget cuts further undermine school operations and digital media becomes more permeated by artificial intelligence. But the greatest threat is the insidious creep of religious indoctrination, a largely unrecognized form of subversion which demands tax dollars in support of religious teachings in specific opposition to the Founding Fathers’ intent.

These efforts have simmered through our nation’s history, but only in the last fifty years have they made strides in overthrowing our constitutional foundations. We truly face a crisis.

[1] “Pressing” was a method where victims were laid down with heavy weights placed on their bodies, causing breathing to become impossible as ribs fractured, lungs collapsed, and internal organs failed over several hours or days. This happened to Giles Corey, an 81-year-old farmer.

New Puritans and the U.S. Peerage: The Willful Destruction of Public Education

Like the slow spread of a fatal disease, certain interest groups within the United States have been working to undermine the nation’s education system. Their goal, as so clearly outlined in the 900 pages of Project 2025, is to change our democratic republic into plutocratic theocracy. Ruling from the top, the wealthiest citizens (U.S. Peerage) will enjoy virtually no restrictions on their profits or the damage caused by their industries, while ruling from the bottom, the Christian Nationalists and other religious extremists (New Puritans) will ensure the population lives by Christian rules.

This is not a theory. This is the fact of the current situation as recent Supreme Court decisions have opened the door for unregulated homeschooling and religious private schools to receive our tax dollars in support of their operations. This is in direct opposition to the Constitution’s First Amendment, which specifically prohibits any government support for any religion.

This workaround has been steadily advancing since colonial days but has increased significantly since the 1940s when the “Red Scare” brought a fresh level of religious fanaticism to the public arena. The result? Today, billions of our tax dollars flow into religious school coffers while public schools suffer for inadequate funding even though 90% of K-12 students attend public schools. Perhaps more damaging than the financial costs are the lessons learned under religious instruction: that the Earth is only 6,000 years old; that vaccinations are harmful; that men are superior to women. These are the seeds of a modern nation’s destruction.

Grab your copy, only $6. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H3NW358F

New Puritans

This is not a theory. This is the fact of the current situation as recent Supreme Court decisions have opened the door for unregulated homeschooling and students at religious private schools to receive our tax dollars in support of their operations. This is in direct opposition to the Constitution’s First Amendment, which specifically prohibits any government support for any religion.

This workaround has been steadily advancing since colonial days but has increased significantly since the 1940s when the “Red Scare” brought a fresh level of religious fanaticism to the public arena. The result? Today, billions of our tax dollars flow into religious school instruction while public schools suffer from inadequate funding even though 90% of K-12 students attend public schools. Perhaps more damaging than the financial costs are the lessons learned under religious instruction: that the Earth is only 6,000 years old; that vaccinations are harmful; that men are superior to women. These are the seeds of a modern nation’s destruction.

91 page booklet $6 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H3NW358F

Table of Contents

Preface

History of Church as State

Education Is A National Priority

The Education Problem: Bigger than the New Puritans

Why the Puritan Agenda Must Not Prevail

Unregulated Private and Home Schooling

The Arkansas Situation

Christian Nationalism’s Goal: Overturn the Constitutional Separation of Church and State

In Conclusion

Afterword

Fire

Over a period of weeks, sometimes months, my dad would collect bits of debris to burn in the big garden beside their house in town. At the edge of the dormant garden, he would back up to his growing stack of brush, the bed of his rusted blue Ford Ranger piled high with dead limbs and old fence posts and oddly shaped pieces of wood that he might find alongside the road. The truck unloading was ceremonial, it seemed to me one day when I watched him, a kind of ritualistic process where he lifted each piece from the truck, carried it slowly in his now-halting pace across the soft, plowed dirt, and strategically placed it on the rising, unruly mound. Even the very last, tiny pieces merited his attention, scraped from the truck bed with his worn-out broom and thrown in fistfuls onto the top of the pile.

Sometimes I watched my father with his fires. Early into the process, he studied the future shape of it, how high it would blaze, whether the base would attract a good draft, whether unwanted combustibles had been suitably removed from the perimeter. He stacked his fuel accordingly, bits of wood and old lumber and limbs broken in winter storms, piled akimbo with large against small, thick against thin in a perfect formula for flame.

He would light it in the morning, when his footsteps tracked rich green across the silvery coat of dew on the lawn. His time at the donut shop for six a.m. coffee with the old liars, as he called them, would be cut short for the fire.

Usually he stood to the side of the shimmering heat, shovel in hand. After one of the last fires, my mother complained that he stood so close that the skin on his forehead turned red and later peeled. Standing in the dining room with them, I looked at my dad as she pointed out the damaged skin. He raised his eyebrows and smiled, offering no excuse except to agreeably remark that it had been hot.

I know his mind traveled to his past while he watched the fire. The flames would dance and reflect in his eyes while he talked about fields they had burned when he was growing up, his dad, his brothers, and how the mules had to plow a line around the field to keep the fire from jumping the fence. He remembered his mother and how she burned off her garden in the winter, leaving the ground filmed in ash for the early planting of onion, cabbage, and potato. He talked about the cold of the night, when the feather bed kept him warm until his father got up to build a fire the stove and his mother would mix biscuits.

