In the art of modern intelligence and counter-intelligence, implementing multiple cloaks are quite useful. Creations of illusion are not magical, or mystical, but they are hints of planned suggestion and a keen understanding of human nature. One of the most historic and prolific examples of intel and counter-intel, or disinformation, was Operation Bodyguard used by the Allies in WWII to hide and deceive the German High Command of the time and place of the 1944 D-Day Normandy invasion. For the removal of Palestinians from the U.N. partitioned land, villages, and homes for Zionist Israel occupation, in comparison there was little difference.
As already examined in the previous Part II, the amount of U.S. funding mobilized for the creation, resettlement, and defense of the new state of Israel was well-organized and well cloaked. Between 1939 and May 1948 the Jewish Agency for Israel raised $3.5 trillion in today’s dollars (New York Times, August 10, 1961). And this agency is simply one Zionist organization out of many more. With the money raised the arms smuggling byThe Sonneborn Group – Institute to the Haganah in Palestine followed (see CIA Memorandum above). There was still one major issue, or cloak to be devised. With the Nazis destroyed, the majority of surviving Jews throughout Europe wanted to remain and rebuild their lives. Rabbi Klaussner, a Zionist in charge of displaced persons in post-WWII Europe, reported the difficulty to the Jewish American Conference May 2, 1948…
“I am convinced people must be forced to go to Palestine… We must, instead of providing ‘displaced persons’ with comfort, create the greatest possible discomfort for them.”
— What Price Israel?, Alfred H. Lilienthal, Infinity Publishing; Anniversary edition (March 1, 2004)
Hence, the underground campaign of “Chomer ‘Enoshi Tov” began. (line break)
European Refugee Camps Create Palestinian Refugee Camps (line break)
If you are curious by what is meant by the Hebrew “Chomer ‘Enoshi Tov“, then the perfect expert to ask is Noam Chomsky. In a 2014 interview he used the term while discussing the Jewish Holocaust:
“Well the translation of the title [ed. Chomer Enoshi Tov] would be something like “Good Human Material.” What [Yosef Grodzinsky] means is that the Zionist emissaries had a doctrine that able-bodied men and women between 18 and 35 had to be compelled to go to Palestine where they would be cannon-fodder for the coming conflict. Now the others they didn’t care much about and even undermined efforts to save children and so on. Well, all of this was going on in the immediate wake of the holocaust involving the survivors. No concern about them. You look through the 1950s, there’s virtually no discussion of the holocaust.”
British containment of the SS Exodus, 1947
“Good Human” cannon-fodder for the conquest of Palestine and the independence and defense of Israel. Ben-Gurion, Rabbi Klaussner, and many other Zionist envoys would use this phrase repeatedly regarding the repopulation of Palestine.
From 1934 as part of the long maritime trail of Jewish refugees escaping Nazi Germany to Palestine, the S.S. Exodus in July 1947 had carried the most passengers, 4,515 Jewish refugees, until the Atzmaut in January 1948. And as Noam Chomsky correctly explains above, in popular American media and literature from 1947 to 1958, no one was interested in the Holocaust until the 1960’s when the fate of world perception and acceptance of Israel hung in the balance. When the film Exodus had hit American theaters in 1960, the general perception began to significantly change. Although Leon Uris’s 1958 bestseller inspired the film, the actual events were far less extraordinary than the book and film both glamorized.
The late Hebrew University of Jerusalem professor of sociology, Baruch Kimmerling, corrects and expounds the misguided literary and cinematic portrayals:
“When the [SS Exodus] embarked, the UN Special Committee on Palestine was holding discussions and Ben-Gurion, the head of the Jewish Agency, the primary governing body of the state-in-formation, felt that the plight of Jewish refugees in Europe needed to be dramatized in order to attract more sympathy for the Jewish struggle over Palestine. The British authorities had refused to let the immigrants disembark in Palestine, or even to take refuge in transitional camps in Cyprus, forcing the boat to be redirected back to Germany. To prevent such a ghastly outcome, Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann persuaded the French Prime Minister, Leon Blum, to host the refugees. Ben-Gurion rejected this solution out of hand, and the poor survivors remained on board for seven months. — Israel’s Culture of Martydom, by Baruch Kimmerling, The Nation, Dec. 22, 2004. http://www.thenation.com/article/israels-culture-martyrdom/
And further, more accurate events are just as astonishing…
“Ben-Gurion’s insensitivity was rooted in his “Palestine-centric” attitude, best exemplified by his 1938 remark that “if I knew it was possible to save all children of Germany by their transfer to England and only half of them by transferring them to the Land of Israel, I would choose the latter, because we are faced not only with the accounting of these children but also with the historical accounting of the Jewish people.” This was not merely a rhetorical declaration. Grodzinsky tells us with great pain how Ben-Gurion and other Zionist leaders vetoed the immigration of 1,000 orphans, who were in physical and emotional danger as a result of the harsh winter of 1945, from the camps in Germany to England, where the Jewish community had managed to secure them permits. Another group of roughly 500 children of camp inhabitants was barred, after Zionist intervention, from reaching France, whose rabbinical institutions had offered them safe haven.”
— Ibid.
To add further insult to the plight of Jewish-European Holocaust refugees, few American and Western European newspaper and radio consumers were informed at the time that many of the Exodus passengers had applied for immigration visas to the United States (denied by Zionists) and/or many more were simply wanting to settle in more peaceful countries — a state of affairs Palestine certainly could not claim. Israel was anything but peaceful.
In the end, however, Ben-Gurion’s and Zionism’s propaganda scheme succeeded despite Jewish-European refugees being sick of war, fighting, and concentration-refugee camps and hundreds to thousands had become anti-Zionists!
The Giyus and The Sieff Group
As mentioned before, the ingathering of Jews into Palestine was not going to Zionist expectations; not enough Jewish-European DP’s were flocking voluntarily in rapid waves to the new Israel state. The slow low numbers would not survive the continued Arab conflicts. What was needed to abate Jewish war-fears was a growing army, the Israeli Defense Force (IDF), to wage the conflicts. Because Americans and European Jews would never agree to or publicly side with another militaristic conflict, Zionist came up with an alternative target: the most desperate of Jewish DP’s. In 1947 these men and their families were still residents of WWII refugee camps throughout Europe. Immediately the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee implemented a $25-million IDF recruitment campaign. On this campaign David Ben-Gurion and Chief of Staff Israel Galili reported…
“The manpower shortage for the fighting army forced modifications in the illegal immigration plan.
…New operational orders were issued: No more boats to bring homeless refugees to a safe haven. From the moment Ben-Gurion’s new orders were sent to the Mossad people in France through Shadmi, the decisions of the February 29th convention in Paris (with Ha’apaláh, B’richáh, and Haganáh delegates) were getting into effect. Haganáh and Mossad took upon themselves the task of moving fifteen thousand Jews of draft age and capability from Europe to Palestine by May 15th. Quotas were imposed on organizers in the various countries, aimed at carrying out the plan to bring in five thousand in March and April, and another ten thousand in May. Mossad people actually received stricter orders: From this moment on, no immigrants who lacked military capability were to be brought to Palestine. “We need only persons who fit the Haganáh,” wrote Ben-Gurion and Galili to commanders of Mossad in Europe.”
— In the Shadow of the Holocaust: The Struggle between Jews and Zionists in the Aftermath of World War II, by Yosef Grodzinsky, Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2004, pp. 187-188.
But this campaign failed, badly.
“Upon being called to fulfill “their duty” and join the IDF… most Jewish DPs were reluctant. A failed voluntary draft drive (to which less than 0.3 percent of the DP population volunteered) led to compulsory conscription.”
— Ibid, p. 226.
Mossad-Haganah fighters, 1947 – Wikipedia
This conscription was called Giyus, and any draft evaders were treated very harshly. Giyus-evaders were blacklisted, fired from jobs, given heavy fines, evicted from their living quarters, food rations cut, and yes, even beaten (Ibid, p. 199). This is quite extraordinary when these “draftees” had never even lived in Palestine, much less became combat soldiers for a foreign nation which did not exist in 1947 and early 1948!
With perpetual Arab-Zionist conflict in Palestine greatly hindering war-efforts, on July 27, 1943, Great Britain and the U.S. State Department came very close to issuing a “reverse Balfour” resolution if the covert Zionist activities didn’t cease. When a Zionist group — which included the aforementioned David Niles (White House official under Roosevelt and Truman), and David Lilienthal (chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority), Ben Cohen (White House staff), Robert R. Nathan (economist in Dept. of Commerce), and Harvard graduate David Ginsberg (assistant from the Securities and Exchange Commission during Roosevelt’s New Deal plan) all known as The Sieff Group — got wind of the Balfour reversal…
…they took immediate action with further coalition help from Felix Frankfurter, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Bernard Baruch and others, and effectively killed the reversal.
— Israel in the Mind of America,by Peter Grose, New York, NY: Knopf Doubleday, 1st ed., 1983, p. 177, 178-182.
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The 1949 Palestinian-Arab Refugee Crisis
James G. McDonald was the U.S. envoy to Palestine regarding the Zionist-Arab conflict and the growing displacement of Arab families. Authors Ilan Pappe and Rosemarie Esber describe it as Israel’s ethnic expulsion and cleansing of Palestine. But McDonald reported the crisis in 1948 to President Truman this way:
“The Arab refugee tragedy is rapidly reaching catastrophic proportions and should be treated as a disaster… Of approximately 400,000 refugees approaching winter, with cold heavy rains will, it is estimated, kill more than 100,000 old men, women and children who are shelterless and have little to no food.”
— Fallen Pillars: U.S. Policy towards Palestine and Israel since 1945,by Donald Neff, Reprint Ed. Washington D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 2002, p. 68.
From 400,000 refugees in 1948 the numbers jumped to approximately 750,000 in 1949. Many of them fled to neighboring Arab countries. U.S. foreign diplomats in Cairo, Egypt and Amman, Jordan reported that their two countries were so overcrowded with starving weak Palestinian families, their already inundated almost non-existent resources were pushed to near collapse.
Remarkably those Arab states continued to donate some $11-million to refugee aids. The U.S. Department of State tracked these activities from April to December 1948 stating:
“This sum, in light of the very slender budgets of most of these governments, is relatively enormous.
…the total direct relief offered.. by the Israeli government to date consists of 500 cases of oranges. Meanwhile, Israel had acquired formerly Palestinian-owned properties worth at least $480 million.”
— Ibid, pp. 69, 72.
