Elle Smith I Love You

I Love Liz Smith - I am her Love Slave.

Dear God,

From the Principia Discordia,

"Western Union Telegram
To: Jehova Yahweh
Care: Celestial Hotel (Suite #666)
Presidential Tier, Paradise

Dear God;
This is to inform you that your current position as deity is herewith terminated due to gross incompetence STOP Your check will be mailed STOP Please do not use me for a reference

Respectfully,

Malaclypse the Younger/Omnibenevolent Polyfather
POEE High Priest"

Politics as Usual

If there is anything that we have learned from the Bush Administration, it is that, while he is a natural born leader, he is not a strict conservative. His deal with the AARP that produced the largest proscription drug benefits plan in history, that will no doubt bankrupt an already wasteful and inefficient Medicare Institution is just one example. Programs such as the No Child Left Behind initiatives are steps in the right direction, but appear to be offering very little in short term positive effects, nor give us any reason to be optimistic for the future of the program as a positive initiative, which has nonetheless cost the American Taxpayer billions of dollars and contributed to the unprecedented national debt and federal deficit.

Why isn’t the Republican Party focusing on key conservative issues such as Tax Reform and the reduction of federal bureaucracy? Never before has proposals such as a National Consumption Tax and a Flat Tax had so much national support and in a time of war and massive federal spending, never have we had such a cause for trimming the federal bureaucracy. The answer is that tiny minority of the American Public called the Swing Vote, or Moderates.

I believe, that in order for the Republicans to remain powerful within the government, they must give benefits to every branch, every vein and every capillary of the bureaucratic machine. This means, that instead of pushing for a more effective and efficient education system, the Republicans, like the Democrats, have no choice but to throw money at the bureaucracies and hope and pray that they do something productive. Spending on Welfare, Education, Healthcare, Medicare, Construction and Legislation increases every year. Yet, what improvements do we have to show for it?

If the George W. Bush wins in November, it will not be because of his conservative political positions, but because of his ability as a National leader in the war on Terror. If John Kerry wins, it will be because Americans no longer believe that we are the “good guys” and that they believe that we should be subservient to other Nations and National Organizations. The two major political parties are NOT looking out for the general interests of the American people or their liberty. They are locked into a political atmosphere that does not forgive the Great Sin of common sense and representative democracy. The American public has never before been so mislead about the real issues at hand, focusing on a War three decades old and on a propaganda machine and its pugilist mercenaries; the result of which is an election that has nothing to do with the good of the People, but the power of the Parties.

The Republican Convention

The Republican Convention this morning, has frustrated me beyond belief, mostly for the same reason I was so aggravated by the Libertarian convention. Thus far, it has been a convention of Republican Values. The only real issue addressed has been a denouncement of frivolous suits. If the Republicans do not put forward a bold and unwavering plan for the future, their convention won’t mean anything. If they preach to the choir, they’ll lose this election. If they continue to send people up there, who say things like, “The Strength of our Nation rests in the Sacrifice of Jesus Christ”, I’m going to be ill.

Killing the Abrahamic Religions

The previous selection illustrates the nature of Christianity and the drastic effects it had on the modern world. Christianity, as an institution, is the greatest destroyer in history – a title that the Muslims seem intent on securing for themselves, though I doubt they have the intellectual ability to succeed. While the Muslims have a spirit of violence, they lack the deceptiveness and viciousness with which the Christians have established their powers and crusades throughout the years.

These religions are a plague. I hope that in my lifetime I am witness to a return to individualized religion and an end of Abrahamic intolerance and violence. The world suffered under a thousand years of Christian brutality and now we’re plagued with Islamic militarism. The Jews were no better in their brief moments of superiority. How long till we take seriously the threat these religions pose to peace, liberty and reason?

Now, the way to kill a religion is to kill their culture, by replacing it with something better. We can do this by readopting the humanist spirit, by preaching love, virtue, science, liberty, reason and individuality. Once we’ve taken possession of these, we must go about recreating society, allowing culture to flourish. (How long has art and music been impotent to inspire?) We need to start a movement away from the intolerance and violence of Organized Religion, toward the Reason and Liberty of Humanism and a pagan kind of religious tolerance (religion unique to the individual).

