Hi, Steshu. If I put the three options another way, it would be 1) the world was created 2) the world was not created but evolved and 3) the world does not exist. It seems like the first two have been debated endlessly. What I'm looking to do is add a third possibility that fits all the data points.
These are interesting premises. Have you considered Lawrence Krauss' version of reality? Add him into a search for Multi-verse. It may challenge your view.
Look at it this way for a moment, Peter. I'm positing a third version of reality in which God is real and the world is not, that transforms everything and everyone into a completely joyful and loving state of infinite and eternal union.
My paradigm, that a Course in Miracles elaborates, fits every data point and solves every mystery for why things could be how they are. And the only thing you need to give up is a belief in your superiority and the other person's guilt, sin and evil.
Why, instead of you and Steshu considering my premise that has the potential to end all suffering and loss, do you want me to drop my experiment in reality and instead consider other possibilities that may challenge my view--a view which no one else, to my knowledge, is representing in the exact way I am? Should I give my authority over to someone more knowledgeable, with a degree and publications? Does Krauss' version give more personal empowerment to change the world? Why do you consider it to deserve more time and attention than mine?
Krauss is a Theoretical Physicist. He changed the way I think, as have you, and I don't give him more weight because of his degrees, but what he has to say, and how he says it. Quantum Theory should change the way peeps see the Universe, as opposed to the measurements we make with our crude sensory perceptions. I agree, that we may not see the world as it really exists, because we interpret electromagnetic signals in a way that helps us survive.
We can measure genetic superiority. (pro athletes vs amateurs. Test Scores, etc.)
We can measure generalized beauty (golden mean).
We can measure psychopathy and observe geno/democide.
I also don't want to accept that experiencing a negative emotion is a bad thing. It has a purpose to cause a stress response in a biological system to avoid that experience in the future. This is a survival tactic and Evolutionary Biology.
Else, I can't comment on the spiritual too much, as I'm not educated in that area. I think things just exist -- and eco- or biological systems change over time due to their environment.
Quantum Theory, as I understand it (and correct me if I'm wrong) takes contradictions in the absolute nature of reality and 'explains' them. So if something is a particle or a wave, depending on what we're looking for, it gives a scientific explanation that shows the world is real and it's not just in our head. Things happen that seem impossible? It's because the world is made up of electromagnetic signals. It's still real, it's still objective reality.
By my theory, every way in which we come up with a sophisticated explanation for anomalies between our experience and what we're told is real, is another layer of protection from realizing it's not real and is under our control. What if you told Krauss, "Hey, there's a simpler explanation. We're making up the world as we go along, out of our collective delusion." He would likely laugh you off as a nutcase. He hasn't changed your perception that the world is real and you're just a body in it. He's just refined why that's true, despite contradictory evidence. Do I have that wrong?
And the only superiority I'm talking about is moral superiority. If you're a better athlete or musician, it doesn't make you a better person. What good vs. evil looks at is better or worse people, not just skills or conformity to a particular norm. Does that make sense?
I'll respond to Hesperado here so it will go to both of you. It seems to me that the 'paradox' of a God who allows evil but does it because he loves us is like the sadistic father. In order to feel a sense of being loved, the child has to convince herself that both are true at once. But the sadistic father, most likely, is the result of his own abuse as a child. God, being omnipotent, has no such excuse. God didn't need to create hunger, pain, suffering and death. He could have created a realm of pure love and endless creativity and joy.
And, within the third possibility, THAT'S WHAT HE DID. And we, as God's Beloved, have co-created that perfect universe. But then we had this crazy idea we didn't need God, which made us afraid of Him. So we hid from Him in this dream where we think we're being punished or our love is being tested. And we project our guilt on all the selves we've fragmented into.
I agree with Camus that, if the first two possibilities were all there was, suicide seems like the logical choice. So it seems like it's worth testing out the third possibility by not judging other people or projecting guilt onto them. And not making fear of God into a virtue. God may be better than this paradox.
Thank you for clarifying your thoughts. I’m not sure that the demiurge evil one god of the old Jewish people should have ever been confused with the Loving Spiritual parent that Jesus referred to in the New Testament.
Pretty sure the point was made in the upper room discourses. So the material world equates to a prison or development zone with a very few children of the spiritual Father here to serve the people.
I appreciate the conversation, Steshu. The only reason I do my YT or Substack or wrote my book is to be able to have a conversation at this deep level, where you've already read and considered my pov. My intention isn't to change your mind about which possible reality is right, only to consider that mine is another alternative to the 'creationism vs atheism' debate.
I think that you were reading when I posted the Jesus is the OG PsyOps episode, or others where I've presented my theory that the NT, like the OT, takes the truth and turns it inside-out, and turned the heroes into villains and vice-versa. So I suspect that Judas the Nazarene, who led the zealot revolt against Roman rule, presented God as a father who loves all equally, and may have proven that pain and death have no power, and there's nothing to fear. There's historical evidence that even children seemed impervious to torture and resurrection was inclusive. This led to revolt spreading like wildfire throughout the Roman Empire.
The story of Jesus was written after the siege of Jerusalem. It describes a God who's only begotten son is Jesus. Only the blood sacrifice and torture of this one son he loves is enough to forgive all the rest of humanity, who is then guilty of his death. That's a very twisted form of parental love, to value one above all the rest and then make the rest guilty for his sacrifice, for the 'original sin' of being born.
So it's possible that the 'good news' of God as a loving spiritual parent is true but the power of that revelation has been subverted into a message of a sinful and evil people who don't really deserve God's love. Just a theory but one that would be much more hopeful and inclusive if it turned out to be true, so it seems worth considering the evidence.
Teresa, this reply should be posted outside every Baptist church in the USA. I wish I had your insight 30 years ago!!!!! Brilliant and succinct and makes so much sense to me.
What a beautiful response, Steshu! You are a great encouragement to 'stay with the disagreement' in the spirit of Oneness and not 'agree to disagree.' I don't know if you were reading back when I posted this one: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/we-need-to-agree-to-agree. Thank you so much!
Those are the only 3 -- if one rejects paradox. The orthodox Christian framework (probably essentially the same as Plato's) accepts the implication that God's omnipotence & omniscience effectively funnels evil back to His responsibility, no matter how removed Satan is from that chain conceptually -- and yet it affirms God's' ultimate goodness and transcendence from the evil He is mysteriously allowing. That may not be intellectually satisfying, but it is accurate and, as Leibniz pointed out, it's really the only alternative (Camus would later clarify the consequences of rejecting it: absurdity leading -- if one is authentic and logical -- to suicide).
Aug 5, 2023·edited Aug 5, 2023Liked by Tereza Coraggio
Hola, Tereza.
So much here! Thank you and a tiny delightful synchronicity with what I am currently writing for my next essay and Krishnamurti. (I won't elaborate on that here.)
Then another great synchronicity about money: you wrote:
“I look at our money system as designed to give power over others and, most importantly, to cause others to inflict pain for the benefit of the person creating the money.”
This is an amazing overlap/synchronicity with my having finished this week watching and listening intently to the 4hr long interview with Anneke Lucas by Brecht Arnaert. Arnaert mentions, paraphrased, that money was an occult development to enhance the expression of Satanic (Moloch) power. And that that is how he came to be interviewing Lucas as a survivor of ritual Satanic torture and sexual abuse from a lineage that goes back to Canaan. I haven’t pursued his research yet. You may find in it an interesting support and deepening of your connection between money and the power to inflict evil.
~4:01:38 [B:] One thing you mentioned and then we’ll close off… One thing you mentioned is that whenever you tried to have some financial success you didn’t succeed.
[A:] Until I got to the bottom of the trauma.
[B:] That’s it. That’s it. So on a purely energetic level money is also energy, actually.
[A:] It is energy. And I was particularly brainwashed once I said ‘No’ to being part of their club. I was reprogrammed to make sure I would never feel deserving. I was humiliated and tortured to make sure I would never feel deserving of success in the classical way, and making money. That was a very powerful spell. That lasted until I got to that particular memory of that being transmitted to me. Once I had the memory I immediately started making money. And now I feel completely empowered in fact, I mean it’s a very big piece of my healing. Because if I have freedom financially that just changes everything, doesn’t it?
~4:02:46 [B:] And that’s also why the sacrificing of children has to do with the monetary system. It’s too long to elaborate now. But it’s the negative energy that they harvest from the children that is somehow transmitted into our money because our money is printed centrally. And the monetary system is diabolic. I’m highly convinced of that. It is preventing people from living in abundance.
In it Stone shares a fascinating Gautama Buddha teaching that he gave at the age of 85 and a few months before he died. The short teaching was about the role of friendship in the spiritual path, and preceded a longer teacher about the 7 Factors of Awakening:
~7:10 Just before the Buddha offers the seven factors of awakening, … he offers the teaching that precedes it. Which is a very famous teaching where he tells the community that the most important factor for living a spiritual life is friendship. The story is that Ananda, his right hand man, says to him, ‘Is friendship half of spiritual life?’ And the Buddha says ‘No, Ananda. Friendship is the whole of spiritual life.’
Thank you again for your delightfully thought provoking and heart opening expression.
Just a quick note to let you, Tirion and Specie know I'm watching the video from the start and am around 2 hrs in. I am so, so impressed by Anneke. She feels completely genuine to me. And her spiritual revelations and psychological insights, as a child being raped and tortured, are astounding.
Her statement, as I understood it, was that the Satanic ritual was just an excuse for these men to project their own helplessness on her from when they had been abused as children, and get 'high' from being the one now in control. She doesn't seem to believe there's any power in it, only a twisted psychology under cover of a 'religion.' Her ability to see the perpetrators as human and vulnerable, and even forgive them, is life-affirming and awe-inspiring.