Palestinian refugees in Amman, 1949
President Truman naively believed the Zionist-lead Israeli state could coexist in Palestine with Arabs as a single state of shared power. But Truman’s 1948 Presidential election had also been bought for him by American Zionist leaders and their organization’s funding and was under heavy pressure to immediately recognize the nation of Israel to the world DESPITE equally heavy opposition by the State Department. Truman tried to persuade Israel to allow Arab refugees to return to their original homes under this coexisting belief and had Mark Ethridge negotiate it. After being continually refused by Israel, Ethridge very disgusted reported to the State Department “What I can see is an abortion of justice and humanity to which I do not want to be midwife…” (Ibid p. 75).
Finally the State Department had one last card to play: the $49-million of unallocated funds from an Export-Import Bank loan to Israel. They threatened to stop it unless Israel allowed at least 200,000 Arab refugees to return to Palestine. When the U.S. coordinator on Palestine Refugee Matters delivered the threat to an angry Israeli ambassador, he returned to his office and in less than an hour received a notification from the White House that Truman was dissociating himself from any withholding of the Ex-Im Bank loan. (line break)
U.S. Popular Media Post-1953 to Today
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If you understand what is meant by the concept “a conflict of interest,” then one doesn’t have to search too far to find Zionist backgrounds or sway in key areas. As noted earlier in Part II, Zionist knew how to exploit the basic nature of the American political system including the intimate relationship it had with media sources influencing popular public opinion or pressure.
A noteworthy example of Zionist influence on American media is the acclaimed academic and co-writer co-creator to the U.N. Charter, Virginia Gildersleeve. Her struggle against the creation of Israel is one as well dramatized as David and Goliath, but was nowhere near as popular or familiar in 1930’s – 1940’s America, not even into the 1950’s.
Virginia Gildersleeve
When Gildersleeve wrote in defense of human rights and humanitarian action for Palestine, and for Palestinian families to be allowed to return to their homes and villages, a widespread campaign was launched against her, stereotyping her work as “anti-Semitic” as Zionists pandered upon Holocaust sympathies. Toward the end of her exceptional career she devoted herself to human rights in the Middle East testifying before Congressional committees, even directly lobbying President Truman to rectify the horrible neglect and violations taking place in Palestine, but to no avail. In her memoirs she wrote the defeats…”[were attributed to]the Zionist control of the media of communication.“
Zionist control was indeed apparent. A study of 1917 news coverage of WWI and post-war reparations (the contentious roots of the Balfour Declaration) revealed that editorial opinion leaned heavily in favor of the Zionist posture. This continued into the 1920’s. Political analyst and author Kathleen Christison writes…
“…editorials and news stories alike applauded Jewish enterprise, heralding a Jewish return to Palestine as ‘glorious news.’
The relatively heavy press coverage is an indicator of the extent of Zionist influence even in this early period. One scholar has estimated that, as of the mid-1920s, approximately half of all New York Times articles were placed by press agents, suggesting that U.S. Zionist organizations may have placed many of the articles on Zionism’s Palestine endeavors.” — Perceptions of Palestine: Their Influence on U.S. Middle East Policy, by Kathleen Christison, 1st Ed. Berkeley, CA: University California Press, 2000, p. 40.
In 1953 author Alfred Lilienthal described the sweeping capture of American newspapers, magazines, and radio stations as remarkably complete. Their “…stories as well as editorial columns, gave primarily the Zionist views of events before, during, and after partition.” The Saturday Evening Post came under ruthless attack by Zionists for publishing an article by Milton Mayer criticizing Jewish nationalism as overly zealous. Secretary of State George C. Marshall, after threatening Israel’s callous treatment of Palestinians, severely underestimated the American Zionist media networks’ ability to hide opposing views to the conflict.
In a March 1949 study by the Department of State it revealed that the general American public was “unaware of the Palestine refugee problem, since it has not been hammered away at by the press or radio.” Most Americans were consumed by the threat of Soviet communism and the cold war, fed of course by most all major news mediums. Completing his book Palestine Is Our Business, author, Yale alum, and distinguished archaeologist Millar Burrows — also Vice-President of the National Committee to Combat Anti-Seminism — wrote:
“A terrible wrong has been done to the native people of [Palestine]. The blame for what has happened must be distributed among all concerned, including ourselves.
…the [counter]plan for Palestine advocated by the Arabs was a democracy with freedom of religion and complete separation of religion and the State, as in this country.
All the Arab refugees who want to return to their homes must be allowed and helped to do so, and must be restored to their own villages, houses, and farms or places of business, with adequate compensation from the Government of Israel for destruction and damage.”
— Palestine Is Our Business,by Millar Burrows, Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1949, p. 11, 131, 154.
As a result of his book, the American Zionist Council published and distributed articles slandering Burrows’ work as “an anti-Semitic opus.“
Dorothy Thompson – “Woman of the Year”
Dorothy Thompson, c. 1937
She was often called “The First Lady of American Journalism” and considered by many colleagues a trailblazer in the field, Dorothy Thompson also made Time magazine’s 2nd most popular woman in America behind Eleanor Roosevelt. Because of Thompson’s poignant criticism of Adolph Hitler’s methods and rise to power while reporting in Germany, she was banned from the country. Upon returning to the U.S., she began writing a very popular syndicated column called “On the Record” which often delivered crisp, outspoken and politically centered analysis of current issues. In her advocacy for the relief of Jews in Europe and Nazi Germany, especially as a woman, Thompson naturally became a celebrity in American journalism, particularly with Zionist. The 1942 box-office hit film by George Stevens “Woman of the Year” with Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy was based upon Thompson’s career. A Broadway play was also made about Thompson played by Lauren Bacall.
Effected by Holocaust atrocities and married at the time to a Hungarian Jewish husband (Josef Bard), Thompson at first favored the creation of the state of Israel in Palestine… until she physically went there herself in 1945. Thompson reversed her pro-Zionist position to a pro-Arab pro-Palestinian one, and what resulted was a complete fall from historical stardom. In his April 2015 article on Mondoweiss.net Gil Maguire gives tribute to Thompson writing…
“Dorothy Thompson’s [career] is truly a remarkable story. Her apex was probably 1948 when Claire Booth Luce and others wanted her to run for president. She’d been one of Zionism’s most famous and influential spokesmen. Her defection, in 1949, created great anger in the Jewish/Zionist communities, and in few short years her career was in tatters and her influence largely gone. Today, Dorothy Thompson is virtually unknown and unremembered. This fascinating woman who deserves to be an icon of the feminist movement, is rarely, if ever, mentioned as an important female historical figure.”
In the 1950 documentary “Sands of Sorrow” produced by the Council for the Relief of Palestine Arab Refugees, Thompson speaks specifically about the conditions of Palestinian Arab refugee camps. Sadly, in speaking out against Zionism and its conquest and occupation of Palestine, Dorothy Thompson was methodically erased from history.
There is a modern effort to bring back to public light Dorothy’s work in a documentary film entitled “The Silencing – Of Dorothy Thompson” by Alternate Focus. Below is a 4-minute teaser of the upcoming film…
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To conclude this 3-part series I want to repeat a quote I often use which makes a point about sources; that is sources of information we accept, or internalize, or prefer, or for better or for worse… take as gospel. It goes like this:
“To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born
is to remain always a child.” — Marcus Tullius Cicero
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But those words of wisdom are not enough. How does one learn whether they have been taught and raised by a family, community, and nation that is on the ‘right side of history’? How can one, as can be humanly possible, decide what is right or wrong as a 4-year old? Or a 10-year old, or even a 19-year old? There is probably no one, perfect, across-the-board answer at any select moment of time and place. However, over time and with the evolution of the collective human brains, greater degrees of right and wrong, and almost right and almost wrong do indeed surface. Yes, many of them are through trial and error, but many are also learned through honest in-depth comparing and contrasting. This comparing-contrasting technique should also include subject matter one might find uncomfortable or offensive — this is truer analysis and broader critical-thinking.
There is however, an identifiable flaw or possible flaw in that process.
Through acts of violence, death, and literal or metaphorical cutting-out-tongues or amputating the ability to write, and so on, that could or does distort history and data which then leads to contaminated conclusions — it becomes even HARDER to decipher ‘the full real story‘. Why? Most often history is written by the Victors and one must dig deeper, literally and metaphorically, to hear, read, and digest the “losers” side of the story. Not too many people I know care to do that sort of legwork-homework.
Coming full circle now, on the historical subject of Easter/Eostre weekend at Starbucks in Part I and then the expansive factors and influences of WWI and WWII Zionist activities and counter-activities for the planned creation of Israel in Part II and III, we’ve discovered a broader lesser-known backdrop (if any at all) of modern Middle Eastern affairs, turmoil, and continued conflict. Obtaining this wider vivid picture created from high-zoom capabilities with multi-colored, multi-textured, multi-layered, more accurate honest representations cannot be achieved with one single camera, from one single angle, or one single frame. One must explore. One must experiment, usually multiple times, to capture the perfect image.
I dare say that my well-intended but very misinformed Fundy-Evangelist that evening at Starbucks likely “faithfully” believed one image, one angle from one camera was all his life and America needed when it came to world politics, religion and terrorism. Please, please don’t make that mistake! Completing difficult intensive homework in school or college should never stop after the graduation.
I welcome any thoughts or questions below. Otherwise, thank you for reading these three rather long extensive posts.
Live Well — Love Much — Laugh Often — Learn Always
This is the continuation from Part I and will examine the next four additional areas of how and why the United States and the United Nations were pawns for Zionist Judaism’s conquest and occupation of Palestine. (line break)
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Self-determination. What does it mean? The fast answer is “the freedom to make your own choices.” Sure that’s a true pure definition… if one lives on an island in the Pacific and no other human beings are on the island. Is that a very comprehensive definition and representation of real life? Not really. The Merriam-Webster dictionary has another definition: the people of a territorial unit to determine their own future political status. Better? Yes and no. I would imagine this extended definition raises more questions than it answers. The principle of self-determination according to these definitions seem well and good, but the practice of self-determination in life and the world, even within family dynamics, is not so cut-and-dry. Taking these two definitions to a macro-scale or global-scale, and the waters begin to get quite muddy; in some cases, sludge or quicksand.
“TheUN Charterclarifies two meanings of the term self-determination. First, a state is said to have the right of self-determination in the sense of having the right to choose freely its political, economic, social, and cultural systems. Second, the right to self-determination is defined as the right of a people to constitute itself in a state or otherwise freely determine the form of its association with an existing state. Both meanings have their basis in the charter (Article 1, paragraph 2; and Article 55, paragraph 1). With respect to dependent territories, the charter asserts that administering authorities should undertake to ensure political advancement and the development of self-government (Article 73, paragraphs a and b; and Article 76, paragraph b).”
