The battle of good and evil is no longer fought amidst angels and demons. It's no longer the exclusive providence of churches and its parishioners. The battle lines have shifted. A new war is being fought. The mind is the battlefield. The fight against evil isn't praying the gay away, it isn't burning heretics, and it never was...
Victory over evil is in the very act of defining its meaning. It behooves us to glean a clear conception of what this word actually means. When words like bad and evil describe something we don't like or something that is harmful then they pass as useful adjectives. When these same words are used to describe a person's moral quality then they become very mischievous little things which routinely cause all kinds of social dysfunction. The very kind of dysfunction that sits at the root of many of society's catastrophes. Such as war, crime, imprisonment, conflict, poverty, and starvation.
Here are ten words that are more conducive to healthy social interaction:
- Incorrect
- Unsafe
- Unhealthy
- Flawed
- Problematic
- Faulty
- Imprecise
- Inexact
- Improper
- Malfunction
Words of this type signify that whatever is wrong can be fixed. When it comes to healthy social interaction between Homo sapiens these words provide a great utility in communicating properly. If you believe someone is evil you have a cause for grievance with that person, and you're inclined to distrust that person, and more likely to become hostile towards that person.
When someone is bad it implies they have a sinister motive, which incites our disapproval, if not condemnation. However, when someone is incorrect it's an occasion for a teaching moment. If someone is unsafe we're prompted to help them. If someone is unhealthy our sense of empathy is aroused.
It's indispensable in a healthy society to imbue characteristics on our fellow man that engender cooperation. We're obligated to discontinue ascribing qualities to human beings that promote conflict. Even "good" can be a problematic characterization because of its rigidity as a quality. If your friend is a "good" person, and they do something you don't like, then you're put into the position of wondering, if you should reassign them a corresponding moral quality that fits better with how they made you feel, which can have corresponding negative consequences on your relationship.
Our inner monologue often bereaves us of friendship with lines like, "I thought you were a good person." Thinking in absolutes tends to set the stage for conflict. If we think of a person's behavior in terms of performance, then it's expected to vary, as performances often do.
We are animals. We are biological machines. It would be healthier to think of ourselves in either format. When a machine malfunctions, you don't decide the machine is malicious, and is now your sworn enemy. You know it needs to be fixed, or reprogrammed. Human beings are often in need of repair and additional programming.
When you see two cats having sex, you don't think to yourself, "you whore!" You know what they're doing is simply a function of their instincts, and is perfectly natural. If only humans could see that they too are animals. It's the great malignancy of human culture to propagate emotional suffering needlessly. We can overcome this condition with an intellectual renaissance, starting with the concept of good and evil. People are neither good nor bad, they're just people.
Angels and demons, or their spawn into ideation (good and evil), serve no functional model for human behavior. We must diagram the manner in which we conduct ourselves from a functional model. Thus, comparing ourselves to a computer or a machine will improve how we examine ourselves. Your body is like a computer's hardware. The software is the content embedded within that framework. The information we store in the neural network of our brains, like software, is the source of causality within a biological matrix. This information comes from:
- Our environment
- Friends
- Family
- Churches
- School
- Television
- Social media
- And literally everything we experience
Our software is constantly updating itself with new data. This isn't really a new concept. The common distinction between body and mind was popularized in our society by psychology. Why is this comparison useful? Well, if the data in a computer is corrupted, the device malfunctions. Don't people have the same problem?
Our thoughts predate actions, actions become habits, and habits script our lives. Flawed behavior in humans is a side effect of programming, and to an equal degree the structural integrity (physical health) of our hardware. The mental state of the individual is intertwined with the physical health of the human body, resulting in distinct behavioral patterns. Physical health is a decree established by the following factors:
- Chemicals
- Hormones
- Vitamins
- Minerals
- Nutrients
- pH balance
People are routinely aware of maintaining their automobiles, checking the tire pressure, and changing the oil. Somehow it escapes people that their bodies which are far more delicate and intricate need to be taken care of.
Scientists, doctors, and people in general are aware of the mental and physical drivers of behavior, but rarely does our society ever blame someone's programming or physical condition for their actions. If they do then the context is always whether or not the person can assume punishment, as if punishment is the only way to deal with errors in human behavior. Why is that? I suggest a collective programming flaw. The belief that individual responsibility is the greatest contributing factor to a person's behavior instead of group responsibility.
Humankind is a symbiosis, meaning that separate individual parts of the system are meant to work together in harmony. If there is a failure in this design the whole system suffers damage. This fundamental law of human nature should be taught in school at every grade level. Social engineering starts with psychological programming.