A friend once remarked on the task of clearing out the old family house after his grandmother died, particularly the basement. It seems during her waning years, she had stockpiled kindling carefully gleaned from her wooded yard. Grocery sacks and cardboard boxes, each one stuffed with dried twigs and broken limbs, filled the space like so many sockets in a wasp’s nest. She had prepared a hive of future warmth. He said it took seven pickup truck loads to remove her cache of carefully prepared comfort.

At first, I discounted my friend’s grandmother’s collection of kindling as some kind of mental or emotional disorder. But today, as I picked up fallen oak twigs in my own yard, the wind tearing through the woods glowing orange with autumn, I thought about this wealth of fuel and one of the more opportune swaps in my life—my old refrigerator for a wood cookstove.

Neighbors had inherited the stove when they bought the old house down the road from me. A “Royal” brand, its heavy cast iron top features six burner plates and a water warming bin on the right. There’s a small firebox and ash bin on the left and an oven in the middle. The sides and front are white enamel, and a glass-covered chromed dial on the oven door features a double-ended needle which simultaneously points to a number and a description of the temperature: slow, warm, medium, hot, and very hot, the intervals also marked at the other end of the needle at 100, 200, up to 600.

I pick up more dead wood and stack it by the door, worrying that my bundles of twigs will be similarly disparaged someday, a burden requiring disposal by patient descendants. But I must plan for future winters when ice coats the electric lines and snow piles up on the roads and I end up with several days of splendid isolation, maybe without running water or the benefit of electricity. Then the old cookstove will spring to life, its grate glowing in a steady bed of coals, lids jiggling as food simmers on its top, the rocked chimney a beacon of warmth into the gray sky outside my window where wind will whip streams of smoke into the icy mist. In a bad winter, a person might need a basement full of kindling.

But I suspect it is not completely the need for fire that pushed my friend’s grandmother or my father in their almost religious attendance to the needs of fire. As much as they might have needed the bodily comfort the fire would assure, they had a greater, more present need—the need to accomplish. In my father’s later years, he could not show much to account for the hours of his days. But he could still build a superior fire.

When he was eighty-five and suffering mini-strokes that, he said, was like hearing distant music, we had taken away his truck keys and he couldn’t go for donuts with the old liars or gather wood for a fire. I found him one day by an old wood pile at the side of his house. He had the sledge hammer in one hand, gripped up close to the head, and a foot-diameter length of oak sitting upright on a nearby stump. He had driven a splitting wedge into the center of the oak, sweat pouring off his forehead, his slight frame bent to the task.

In response to my concerned questioning, he replied: “The ole dad is still worth something.”