— Encyclopædia Britannica Online, s. v. “self-determination”, accessed April 05, 2016,http://www.britannica.com/topic/self-determination.
A better definition don’t you think? Not really… (line break)
Paris Peace Conference of 1919 (line break)
1919 Paris Peace Conference
After the defeat of the European Central Powers in World War I, the victors of the Allied and Associated Powers met in Paris, France to address and discuss the fate of those beaten nations (peoples) and their territories. The Central Powers primarily consisted of the Ottoman Empire, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Bulgaria. Both the Germans and the Ottomans had colonies in Asia and Africa as well. See world map below.
Two new terms or principles are introduced into future world conferences over nations or “territories” and their defeated peoples: 1) trusteeship, and 2) mandate.
Trusteeship — a defeated nation’s territories and it peoples, that are considered unable to govern themselves, are entrusted to another state which was victorious. Mandate — a victorious trustee-nation receives a mandate to rebuild the defeated territory creating the necessary foundations for self-determination and independence.
Map of World War I. The Allies are depicted in green, the Central Powers in orange, and neutral countries in grey.
All very simple, right? No. The above world map is of July 1914, at the beginning of World War I. The Paris Peace Conference begins in January 1919. When the some 25 nations around the world — representing a global jury — participating in the post-war conference convened, they were unaware of the Sykes-Picot Agreement of May 1916, when the outcome of the war was still far from certain. It was signed by Sir Mark Sykes of Great Britain and François Georges-Picot of France with the assent of imperial Russia. Why is this highly volatile monkey-wrench important? Because as early as November 1915 Sykes and Picot, with the knowledge of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, began negotiating how the Ottoman Empire would be divided up if defeated. Key leaders and nations in East Europe, the Near and Middle East… who had sacrificed their soldiers and resources into the war against the Central Powers — including against fellow Muslim Arabs — and with certain major political “promises” given to them by Western powers for siding with them… were never notified of this secret agreement.
“This secret arrangement conflicted in the first place with pledges already given by the British to the Hāshimite dynast Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī, sharif of Mecca, who was about to bring the Arabs of the Hejaz into revolt against the Turks on the understanding that the Arabs would eventually receive a much more important share of the fruits of victory. It also excited the ambitions of Italy, to whom it was communicated in August 1916, after the Italian declaration of war against Germany, with the result that it had to be supplemented, in April 1917, by the Agreement of Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne, whereby Great Britain and France promised southern and southwestern Anatolia to Italy. The defection of Russia from the war canceled the Russian aspect of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, and the Turkish Nationalists’ victories after the military collapse of the Ottoman Empire led to the gradual abandonment of its projects for Anatolia. The Arabs, however, who had learned of the Sykes-Picot Agreement through the publication of it, together with other secret treaties of imperial Russia, by the Soviet Russian government late in 1917, were scandalized by it, and their resentment persisted despite the modification of its arrangements for the Arab countries by the Allies’ Conference of San Remo in April 1920.”
— Encyclopædia Britannica Online, s. v. “Sykes-Picot Agreement”, accessed April 05, 2016,http://www.britannica.com/event/Sykes-Picot-Agreement.
Arab Delegation to Paris
No one from the West bothered to ask the peoples of these “minor” territories or their leaders how they wished themselves to be self-determined or governed.
*Sidenote — For an exceptional more comprehensive perspective of pre, World War I, and post-WWI, watch Al-Jazeera’s World War One Through Arab Eyes.
U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and the State Department was sympathetic to the Arab cause presented by Emir Prince Faisal, however, the American delegation to Paris, along with heavy support from the U.S. Senate in Congress and a delegation of Jewish Zionists attending — which incidentally included U.S. Supreme Court Justices Louis Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter, and officials from the WZO — had already outmaneuvered Wilson and the State Department as well as several prominent American Christian leaders, such as Harry E. Fosdick and Henry S. Coffin, both who firmly opposed Zionism and a state of Israel in Palestine. With the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration, both done privately years before with France and Great Britain, President Wilson tried one more tactic: send a commission to Palestine to examine the Palestinian Mandate in person.
King-Crane Commission
Many American students, history teachers, or the general public know anything about the King-Crane Commission to Palestine in 1919. The purpose of the commission was to learn, from Syrians and Palestinians living there, the attitudes and real viability for “resettling” their land and homes. After interviewing the inhabitants between June 10 and July 21, 1919, also entitled Inter-Allied Commission on Mandates in Turkey, the commission reported that if a Jewish state were created in Palestine, it would accomplish only:
“…the gravest trespass upon the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine,”[and subjecting them]“…to steady financial and social pressure to surrender the land, would be a gross violation of the principle[of self-determination]and of the peoples’ rights…”
“…the well-being and development[by the existing inhabitants formed]a sacred trust [where those present peoples should become free and their national governments] should derive their authority from the initiative and free choice of the native populations.”
[The report continues stating that following meetings with Jewish representatives who made it clear that] … “the Zionists looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine…”
The report ended stating that in order for dispossession to take place, armed force would be required and unavoidable, so the commission urged the Peace Conference to dismiss the Zionist proposals stating “the project for making Palestine distinctly a Jewish commonwealth should be given up.“
President Wilson’s and the King-Crane Commission’s efforts would be heavily suppressed and for naught due to the publicity power wielded by Brandeis, Frankfurter, Chaim Weizmann, the WZO and Yiddish newspapers, further backed by their associated U.S. Senators in D.C. All combined they simply buried the above report.
The en mass immigration of Jews to Palestine commenced. Consequently, the four continents, arguably the world, were pushed on turbulent bloody hyper-convoluted paths for centuries to come.
Inspiration or Coercion?
After the newly formed (Western) League of Nations made it acceptable for Jews to migrate to Palestine, most less-Zionistic Jews at the time felt little need to go. This is clearly evident by a plethora of documented cases, but for the sake of your time I list three below.
U.S. Supreme Court and ZOA vs. Gibson — From 1919 to 1924 Hugh S. Gibson was the U.S. Ambassador to Poland. Most of his work there was to accurately assess Poland’s needs for self-determination in the immediate wake of WWI and how the U.S. could help. Back home in American newspapers were numerous stories of anti-Semitic violence throughout Poland. After investigating the alleged incidents and severities, Gibson reported to William Castle and the State Department that the American news articles of “Polish militarism, anti-Semitism and expansionism” were over estimated and in a personal letter to his mother wrote: “These yarns are exclusively of foreign manufacture for anti-Polish purposes.” (Hoover Institution, HGP, Box 17, f. William R. Castle, 1920 and Hoover Institution, HGP, Box 24, Diaries, f. Mary K. Simons-Gibson, 1919)
When Supreme Court Justice Brandeis and ZOA delegate Frankfurter were made aware of Gibson’s dispatches, they both demanded a meeting with him. Gibson described their meeting this way accusing him that:
“I had done more mischief to the Jewish race than anyone who had lived in the last century. They said… that my reports on the Jewish question had gone around the world and had undone their work… They finally said that I had stated that the stories of excesses against Jews were exaggerated, to which I replied that they certainly were and I should think any Jew would be glad to know it.”
— Fallen Pillars: U.S. Policy towards Palestine and Israel since 1945. Reprint Ed. Washington D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 2002, p. 20
Ambassador to Poland, Hugh S. Gibson
Gibson also noted that Frankfurter alluded to him that if he continued writing such reports, Zionists would block his upcoming Ambassador’s confirmation by the U.S. Senate. By May 1924 Gibson was reassigned as U.S. Minister to Switzerland.
1930’s Germany and Zionism — Unlike the inaccurate news reports of anti-Semitic violence in Poland, the rise of the German National Socialist Workers Party (Nazis) certainly gave cause to Jews in Germany to flee for their lives. President Franklin D. Roosevelt took action to help on two separate occasions: in 1938 and 1943. The British tried to follow suit in 1947. Morris Ernst – International Envoy for Refugees for Roosevelt, and Harry N. Howard – U.S. State Department Near East, both wrote about American-British efforts to welcome in near 1-million Jews from Eastern Europe:
“…active Jewish leaders[in the U.S.]decried, sneered and then attacked me as if I were a traitor. At one dinner party I was openly accused of furthering this plan of freer immigration[into the U.S.]in order to undermine political Zionism… Zionist friends of mine opposed it.” Ernst continued writing that the Jewish leadership in America were “little concerned about human blood if it is not their own.”
“…there was discussion of liberalizing American immigration laws in this period.” Harry Howard states in a 1950 interview, “The Zionists opposed that liberalization on the ground that this would not be a solution as far as they were concerned. They wanted a political, not necessarily a humanitarian, solution — that is, they wanted a state.”
In the 1960 July issue of The Spectator magazine, journalist Erskine Childers wrote discussing in detail the talks between FDR, Britain, Ernst, and the Jewish DP’s (Displaced Persons) from Europe…
“…[Zionist sabotaging]was done by seeing to it that Western countries did not open their doors, widely and immediately, to the inmate of the DP camps.”
“It is incredible that so grave and grim a campaign has received so little attention in accounts of the Palestine struggle — it was a campaign that literally shaped all subsequent history. It was done by sabotaging specific Western schemes to admit Jewish DPs.”
image courtesy of Timothy Hughes Rare & Early Newspapers
Hate Attacks on Iraqi Jews Faked? — By 1949-50 Iraqi Jews were either being coerced out of the country or due to economic conditions willing to consider immigration to Palestine, or both. Due to the ancient history of exiles and the Jewish Diaspora, Zionists had fervent inspirations to persuade Iraqi Jews to Palestine. Many Iraqi Jews were not that motivated to leave their current homes. Rabbi Sassoon Khadourie, Chief Rabbi of Iraq, spoke about covert Zionist bombings during Operation Ezra and Nehemiah to Israel from Iraq. Although counterarguments spoke of Sassoon being a propaganda puppet for pro-British Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Said, in his last weeks and days before dying in 1971 Rabbi Khadourie never recanted his statements. However, the former CIA operative Wilbur Crane Eveland to the Middle East, specifically Iraq in 1950-53, reappraised his life and work in his book Ropes of Sand he writes about the synagogue bombings as…
“…attempts to portray the Iraqis as anti-American and to terrorize the Jews”
“Soon leaflets began to appear urging Jews to flee to Israel… most of the world believed reports that Arab terrorism had motivated the flight of the Iraqi Jews whom the Zionists had ‘rescued’ really just in order to increase Israel’s Jewish population.”
