Principle vs reality: marrying an idolator

♦ 01/05/2021 ♦ 2 Comments

Nevertheless, the decree of Shem’s court that one should not marry an idolater still stands, whether it would be the wife or the husband as the idolater. It appears that even if two people are already married, but one begins to serve idolatry and is not willing to give up these ways, the other partner is obligated to divorce and separate.

Part VI, chapter 4, topic 16. The Divine Code, by Moshe Weiner

So according to rabbi Weiner, it is forbidden for a person to marry an idolater based on a decree from Shem’s court. The decree is so serious that if someone starts to worship idols while married to another, the idolator should be divorced.

Now I’m gonna interrogate this “command” from different angles because I believe there are substantial weaknesses in including this in a book for the education of Gentiles about their divine responsibilities.

So, this “command,” is it part of the seven laws, the actual seven laws as related in the Talmud in Sanhedrin 56a, the prohibitions that would bring the liability of the death penalty if a righteous court found a person guilty of breaking them? Is it part of the seven laws, the laws summarised by Maimonides in Mishneh Torah, Laws of Kings, Chapter 9? Let me list them now.

  • Justice
  • Cursing God’s Name
  • Worshipping idols
  • Murder
  • Forbidden Sexual Partners
  • Theft
  • Eating meat taken from a living animal

Well, there’s a law against worshipping idols. Is that command from Shem included there? That law amongst the seven only prohibits an individual from active idol worship. The Talmud limits this to acts of idolatry that would get a Jew the death penalty according to the Jewish law of idolatry. Being married to an idolator does not fall under that Talmudic limitation and isn’t idol worship in and of itself. Maimonides tries to expand that to say any act of worshipping idols is forbidden to Gentiles. Under what authority, I know not. But even if I assumed he had such authority, then being married to an idolator is not idol worship in and of itself. So Shem’s command does not fall under the law of idolatry.

It is noteworthy that rabbi Weiner does not include that “command” in his chapter concerning idol worship.

Does Shem’s command fall under the law of forbidden sexual partners? Well, the Talmud, Rashi and Rambam limits who the sexual partners are referred to in this command. Those sexual partners include and are limited to as follows:

  • a man’s father’s wife;
  • a man’s biological mother;
  • another man’s wife;
  • another man (male homosexuality);
  • an animal; and
  • a man’s maternal sister.

None of these sexual partners are “an idolator.”

Added to this, the law concerns sexual partners, in that penetrative sex should not occur. But since the verse used to derive these commands relates to marriage, other rabbis, like, I believe, rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, relates this to forbidden marriages. The problem still is that “idolators” are not included.

So Shem’s “command” doesn’t fall under the prohibition of forbidden sexual partners or forbidden marriages. I can also conclude that it doesn’t fall under any of the other laws of the seven commandments either. Therefore Shem’s “command” is not part of the divine seven laws. Shem’s “command” does not have the universal divine authority of the seven commandments.

This leads to jurisdiction. Lacking the backing of the seven commandments, what exactly was Shem’s jurisdiction? Let’s imagine he had a court. Let’s look at the law of Justice which includes courts. Talmudically, the command is that each Gentile community or town should set up its own court. Maimonides says that it is obligatory for Gentiles to set up judges and officials to judge concerning the six (or seven) laws.

So, being a non-Jew, Shem sets up his court to govern his people. What made any other court in his day subservient to the judgements and edicts of his court? There’s no law in the seven laws that grants him universal and ubiquitous jurisdiction. To compound on that significant question, what made any court after his day up until now and onwards subservient to the judgements and edicts of his courts? Again, anyone zealous for their own tribe whilst honouring the seven commandments should question this. Why does a foreigner from one tribe have any authority over another in a matter that is not part of the actual seven laws (as I defined the seven laws above)? The simple answer is that he does not without previous agreement. I know no one who has made such an agreement with Shem or his court.

That’s why I keep reserving my language, only referring to Shem’s “command” in quotation marks, suggesting that it is only supposedly or purportedly a command, but not actually such. Why? Because Shem only has the authority to deal with his court and his town/community and those that have agreed to it. He has no standing elsewhere. Hence, he can give no command to any other court as he has no authority to do so.

So, in real terms, realistically, it is false to say that all Gentiles are forbidden to marry idolators. That’s the principle. There is no such universal prohibition.

Now I’m not a rabbi. And I’m not declaring that anyone obey me. That’s why I only use arguments based on principles, take it or leave it.

Let me add another dimension. So this principle states that it’s forbidden to marry an idolator. Isn’t there something a bit uneven about this? Why are idolators singled out? Aren’t there seven laws, seven basic standards shouldn’t go below? So it’s ok, due to Shem’s neglect of other laws, to marry a thief or murderer? It’s ok to marry someone who curses God or who is known for breaking the law concerning sexual partners? If I have a spouse, and that spouse choose to help set up unjust courts and unrighteous legal systems, who perverts justice? What about the spouse who regularly buys and eats meat taken from a living animal? That’s all permissible??? Each of these types of spouse can affect the upbringing of children or impact a community. Is there any just basis for singling out the idolator?

I’ll be blunt. This “command” stinks of the unjust bias religious Jews and religious Gentiles have for the law of idolator as if it is the most important. Ex-christians seem most susceptible to this bent as well as too many Jews. A person can be a damned tyrant, unfair, unjust, but to some, as long as he claims belief in God, that’s a redeeming quality. I say, NO! It reminds me of those people that say idolators can’t study the seven laws. I retort, “so a murderer can???” No. If there are seven basic laws and a person repeatedly and unrepentantly breaks any one of them, they are equally condemned.

So when it comes to whether a Gentile can marry an idolator, it’s not one of the seven commandments, nor is it part of the seven commandments. It’s not a divine command and if it’s sourced from Shem’s court, there’s no evidence of jurisdiction.

Reality, however, … In reality, marriage is not an easy road. It comes with challenges, with highs and lows. People, for one reason or another, choose to spend their lives together. At least they aim to do so. The journey can be much more difficult if there are significant differences between the married couple in terms of moral standards. Conflict and pain can ensue if not enough forethought is put into such a crucial decision that affects families and children.

Since there is no commandment against it, a Gentile can marry any other Gentile that are not among the forbidden six. But that does not mean it’s wise or even good to marry simply anyone. It’s not about commands and prohibitions. It’s about doing what is best for you and the people around you, the potential spouse and any hopes for children. Making an unwise decision is costly in so many ways.

If you want as happy or as fulfilled a life as possible, think long and hard about such a weighty decision.

When the foundations are destroyed …

♦ 30/04/2021 ♦ 1 Comment

So she said to me bluntly that some of her family had died with COVID. I asked her to clarify if she meant “with COVID” or “of or from COVID.” She gives me the response I get from so many, a shrug and a look of “aren’t they the same thing?” She rephrased her statement, as if the correction helps, to say that those family members had died of COVID. I think it was hard to hide my skepticism when I responded with “oh, really?” Soon after that, she was busy and had to go her way.

I walked away from that short and superficial discussion initially absorbing the sincerity and simple belief with which she had declared her statement of faith. For her, it was fact. And it was obvious that she had gone along with the common narrative. She was a mask wearer, having been injected with a needle, the contents of which she had no clue about. The notion of foreign travel made her uneasy feeling that other nations were more dubious due to the stories of the bug. So her family members dying with/of COVID fits the picture well. And that sincerity and simple belief can seem convincing. I wondered to myself, how can I hold to my doubts about the story when someone just told me that their family members died of the virus?

Thinking about it, I realised I had been here before. I was raised a christian, amongst people that had a sincere belief about the saving and healing power of Jesus Christ, his divinity and superiority, his suffering and sacrifice for them. They will stand up in front of crowds, in the midst of groups, and declare how Jesus did this and how Jesus did that. I’ve had this experience through all the years that I had forsaken the notion of Jesus, this simple acceptance of some position. And that’s only one example, one subject matter, that I have to deal with people of faith, the other occasions involving atheists and acolytes of scientism.