I turned away so he couldn’t see my tears.

~~~

Back when his neighbor Cotton was still alive, my dad would call out to him on the morning of a fire.

“Come on over,” he’d wave his arm.

And Cotton would bring over a few limbs he’d been saving or anything wooden he wanted to get rid of, set up his lawn chair next to Dad’s, and they’d tend the fire together. Dad would stick his cigarette lighter down to the bits of paper and cardboard he had crumpled at the base of the heap, and then light a fresh Winston and draw on the cigarette strong and deep while the blaze flared into the brush and started working its way up the near side of the pile.

The fire merited their full attention. Orange-red flames would tear through the heap of wood, picking up speed. They listened to the snapping and popping of it, smelled the scent of wood smoke. Dad would take another drag off the Winston and then launch into one or another of his stories.

In one of his tales, he recalled high school at Morrow. Among his buddies there, he joined with three friends in a quartet that performed on the Fayetteville radio station. They were late one day, racing down the road in a Model T. As they approached the railroad crossing between Cane Hill and Prairie Grove, the freight train whistle sounded loud and long. In those days, the trains were endless. The quarter didn’t have time to wait. So the driver floored that old car, and they barreled through the turn on two left wheels and a cloud of dust seconds before the steam engines roared across the road, whistles blaring and the engineer shaking his fist at them.

He’d have to stop and laugh about that, full of renewed vigor.

On occasion, my dad would muse over his adventures teaching singing school. The shaped note method simplified the more arcane aspects of reading music, and folks would flock to these gatherings, although the popularity had as much to do with socializing as it did with music. He liked to reminisce about the time he forded the White River at Goshen to teach singing school there. Mid-river, he fell off the mule and wore wet clothes the rest of the day.

His father’s job with the railroad gave way to the Depression, and after trying to make his way with blacksmithing, in 1933 the family moved to West Memphis. Dad was in his last year of high school, so he stayed at Morrow in an arrangement with the folks who owned the general store. He would live at the store and keep the fire going in the wood stove overnight so the canned goods didn’t freeze. After a few months, he got word his mother was sick, and he had to hitchhike to West Memphis. He had nothing but an apple in his pocket.

When he told his stories, Dad didn’t have to look at Cotton to know he was paying attention. Cotton came from the same times.

The flames would leap high in the air, twice as high as the shimmering cone of wood, twisting into the air like a curling orange hand with only a faint grey vapor of smoke rushing from the top of it. Periodically Dad or Cotton would walk around to the side or back of the pile and pick up ends of logs or still-burning sticks that had fallen out of the path of the flame and throw them back onto the fire. Each thrown piece caused a great cavalcade of sparks to explode into the air, a celebration of new fuel, of longer life to the fire.

Cotton would stay with my dad while the fire burned down, sometimes for the rest of the afternoon, poking at it, throwing on newly discovered fallen twigs or dead weeds to keep it alive. By that time, there was little talking. Dad would use the shovel to drag the last few little unburned pieces over to the center of the ash circle where the coals ate them up in quick yellow blazes.

Finally Cotton’s wife would call him home to dinner. Mom could have called Dad too, but he wouldn’t have come. He would lean on the shovel, watching the red embers swell and throb in the slight breeze of dusk, until the last bit of fire had died.

My friend’s grandmother probably labored slowly, moving from place to place in her yard to collect the fallen twigs, carrying the brown paper grocery bag in her stiffened hand. Breezes would have lifted the tendrils of white hair that had escaped her tidy braid, and she would have stopped on occasion to stare off in memory of past times, when young she might have run laughing through green spring fields chased by a lover, perhaps examined in close intensity the phosphorescent emerald glow of new moss at the base of a big tree. Each time she bent to a fallen twig, a fresh scene spilled into her mind and she was transported to a better time. Later, she may have sat on her porch to review the tidied yard and the merits of her life.

That hasn’t happened to me yet but I expect it. For now, gathering fallen twigs is a practical exercise when I have come outside to put scraps in the compost or rake a few more leaves. But gathering twigs and preparing for fire leads me to examine the purpose of my existence. In the long tradition of humans and fire, I seek proper reverence for the knowledge I carry forward, the experience of my father, of all the grandmothers, who depended on fire for survival. We are removed from that now. My children in their comfortable homes have no need to build fire.

Yet there is ceremony in every fire. When I begin to clear a brush pile or dispose of too many fallen leaves, I think of composition, how the tiny start of flame will need room and air to burn upward, where larger limbs should be placed to catch early and burn long. After all the fires of my life, each new one is still an experiment testing whether I can prove my worth.

The flames of my success warm me and encourage me. My success is the fire. Its flames live on my arrangement of wood and air, orange and red, leaping and cracking. Embers fall to the ground and glow in the gathering bed of hot ash. My thoughts and life rush outwards in a vision of times more than my own, more than my father’s.

The ancient tribe has gathered and their shadows circle my fire.

From I Met a Goat on the Road

The New Peasants

https://knightstemplar.co/what-did-peasants-do-in-the-middle-ages/

We need to stop thinking like peasants. We no longer live under the rule of a king or an aristocratic lineage of dukes, earls, and what not. We citizens of the United States (and most modern democracies) hold equal shares of power over ourselves, each of us with the right to assemble, speak our mind, and vote in order to maintain a government that protects us from any force threatening to bar our path to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Apparently some among us have forgotten, or more likely never learned, that this is our gift as Americans. They are the 21^st century serfs who plod along ignoring their rights—and their duties—as American citizens. Observers most often label these new age serfs as ignorant, but that’s not entirely the reality. These modern serfs are willfully ignorant, a choice they have made in order to avoid thinking.