Christian Force, Fraud and Violence (From: A History of Pagan Europe by Jones & Penniick)

“Constantine was baptized into Christianity by an Arian bishop on his deathbed, on Whitsunday 337. Constantine never followed the Christian sectarians in persecuting non-Christians, but his three sons did. In 340 a ban was put on Pagan sacrifices, ‘superstition’ and ‘unsoundness of thinking’ in the east, and in 342 this edict was extended to the whole Empire. In 346 public sacrifices were banned and Pagan observance was made a capital offence. The Pagans kept their heads down and waited for the tide of history to sweep the new sect away. The dualism of Christian thought was completely unprecedented and presumably incomprehensible to Pagans.

In 349, Pagan sectarians back the political rebellion of one Count Magnentius, commanding officer of the elite Jovian and Herculean legions set up by Diocletian. He was bought off by the youngest emperor, Constans, but renewed his efforts the following year, taking the whole of the western Empire. His Pagan regime was received with great rejoicing by the majority of the population, who obviously only needed a champion in order to reassert their own beliefs. Yet at the same time Christian conversations were multiplying rapidly, especially in the cities. It is at this time that the word ‘pagan’ ceased to be used by the Christians simply to refer to a cowardly non-combatant in the army of Christ, and regained its literal meaning: a country person, a rustic, a yokel who was too slow-witted to take up the religion of the modern age. Magnentius was defeated after some diplomatic realignment of forces by the eastern emperor, Constantius, in September 351 and committed suicide two years later in Gaul or Britain, to which he had retreated. In the campaign against Magnentius, however, Constantius had had to give power to the only male relatives (apart from his brothers) whom he had not butchered on his accession, his cousins Gallus and Julian. It was Julian who was to lead the next Pagan restoration.

Julian was a thoughtful young man, prickly and defensive, who eventually developed the eccentric habit of dressing like a Hellenistic philosopher, with an unkempt beard and wearing a rough robe. He and his brother had the courtly manners of a gentleman of whatever faith, but when called to military command distinguished himself as a brave leader, a fair disciplinarian and a just victor. When his duties took him to Greece the young prince reconverted to Paganism at the shrine of Athena of Ilium – once more the purported site of ancient Troy, the symbolic home of the mysterious Palladium. The following year he experienced an ecstatic vision during his initiation into the Mithraic Mysteries at Ephesus (the site of Maximin Daia’s shrine of Zeus Friend of Humanity), and became a committed Pagan missionary for the rest of his life. Clearly, private Pagan worship including the Mysteries was still going on, but Julian noted with bitterness the decay of the public temples.

Julian’s military appointment under Constantius took him as Caesar to Gaul, where the Germanic tribes, pressed by Gothic invasions from the east, had been ravaging the province. The new Caesar restored order and, it would seem, prosperity there, then duly rose against the emperor in what had become the time-honored way of taking power. After more diplomatic intrigue, Constantius died on 3 November, 361, naming Julian as his successor, and the new emperor marched into Constantinople on 11 December, 361. He did not institute a massacre of the Christians, which led them to complain that they had been cheated of martyrdom. He reduced corruption in the administration, repealed the laws of religious persecution, but prevented Christians from serving in the military (because their law forbade killing), from receiving grants and gifts (because their religion preached poverty) and from using Pagan texts in schoolbooks (because Pagan myths demonstrated Pagan ethics, which could only mislead Christian children). It is unclear whether these rulings were superbly cynical or naively sincere.

Under Julian the temples were reopened and the marauding bands of Christians who had become used to pillaging and destroying Pagan shrines became subject to the usual penalties of the law. Julian himself seems to have been a philosopher at heart, and this may have been the climate of the times, with people fighting over ideas, whether rational or revelatory, and seeking to put into practice an ethical rule of life. There is some evidence that Julian intended to set up a Pagan ‘church’ preaching Pagan ‘doctrines’, with authority imposed from above by himself as supreme pontiff. This is the religion of a Follower of the Word, whereas for the bulk of Julian’s subjects the many divinities of what we can now see as the Pagan religion were simply unseen presences whose existence was proved by their effects, numina whose presence people would be mad to deny. The climate of thought was changing whether because of the dogmatic preaching of the Christians and Manichees or as the precondition of this. Julian’s version of ‘Hellenism’ reflected the change in the times.

In 363 the emperor went to secure the eastern frontier against the Persians and died in battle. Christianity became the official religion once more, but Paganism was tolerated until the accession of Theodosius in 379. Meanwhile, Pagan art and literature had taken heart again in Rome and the so-called ‘Aristocracy of Letters’ flourished in that backwater until the Pagan rebellion against Theodosius in 394. After Theodosius declared Catholic Christianity the only permissible faith in 381, the western emperor, Gratian, snubbed the Pagans of Rome by declining the title of Pontifex Maximus and then enacting a series of deadly laws against the cults of the old Republic. State funding was to be withdrawn from Pagan shrines and ceremonies, the altar of Victory was to be removed from the Senate, and, perhaps worst of all, the Vestals were to lose their privileges and immunities and their sacred fire was to be put out. The Roman establishment was stunned. By the end of the year, however, Gratian was murdered by his barbarian Master of Cavalry at Lyons.