I am more skeptical of Brecht and his theories. Clearly he has an agenda, with the statues in the background and the praying ahead of time. To him, it's good vs. evil, Jesus vs. Satan, Judeo-Christianity vs. Moloch. So far, I haven't found a single Canaanite mentioned in Whitney Webb but there's not a page that doesn't link in another Semite--the masters according to Noah the pedophile patriarch, from my interpretation.
Anyway just wanted to give a quick thanks and I'll respond more (or do an episode) when I've finished it.
I'm not sure about Brecht, too. On the very very quick brush of this interview it strikes me he is coming from a good/evil dichotomy. I hope to find the time to look into him and his research. We'll see. So many rabbit holes.
I wonder if we can start using 'misoped' in our language instead of paedophile? Misopedia instead of pedophila? It strikes me that one of the ways 'we' allow for the continuation of hurtful actions and lack of compassion, is when our language, the *roots* of and use of our language is not in alignment with each other. Babel.
Yes and for all his protests that he's not wanting to sensationalize Anneke's testimony, he keeps pushing her for details of the horror. It annoyed me that he described himself as someone with "a sexually healthy appetite" who couldn't imagine being aroused by the thought of sex with a child. We didn't need that clarification or that image in our heads. That was a protest that was uncalled for.
Instead of Satanic cults, what about Pedo-Sadist Cults? It takes away what Anneke sees as just an excuse and leaves the behavior. We don't need to prove that these are worshippers of Satan or 33rd-degree Freemasons or Semites or Canaanites serving Moloch. These are pathetically sick men who are reversing and justifying their own childhood trauma by re-enacting it as the perpetrators. It exposes them as weak and powerless, which they are cloaking in pompous rituals that are utter nonsense. To me, that would bring us semantically one step closer to ending it.
And just a side point on Babel. In my book I talk about the Greek use of barbarian, which comes from babble and describes anyone who doesn't speak proper, upper class Greek. It was a way of demeaning the foreign-born. My subheading "Will the Real Barbarian Please Stand Up?" describes the inhumane things the Greeks were doing by comparison. So I haven't formed a theory about the Tower of Babel myth but I'm sure there's something there that's been reversed to preserve the idea of empire.
Aug 6, 2023·edited Aug 6, 2023Liked by Tereza Coraggio
Yes. I agree with your observations about Brecht!
And at the same time, I also found it interesting that Anneke, mind-controlled to be super psychically aware of men's hidden truths, was obviously comfortable with him during this interview, to the point that she openly hugged him after being open with him and sharing not before publicly shared horrors she had been part of. So... maybe he really does have a 'healthy sexual appetite.' Why say it? Complex question, under the dynamics of the situation. (Or was *that* action by Anneke latent mind controlled behaviour in her interactions with men! Oi vey, endless spirals. Now to see her elsewhere.)
Interesting about the Greeks. From my reading of ML von Franz's great book, The Golden Ass of Apuleius: The Liberation of the Feminine in Man, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/80082.The_Golden_Ass_of_Apuleius, and other sources, the brutality of Greek 'culture' is reasonably well known. I wasn't aware of that particular nugget, though. Reminds me of the origin of the world 'shibboleth', one of my favourite words.
In The Golden Ass, Apuleius makes passing reference to a husband catching his wife having extra-marital sex. The husband then had that man beaten, in which he cried like a child. That line resonated with me, because Apuleius used it casually as a analogy everyone would recognise when he wrote in 180ad. Hmmmm. I don't think von Franz highlighted that child torture had been normalised in Greek culture to that extent.
I look forward to your babbling about babel and towers as caves! Love it.
Interesting. I didn't see Anneke's psychic awareness of the men's hidden truths as part of the mind-control but rather her spiritual gift that saved her from the mind-control. I do remember her talking about the attachment she was manipulated to feel toward her rapists but that vision and compassion that they were re-enacting what had been done to them seemed particular to her.
And her understanding of the huge pincer bugs as confused and not malicious, which Brecht remarks on, that was such a leap of compassion. I don't see Brecht as prurient and maybe I'm just pushing back against my own sordid curiosity on the horrific details, personified by him. He earned that long hug.
I think that I've bristled before at people telling me who I should read but in the case of ML von Franz, where have you been hiding her from me? Her thesis about needing the feminine in men to be cultivated fits perfectly with my third paradigm about masculine-feminine being a false dichotomy and neither being possible within the same person without the other. I want to read everything (167 books??!!) that she's written.
And I know we've talked about the etymology of shibboleth before, also one of my favorite words, but explain it further, please?
Aug 6, 2023·edited Aug 6, 2023Liked by Tereza Coraggio
"I didn't see Anneke's psychic awareness of the men's hidden truths as part of the mind-control but rather her spiritual gift that saved her from the mind-control." In the last quarter she specifically details how she was 'trained' to become psychically aware of all men: paraphrased, 'I was trained to know what men want, really want, even if they don't know what they really want.'
ML von Franz, you mean you don't know her! OMG, what planet are you from? She has some videos on-line, too. After Jung, von Franz my most important 'Jungian' read. I had and read, often more than once, many of her most important books. Maybe 5 times, 'On Divination and Synchronicity: The Psychology of Meaningful Chance' https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/92547.On_Divination_Synchronicity.
Loved 'The Grail Legend' too. 'Apuleius' is a very important read, imo. Her 'Puer Aeternus: A Psychological Study of the Adult Struggle With the Paradise of Childhood' was absolutely pivotal! Wow, so many of her books.
Her book 'Dreams: A Study of the Dreams of Jung, Descartes, Socrates & Other Historical Figures' is great and just up your alley. She looks at Joseph's dream in a 'different' way. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/436267.Dreams
I'll look forward to your next essay and its synchronicity, Guy!
I'll listen to this interview when I have a chance, it touches on so many topics that seem like they're calling me--pedophilia as ritual and blackmail, religion, money. Is it the perpetrators that trace the lineage back to Canaan? Very interesting.
From my Biblical episodes, you know that I see it as having turned truth upside-down and inside-out, making the heroes into villains and the villains into heroes. In the same way that Cain is the patriarch of Evil in Genesis, the Canaanites are cursed to be a race of slaves by Noah. I think this history was written backwards, with the story of Cain postdating the curse of the descendants of Canaan.
I've often found, as a rule of thumb, that the best defense is a good offense. People accuse others of the exact thing they're doing. So if ritual abuse of children is happening, who is accusing the lineage of Canaanites?
And, as I talked about in The Devil & Naomi Wolf, Satan was an invention of the Hellenic Judeans to blame them for revolting against Roman rule. The demon-possessed were the zealots who believed in and fought for sovereignty. When I alluded to you as Lucifer, you should take that as a compliment ;-) There's a reason I think that the name means clear-sighted.
Investing evil and Satan with supernatural power encourages ritual abuse, even if it's for the purpose of condemning it. It says that blood sacrifice gives power. I don't question whether these things happen but calling them Satanic, as if Satan is real, is a way that perpetuates them. Again, if we condemn the action as evil but not the people, we have a better chance of ending it. At least that's my logic.
Hola, Tereza. I will look at your Biblical Episodes. I don't think I've watched them, or all of them. At least not by that name. Oddly enough, another small synchronicity, my essay suddenly and unexpected includes John 1 from the Bible!
Rule of thumb regarding controlling the narrative is likely a good one. (As to 'Rule of Thumb', do you know that that is old British law that made it unlawful to beat your wife with a switch smaller than the width of your thumb?)
Elaine Pagels also has an interesting discussion about the origins and meaning of 'Satan' and its changing 'face', so to speak. I imagine you have read her book? Here is a short recent interview of her discussion and surprise at her re-reading of the Gospel of Mark as a kind of self-serving advocacy of anti-semitism. An interesting look. https://youtu.be/MLyyIVSkfeA
Thank you for correcting my language use! I love it, since I am a strong advocate for the 'proper' understanding and use of language to empower/disempower ourselves to the benefit of the power structures external to ourselves. That care you have directed my attention to this delineation of evil. Love it. I'll be more careful about how my language gives power to or removes the power from the 'evil' structure.
OMG on rule of thumb! I'll never use that phrase again! In one of my old radio episodes I talked about metaphors of torture and how they've become so normalized that we don't even recognize them. I cited Amnesty Int'l talking about "holding the torturer's feet to the fire" in one ad. "Over a barrel" "Between a rock and a hard place" "Throw the first stone" the list goes on and on. It's hard to even use the English language without falling into them.
And if synchronicities are a way of confirming this socio-spiritual link between us, there you go again! Elaine Pagels is my primary reference in https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/the-devil-and-naomi-wolf. The vulnerability in her intro to The Origin of Satan was one I modeled my prologue on, although I took it out of the current version. She's amazing! Thanks for the link, I'll reference it next time as a way that readers can do more research.
While my partner Yoshiko (Japanese) were travelling in the initial months following our becoming, by choice of refusal, 'covid refugees', we went to Spain, the province of Galicia, where my sister and her husband fled from Canada to live. Yoshiko was fascinated about the city of Toledo, not far from where we were, at Lugo, with the most intact Roman fortress Wall. Anyway, at Toledo we happened to walk past the museum of human torture. PAST! We didn't know such a thing existed and the feeling outside the church-like building door was... rather grim.
(And one day we will talk about the abuse/misuse and boomerang effect of the world 'never'! LoL!)
Hi Guy, thank you for your reply and links. There are some important rabbit holes to go down there. It seems to me that the world is coming to terms with this financial system that traces it's roots back to antiquity. I get the sense that it is finally coming to an end. Most people may never realize the role that satanic abuse and consumption of our children plays in our money. And i guess that's okay. There are a lot of young souls around. Hopefully the older souls will be able to lead us out of this situation into a better world.