We live in a funnel down society where information disseminates from the top down. We need a grass roots effect where information spreads outward throughout society from person to person, so that the group is in control of itself instead of a few in control of the many. The problem with allowing a few to corral the population is this, "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
We know the power of ideas can be used for good or bad. We can look at what history has taught us. In the Bible, Jesus spoke against the corruption of the religious leaders of his time. Everyone hears those stories, but no one wants to accept the possibility that history can repeat itself. To think such a thing would be blasphemy. The fear people have that the devil may be putting thoughts into their minds paralyzes their reason. "I know my pastor. He's a good man, right?"
We see examples of what programming a group of people with the wrong beliefs can do in the Crusades, the Inquisition, slavery, genocide, and nazism. People want to think it could never happen in any degree to them in their place or in their time. Ego makes us always view ourselves as the good guys. So, it's the other people who think wrong beliefs. It's other people who do bad things, right? Here's a clue. If your belief system prohibits the act of even questioning its validity, then you have cause for concern.
Science is the promotion of questioning everything. Through the process of questioning, we learn. When an organization puts a restriction to which extent you can examine its doctrines with scrutiny and rigorous logic this is a tactic devised to defend a position which is not defendable. If you're position is untenable the only way to survive is to create a punishment (heresy) which institutes a ban on the intelligent deliberation of facts (faith).
Opposing views are forbidden with the caution that the devil is the source of conflicting ideology. It is a survival feature, a defense mechanism embedded in the system that to even question the system is the worst sin. Any doubts parishioners may have regarding the veracity of their religion's claims are crushed with the premise that to speak against the doctrines of the church is the worst thing you could ever do. Leaving people too afraid to even vocalize their doubts, much less act on them.
Suppression of critical thinking is an element in public schools as well. The story of George Washington ("I cannot tell a lie!") is an obvious attempt to assign an unimpeachable character to our first president. All people lie, so hearing that story makes one suspicious of why obvious manipulation is openly a part of the curriculum in public schools. I guess they wanted to set the precedent for politicians who would come after. Mitt Romney said he and his wife ate off an ironing board instead of a kitchen table. Romney also stated he takes cold showers to save money. Mitt Romney's net worth is in the hundreds of millions of dollars. It doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to deduce the credibility of their story is on some shaky ground.
Politicians are accountable for the things they say to the public. If we're tempted to assume a lazy conception about which particular brand of information is disseminated throughout the general population we must remember what history has taught us. Why weren't slaves allowed to get an education? Why weren't they even allowed to read and write? Because their slave owners knew it would be easier to control them if they were uneducated. Benjamin Rush said in 1786, "It is favorable to liberty. Freedom can exist only in the society of knowledge. Without learning men are incapable of knowing their rights, and where learning is confined to a few people, liberty can be neither equal nor universal."
Schools incorporate P.E. (physical education) because they know the importance of learning to keep the body healthy. The state should implement S.E. (social education) in public schools designed to help children learn their part and place in society as a useful and healthy component. The data systems in place programming the executive function of our prefrontal cortex could be the cause of all humanity's problems or the source of our salvation depending upon what information is programmed into it.
Cultural symbiosis should be about improving the quality and standards of education. Because of cultural concepts like "free will" people often believe that animals run on instinct but humans don't, forgetting that humans are also animals. We need a cultural update —a society 2.0— if we are going to outlive the delusion that computers are programmed and people aren't.
Maybe you've heard the phrase "hive mentality." People often think bees and ants operate as a unit, but that humans do not. I hope to refute this point. People are not capable of independent thought and don't have identities separate from the group. It only appears that people are chaotic, and random, and different from each other because we are programmed to behave this way.
The programming of society could be the result of a natural Darwinian evolutionary progression or it could be a system of control governed by an elite group. The Illuminati's creed comes to mind, "out of chaos comes order." The function of the creed is basically to espouse the tactic of "divide and conquer."
The theory of the Illuminati is that the elite control the world by creating problems that they have the solution for in advance, making themselves the saviors of mankind. An example would be to pollute drinking water if you have a bottled water company, to boost sales and to increase the public's dependence on you. Thus, increasing your power. A second example would be to pollute the air so you can sell air purifiers. Another instance would be to degrade food quality to make people sick, creating the need to buy medicine from pharmaceutical companies. (Owned by the very people who made you get sick to begin with.)
Altering food also makes teeth rot, forcing people to get dental repair with materials that dim the mind. Making them easier to influence, manipulate, and control. They create diseases to reduce the surplus population. Then they show up with the cure. Vaccines that stop the disease but leave you with stowaways inside the cells, disrupting their proper functioning. Effectively rendering you a devolved version of your previous self.
I don't know that anyone is certain about the existence of a covert ruling class, so I digress. Regardless of its origins or the intentions behind them, the cultural constructs that occupy our grey matter have been learned and interfere with mankind's ability to work together, by pitting us against each other. How does it do that you might say?