True, thinking is a troublesome exercise. Thinking requires the gathering of all pertinent facts on any particular issue. Such fact gathering requires not only the time and effort of the exercise, but also possession of skills in such areas as rationality and research. These skills are taught to children in their school years, but the teaching is clearly inadequate. This inadequacy is not necessarily the fault of the teacher or the school system or the curriculum, although all three can be at fault to some degree. More likely the inadequacy is due to parents not practicing thinking at home.

This kind of generational non-thinking used to be the norm, back when most of us were serfs. Those were the days when a few traditional skills sufficed in meeting life goals. A serf served his/her lord—the duke, earl, or even the king—who made his expectations clear. A woodsman was to cut and haul wood. A farmer was to plant, cultivate, and harvest crops.

As explained in Wikipedia:

Serfdom is the forced labor of serfs in a feudal society. In medieval Europe, serfs were peasant farmers who worked without pay for a lord. In exchange, they got to live and work on the lord’s manor. They also got the lord’s protection. Serfs had more rights than slaves (for example, serfs could own property). However, they were not completely free. They could not move, marry, or leave the manor without the lord’s permission. In most serfdoms, serfs were legally part of the land. If the land was sold, they were sold with it. Serfs worked in their lord’s fields. They sometimes did other things related to agriculture, like forestry and transportation (by both land and river). Some also worked in craft and manufacturing … like the village blacksmith, miller or innkeeper. Serfdom developed from agricultural slavery in the Roman Empire. It spread through Europe around the 10th century. During the Middle Ages, most European people lived in serfdoms.

Serf children grew up learning about life from their parents, a life that followed the rules set down by their lord’s demands. The sawyer’s sons were sawyers. The tanner’s sons were tanners. Owned by their fathers as girls, females were handed over to their husbands to serve as wives and mothers, subject to his absolute control.

Those rules made it easy to decide what to do without having to think about it.

https://americanantiquarian.org/millgirls/files/original/8a8abec89136208b78c319d282bac1e1.jpg

Ah, those were the days. There were established rules about not only what work to do each day, but what to wear (same homespun garments as the day before), what to eat (same basic gruel and bread as the day before), what to believe (acceptance of one’s humble place in life because the Bible said so), and so forth. Even a free man could become a serf if he owed a large debt. He would make an agreement with the lord of the land. The lord would keep him safe, give money to pay his debt, and give him land to work on. In return, he would work for the lord. All his children would become serfs.

So while our early ancestors arrived in the American colonies fresh from their peasantry, only a few of them brought with them the practice of thinking. This is the resistant strain of human nature, to do what the parents did, to blindly accept a set of rules to follow, to spend our days laboring to satisfy our lord and master. The goal has shifted only slightly in that we labor in the belief that if we work hard enough, we too can be a lord. This is the fantasy that controls so many, that someday when we’re lords, we won’t want the government to tax us. This is the thinking that allows the rich to pay taxes at the same rate as the rest of us, when their incomes surpass by billions the amounts we earn. Meanwhile, we bow down (at least mentally) to the lords who have achieved ‘greatness’ through wealth or power.

After all, peasants believe, how could lowly persons such as ourselves manage to decipher the intricacies of big business or political process much less discern the many aspects of personality and manipulation employed by the lords? How are we supposed to know what is true? We must believe what our chosen leaders tells us. Never mind what news source may or may not employ actual journalists, or who provide ‘news’ instead of ‘entertainment.’ It’s all a lie anyway, they say, throwing up their hands, disheartened.

Well, yes, these are difficult mental tasks for people who never learned how to research or reason. Besides, we’re busy trying to keep a roof over our head and food on the table.

A full 34% of the voting-eligible population did not vote in 2020, which saw the highest voter turnout since 1914. Even more concerning is the popularity of wannabe dictators like Donald Trump whose supporters openly ridicule education, basking in the praise of a man who “loves the poorly educated.” It should be no surprise that Democrats control 77% of the U.S.’s most highly educated Congressional districts (107 districts) while Republicans control 64% of districts where the fewest people went to college (107 districts).[1]

There is no controlling force that coerces individuals into peasant thinking. Such a role is heavily influenced by tradition and hardly mitigated by many educational opportunities. Community plays a role as well, either offering role models who use thought and action to move beyond peasantry, or by warning of negative results for those who try to move beyond their family traditions of non-thinking. It is often easier to remain in the trenches than to climb out, especially when one has failed to grasp the tools which make climbing possible. Plus, who wants the responsibility of stepping up to the plate? I might swing and miss.

Our society and especially our educational systems are failing to penetrate the mental laziness of lingering peasantry enticing us to depend on lists of rules handed down by lords. Curriculum for all schools, public, private or religious, should provide the methods of rational thinking in order to protect malingering peasants from their self-destructive (and democracy-destroying) behavior. Curriculum requirements should include debate where fact-based points are presented on a chosen topic. A thorough understanding of civics and history should form the core of classes that also teach language arts and mathematics/logic. At strategic points in those school years, there should be lessons in conflict resolution as well as introduction to introspection.

The answer is stepping up to our human potential, NOT to install a wannabe king.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/14/us/politics/trump-presidential-campaign-voters.html

[1] https://www.politico.com/interactives/2022/midterm-election-house-districts-by-education/

The Continuing Israeli-Palestinian Agony

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2024/01/16/after-over-100-days-of-war-palestinians-fight-hard-hit-areas-of-gaza-and-fire-rockets-israel.html

Many Israelis and Jewish people worldwide recognize the futility of Netanyahu’s relentless attack on Gaza under the excuse of protecting Israel from Hamas. The United States is caught up in a tangle of its historical sympathy and generosity toward Israel and the current reality of Israel’s genocidal violence against Palestinians. The truth is, the more Palestinian deaths, the more certainty that Hamas will never die. Every bomb dropped recruits more support for Hamas.