Tereza's posts often inspire, confirm and/or challenge my ideas, all at the same time. Today's essay had so many synchronicities with my day, it felt too energetic not to share.
Aug 5, 2023·edited Aug 5, 2023Liked by Tereza Coraggio
The origin of money is more nuanced than that I think. According to Ellen Brown, and also Bernard Lietaer, money had taken two separate historical routes depending on who was in charge of a given society. The one you describe is a perversion of the one that existed well before that. Chapter 5 of Ellen Brown's "Web of Debt" describes it very well, titled "From Matriarchies of Abundance to Patriarchies of Debt". Vive le difference!
Yes! My book starts with David Graeber's Debt: the First 5000 Years. It's his work that I've derived my origin of money from. And it's his posthumously published The Dawn of Everything that I've gotten my episodes on matriarchal societies. But I didn't remember that Ellen had put those two together! She's the other major influence on my book and my economic system. On this page is a series of classes I designed: http://universecity.us/ with one I taught on Web of Debt: http://universecity.us/wp_econ/. And if I look on this page, I have questions for the class on Ch. 5: http://universecity.us/wp_econ/?p=54. Thanks for reminding me that Ellen covered this, which overlaps with Graeber!
One of my YTs is Patriarchal Pyramid or Matriarchal Matrix? https://youtu.be/dtID5Ho_OBY. So I'm definitely thinking along the same lines. Our money system comes from the Roman/ Greek system of domination but it hasn't been that way everywhere and doesn't need to stay that way.
Light a candle in he darkness. I have found that love can disarm an enemy.
However, WHILE they are in the act of murdering you and your loved ones, one is required to turn that love into the courage to act in protecting God's creations, including ourselves. '
I really do wonder about (so-called) “sacred cows” and discarding them. I guess that we all have them, even those who we hold dear as perfectly trustworthy truth-tellers.
What would you say to those who think the statement/premise/dogma/belief that “Evil does not exist” is exactly the delusion an evil “ultimate god” would want us to believe? Accepting that belief seems like just another way an evil “ultimate god” would gaslight us all?
Jack! I was just wondering if you were still around.
So, thinking like an evil ultimate god, what would the belief that evil doesn't exist cause humans to do? It seems like, when there is someone behaving destructively, they would have to ask themselves, "What could cause me to act like that?" Because they couldn't just write the person off as an evil person who does what they'd never do. So they'd have to analyze the circumstances, the system, that caused or allowed a person to go so haywire. And fix it.
On the other hand, if humans believe that some people are just evil, they'll start fighting among themselves about who those evil people are. When bad things happen they'll find someone to blame and make sure that bad things happen to them. And the system that allows or even causes people to do bad things will grow and grow and grow. So it would serve my evil purposes to have people believe in me, especially if they raped, tortured and killed children in my name, as my latest YT is about (Substack later today): https://youtu.be/9tqyeFJ-0Nk.
So Moses comes down from the mountain with a tablet inscribed by the ultimate god, and the only words on the tablet are “Evil does not exist”. Are you claiming that if that had happened, our policy wonks would simply eliminate all evil deeds by tweaking the socio-economic system? I think, instead, most people would glom onto Aleister Crowley’s “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law”. (I actually think Crowley’s statement is much more compelling and philosophically defensible, and that it does not alleviate individuals of personal responsibility, though that is often how it is read.) If evil is claimed not to exist, I think we would get a video-game reality in which players could and would commit any atrocity with impunity, which is essentially the world we have today.
This, of course, is hardly a new topic. Ever since Paul asserted that followers of Jesus are not required to mutilate the sex organs of their male babies or observe other Jewish laws, antinomianism became a problem for orthodox Christians (and some Gnostics, too). And it continues to be an intellectual problem to this day in many Christian congregations (especially those that believe they are saved by faith or grace (or gnosis) alone, rather than by compliance with a legal or ethical code).
BTW, I might also argue that “evil does not exist” is the foundation of every empire, since that allows the empire to be the ultimate moral authority on every issue. It is also foundational to secularism, materialism, and scientism.
Lastly, just a question: In your view, is Victoria Nuland a good person working within an evil system?
You haven't clarified which of the other two you do believe. Is God evil or is Evil god? If you dogmatically believe in the existence of evil, did God create it? Or does Evil supersede the idea of God, making violence the most powerful force in the world?
I'm glad you brought up the Ten Commandments because I think they're a great illustration. Where does God say Thou shalt not torture? Enslave? Wage war? Salt fields? Poison wells? Burn houses? Rape women? Take the harvest?
I forget what culture it's from but you probably know, there's a beautiful and elaborate code of ethics from somewhere in anthropology. It isn't like these things were mysteries as to how to treat others. With the 10C, you needed to know who it applied to before it was right or wrong. It assumed that whatever the society itself did was moral, and this just gave some rules that were petty by comparison for intrasocial dynamics.
Is the only reason that you don't commit atrocities on the daily because someone would call them evil? I find that hard to believe. So if you wouldn't adopt that as your new m.o., why do you think others would?
On VN, I think that she's exactly who her life circumstances created. Did she create herself? If you'd been born as VN, with the soul of JS, what would have caused you to do differently? There's no logical reason that you'd make better choices as JS doing VN. Is there?
So as not to write a ten volume response, I will simply provide you with a few personal declarations unencumbered by formal argument.
Believing that “evil does not exist” is dogma. I do not “believe” evil exists because some authority has convinced me. Instead, I know evil exists based on the incontrovertible and ubiquitous evidence of my own senses and my own life experience. In Jeffersonian English, evil is self-evident. I do not need a theologian, philosopher, sage, or divinity to prove via smooth or even brilliant and poetic semantic constructs (i.e., scripture and its sad offspring, dogma and doctrine) that evil is intrinsic to and dominates this material world.
That said, if you want to question what “this world” is—Vishnu’s dream, Plato’s cave, The Matrix, the multiverse—I’m with you in asking that question. But while we pursue that metaphysical question, we better not forget to deal first with the world we have—the material world we know through our limited senses. For most of us, the material world is the only world we will ever know. I really want reality to be a fully imaginal creation that any of us can tweak and change just through the unlimited power of our imaginations. But, at least until now, I have no personal definitive proof of that possibility. (A few hints, but nothing definitive yet.)
I avoid use of the term “God”. But within the modern western convention of using the capital-G God of Judaeo-Christian mythology, He is as Evil as the day is long. I accept the description of Him exactly as is given in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. (I can find nothing good about Him in the entire OT.)
My own views of this world are a syncretism of a thousand previous syncretisms, but I do (at the moment) give special homage to Marcion, whose early version of “Christianity” was likely the most popular new religion in the Mediterranean world (until the Church Fathers and their Roman imperial handlers made it heretical and rubbed it out). Marcion simply conceded that “this world” was created and is ruled by the Canaanite creator/storm god of the OT, and Marcion conceded that the “Jews” were His chosen people. I am willing to go with that assessment. Of course Marcion then said that Christ was not the son (or even a distant acquaintance) of the OT Creator God, but rather Christ was the son/manifestation of an “alien god” from an alien heaven who had nothing whatsoever to do with this creation/abortion of the material world, but who, out of grace alone, was willing to provide us with an escape from this mundane reality. (This metaphysical framework, btw, completely nixes the problem of evil by stating unequivocally that the god of this world is evil. Marcionites had no need for a theodicy. Neither do I, thank God.)
Let me also be as clear as possible: this world is evil. And everything in it is evil, except those rare fragments of captured divine essence from another realm trapped in matter. As the Manichaeans thought, the entire Cosmic Game is about unmixing the "Light" from the "Dark" until all the Light escapes back to its home realm. This seems to me, if nothing else, a very useful (and fun) metaphor because it could, if we let it, set us all on a purposeful, meaningful course.
Lastly, Victoria Nuland is evil. Yes, she also works in an evil system. But that can be said of any of us. Good people successfully evade or refuse to behave evilly even within the most evil systems. BTW, there are plenty of evil people working their evil in perfectly good systems. Good people are good in any system, just as evil people are evil in any system.
Okay, thanks for clarifying. So, if I might summarize, this world and almost everything in it is evil, created by an evil God who also created evil people, who are the vast majority. However there's an alien god (lower-case) in an alien heaven who instilled a rare person here or there with a fragment of a non-evil divine essence, possibly including one particular person 2000 yrs ago. And the purpose of those non-evil people is to separate themselves from the evil people so they can get back to the alien heaven and leave the evil world alone?
I really should have started with this but how do you define evil?
Yes, overall your synopsis of my synopsis of Marcionism and Gnosticism—as I presented them—is accurate and reminds me, in miniature, of the polemics provided by the Church Father heresiologists (Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, Tertullian, etc.) against Marcionites, Gnostics, and other heretics. Interestingly (to me), those angry ancient polemics were very accurate and almost all that scholars and adherents of such heresies had to go on until the Nag Hammadi Library was discovered and translated; yet, based almost entirely on those polemics alone, Gnosticism survived and resonated deeply through the millennia with people like William Blake and Carl Jung (and countless others). We must often be eternally grateful to our most severe critics.