We receive programming from many different mediums. One example that comes right to mind is the good vs evil paradigm in superhero stories. They were ever present in the Saturday morning cartoons I watched as a child. The concept of good vs evil didn't start with Superman fighting Lex Luthor. The idea of good and evil stems from religion.
Conceptually these figments have no place in a civilized society because people are neither good nor bad, they're just people. Martin Luther King helped people to see that black people, white people, are all just people. Will & Grace (the show), helped America to see that gay people, are just people. Bill Maher has given atheists a voice and hopefully shown the religious zealots out there that an atheist isn't the same thing as a devil worshiper.
History consistently produces intelligent discerning individuals to tell the rest of us, "The bad people were not actually bad. They are just like us." That doesn't stop propagandists from creating another boogeyman for us to fear. Someone will say, "The Mexicans are coming to take our jobs. The Muslims are coming to start global jihad."
No matter how many times the best and brightest among us point out that who we thought was the bad guy was in fact just Mr. Rogers with a vilified persona there will always pop up another super villain to take their place. Why? Because we truly believe in the existence of good and evil. If someone opposes us then they must be the bad guy, because we're the good guys.
I have no problem with the word bad as a description of things or behaviors we don't like. Where this word takes a wrong turn is when it goes from merely a descriptive term to people actually thinking "bad" is a person or a group of people. That evil is not just an adjective but it's an actual place and the people who live there. The Bible did a good job of planting that image in our heads with the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. The people there were all evil so we're supposed to feel like it's OK God killed them all. The Bible takes this one step further with the story of Abraham and Isaac by granting full license to kill in the name of God. Not only the wicked but innocent people as well, not only adults but children, not only our enemies but our very own family, if it's in the name of God, nothing is off the table.
If a person is bad then it doesn't matter what I do to them or do to stop them because I'm justified. That's the problem with this line of thinking. Even thinking someone is a good person is problematic. Thinking in absolutes makes certain the person whom this virtuous aura is projected upon will not live up to a perfect and unrealistic standard. This is the kind of thinking that sets a lot of relationships up for failure. People in relationships have this perfect image that sets an impossible standard of what their mate is going to be for them. Things like their soulmate, their true love, their angel here on earth. When they get just a normal human being who says and does insensitive things they take it as a dream shattered and a heart broken.
It's at this point where some people will think if there's no bad people then how do you explain all the ones I've met throughout my life. That's a good point, but it's funny though, how it's always someone else who is evil. It's never ourselves or the people we love. If you've lived long enough though then you've had someone label you as a bad person. Despite whatever we do to make someone mad at us, still we know we're not bad. Why then are those other people so sure that we are? Why are we so sure when we fight against another country in a war that they are the bad guys? Ironically they are equally confident we are the bad guys. Strange isn't it?
The problems human beings face are not from the devil. They're not from some vindictive or sinister place inside us. They come from a much more innocuous source, although with an insidious affect on us individually, and on society as a whole. It comes from culture, from language, and the programming we receive from them. Which is good news. We don't have some mythical demon to destroy in the battle of Armageddon to root out evil from the world. We just have to debug our programming so that our program will run as intended.
All the problems of mankind are technical problems and therefore have corresponding technical solutions. The scientific method can and will offer some useful solutions to what are essentially math problems, not spiritual problems, not morality problems. In Alcoholics Anonymous the first step to recovery is to admit you have a problem. In the spirit of that tradition we need to get rid of the snake oil salesman, the shaman, the witch doctor, the fortune teller, the politician, the pontiff, and replace them with the programmer, the coder, the scientist, the mathematician, the social engineer.
The people whose actions have a negative affect on others, intentionally or not, are not the problem. It's the systems in place that drive their behavior which must be modified. There's a saying that goes, "there's no such thing as a bad student, only bad teachers." I would take that one step further and say there are no bad teachers only bad systems of teaching.
The first rule of detoxification is first to eliminate the source of contamination or else recontamination will occur. You Catholics know what I'm talking about. No matter how many "our fathers" or "hail mary's" you say you find yourself right back at confession confessing the same sins all over again, rinse and repeat, do it all over again. And how many times (Baptists!) must we listen to the same sermon on the mount and then the crucifixion story. If we went to a mechanic and he told us to rotate our tires no matter how many times we came in or no matter what was wrong with the car we'd go to a different mechanic. Out of all the denominations the Baptist denomination is a little O.C.D.
