Tag Archives: Religion

Are Kids REALLY Getting Worse?

The other day I was talking to a neighbor of mine. She was saying how lately some of the kids in the neighborhood have been acting less polite than usual. And I think when she said lately, she meant the last several years. And because of her age, I was almost ready to discount her statement as just another disgruntled old person’s expected “kids today,” rant.

There is a famous quote that goes something like this: “kids today don’t listen anymore, and they don’t respect their elders, blah blah blah,” which sounds like a common enough complaint. When you realize that was spoken by some Greek guy over two thousand years ago, it becomes apparent that old people grumbling about kids is common to every generation.

But one thing that is different, at least in this particular situation is there are some statistics to back this up. According to several sources, there are less and less people getting and staying married. And there are less and less people attending religious services on a regular basis. Before you click off this page thinking that I’m some right wing family values religious nutcase, please understand I haven’t stepped foot in a church since my fathers funeral, and I think it’s absolutely fantastic that social pressures that keep people in otherwise unhappy marriages are crumbling, giving people freedom that they wouldn’t have enjoyed in other generations.

That being said, I think this is an interesting phenomenon from a scientific, societal standpoint. There are less and less marriages, and many more divorces, which many argue lead naturally to a less stable upbringing for kids. Of course there is the argument that kids are better of with separated or divorced parents than with parents together but at each others throat all the time.

Also, less and less families are attending any kind of church services as a whole. When you combine these two together, you have less positive role models for kids to look up to, which leaves them only with each other to learn how to behave and act in modern society.

Please keep in mind that I am not arguing for people to stay married if they hate each other, or get married if they aren’t ready. Nor am I advocating any church participation of any sort. I jus think it’s interesting to watch the dynamic unfold, and how it will affect society in years to come.

I am a firm believer in personal responsibility, and if you are of the persuasion that it is up to society to teach you morals and proper behavior, and then you are at the mercy of the ebbs and flow of societal trends, be they good or bad.

If, however, you are inclined to choose your own moral path, based upon your own choices and decisions for where you want your own life to lead, then there has never been a better time that right now.

Crumbling influences of society can be good, and it can be bad. Like any other system, those that depend upon it stand to lose when the system has problems. Those that understand the system for what it is, and use it to their advantage usually come out ahead, regardless of their social economic background and upbringing.

Crumbling social pressures to get and stay married may make finding and keeping a partner more difficult, but much more rewarding once they are found.

Similarly, releasing oneself from the restrictions of the two thousand year old religious moral authority may seem frightening at first, but when you realize you can make your own rules, (so long as you are prepared to live with the consequences,) you can gain so much more power.

What many come to realize is that when they choose their own path in life, they find that their own personal code of morals and ethics closely mimic the beneficial ones from religion. Don’t kill, steal, or covet, or lie. And as a bonus, some of the stuff is supposedly bad, isn’t so bad after all.

Like sex and money are perfectly fine so long as you make sure everybody is happy, and nobody gets hurt. Of course, if you’re going to make more people, then you need to be sure they grow up with the best resources, mental and otherwise, to achieve their dreams in life as well. Maybe that’s what my neighbor was getting at.

What God do You Worship?

I read an interesting paper on the Internet the other day. It was a long, academic treatise on the difference between males and females. I won’t bore you with the details, but the gist of it was that men are better at some things than women, and worse at other things. And women are better at some things, and worse at other things. I know, really breathtaking breakthrough, right? The interesting things, or one of the interesting things about the paper, which actually was transcribed from a speech the guy gave, was some interesting thing they found out through genetic research. Doing some kind of advanced genetic testing, the methods of which are way over my head, they discovered something really interesting. All humans, judging only by their DNA, have way more female ancestors than they do male ancestors.

Of course if you look at one person, then obviously they have to have an equal number of males and females. Mom and dad, grandma and grandpa and however many greats you want to add on down the line until you get to the proverbial (or not so proverbial, according to your belief system) Adam and Eve. But when you combine groups of people, they find they the females start to outnumber the males when you go back further into history.

What this means is that going way, way back in time, most of the kids were made by a relatively small group of males, and a generally large group of females. This of course, predates modern society, so we are talking about many thousands of years of pre-history. By this guy’s estimation, all of us collectively come from 40% of the males of history, and 80% of the females. Until very recently in human history, it was a sad fact that most males, and a few females didn’t ever get together with somebody long enough to produce a child.