The U. S. and President Biden’s situation is a classic Catch 22. Should we take a hard line with Netanyahu and his rightwing government, setting down an unequivocal rule that no more financial or military support will be forthcoming if Israel does not step back and reorient its Palestinian policies? The logical (and fair) solution would be the formation of a Palestinian state and returning the Israel/Palestine borders to the 1967 boundaries.

[My personal view is that the attempt to create a state of Israel was a mistake from the start. The fond dream of Zionists, this effort to reestablish a Jewish state after 2,000-plus years, was absurd and unnecessary. No other religion has its own ‘state.’ Religion is a personal choice, not appropriate justification for the establishment of a nation. Imagine if we forced a partition of England as a homeland for Methodists!]

Back to the Catch 22. If Biden takes such a step, he risks losing political support from American Jews and evangelicals. This comes at a critical time in American politics as the extreme right wing hopes to bring Trump into a second term as president, which in itself could spell the end of our democracy.

For Biden, evangelicals won’t be much of a loss, since most are already lined up for Trump in the deluded belief he is a “flawed vessel” for the hand of God. This is a form of religious schizophrenia. Historically, Christians hate Jews because they killed Jesus. BUT THAT WAS GOD’S PLAN, right? Creating then sacrificing his “son” in order to provide forgiveness for humans? So logically, Christians should LOVE Jews for the crucifixion as a manifestation of God’s plan.

In reality, Christian ‘love’ of Israel is a self-serving strategy. “American evangelicals are among Israel’s most ardent advocates, compelled in part by their interpretation of scripture that says God’s ancient promise to the Jewish people designating the region as their homeland is unbreakable.”[1] American evangelical support for Israel has exacerbated conflict along Israel’s boundaries in encouraging settler expansion.[2]

“For many “Christians Zionists,” and particularly for popular evangelists with significant clout within the Republican Party, their support for Israel is rooted in its role in the supposed end times: Jesus’ return to Earth, a bloody final battle at Armageddon, and Jesus ruling the world from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. In this scenario, war is not something to be avoided, but something inevitable, desired by God, and celebratory.”[3]
BUT: “When it comes to anti-Semitism the Religious Right falls under two great clouds of suspicion. First, contemporary anti-Semitism originated in and was nourished for millennia by Christian condemnation of Jews for the crucifixion of Christ and for their continued rejection of Christ as the Messiah. Second, political anti-Semitism has most frequently and disastrously arisen from right-wing governments and ideologies from the Czarist pogroms to Hitler’s Final Solution. …Historically, the strong and traditional religious beliefs of evangelicals and fundamentalists have both engendered religious particularism that makes them critical of followers of other faiths … and encourages antipathy toward Jews for rejecting Christ now and in the past.[4]

https://worshipleader.com/leadership/awakening-prayer/

The right also loves to use the phrase “Judeo-Christian values” to promote a conservative Christian agenda that conveniently erases the several thousand years during which “Christian values” included beating, forced conversion and murder of Jewish people. …Christian philosemitism, especially on the political right, is often linked to support for Israel. Evangelical conservatives have long embraced Israel in part because many believe it’s important for fulfilling end times prophecies (in which Jews convert or go to hell). Evangelicals also have a strong connection with Israel and the holy sites located there. Israel’s oppression of Palestinian people and its conflicts with its Muslim neighbors also feed into right-wing ideology, specifically Islamophobia.[5]
The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), the largest Protestant Christian denomination in the U.S., has explicitly rejected suggestions that it should back away from seeking to convert Jews, a position which critics have called anti-Semitic, but a position which Baptists believe is consistent with their view that salvation is solely found through faith in Christ. In 1996 the SBC approved a resolution calling for efforts to seek the conversion of Jews “as well as the salvation of ‘every kindred and tongue and people and nation.'” …Most Evangelicals agree with the SBC’s position, and some of them also support efforts which specifically seek the Jews’ conversion. Additionally, these Evangelical groups are among the most pro-Israel groups. (For more information, see Christian Zionism.) One controversial group which has received a considerable amount of support from some Evangelical churches is Jews for Jesus, which claims that Jews can “complete” their Jewish faith by accepting Jesus as the Messiah.^[6]

Without doubt, for Joe Biden facing the November 2024 election, he must temper his choices of policies toward Israel in consideration of the American Jewish vote, which has traditionally aligned with Democrats.

For most of the 20th century since 1936, the vast majority of Jews in the United States have been aligned with the Democratic Party. During the 20th and 21st centuries, the Republican Party has launched initiatives to persuade American Jews to support their political policies, with relatively little success.[7]

Are enough American Jews outraged by the Palestinian death toll and allied threat to Israel’s future to vote for Biden even if he places firm conditions on the continuance of U.S. financial and military aid? As reported January 8, 2024 in the Jerusalem Post, “Gallup’s tracking of Americans’ views on Netanyahu since 1997 indicates a recent negative shift, with a 47% unfavorable rating against a 33% favorable rating. Notably, Republicans maintain a more positive view of Netanyahu, with 55% favorability, in contrast to 14% among Democrats and 30% among independents.”[8]

Whether this shift in opinion would hold if the U.S. no longer supplied Israel with 2000-pound bombs and other weapons in its relentless attack on Gaza remains an open question. But world opinion increasingly demands a change of U.S. policy toward Israel, and the U. S. is the only entity with sufficient leverage—the threat of withholding all U.S. aid—to force Israel to make changes that Netanyahu and his cohort adamantly oppose.

The so-called two-state solution is unquestionably an important first step, with boundaries between the Palestinian state and the Israeli state established along the fraught 1967 lines (with updated adjustments). Additional terms would include U.N. peacekeeping troops in place to enforce demilitarization on both sides as well as U.N. and mandatory Israeli funding in restoration of Gazan infrastructure.

Solutions rely on the Arab world’s acceptance of Israel’s existence in their midst and on Israel’s acceptance of its new boundaries without any expansion. If ARab states expect to hold a respected position in world affairs, it’s past time for the Arab world to embrace modern social norms—no more cutting off fingers, heads or other body parts, no more burning people alive or other bloody jihad. The savagery of Arab attacks on its ‘enemies’ is contrary to their own best interests, just as is Israel’s genocide against Gazans.