Both of these men are joined in agreement by many authors and journalists. Naeim Giladi, a Jewish-Iraqi author, describes the consensus of his colleagues reappraisals…
“I write about what the first prime minister of Israel[Ben-Gurion]called ‘cruel Zionism.’ I write about it because I was part of it. Jews from Islamic lands did not emigrate willingly to Israel. Jews killed Jews.”
“…[Zionist]Jews on numerous occasions rejected genuine peace initiatives from their Arab neighbors.”
As can be expected inside the political game of counter-intelligence and disinformation, Zionist organizations and prominent members cried then and will cry today ‘forms of anti-Semitism.‘ I invite YOU to decide after examining all the relevant information now available.
Now for a brief respite from endless strife, I give some comic relief for you…
Alright, now back to business. We can laugh and enjoy life afterwards. (line break)
The Modern Israeli Lobby on Harry S. Truman (line break)
She is a prolific author, noted educator and academic, and has achieved prominence as a historian of the United States and its Jewish Americans. Naomi W. Cohen has been published several times over, but in her 2003 book The Americanization of Zionism, 1897-1948, she writes:
“Although Brandeis participated in the negotiations with England leading to the Balfour Declaration, his primary focus after[World War I]shifted from political to “pragmatic” or “practical” Zionism. Active behind the scenes and with his lieutenants throughout the decade, he encouraged American Jewish investment in the physical upbuilding of Palestine. That emphasis, also adopted by the ZOA, well suited the shift of world Zionism into its second phase, “Palestinianism”.”(p. 7)
As Europe began sliding back to political, ethnic, and economic turmoil in the 1920’s and 30’s, general American sentiment wanted nothing to do with their constant problems. In contrast to that U.S. sentiment, however, were American Zionist activists, Cohen explains, and their leaders maneuvering to divert polarizing Zionism into covert Palestinianism:
“…the retreat to Palestinianism wasn’t all bad. Coping with antisemitism, which increased in the 1920s, and with the grim conditions spawned by the Great Depression of the 1930s, American Jews dared not risk any major outbursts about Jewish statehood from their non-Jewish fellow Americans. Within American Jewish circles, Palestinianism, far less strident than political Zionism, permitted the spread of a “quiet” Zionism in synagogues and Jewish schools.”(p. 8)
AZEC Madison Square Garden rally, NY Sept 1945
Special interest groups, otherwise known as lobbies, play an important and controversial role in American politics and legislation. American Zionism recognized this tool early on and by 1943 was one of the most well-funded lobbies in the U.S. due in no small part to Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver. He created the American Zionist Emergency council (AZEC) and by the middle of WWII when buying a 5-pound bag of flour was 0.25-cents, the AZEC had a budget of $500,000. Its fundraising umbrella was the United Jewish Appeal which gained financial resources of $14 million in 1941 and $150 million by 1948 — four times more than the Red Cross received in donations from all Americans; in today’s dollars: $1.5 billion. In 1945 when Hillel Silver was made aware of a British move against Zionism…
“AZEC booked Madison Square Garden, ordered advertisements, and mailed 250,000 announcements — the first day. By the second day they had organized demonstrations in 30 cities, a letter-writing campaign, and convinced 27 U.S. Senators to give speeches.”
“Grassroots Zionist action groups were organized with more than 400 local committees under 76 state and regional branches. AZEC funded books, articles and academic studies; millions of pamphlets were distributed. There were massive petition and letter writing campaigns. AZEC targeted college presidents and deans, managing to get more than 150 to sign one petition.”
— Against Our Better Judgement, by Alison Weir, CSI Publishing, San Bernadino, CA: 2014, p. 37
This level of organization and swift action would make any of today’s wealthy Washington D.C. lobbies green with envy. If political leverage is the goal, then understanding the ropes and pulleys of our U.S. government and how to activate them for specific interests, then 1940’s AZEC’s and their UJA umbrella is a superb blueprint to follow.
Harvesting American Christianity
Today, Jews and Christians have a convenient interest in the other’s historical background. The relationship has certain mutual dynamics which are readily exploitable. This was no less true in the decades before, during, and after World War II. Hillel Silver, Louis Brandeis, AZEC, and other Zionists, including Felix Frankfurter, recognized this avenue toward a stronger Israel in Palestine as a significant long-term role. Heading up this push would be the original American Palestine Committee founded by Emanuel Neumann, later known in 1946 as the American Christian Palestine Committee (ACPC). The primary goal of the ACPC was to harness a group of prominent Christian Americans in moral and political support of Zionism…
“The initial impetus was given late in 1942 by prominent Protestants such as Reinhold Niebuhr, S. Ralph Harlow, Henry A. Atkinson, Daniel A. Poling, and Paul Tillich. Working with them as liaison with the Emergency Committee for Zionist Affairs were Milton Steinberg and Philip Bernstein, who enjoyed the full cooperation of Stephen S. Wise and Emanuel Neumann.
The Christian Council emphasized the need to destroy racial and religious discrimination and to demand justice for the Jewish people everywhere, but it considered Zionist objectives in Palestine the paramount goal and the basic solution to Jewish national homelessness. The council strove to gain the sympathy of churchmen and clergy by organizing conferences, arranging seminars, and publishing literature. The influence it exerted was out of proportion to its relatively limited membership.”
— Encyclopaedia of Zionism and Israel(ed. Patai), accessed April 10, 2016, http://www.iahushua.com/Zion/zionhol10.html
While American Protestant and Catholic leaders and their followers were being cuddled by Zionists at home, the reality in 1947-48 Palestine was bloody and covert. Palestinian Christians and Muslims, their institutions, churches, and mosques were attacked by Israeli militants. Citing a June 1948 report from the Haganah/IDF operations:
“The Christian “exodus” from the Holy Land can be traced to 1948, when more than 750,000 Palestinians were forced from their homes by the creation of the State of Israel. With hundreds of Palestinian villages destroyed and at least half of the indigenous population displaced to refugee camps internally or in neighboring countries, Christians and Muslims — whose roots in the Holy Land stretched back for centuries — suffered the same fate.”
— What sparked the Christian exodus from the Holy Land?, Institute for Middle East Understanding, 2012, accessed April 10, 2016, http://imeu.org/article/christians-in-the-holy-land-under-israeli-siege
This sort of harassment, attacks, and human-rights violations by Zionist-Israeli operations on Palestinians still continue to this day along with America’s political Right and U.S. military support.
President Harry Truman is Bought
Truman with Senators McGrath and Green, c. 1948
Howard McGrath was the Chairman of the Democratic Party from 1947-49 and bluntly informed Abraham Feinberg and other Zionist supporters that President Truman cannot possibly win the 1948 election against Dewey unless he sees the American people, stating:
“The President[Truman]has to make a trip from coast to coast. He wants to do it by train, he wants to see the people, and there is no money.”
“I[Feinberg]had to get back to New York and I got up. I was the youngest of the group, and maybe for that reason the brashest. I said, “Howard, the President has done a great deal for my people. I feel that we owe him a great deal. We certainly owe him a chance, and I will pledge on behalf of Ed Kaufmann and myself that within two weeks we’ll have $100,000 towards this [train]trip.”
“I[Feinberg]had already got the commitments for the $100,000 from people around the country, all of whom understood that without Truman, Israel would have had very difficult days and times trying to even come into existence. As that train went into towns where there were Jewish communities, I arranged that a Jewish delegation would ask to see the President and be received on the train and that, in as many cases as possible, they would bring him donations above these original commitments. So, the trip was a triumphant trip from his point of view as a politician, forgetting the money, He was right when he said, “If I see the people, I can be elected.” And that made the difference. He often said, “If not for my friend Abe, I couldn’t have made the trip and I wouldn’t have been elected.”
— Harry S. Truman Library and Museum, “Abraham Feinberg Oral History Interview” by Richard McKinzie, August 23, 1973. http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/feinberg.htm – Accessed April 17, 2016, sections 22-24
Zionist Militarism and Conquest of Palestine
By 1952 Feinberg was found by the CIA to be smuggling arms into Israel for Jewish fighters against Palestine, and by 1970 also found by the FBI to be a long-term Soviet spy inside the U.S. and Washington D.C. government. With this type covert aid since 1946 to Israeli fighters, 33 massacres of Palestinian men, women, and children commenced:
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When Israel’s War of Nationalism had officially ended (1944-1952), 750,000 Palestinians were horribly expelled and in those 33 villages in the slide show above, Red Cross workers first on the scenes of atrocities stated the aftermath “reminded them of Nazi S.S. troops they had seen in Athens, Greece.” (line break)
Pressuring the U.N. General Assembly (line break)
During the spring of 1947 after Britain was exhausted with problems and conflicts of increased Jewish immigrations into Palestinian lands, Great Britain dumped the problem onto the United Nations. A committee was formed known as the U.N. Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) to propose resolutions. It consisted of 11 member nations. Two initial solutions were proposed, both rejected by the Arab coalition who proposed a third solution: a single secular democratic state in Palestine with citizens receiving equal rights. Zionists vehemently rejected it. By the fall of ’47 when it became clear Resolution 181 did not have the required two-thirds vote to pass, Zionists members began an intense campaign to sway U.N. delegates to vote for the passing of R-181.
Philippine U.N. delegate Gen. Carlos Romulo
As this 1982 New York Times magazine article describes (p. 6 and previous), delegates from Liberia, Greece, Cuba, Costa Rica, Haiti, and the Philippines were targets of high value. Liberia stood to lose Harvey Firestone’s increased rubber expansion plan which made up the bulk of the Liberian economy. Wives of a number of Caribbean nation delegates received mink coats from Macy’s — offended, the wife of Cuban delegate returned hers. President Jose Figueres of Costa Rica reportedly received a blank checkbook. Haiti had been promised economic aid but it became conditional on their partition vote of yes. Seven different bills for the Philippines were in deliberation in the U.S. Congress at the time and Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, ten Senators, and Truman’s domestic advisor Clark Clifford strongly advised President Manuel Roxas that their bills would take the highest priority if the Philippine delegate reversed his position against the partition resolution. Just months earlier the delegate from the Philippines General Romulo made a passionate speech against partitioning saying…
“…it is clear to the Philippine Government that the rights conferred by mandatory power, even if subsequently confirmed by an international agreement, do not vitiate the primordial right of a people to determine the political future and to preserve the territorial integrity of its native land.