We all know the story. We've heard it a thousand times but he's going to tell us anyway, "Jesus died on the cross. He delivered us all from sin. Now come to the pulpit. Accept Jesus as your personal savior and get saved." It's like, pastor, I got saved the past ten Sundays in a row! It's the same people in here every Sunday, so who are you talking to in here? We've all been saved now. Save some salvation for later because if you over use it, it won't mean as much.
Let's switch gears for a minute. Let's look at how our society treats its citizenry. There are tons of YouTube videos of little kids skate boarding being harassed by adults and cops. They're just children playing and it's disturbing to see them being treated like criminals.
I understand in many cases they're not being punished for skate boarding but where they're doing it. In some of the cases they may be in breach of property laws such as trespassing and loitering. I feel though that if what they're doing is a crime then the way they're being treated should be a greater crime.
This reminds me a lot of the child chased up a tree in the movie Robin Hood. Soldiers accuse a child of stealing the king's deer. I'll never forget Robin Hood's valiant response when he said, "Isn't it a greater crime to allow a family to starve." Shouldn't our laws protect children from molestation and harassment? Shouldn't children be allowed to play in peace in a peaceful society?
The thought process behind harassing children is that they're young punks, they're breaking a rule, and therefore we're justified in punishing them. When we're programmed to believe people can be evil then it follow that their motives are sinister. Every person views themselves as the good guy so when you're in conflict with anyone for any reason that automatically makes them the bad guy. We wouldn't be in conflict with another person if they were good because two good hearts would shine rainbows to each other like in Care Bears. We'd know that it was a good person, a godly person, and no need to bother them, but if they just turn out to be bad then expect zero hesitation to kick the shit out of them for Jesus.
Muslim extremists and religious fanatics commit acts of terrorism because they truly believe we are the infidel. In their eyes we are evil so whatever they do to stop us is justified. This is an extremely violent and malevolent manifestation of the good and evil paradigm. One that is pervasive throughout all countries and all cultures.
We have the same disease here in our culture, just different symptoms. That's why children are treated like criminals for playing in public. That's why we put people in prison and throw their life away like it's a piece of garbage. Societal structures and cultural systems which have existed for thousands of years hold us like a prison in a failing pattern of social dysfunction.
When a two year old child does something wrong we have an obligation to correct them without faulting them for their actions. Should we blame their bad heart or wicked mind for their behavior? Of course not. As Jesus said about us, "forgive them, they know not what they do." We don't place any blame on a toddler. We understand they don't know any better yet.
For some reason when people get older though as cited in the law, "ignorance of the law is no excuse." Perhaps it should be ignorance by the law is no excuse. When a child does something wrong they carry no blame. We know the parent is responsible for them because of the age difference and the intelligence difference. A thirty five year old man is just a drooling, booger eating toddler compared to the sophistication of the machine that has been growing and evolving for thousands of years before any of us were even born. The machine I'm referring to is human civilization.
The social, economic, and educational systems running today, like a computer program, affect and drive human behavior. You don't punish someone for being a product of their environment. You change the environment. If the president of the United States was born in the ghetto he would be poor, maybe homeless, in prison, or a crack head. The guy in prison for robbing a jewelry store would be the politician if he were born in a rich family and had gone to the good school.
Of course there are exceptions to the rule, but in math we don't look at the outliers to suggest a focal point for a normal distribution, that's why they're called outliers. The center of a normal distribution is the mean or in other words the average. Certainly the average person born in to poverty without an education is more likely to end up drug addicted, in poor health, or in prison.
Certainly the average person born to an affluent family with a good education is more likely to have better health, and gainful employment. Why then does the so called public education system allocate money to a particular school with tax money from the area in which that school resides? So, if you're in a poor area you get a poor education. If you're in a rich area you get a rich education. Instead taxes should be collected throughout the entire country to be evenly dispersed throughout all schools so that each child gets an equal education. The current method of collecting and dispensing tax money is unethical and fails at giving each person a fair opportunity at the American Dream.
The human machine has quite an eloquent C.P.U., using again the analogy of the brain to a computer, and the software to our beliefs and notions. Our software malfunctions when data is corrupted with poorly scripted information. Just like in actual programming of computer code the program does not perform tasks the way intended if errors are made when attempting to transcribe the correct verbiage in to a line of code. Our minds work the same way.
If we want to design a system conducive to the cultivation of fully functional humans that interact with their environment in a healthy and harmonious balance, then we need to make sure there are no bugs in the code. In programming they're called bugs, but in a social and cultural context they're called euphemisms. A euphemism is a term that is used to disguise something unacceptable. To make it appear more appealing and to garner acceptance. The short of it is that it's simply a manipulation, a way to pull the wool over your eyes.
A great example of this is the old west revolver colt made, the peacemaker 45. Now hopefully I have a discerning audience. It shouldn't take much explanation here. This is a GUN. It's used to kill people, period! And it's called a peacemaker. This is the epitome of what a euphemism is.