After Gratian’s assassination, a patrician called Symmachus became Prefect of Rome in 384. He fronted the Pagan party in the argument over the Altar of Victory, arguing that ancestral usage ought to be maintained, for different nations have different faiths. Rome should be allowed to live in her own way.

‘We ask peace for the gods of our fathers, peace for our nature divinities. It is only just to assume that the object of a ll people’s worship is the same. We look up to the same stars, one sky covers us all and the same universe surrounds us. Do the means by which a man seeks the truth really matter? There is no single road by which we may arrive at so great a mystery.’

The Christian emperor, under the guidance of Bishop Ambrose, refused to restore the Altar, Symmachus was assailed by a whispering campaign and resigned as chief magistrate in 385, just before Emperor Valentinian held his ten-year jubilee in Rome. That year, 386, saw Libanius publish his Defense of the Temples, but it also saw the fanatical ex-monk John Chrysostom appointed as archbishop of Constantinople. In 392, thoroughgoing laws contested by Christian heirs, banned all celebratory games and Pagan holy days, and forbade even the worship of the household deities in private. In the west, however, Valentinian was assassinated in 392 and Eugenius (392-394) restored the image of Victory in the Senate and payments to Pagan priests began again. Pagan shrines were restored ceremonially by senior officials, including that of Hercules at Ostia.

Theodosius had been principal emperor since 379 and in his eastern area of jurisdiction anti-Pagan legislation had been continuous. Given the unstable nature of the times, he had a horror of secret societies and of magic, so private Pagan rituals were forbidden from the start of his reign. Monasteries and nunneries had been founded in the east, and gangs of black-robed monks would roam the cities and countryside desecrating temples and inciting mobs to destroy them, while the civil authorities turned a blind eye. In 390 a mod burned down the library of Alexandria, an irreplaceable collection of documents dating back to remotest antiquity, and in the following year the Serapeium (temple of Isis and Serapis) was destroyed by order of Archbishop Theophilus of Alexandria. After decades of expecting the Christians to go away, the Pagans finally fought back. The old Roman habit of obedience to authority was perhaps weaker in the east, and there were battles in the streets. One Bishop Marcellus, having sent a party of soldiers and gladiators to destroy a temple, was seized by the local populace and burned alive. At Alexandria, some of the wreckers were crucified. But the Pagan cults were disunited, there was no concept of a general Pagan religion (Julian’s ‘Hellenism’ had not been tested for long enough), and Libanius’ ‘men in black, who show their piety be dressing in the clothes of mourning’ ultimately had their way, destroying most of the artwork and the learning of the ancient world in their zeal to discover and eradicate ‘sin’.

In 394, Theodosius took over the whole Empire and announced that the state could not afford to pay for Pagan rites, as the money was needed for the army. Official Paganism was forced underground, and Pagans were persecuted. The civil right of Pagans continued to be suppressed, culminating in 416, when Pagans were barred from the Imperial Service. But by then, the Empire was divided, raved by Goths, Vandals and Huns, moving west under pressure from the Huns who had recently been expelled from China. Many of these were Arian Christians. The Roman troops who defeated Eugenius, the Pagan emperor in the west, in 394 were under the control of an Arian, a Vandal named Stilicho, and included Gothic Arian mercenaries under one Alaric. Alaric next appears the following year pillaging and largely destroying the Pagan shrines of Greece. Some Pagan commentators of the time were convinced that this was a religious crusade. The Mystery shrine, still functioning at Eleusis, was destroyed then, and the Erechtheum, the shrine of Poseidon on the Acropolis, became the first Pagan site on the peninsula to be converted into a Christian church.

Stilicho the Vandal, a naturalized Roman, was now chief of staff under the western Emperor Honorius (395-423), who instituted the long-feared decree to destroy the temples in 398. The law attacking the temples was, however, repealed, and the Empire relapsed into its previous state of confusion. At some time after 402 Stilicho burned the Sibylline Books, perhaps to demonstrate his contempt for the Pagans’ explanation of the chaos as a consequence of abandoning the ancestral deities. In 405 more than 200,000 Goths, under a Scythian Pagan called Radegais, flooded into Italy from the northeast. They were defeated, but only just, by Alaric. More pretenders to the throne arose and were defeated, Stilicho was executed on a pretext by Honorius, and then in 409 Alaric found himself on the receiving end of a new persecution. The administration was to be purged of ‘barbarians’. Briefly, Alaric, although Christian, set up a new Pagan Imperial administration in Rome, but the experiment failed to impress Honorius, and in a fit of frustration on 24 August, 410 Alaric sacked the city.