We cannot believe that the majority of this General Assembly would prefer a reversal of this course. We cannot believe that it would sanction a solution to the problem of Palestine that would turn us back on the road to the dangerous principles of racial exclusiveness and to the archaic doctrines of theocratic governments.”
— United Nations General Assembly, A/PV. 124, 26 November 1947 https://unispal.un.org/DPA/DPR/unispal.nsf/0/1BCE87E6077A1A0685256CE70075D5BE Accessed April 18, 2016
Count Folke Bernadotte months prior to murder (Photo by Frank Scherschel//Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)
Twenty-four hours later during voting, the Philippine delegate (not General Romulo) voted for the partition resolution. Three days later the General Assembly adopted R-181 (II). Immense Zionist pressure during these weeks leading up to November 29, 1947 are held in high esteem by Zionists and radical Israelis today.
Within just months of the U.N. partition adoption, Israeli forces expelled over 413,000 Palestinian people from their homes. Fighting soon erupted and the U.N. had another Nazi-Juden problem, but under a different guise: “Israel Independence.” A U.N. committee requested again the expert negotiating services of Count Folke Bernadotte of Sweden, who had previously and successfully rescued thousands of Jews from Nazi concentration camps, to bring a ceasefire to the Arab-Israeli conflict. However, two months after his first and only proposal for peace, Bernadotte was assassinated September 17, 1948 by Jewish-Lehi terrorists. This Sept. 1995 Washington Report reviews the details of Bernadotte’s efforts and murder.
* * * * * * * * * *
Next in Part III we conclude the origins, occupation, and conquest of Palestine by comparing WWII refugee camps in Europe into new ones in Palestine, and finally examine the popular U.S. media and public perception post-1953 up to our present day to end the 3-part series. Meanwhile, please feel free to share your thoughts about this widely unknown subject of almost 70-years of Israeli occupation in Palestine.
As the Easter weekend ended, I had once again come through the annual quagmire of suspicious historical thickening and recycled storytelling.
No, this post is not about the increasingly needed awareness and action of local and global conservation; though I wish it were. Recycling is highly beneficial for our planet and certainly requires non-stop reminding, teaching, promoting, and implementing on wider scales by everyone. But this post will not be that. No, the post will be about repetition, about repackaging worn out fossilized traditions. If anything, it should be a challenge, an “I dare you!” for many to drop their pretense. This post will be about the complete irony of a great number of humans resisting or denying change while also existing in the very state of endless change. As Heraclitus wisely concluded, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” And Socrates reinforced, that living “the unexamined lifeis not worth living.“
Every Spring Without Fail
I was at the local Starbucks to continue reading my new book by neurologist Dr. Simon LeVay, Gay, Straight, and the Reason Why: The Science of Sexual Orientation. Since it was a comfortable cool evening, I thought I’d lounge at an outside table with my book and Caffè Americano. I hadn’t realized I chose a table near a church group. I assume they noticed my book and its title. Otherwise, I’m not sure what motivated them to strike-up (politely) conversation. We exchanged our pleasantries and preferences about the various coffee and beverage choices. The older gentleman of the group seemed to have another question.
Over the years the discussions usually go something like this as did this one… “What are your plans for Good Friday and Easter weekend?” I respond, My kids are grown now so no need for fun rabbits and Easter-egg hunting. Their face appears more curious. “What Easter Sunday service will your family attend?” they ask with some reserved excitement. Not wanting to risk their invitation to their church service, followed by my decline and learned explanation, I simply reply I don’t have a specific Eostre location to celebrate the Pagan festival. And there it is… their puzzled, blank, momentary silent stare. One might think their curiosity has now rendered them speechless, right? Wrong.
I am now confronted with the choice to either let the naïvety perpetuate, or determine how much time they REALLY and truly want to invest into highly probable and highly plausible (near accurate?) history. Hmmm.
However, in this particular instance their next question was a new variation of the same agenda. It was not the usual “so you’re not a Christian? Why not?” or “Would you like to come with us to our sunrise service?” or the popular “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten…” lah-de-dah who eventually was crucified, buried, and rose from the dead days later. No, this question took a slightly different twist.
“Have you not heard” he began to explain “that the resurrection of Jesus Christ is the one divine miracle that distinguishes Christianity above all other beliefs?” My eyebrows raised into my forehead and a big grin took over my cheeks. Suddenly the song by The Clash leaps into my head, that well-known guitar strum opens, then… Should I Stay or Should I Go? I sigh, That is quite a bold claim I tell him modestly with a chuckle.
(In my head… I guess I’m staying, huh?)
“It is bold because it is true” he answers. “Extraordinary events are very difficult for many to understand,” he continued “but God’s Word and promises, revealed in Scripture, fortunately make it easy as well as true.” My brain is going 90-to-nothing and all I could muster was Really? I wasn’t sure where to start! The explicit and implied presuppositions were everywhere flying out of his mouth and brain!
“Yes” he told me, “and many hearts are too hardened to hear God’s Word and promises” I let him go on “…and some softer hearts respond immediately!” Now I’m thinking two different scenarios here. One, what type of “heart” does he think I have? And two, what is the difference (his definition) between a soft heart and a hardened heart? Drum roll please.
Protestors at Irving, Texas mosque – Nov. 2015
Since I suspected the gentleman was not a cardiologist and could offer very little knowledge on my own heart through his obvious clairvoyance, I chose number two. What is your explanation of a soft heart versus a hardened heart? I’m thinking I will dread having asked my hearty question. In my head I beg, please sir, answer cholesterol or too many ice-cones?
No such luck. “The soft hearted have been chosen by God’s Holy Spirit. In Hebrews” he began “God said, ‘…make sure brothers and sisters that none of you have a sinful, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God.’” He was on a roll. “‘Encourage one another daily…so none of you will become hardened by sin’s deceitfulness. We have come to share in Christ.’” With a slight grin I ask, Should I assume then you are massaging my soft or hardened heart? A loaded question, right? I did manage a laugh from him and two others of the group.
Before he could answer and start again, I quickly asked,
Up in Irving and Richardson, Texas a group of “Christian Patriots”, I’ll call them, stood outside Muslim mosques with slandering picket-signs, in camo-fatigues and semi-automatic rifles. Who has the “hardened hearts”? The American Muslims attending their mosque, or those wailing Christian Patriots with displaced trigger fingers?
I think the gentleman’s response was something like “the history between God, Abraham, Isaac, and Ishmael answers the big question:God’s favor.” The man’s biblical knowledge was good and so far correct. He went on… “In Genesis 16 an angel of God told Sarah, Abraham’s wife, that Ishmael and his descendants would be in disfavor of God. It would be Isaac, son of Abraham and Sarah, that would inherit all of Abraham’s, and therefore God’s blessings.” Then I added, And Ishmael would simply father a great nation of wild men full of justifiable animosity! “Well yeah, more less” he said a little surprised by my apparent bible knowledge. “Since then,” the man continued “the Near and Middle East have been in constant conflict. They have hardened hearts to the purpose and salvation of Christ’s death and resurrection.” Yes, my eyes popped out like bowling balls as well… WOW! You just made a huge leap! I said startled. I asked:
Don’t you think the conflict today — well, for that matter, since the first Catholic Crusade in 1099 — is a culmination of the 1917 Balfour Declaration, the 1947 U.N. Partition Resolution #181, the United State’s ongoing military and economic support for the Israeli Occupation of Palestine!? And as if some 3,000 years of “Divine disfavor” and mistreatment on Ishmael’s descendants weren’t enough, the U.S. has and will commence necessary warfare and occupation on any Near and Middle Eastern countries, their sacred homelands, should our foreign interests be perceived as threatened, ala Iraq in 2003?
Geez, I really do empathize with their animosity!
It didn’t matter that my intended reaction from him was unsuccessful, it didn’t fit his intended result. He paid me a polite compliment for my history lesson, perhaps to patronize, but he returned to what he really wanted to achieve, “If you decide you’d like to attend a different sort of Easter service,” he reached into his satchel “here is my business card with our church’s address.” I smiled warmly That’s not necessary. Thank you. But the determined evangelist left his card on the table anyway.
After 20-minutes or so chatting with this gentleman, I asked myself why do so many (Texans) people care little about verified and most plausible history, especially that of Antiquity? Am I the only person to comprehend the concept: Pop(ular) history is always written by the Victors — in this case, not the last remaining holdouts of 2nd century Jerusalem-Palestinia nor post-4th century Alexandria?
Class, Students…Take Your Seats
Since I have covered numerous times on my blog the wrong and unreliable history and construction of the Christian Canonical New Testament, I will not expound or repeat those posts here. I will make, however, one very important point in regard to the “story” of Jesus’ resurrection…the modern asserted purpose of Easter.
It is critical for the average indifferent reader of the New Testament crucifixion and resurrection story to know that the four synoptic gospels were not written in the same monastery room simultaneously — or within days or weeks of each other — by four specific authors or apostles. Furthermore, most all expert palaeographers agree that 1) the gospels proceed from oral traditions, 2) their language is from the primitive Aramaic form, and 3) the transliteration, mutation, and copying of the oral Aramaic tradition into the Greek Gospels took place some 70-80 years AFTER the crucifixion. Yet, with all the relevant scientific evidence as to reliable dating each of the four gospels, one must remember too that by 70 CE there were no living survivors personally acquainted with eyewitnesses to the crucifixion or possible resurrection. Only word-of-mouth from synagogue and household to synagogue and household were these stories passed on for 6-8 decades.
Dr. James Tabor
With that Dr. James Tabor and the vast majority of other historians and scholars of Antiquity agree that the Gospel of Mark copies are the oldest and first written accounts of Jesus’ events. What makes this dating so paramount is that in the first written account of Jesus’ crucifixion and supposed resurrection is… there is NO RESURRECTION story in Mark! My evangelist gentleman at Starbucks had his story/facts wrong and disordered. Truly, the very last passages simply stop after Mary Magdalene and her female companions see Jesus’ tomb opened and emptied with a young man — not an angel — standing at the entrance. Out of astonishment and fear they fled from the tomb and said absolutely nothing! End of story (Mark 16:6-8). Dr. Tabor explains the massive implications for the validity of resurrection forgery stories thereafter in this article: The “Strange” Ending of the Gospel of Mark and Why It Makes All the Difference. As it is, Easter is merely an ancient pagan festival.
Nevertheless, should you desire to read-up and possibly rethink on such a pivotal time in Western civilization’s social and literary history, I’ve provided the below list/links:
What I would now like to tackle are the little known historical factors about modern Jerusalem, Israel, and Palestine and the justifiable animosity some Muslims, Arabs, and Palestinians harbor toward all of the Western Allied victors of World War I. I’d wager that many of you had/have no clue.