A gun is in fact the antithesis of its moniker. I mean it is anything but a peacemaker. It would be more appropriate to call it a toaster because it is more likely to make toast than peace. The label put upon it by its maker is a useful marketing tool in enticing buyers without burdening their conscience with thoughts of people dying. A pesky inconvenience for anyone hoping to boost profit margins.
The most malignant and insidious euphemism is religion. It's hope and fairy tales in a box. It is a device that turns mere men rife with sin into holy men bound for eternal glory. What a sales pitch! What it actually does is fill people with guilt and fear by assuring them a punishment in eternal hell fire for doing things that were never wrong to begin with. It's one of life's great ironies that Jesus spoke against religion so they used him to build the largest religion in the world.
You can easily be convinced you're sinful if you're convinced first that natural biological processes are sinful. Such as eating (I mean gluttony), such as sex (I mean lust), such as resting (I mean slothfulness). And of course it wouldn't be complete without condemning good self-esteem and happiness (I mean pride). No one can stop doing any of those things. So, once you're convinced those things are bad it's easy to make you feel like you can't be good without the help of God.
You will always need God's forgiveness and religion will always be there to tell you how to get it. No one likes to feel there's something wrong with themselves, such that getting someone to accept an easy fix solution to their defects is not hard to do. Just say I believe, and then poof, all the bad things about you are gone. The best part is they're all replaced with good things. Who doesn't like to be praised and complimented, and to be a part of something special and magical. It's a sophisticated, clever, and effective manipulation.
Once you accept all this, the stage is set, for thinking that people are either good or bad, and acting upon this false axiom. Leaving you acting upon good intentions but bad information. When you believe someone is bad you don't feel sad for them when they have to go to prison for twenty years. You're prone to think they brought it on themselves or they even deserve it. Instead of thinking this person is malfunctioning, we need to help them, we think this person is bad, we need to punish them.
Parents of criminals always say their child is a good person, they just fell in with a bad crowd. If you have five kids who get into trouble together it's interesting to notice how each kid's parents will say their kid is good, and it's his friends who are bad, and were a bad influence on him. Each parent says the same thing about the other parent's kid because something inside us knows people aren't bad when it's your friend or your son. When you don't know the person at all it's easier to fill in what you don't know with the propaganda you've been fed your whole life.
Imagine you had two children playing together in a room. One has lots and lots of toys. The other has not even one toy. If the one with no toys stole a single small toy to play with would you exact severe punishment upon him? Would you feel like he did anything wrong? Would you believe his actions stemmed from an intrinsic badness present within the child, or that it was simply an action that sprung from the disparity of his situation?
Why in a world of billionaires do we imprison people for stealing just enough to survive? Money used to feed yourself is not a crime. When society fails to educate and employ its citizens that's the crime. Perhaps it would be more just, to imprison the lawmakers who devised a system of making people desperate and then punishing them for it. Especially when it costs more to send offenders to prison than it does to send them to college.
If we send an offender to college then he becomes an asset to society and his family. Taking away the right to vote along with the ability to ever get a job again forces a potentially productive citizen into a perpetual cycle of crime and prison. Why would we do that to someone who just wants to pay their bills? Why would we do that to ourselves, to society?
If you can get people to believe that you deserve an eternity in hell just for saying, "I don't believe a story" (whether self proclaimed to be the greatest story ever told or not) then twenty years in prison seems like a light sentence. Supposedly we're punishing the wicked, however, most of the incarcerated prisoners are men. Are we supposed to believe that men are disproportionately more evil than women?
Most prisoners are also black. Are we supposed to believe that black people are more evil than white people? Most prisoners are also poor. Are we supposed to believe that poor people are more evil than rich people? Or is it more likely that these statistics show that these are the people targeted by our laws to make into criminals?
God spends a lot of time punishing people in the Bible, and we're supposed to model our behavior after him? Pundits with opposing view points always want to use examples of the most heinous crimes to encourage punishment, while ignoring the statistics that the vast majority of crimes are nonviolent thefts and crimes to get money (poverty crimes). Violent behavior should be treated as a mental health issue. Aberrant conduct is a consequence of beliefs, circumstances, and physical health more than any unfounded notion about the existence of evil within a person.
Culture is routinely biased in its condemnation of infractions. The Bible says, "God is no respecter of persons," but apparently we are because when a citizen kills, they're a murderer, when a soldier kills, they're a hero. A murderer kills one person, a conqueror kills millions. The mighty generals and kings all through history are regarded as heroes for killing thousands. One person is no more evil than the other, they both need to be reprogrammed.