On one level, my life experience has taught me that sincerity is not evidence of truth. Again, sincerity is not evidence of truth. Simply because a person sincerely believes that they are right or portrays themself with sincerity, that doesn’t mean that they are correct. They could tell me something with no hint of deception or pretense, since they are wholly persuaded that they hold the truth. And yet what comes out of their mouths is utter falsehood. When you have invalid premises, a rotten foundation, then the conclusions, even when accurate, is still rooted in wrongness.

So, I sat in my car, thinking about what had just happened, and I realised why, at least currently, I could not be convinced by her sincerity, even if she came into my face and angrily declared her family members dead because of COVID. My problem lies at the very root of the tree. I’ve lost faith in the notion of viral contagion.

For me, I realise that the whole path of disease or the cause of it is fairly unknown to me. I know the stories. Believe me, I know the stories. I was raised knowing that I have to wash my hands so as not to spread germs and illness. I’ve seen many a time where a person sneezes or coughs or has some other expulsion and people are warned to not go near so as not to catch that illness. I was raised with that. But I only had the stories and I didn’t pay attention to the details of reality. The stories were used to interpret reality rather than having reality be the basis for the stories. There’s a significant difference in that.

So I know that people get sick. And I know that people can get sick around the same time, but not all of them. I remember when I was young, I thought my dad was kind of invincible because he never seemed to come down with any of the illnesses that other family members would get. In fact, thinking about it, my mum never really came down things the ailments us kids had. And even us children, we didn’t really get sick at the same time. There was never really a time where one kid got sick and then, within a reasonable time, the other sibling got the same illness. Damn, my own life should have refuted the notion of fundamental segments of germ theory. But no, remember, I was using the stories to interpret reality rather than making reality or at least the experience of it the basis of the stories I hold to. So I still washed my hands to get rid of the germs and avoided coughs and sneezes purposefully.

So people close to me are really into the belief in the virus, going over the top with making sure that things are clean and washed and covered and protected to make sure no one gets sick (even though people still get sick). But, as I’ve said, this current COVID story has forced me to actually think about what I know. Here’s the story that I used to hold as true to interpret disease. So some invisible thing would be in someone else and they were sick because of it. That thing was not originally part of their body, but somehow it got in and they were sick because of it. Now somehow, because they cough or sneeze, or because it’s on their skin and they touch something, the invisible thing gets out and come into contact with me. Then this invisible thing gets into my body and causes the same disease. The common evidence for this story is the common cold or the flu, seasonal diseases.

Before I go any further, that last part, “seasonal disease,” should have been a red flag already. I mean, if these things get into our bodies through coughs, sneezes and surface contact, then why would the season matter? These things should be all-year problems, not just in the winter. Anyway, remember, the story interpreted experience. So, I was just blindly following.

So, anyway, what’s my problem with this story of contagion? If I switch things and focus on my experience, then I’ve never experienced a single part of the story. Not one part. This invisible thing? Well it’s invisible and doesn’t hit any of my senses. And as I said to someone, if it’s invisible, how do I know it’s there? How do I know how it moves? No, fundamentally, how do I know it’s even there? To be blunt, I don’t.

Now that is doubt right there. I don’t have to cite or refer to different theories of disease, such as terrain theory or miasma theory or polymorphism. My own experience cuts at the root of the story.

Now with this rethink, it didn’t help to learn not only of other understanding of how disease is caused, but also experiments that call into question whether germ or viral or contagion theory was ever proved. In the year 1919, there were experiments regarding the spread of influenza, one in Boston and the other in a place called Angel Island, both in North America. There, “volunteers” were subjected to multiple ways of getting into contact with the presumed influenza invisible thing, a bacterium or virus, such as injections, smears up the nose and throat, even rooms with influenza sufferers where they came into close physical contact, breathing their air and sucking in their coughs, etc. But no matter what they tried, the illness wouldn’t spread. Here’s a quote from a relevant source.

Perhaps the most interesting epidemiological studies conducted during the 1918–1919 pandemic were the human experiments conducted by the Public Health Service and the U.S. Navy under the supervision of Milton Rosenau on Gallops Island, the quarantine station in Boston Harbor, and on Angel Island, its counterpart in San Francisco. The experiment began with 100 volunteers from the Navy who had no history of influenza. Rosenau was the first to report on the experiments conducted at Gallops Island in November and December 1918.69 His first volunteers received first one strain and then several strains of Pfeiffer’s bacillus by spray and swab into their noses and throats and then into their eyes. When that procedure failed to produce disease, others were inoculated with mixtures of other organisms isolated from the throats and noses of influenza patients. Next, some volunteers received injections of blood from influenza patients. Finally, 13 of the volunteers were taken into an influenza ward and exposed to 10 influenza patients each. Each volunteer was to shake hands with each patient, to talk with him at close range, and to permit him to cough directly into his face. None of the volunteers in these experiments developed influenza. Rosenau was clearly puzzled, and he cautioned against drawing conclusions from negative results. He ended his article in JAMA with a telling acknowledgement: “We entered the outbreak with a notion that we knew the cause of the disease, and were quite sure we knew how it was transmitted from person to person. Perhaps, if we have learned anything, it is that we are not quite sure what we know about the disease.”69 (p. 313)

The State of Science, Microbiology, and Vaccines Circa 1918, John M. Eyler, PhD, found at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2862332/

Now the person leading the experiment cautioned against drawing conclusions. But as another scientist said, what was his name? … Ah, Feynman. Richard P. Feynman. “It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.” So there was a position that bacteria or viruses cause disease. Yet in the presence of such bacteria/virus, the disease was not caused. Therefore, the bacteria/virus isn’t the cause of the disease. The guy may be afraid to draw such a conclusion. But I think his experiment does put a big question mark over the germ theory, if not totally refuting it.

So if I already see my experience not conforming to the germ theory idea, and there are actual experiments that don’t conform to the germ theory idea, then on what basis do I believe in contagion?

I know what some may say, what my shadow self would say, that the evidence is that people get sick at around the same time. Ok, to say that properly, some people get sick around the same time. But that’s not a proof of contagion only of season, only of similar environmental factors cause similar effect on some humans. But that doesn’t prove that an invisible something made it all happen. It’s not even evidence of it. The fact that other people don’t get sick refutes the idea that the causative factor is the invisible bug, as there is no realistic way to isolate that healthy person from the bug that should be everywhere, especially in schools. You should know, … Well, at least I learnt that in the mainstream narrative, viruses are so small that they have the movement of air fluidity and therefore could be anywhere in the air, and germs are small enough to get splattered onto all forms of surfaces. In fact, those who know the common narrative really well would know that so-called viruses and germs are already part of the human body’s bio-system, working with it. So these invisible things are everywhere. How could anyone isolate from that? How could a mask protect from that? Yet some people are fine and some people get sick in various seasons. That, again, pokes a hole into the story I was raised with, the narrative that surrounds me, that I’m supposed to believe in.

So the foundation is cracked and crumbled. And that should be before I hear of and read reports that the virus controlling today’s narrative, SARS-Cov-2, has never been isolated/purified, never been shown not to be in healthy people but only sick people (“asymptomatic carriers” shits on that idea), never been shown to be the cause of the illness or disease called COVID-19.

So without the foundational position that Jesus is any real cause of forgiveness or salvation, if someone comes up to me and says “Jesus saved my life,” exuding all the simple sincerity in the world, the statement is meaningless and the sincerity is based on imagination. How else could I see it? And if someone says that COVID killed their family members, it too must be meaningless, based on imagination. Both are based on ignorance.

“But the test came up positive!” But SARS-Cov-2 has never been proven to be the cause of any disease. In fact, it hasn’t even been shown to exist as it hasn’t been purified! So what good is the test? The test is useless. And if COVID-19 is a set of symptoms said to be caused by an agent never proven to exist, then … the claim is meaningless.

“But there have been so many deaths!” Hearsay! Added to that, if the deaths were said to be caused by an agent that has never been shown to be the cause of any illness, then the claim is baseless.