How would I define evil? First I must say that definitions are all inversely proportional in value to their scale—the smaller the thing being defined, the more accurate; the larger the thing, the less accurate any language allows. As cosmic-scale thought forms go, “Evil” is as large as “God”, so any definition must remain partial and somewhat dissatisfying. However, simplistically (if Buddhist thought can ever be considered simplistic), I would at least partially define evil as suffering. From a gnostic perspective, I would add that the suffering, specifically, is the agony of a transmundane, infinite, eternal being placed in solitary confinement within a finite, mortal, material corpse (physical body and psyche/soul “body”) which has been buried in the prison-yard sarcophagus of this material supermax realm, all of which was intentionally designed by its architect/creator/warden to permanently incarcerate and separate that infinite transmundane being from its transcendent source. What I hear from others for whom the gnostic worldview resonates—and which I consider a primary gnostic “marker”—is “I do not belong here” (where “here” means this world or reality). From that point on, all the classic questions—Who am I, really? Why am I here? What’s the point?—lead, imo, inexorably to a gnostic worldview, which, admittedly, is the hardest of all hard truths. Who, after all, wants to discover that their creator god and world are evil? Paradoxically, I also think this gnosis of "the world as it really is"—with all it's brutality, lies, hate, ignorance and death—also happens to be the basis of all humor.
Thank you for subbing me, Boris, I know I've seen your comments on Matt Taibbi where we both subscribe and I was honored to see you take an interest in my stack. What led you here, if I might ask?
Usually when someone asks for credentials it's for the purpose of discrediting that person's ideas ;-) Not to say that's your intention. The author's blurb on my book reads, "Tereza Coraggio offers no market credentials by which you can judge her worth or the value of this book. Open it and decide for yourself."
Firstly, I love the 'jump in' quality of your spirit and mind - and you're always up to the task.
Secondly thank you for shout-out and kind words. Really appreciate it.
Thirdly, your posts always require the reader to go deeper and find their own contradictions.
Lately I'm thinking - with everything going into the shredder - that there won't be anything untouched by new revelations, in terms of the distortions we've been living with. So, religions and spirituality too. The good VS evil (It feels over to me) paradigm included.
Of course, many things found in religion and spiritual circles are valuable, helpful, all that. I don't think we'll be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
But I imagine there's a shake-up coming and in the aftermath and the rejiggering that happens, many of our paradigmatic assumptions (like good vs evil) won't make it.
Like your handle implies - they'll be fully new ways to move forward, I imagine less divided, less divisive and more expansive than we can yet see.
As the layers peel off the manufactured layering over reality, it reveals not just the world as it is, but us too; we are being released from the false versions of self, developed in response to the false reality.
I think we're already in the beginning of that very large process. It's scary.
Yet it has to happen
Religions mediate that Loving Presence, we call God or Source, and of course place themselves in authority in the process. As if. Maybe as these things go away, the institutionalized piece, the external appendage piece, the old authority structures - unnecessary and slows it all down - we come to realize we live in this Loving Presence all the time, and with alignment can fully embody that knowing.
Major upgrades incoming.
What a time to be alive. on planet earth, huh? Glad we got to connect, Tereza!
Thank you, Kathleen. I'm trying to remember that playground rhyme that 'everything you say about me sticks to you.' I think it's apropos ;-)
Your phrase about a time of undoing, and what you're saying here reminds me of the Charles Eisenstein episode about the space between stories. There's a definite feeling of vertigo, which could slip into panic when this first started, from having the ground shift under my feet.
I picture the third paradigm as taking a dichotomous line and launching up from it in a new dimension. Not either-or and not something inbetween. Changing the question and looking at what the two 'opposites' have in common as a single plane. And what the difference from that whole continuum would be.
In this case, good-evil is a continuum of separation and judgment. Springing up from that is Oneness and forgiveness--giving the benefit of the doubt forward that this person is doing the best they can, and enabling them to do better by changing the circumstances.
Aug 6, 2023·edited Aug 6, 2023Liked by Tereza Coraggio
Tereza, I think you are in danger of being an idealist. That's not a bad thing. How do you propose we deal with psychopaths, and those determined to outmuscles their neighboring empires with Military force? (ps. i'd be on your side)
Hi, Peter. Well, you and I live in the belly of the beast determined to outmuscle their neighboring or far-flung empires or sovereign nations with military force. So our most pressing moral question is how WE can stop enabling evil actions. The first step, I believe, is to stop giving the psychopaths who run the world our properties and our labor for free. We're the power behind the psychopaths. Without us doing their dirty work and justifying it because we have to make a living, have to pay our mortgage, what could they do? They could do the harm they were capable of as mere individuals, with all of us condemning those actions. Now the most violent and destructive actions in the world are tolerated because deep down, we know that we're a part of it. So let's stop being psychopath-enablers and see what happens.
Just curious as to how you've concluded that RFK Jr. "is a good person"... and that you like how he treats people. Are you aware that he cheated on both of his first two wives while still married (kept a little book to record his affairs) and his second wife committed suicide after the divorce? Have you looked into his connections with his nephew's murder of a young neighbor girl?
Ah, I knew someone would call me on that! I didn't know all of the details (he's had three wives? didn't know about the nephew's murder. did know about the cheating, black book and suicide). But theologically, I believe that whatever someone else has done, I would have done the same or worse in their circumstances. Either I'm how nature made me, aka God, or I'm how my circumstances made me. There's no other logical alternative.
If RFK is a bad person, was he born that way or did his life--that gave him more power over others than anyone should have--make him that way? In either case, it's not his fault. What would have made you or I do better if we'd been born as RFK? Rather than blame the person, changing the circumstances so no one has that power seems like a better solution to me.
And these women who married RFK jr chose him over me because they thought he was their soulmate? Or did they choose based on his status in society??? Just saying that women have been choosing the “bad guys” and the rich and famous for a long time. Then they are upset when the guy they chose isn’t the most loyal and loving.
Hi, Mark. How would that be different than the second possibility? If evil does exist as the power to cause others to inflict pain, thereby multiplying its effect, then Evil would be God--defined as the strongest force in the world. Sorry, maybe I should have defined god first.
When I'm out in nature, I don't perceive "good" or "evil". I can't ascribe those qualities to the bear or the hummingbird I see in my backyard, or even to the "raging" waters that inundated us last month ("raging" is a very human-oriented descriptor -- the water is simply following gravity). So I guess what I'm getting at is that I don't see evil as the strongest force in the world -- maybe only in the world of us crazy humans. And even there I would like to believe that good is stronger, though that certainly seems in doubt recently.
You make an interesting comparison, Mark. Good and evil don't exist in nature. We give human attributes to natural phenomenon but don't actually judge them as having intent. Even animals who are destructive, sometimes wantonly, are seen as fundamentally innocent aka good, but operating on instinct or something that's gone haywire in their biology or environment.
Why are humans the only exception to that? When we see someone do something hurtful or destructive, we have this theory of free will that nothing caused them to do that. We don't ask 'why?' or even better, 'what could cause me to do the same in their circumstances?' We attribute guilt and blame because we accept that this is a person who doesn't have our same morals. So it perpetuates the actions, generation to generation, because we never get to the cause.
Aug 6, 2023·edited Aug 6, 2023Liked by Tereza Coraggio
"Why are humans the only exception to that?"
If I could answer that question successfully, I'd be rich and famous and my latest book (which doesn't exist) would be on the New York Times Bestseller list.
Thank you for engaging in the conversation. I'm curious as to your closing statement, "Rather than blame the person..." I'm not sure how you interpreted my comments to mean that I am "blaming a person." My question was how you concluded that RFK is a "good person" when his actions are not "good." I see now that I should have asked you to define a "good person" instead and how RFK meets your definition. To me, cheating on your spouse is consistent with a person who lies, cheats and betrays, not a person who is "good." The number of marriages is not of concern to me, nor the number of divorces. But the lies, cheating and betrayals are of concern to me. A person's actions demonstrate their character, wouldn't you agree?
Hi, Peggy. I think there's a way in which our discussion illustrates my point in this article. What I'm positing is that people are always good unless we accept that God or nature created them bad, which would make God evil by my definition. I don't hold the belief system that people are 'born bad' by nature. And I don't think they 'are' the worst thing they've done. Actions are good or bad, but not people.
As a husband, RFK has done things that might concern me if I was thinking about being his fourth wife. I don't think any of these things are less than twenty years old, yes? So maybe not even then, but that's your prerogative. These are personal failings in the context of his marriages, not his political life.
In his political life, he has professed his support for sending my tax money to a regime that forces others to kill, torture, starve, enslave and impoverish. That's my definition of evil. It may also be central to the Great Reset and all the agendas of depopulation, dispossession, destruction and deception that we've experienced.
I'm saying that I can't support Bobby because of the second, and you don't support him because of the first, so I'm not sure where we disagree. Is there a candidate you support because they're morally a good person in their personal life, even though they may support corrupt regimes in their political life? Otherwise it doesn't seem like we disagree.
There’s an infinite number of possibilities for ultimate reality. The 3 in the article are not even close to encompassing the possibilities.
Hi, Steshu. If I put the three options another way, it would be 1) the world was created 2) the world was not created but evolved and 3) the world does not exist. It seems like the first two have been debated endlessly. What I'm looking to do is add a third possibility that fits all the data points.
These are interesting premises. Have you considered Lawrence Krauss' version of reality? Add him into a search for Multi-verse. It may challenge your view.
Look at it this way for a moment, Peter. I'm positing a third version of reality in which God is real and the world is not, that transforms everything and everyone into a completely joyful and loving state of infinite and eternal union.
My paradigm, that a Course in Miracles elaborates, fits every data point and solves every mystery for why things could be how they are. And the only thing you need to give up is a belief in your superiority and the other person's guilt, sin and evil.
Why, instead of you and Steshu considering my premise that has the potential to end all suffering and loss, do you want me to drop my experiment in reality and instead consider other possibilities that may challenge my view--a view which no one else, to my knowledge, is representing in the exact way I am? Should I give my authority over to someone more knowledgeable, with a degree and publications? Does Krauss' version give more personal empowerment to change the world? Why do you consider it to deserve more time and attention than mine?