As a Christian, Alaric allowed one sanctuary to be spared, the church of St. Peter on Vatican Hill. In it were kept the valuables of as many Christians as could get them there, and their girl children. The new city was set up as a Christian foundation. Further edicts referred to Pagan practices as an error on the part of Christian believers, rather than as a part of a separate and independent religion. One thousand years of Pagan tradition had come to and end.

However, the common people remained Pagan in fact if not in theory, as decrees and the writings of observers show. The writings of Church fathers from Augustine (354-430) through to the antiquarians of the nineteenth century variously condemn, bewail or simply observe the remnants of ancient belief and practice among unlettered folk. The temple of the Mother of Heaven (i.e. Isis) at Carthage, disused and overgrown by the early fifth century, was made into a church. But in the year 440, bishops noticed that worshippers there were continuing to worship the old goddess, and had the temple demolished.

A few Pagan intellectuals managed to salvage and transmit the learning and values of the past during that first bleak century. We have already mentioned Zosimus the historian, writing at the end of the fourth century, whose account of Roman civilization fills out with its own bias the biased record of his Christian contemporaries. In addition, the lawyer Martianus Capella, a contemporary of Augustine at Hippo, compiled the Marriage of Philology and Mercury, a great compendium of what became known as the seven liberal arts, including long quotations from Classical authors. Platonic teaching continued in Alexandria, a hotbed of Christian missionary zeal, but in 415 the head of the school, Hypatia, was torn apart by a Christian mob on her way to the lecture theatre. In 4320433 a young visionary called Proclus studied in Athens under the Pagan philosophers Syrianus and Plutarch. After further wandering under the guidance of his Goddess Hecate, the divine patroness of his birthplace, Byzantium, Proclus himself became head of the Academy in around 450. He wrote and taught voluminously, and when in 529 the eastern Emperor Justinian closed down the Pagan schools in Athens, the remaining philosophers, rather than recanting, fled to Persia and taught at the university of Jundishapur. Greek learning was thus preserved and built upon by the Persians and also by the Arabs, who had received it through centuries of interaction with the Graeco-Roman Empire. It was eventually returned to the western world when the Christian Frankish Empire clashed with the Islamic Moorish Empire in Spain in the ninth century.

Cultured Christians such as Boethius and Cassiodorus were rare but invaluable in the transmission of learning. Boethius translated Aristotle into Latin, wrote several treatises on logic, music and arithmetic, and used quotations from Classical authors freely in his work The Consolation of Philosophy. By applying philosophical categories to questions of Christian theology, he prepared the way for the later readmission of intellectual speculation into the theological fold. Cassiodorus was a pupil of Boethius, who extended Capella’s work on the seven liberal arts and eventually founded a house of contemplatives which included a well-stocked library of many ancient texts. Boethius and Cassiodorus gave medieval philosophy the intellectual nicety for which we respect it today, much of which is derived from Pagan thought.

After the death of Emperor Theodosius in 395, the old Roman Empire with its two Christian capitals split once more into east and west. This time there was to be no coordinating authority. In 381 Theodosius had declared the eastern patriarchate in Constantinople equal in authority to the western patriarchate in Rome, and after that the two Christian dominions went their increasingly separate ways, as the political strength of the western Empire diminished following the sack of Rome. Despite localized fanaticism, such as that of the Christian mobs in Egypt, the Byzantine Empire retained the Greek respect for intellectual and visionary information, and preserved many ancient documents as well as incorporating some mystical teachings into its form of Christianity. By contrast, as Neoplatonism grew during the second century, the Christians in Rome had abandoned Greek, their original liturgical language, and began to distrust it as sophistical and dangerous to honest minds. Western Christianity based on Rome was politically active, considering itself a moral counterbalance to the ignorance of its new political rulers, the one-time warrior nomads who knew little of urban civilization, but in its initial years it also set itself against speculative thought, both intellectual and mystical.