Some have argued that when large societies were created, this became a problem, as so many males together competing for the females more often than not turned into violence and disaster. It wasn’t a problem when you had hunter-gatherers in groups of fifty or a hundred or so. But when they invented agriculture, and lots of people started living together, it became a problem. They needed to come up with a system. A one man, one woman system that would keep guys from braining each other to death whenever they passed each other on the street.

So how to the guys who were in the 40 percent from taking all the girls for themselves? How to create a system so the other 60 percent wouldn’t feel left out and conspire to destroy society? What beautiful method did they come up with to keep everybody in check? Yep.

Religion.

That’s right. As sacrilegious as it sounds, religion was invented so that everybody could get laid. That was God’s original job. To make sure there was enough sex to go around for everybody, and those that were naturally good at it (for whatever the reason) wouldn’t take more than their fair share.

So what happened? What happened after they invented the giant all seeing, all knowing eye in the sky to keep watch over everybody so they wouldn’t kill each other over a woman? Society flourished. Great temples and Churches and works of art were built. Art, music, literature were created. Giant cities were built. The Pyramids, the Great Wall of China, the bold and daring journeys of Zheng He, Magellan, and Columbus.

Something to think about next time you’re in church, if that’s your thing.

Here’s a link to the article, and here’s a link to a YouTube video I recently made on the subject. Enjoy.

The Preacher and The Crystal Shop

I was out with a friend yesterday, downtown. We were just wandering around. I had just bought a bunch of white board markers. I use a white board marker when I make my YouTube videos, as I don’t have a printer. I position the camera just in front of the white board, so I can check the notes while still looking at the camera. I try to use different colors for different parts of my monologue. We had just left the stationary store. It was next door to a new age, metaphysical type shop that sold different crystals, and incense and other things that can help you to get in touch with the metaphysical world, if that is what you are into.

We walked in, and there were several tables set up with different crystals on them. I went over and picked one up, and suddenly noticed a strange sensation. I turned around, and the shopkeeper was looking right at me. The other people in the shop were grinning, as if they knew what was coming. I suspected she pegged me as first time customer and decided to give me some hocus pocus sales pitch to try to get me to buy some crystals or incense or tarot cards or something.

The power of the spirit has found you! The crystals are a manifestation of the love of the universe! You think you have chosen them, but they have chosen you. You must listen to your intuitions and let them guide you! You must not forsake the wisdom of their advice! That which you see around you is but a representation of the glory of infinite intelligence that precedes all that is, was, and will be! Beware those who disregard these truths!

The people in the shop were grinning, as they had apparently heard her say this to others. I was impressed at her acting abilities, and chose a couple crystals. One rose quartz and one purple one (I forgot the name already.) My friend and me went on our way.

Later that day, we were in a different part of town. There is a government building, and sometimes on the steps people will come and preach. Usually from some type of Christian angle. They kind of remind me of my days in university, where some weird guy would stand on the steps in front of the cafeteria and go on and on about the dangers of fornication.

The guy that was there, I had never seen before. So we stopped to hear his monologue. As soon as we stopped, he looked directly at me, which was kind of spooky. Everybody around was smiling, I guess because they were glad it was me and not them he was aiming his sermon at.

The power of the Lord has found you! The Bread of Life is a manifestation of the Love of the universe! You think you have chosen it, but it has chosen you! You must listen to your soul and let it guide you! You must not forsake the wisdom of your soul’s advice! That which you see around you is but a representation of the glory of God that precedes all that is, was, and will be! Beware those who disregard these truths!

I felt a bit confused, as I slipped into an uncomfortable feeling of Déjà vu. Has that ever happened to you? So anyway, he had some basket that he was apparently asking for donations. Everybody was looking at me, as his sermon was directed at me. I didn’t have any change, so I put in the two crystals I had bought at the shop before. Everybody seemed to take that as hint, and began filling up his basket with red and purple crystals. Which was strange, because I think he might have been hoping for some money. I don’t know what he is going to do with all those crystals.

The Glory of Christ Revealed by the Jews

I saw a fantastic movie yesterday, called Defiance.  It is based on a true story about a group of Russian Jews hiding out in the forests during World War II. It showed their heroic courage of resistance against the Nazi’s. However, as much as I was moved by their resistance, and ultimate survival in the face of overwhelming evil, I’d like to talk about something else.

There was a scene, which caused me one of those “Aha” moments. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. You are sitting there, reading this, and you stumble across something that causes your brain to go in an unexpected direction, and it makes a series of subsequent connections in your brain, which causes you to suddenly look at this from a new, and perhaps richer and more rewarding perspective.