Some Bullets for Buster-ing (line break)
A rundown of the Jerusalem historical timeline from my March 2014 post Religious Imperialism Alive Still and Dr. Juan Cole’s ten historical reasons why Jerusalem is not Israel’s to occupy… deserves a quick revisit.
The ancient geographical history of Judaism begins in Mesopotamia, loosely modern-day Iraq and Syria, not Jerusalem or the Levant.
The settlement of Jerusalem was named in honor of Shalim, (salem) from the Canaanite religious pantheon, found on inscriptions in Syria. Modern Judaism wrongly translates the word as City of Peace, and has romanticized its historical context as their own at the exclusion of Palestinians, Syrians, Lebanese, and Jordanians.
Strictly from Biblical sources, i.e. not from additional independent sources, Judaism (a monotheistic religion) asserts that the prophet Moses led slaves inside ancient Egypt to the Sinai Peninsula. The only archeological evidence of a monotheistic worship happening inside Jerusalem doesn’t take place until around 1000 BCE. All evidence prior to 1000 BCE clearly demonstrates common Canaanite deities were worshiped.
There is no definitive independent proof that Jerusalem was even inhabited between 1000 and 900 BCE by any particular people or tribes.
A Jewish group known as the Hasmoneans did rule Jerusalem briefly between 168 and 37 BCE. This is a grossly different time span (almost a 2,200 year difference) from what Zionist Judaism claims: 3000 BCE to present? Beginning in 637 CE, the Muslim Arabs put siege to Jerusalem and conquered it a year later. They ruled until 1099 CE when all the European Crusaders took it. It is at this point when the Jewish and Muslim inhabitants of Jerusalem fought side-by-side but were horrifically murdered in mass by Christian Crusaders.
Perhaps the most notable part of Jerusalem’s history is in 136 CE after the Bar Kochba revolt against Roman authority failed. Some of the Jews in Jerusalem remained, but firmly under the rule of Rome and then Byzantium. Many converted to Christianity to escape the harsh oppression. After 638 CE and the Arab Muslim invasion, 90% of Jerusalem converted to Islam! Thereafter, the entire region was almost exclusively Muslim for the next 1,300 plus years. Palestinians are the legitimate descendants of Jerusalem, Eastern Israel, and the region!
In 1947 the virtual city and region of peace was completely turned upside down. Despite the historical and archeological chronicle of Judaism, the United Nations enacted the Partition Plan for Palestine following World War II and under sympathy of the Jewish Holocaust.
Past and present Israeli governments have not been united, much less consistent, about how East Jerusalem and the West Bank should be settled and managed once they were taken over. Comically, this is reminiscent of Judaism’s long history of sectarian division and fragmentation going all the way back to 37 CE.
The archeological record and linguistic history of Jerusalem and the Levant show who has the most legitimate claim to sovereignty from best to least, in chronological order listed below, by the number of years settled:
Muslims – they ruled it and built it for at least 1,191 years.
Egyptians – ruled it as a vassal state for several centuries in the 2nd millennium BCE.
Italians – ruled it for about 445 years until the fall of the Roman Empire in 450 CE.
Iranians – ruled for 205 years under the Achaemenid Empire, for three years as a Parthian-Hasmonean vassal state, and for 15 years under the Sassanids.
Greeks – ruled it for over 160 years, counting the Ptolemys and Seleucids as Greek empires. If this period is counted as Egyptian and Syrian, that adds significantly to an Egyptian claim while introducing a Syrian one!
Byzantines (Greeks/Turks) – ruled it for 188 years, however if one considers the heir to be Greece and add the time Hellenistic dynasties ruled, that gives Greece almost 350 years of ruling Jerusalem.
Iraq– the Assyrian and Babylonian Empires ruled Jerusalem for 183 years, though adding the Ayyubid Empire (Saladin’s dynasty) who were Kurds from Iraq, ruled for 730 years bringing the total reigning years up to that point to a whopping 913 years!
JEWS – finally we arrive to the people who have the LEAST claim for Jerusalem and much/most of Palestine. The Hasmoneans ruled as a vassal state under Parthia for 131 years. These are not the same people commonly known as Canaanites or Hebrews. Those are much later terms. There are at least two general classifications: Proto-Sinaitic and Proto-Canaanite, roughly the descendants of Egyptians to the far south, not Judea.
In the end, the only real claim Judaism has for Jerusalem and a state of Israel is based subservient to Persians, Greeks, and Romans when they ruled Palestine.
That said and established, now to take a 2-part look at how the United States, and by default its people, were a pawn used in the 1948 Israeli occupation of Palestine. If anything, the Hebrew history, their own biblical history has them originating in Egypt. Perhaps modern Zionist Jews should return there? Their own legacy supposedly begins in Egyptian empire, so try to create your political “nation” around and along the Nile River. That is much more historically accurate and logical. But in 1947-48 they did not choose there. Why not? They did consider, of all crazy places, the state of Texas in the U.S.A., but decided against Texas. Why?
* * * * * * * * * * (line break)
The U.S. and Israel Meet (line break)
His name was Theodor Herzl. An Austrian-born European journalist, Herzl founded the Zionist Movement in 1897 called the World Zionist Organization and its first Zionist Congress. After its inception the WZO experienced unprecedented growth in just two years from representing 117 groups to 900 groups world-wide. Their first order of business was to start a Jewish state somewhere in the world. They consider at least four locations throughout four different continents, including Texas, but eventually decided on Jerusalem and Palestine even though Palestine in 1899 was already inhabited by 93-96% non-Jews all living in overall peace between the 7th century CE until 1920 when Great Britain took it as compensation from WWI and the Ottomans.
Theodor Herzl
With 99% of Palestinian land owned by Christians and Muslims, the WZO had a serious obstacle in the way of their new Israel state. Dr. Israel Scheib (later Eldad) was a philosopher and member of the Zionist Movement, specifically the Lehi group. Despite being born in Pidvolochysk, Galicia — an area in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire now in modern day western Ukraine — Dr. Scheib wrote…
“Israel is the Jew’s land… It was never the Arabs land, even when virtually all of its inhabitants were Arab. Israel belongs to four million Russian Jews despite the fact that they were not born here. It is the land of nine million other Jews throughout the world, even if they have no present plans to live in it.”
Several other high-ranking WZO members speak the same language. Scheib’s and other sources can be provided if necessary.
Max Nordau is the next pivotal player. In the Maccabaean, Vol. 7 (1904), Nordau was quoted as saying “Zionism’s only hope is the Jews of America.” He was a close associate to Theodor Herzl. They are both initiates in the galvinization of American-based Zionist organizations in New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Chicago, and Baltimore by the start of the 20th century. By 1918 Nordau, Scheib, and Herzl had helped generate over 200,000 Zionists in America. At the end of 1923 every New York Yiddish news press except one was Zionist, reaching 535,000 families in 1927. By 1948 Zionist numbers swelled to near 1-million.
Merely reaching ordinary American citizens, however, was not sufficient. Through most of President William Taft’s administration (1909-1913), American Zionist organizations began their inroads into Congress influencing Senators and House Representatives about the plight and goal for an Israeli state. Unlike Congressional officials, U.S. State Department positions were not dependent on public votes and campaign donations. Therefore, State Department officials had the advantage of more objective thinking and reasoning for the people rather than a tiny group working for domestic or foreign entities. Here we have the first serious opposition to Zionism. Correspondence after correspondence, year after year, U.S. statesmen and military advisors under Taft repeated, ‘Zionism runs counter to U.S. interests and principles.’ But they would not be deterred.
In 1912 the Zionist Literary Society approached the Executive office directly for endorsement. Secretary of State Philander Knox flat out refused them audience, saying:
“The problems of Zionism involve certain matters primarily related to the interests of countries other than our own.”
— Fallen Pillars: U.S. Policy towards Palestine and Israel since 1945, by Donald Neff, Washington D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 2002
In that same year the Zionist went directly to prominent Harvard Law graduate Louis D. Brandeis who would later become a Supreme Court Justice in 1916.
Into the U.S. Supreme Court
Justice Louis Brandeis
Though Brandeis’ Kentucky parents raised Louis as secular, in 1912 he converted to Zionism. Two years later he became the Director of the international Zionist Central Office which had recently moved from Germany to the United States. By most accounts and biographies, Justice Brandeis is held in high esteem. Yet, when his extra activities are put under microscope with Felix Frankfurter — later to become appointed Associate Supreme Court Justice by Franklin D. Roosevelt — evidence begins to paint a different picture.
Historian Bruce A. Murphy, an acclaimed judicial biographer of American Constitutional law and politics, wrote in his 1982 book The Brandeis/Frankfurter Connection: The Secret Political Activities of Two Supreme Court Justices…
“In one of his most unique arrangements in the Court’s history, Brandeis enlisted Frankfurter, then a professor at Harvard Law School, as his paid political lobbyist and lieutenant. Working together over a period of 25 years, they placed a network of disciples in positions of influence, and labored diligently for the enactment of their desired programs. This adroit use of the politically skillful Frankfurter as intermediary enabled Brandeis to keep his considerable political endeavors hidden from the public.”
— The Brandeis/Frankfurter Connection, by Bruce Murphy, New York, Oxford UP, 1982, p. 10, 44
Murphy continued writing that Brandeis mentioned their arrangement to “another Zionist lieutenant — Court of Appeals Judge Julian Mack.” This book would earn Murphy the Certificate of Merit from the American Bar Association. Then and today, these types of activities and associations, intentionally hidden ones at that, would have been considered highly unethical for a Federal Justice. The fact that Brandeis and Frankfurter hid them is indication they knew they were unethical as well.
Because Theodor Herzl, Israel Scheib, Max Nordau, Louis Brandeis, and Felix Frankfurter realized over two decades, they would need a more extensive wider-web of key people in key positions to harness American support for an Israel state. But key U.S. federal offices and agencies were staunchly opposed to such obvious public efforts and very risky affairs abroad. As a result, they would have to go clandestine but efforts would have to appear upfront as humanitarian, as educational, and culturally uniting. Where best to begin their foreign interests in America? In the bosom of her most prestigious campuses: the Ivy League. Of course.