Divided by conflicts between Catholics and Arians, the western Empire grew increasingly weak, its last emperor being deposed in 476 in favor of a barbarian king of Italy. The Goths and Vandals who held Italy and Spain, however, saw themselves as custodians of an ancient civilization which they, as newcomers, did not share. This civilization was, of course, Pagan. The Catholic Church in these countries adopted many of the outward forms of Pagan ceremonial. For example, the Goths wore their hair long and their tunics short, but Christian priests retained the short hair and long robe of a Roman gentlemen. A shaven head had been characteristic of a priest of Egyptian religion, so much so that St Jerome (b. 348) stated that Christian priests should not appear with shorn head lest they be confounded with priests of Isis and Serapis. Yet by 663, the Synod of Whitby included an argument not over whether priests should be tonsured, but over what style of tonsure to adopt. Christianity was vehemently opposed to the worship of goddesses. Yet one of the earliest churches dedicated to Mary Mother of God was on the site of the temple of Diana at Ephesus. A synod held at Ephesus in 431 first designated Mary as Mother of God. The procession torches, as were once used in the processions of Diana. The use of holy water passage marking the turning points of human life, the veneration of local saints, and the great feast of the dead, the annual Christian Parentalia on All Souls’ Day, can all be seen as direct imitations of Pagan tradition.

St. Augustine proposed the ‘christening’ of Pagan objects as well as of Pagan people, to convert them to Christian use. Notoriously, in 601 Pope Gregory I advised his missionaries in northern Europe to do the same thing with holy places. We have already seen the unexpected result of an early attempt to do this (the temple of the Mother of Heaven at Carthage, above). In Rome, the Litania Major of the Catholic Church was held on St Mark’s Day (April 25), the day of the Roman Robigalia. In that city, it included a procession that took the same route as the Pagan procession. During the following centuries, Church directives became full of orders to Christian priests not to allow, for example, ‘carols’ of dancing and singing, especially by young women, in their churches. Priests even took part in the rites of the Calends of May. The orders were mixed and ad hoc, because they were fighting against the inevitable. The Roman midwinter feast of Saturnalia (17 December), the winder solstice or Brumalia on 25 December and the New Year feast on the Calends of January persisted in their Pagan form through an accident of Church doctrine. In theory they were Pagan holidays, not Christian ones. New Year celebrations had been inveighed against by Bishop Martin of Braga in 575:

‘You shall not perform the wicked celebration of the Calends and observe the holiday of the Gentiles, nor shall you decorate your houses with laurel and green branches. This whole celebration is Pagan.’ (Acta Conciliarum V.iii399, quoted in Tille (1899), p. 103 n. 2)

In 742 the Northumbrian missionary Bishop Boniface warned his German converts against celebrating the solstice. However, they said they had seen the same done in Rome outside St Peter’s Church and not forbidden. In fact, the winder solstice or Brumalia, by now the feast of Mithras and the Unconquered Sun, had been associated with the birth of Jesus in 354 by Bishop Liberius of Rome. This move had been made in order to accommodate the new doctrine, one move in the continuing battle against Arianism, that Jesus had been divine from his birth rather than receiving divinity when he was baptized by John, which latter occasion was celebrated as the Epiphany on 6 January. The new feast of Christ’s mass at the winter solstice was exported to Constantinople in 379, and in 506 the Law Book of Alarich designated it as a public holiday. As we have seen, in the time of Constantine, the new faith of Christianity was taken to be similar to that of the Unconquered Sun, whose feast day, together with that of Mithras, was also at the winder solstice. Why Bishop Liberius chose the winter solstice as the birth of Christ we do not know, but we can assume that his choice took account of the historical conflation of Christ, Mithras and Sol.

What is certain is that once the choice was made the old Pagan celebrations were almost bound to attach themselves to the new data. The name of Saturnalia died out, but its celebrations, such as decking houses with evergreens, giving presents and feasting, were attached to Christmas. Some features of the New Year, such as the keeping of a perpetual fire in the hearth and the laying of a table for the goddess Fortuna (later for local spirits or for Father Christmas), were transferred to the new feast. But New Year, which corresponded to a genuine turning point in civic life each year, also remained as a (heretical) feast in its own right and was never assimilated by the Church. It is not generally true to say that the Church adopted Pagan feast days as its own feast days, but it did adopt the celebrations of adjacent ones, such as the Saturnalia, into its own liturgical year, and it did lend its blessing to local events which would have been celebrated anyway, such as Plough Monday, St. George’s Day, beating the village bounds, and May Eve, as we shall see.