Krauss is a Theoretical Physicist. He changed the way I think, as have you, and I don't give him more weight because of his degrees, but what he has to say, and how he says it. Quantum Theory should change the way peeps see the Universe, as opposed to the measurements we make with our crude sensory perceptions. I agree, that we may not see the world as it really exists, because we interpret electromagnetic signals in a way that helps us survive.
We can measure genetic superiority. (pro athletes vs amateurs. Test Scores, etc.)
We can measure generalized beauty (golden mean).
We can measure psychopathy and observe geno/democide.
I also don't want to accept that experiencing a negative emotion is a bad thing. It has a purpose to cause a stress response in a biological system to avoid that experience in the future. This is a survival tactic and Evolutionary Biology.
Else, I can't comment on the spiritual too much, as I'm not educated in that area. I think things just exist -- and eco- or biological systems change over time due to their environment.
Quantum Theory, as I understand it (and correct me if I'm wrong) takes contradictions in the absolute nature of reality and 'explains' them. So if something is a particle or a wave, depending on what we're looking for, it gives a scientific explanation that shows the world is real and it's not just in our head. Things happen that seem impossible? It's because the world is made up of electromagnetic signals. It's still real, it's still objective reality.
By my theory, every way in which we come up with a sophisticated explanation for anomalies between our experience and what we're told is real, is another layer of protection from realizing it's not real and is under our control. What if you told Krauss, "Hey, there's a simpler explanation. We're making up the world as we go along, out of our collective delusion." He would likely laugh you off as a nutcase. He hasn't changed your perception that the world is real and you're just a body in it. He's just refined why that's true, despite contradictory evidence. Do I have that wrong?
And the only superiority I'm talking about is moral superiority. If you're a better athlete or musician, it doesn't make you a better person. What good vs. evil looks at is better or worse people, not just skills or conformity to a particular norm. Does that make sense?
Quantum is Superposition & Particle-Wave duality defined by a Mathematical Probability Equation.
I need to go bbq. I think this is too deep for me on Sunday. 😎😉
I'll respond to Hesperado here so it will go to both of you. It seems to me that the 'paradox' of a God who allows evil but does it because he loves us is like the sadistic father. In order to feel a sense of being loved, the child has to convince herself that both are true at once. But the sadistic father, most likely, is the result of his own abuse as a child. God, being omnipotent, has no such excuse. God didn't need to create hunger, pain, suffering and death. He could have created a realm of pure love and endless creativity and joy.
And, within the third possibility, THAT'S WHAT HE DID. And we, as God's Beloved, have co-created that perfect universe. But then we had this crazy idea we didn't need God, which made us afraid of Him. So we hid from Him in this dream where we think we're being punished or our love is being tested. And we project our guilt on all the selves we've fragmented into.
I agree with Camus that, if the first two possibilities were all there was, suicide seems like the logical choice. So it seems like it's worth testing out the third possibility by not judging other people or projecting guilt onto them. And not making fear of God into a virtue. God may be better than this paradox.
Thank you for clarifying your thoughts. I’m not sure that the demiurge evil one god of the old Jewish people should have ever been confused with the Loving Spiritual parent that Jesus referred to in the New Testament.
Pretty sure the point was made in the upper room discourses. So the material world equates to a prison or development zone with a very few children of the spiritual Father here to serve the people.
I appreciate the conversation, Steshu. The only reason I do my YT or Substack or wrote my book is to be able to have a conversation at this deep level, where you've already read and considered my pov. My intention isn't to change your mind about which possible reality is right, only to consider that mine is another alternative to the 'creationism vs atheism' debate.
I think that you were reading when I posted the Jesus is the OG PsyOps episode, or others where I've presented my theory that the NT, like the OT, takes the truth and turns it inside-out, and turned the heroes into villains and vice-versa. So I suspect that Judas the Nazarene, who led the zealot revolt against Roman rule, presented God as a father who loves all equally, and may have proven that pain and death have no power, and there's nothing to fear. There's historical evidence that even children seemed impervious to torture and resurrection was inclusive. This led to revolt spreading like wildfire throughout the Roman Empire.
The story of Jesus was written after the siege of Jerusalem. It describes a God who's only begotten son is Jesus. Only the blood sacrifice and torture of this one son he loves is enough to forgive all the rest of humanity, who is then guilty of his death. That's a very twisted form of parental love, to value one above all the rest and then make the rest guilty for his sacrifice, for the 'original sin' of being born.
So it's possible that the 'good news' of God as a loving spiritual parent is true but the power of that revelation has been subverted into a message of a sinful and evil people who don't really deserve God's love. Just a theory but one that would be much more hopeful and inclusive if it turned out to be true, so it seems worth considering the evidence.
Teresa, this reply should be posted outside every Baptist church in the USA. I wish I had your insight 30 years ago!!!!! Brilliant and succinct and makes so much sense to me.
What a beautiful response, Steshu! You are a great encouragement to 'stay with the disagreement' in the spirit of Oneness and not 'agree to disagree.' I don't know if you were reading back when I posted this one: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/we-need-to-agree-to-agree. Thank you so much!
I had not seen your prior article referenced. It is on my agenda for tonight, after work. Thank you for sharing it with me.
I wish Substack had a “love” option for this comment.
Those are the only 3 -- if one rejects paradox. The orthodox Christian framework (probably essentially the same as Plato's) accepts the implication that God's omnipotence & omniscience effectively funnels evil back to His responsibility, no matter how removed Satan is from that chain conceptually -- and yet it affirms God's' ultimate goodness and transcendence from the evil He is mysteriously allowing. That may not be intellectually satisfying, but it is accurate and, as Leibniz pointed out, it's really the only alternative (Camus would later clarify the consequences of rejecting it: absurdity leading -- if one is authentic and logical -- to suicide).
Hola, Tereza.
So much here! Thank you and a tiny delightful synchronicity with what I am currently writing for my next essay and Krishnamurti. (I won't elaborate on that here.)
Then another great synchronicity about money: you wrote:
“I look at our money system as designed to give power over others and, most importantly, to cause others to inflict pain for the benefit of the person creating the money.”
This is an amazing overlap/synchronicity with my having finished this week watching and listening intently to the 4hr long interview with Anneke Lucas by Brecht Arnaert. Arnaert mentions, paraphrased, that money was an occult development to enhance the expression of Satanic (Moloch) power. And that that is how he came to be interviewing Lucas as a survivor of ritual Satanic torture and sexual abuse from a lineage that goes back to Canaan. I haven’t pursued his research yet. You may find in it an interesting support and deepening of your connection between money and the power to inflict evil.
Arnaert mentions that in two places. Here he makes a short reference: https://youtu.be/SBte1s7oqCc?t=2157
And here, with transcript, he connects the energetic ‘value’ of money and its printing with child ritual sacrifice.
https://youtu.be/SBte1s7oqCc?t=14496
~4:01:38 [B:] One thing you mentioned and then we’ll close off… One thing you mentioned is that whenever you tried to have some financial success you didn’t succeed.
[A:] Until I got to the bottom of the trauma.
[B:] That’s it. That’s it. So on a purely energetic level money is also energy, actually.
[A:] It is energy. And I was particularly brainwashed once I said ‘No’ to being part of their club. I was reprogrammed to make sure I would never feel deserving. I was humiliated and tortured to make sure I would never feel deserving of success in the classical way, and making money. That was a very powerful spell. That lasted until I got to that particular memory of that being transmitted to me. Once I had the memory I immediately started making money. And now I feel completely empowered in fact, I mean it’s a very big piece of my healing. Because if I have freedom financially that just changes everything, doesn’t it?
~4:02:46 [B:] And that’s also why the sacrificing of children has to do with the monetary system. It’s too long to elaborate now. But it’s the negative energy that they harvest from the children that is somehow transmitted into our money because our money is printed centrally. And the monetary system is diabolic. I’m highly convinced of that. It is preventing people from living in abundance.
[A:] That’s for sure! It is absolutely.
Finally, a most surprising synchronicity on the ‘Friendship’ reference you included in your essay. This morning I listened to a Michael Stone podcast I’d listened to earlier this year called ’7 Factors of Awakening (pt1)’. https://podcasts.apple.com/mx/podcast/awake-in-the-world-podcast/id923427517?i=1000378241532
In it Stone shares a fascinating Gautama Buddha teaching that he gave at the age of 85 and a few months before he died. The short teaching was about the role of friendship in the spiritual path, and preceded a longer teacher about the 7 Factors of Awakening:
~7:10 Just before the Buddha offers the seven factors of awakening, … he offers the teaching that precedes it. Which is a very famous teaching where he tells the community that the most important factor for living a spiritual life is friendship. The story is that Ananda, his right hand man, says to him, ‘Is friendship half of spiritual life?’ And the Buddha says ‘No, Ananda. Friendship is the whole of spiritual life.’
Thank you again for your delightfully thought provoking and heart opening expression.
Just a quick note to let you, Tirion and Specie know I'm watching the video from the start and am around 2 hrs in. I am so, so impressed by Anneke. She feels completely genuine to me. And her spiritual revelations and psychological insights, as a child being raped and tortured, are astounding.
Her statement, as I understood it, was that the Satanic ritual was just an excuse for these men to project their own helplessness on her from when they had been abused as children, and get 'high' from being the one now in control. She doesn't seem to believe there's any power in it, only a twisted psychology under cover of a 'religion.' Her ability to see the perpetrators as human and vulnerable, and even forgive them, is life-affirming and awe-inspiring.
I am more skeptical of Brecht and his theories. Clearly he has an agenda, with the statues in the background and the praying ahead of time. To him, it's good vs. evil, Jesus vs. Satan, Judeo-Christianity vs. Moloch. So far, I haven't found a single Canaanite mentioned in Whitney Webb but there's not a page that doesn't link in another Semite--the masters according to Noah the pedophile patriarch, from my interpretation.