Rehabilitation is a term already used when it comes to prisons but no system is in place to actualize its practice in all the prison populations. Educating inmates while they're in prison would have been difficult in the past. To train all the correctional officers to teach inmates or to find teachers willing to go in to the prisons would have been difficult. Now with websites like Khan Academy all inmates need is a laptop! Not only could this be a tool in the prisons but in the school systems as well.
Sal Khan has revolutionized learning on the internet with his website. Students who live in a poor community with poor schools can't afford to pay the highest teacher salaries. Now they can afford the best teachers for the price of a laptop. Students can log on to these websites where the teacher's lectures are recorded. Students can interact with the website doing actual classwork and take tests and so on. Schools routinely spend tens of thousands of dollars per student annually on each child's education. A laptop only costs $400.
A view that seems to be lost in our culture is the idea that companies and organizations can do more good or bad than a single person. Governments and institutions can do more good or bad than a single person. Cultural and social systems can do more good or bad than any one individual alone. The impetus for good or bad in our society is perceived to come from the individual. This is not true. Whatever one person can do, a group of people can do to a greater magnitude.
A defective person can do damage with their actions but a corrupt education system, or social system, or cultural system, or health care system, or agricultural system, can drive multitudes of people to dysfunctional behavior perpetually. If we believe that individual responsibility instead of group responsibility is the main cause for a person's actions together with the belief that people's souls have a quality that varies from good to bad then we target the individual when something goes wrong instead of the many systems in place that propagate ideas, the same ideas that predate behavior and spur the provocation of actions. Some people regard this line of thinking as an excuse for people to do whatever they want. This is not true at all. We could hate people ten times more for crimes they commit but it wouldn't change anything.
Change comes from taking action against the source of peoples behavior which is the operating system (culture). We need to program the system to get the kind of behaviors we find favorable. One person can wreck a car in to someone taking their life because they were texting and driving. A company can build millions of cars that pollute our environment on a massive scale and provide the platform for people to die in car crashes, and to get speeding tickets, and D.U.I.'s. Group responsibility over individual responsibility!
A company can build a vehicle or devise a mode of transportation that is completely safe. Elevators, trains, rails, subways, and self driving cars, for example, are all safe. They take people where they need to go all the time and are many times safer. If people live in modern cities, everyone can get around on trolleys, buses, elevators, bikes, lifts, and by walking. High speed rail can take people from city to city, completely ending transportation related deaths. Government institutions can pass and enforce laws that make transportation better or worse.
The systems in place throughout society create the rules of the game and then punish us for playing. There is an overwhelmingly lopsided emphasis placed on individual responsibility and almost none whatsoever on group responsibility. There are many examples of this. Speed limits usually top out at about seventy miles per hour. Automobiles can exceed well over a hundred miles an hour. Why aren't cars built with a maximum speed that matches the maximum speed limit?
The internal computer in your car can be designed to receive a signal for maximum allowable speed for the stretch of road you're on by G.P.S. Instead of the road sign telling you how fast to drive it can tell your car how fast to drive by sending a signal to your car's internal computer. Why does the government enforce how fast people can drive instead of enforcing how fast the automobile makers design the cars to go? The department of transportation can have traffic lights signal the car to stop instead of the driver, for a safer mode of transportation. This way you don't have to rely on thousands of individuals on the road to do the right thing for transportation to be safe. If there are ten thousand people on the road in your area all it takes is for one person to not pay attention, or get sleepy, or look at a text message for you to die.
Why is the noise ordinance set at a lower decibel than car stereos can exceed? Why doesn't the government just regulate how loud the car stereo manufacturers can make the stereos instead of regulating how loud everyone plays it? Why not stipulate how dark companies can make window tint instead of police officers pulling citizens over for having window tint that is too dark.
We're told in school to eat healthy. Doctors tell you to eat healthy. Nutritionists say people are shirking personal responsibility when they choose not to eat healthy. If you live in a big city then you've got options but in a medium size to small town when you're driving down the road you see McDonalds, Burger King, Wendys, Hardees, Sonic, Dairy Queen, Krispy Kreme, Dunkin Doughnuts. (It's nothing but heart attack food.)
When you walk down the aisle at your local grocery store you see cereal, potato chips, sodas, cookies, crackers, cakes, microwave meals, canned foods, processed foods, and boxed foods full of preservatives. You have to go out of your way to eat healthy. It costs more to eat healthy. Fresh produce is one of the most expensive things in the store. Meat that has no antibiotics or hormones added is more expensive.
It's more time consuming to cook a healthy meal. McDonald's can have a burger ready for you in one minute. Government is being irresponsible. Companies leave you with mostly bad choices and then chastise you for making a bad choice.