The Western Empire was broken up eventually by the continuing rivalry between Catholics and Arians. In 534, the eastern Emperor Justinian reclaimed Africa from the (mostly Arian) Vandals and was hailed as a liberator by the Catholic Church there, and between 535 and 555 he took Italy back from the (Arian) Goths, all in the name of religion. The wealth and infrastructure of the country were almost destroyed in the process, and it did not have time to recover before the next wave of barbarian invasions, led by the Lombards in 568. Any pretence at a western Empire was now over, and yet the ideal remained, to be revived as the Holy Roman Empire by Charlemagne the Frank (741-814). The eastern Empire remained politically and liturgically intact (though held by the Franks on behalf of Rome for fifty years until 1261), until it fell to the Islamic Turks in 1453. After that the self-appointed championship of the Holy Roman Empire of the east, with its Orthodox rite, differing from that of the Catholics, was taken on by Russia.”

Intention

I have found that most people do not understand how to achieve the things they desire most and when it comes to the basics, it all comes down to intention. Intention is like the adrenaline of the will. When applied it can accomplish feats that seem impossible or, at least, nearly so. Intention, though, does not live in a vacuum and it often needs to be fostered. Merely desiring something is not what I mean by intention. An individual must surround themselves with idols in order to continuously stimulate the subconscious and to remind it that there is a desire that requires more than just a conscious attention.

People often become what they surround themselves by and it is no wonder then that social classes are what they have become. If you are born into a city and you surround yourself with drugs, guns and violence, then drugs, guns and violence will be the essence of your life. However, if you surround yourself with books and magazines, if you act the way you think the person you want to become would act, then you are that much closer to actually being that person. Acting, in this sense, is not the same as being “fake”. Instead, it is a way of training the subconscious to think the way you’ll need to think when you finally realize your dreams and the position you desire.

In Alcoholics Anonymous there is a saying, “fake it until you make it”, and this is sound advice for more than just those who are suffering with an addiction. This is true for everyone who wants to be something more than who they are. Subconscious intention is what is being effected by the pretending or faking; because you are already acting as though you are who you want to be, your subconscious mind will begin to operate as that person, giving you the drive and motivations from within that you’ll need to succeed and overcome diversity. If you surround yourself with idle pleasures, then you will live an idle life. If you surround yourself with “great things”, you will have a natural inclination towards greatness. What you take into your subconscious mind will have an effect on your instincts. Therefore, if you surround yourself with a positive attitude, you will develop positive instincts, but you’ve got to fake it till you make it.

In my own life, I have found that everything worth doing took a great deal of practice and the more dedicated I was to the practice, the better I was at the work. The better I was at the work, the better I thought of myself…and this is how one comes to feel pride, self-esteem and ambition. Ambition and Intention are like one iceberg in an ocean. Ambition lives at the surface. It is the conscious mental energy and virtue that overcomes the distractions and pushes itself toward a goal. Intention is the great majority of the same iceberg that isn’t seen. It is subconscious and it is what grants energy to your ambitions. This can be either good or bad, because whatever your real intentions are in the subconscious, so too will be your ambitions on the conscious level. Now, this is not the way it always is, many times we go through deeply personal struggles trying to get what we want “deep down inside” to work with our conscious ambition and when they are in fact contradictory, it causes a great deal of stress.

The important lesson here is, that intention is subconscious and it is a part of the vast information your brain takes in without bothering to disturb your consciousness. Everything you surround yourself with is collected and stored as information in your brain, whether you know it or not; so if you surround yourself with clutter, organization will be a struggle. If you surround yourself with friends who have no ambition, ambition will be a struggle. If you surround yourself with common things, great things will be a struggle and so forth.

Almost every individual I know who went from being “nothing” to being “something” did so by living and thinking as though they had already accomplished their goals. They shaped their intentions which fueled their ambitions…and they thrived.

The Gospel of Steven

For thousands of years our religions have preached hypocrisy, filled with the terrors of hell and the bliss of heaven. Arrogance has filled the hearts of the faithful and they have believed they understood the will of the gods, but I think it is not a coincidence that their beliefs have always been entirely self-serving. The Muslim believes that God will bring them power, riches and dominion over the earth. The Christians believe they will receive immortality and the Power of Christ on Earth, they believe that God will slaughter the souls of those who oppose their Christian Will and that all on earth will be made to suffer, save the Christians. The Jews…well, the Jews believe themselves the chosen people of God! Yet, the faithful think of themselves as humble and with the sword of hatred they sentence those who would not believe, to an eternity of hell.