“But if it really exists, and you act as normal, that could have some real consequences!” Unicorns, evil spirits, leprechauns, fairies, Santa Claus, the Illuminati, human-kidnapping aliens, cursed items. If any of these exist, and I act as if they don’t that could have some real consequences. So what? Based on the movies and the claims, letting loose an evil spirit from a curse item can have real impact on lots of people. Acting as if the Illuminati doesn’t exist is just to cement their hold in the world.

Look, first prove that the thing exists before we start talking about consequences. And if you already believe it exists without necessary evidence, then you’re just part of a cult. No apologies.

“The only reason you don’t believe is because you don’t have access to a special microscope that would make such entities visible.” I saw this sort of argument on a forum. Someone claimed that the reason why certain people reject the germ theory or that virus cause disease is that they haven’t seen such things under a special microscope called an electron-microscope. In response, I could say that the comment is patently false since my life experience says a lot more to me than seeing something under a microscope. Added to that, others have looked through those microscopes and still do not see what is seen as evidence of germ theory. The fact is that what is seen can be interpreted in various ways. Added to that, seeing something under a microscope doesn’t tell the whole story. It doesn’t tell you the source of the blobs you see there. I think a lot more praise is given to such a device and vision than it is worth.

So without the belief in contagion, without belief in the invisible things that possess a body and can wreak havoc, especially with the lack of relevant evidence, I just can’t give the stories any credence, especially when the stories are held by people who are normally ignorant of the details, just holding on to stories because they are popular or because a supposed authority figure stated it. Investigation normally seems to stop just there. That’s why pressing people with questions normally ends in silence, abrupt end of conversation, or emotional outbursts. Actual proof and evidence, actual rational scrutiny of the base claims, was never part of the equation.

Why I don’t want to be a Jew

♦ 29/04/2021 ♦ 5 Comments

I remember the early days when I took more interest in the Seven Laws for non-Jewis humanity. One of the challenges I faced was a guy called Asher Meza. He claimed to be a Jew, a rabbi even, and taught that Gentiles should become Jewish, that the ideal of the Torah is to be Jewish. He was essentially teaching that to be closer to God one should convert to Judaism by becoming a Jew and keep one’s portion of the 613 commandment given by God to Israel. More commandments means more righteousness, right?

He wasn’t the first to encourage me to become a Jew. Before I accepted the oral tradition, whnle I still thought, ignorantly, that it was possible to be “sola-scriptura” whilst embracing the Jewish Bible, the Karaite Jews that I hung around with online also taught that Gentiles who acknowledge the God of Israel should become Jewish and be circumcised.

For all the years since I left christianity whilst still accepting the truth of the Jewish Bible, it may have seemed natural to others that I should become Jewish. I had accepted central tenets of their worldview. Why not, instead of nibbling the edges of the sandwich, just swallow the whole thing, hook, line and sinker?

But after embracing the seven laws, it is not the case that I’m simply resigned to the fact that I can’t realistically become Jewish, but I am actively and strongly repulsed at the idea of becoming a Jew. I hope to God that I never become one.

But why is this? Why such a strong sentiment? Let me start from the lower levels and work my way up. This may end up going totally random, but I don’t really care.

Firstly, I’m a non-Jew. My ethnicity is not Jewish at all. My nationality? Well, that just a governmental-cult don’t give a damn about. Ethnicity is about a physical heritage, so that is more real than a passport of political ownership. But my physical being originates from outside of the tribes of Israel. That’s just how I am. There has been no inherent flaw that has been shown about that state of being, nothing about it that separates me from being good or knowing and respecting God. So already I have an identity with no reason to change it.

I have no personal desire, based on that identity of ethnicity, of physical familial/tribal heritage, to change that identity. So there is no inner thrust to forsake my tribal history to take on that of obvious foreigners.

Now some may say that they have God’s revelation, the Torah, and a special covenant or pact with the creator of the universe. I don’t doubt that. God made a vocation and gave it to them. But in that revelation, there is no biblical mandate, command or urgency for a person of another tribe to become Jewish. God may well welcome them in places like Isaiah 56. But that is neither mandate nor urgency. In fact, the law of Moses is more about separating Israel from everyone else rather than a free-for-all “religion” that everyone is welcome to, or must join. Neither the law of Moses nor the Torah is “religion.” As far as I’m concerned, religion was the artificial container used to transport the divine tradition through the past centuries. But religion is only an artificial container.

But since there is no command to become a part of Israel, then there’s no external divine force to push or pull me to Israel.

Another reason why I don’t want to be a Jew is that I have no reverence for that people or desire for their relationship with God. I do not see them as exceptional in various ways, neither do I care for their pact with God. That’s theirs and I’m happy for them. But as a people, they don’t make me think they are greater or better. Yes, I accept the oral tradition on principle that the written tradition must come with unwritten tradition. But having had a peak at what their tradition enjoins upon them, I want no part in that. As an outsider, a happy outsider, I’m happy to leave them to live by and wrangle out the truths in that tradition. The experiences I’ve had with some of them hasn’t been good or awe-inspiring. Yeah, there are great ones, but there are great ones in any people. And the masses of them show no greater sense of insight or ability to cut through indoctrination and BS than any other people. That kinda leads me to the final point.

I’m repulsed at the actions and beliefs of the Jewish people, who seem mostly slavish to government, having no real difference to Gentiles. Even their rabbis that I dealt with used horrific reasoning to justify the tyranny of Gentile governments, applying to rationalisations such as that of John Locke. They even use their principle of “the law of the king/government is law” to justify what the state does. Knowing what the seven laws command, I’m aghast at the notion that certain American Jews, religious Jews, are avowed constitutionalists, despite its obvious contradictions with the seven laws. Another rabbi was praising Trump. I see the state of Israel currently under medical tyranny with green passes that essentially make their rulers the same as the Nazis of old that they condemn vehemently, making second-class citizens out of those who won’t be injected with the experimental gene therapy for a virus never proven to exist in the first place. I doubt there would be much place for a philosophical anarchist and antiestablishmentarian like myself amongst a people who have it in their tradition that one must pray for the welfare of the government, believing that without it, the government that is, men would eat each other. I’m more than happy to bin that principle totally.

I would never want to be bound to such a people. The people I live amongst are bad enough. As far as I’ve seen, they are not much better. Maybe that’s one way that I see equality being “realistic,” namely, that I equally have little respect for humanity on a whole, Jews included. Added to that, many of the Jews are nationalistic as it is, jealous/zealous for their own. Why would I make myself even more of an outsider by becoming some bastard Jew? By “bastard Jew,” I mean one with no legitimate heritage in the people. Although others have “converted” and become Jews, they saw some benefit in it that overcomes the “rootless tree,” bastard aspect, some deep attraction or love for the people and divine pact. I see no such benefit.

This is just my personal position, giving a few reasons why it’s my hope that I never become a Jew. I wonder if the position would be stronger for someone who actually loves his own people, an actual tribalist who, although respecting the divine custodianship the Jews have, still knows who his earthly family and would use the more accessible divine principles to better himself, his own family and tribe instead of leaving it to join the Jews. I personally feel I have no people, no tribe, having been cut off from my roots at birth and through habit. Yet even without that, I would not make the Jews my people, not at all.

Others may feel differently, feeling a strong pull to Israel, and I don’t condemn such a person. That’s his or her path. But, as for me, I’m happy for the Jews to keep to their own and for me to keep to my own. They have their divine law. I’ve been given enough of mine for now to go away and learn and apply. I’ve already written earlier that I think that rabbis should attend to their own people and should be busy with improving the lot of their own. That doesn’t mean they ignore non-Jews, but they should have their own tribal priorities.

Anyway, onwards.

A Gentile’s relationship with the Jewish Bible

♦ 23/04/2021 ♦ 2 Comments

In a way, the title says it all.

I became a christian at the end of the previous century. Sounds like a long time ago, right? GRIN! At first I was lax about the commitment I had made to the faith, but going to university challenged me to me to take my choice a lot more serious. I had simply settled with the doctrines of my sect without actually studying, and I was challenged by other christians that had stances that conflicted with mine, yet we call claimed it was biblical. So I chose to start to make sure I had a biblical reason for what I believed.