Anyway just wanted to give a quick thanks and I'll respond more (or do an episode) when I've finished it.
I'm not sure about Brecht, too. On the very very quick brush of this interview it strikes me he is coming from a good/evil dichotomy. I hope to find the time to look into him and his research. We'll see. So many rabbit holes.
I wonder if we can start using 'misoped' in our language instead of paedophile? Misopedia instead of pedophila? It strikes me that one of the ways 'we' allow for the continuation of hurtful actions and lack of compassion, is when our language, the *roots* of and use of our language is not in alignment with each other. Babel.
Yes and for all his protests that he's not wanting to sensationalize Anneke's testimony, he keeps pushing her for details of the horror. It annoyed me that he described himself as someone with "a sexually healthy appetite" who couldn't imagine being aroused by the thought of sex with a child. We didn't need that clarification or that image in our heads. That was a protest that was uncalled for.
Instead of Satanic cults, what about Pedo-Sadist Cults? It takes away what Anneke sees as just an excuse and leaves the behavior. We don't need to prove that these are worshippers of Satan or 33rd-degree Freemasons or Semites or Canaanites serving Moloch. These are pathetically sick men who are reversing and justifying their own childhood trauma by re-enacting it as the perpetrators. It exposes them as weak and powerless, which they are cloaking in pompous rituals that are utter nonsense. To me, that would bring us semantically one step closer to ending it.
And just a side point on Babel. In my book I talk about the Greek use of barbarian, which comes from babble and describes anyone who doesn't speak proper, upper class Greek. It was a way of demeaning the foreign-born. My subheading "Will the Real Barbarian Please Stand Up?" describes the inhumane things the Greeks were doing by comparison. So I haven't formed a theory about the Tower of Babel myth but I'm sure there's something there that's been reversed to preserve the idea of empire.
Yes. I agree with your observations about Brecht!
And at the same time, I also found it interesting that Anneke, mind-controlled to be super psychically aware of men's hidden truths, was obviously comfortable with him during this interview, to the point that she openly hugged him after being open with him and sharing not before publicly shared horrors she had been part of. So... maybe he really does have a 'healthy sexual appetite.' Why say it? Complex question, under the dynamics of the situation. (Or was *that* action by Anneke latent mind controlled behaviour in her interactions with men! Oi vey, endless spirals. Now to see her elsewhere.)
Interesting about the Greeks. From my reading of ML von Franz's great book, The Golden Ass of Apuleius: The Liberation of the Feminine in Man, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/80082.The_Golden_Ass_of_Apuleius, and other sources, the brutality of Greek 'culture' is reasonably well known. I wasn't aware of that particular nugget, though. Reminds me of the origin of the world 'shibboleth', one of my favourite words.
In The Golden Ass, Apuleius makes passing reference to a husband catching his wife having extra-marital sex. The husband then had that man beaten, in which he cried like a child. That line resonated with me, because Apuleius used it casually as a analogy everyone would recognise when he wrote in 180ad. Hmmmm. I don't think von Franz highlighted that child torture had been normalised in Greek culture to that extent.
I look forward to your babbling about babel and towers as caves! Love it.
Interesting. I didn't see Anneke's psychic awareness of the men's hidden truths as part of the mind-control but rather her spiritual gift that saved her from the mind-control. I do remember her talking about the attachment she was manipulated to feel toward her rapists but that vision and compassion that they were re-enacting what had been done to them seemed particular to her.
And her understanding of the huge pincer bugs as confused and not malicious, which Brecht remarks on, that was such a leap of compassion. I don't see Brecht as prurient and maybe I'm just pushing back against my own sordid curiosity on the horrific details, personified by him. He earned that long hug.
I think that I've bristled before at people telling me who I should read but in the case of ML von Franz, where have you been hiding her from me? Her thesis about needing the feminine in men to be cultivated fits perfectly with my third paradigm about masculine-feminine being a false dichotomy and neither being possible within the same person without the other. I want to read everything (167 books??!!) that she's written.
And I know we've talked about the etymology of shibboleth before, also one of my favorite words, but explain it further, please?
"I didn't see Anneke's psychic awareness of the men's hidden truths as part of the mind-control but rather her spiritual gift that saved her from the mind-control." In the last quarter she specifically details how she was 'trained' to become psychically aware of all men: paraphrased, 'I was trained to know what men want, really want, even if they don't know what they really want.'
ML von Franz, you mean you don't know her! OMG, what planet are you from? She has some videos on-line, too. After Jung, von Franz my most important 'Jungian' read. I had and read, often more than once, many of her most important books. Maybe 5 times, 'On Divination and Synchronicity: The Psychology of Meaningful Chance' https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/92547.On_Divination_Synchronicity.
Loved 'The Grail Legend' too. 'Apuleius' is a very important read, imo. Her 'Puer Aeternus: A Psychological Study of the Adult Struggle With the Paradise of Childhood' was absolutely pivotal! Wow, so many of her books.
Her book 'Dreams: A Study of the Dreams of Jung, Descartes, Socrates & Other Historical Figures' is great and just up your alley. She looks at Joseph's dream in a 'different' way. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/436267.Dreams
And you may find 'The Way of the Dream' interesting, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1787801.The_Way_of_the_Dream
This is a transcript of a series you can also watch on-line, which is really excellent.
This is one place that shows it: https://wellcord.org/the-way-of-the-dream/the-way-of-the-dream/
Enjoy! von Franz is great huge 'rabbit' hole.
I'll look forward to your next essay and its synchronicity, Guy!
I'll listen to this interview when I have a chance, it touches on so many topics that seem like they're calling me--pedophilia as ritual and blackmail, religion, money. Is it the perpetrators that trace the lineage back to Canaan? Very interesting.
From my Biblical episodes, you know that I see it as having turned truth upside-down and inside-out, making the heroes into villains and the villains into heroes. In the same way that Cain is the patriarch of Evil in Genesis, the Canaanites are cursed to be a race of slaves by Noah. I think this history was written backwards, with the story of Cain postdating the curse of the descendants of Canaan.
I've often found, as a rule of thumb, that the best defense is a good offense. People accuse others of the exact thing they're doing. So if ritual abuse of children is happening, who is accusing the lineage of Canaanites?
And, as I talked about in The Devil & Naomi Wolf, Satan was an invention of the Hellenic Judeans to blame them for revolting against Roman rule. The demon-possessed were the zealots who believed in and fought for sovereignty. When I alluded to you as Lucifer, you should take that as a compliment ;-) There's a reason I think that the name means clear-sighted.
Investing evil and Satan with supernatural power encourages ritual abuse, even if it's for the purpose of condemning it. It says that blood sacrifice gives power. I don't question whether these things happen but calling them Satanic, as if Satan is real, is a way that perpetuates them. Again, if we condemn the action as evil but not the people, we have a better chance of ending it. At least that's my logic.
Hola, Tereza. I will look at your Biblical Episodes. I don't think I've watched them, or all of them. At least not by that name. Oddly enough, another small synchronicity, my essay suddenly and unexpected includes John 1 from the Bible!
Rule of thumb regarding controlling the narrative is likely a good one. (As to 'Rule of Thumb', do you know that that is old British law that made it unlawful to beat your wife with a switch smaller than the width of your thumb?)
Elaine Pagels also has an interesting discussion about the origins and meaning of 'Satan' and its changing 'face', so to speak. I imagine you have read her book? Here is a short recent interview of her discussion and surprise at her re-reading of the Gospel of Mark as a kind of self-serving advocacy of anti-semitism. An interesting look. https://youtu.be/MLyyIVSkfeA
Thank you for correcting my language use! I love it, since I am a strong advocate for the 'proper' understanding and use of language to empower/disempower ourselves to the benefit of the power structures external to ourselves. That care you have directed my attention to this delineation of evil. Love it. I'll be more careful about how my language gives power to or removes the power from the 'evil' structure.
OMG on rule of thumb! I'll never use that phrase again! In one of my old radio episodes I talked about metaphors of torture and how they've become so normalized that we don't even recognize them. I cited Amnesty Int'l talking about "holding the torturer's feet to the fire" in one ad. "Over a barrel" "Between a rock and a hard place" "Throw the first stone" the list goes on and on. It's hard to even use the English language without falling into them.
And if synchronicities are a way of confirming this socio-spiritual link between us, there you go again! Elaine Pagels is my primary reference in https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/the-devil-and-naomi-wolf. The vulnerability in her intro to The Origin of Satan was one I modeled my prologue on, although I took it out of the current version. She's amazing! Thanks for the link, I'll reference it next time as a way that readers can do more research.
While my partner Yoshiko (Japanese) were travelling in the initial months following our becoming, by choice of refusal, 'covid refugees', we went to Spain, the province of Galicia, where my sister and her husband fled from Canada to live. Yoshiko was fascinated about the city of Toledo, not far from where we were, at Lugo, with the most intact Roman fortress Wall. Anyway, at Toledo we happened to walk past the museum of human torture. PAST! We didn't know such a thing existed and the feeling outside the church-like building door was... rather grim.
(And one day we will talk about the abuse/misuse and boomerang effect of the world 'never'! LoL!)
All the best.
Hi Guy, thank you for your reply and links. There are some important rabbit holes to go down there. It seems to me that the world is coming to terms with this financial system that traces it's roots back to antiquity. I get the sense that it is finally coming to an end. Most people may never realize the role that satanic abuse and consumption of our children plays in our money. And i guess that's okay. There are a lot of young souls around. Hopefully the older souls will be able to lead us out of this situation into a better world.