But a time is approaching when the Religions of Abraham will indeed be humbled, when the armies of faith will tremble in wake of reason. For among the pagans and atheists, a voice has arisen, “love and virtue, my children, are the possessions of no religion, but to every person who seeks happiness”. Do not be fooled by the children of Abraham! They have seen the malice of their work and, to protect themselves, claim that God judges the heart and forgives all sin. Have they not yet learned that sin is a reflection of the heart? That what the mind believes, it does?

Morality is this, to love and be virtuous, but morality is not the only drive in the souls of men. There are dangers and prizes around every turn and the seas of reality must be navigated. The children of Abraham navigate these seas by faith alone, and look at where it takes them! The Muslims live a thousand years in the past, in the deserts and caves…they have not found within themselves the ability to achieve. Progress does not come by faith, but by reason. Reason is the logic of the gods inside us all. Reason is that which sees, hears, feels, smells and tastes, it is that which names and understands, it is that which knows and enables us to act. The religious of today live in fear and have become utterly dependant upon their Faith, for without reason nothing is certain and they live in darkness. They pray into the night for guidance, but when it comes they do not understand it, because they have hardened their minds; and without the mind the heart hears only confusion, it hears the whispering of the instincts and the affect, but it cannot interpret them, because it cannot think. The religious feel deeply, but they do not know. They love without knowing how to love. They want without knowing how to want. They desire justice, without knowing the meaning of the word.

Because they cannot think, they cannot evolve, and so they are left to worship ancient scriptures…mere relics of an arduous and bewildering age. God is found in our rational experience of nature, in our science and in our books, in the exploration of the human condition, of the condition of the Earth, of the condition of the stars. Knowledge is affirmation that what we have believed is true. Every time we act with reason, we improve our chances of success. My friends, the gods are not perfect, they are not themselves the totality of the divine! Everything evolves or is diminished. The children of Abraham have proven incapable of evolution and they have foreseen their own destruction, but before they are chosen for extinction, they will unleash hell on earth. Be prepared to survive them.

Be prepared to use your minds to overcome the wrath of the crumbling Temple, but throughout the coming age, do not forget the only truth that kept the religions alive for so long; the truth of love and virtue. Without love and virtue the world of men is cold and dark, we become too easily consumed with our irrational desires and the mind falls prey to immoderate and excessive decadence. Do not forget the poets who wrote so passionately of love. Do not forget to cherish the touches, the kisses, and the union of souls and never let your passion for life decline. Love is passion and Virtue is the logic of relationships. We must learn to love each other and to be virtuous unto one another because it is right and true, not because the God of Abraham has threatened us with violence, evil, hell and high waters!

I foresee a future world where everyone will have their own religion and where the gods will once again find peace in the peaceful hearts of men. I foresee the decline of Abraham and his progeny, for they have forsaken what makes men great and traded love for judgment, virtue for ritual and reason for mere faith. My friends, we can all enjoy the Love of God in our hearts, when we first learn to love ourselves. Do not buy into the lies of the New Testament, that the law is to love God and to love others. No. First learn to love thyself and love of the gods and of others will follow.

Happiness is knowing what one wants from this life and spending every minute of every day trying to achieve it. Knowledge is not procured by faith…it is procured and secured by reason, the mind of the gods in Man. Nature teaches us this: To know thyself, to know others and to know the world. To love thyself, to love others and to love the world. When you do this, you will learn the meaning of virtue, for virtue is not a matter of universal morality, but of reflecting upon those behaviors that increase the joyfulness of men and of your self. Happiness is available to those who will take responsibility for their own lives, to live by Reason and the capabilities of their mind, to find in every day the joy of life, the awe of the universe in its’ grandeur and mystery, but most of all, to find in each other, partnership and cooperation, that we must not navigate this life alone and as a family, work together for the mutual benefit of all.

The hour is approaching when the love, virtue and reason of sensible men will be the tools of salvation from those who preach dependence, fear and pity. The walls of Religion will crumble, because they have no foundation in the mind.

Smile --> The world is going mad.

There is a kind of spirituality in instinct that allows us to look upon the world with a peculiar enchantment, as such the universe becomes absurd and everything appears clichéd. All the classifications, the language and naming of things, the self-righteousness, the wealth, the power, the outrage, the suffering, the fear, the pity and the sadness all seem to reflect something so oddly human and unnecessary that it takes discipline to remain steadfast in ones’ ability to reason and not commit themselves to chaos.