My relationship with the Bible grew as I used it to study and to worship, really enjoying the word. It was partly due to reading the whole Bible that I started to see the cracks in the foundation of christian central doctrines. Reading the whole thing, I realised that the sacrificial law didn’t match Jesus’ death at all and that Ezekiel makes prophecies that flat out contradict Jesus’ presumed role. Reading the Psalms was a joy. I spent years studying the book of Genesis, going through it. I learnt Hebrew and Greek so as not to put total trust in translators. Studying the Jewish Bible for me, reading it and thinking about it, was a joy, a real joy. I may not have smiled while I did it, but my joy wasn’t really expressed on my face. It was just a place of solace for me.

But one of my greatest weaknesses seems to be that I think a lot. I left christianity and I ended up learning about the seven laws and that there is a sharp distinction between Gentile and Jew. I’ve made it plain that I’m not a Jew and I’m happy not to be one. The seven commandments are for Gentiles, not the law of the Jews. We Gentiles are supposed to rule ourselves, not have some Jewish overlord, something I understood from the law of Justice. I don’t really care that some rabbis and their followers think that Gentiles need constant hand-holding and leading from the Jew. It’s neither realistic nor do I think it’s good. Anyway, …

It should have been obvious by the fact that the Jewish Bible is in Hebrew that the Jewish Bible belongs to the Jews; the Hebrew Bible was given to the Hebrews. Their whole tradition is for them, both oral and tradition. Sure the Hebrew Bible is much more widely available and easily accessed than the oral tradition. And with regards to the oral tradition, when I accepted it, one of the conclusions of my consideration of the topic is that the Bible, especially the law of Moses, the five books of Moses, needs authoritative interpretation so there can be a true understanding. There may be a serious weakness in personal interpretation because of that existence of a true divinely-given understanding that the Torah-true Jews are supposed to have.

Certain events recently have caused me to ask myself the question about how I’m supposed to interact with the Jewish Bible now? I’ve been using the book of Proverbs to teach my son some useful principles of reading, understanding and applying wisdom to his life to make it better. But I don’t use a commentary or some oral thing off the Jews. Yet I still ask myself, if they have the tradition, the proper understanding, access to all their commentaries, yet all I have is the book, and it’s their book in their language, then is it better that I simply leave their book alone? Should I simply take what they have which is mine, namely the seven commandments, and then just leave them to it? Maybe if I want wisdom I should just look for the wisdom of the culture I’m in that I can actually access rather than some teaching that is afar from me in many ways. Even the Jews have the teaching that even though they have Torah and the other nations don’t, wisdom itself is everywhere and amongst the nations.

Now I know some have said that the Jewish Bible is for everyone, that there are universal truths in there. The fact that it is authored and inspired by the source of objective truth, and it includes the history of all nations before it narrows down to being more focusing on Israel, makes it inevitable that there are universal truths in that tradition. But if it’s true that there is a barrier between me and the proper understanding of the book, and that I need access to some rabbi or well-enough trained Jew to learn the book, two things I don’t have easy access to, then what am I doing messing around with somebody else’s property?

“Well, you’re allowed to read it. They said so!” Yeah, they did, right? Let me counter some of my previous thoughts with some experienced facts. I didn’t leave christianity because of the oral tradition, only the written one, namely the Jewish Bible. The joy that I got from the Jewish Bible, I didn’t get the vast majority of that from the oral tradition but from reading the text. On a good number of topics, when I’m approached by God-rejectors, christians or muslims about claims about the Jewish Bible, I’ve not needed to ask a rabbi first before using the translation of the text and the context to refute their point. And, as I said, my son and I get a lot from just reading the words we see, no Jew involved whatsoever. Even if the “proper understanding” is out of my reach, the understanding that I get is very powerful and really relevant to me.

So maybe that’s how I should take it. It’s not as if, because I realise that the tradition is theirs and not mine, that they are more or less separate from my life and their tradition is mostly inaccessible to me, I can no longer touch or read a Bible. I’ve never pretended to be an authority or expert or someone even to be listened to. All I can do, in my position, is, if I read it, I take what I can from it and just move on with my life. I’m not claiming the tradition to be mine. If what I learn is useful to me, then I take it. You can’t really copyright an idea, as much as some claim so.

Point proven! Enough already!

♦ 22/04/2021 ♦ 4 Comments

I’ve mentioned before how I’ve observed how people are treated in certain circles once they are linked in some way to Israel or the comments that are made with regards to the topic of Jews. To summarise, I see many social media messages that express hatred or distrust for Jews and for those who support Israel. The term “Zionism” or “Zionist” is used as a slur when spoken or written, meaning something traitorous or evil. I’ve seen some person that seems to be treated respectfully first, but once there is a suggestion that the person is a Jew, maybe because of the shape of their nose or the sound of their last name, then the person is seen as untrustworthy.

Because of my fringe ideas, I end up in certain groups where either the whole story of the holocaust or aspects of it are rejected in an outspoken way. That, in and of itself, doesn’t really matter to me: they’re normally not Jews so they don’t have to be invested or care about the history of another people. But what does cause me concern is the undertone of “the evil Jew.” The amount of times I’ve been told “hey, just watch this documentary and you’ll see!” I gave it a try once too. I started watching this documentary about some “Europa” thing, which tried to paint history in a total “evil Jew” way. At least I learned that all the major wars were either started by or gain benefit for “the Jews.” And that the Jews planned and celebrated the introduction of the federal reserve and the income tax in America, with their rabbis of course. Wait there, did I forget that the Jews are not even real Jews? That last part wasn’t part of the documentary, but it’s something that I heard with enough frequency.

I didn’t finish watching the documentary; I realised that I’m just hearing someone else’s story about a history that I never lived through, never experienced and can’t verify. It’s just another stranger with another story. That seems to be much of history: strangers and stories.

Anyway, after I had another bout of seeing a torrent of such outpourings of “love” for Jews, … No. I think I need the bluntness of the fact to lay the foundation for what I say next. So, after witnessing another episode of people ragging on Israel and describing Jews as things unworthy, something slapped me across the face like a wet fish. (I wonder how being hit by a dry fish would be different.)

One claim that is made is that the land of Israel was stolen from the Palestinians, that the Jews used the Holocaust and their political and financial ties to get the land of Israel and create the state of Israel. For many, the state of Israel is illegitimate and should not exist. Not that I agree with that story, but I realised that the Jews needed to get that land! With all that I had experienced, it hit me more solidly that there was an easy and secular justification for Jews to get and keep that land. Sure, I accept their Torah claim to that land and much more land. It’s not as if I was doubting it. But time after time, I was being shown the natural reason why a person needs their own home, and why such a people need their own land.

“A man, despised and rejected.” I’m sure lots of Gentiles like the Jews and love them. I’m not a collectivist and don’t really have love or like for masses of strangers, so I’m not included in that. But I know for a fact that plenty of Gentiles don’t like Jews and hate them. Historically, I believe the Jews have been despised by many-a-Gentile for a long time. I’m sure that many christians in the past had good feelings for Jews. I’m also sure that, because of what the new testament teaches, many christians historically did not like Jews, the God-killers or the Christ-killers, the seed of Satan, contrary with every man. They ain’t gonna be loved by many-a-muslim either, especially nowadays. And as long as they have no home of their own, they are all the more vulnerable. Seeing the sentiments I’ve seen, it would be a dangerous thing for a Jew to trust the good affection of foreigners. Very few people like strangers over-staying their welcome, and as long as Jews have no home of their own, they would always be strangers. It’s very natural for a family to wish its own to do better than the strangers or visitors, as it is also natural for feelings for the strangers to turn sour if they appear to be more successful than the family members. It’s the same for racial/national groups. And this is true even for the foreigners who lived among the Jews. Biblically, Jews should have more advantages in their own land amongst their own people. They have natural love for their own and not so much for strangers. It makes sense. So it also makes sense for Jews themselves to be strangers and foreigners in other lands is an automatic demotion, even if they think they’re doing well for themselves.