You're welcome. The interview is amazing in many, many different ways.
Great comment. Thank you for posting.
You're welcome.
Tereza's posts often inspire, confirm and/or challenge my ideas, all at the same time. Today's essay had so many synchronicities with my day, it felt too energetic not to share.
All the best,
Yes, Tereza's posts often have the same effect on me, too. Always thought provoking!
The origin of money is more nuanced than that I think. According to Ellen Brown, and also Bernard Lietaer, money had taken two separate historical routes depending on who was in charge of a given society. The one you describe is a perversion of the one that existed well before that. Chapter 5 of Ellen Brown's "Web of Debt" describes it very well, titled "From Matriarchies of Abundance to Patriarchies of Debt". Vive le difference!
https://archive.org/stream/Web_of_Debt-The_Shocking_Truth_about_our_Money_System/Web_of_Debt-The_Shocking_Truth_about_our_Money_System_djvu.txt
Yes! My book starts with David Graeber's Debt: the First 5000 Years. It's his work that I've derived my origin of money from. And it's his posthumously published The Dawn of Everything that I've gotten my episodes on matriarchal societies. But I didn't remember that Ellen had put those two together! She's the other major influence on my book and my economic system. On this page is a series of classes I designed: http://universecity.us/ with one I taught on Web of Debt: http://universecity.us/wp_econ/. And if I look on this page, I have questions for the class on Ch. 5: http://universecity.us/wp_econ/?p=54. Thanks for reminding me that Ellen covered this, which overlaps with Graeber!
One of my YTs is Patriarchal Pyramid or Matriarchal Matrix? https://youtu.be/dtID5Ho_OBY. So I'm definitely thinking along the same lines. Our money system comes from the Roman/ Greek system of domination but it hasn't been that way everywhere and doesn't need to stay that way.
Light a candle in he darkness. I have found that love can disarm an enemy.
However, WHILE they are in the act of murdering you and your loved ones, one is required to turn that love into the courage to act in protecting God's creations, including ourselves. '
But these days, TRUTH is the new "hate speech."
I really do wonder about (so-called) “sacred cows” and discarding them. I guess that we all have them, even those who we hold dear as perfectly trustworthy truth-tellers.
What would you say to those who think the statement/premise/dogma/belief that “Evil does not exist” is exactly the delusion an evil “ultimate god” would want us to believe? Accepting that belief seems like just another way an evil “ultimate god” would gaslight us all?
Jack! I was just wondering if you were still around.
So, thinking like an evil ultimate god, what would the belief that evil doesn't exist cause humans to do? It seems like, when there is someone behaving destructively, they would have to ask themselves, "What could cause me to act like that?" Because they couldn't just write the person off as an evil person who does what they'd never do. So they'd have to analyze the circumstances, the system, that caused or allowed a person to go so haywire. And fix it.
On the other hand, if humans believe that some people are just evil, they'll start fighting among themselves about who those evil people are. When bad things happen they'll find someone to blame and make sure that bad things happen to them. And the system that allows or even causes people to do bad things will grow and grow and grow. So it would serve my evil purposes to have people believe in me, especially if they raped, tortured and killed children in my name, as my latest YT is about (Substack later today): https://youtu.be/9tqyeFJ-0Nk.
Good to hear from you!
So Moses comes down from the mountain with a tablet inscribed by the ultimate god, and the only words on the tablet are “Evil does not exist”. Are you claiming that if that had happened, our policy wonks would simply eliminate all evil deeds by tweaking the socio-economic system? I think, instead, most people would glom onto Aleister Crowley’s “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law”. (I actually think Crowley’s statement is much more compelling and philosophically defensible, and that it does not alleviate individuals of personal responsibility, though that is often how it is read.) If evil is claimed not to exist, I think we would get a video-game reality in which players could and would commit any atrocity with impunity, which is essentially the world we have today.
This, of course, is hardly a new topic. Ever since Paul asserted that followers of Jesus are not required to mutilate the sex organs of their male babies or observe other Jewish laws, antinomianism became a problem for orthodox Christians (and some Gnostics, too). And it continues to be an intellectual problem to this day in many Christian congregations (especially those that believe they are saved by faith or grace (or gnosis) alone, rather than by compliance with a legal or ethical code).
BTW, I might also argue that “evil does not exist” is the foundation of every empire, since that allows the empire to be the ultimate moral authority on every issue. It is also foundational to secularism, materialism, and scientism.
Lastly, just a question: In your view, is Victoria Nuland a good person working within an evil system?
You haven't clarified which of the other two you do believe. Is God evil or is Evil god? If you dogmatically believe in the existence of evil, did God create it? Or does Evil supersede the idea of God, making violence the most powerful force in the world?
I'm glad you brought up the Ten Commandments because I think they're a great illustration. Where does God say Thou shalt not torture? Enslave? Wage war? Salt fields? Poison wells? Burn houses? Rape women? Take the harvest?
I forget what culture it's from but you probably know, there's a beautiful and elaborate code of ethics from somewhere in anthropology. It isn't like these things were mysteries as to how to treat others. With the 10C, you needed to know who it applied to before it was right or wrong. It assumed that whatever the society itself did was moral, and this just gave some rules that were petty by comparison for intrasocial dynamics.
Is the only reason that you don't commit atrocities on the daily because someone would call them evil? I find that hard to believe. So if you wouldn't adopt that as your new m.o., why do you think others would?
On VN, I think that she's exactly who her life circumstances created. Did she create herself? If you'd been born as VN, with the soul of JS, what would have caused you to do differently? There's no logical reason that you'd make better choices as JS doing VN. Is there?
So as not to write a ten volume response, I will simply provide you with a few personal declarations unencumbered by formal argument.
Believing that “evil does not exist” is dogma. I do not “believe” evil exists because some authority has convinced me. Instead, I know evil exists based on the incontrovertible and ubiquitous evidence of my own senses and my own life experience. In Jeffersonian English, evil is self-evident. I do not need a theologian, philosopher, sage, or divinity to prove via smooth or even brilliant and poetic semantic constructs (i.e., scripture and its sad offspring, dogma and doctrine) that evil is intrinsic to and dominates this material world.
That said, if you want to question what “this world” is—Vishnu’s dream, Plato’s cave, The Matrix, the multiverse—I’m with you in asking that question. But while we pursue that metaphysical question, we better not forget to deal first with the world we have—the material world we know through our limited senses. For most of us, the material world is the only world we will ever know. I really want reality to be a fully imaginal creation that any of us can tweak and change just through the unlimited power of our imaginations. But, at least until now, I have no personal definitive proof of that possibility. (A few hints, but nothing definitive yet.)
I avoid use of the term “God”. But within the modern western convention of using the capital-G God of Judaeo-Christian mythology, He is as Evil as the day is long. I accept the description of Him exactly as is given in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. (I can find nothing good about Him in the entire OT.)
My own views of this world are a syncretism of a thousand previous syncretisms, but I do (at the moment) give special homage to Marcion, whose early version of “Christianity” was likely the most popular new religion in the Mediterranean world (until the Church Fathers and their Roman imperial handlers made it heretical and rubbed it out). Marcion simply conceded that “this world” was created and is ruled by the Canaanite creator/storm god of the OT, and Marcion conceded that the “Jews” were His chosen people. I am willing to go with that assessment. Of course Marcion then said that Christ was not the son (or even a distant acquaintance) of the OT Creator God, but rather Christ was the son/manifestation of an “alien god” from an alien heaven who had nothing whatsoever to do with this creation/abortion of the material world, but who, out of grace alone, was willing to provide us with an escape from this mundane reality. (This metaphysical framework, btw, completely nixes the problem of evil by stating unequivocally that the god of this world is evil. Marcionites had no need for a theodicy. Neither do I, thank God.)
Let me also be as clear as possible: this world is evil. And everything in it is evil, except those rare fragments of captured divine essence from another realm trapped in matter. As the Manichaeans thought, the entire Cosmic Game is about unmixing the "Light" from the "Dark" until all the Light escapes back to its home realm. This seems to me, if nothing else, a very useful (and fun) metaphor because it could, if we let it, set us all on a purposeful, meaningful course.
Lastly, Victoria Nuland is evil. Yes, she also works in an evil system. But that can be said of any of us. Good people successfully evade or refuse to behave evilly even within the most evil systems. BTW, there are plenty of evil people working their evil in perfectly good systems. Good people are good in any system, just as evil people are evil in any system.
Okay, thanks for clarifying. So, if I might summarize, this world and almost everything in it is evil, created by an evil God who also created evil people, who are the vast majority. However there's an alien god (lower-case) in an alien heaven who instilled a rare person here or there with a fragment of a non-evil divine essence, possibly including one particular person 2000 yrs ago. And the purpose of those non-evil people is to separate themselves from the evil people so they can get back to the alien heaven and leave the evil world alone?
I really should have started with this but how do you define evil?
Yes, overall your synopsis of my synopsis of Marcionism and Gnosticism—as I presented them—is accurate and reminds me, in miniature, of the polemics provided by the Church Father heresiologists (Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, Tertullian, etc.) against Marcionites, Gnostics, and other heretics. Interestingly (to me), those angry ancient polemics were very accurate and almost all that scholars and adherents of such heresies had to go on until the Nag Hammadi Library was discovered and translated; yet, based almost entirely on those polemics alone, Gnosticism survived and resonated deeply through the millennia with people like William Blake and Carl Jung (and countless others). We must often be eternally grateful to our most severe critics.