The Undisclosed ‘Other’ Menorah Society of Harvard
Professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem Dr. Sarah Schmidt first published an article in the American Jewish Historical Quarterly in 1978 reviewing the society saying “The image that emerges of the Parushim is that of a secret underground guerilla force determined to influence the course of events in a quiet, anonymous way.” Peter Grose, writer and former editor to the New York Times and ironically a Zionist sympathizer, also reported on a branch of the Menorah Society at Harvard in 1984 writing that Justice Brandeis was a leader in “an elitist secret society called the Parushim, the Hebrew word for ‘Pharisees’ and ‘separate,’ which grew out of Harvard’s Menorah Society.” Grose goes on to report that Brandeis used the Parushim “as a private intellectual cadre, a pool of manpower for various assignments.“
Associate Justice Julian Mack
During Woodrow Wilson’s Presidential campaign of 1912, Wilson was impressed by Brandeis’ abilities and accomplishments to make business moguls and government officials accountable to the public. They both shared very similar views on social and economic policies, and completely agreed that federal government should stay out of the national economy. This friendship would eventually foster Brandeis’ appointment by Wilson to the Supreme Court in 1916. Reluctantly, however, Brandeis had to withdraw from all his private clubs and associations, as was the ethical standards against conflicts of interest. Two years later when the multiple branches of the Federation of American Zionists reorganized, renamed as Zionist Organization of America, Brandeis was elected an honorary President and coincidentally(?) Harvard Law graduate Julian W. Mack elected as acting President. But privately Louis Brandeis did not abandon his ZOA lieutenants and friend Julian Mack.
“Through his lieutenants,[Brandeis]remained the power behind the throne.”
— Fallen Pillars: U.S. Policy towards Palestine and Israel since 1945, by Donald Neff, Washington D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 2002, p. 59-60
“At Brandeis’ behest, Frankfurter also became involved with American Zionism. In 1917 Frankfurter accompanied Ambassador Henry Morgenthau to Turkey and Egypt to see what could be done for the settlements in Palestine during the World War. Frankfurter also attended the peace conference in Paris as a representative of the American Zionist movement and as a liaison for Brandeis.”
— Jazz Age Jews, by Michael Alexander, Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2001, p. 91
Funeral of Archduke Ferdinand & wife Sophie, Sarajevo, 1914
Despite the opposition by American Jewish anti-Zionist, the ZOA and American Zionist memberships grew dramatically during World War I. One particular anti-Zionist according to Jews Against Zionism by Thomas A. Kolskey (p. 25) wrote of the movement, it is “a foreign, un-American, racist, and separatist phenomenon.” When one today considers the 19th century seeds and roots of Zionism, i.e. Eastern Europe and specifically Vienna, Austria, they will find those seeds and roots in the heart of the Balkans conflict of 1912-13. When Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Este was assassinated, World War I broke out. Zionism was born out of this deep historical Near Eastern-European crisis, losses, exiles and Diaspora, and the unwavering belief that Jerusalem and Palestine will forever be their homeland which continued through World War II and continues today.
On a sidenote correlating to my earlier Starbuck’s encounter above, Dr. Sarah Schmidt reviews the work of Timothy Weber, President of the Memphis Theological Seminary, regarding how the late 20th century friending of American evangelicals by the state of Zionist Israel, and continued today, was a natural eschatological fit for both. Since the end of WWI the two are synonymous with Fundamentalism. I highly recommend reading Schmidt’s short review: Dangerous Friends – How Evangelicals Became Israel’s Best Friend. How the two want “God’s plan for mankind” to become fulfilled, will or should horrify the world.
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World War I and the Balfour Declaration (line break)
From the earliest stages of the Ottoman Empire’s decline, Zionist recognized that their weak global positioning required the backing of a superpower. They had tried to sequester the help of the Ottoman’s who controlled Palestine at the time, but by 1912 the Ottomans had only illusionary power over their distant provinces. They turned to the British. However, like the Ottomans the British were less than enthusiastic about their cause.
Lord Arthur Balfour
In 1916 the war was going very poorly for the British. In one day alone in 1916 the British lost 57,470 soldiers in the Battle of the Somme. Now the Zionist had their leverage. Since pushing religious and idealist arguments upon the British Parliament hadn’t worked previously, pushing the power and influence of American Zionist to bring the United States into the war had much more punch. They promised the British they could bring the U.S. into the war on the side of the British under one condition: give full support of a Jewish home in Palestine afterwards. Thus, in 1917 British Foreign Minister Lord Balfour wrote a letter to Zionist leader Baron L.W. Rothschild promising Great Britain would sympathize…
“…with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet.
His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.
I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.”
Because 92% of all Palestinians were non-Jews in 1917, the U.S. State Department always saw the creation of a Jewish state there as nothing less than building a powder-keg and lighting the fuse. Zionist always had their counter-punch to any resistance to a state of Israel in Palestine as plain and simply ‘blatant anti-Semitism.’
Because Zionist sentiment was growing in America with powerful proponents as Brandeis, Mack, Nordau, and Schieb, along with growing ZOA memberships, the State Department considered alternative actions. One of these plans, though a long shot, was a separate U.S.-Ottoman peace. To explore this slim possibility the State Department sent an emissary, Ambassador Henry J. Morgenthau, to Turkey to discuss. However, Felix Frankfurter became part of the delegation and ultimately became a staunch opponent. He eventually persuaded Morgenthau to abandon all efforts for a separate non-British U.S.-Ottoman peace. All subsequent complaints of Zionist sabotage were answered as ‘blatant anti-Semitic rhetoric.‘
By war’s end, Jewish Zionist would have their necessary superpower support and begin the dismissal and removal of some 750,000+ Muslim and Christian Arabs.
For a more in-depth examination into the earliest origins of Zionist Israel, watch the acclaimed documentary “1913: Seeds of Conflict.” And be sure to go to its official website for excellent complimentary history,here.
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In the upcoming Part II of The Circus of Recycling, these four topics: the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, the Modern Israeli Lobby & Harry S. Truman, the buckling of the U.N. General Assembly in 1947, and Zionist Militarism and the Conquest of Palestine… will be the next critical topics covered.
Finally! It’s here. The end. The last part! You are welcome to laugh with me, please. I am. Find a lounge chair, this is the last epic(?) post in persnickety. 😉
A Quick Prologue
I am completely aware that this post is over 11,000 words long. It is extensive to say the least. But I’ve written this much because I feel all the points covered are important, no, critical to drive home just how much day-in and day-out we humans miss so much detail, so much little and large bits of intrigue, mystery, and unrealized joy waiting to be seized and experienced. I encourage you to read the entire post. Read it in portions over two or three days, but please complete the entire post. There is likely something new for you that you had never considered which might catapult your existence into an entirely new dimension.
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Previously in Untapped Worlds – Retooling I closed with two suggestions. The first was to realize what compersion is and is not, and how we should embody its fullest meaning. Embracing a mostexpansive form of compersion is critical. The second suggestion plays off the first. While learning exactly what compersion means, open the flood gates of your lifestyle and deathstyle. Yes, you read correctly. Make your life practically inseparable from death! Sounds spooky and insane doesn’t it? Sounds contradictory doesn’t it? Shush! Hold on…
Put aside tendencies to understand death literally. Put aside for a moment the fear and obscurity civilization’s foreboding institutions have trained your brain to “escape” and disengage death. Now let’s ask the question once again, What does it mean to be more human?
Personality
What is personality? How it is formed. Is it set in granite from birth or is it molded throughout stages of life? In my May 2013 post DRD4-7R I shared what geneticists had found as the chemical brain messenger — the 7R variant of DRD4 — linked to curiosity and restlessness found in 20% of the population. This would suggest that a newborn infant comes with a basic blueprint, but one which expands (or retracts) in stages based upon external stimuli or influences, but interpreted by the internal (neurogenetical) reckoning birth-print. Many modern cardiologists and addictionologists would argue not a basic birthprint, but a familial-print or hereditary-print. Religious clergy, rabbis, and imam/ulama most certainly take it much further. They fall on the side of the ‘granite’ birthprint.
The spectrum of personality’s origin and expression probably falls somewhere in between the two extremes of the nomothetic and idiographic schools. Personally, I fall squarely toward the idiographic for two major reasons. One, human conception and gestation lasts only about 9-months. Granted, there is no denying that those genes passed down from approximately 500,000 generations over the last 200,000 years (start of Homo sapiens only), after those 9-months the experiential influences such as culture, social, and situational factors then interact over an average lifespan of 71-years by today’s figures. Two, psychological states such as PTSD clearly and unequivocally reveal just how sweeping an impact external factors effect personality.
As I also covered in Untapped Worlds – An Intro and Departure, the first two parts of the series, the human brain and body are quite malleable by environment and individually reckoned by our neurogenetic familial-print. As science becomes increasingly useful for verifying the Nature of life it shows the human brain and body are less influenced by general or monistic laws of exoteric or esoteric existence. Human personality is significantly formed and moved like a river which to exist requires tributaries, a landscape, a mouth, and its sea or ocean.
Relationships
James G. Ballard. Abraham Lincoln. Or the some thousands listed in the Fathers Hall of Fame at the National Center for Fathering who did or now live and practice intimate intensive relationships nurturing and expanding their domestic responsibilities. There are a cut of men, fathers, who make great mothers. Many of them are single, waking early to make breakfast, drive their kids to school or extracurricular activities, and then in the late afternoon do the same and get them to bed. Repeat in the morning.
I did all the domestic duties for a year-and-a-half with my two children; one 7-years of age at the time, the other our newborn just home from hospital. Those 18-months were without a doubt the most exhausting and fulfilling times of my life. I will never again take for granted what millions of mothers do day in and day out. They never get near as much acclaim as they should.
A Lost History of the Full Household
How many of you men or fathers have managed a household with multiple children? Can you remember those late late nights and wee-morning hours? Sleep? What sleep.
Mbuti father
Managing a romance and a household is really beyond a full-time job. It is your own small business but with your entire life savings, retirement, prospective growth-plan, budget, and all three areas of personal health invested… for better or worse. Talk about walking the edge, the fine line, it’s more than enough to put many a man into panic mode. Dads of the West Congo, called the Aka Pygmies, know exactly what I’m speaking about. The Arapesh of New Guinea also know. In the African Ituri the Mbuti are superb fathers. In Tahiti women can be chiefs of their entire tribe! What we industrialized workaholic Westerners see as primitive, they share all responsibilities of child-rearing and parenting equally; right down the middle. In some cases the fathers happily do more! In these “primitive” cultures, sharing domestic duties are not determined by biology or gender. That is a foreign concept. Their dynamic lives are full of everything humanly possible. Parenting and romance to them are embraced art forms in the same context and pragmatism as their neighboring animal counterparts. Long ago the peoples of the Western hemisphere had the same setups. But three major events changed the family households for centuries to come.