For me, the fact is that it is both natural and necessary for the Jews to get that land, even if they stole it. Let me pretend that I go along with the stories that the Jews did unjustly get that land, that they stole it. Here’s how I personally see it. There’s a small homeless family in a walled community. Everywhere they go, they may do well for a while but in the end they get the shit kicked out of them (translation: they get attacked and beaten up). When it seems like the animosity against them is getting too hot to handle, they spot a small house which is part of a larger complex where a few of them are staying with the strangers there. The walls around this small house seem good enough to give the family some defense. So they have a choice: continue to remain homeless and in constant threat and vulnerability, possibly risking worse to the point of death at the hands of the others, maybe go to another stranger’s house and see how long the kindness or tolerance lasts; or get that house, take it, and, if necessary, push the unwilling occupants into their greater complex and seal the door behind them. Some may consider it theft depending on how they get the land. But, realistically, what are the choices?

And the moralists and idealists, … or the moral idealists(?) will complain. “You must say in self-abuse until things open up naturally for you.” “Wait for God to save you because you cannot save yourselves through your own efforts.” “Keep getting battered, mistreated, hated and mistrusted, at the whim of strangers, because morally you’ll be better even if physically you’re ripped apart.” “You have to keep the moral high ground, even if your legs are chopped off.” And those indifferent or who hate will say “you’re being punished by God, you just need to take it!” They will see him as “stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.” “You deserve it anyway!” “That’s just the way it is.” The self-loathers among the family who lack self-preservation will say, “Ooooh, this is wrong! We shouldn’t be here! I’ll fight to get us out!”

Anyway, that little analogy or metaphor is just if I took the side that the land the Jews currently reside in and call their home was stolen or misappropriated. I don’t take that side. But the fact is that Jew-haters, Jew-supremacists and anti-Zionists have finally forced me to confront the immutable truth Jews have a damn good secular reason for possessing that land and making it home.

But as a side note, it also dawned on me that Israel and the Jews are not the centre of the world, not the centre of my world anyway. The older I get, the less invested I am in their story. Yet for the people who don’t like Jews, who think they run their country or the world or the media or whatever, the “Jews” in their heads have a lot more sway on them than they realise. But then again, they are in their heads, so …

Gravity is BS!

♦ 21/04/2021 ♦ Leave a comment

I see those pictures of the solar system belief, of circles representing planets, orbitting a yellow circle, with no physical mechanism to bind the pretended bodies to the centre of the rotation. Really, it’s like being asked to believe in magic. Oh, the balls just orbit the middle one through some magical influence.

The people who are ignorant of the fact that Einstein’s speculations superseded the mass attracting mass notion falsely attributed to Newton, those people will declare that the sun is so massive that some invisible force causes the balls to fall around it and have been falling around it for billions of years. Those people use the terms “mass” and “massive” as if they know what they’re talking about in physical terms. I don’t believe they have a clue.

Others who received Einstein’s mathematical unscientific theories into their bosom imagine that the maths are somehow physically real (“reification fallacy”) so as to see in their mind (not reality) some invisible, non-physical fabric called space-time, bent and distorted by the sun’s “mass” causing the other balls to fall perpetually around it. Again, they talk with the confidence to make it seem as if the mathematical concept is real. I’m not even gonna attempt to point out the stupidity in that.

Recently I witnessed the wisdom of a modern acolyte of scientism when a person told me that some guy called Cavendish proved the gravity ascribed to Newton, the gravity now superseded, replaced. I questioned him as to whether Cavendish’s experiment was scientific which he affirmed. I followed up by asking whether a scientific experiment can be done without a hypothesis, to which he correctly answered “no.” I then asked him to quote me Cavendish’s stated scientific hypothesis. This guy had better character than most globe believers I encounter. He admitted that he both didn’t know of any such hypothesis and didn’t even know what a scientific hypothesis was. That was another learning experience for me.

It was recently reaffirmed to me that Newton’s work where he supposedly proposed mass attracting mass was written in Latin. That poses a significant problem in my mind about the presumed link between Newton and this invisible “gravity,” that problem being that there is no Latin word for a force attracting one mass to another. I strongly doubt that those ancients who originally wrote and spoke Latin held such a concept. So how is it ascribed to a book written in Latin? For me personally, both the history and concept of gravity is an unholy mess based only on the mental and imaginative and not on the physical or the scientific method and therefore not based on science proper.

In my searches, no one has proposed a scientific experiment that Newton used to prove mass attracts mass by means of a force. In the same way, no one has shown me the scientific experiment Einstein used to prove his type of gravity and the existence of space-time, a concept that seems to have no physical reality, and seems to be only mathematical or conceptual.

Added to this, mass is simply a different form of inertia, described as a resistance to change in the state of motion or rest.

I have no personal experience of something that doesn’t want to change its speed generating a force just because it resists a change in speed. In fact, it makes no sense. A big mass is just something that more strongly resists a change in motion. There is no reason or mechanism for that resistance, for inertia, to generate an attractive force, not even a medium (“space-time”) that only exists in the mind or on math papers.

Because of this, I conclude that there is no scientific basis and no basis in reality for either form of “gravity,” either inertia attracting inertia(???) or distortions in maths (“space-time”).

In brief, “gravity” is bullshit!

What do the seven laws have to do with real life?

♦ 16/04/2021 ♦ 1 Comment

So I’ve summarised where the seven laws come from and explained why I accept the oral tradition of so-called “Orthodox Judaism.” They are God-given laws that are the baseline moral/legal standard for non-Jewish humanity. The Jews have their own laws to keep and the rest of humanity has its laws.

But how relevant are those basic laws? Why do I keep referring to them? I’ll just list them again.

  • Justice
  • Cursing the name
  • Idolatry
  • Murder
  • Forbidden Sexual Partners
  • Theft
  • Meat taken from a living animal.

How are these laws relevant to life today?

On various levels, for me, the basic laws of mankind show their relevance. In fact, since I can mention the applicability of some aspect of the seven laws in so many of my articles demonstrates their relevance.

Since the seven laws are basic obligations on mankind, and meant to be the basis of international secular law, they provide a bar, a standard, with which to judge the state of communities, nations and individuals and oneself. They are the general guide for how one lives and how one relates to those who claim to be in positions of power. Bodies of law and constitutions can be measured to see if they even meet with these basic standards, exceed or fall below such standards.

Three clear and simple examples are justice, murder and idolatry. Murder, according to the seven laws, includes abortion as a forbidden act. How does the government handle the killing of the unborn and how does it measure up to the divine standard? Most western governments fail since they legalise the practice of slaughtering the unborn with some industries profitting and benefitting from the killing. I only say “most” because I don’t know if there is a place that still forbids it. It could be that all western governments fail in this way. The law of justice includes that command that courts are supposed to uphold this minimum requirement. Yet, since government edict is upheld by courts in defiance to the seven laws, then both the law of murder and justice are ignored and thrown aside.

With regards to the law of idolatry, the active worship of false gods is forbidden. Yet in bills of fictitious “human rights” and in constitutions, it is explicitly written that the government and courts can’t interfere with a person’s worship. In fact, it is widely believed that worshipping any god is a basic human “right.” Again, contradiction between the divine standard and God’s law.

It could be argued that since God’s laws are being ignored, then they are not relevant. On a subjective level, that may well be true. But when it comes to objective reality, ignoring objective principles do not make them irrelevant. If I ignore the fact that things heavier than the air tend to drop, that will not stop me falling to my death if I jump off a cliff. Ignoring the fact that there are objective standards of morality doesn’t impact the fact that, since there is an objective Judge, then there will be consequences. In fact, the world’s very lack of moral fibre may be one of the significant causes to its current decline and moral and intellectual deplorable state, and its apparent acceleration into the abyss.