How would I define evil? First I must say that definitions are all inversely proportional in value to their scale—the smaller the thing being defined, the more accurate; the larger the thing, the less accurate any language allows. As cosmic-scale thought forms go, “Evil” is as large as “God”, so any definition must remain partial and somewhat dissatisfying. However, simplistically (if Buddhist thought can ever be considered simplistic), I would at least partially define evil as suffering. From a gnostic perspective, I would add that the suffering, specifically, is the agony of a transmundane, infinite, eternal being placed in solitary confinement within a finite, mortal, material corpse (physical body and psyche/soul “body”) which has been buried in the prison-yard sarcophagus of this material supermax realm, all of which was intentionally designed by its architect/creator/warden to permanently incarcerate and separate that infinite transmundane being from its transcendent source. What I hear from others for whom the gnostic worldview resonates—and which I consider a primary gnostic “marker”—is “I do not belong here” (where “here” means this world or reality). From that point on, all the classic questions—Who am I, really? Why am I here? What’s the point?—lead, imo, inexorably to a gnostic worldview, which, admittedly, is the hardest of all hard truths. Who, after all, wants to discover that their creator god and world are evil? Paradoxically, I also think this gnosis of "the world as it really is"—with all it's brutality, lies, hate, ignorance and death—also happens to be the basis of all humor.
Dear Tereza, where I can find more information about you -- your qualifications, education, area of expertise, professional life?
Many thanks in advance.
Thank you for subbing me, Boris, I know I've seen your comments on Matt Taibbi where we both subscribe and I was honored to see you take an interest in my stack. What led you here, if I might ask?
Usually when someone asks for credentials it's for the purpose of discrediting that person's ideas ;-) Not to say that's your intention. The author's blurb on my book reads, "Tereza Coraggio offers no market credentials by which you can judge her worth or the value of this book. Open it and decide for yourself."
https://www.amazon.com/How-Dismantle-Empire-2020-Vision/dp/1733347607
You don’t do light, do you?
Firstly, I love the 'jump in' quality of your spirit and mind - and you're always up to the task.
Secondly thank you for shout-out and kind words. Really appreciate it.
Thirdly, your posts always require the reader to go deeper and find their own contradictions.
Lately I'm thinking - with everything going into the shredder - that there won't be anything untouched by new revelations, in terms of the distortions we've been living with. So, religions and spirituality too. The good VS evil (It feels over to me) paradigm included.
Of course, many things found in religion and spiritual circles are valuable, helpful, all that. I don't think we'll be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
But I imagine there's a shake-up coming and in the aftermath and the rejiggering that happens, many of our paradigmatic assumptions (like good vs evil) won't make it.
Like your handle implies - they'll be fully new ways to move forward, I imagine less divided, less divisive and more expansive than we can yet see.
As the layers peel off the manufactured layering over reality, it reveals not just the world as it is, but us too; we are being released from the false versions of self, developed in response to the false reality.
I think we're already in the beginning of that very large process. It's scary.
Yet it has to happen
Religions mediate that Loving Presence, we call God or Source, and of course place themselves in authority in the process. As if. Maybe as these things go away, the institutionalized piece, the external appendage piece, the old authority structures - unnecessary and slows it all down - we come to realize we live in this Loving Presence all the time, and with alignment can fully embody that knowing.
Major upgrades incoming.
What a time to be alive. on planet earth, huh? Glad we got to connect, Tereza!
Thank you, Kathleen. I'm trying to remember that playground rhyme that 'everything you say about me sticks to you.' I think it's apropos ;-)
Your phrase about a time of undoing, and what you're saying here reminds me of the Charles Eisenstein episode about the space between stories. There's a definite feeling of vertigo, which could slip into panic when this first started, from having the ground shift under my feet.
I picture the third paradigm as taking a dichotomous line and launching up from it in a new dimension. Not either-or and not something inbetween. Changing the question and looking at what the two 'opposites' have in common as a single plane. And what the difference from that whole continuum would be.
In this case, good-evil is a continuum of separation and judgment. Springing up from that is Oneness and forgiveness--giving the benefit of the doubt forward that this person is doing the best they can, and enabling them to do better by changing the circumstances.
Tereza, I think you are in danger of being an idealist. That's not a bad thing. How do you propose we deal with psychopaths, and those determined to outmuscles their neighboring empires with Military force? (ps. i'd be on your side)
edit: typo
Hi, Peter. Well, you and I live in the belly of the beast determined to outmuscle their neighboring or far-flung empires or sovereign nations with military force. So our most pressing moral question is how WE can stop enabling evil actions. The first step, I believe, is to stop giving the psychopaths who run the world our properties and our labor for free. We're the power behind the psychopaths. Without us doing their dirty work and justifying it because we have to make a living, have to pay our mortgage, what could they do? They could do the harm they were capable of as mere individuals, with all of us condemning those actions. Now the most violent and destructive actions in the world are tolerated because deep down, we know that we're a part of it. So let's stop being psychopath-enablers and see what happens.
Good touche! economic sanctions!
Just curious as to how you've concluded that RFK Jr. "is a good person"... and that you like how he treats people. Are you aware that he cheated on both of his first two wives while still married (kept a little book to record his affairs) and his second wife committed suicide after the divorce? Have you looked into his connections with his nephew's murder of a young neighbor girl?
Ah, I knew someone would call me on that! I didn't know all of the details (he's had three wives? didn't know about the nephew's murder. did know about the cheating, black book and suicide). But theologically, I believe that whatever someone else has done, I would have done the same or worse in their circumstances. Either I'm how nature made me, aka God, or I'm how my circumstances made me. There's no other logical alternative.
If RFK is a bad person, was he born that way or did his life--that gave him more power over others than anyone should have--make him that way? In either case, it's not his fault. What would have made you or I do better if we'd been born as RFK? Rather than blame the person, changing the circumstances so no one has that power seems like a better solution to me.
hmmm, regulars would argue, we (people) are a product of genetics and our environment.
And these women who married RFK jr chose him over me because they thought he was their soulmate? Or did they choose based on his status in society??? Just saying that women have been choosing the “bad guys” and the rich and famous for a long time. Then they are upset when the guy they chose isn’t the most loyal and loving.
Another possibility is that god does not exist, but evil does exist, as defined by humans.
Hi, Mark. How would that be different than the second possibility? If evil does exist as the power to cause others to inflict pain, thereby multiplying its effect, then Evil would be God--defined as the strongest force in the world. Sorry, maybe I should have defined god first.
Pretend life is a game and consider what you think is the goal.
Have the most fun?
Protect the children?
Become the most powerful?
Cause pain and suffering just for the sake of it because you can and it makes you feel powerful and you find it funny?
Explore and learn about existence in all aspects?
Have the most sex?
Make the most money?
Love someone more than yourself?
Achieve the pinnacle of success at whatever interests you?
Create or express yourself with music or art?
Win the Stanley Cup?
With so many different purposes and beliefs the potential for love and evil is endless.
Maybe there is a counteracting force called "good" that can cancel out the evil.
When I'm out in nature, I don't perceive "good" or "evil". I can't ascribe those qualities to the bear or the hummingbird I see in my backyard, or even to the "raging" waters that inundated us last month ("raging" is a very human-oriented descriptor -- the water is simply following gravity). So I guess what I'm getting at is that I don't see evil as the strongest force in the world -- maybe only in the world of us crazy humans. And even there I would like to believe that good is stronger, though that certainly seems in doubt recently.
You make an interesting comparison, Mark. Good and evil don't exist in nature. We give human attributes to natural phenomenon but don't actually judge them as having intent. Even animals who are destructive, sometimes wantonly, are seen as fundamentally innocent aka good, but operating on instinct or something that's gone haywire in their biology or environment.
Why are humans the only exception to that? When we see someone do something hurtful or destructive, we have this theory of free will that nothing caused them to do that. We don't ask 'why?' or even better, 'what could cause me to do the same in their circumstances?' We attribute guilt and blame because we accept that this is a person who doesn't have our same morals. So it perpetuates the actions, generation to generation, because we never get to the cause.
"Why are humans the only exception to that?"
If I could answer that question successfully, I'd be rich and famous and my latest book (which doesn't exist) would be on the New York Times Bestseller list.
Superb article, thanks.
Anyone else misread the 'P' as a 'B' ? :)
That may go along with my theory that our belief in an evil God and toxic masculinity are one and the same ;-)
Thank you for engaging in the conversation. I'm curious as to your closing statement, "Rather than blame the person..." I'm not sure how you interpreted my comments to mean that I am "blaming a person." My question was how you concluded that RFK is a "good person" when his actions are not "good." I see now that I should have asked you to define a "good person" instead and how RFK meets your definition. To me, cheating on your spouse is consistent with a person who lies, cheats and betrays, not a person who is "good." The number of marriages is not of concern to me, nor the number of divorces. But the lies, cheating and betrayals are of concern to me. A person's actions demonstrate their character, wouldn't you agree?
Hi, Peggy. I think there's a way in which our discussion illustrates my point in this article. What I'm positing is that people are always good unless we accept that God or nature created them bad, which would make God evil by my definition. I don't hold the belief system that people are 'born bad' by nature. And I don't think they 'are' the worst thing they've done. Actions are good or bad, but not people.
As a husband, RFK has done things that might concern me if I was thinking about being his fourth wife. I don't think any of these things are less than twenty years old, yes? So maybe not even then, but that's your prerogative. These are personal failings in the context of his marriages, not his political life.
In his political life, he has professed his support for sending my tax money to a regime that forces others to kill, torture, starve, enslave and impoverish. That's my definition of evil. It may also be central to the Great Reset and all the agendas of depopulation, dispossession, destruction and deception that we've experienced.
I'm saying that I can't support Bobby because of the second, and you don't support him because of the first, so I'm not sure where we disagree. Is there a candidate you support because they're morally a good person in their personal life, even though they may support corrupt regimes in their political life? Otherwise it doesn't seem like we disagree.