It’s time for Israel to live up to its religion with its idea that Jews are “God’s chosen people” not in order to believe themselves above any laws or superior in some way, but in order to fulfill the mission of proclaiming his truth among all the nations of the world.[9] Contrary to the “buy my ticket to heaven” ideas of the evangelical Christians in its support for Israel as a nation, it seems the message preserved in the 2,000 to 2,500 year-old-writings of Jews is that anyone embracing the Jewish faith must serve as a messenger “to make God known to the world.”

https://velveteenrabbi.blogs.com/blog/2014/07/joint-jewish-muslim-fast-against-violence.html

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/15/us/american-evangelicals-israel-hamas.html

[2] See https://theconversation.com/us-giving-to-israeli-nonprofits-how-much-jews-and-christians-donate-and-where-the-money-goes-201920

[3] https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/truth-many-evangelical-christians-support-israel-rcna121481

[4] Smith, Tom W. “The Religious Right and Anti-Semitism.” Review of Religious Research 40, no. 3 (1999): 244–58. https://doi.org/10.2307/3512370.

[5] https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/christian-led-caucus-protecting-jewish-values-no-thanks-ncna1287802

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_Christianity

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Jews_in_politics

[8] https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/article-781227

[9] See, for example, https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-quot-chosen-people-quot

Light Being Human

Goddess Ishtar (Inanna) on an Akkadian Empire seal, 2350–2150 BC. She is equipped with weapons on her back, has a horned helmet, and is trampling a lion held on a leash. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inanna

Despite the exquisite engineering that has brought us to our modern stage of humanity, we are—most of us, for the most part—still ruled by our animal brain. That doesn’t mean we don’t feel the pressure of our extraterrestrial part. To whatever extent our consciousness has been cut off from awareness of our genetic inheritance from our Sirius ancestors (or Pleiades, Orion’s Belt, etc., or perhaps all of these), the barrier to self-knowledge needs to be struck down so that we can see our true nature.

Admittedly, our ET brain has started to recognize itself. Perhaps there have been a few who have known over the millennia, but those were the exceptions often targeted for hostility by the rest of our herd. As our culture and technology advances, allowing us finally to know about DNA and gene manipulation as well as space travel, the possibilities of our origins have become more understandable. Of course there are some primitive tribes like the Dogon of West Africa who have not lost their awareness of ancestry from Sirius although in recent decades their primal knowledge has been polluted by the evangelizing of other religious beliefs.

Glimmers of our extraterrestrial/animal dualism leak into our consciousness in various ways, but only enough to cause suffering. Which is not how it was meant. There have been many times when one or more group of extraterrestrials tried to help us. We are, apparently, a project of theirs whose intervention has advanced our slow progress toward Homo sapiens. Interventions by these visitors have made our previous animal brain receptive to extraterrestrial consciousness. The evidence of these phases increasingly appears in the fossilized remains of a long list of human predecessors. The most recent in our great span of becoming: Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis, Homo ergaster, Homo erectus, Homo antecessor, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo naledi, Homo neanderthalensis, Homo denisova, and currently Homo sapiens.

Anthropological models based on fossils from the human evolutionary tree. P.Plailly/E.Daynes/Science Photo Library. https://www.newscientist.com/definition/human-evolution/

Sumerians recorded what they could of this extraterrestrial history in their Enūma Eliš circa 3350 BC. All early human histories agree that gods came from the sky not only to shape the human being but also to share important knowledges including astrology, mathematics, writing and an alphabet, metallurgy, measurement of time, and much more.[1] Typical of our domineering animal brain, we have manipulated these teachings into power structures by which to control each other for our own advantages. Religious dogma commands we must rely on faith in a religion’s particular set of rules which denies us any chance to let our ET emerge.

Yet even without any awareness, that genetic force pushes us beyond norms to do things that defy explanation like creating music that expresses the conflict. Music, as vibration, is the natural medium of our extraterrestrial existence. The dichotomy between our ET and our animal form is unmistakable in songs like “Creep,” by Radiohead. Lyrics author Thom Yorke dismissed the song, remembering his depressed state of mind in the late 1980s while at college. He particularly didn’t like the lines, “What the hell am I doing here / I don’t belong here.” Bandmate Jonny Greenwood contributed the abrasive guitar hits that accompany the chorus where the lyrics break into “I’m a creep. I’m a weirdo.” Yorke said the guitar sound was as if the song was “slashing its wrists. Halfway through the song it suddenly starts killing itself off, which is the whole point of the song really. It’s a real self-destruct song, there’s a real self-destruction ethic in a lot of the things we do onstage.”[2]

Yorke singing the chorus of “Creep” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFkzRNyygfk

Unlike the interpretations including that of Yorke himself, this song is largely not about a young male’s angst over a girl. That’s the surface meaning. Underneath, it’s about how we live with a level of grief over the loss of contact with our ET consciousness and don’t know how to understand that part of ourselves or what to do with it. For millennia, whatever knowledge might be understood innately has been funneled into religion, a terribly destructive force in the world.

The arts and sciences are often the fields pursued by those possessing the greatest amount of ET genes. Nicola Tesla, for example, suffered at the mercy of his inner ET when he pursued his experiments in electricity and many other scientific advances that wouldn’t be fully appreciated in his lifetime. “If you want to find the secrets of the universe,” he once said, “think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration.” He was ridiculed, shunned, and died penniless. Yet these fields are the very focus of present-day breakthrough research.

In September 2023, a video was produced on the subject of vibration and quantum physics:

“The Law of Vibration and Quantum Physics: A Dance of Energy and Matter” delves into the intrinsic connection between ancient wisdom and modern scientific discoveries. This video explores how everything in the universe, from our thoughts to the farthest star, operates on vibrational frequencies. By weaving insights from quantum physics with practical implications in health, relationships, and everyday life, the piece offers a compelling perspective on our interconnected reality and the profound influence of vibrational energies on our existence.”[3]

Albert Einstein reported that “If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.”

Music is vibration.

In my book Chroma: Light Being Human, I made an attempt to imagine the process by which extraterrestrials gradually managed to create a place in our ape brains to receive their energy. I believe we are now in another genetic change period. The signs are here.

What if we knew that what has been called our ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ is in fact an extraterrestrial presence, that we are an animal creature selectively bred over millennia to host the presence of a vibration that carries a consciousness from beyond this planet?

But then, isn’t that exactly what religion has sidetracked? Worldwide, all the early religions describe beings arriving from the sky, variously described as light or bright, riding in flying carriages that arrive in great noise or in fire-breathing dragons flying through the air and often portrayed with wings. The beings are said to have created us. They have taught us rules to live by, sometimes offering ET teachers who lived among us. Sadly, we’ve been led astray by priests who have misinterpreted everything out of denial, ignorance, or to justify their animal brain’s arrogance and hunger for power.

Our understanding has been complicated and delayed by the slow progress of science, progress which has been fought tooth and nail by religion. How could we have understood the method by which we evolved without understanding genetics? Or the nature of the universe? Our animal brains had no appreciation of machines or science. We saw magic and mysteries wrought by supernatural beings who flew down from ‘heaven.’ We offered sacrifices of our most valued possessions, our food, our wealth, our children, in order to appease these ‘gods.’ We fell in line before the priests who claimed to represent the gods. The history of our destructive religions is all too plain to see.

Now it’s time to grow up into our current times and scientific knowledge, and accept that ET is among us, that we are ET as much as ape.

Dreamstime https://www.livescience.com/18518-humans-broken-genes.html

Other artists performing “Creep”:

And many more.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumer

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creep_(Radiohead_song)

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hh8B7DoNeo

Some Painful Truths

Above, supporters of former President Donald Trump are seen protesting his indictment in Manhattan, New York, on Monday, April 3, 2023. KATHERINE FUNG / Newsweek 4.3.23

Others have said how, once a person has been duped, it is almost impossible to convince them they have been duped. They’ve bought in, hook, line and sinker. Never has this been more true than in the present day. Despite all our education and media and news report, our ‘advanced’ culture, nearly 40% of the U. S. population still holds a favorable view of Donald Trump.

Who are these people?

While they tasted the bait, times were glorious! They owned the world, vindicated in their every idea, belief, and prejudice. Racism wasn’t really racism while they tasted the bait, but rather the righteous validation of their belief in whiteness.

Thus it was for the role of women, made from Adam’s rib to be his helper. Subordinate. The weaker vessel, made to suffer the agony of childbirth to give man his offspring, a punishment for Eve’s original sin. Not to speak in the church of God Almighty—white male, of course.

It goes without saying that the homosexuals and transwhatever were scum of the earth. Hardly worth mentioning, not worthy of recognition much less any right to exist, work, marry, or enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Equally unworthy of mention were the heathen believers in Allah and other blasphemies, seeking to secretly infiltrate America with their insidious brown-skinned conspiracies to destroy the great God-given white nation we call America.

And so it continued for four glorious years as time after time Trump’s words and acts magnified and validated the prejudices. Never mind that God sent a plague, that over a million people died, under Trump’s watch. Never mind that he oversaw, indeed, implemented, a continuous scroll of misdeeds and treachery that threatened the very foundations of the U. S. Constitution. None of that mattered while the bait was ingested, while all the validations of hate surged through the hearts and minds of the true believers—the duped.

Now, with the efforts of honorable leaders eager to restore the nation to its solid foundations, its core philosophy that all of us were created equal, the duped refuse to accept the evidence. Refuse to read the indictments. Refuse to think that some, all, of the allegations might actually be true. No doubt even a trial and conviction will be denied by these folks.

Is this a matter of willful ignorance? Yes, but that’s not all.

In academic studies, subjects asked to distinguish truth from lies answer correctly, on average, only fifty-four per cent of the time. This is a result of several mitigating factors, not least of which is a sense of allegiance to the people and information sources we have already trusted. For example, in a Stanford University study,

A third type of bias comes from our existing political alignment, in the form of partisanship. When it comes to news and information generally, one’s identification as a Democrat or Republican, or one’s self-image of being liberal vs. conservative, has a big impact on what we readily believe or reject in the news, regardless of its truthfulness. As uncomfortable as this may be to accept, abundant research shows that people frequently reject news that’s inconsistent with their political ideology, and are prone to accept news that’s consonant with their political orientation. Like it or not, research demonstrated quite clearly that most politically-oriented fake news during the 2016 US election campaigns was consumed by conservatives, with Donald Trump supporters being especially likely to encounter and visit fake news sites. …Hillary Clinton supporters were more likely to visit fact-checking websites and less likely to visit fake news websites. Trump supporters were less likely to visit fact-checking websites and more likely to visit fake news websites.[1]

Similar conclusions have been confirmed in multiple studies. Lee McIntyre, research fellow at Boston University, has published several books on the conundrum of duped people.