The seven laws are also a general guide for how one lives. Avoiding acts of theft, idolatry and injustice, for example, is keeping in line with the divine laws whether acknowledged or not. Some have said that the laws are much too basic for such a guide. Unfortunately the current sorry state of the world is evidence that this is not true, that even basic morality is too high a standard for people.

But this is just at a superficial level of the laws, just reading what the basic laws state and living by them or seeing the world through their lens. Personally, once I started to actually think about them and ponder them, then I saw a lot more relevance to what they point to and what they challenge a person to do and think.The basic level of the law of idolatry simply states not to actively worship idols. A person can simply avoid bowing down to statues, which is good. But for me, I see something deeper that is not legal but is just moral. Close to the surface of that law is the principle of not being led to idolatry or putting oneself in the position to break the law. One what I see as a deeper level, I see the law is about avoiding devotion to falsehood, or having excessive adoration for people or ideas. Just that principle, that simple statement, tells me so much about dealing with life in general. No one would consider celebrities, sports athletes or politicians as literal idols. A person can be a fan(atic) of a certain figure, following them and hanging on their every word. They would never be considered to have broken the superficial law of idolatry, but the deeper aspects and morality it points to does warn a person against such excesses.

And that is only one aspect of the deeper morality of the law against idolatry.

What about the law of eating meat taken from a living animal? What could be the deeper understanding of what seems to be an obscure law? Some people see this as teaching against cruelty to animals, to make sure the animal is dead before eating so as not to cause it prolonged suffering. I personally see the importance of delayed gratification, to not simply act on impulse and instinct to devour. Again, that principle has a lot of application in this world.

The laws concerning forbidden partners, theft, murder and justice also have so many deeper applications regarding how to deal with people and institutions.

So the seven laws have plenty of relevance to real life both on a superficial level and especially on a deeper level.

The blurring of the lines

♦ 30/03/2021 ♦ Leave a comment

“You flat-earthers are so retarded, you deny gravity!“

“How can anyone in their right mind deny that things fall down?“

It’s not an unusual response. Since I’m going to be as bold about my views as my opponents, and my views are hated and ridiculed, I shouldn’t be surprised at the hyena-like response of many. But it’s through these experiences that I learn both a superficial lesson and a deeper.

Reification is treating a concept or idea as if it were real. In my mind, it’s similar to the deification of brute matter or the stars or an idea, where one doesn’t have a strong enough grasp on reality, so as to make up stories about the silent and treat those stories as “gospel truth.”

I believe that a person making such statements as those at the beginning of this post has been so deeply brainwashed that they cannot tell the difference between a concept and reality. Let me explain.

I remember Neil deGrasse Tyson attempting to do some sort of rap-battle with a rapper called B.o.B. who had expressed that he saw the earth was flat. To finish of his “performance,” he exclaimed, “THIS is gravity,” upon which he dropped the microphone he had been using unto the floor. The audience erupted with applause as if he had done something dynamic and punchy. I should have realised then just what had happened, but I wasn’t at the place.

Recently, I got into a hearty debate with some stranger, a globe-zealot who acted as if he were there to school me, the apparent ignoramus. He started talking about gravity, so I stopped him and asked him to define gravity. He defined it as the force that pulls physical objects to the centre of mass of the Earth, basically that mass attracts other masses. Again, at this point, it should have clicked in my head what the issue was, but I carried on. I asked this person who was the first person to prove gravity, to which he replied “Newton.” I pressed him, asking if Newton proved it scientifically, me understanding that “science” means knowledge acquired by means of experimentation, scientific experimentation meaning the necessity of hypothesis and the identification of independent (cause), dependent (effect) and controlled variables, the experimenter varying the presumed cause to see if it creates the desired effect. He said “yes,” that Isaac Newton had proved it scientifically. So I asked for the scientific experiment that Newton performed to prove mass attracting mass. The response I got from this self-approved “teacher” and globe evangelist was that Newton proved this by seeing an apple drop and then creating an explanation. Watching an apple drop … and then making an explanation. *sigh!* Watching an apple drop and then making a damn explanation?!?

Should I be surprised that this is what is called “science” nowadays? But then again, people think astrophysics is a science following the scientific method, so …

Anyway, when I asked the guy to define “gravity,” what I should have taken notice of is both the definition and the source of the definition. He correctly did not say the definition was “things drop” and he also, correctly didn’t ascribe its source to the first human that dropped something. No, he defined it as mass attracting mass by means of a force, and the origin was Newton (who actually wanted nothing to do with such an idea). Now I know that Newton has been supplanted, superseded by another concept, a mathematical one, “space-time,” that was put forward by Einstein with even less scientific experimentation, but that’s not the point.

Here’s the point. In real life, the external world we all experience, everyone experiences that a lot of things drop to the floor, but not everything. No one denies that things drop in real life. Those who reject the globe and accept other ideas, they accept that things that are more dense than the air will tend to drop. But neither Newton or Einstein were dealing with the real world of drop, but they were trying to understand how things drop and they did so in the world of language (mathematics being a language) and ideas.

So when a person scorns the globe-concept-rejector, saying “the retard denies gravity, that things drop,” they appear to have conflated two different things: the reality that things heavier than the air tend to drop and the conceptual understanding as to how things drop.

So when Neil deGrasse Tyson exclaimed “this is gravity,” and dropped the mic, the only thing he had actually done was reinforce the blurring of the lines between a concept and reality. The high priest had only made firm the faith of the acolytes with an empty show. I’m sure many bubbled and giggled at how Neil had embarrassed the ignorant B.o.B.! I mean, who in their right minds would deny, … deny, … Deny what? Things heavier than the air falling? Does anyone deny that? I would have laughed to see Neil do the same thing with a helium balloon. I can imagine a parody of Neil’s “performance” where there is someone called “Turd the Clown” in his place, and ending it by trying to “drop” a helium balloon.

Anyway, there’s been such a blurring of reality and concept that to challenge the concept is seen as if it challenges the reality and is, therefore, utterly ridiculous. But I think I can say with confidence that it’s much harder to experientially prove, to visibly prove the concept of mass attracting mass by means of a force. Some things have to be taken from granted, must be assumed without proof, like the notion that mass is a real thing and not just a mathematical concept (and not weight or inertia), or that the solar system/a-centric universe model is the true truth. And a model can never be the true truth, only a concept, a limited or useful representation, hence the word, “model.”

Maybe it’s because of my thoughts nowadays, but I can understand a grounded, no-nonsense guy would not hold as truth the notion of the force of a mass attracting another mass with no physical connection between the two objects. I can understand a man not treating as concretely real or objectively true the notion that there is some entity called “space-time” which has physical descriptions as “bending” and “warping” but no actual physicality to it, only concepts and maths. I think a lot of people know that concepts, non-physical things, cannot bend or warp.

But the masses hold so dearly to the edicts and ukases of man, enshrining them so deeply in their beings, that to defy the ukase is to defy reality itself. And isn’t that a symptom of the virus of idolatry, at least philosophical idolatry?

For me, this is another far-reaching message. It’s not just about gravity and flat-earth. Even if it should happens that, years down the line, a kind person sits down with me, and helps me to understand three actual scientific experiments, fulfilling all the necessary requirements of the scientific method, clearly showing mass creating a force to attract another mass, thereby proving the gravity ascribed to Newton, and then sits me down again and shows me the seven similarly-principled scientific experiments that show that the warping of space-time due to a significant mass caused the attraction between two masses, and I now know that, in true truth, the why of things dropping is physically demonstrated, even if that happens (when is this sentence gonna end???), there will still be a lesson for me in this article in different avenues: the idolatry of science and pseudoscience, the power of lies and delusion, the need for discernment to tell the difference between what is opinion and what is fact, the self-solidifying nature of the cult, the difference between law and morality. (*I gasp for metaphorical breath at such a sizable sentence.*)

Unfortunately, it may just end up being cast down the gutter for others because it’s just another retarded gravity-denying flerfer. Mic drop!

It’s a good thing I don’t write my blog posts for other people, isn’t it?