That’s what happened to in between shoveling handfuls of salted buttery popcorn into my mouth. (The movie was just recently released here in my small town in Japan.) The particular scene in the movie was after a particularly hard winter. This group of people had escaped the cities, where they would have been put into the ghetto’s, which later turned into the horrible Nazi death camps. Because they were living in the forest, they had to build their own shelter, and find their own food. They had just gone through a harsh winter, and one day, they noticed the ice was thawing. The movie showed several moving scenes of people realizing that because the snow was thawing out, and the sun’s warmth was being felt, they had made it through the winter. The melting ice, the sun were signs of hope. The dark cold winter had passed, and the warm and bountiful spring was on its way.

This is where’ the AHA hit me. Imagine you are part of a nomadic tribe in Europe, during the last ice age. About ten thousand years ago. Every year the winter comes and the horrible cold kills many people and makes it difficult to live. Every day the sun gets lower and lower on the horizon as the cold icy death of winter approaches. If you are a nomadic hunter/gatherer this is horrible. You don’t have cities, or guns, or any kind of technology to create any sustainable warmth other than lighting a fire every night. And when everything is frozen, lighting a fire can prove difficult. (Just ask that guy in the Jack London story.)

You’re whole mindset is based on complete dependence on the elements being kind. Warm is good. Cold is bad. Every season that you make it through the winter is a reason to celebrate, just like the Russian Jews did. For them, they only went through that once or twice (I’m not sure how many years they had to hide out in the forests.) But for the primitive hunter-gatherers, it was a yearly occurrence. And also was a yearly occurrence was the celebration that the sun stopped moving lower and lower on the horizon and started moving up, signaling that spring was coming.

So perhaps they created a celebration of sorts. A two-stage celebration. The first stage, when the sun stopped moving lower on the horizon. And the second celebration, which really is a continuation of the first, is when the length of the day overcomes the length of the night. The first is the winter solstice. The second is the spring equinox.

The Winter Solstice. The Birth of the Sun. December Twenty First.
Christmas Day. The Birth of the Son. December Twenty Fifth.

Coincidence?

The Spring Equinox. The overcoming of the darkness by the Sun. March Twenty First.
Easter. The overcoming of Death by the Son. The date varies, but it is directly related to the occurrence of a full moon (light in the darkness) after the Spring Equinox.

Coincidence?

Could it be that the Christian religion, largely spread around the world by European culture, has its roots in primitive man’s mythology, which arose to help overcome the fear of winter, during the ice age in Europe ten thousand years ago?

Let me know what you think.

Permalink

Reincarnation

The other day I got into a discussion with a friend of mine about reincarnation. Actually it wasn’t specifically reincarnation per se, but more along the lines of past lives. My friend was adamant that it is a complete hallucination and that all stories of past lives are made up either consciously for attention, or unconsciously to be able to deal with past experiences in this life that are too painful to face.

While I”m not a full fledged card carrying member of any official past lives network (If they indeed exist), I do believe their is something valuable at least in the concept of past lives. There is just too much about the mind and the whole concept of reality that we all share to be really sure of anything.

Of course, if you are a religious person, you can take solace in your beliefs, whatever they may be. Personally, I used to be a deep believer in the Catholic Church. There was even a time when I went to daily mass. But the more I read different texts on different subjects from different cultures, the more I realized that there has got to be a more inclusive explanation for everything. But I digress.

My friend was telling me about different case studies where they’ve hypnotized people and have done what they call “pass life regressions.” Under hypnosis, they slowly take the person back through several lives and the person describes things as they are being regressed. Supposedly a researcher in this field has done with thousands of people and has come to some startling conclusions. Certain people who claimed to have lived before in ancient China, for example, all accurately described the clothing that was worn at the time. This is either a strange coincidence, a extremely well planned hoax, or something else entirely.

My friend claims that this study only shows that the hypnotist is only cleverly using hypnotic techniques to plant memories into people. If that were the case, then of course you would expect most people to come up with the same answers about people living in ancient China.

I’m not so sure. Perhaps we do go through this life several times. Perhaps these people weren’t regressing to previous lives at all, perhaps they were merely tapping into the superconscious. The giant storehouse of all information ever known or to be known by all sentient entities that have lived or ever will live. Or maybe it is just gigantic shared hallucination.

In the end, my friend and I agreed to disagree. He thinks everything is explainable by current biological science. While I agree that ultimately science must explain everything, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a whole lot of science that we have discovered yet, or are even capable of understanding.  The general belief among cultural anthropologists is that any yet to be discovered technology, when shown to a more primitive society, will be treated by them as magic. Perhaps all of this is some kind of magic, on some level.

Permalink