People want to do the right thing. If there were a healthy fast food place on every corner, lots of people would eat there for the convenience. There's no question that despite the fast food industry having all unhealthy food people still want to do the right thing for their own health. That's why McDonalds responded to the public outcry for healthier food options by putting salads and bottled water on the menu.
What we eat has not only a tremendous impact on the health of our bodies but it vastly affects the well-being of our society. The physical condition of a person's body affects their behavior because the brain is part of the physical body. The moral condition of your soul is not what affects your behavior. Nutrients affect your behavior. Toxins affect your behavior. Religion invented morality.
Negative effects on your body negatively affect your behavior. Your body has an intricate data relay system that just like any machine relies on chemical reactions, electrical signals, and motor functions. The stability of this system depends heavily upon the integrity of cooperating systems to supply quality materials to execute programmed functions with. Its communication network is compromised when poor dieting, and environmental exposure to toxins cause weak signals, misfiring, and faulty feedback loops! Let me channel my inner Bill Murray, "Fire and brimstone! Cats and dogs living together! Mass hysteria!"
Fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, beans, and meat all have nutrients, minerals, and vitamins needed by the body. Processed foods have little to no nutrients and often contain ingredients that interfere with the body's natural processes. Avoid high fructose corn syrup, M.S.G., dyes, aspartame, and high amounts of sugar and sodium. How many of you eat a bowl of cereal every morning for breakfast? If you wouldn't take a bowl of shit, stir it up with some sugar on top to eat for breakfast, then I recommend you take cereal out of your diet. And milk is like washing it down with piss.
If you want to know what your diet should be like, google the Max Gerson diet. Check out the documentary, The Beautiful Truth. Besides food toxins, and a lack of nutrients from a processed food diet, a.k.a. american food diet, the single greatest source of exposure to toxins encountered in the average person's lifetime comes from common medical practices. CT scans expose your body to five hundred x-rays worth of radiation. So, you could get five hundred x-rays back to back to back or you could just get one CT scan. Either way you'll get doused with the same amount of radiation.
Nuclear thyroid scans also expose patients to radiation. If you get an MRI with contrast they give you a pill that puts a heavy metal into your body called gadolinium in an amount that is off the chart for safe levels in the body. Mercury makes up fifty percent of an amalgam dental filling. The E.P.A. has mercury listed as being toxic in water at two parts per billion. That means if you put five large swimming pools together to make one jumbo sized swimming pool and you dropped just two milliliters of mercury in there it would be unsafe to drink.
Doctor's offices routinely vaccinate children with vaccines containing thimerosal (mercury) at concentrations of parts per hundred thousand! Everyone in this country today either has a chronic illness or knows someone with a chronic illness. Now where do you think all these sick people are coming from? The medical industry is booming baby!
The medical industry currently makes up thirty percent of the U.S. economy. If people stopped getting sick the economy would tank. I'm reminded of the movie Blow when all the women in California were flight attendants. Half the people I know are nurses and the other half are patients.
If you take your kids to the dentist to get a cavity filled do not get them an amalgam filling. That's the silver metal fillings, they are completely unsafe. The A.D.A. (American Dental Association) lied about the safety of mercury as an ingredient in tooth fillings. I read an article where the A.D.A. claimed amalgam fillings were safe. They claim that mercury is bound in the amalgam formula to the other metals that make up the filling material. Supposedly it cannot in anyway get out of the filling and in to your body. Anyone who has ever studied biology or chemistry knows that mercury in the smallest amounts kills living cells on contact.
Even if we wanted to believe the A.D.A. they came out in another article and completely contradicted everything they said the first time. They studied the surface of twenty year old amalgam fillings and found that ninety five percent of the mercury is gone out of the surface of these fillings. They try to spin the story by saying that this means the amalgams are safer because they have less mercury in them. This completely contradicts their statements that amalgams are safe because the mercury can't come out. Which one is it? Are they safe because the mercury came out or are they safe because the mercury can't come out?
Even if mercury escaping from the filling and absorbing into your body wasn't a concern the presence of mercury is still problematic. If you think just because the mercury is inside your tooth it doesn't have a route to the rest of your body, think again. Emergency rooms routinely use Intraosseous Infusion straight into the shin bone to get fluids into an E.R. patient. Long story short, if there's a chemical in your tooth, chances are it's in your brain.
Now you know why you can't remember things, why you're getting those headaches. For anyone contemplating chelation therapy to remove mercury from your body, first remove the amalgam fillings. Rule number one of detoxification is remove the source of contamination first or every time you get chelation you'll just be pouring more mercury into your body. Make sure you find a knowledgeable doctor that knows which chelator to use.
