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And here we go again

Good Friday 2020
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Sitting in bed this morning drinking a cup of tea, I found my thoughts drifting back to parents, grandparents and great grandparents. What tumultuous times they lived through. The culmination of two millennia of Christian ideals, smashed asunder on a world scale. The hopes of countless generations of people, so fundamentally disappointed during the 20th century and continuing on into this one. What has happened to come to this?
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What a fatal shock it has been.
• Barbaric world wars with the deaths of how many tens of millions not known.
• World wide pandemics killing countless millions more.
• Wealth distortions grown to such a level that a handful of people have more than billions of other peoples.
• The technological research causing significant evil as well as marvellous good.
• The battle for supremacy between different wealth ideologies of the few.
• Etc
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And what will that fatal shock in our present now produce?
A more coercive fall in the same direction?
• More fragmentation within societies
• More paralysis in not knowing what to do.
• More fundamentalist thinking with growing battle between opposites.
• Growing loss of the ability to think deeply.
• Survival of the fittest.
• Culling of the herd.
• Expanding levels of mental illness.
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And no idea of what is wrong inside.
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Will the present way get fundamentally changed?
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One must hope. Humankind is going back toward greater herd like characteristics and the herd does not want things to change, but go on in the same way forever. (And forever is a myth.)
Well, as long as your herd is living the ‘good life’ there is not a great enough shattering of the glass bubble.
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Let us hope that more time, more pain will not need to come yet.
More crosses, and waves of psychological/spiritual dislocation and distortion.
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During the ‘Battle of Briton’ they had communal solidarity, physical camaraderie, all hands to the pump and by the skin of their teeth they managed to get through it.
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The current strategy of ‘flattening the BUG’s curve’ resulting in an extended period of ‘solitary confinement’ until a sufficient number of the herd have been exposed and developed antibodies (to what in the end) is likely to be ‘a bridge too far’ if creative political strategies are not developed to relieve the pressure points that will develop.
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The road ahead may turn out to be a year of Good Fridays.
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Have a read of the linked article and see if your current experience, courtesy of the BUG, gives you any empathy for what the author’s experience has been.

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Eyes Open

Waking Up
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What has the Christian Way to offer these days, to people who are searching for a spiritual sustenance but have run up against the failure of the mainstream church based expression, at best incomprehensible to many, at worst abusive in one form or another. For an organization whose prime focus is about creation, what has it got to say about the two greatest dangers to creation today; nuclear war and climate war. Dangers, the silence over which is now starting to be broken by young people with the courage to confront their future. And for which sacred pneuma has been, for people with ears to hear, constantly calling for urgent change.
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The failure of the Christian Church to rework its foundational stories in language, symbols, rituals, celebration etc that young people of today can understand and respect has been a catastrophe. When the church joined the Empire in the fourth century and after the first seven ecumenical councils, the existential Jesus got progressively left behind.
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How does one re-engage with that existential Jesus and his experience of dealing with a Jewish church that he perceived had lost its way?
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To get some idea, a good starting point might be the first gospel (Mark) and its rendering of who Jesus was.
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A man who taught what it was meant, to BE.
A modern day hero who walked a lonely path, misunderstood by even his closest followers, but a man in whom sacred pneuma had been able to work to bring about a union of the human and divine natures as much as this is possible in human beings. And through this union, the communication of what the kingdom of God might look like in action. Maybe something like the young people mentioned above.
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The good news, is that if it happened to one; to be able to raise his level of consciousness to the level needed for this, it is open to others to follow suit and become human expressions of the mysterious Cosmic Mind like consciousness some call God.
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Have a read of the linked article by Caitlin Johnstone and see what you make of it.
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Do not let automatic rejection get in the way of the uncomfortable-ness of having to engage something off of the normal path. It seems that pneuma works everywhere and this might be another example.
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One is always conscious of not letting the unknown stranger walk on past. That stranger may be the one for you.

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Cultural to Geopolitical to Creation Stress

Who worries or cares today?
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Have you noticed the increasing amount of concern being expressed overseas of late? The linked article by Col. Andrew Bacevich is just one of many starting to appear regularly on the more main stream alternate media blogs in the US and Europe. The increase in internal US cultural stressors, particularly evident in the current implosion of the Mueller debacle and the continuing increase in identity politics fragmentation, coupled with the need for the US military to start looking at having to recruit 16 year old youths, triggers some anxiety. Additionally, the increasing proliferation of gun related massacres in the US is frightening.
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This of course is not isolated to the US. The recent revelations concerning the Malaysian Government rejecting the professional conduct of the MH17 joint inquiry, seems to put a previous and current Australian Foreign Minister in a somewhat embarrassing position.
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Poor Old Blighty also seems to be in a real pickle, what with teetering government, then a new Executive after a bloodbath massacre of the old Theresa May crew and, the ongoing BREXIT fiasco.
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Additionally, an article penned by Roberto Savio in Italy The Precipitous Barbarisation of Our Times also doesn’t skirt the issues.
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All of the above of course is only talking about the antics of “squabbling politicians as reported mainly by scavenging newspaper scribblers”
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The critical thing is, who cares, who even takes any interest these days as long as there is a perception that there is still something to get out of the trough?
I guess that I am too old not to remember that not so many decades ago there was an idea that was current in society, that in life, it is better to live for a purpose greater than oneself.
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The collapse of religious meaning in Western European culture of both Catholicism of the Roman rite and Protestant variants of Calvinist persuasions is finally realistically looking as if heading into a terminal phase.
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Take a moment to read the linked articles and see how good an argument you can mount to counter Bacevich’s and Salvio’s assertions.