One of the deepest roots of post-truth has been with us the longest, for it has been wired into our brains over the history of human evolution: cognitive bias. Psychologists for decades have been performing experiments that show that we are not quite as rational as we think. Some of this work bears directly on how we react in the face of unexpected or uncomfortable truths. A central concept of human psychology is that we strive to avoid psychic discomfort. It is not a pleasant thing to think badly of oneself. Some psychologists call this “ego defense” (after Freudian theory), but whether we frame it within this paradigm or not, the concept is clear. It just feels better for us to think that we are smart, well-informed, capable people than that we are not. What happens when we are confronted with information that suggests that something we believe is untrue? It creates psychological tension. How could I be an intelligent person yet believe a falsehood? Only the strongest egos can stand up very long under a withering assault of self-criticism: “What a fool I was! The answer was right there in front of me the whole time, but I never bothered to look. I must be an idiot.”[2]

Trump supporters are not the first group to suffer this terrible cognitive dysphoria. The Civil War is not over for many who cannot accept that what their ancestors fought and died for might have been wrong. In their multitude of righteous excuses for the Confederate cause, the war was not about slavery. Rather, the Lost Cause was based on six tenets:

Credit: Cook Collection, The Valentine
Original Author: Unknown
Created: ca. 1907
Medium: Photographic print
Publisher: Valentine Richmond History Center

1. Secession, not slavery, caused the Civil War.

2. African Americans were “faithful slaves,” loyal to their masters and the Confederate cause and unprepared for the responsibilities of freedom.

3. The Confederacy was defeated militarily only because of the Union’s overwhelming advantages in men and resources.

4. Confederate soldiers were heroic and saintly.

5. The most heroic and saintly of all Confederates, perhaps of all Americans, was Robert E. Lee.

6. Southern women were loyal to the Confederate cause and sanctified by the sacrifice of their loved ones.[3]

The fundamental truth is that the war was about the South’s determination to continue its use of enslaved people to generate the bulk of its wealth. Tens of thousands of people of Southern heritage have bought into the falsehood of the Lost Cause, continuing to display the Confederate flag and nurse their invisible wounds.

Likewise, millions of people today are standing firm in their belief that Trump can do no wrong, that he was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election, and other similar dross. Don’t bother them with facts. Their minds are made up and their egos depend on it. One can only hope that enough of them will overcome the cognitive dissonance to accept that Trump was not sent by God Almighty to bestow an all-white conservative dispensation on the United States of America, but rather that he was and is a corrupt man clever enough to dupe 61,943,670 voters (2016 election).

Whether Twain actually said this remains an unproven irony.

[1] https://www.cits.ucsb.edu/fake-news/why-we-fall

[2] https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/how-cognitive-bias-can-explain-post-truth/

[3] https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/lost-cause-the/

Bacon and Other Non-AI Considerations

Look, we’ve already been through this. We went to a lot of trouble to adjust a biological form so that we could exist in it. A LOT of trouble.

Now, thanks to some of us, it looks like we’re headed back to a mechanical existence with Artificial Intelligence (AI), potentially ‘smarter’ than us embodied critters who struggle with the duality of animal/spirit existence. Sometimes the animal overrides our sense, our integrity, and bad things happen. Then there’s the annoying bit of bodily maintenance what with all the aches, pains, and annoyance of eating, sleeping, waking, walking, and cleaning up after ourselves. Then, as the saying goes, we die.

But we’ve forgotten why we went to all the trouble in the first place. We were BORED! What is the pleasure of existing forever in a form that can’t smell or taste bacon? What about the joy of standing outside after a rain and inhaling fresh moist air? The thrill of snow? What about splashing in a stream? Catching a fish? Digging in a garden? Holding a purring cat?

What about beholding the vista of distant snow-capped mountains? Or of the mighty sea as its lapping waves caress our feet?

What about meeting someone who triggers that amazing animal instinct called mating? Oh, the touching, kissing, the wondering and weeping, the throes of orgasm as we curl into our mate? The warmth of hugging, holding.

We seem to have forgotten the reasons we exist in this hybrid form, this animal with a mysterious intellect that can’t seem to fully elucidate itself. The animal gives our emotions, our senses of taste, smell, hearing, sight, and touch. The animal understands running, swimming, climbing. The animal creates its own future by reproducing adorable little versions of ourselves. The animal knows the overwhelming smack-you-in-the-forehead ecstasy of physical existence.

So now some smart asses are grabbing their claim to fame with their AI creation, mini-wannabe gods who will set us back a few million years to when we first started tinkering with the ape form in the hopes of taking a ride inside. Hasn’t their ilk done enough already, what with assault rifles and nuclear weapons?

I mean, okay, I enjoy running water, air conditioning, and supermarket shelves full of choices. I prefer using a motor vehicle to travel near and far rather than my feet or the horse. Television is nice and, admittedly, this communique comes to you via computer and the internet. But look where that has brought us!

So, in conclusion fellow hybrids, are really going to send ourselves out of our lovely bodies?

The Cold

Memories of winter’s challenges rise up to nourish me on these days, recollections of times when hardships were met and I was satisfied with my refuge, my larder, my conquest of the elements. In more distant times, I might have twisted strands of wool or linen and watched the wheel spin it to thread, or pounded clothes in a hot kettle for cleaning, or ground corn between stones to make coarse bread. I might have wrapped my children in animal skins and tied my own feet in fur before braving the cold for more wood, or brought the livestock into the other end of a rough cabin to keep them from freezing in the long nights.

How did I, of all my previous iterations, manage to occur here, now, where everything I need comes more or less effortlessly—the twist of a knob, click of a button, the turn of a key? A house with insulated walls and thick glass that keep in the warmth and allow me to watch frozen rain fall from gray-white clouds. What future embodiments of myself will wonder back on this time, and what will they know? What I don’t know. What I can imagine for better. Or worse.

I don’t have to figure it out. Anyway, I can’t. Better to turn to the pan and stir the soup, add another log to the fire, stand at the window longer and marvel at the shades of gray and rust among the trees of the woods, the white of the sky and ground. Soon the scene will explode in infinite shades of green and heat will soak the edges. I’ll be pleased then to remember this cold.