The comedy of empty gestures

♦ 25/03/2021 ♦ Leave a comment

I declared to myself, “I know rituals when I see them.” Is that really true? I don’t know. I hope so, but maybe not. But I do hate empty gestures, actions that are said to mean something but literally mean nothing. Maybe it’s because of my experience with religion, idolatry and deceitful people, but I detest it and will actively rebel against it when given the opportunity.

But there is power in the ritual, meaningless act said to represent something, in that it seems to unite the collective doing it, empowers the cult. An empty gesture therefore isn’t simply some useless thing, but a tool to control the group. And since expression is related to thought, then to control someone’s expressions, to encourage a movement or outflow of communicative energy, may well be a way to control the mind. The answer to the question of whether it’s an inward movement, of controlling the mind, or an outward movement, of expressing a mind already controlled, I don’t know. I don’t even know if it’s always an either-or question.

So recently, there was a ukase for the denizens of the UK to observe one or two minutes of silence for all of those who had died from the phantom virus, those who have been battling to keep it at bay, for some person or other regarding the monster currently and purportedly ravaging the world. Of course the action involves inactivity, something quite easy for a lot of people. So there are a few moments of inactivity for the dead. The observance of this rite may mean literally nothing. There is nothing special about shutting up. Parents tell their kids to shut up and think about what they’ve done a lot of times. But it’s odd that the ukase is “for” an unknown number of unknown people, for strangers. That word “for” … Is it supposed to mean “for the benefit of?” There is no benefit for the dead because – guess what! – they’re dead. It can’t be “in memory of” because, if they existed, there was no relationship to remember. I read some drivel that said that the silence was to remember all the people that had died. Remember who? Exactly. So to be silent FOR the dead … what meaning does that have? Oh, wait! Is this another Barnum statement, a statement that sounds as if it means something specific, but is, in truth, utterly meaningless and subjective? Seems like it.

But in that meaningless silence, what is being tapped into? What is being agreed with by participating in the scheduled inactivity? The common narrative. The belief that that fuzzy but significant amount of people have actually died directly because of the unproven invisible monster. In the silence, there is, at least, the exhibition of faith. “I believe with perfect faith that the demon, COVID-19, as proclaimed by the priests, swallowed up so many lives. How sad.” And then afterwards, things carry on as normal. Nothing changed. It wasn’t the start of a changed life, only the continuance of the rote, routine and repetition of life.

How hollow, the secular faith.

There is another ritualistic moment of silence observed by the cult of the UK on November 11, Armistice Day, when so many remember those who died in, … Well there are multiple reasons for the silence apparently. Or alternate ones. One source said that the silence was “to commemorate the lives of people who have been killed in wars across the world.” The other says it is supposed to commemorate when a truce, an armistice, was drawn at the end of world war one, over 100 years ago. Maybe the first source, from a radio station, is just evidence of England trying to be more inclusive of foreigners or trying to make the ritual more relevant to moderns. Or maybe all of this is just more Barnum statements, rituals so ambiguous you can shove many ideas into it. Again, the relationship with silence and an old political peace treaty or people dying all over the world due to wars (at least they actually die of the thing this time, LOL) seems tenuous at best. In fact, it seems like another empty gesture, another ritual. Meaningless. Except, to plug into a collective mindset, to join the cult.

There have been various events where empty gestures were given by the masses. When I used to be on facebook, I remember something apparently tragic being promulgated by the media which sent people using some sort of lens on their profile photo so it would show the national flag where the bad thing happens. Maybe it was the Charlie Hebdo affair where certain French people who publicised the making fun of other people’s religions didn’t expect to be killed for it. But it was painted in the light of tragedy. And when certain of the public are told to feel something by the media, by Joe, they damn well will feel like it. “Hey, look everybody on Facebook! My profile picture is a different colour now. It really means something.” Well, it changes nothing about what happened, will be forgotten in the next news rush where they’re told to feel something about something else, and only ends with the person continual pulled and pushed to go with the herd.

Was that why it was so easy to slip on the mask? I mean, it’s not some historical precedent where every time a coronavirus was said to be circulating people put the mask on. But then again, I didn’t know what coronaviruses were until this popular story arose about COVID-19. It was only when I looked that I found out that coronoaviruses are said, according to the widely-held belief about germ theory or invisible spirits, to be the cause of the common cold and the flu. I have memories of the early days of my research into this topic, learning the unfamiliar word “coronavirus,” and then finding out that there were coronoviruses back in the 60s. I thought to myself, “Wait! What?!? The coronavirus was around in the 60s and people are only talking about it now?” But, yeah, I found out that these viruses said to be the cause of illness had been around for a long time. But in many countries, there was no precedent for wearing masks when the cold went around or when the flu went around.

In fact, I had to learn that, even though some Asian countries have a habit of wearing masks, there was not clear evidence that wear masks made any difference to virus infections. In fact, some papers showed positively that masks made no difference to the infection rates of influenza, influenza being alleged caused by a coronavirus. And also reading about the size of these viral particles, how they are small enough to have the fluidity of air, most masks are useless as a means of protection, maybe all the of the readily available ones, even the surgical ones. Why? It’s not simply that the particles may be able to straight through the fabric, but also that wherever the air goes, the viral particle can flow. Therefore, if you can breathe in, you can breathe in viral particles, and when you breathe out, the viral particles will flow the same way as air. This means both through and around the mask. And air doesn’t necessarily flow in straight lines and can still end up in front of you, around you and behind you. The video in the picture below is evidence of that.

Yet, despite having no historical precedent, people just went along with it. It’s not as if a person can see the mask physically stopping the virus. And I highly doubt that people did the research, went through the calculations and came to the informed conclusion that masks literally stop viruses. No, the habit of wearing just spread like a popular virus. And I hear the intention behind it when I speak to the zombies: “I’m wearing this to protect you!” “Put your mask on; think about other people!” But, regardless if the germ theory were true or not, isn’t all just another empty gesture? In fact, what makes it worse is that there is such faith behind this empty gesture. People actually think the masks protect. But for all that good intention, effectively and objectively, it means absolutely nothing.

Unapologetically, I relate this to two of the seven laws: the prohibition against idolatry and the command concerning justice. Deeper thought into the principles of idolatry reveals how unfortunate it is to invest oneself in lies and ritual for false reasons. And the principles of justice invites a person to actually think things out and investigate to makes one’s actions meaningful, fair, just and true.

But this cult-ure that I live in is one of empty gestures, doing meaning acts not to really make a difference in the world, but just to make firm the cult. Even people supposed to have sense do the senseless.

The evidence is crap; but there’s a lot of it

♦ 24/03/2021 ♦ Leave a comment

Many people hold to mainstream beliefs. I guess that’s what makes them “mainstream.” Me being the sore thumb sticking out, I go against the grain many-a-time, and when I confront the popular view with my alien ideas, the response I normally get is that there is loads and loads and loads of evidence for the mainstream view. Why else would the mainstream view be accepted?

As a brief but related aside, I do check myself every now and again, to make sure I’m not simply crazy, … No, that’s wrong. The issue isn’t whether I’m crazy. It’s whether I’m on the right path in thought. I think it’s possible for even a crazy person to be on the right track.

Anyway, when I was a christian but on the way out, there was the claim that there were hundreds, sometimes thousands of messianic prophecies. And when someone throws a huge number at you like that, it’s easy to think that the abundance of evidence means that the case in question is a done deal. I remember, years after I had left the belief in Jesus behind, someone gave me a DVD by Chuck Missler which had a lot of Bible verses said to be evidence for Jesus, his death, and resurrection three days later. There wasn’t just one; there were a good number of verses.

Yet every single verse had nothing contextually to do with Jesus. Many times, they weren’t even prophecies about the future, only historical narratives. There was this one verse, part of a psalm, where it says that someone was hated for no good reason (Psalm 69; John 15:25). Now I believe that it is clear that such a statement is non-exclusive, that it cannot be a specific statement only referring to one person because there are too many people in the world who are or feel hated for no reason. This statement on its own could never be a messianic prophecy.