Research the subject for yourself before you settle on a doctor. If you want to get amalgams removed it takes a special dentist that knows how to remove them safely. If you must get your kid a filling, get them a composite filling, they're much safer. Though composite fillings are safer they are not completely safe either, but those are really you're only two choices besides going with a ceramic crown.
Composite fillings get their strength and binding capacity from BPA, which is a known neurotoxin. Extensive research has been done on this chemical on rats and the results weren't good. These researchers have cages full of crazy rats and little mentally debilitated rats now. The safest route to a healthy mouth is to not need a filling at all so brush and floss your teeth daily. Eat little to no processed foods because that's what causes cavities.
If you don't understand how the foods we eat and exposure to certain medicines can alter your mental state affecting your decisions then just look at a person under the influence of drugs and alcohol. Everyone knows that drugs affect behavior. Everything that enters the human body has this potentiality. So, we better make sure the food we eat is imbued with natures goodness. We better make sure the air we breathe is free from pollution and the medicines we take are safe.
We better make certain that our systems of learning, culture, and social interaction are designed to be harmonious with our values. Which, should be for all people, efficient communication throughout all humankind, because that's the source code for peace, happiness, and love. There should be no physical barriers and borders between people from different parts of the world. There is only one country for all people, it's called Earth.
The ethnicity that all people claim as their race should be the human race. There should only be one language for the entire earth. We need a new language devised by scientists and mathematicians to be as pure and free of confusing components as possible. John Lennon's song imagine portrays a world just like that, free of religion, and free of boundaries.
Lennon was killed for the same reason as Martin Luther King Jr, because he had a dream. A dream that didn't fit in with the world order. This makes me think of a passage from the story of the Tower of Babel, "And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech." I always found this passage in the Bible particularly troubling. What stuck out to me was the reason God confounded the language. He said it was because the people were united and too efficient and would be able to accomplish anything they imagined. The bewildering part to me is why God thinks this is a bad thing and decides to sabotage them.
We know the Bible is thousands of years old. It makes you wonder if the originators of religion documented the beginnings of their conquest to ensnare mankind into intellectual slavery. (Hiding the story in plain sight and recording it here in the oldest and most widely distributed publication in the world.)
Atrocities abound throughout history. The empire of Great Britain is said to have contrived famines in India to effectively reduce the indigenous population. More well known is the treatment of the Jews under German rule during the Holocaust. Slavery is the most blatant example from history of how the powerful are capable of treating those they rule. History has no shortage of corrupt religious figures. In spite of this somehow people often reject even the faintest possibility that their church or their government would victimize them in any way.
It is our right to scrutinize doctrines, and laws, and to question our leaders. Their only function is supposed to be to serve the people, but all too often it ends up the other way around. It will always be that way as long as there is an incentive to abuse positions of authority. It's written in the Bible, "for the love of money is the root of all evil." Until we abolish the monetary system the effects of greed will repeatedly manifest throughout society.
If you're wondering what we would replace the monetary system with I recommend to everyone to watch the documentary Zeitgeist or listen to the lectures of Jacque Fresco. Peter Joseph also has some great interviews out there detailing what a resource based economy would be like. I hope for all our sakes this kind of utopian society is realized in my life time. I also recommend any documentaries done by Michael Moore. The last one I'm going to throw at you is Bill Maher's infamous hit Religulous.
I've stated that our method of communication needs modification but the way we listen also needs to change. The second you're not signaling the correct social cues, a person not formatted to your way of thinking will stop listening to you altogether out of fear that you'll corrupt their system of values or just from the presumption you don't know what you're talking about. We need to be open minded to find new avenues for change that will lead our society down new paths of prosperity and peace. Sometimes we have to step outside of ourselves to see the world the way it ought to be.
Imagine if you could go back in time to view a small tribe of Indians. Out on a prairie you can see children playing. Next you see a couple of adults yelling at them and exacting some corporeal punishment on them. You want to tell the adults to leave the children alone. It's explained to you that the kids aren't allowed to play there and that's why they're being punished. You think to yourself that seems like a stupid rule. Why not just let the kids play. They're not hurting anyone. Then you see an angry man telling someone sleeping under a tree that he's not allowed to be there before forcing him to leave. You think to yourself, "what an odd society."
After your time travel you decide to go on a space voyage to an alien colony somewhere in the far reaches of space, on a distant planet to observe their social behavior. One of the first things you notice is some of the aliens putting other aliens in cages. You're told they're being punished for breaking some part of the social contract. Your first thought is why can't this alien race make the rules of their society such that no one has to end up in such a sad state.
Suddenly your thoughts take you back to earth to your time and for the first time you realize your people do the same things to each other. You realize then that you sometimes must step outside of your own cultural bubble to see things the way they ought to be...
No comments:
Post a Comment