I realize that there is no universal justification for any one standard of judgment of either value and virtue, and that all we can do is to establish what we believe is the most important ‘thing’, actually or conceptually, and then to derive from that standard our core values and ambitions. While most of us find ourselves annoyed and disturbed by the imperial piper and its’ fools, there is really very little we can do to change their tune. Throughout history, ideas continually have evolved from a mere thought, into an institution, to an extreme and then towards destruction. Like all things, ideas are born, they live and they die. The Age of Social hysteria and outrage is at hand and the idea that we all have a right to happiness, equality and a life of fairness and ease is now alive.

Those of us who see the frivolousness and danger of this idea are forced to watch as governments and institutions, once again rise to power, and we see the individual once again wane in the wake of the Imperialization of poverty and dependence. The best we can do is to carve out our strongholds within the fabric of change and try to hang on to our liberties for as long as we can, to continue to live our lives by the virtues of reason, liberty and character so that when the Piper finally leads his quarry into the abyss of absolute dependence, we will remain prepared to rebuild all that we had lost.

Yet, one lesson that we have yet to learn is to find peace in disaster. I have spent most of my life outraged by what I saw, but recently, I’ve begun to find a real peace in the face of all this social hysteria and political folly. Reflect with me, for a moment, and see if you too do not come to the same conclusions as I.

Why do we love liberty and reason? We love liberty because it is the truth, because everything is born free and only acquires its’ shackles with age. We love liberty because we feel that it is the most productive and beautiful state of being. We love reason, for in a state of liberty, one must possess reason to survive. Reason is the tool we use to navigate the seas of reality, pushing back the fears and superstitions of old and allowing ourselves to learn how things work best and trying to duplicate the process as much as possible. We love liberty and reason because we want things to work. We want to work. Much of our happiness comes from the work that we do, from our ambitions and desires and struggles. The greatest feeling we can feel is that of overcoming obstacles that prevented us from succeeding and to finally taste the fruits of our labor. We find no joy in pity or fear and feel that everything that is possible is possible for us, so long as we have a will for it, we can always find a way to achieve it. And we are happy living our lives by a simple creed: When first we know what it is we want, we work hard to achieve it and when we succeed we are pleased. We find happiness, contentment and peace of mind in the process of Life, because for us, life is not something that is owed to us, but it is the Divine Itself! Life is what we do with every breath and every action. We have realized that in death we are all equal and only in Living can we be great and we strive to become so.

But now, we are faced with a world that wants to take away our reason and our liberty and replace it with religion or government or mob-rule (depending on the oppressors personal taste and whim). How can we still be happy knowing that we may well lose those things most precious to us? I believe the answer can be found in the Shrugging Off of those who are enemies of liberty and reason.

I fear that many of us spend a lot of time entertaining feelings of outrage, anger, frustration and the like, because we know the direction Man is taking is wrong and disastrous, but why should we be stripped of our happiness and joy, because of the actions and policies of Fools? So long as we are not following the Piper, consumed with its sweet tune of “the State Will Protect Thee”, we still have our own personal liberty and reason intact. I can find happiness in solitude. I believe that many of you understand what I mean. We do not value ourselves because of the way others see us, but rather because of the way we see ourselves. As long as we continue to do what we want to do, to achieve the lives we want to live, our happiness is something that cannot be taken away from us.

In the last two or three days I have caught myself smiling at the fact, or thought, that I can survive anything. That reason and liberty, for me, are instincts. Many of you may agree that we are incapable of acting out of dependence, pity and fear – and if this is true, then we already have everything we need to be happy! Even if things get worse or even to the point of being really, really bad. Aren’t we the ones who will be more than happy to fight to restore liberty? Aren’t we the ones who have spent our time in study and in learning from experience? Doesn’t this make us capable of dealing with whatever it is the world throws our way?

A problem with politics today is that everyone is angry and everyone is outraged. I believe that it would be a great credit to us, if we could begin to express ourselves with a sense of lightness and peace of mind as we try to whittle away at the arguments and lies that lie at the heart of the Pipers’ tune…that if we are truly rational people, we have no need to rely on anger to make our points stronger. That if we have logic, our points and arguments would be just as strong coming from a smiling mouth that laughs at the absurdities of liberal thinking. I won’t have a bad turn in this country make me a bitter man, instead, I desire to rise above the absurdities of some and practice the art of happiness that comes from knowing what I want to do and doing it.

Now, I’m not accusing anyone of being angry other than myself, but if there is anyone who has felt outrage and is tired of feeling that way, I just wanted to offer my reflections over the past couple of days in the hope that they would bring a smile to your face and a lightness to your soul. J