What makes it even worse is that the whole psalm, the whole song – it’s a song – never claims to be a prediction and goes flatly against the christian doctrine of Jesus. They say Jesus is sinless when the song has the writer or the person reciting it admitting his own sin. Total contradiction. This evidence is crap as it doesn’t support the claims of Jesus’ messiahship or that he was even predicted to be coming. The fact that the greek testament, the christian bible, uses it in John 15:25 is an indictment against its claim to have come from God.

Now although the evidences provided by Missler and the new testament are rubbish, a christian can still apply to the fact that are just so many more evidences, like others amongst the hundreds and thousands of alleged prophecies. But the claim of high numbers in and of itself doesn’t support the claim. The fact that a sample of evidences are of such low quality, not actually supporting the claim, that calls into question whether the “hundreds” actually prove the case.

I can say that, by my own experience of going through several hundred so-called prophecies, one-by-one, they don’t prove that Jesus is messiah or predicted by the Jewish Bible. Who knows? Maybe they would claim that I should not rely on my experience. When it comes to the next subject, some do.

When the notion that the earth was a ball spinning and orbitting the sun, not the centre of the universe, was challenged in my mind, me realising that I only accepted it because it was what I was told, not having been proved to me, I did what some would consider my due diligence and actually looked for and looked at the evidence for the mainstream proposition. I didn’t just look for the modern ignoramuses who, like me, bleated out the points without understanding why the beliefs were held, but instead I looked for the forefathers of the evidences. One of the princely amongst them was Galileo, or should I say “the myth of Galileo.” I call it a myth because of the way the media and teachers preach the gospel of his sacrificial life, that he fought the closed-minded and antiquated church, how he used “science” to battle religion, how he saved us all, sacrificing himself to show us that the earth truly, truly, orbitted the sun. Nothing is said about his character flaws. Nothing is said about the nuanced disagreement between certain people in the church (not all of them) and Galileo, that it wasn’t simply “science versus religion.” And nothing is said that critically analyses the evidences that Galileo brought up. No, I had to do that under my own steam on various levels.

So I sought the evidences and ask the question of each: do you prove that the earth moves around the sun? What I found was … ok, I won’t just it now, I’ll just state it. The evidences were:

  • Jupiter appeared to be orbitted by moons;
  • Venus had phases like the moon; and
  • The sun caused the tides.

So I interrogated each proof, the question still being whether the earth was no longer the centre of the universe, but actually and truly, absolutely, orbitted the sun. Each and every proof did nothing to the central idea of geocentrism at least, that is, if I believed the earth to be a ball. The fact that Jupiter had objects orbitting it did nothing to the central notion of geocentrism. The fact that Venus had phases only spoke of what Venus was doing, not what the earth was doing. The idea that the sun created the tides is seen as false by people then and people now. So there are two evidences that are irrelevant to the central idea of geocentrism since someone called Tycho Brahe, before Galileo, had a geocentric, earth immovable and centric, model that accounted for both observations. And then there was evidence that was patently false.

Also understand that, for someone espousing flat earth, witnessing things happen in the sky tell us nothing rationally about the ground below our feet.

Now if there are any comebacks that Galileo’s observations made the heliocentric model more viable, then that point ignores two things. Firstly, a model is just a mental abstraction, a representation, a useful representation at best. And that’s the point: a model can be useful, matching observations, but that doesn’t make it true. Secondly, the viability of the heliocentric model is irrelevant to the main point that Galileo did not prove that his notion was true or that geocentricity or even flat earth were false. Galileo’s “proofs” were, in this context, crap. Textbooks and other books written by people accepted as scientists centuries after Galileo, including Einstein, clearly state that there is no optical evidence of the earth’s movement, especially when it is accepted that universal movement is relative, that there’s no way to prove absolute motion. Therefore, Galileo becomes propaganda for an agenda other than the status of the earth, in order to still indoctrinate the children with the idea that “science” is better than religion, the words of scientists have more power than the words of an old book, to be really blunt. The status of the earth still gets slotted in undercover.

In times past, someone thought it good to challenge my conclusion that the earth isn’t moving, that there is enough reason to ignore my experience. As part of that challenge, they stated that even if Galileo’s proofs were crap, there are just so many other proofs that the earth is a ball and that the earth is moving and that the earth is orbitting. Of course, it is ignored that I had to look at such evidence to come to my conclusions. But … let me quote myself: “The fact that a sample of evidences are of such low quality, not actually supporting the claim, that calls into question whether the “hundreds” actually prove the case.”

Yeah, I looked at the evidence and came to a conclusion different to other people. I must be wrong, right?

But then came the dreaded COVID-19. And shouldn’t it be obvious to me that there is a virus that is causing death to so many? How can I reject the evidence? How can I oppose the lockdowns and the masks and the dictates of tyrants who claim to have my health in mind by commanding people to commit financial suicide, closing down their means of income, for this most savage, death-dealing, bloodthirsty virus? Surely it is obvious!

One person said that I should take note that almost 3 million people worldwide have died from COVID-19. How can such a number be a fiction? Who could make up a number like that and how would they do it? Surely there must be a conspiracy right? Wait, I’ve heard this argumentation before about the moon landing and flat earth. Let me see if I can reword a guy’s question but in line with the COVID narrative. “Why would governments need to pretend that COVID exists? What tangible benefit is there to such a costly conspiracy?” And it is costly since the dictates of government ravage their own economies.

But as I said in a recent article, it is first important to find out if there is a problem, an issue with the data, first. Motives and conspiracies are irrelevant to the actual existence of a problem.

So, 3 million dead because of COVID, that’s the claim. Is it true? Well, … the claim must be that either COVID-19 killed people, or that it played a direct role in their death. So where does this number come from? Not a clue. I looked at worldometers.info who just collate the information from different governments. But those governments have different and odd ways of getting the death data. I know that the UK government and USA government don’t have a general number of deaths caused by COVID-19, only numbers of people that died a certain time after getting a positive test result, like 28 or 60 days. This is regardless of whether the person had symptoms. So it’s not about whether people had the disease, COVID-19, but rather whether the test detected the presence of … of what? That’s the question. I’ll leave that there. It’ll make this article too long to go into that. The numbers also include people who were only suspected of having the virus/illness. If the worldometer is collecting statistics so flaky so as not to show the actual cause of death, only that people died a certain time after, or who died and then had a test but the cause of death may not be related, then that makes the whole number very questionable.

In fact, I would charge anyone who brings such a number with hearsay, only going on records the creators of which cannot be questions or cross-examined. The people who bring 3 million or 1 million or hundreds of thousands or even 5, as the number of those who have died because of COVID-19, are really going on official rumour at best and downright meaningless numbers at worst. So that piece of evidence must be thrown out.

But, says the believer, even if you throw out that evidence, there is so much more evidence that there is a brand new virus slaughtering millions (is that a begging the question fallacy?). But the evidence that this person chose to give me was shoddy. And if this piece of evidence was so weak, so sloppy, then … I’ll quote myself again: “The fact that a sample of evidences are of such low quality, not actually supporting the claim, that calls into question whether the “hundreds” actually prove the case.”

And you may think me premature in bringing up my quote, but I’ve already written a good amount of articles showing other pieces of crap evidence that betrays a total lack of understanding of causality with regards to COVID-19, with people unable to actually prove the line of cause and effect, even the existence of the alleged causative agent, the virus, SARS-Cov-2. The standard of reasoning and evidence is grotesquely poor, even from people claiming to be managers, scientists and doctors.

The fact for me is that, in many significant areas of my life, things appear to be obvious. Things are taken for granted and, when challenged, it is claimed that there is just so, so much evidence for that position. It would seem ludicrous for me to even dream of rejecting the idea. But there have been too many occasions where either the sample of evidence provided is piss-poor in terms of quality and whether it actually touches the claim in question (or even refutes it), or the whole pile of evidence, when checked individually, is a castle made of sand or cards, founded first on an untenable assumption, an assumption not proven which is already accepted as true.

The title is the sense I understand from such an approach: the evidence is crap, but there’s a lot of it, both in terms of so-called evidence and crap.