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The horrors of a blind faith mentality

Propaganda lies to the Authors as much as the Audience
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Crashing through the Everglades he stood there in the quagmire, detritus of our times.
Fuming I had to go around him forcing me to then enquire …
What of this hell does have you standing here … here in my fastest drive through door way?
Highways of detritus and doggy type food tins hither thither. No plastic bags though, an improvement now I suppose, but as I look over this trash, it says more about you there stuck in this stuff.
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And here is a winner, a Bi-Line Newspaper head line …
I am here to see if anyone is at least now aware of what we in particular; westernised, globalised, militarised, capitalistic conquerors of all, went along with in pursuit of this most gloriously fed wealth stream. Only for us, the wealth of nature and what other men, women and children have done to plan and work for their existence in the future, which after the plunder will exist no more?
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This is my virgin trial as I am a visitor as such, with no prior contamination from the hoards that are here. What it took in life times of other peoples to destroy, the westernised, plagiarised, militarised, criminalised torturers lot have done to these others in an instant almost, while singing with “purity of voice and message” the hypocrisy of which, one would have to be here to appreciate.
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And then back home they go to a civil society with a sense of morality and honour and propriety of respect toward one another. Do they realise they will need to become aware of how to prepare should depravity and loss of respect for their humanity occur, when conscience and a deep sense of the preciousness of life vanishes, if the enormity of their sinfulness strikes?
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Within a greed and debt ridden, moral-less mentality, how can the governors prepare a way out to encourage strength in an individual to continue to hold their countenance for a love of the land and all the creatures one and all that inhabit it?
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In the rising levels of chaos, is a blind faith enough to know how to be a true expression of the life force that creates all?
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Only the hubris of the exceptional and/or elect seems to make them think so!
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Failed Humanism

Religious reaction
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Alastair Crooke’s article is very interesting in as much as it seems to reflect amongst others, on a growing panic in the Jewish Tribe.
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Has it, at its base, a possible late flowering religious reaction to failed Humanism, which the Christian West has been going through now for the last three hundred odd years, coming to a peek in the 19th century, with the resultant cultural wreckage spreading until the present?
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Surprisingly to this observer, uninformed of development in Jewish religion and culture, is it possible that similar to the scream of Luther and Calvinism, the latter connected with Humanism in Bourgeoisie culture, is being heard here too?
The author quoted by Crooke seems well into fear and panic, that the darkness of the Luther prescription, blind faith, and the fanatical fear of sinfulness resulting in the search for the elect status of an individual is returning to Jewish culture. Albeit in the Jewish case, all of the tribe having to qualify, not just the individual – and the fracturing effect that will have.
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(“But what we can observe frightening Caspit so in his Ma’ariv pleading, is his fear that Israel may be transiting now, from liberal Zionism (of the early Kibbutzim stalwarts) back towards Yahweyism.”)
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If this is anywhere near the mark, one could see some of the underlying driving forces.
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Since the end of World War II, one could almost entertain the thought that the new Israel took roots in the U.S.A. with Palestine, being only a colony of that parent.
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The problem with setting up camp in the U.S., is that any ethnic group is subjected to the overwhelming cultural religion of “America” itself, underpinned by the secular humanist values of ego, will and reason. – A most individualistic inducing way where blind faith and fanatical literalism has long ago killed off the church base of Western religion in the Eurocentric world.
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The U.S. as the Eurocentric white world’s great hope to save Christian culture has comprehensively failed to accept that sacred vocation, irrespective of how much it tells itself that it is the exceptional nation, based on the pilgrim city on the hill. – A reference to the temple on temple mount in Jerusalem and almost a subconscious understanding now of the U.S’s. new Israel role?
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Tangentially, this is an irony when looking at the fanatical literal Calvinists in the American Christian Zionist political right doing everything they can to try and set up the Palestine colony, but in the process sowing havoc within the new Israel and doing its bit in starting to tear the U.S. apart from the inside. How can rapture happen if that comes to pass?
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The much touted demise of Islam through the overwhelming strength of U.S. led Western humanist culture where greed, comfort and plenty will ride triumphant was comprehensively answered in the negative by the catastrophe of September 11, 2001. The metaphorical/metaphysical significance of that event in both religious and cultural terms is overwhelming and still reverberating throughout the Eurocentric white world.
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And so…
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How can the Jewish Tribe continue to remain “pure” in this sort of battle between the individual versus the tribe when to some, Yahweh’s Law is being gradually diminished?
Does it mean that being Jewish in the 21st century has become ethnic cultural, and not exclusively ethnic religious – Similar perhaps to the tremendous pressures that are tearing the Western Christian religious culture to pieces?
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Probably completely off the mark but it does trigger thoughtfulness.
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Further surveying of the U.S. landscape will now be needed for signs of any other “indications” hinting of these wild thoughts.
Follow the link and see what you make of Alistair Crooke’s ideas.

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