The industrial revolution was the first culprit of the household’s demise. In a mechanized civilization long setup to serve/benefit the males, the Western nations would soon see the wide-ranging consequences of fatherless households. The other contributing events were birth-control and rightly so Feminism. With these three changes came a complete revamping of Western families. But recently slight changes have started a small return to our specie’s natural equal roles. In Sweden fathers get 1-year off for paternity leave, unpaid. Though only around 14% of the leave is actually used, it is a percentage that is slowly growing.
Expanding and returning a man’s domestic roles are required. In those parts of the post-Industrial Revolution world like the U.S., it is more dire given our domestic violence, criminal, divorce, and homeless statistics. Since the early 19th century overhaul of the old traditional households, returning the husband/father back home seems today like an Untapped World.
Family Conversations
How many elderly people have you heard reminiscing of lost family dinners and family time together? How many people do you know, myself included, that enjoy and look forward to family meals of an hour or more? What about for family reunions?
In our American culture of convenience, declining motion due to pay-others-to-do-it, and less patience for perceived problems, have we lost the benefits of friction-to-resolution which leads to a growing art of deeper adaptable conversation and understanding? Family conflicts are rarely solved unless people learn to talk WITH one another not at, and investing the necessary time and energy to do so. But how accurate are our great grandparents memories of a family closeness gone by?
Lost family time is probably a figment of the imagination by earlier generations. Before or after the industrial revolution, birth-control, and Feminism three historical barriers kept families detached:
Segregation. From Socratic Greece to Europe’s Black Death and industrialization, to the Nuer of East Africa or the Baikairi of Amazon, one’s age and gender determined what you could or couldn’t do with the men and family.
Silence. Foreign visitors to Elizabethan England, Beatrice Gottlieb writes, were silent occasions. Italian etiquette dictated that ‘talk is not for the table, but for the piazza.’ And the Rule of St. Benedict taught ‘days are to be spent in silent prayer, avoiding evil words and conduct’, and family meals were for listening to Scripture readings in reverence of God, not idle talk. The same reverent silence was found among Quakers and Buddhists of the time.
Emotional repression. By the 18th century the social norm of European conversation was one of intellect and wit turned into an eloquent social art to be displayed. One’s plumes could be presented in such coffeehouses where educated MEN could gather and match their show with colleagues about politics, business, art, literature, and current science. One such example was Turk’s Head Tavern, Soho, where women and children were strictly prohibited.
If 18th century social conversation was about cerebral edification for the men, the 19th century was about hidden emotions scratching, clawing, and pushing out the nails and hinges of their locked basement doors. There is much irony found in the title-given period: the Romantic Movement. Though we find glimmers of primal passion in the poetry of Coleridge and Keats, for example, open displays of affection and emotions by men were reserved for paper only. Expressions of such raw instincts was considered irrational and a lack of masculinity! This was absolutely the case at home during family dinners at the table. All topics and conversation were lead and managed by the man of the house. The childhood and life of John Stuart Mill is a sad ‘family’ testimony of the repressed Victorian Era represented by his father.
Expanding Sympathy into Deep Empathy
Many might feel the Golden Rule catches the essence of empathy: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Though it is a popular notion, it is not concentrated properly. It centers on you — your own experience, your own subjective views — and thus how you feel you should be treated apart from a wider general view or consensus. The Golden Rule falls quite short. Empathy requires much more. It requires putting yourself into their life, their shoes, and metaphorically (or literally?) walking in them 100-miles.
Claiborne Paul Ellis (aka C.P. Ellis) was born into an impoverished North Carolina white family in 1927. His father was a white supremacist and active member of the Ku Klux Klan. C.P. inherited all of his father’s world-views and like Adolf Hitler hated all Jews, C.P. blamed all blacks for his socio-economic and occupational woes, indirectly the birth of his own youngest son born blind and mentally impaired, and finally despised the civil rights movement all throughout the South and his native state. When a $78,000 federal grant was given to North Carolina to aid in public school desegregation, as acting president of Durham County’s KKK chapter C.P. was asked how to spend it. Ironically Ellis was elected a member of that committee along with civil right activist Ann Atwater. What followed is nothing short of spectacular:
Because of a simple 10-days long collaboration at the same table as your “hated enemy”, your entire world-view and life can be overturned and done with the most incredible benefits: spending quality-quantity time with other humans, especially those very different than you, and a lifelong friendship begun. C.P. Ellis and Ann Atwater are proof that truer unabridged empathy unites.
Love and Compersion
A historically conservative United States as well as some similar nation-cultures have a general and quite limited notion of love and how it can be more fully received and expressed. The ancient Greeks had no such constraints but one. They recognized at least six varieties of love. Roman Krznaric, an author, cultural philosopher, professor of sociology and politics at Cambridge University and City University, London, and advisor to the United Nations on using empathy and conversation to create social change, describes these six Greek forms of love — notice the difference of Athenian eros versus modern notions of love or romance:
Eros – The first kind of love was eros, named after the Greek god of fertility, and represented the idea of sexual passion and desire. But the Greeks didn’t always think of it as something positive, as we tend to today. In fact, eros was viewed as a dangerous, fiery and irrational form of love that could take hold of you and possess you — an attitude shared by many later spiritual thinkers, such as the Christian writer C.S. Lewis. Eros involved a loss of control that frightened the Greeks. Which is odd, because losing control is precisely what many people now seek in a relationship. Don’t we all hope to fall “madly” in love?
Philia – The second variety of love was philia or friendship, which the Greeks valued far more than the base sexuality of eros. Philia concerned the deep comradely friendship that developed between brothers in arms who had fought side by side on the battlefield. It was about showing loyalty to your friends, sacrificing for them, as well as sharing your emotions with them. (Another kind of philia, sometimes called storge, embodied the love between parents and their children.) We can all ask ourselves how much of this comradely philia love we have in our lives. It’s an important question in an age when we attempt to amass “friends” on Facebook or ‘followers’ on Twitter — achievements that would have hardly impressed the Greeks.
Ludus – This was the Greek’s idea of playful love, which referred to the playful affection between children or young lovers. We’ve all had a taste of it in the flirting and teasing in the early stages of a relationship. But we also live out our ludus when we sit around in a bar bantering and laughing with friends, or when we go out dancing. Dancing with strangers may be the ultimate ludic activity, almost a playful substitute for sex itself. Social norms frown on this kind of adult playful frivolity, but a little more ludus might be just what we need to spice up our love lives.
Agape – The fourth love, and perhaps the most radical, was agape or selfless love. This was a love that you extended to all people, whether family members or distant strangers. Agape was later translated into Latin as caritas, which is the origin of our word charity. Lewis referred to it as “gift love,” the highest form of Christian love. But it also appears in other religious traditions, such as the idea of mettā or “universal loving kindness” in Theravāda Buddhism. There is growing evidence that agape is in a dangerous decline in many countries. Empathy levels in the U.S. have dropped nearly 50 percent over the past 40 years, with the steepest fall occurring in the past decade. We urgently need to revive our capacity to care about strangers.
Pragma – Another Greek love was pragma or mature love. This was the deep understanding that developed between long-married couples. It was about making compromises to help the relationship work over time, and showing patience and tolerance. The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm said that we expend too much energy on “falling in love” and need to learn more how to “stand in love.” Pragma is precisely about standing in love — making an effort to give love rather than just receive it. With divorce rates currently running at 50 percent, the Greeks would surely think we should bring a serious dose of pragma into our relationships.
Philautia – The final variety of love was philautia or self-love. The clever Greeks realized there were two types. One was an unhealthy variety associated with narcissism, where you became self-obsessed, and focused on gaining personal fame and fortune. A healthier version of philautia enhanced your wider capacity to love. The idea was that if you like yourself and feel secure in yourself, you will have plenty of love to give others (today this is reflected in the Buddhist-inspired concept of “self-compassion”). Or as Aristotle put it, “All friendly feelings for others are an extension of man’s feelings for himself.”
And that is compersion.
What struck me the most about the Greek’s emotional diversity was they sought it, embraced it, and refined it in its many forms with a wide-range of people, not just one. They extended it to friends, colleagues, immediate and extended family, spouses, lovers, strangers, and equally to themselves! Krznaric goes on to explain that this approach to human connection would be practically unrecognizable in today’s social circles — or relentlessly chastised for its pluralism and depth. The ancient Greeks would be shocked by our extreme narrow-mindedness and ideals.
Another modern extension of the Greek philia love (or pseudo-storge?) is the little known form of compersion. This love-form also combines possible sexual (eros) and/or emotional joy (philia) discovered outside a traditional binary monogamous commitment, but the compersive joy is experienced by the Giver or the one not literally participating within the outside relationship of their partner/spouse. The Urban Dictionary gives an excellent commentary stating:
“Compersion can be thought of as the opposite of “jealousy;” it is a positive emotional reaction to a loved one’s other relationship. It is analogous to the feeling of joy a parent feels when their children marry or that best friends feel for each other when they are happy in a romantic relationship.”
Personally, I have experienced this form of love numerous times not only with my own children, but with several of my partners and a spouse. The deepest impact it had for me was not just the pleasure and joy I had watching mesmerized by her unfiltered primal passions lost in the moment, but also how profoundly gracious she was for my comfortable willingness to indirectly enjoy it with her. “I have never known” she described “that level, that form of liberation — without any shame or fear — or deeper sharing-companionship with any man!” She fell into the soft couch as if all her breath was taken while melting in pure bliss and awe how much I loved seeing her so happy. This deeper love was ‘returned’ to me several times as well, and she raved about how pleasurable it was for her. That wasn’t all either. We both learned other aspects of each other we may have NEVER discovered on our own, together as a closed-off couple. What followed for us was the strongest trust and bond either had ever experienced. Gone was one social-romantic stigma neither of us had to fear anymore.
Yes indeed, a fictitous dragon was slain. A previously unchartered Untapped World now tapped.
Living vs. Alive
Time
Should an extraterrestrial scientist decide to study the human species and our daily routines, it would quickly realize that a few similar mechanized devices were the cornerstone of our organization. Case and point, the Lilliputians examining Gulliver:
“Out of the right fob hung a great silver chain, with a wonderful kind of engine at the bottom. We directed him to draw out whatever was at the end of that chain; which appeared to be a globe, half silver, and half of some transparent metal; for, on the transparent side, we saw certain strange figures circularly drawn, and thought we could touch them, till we found our fingers stopped by the lucid substance. He put this engine into our ears, which made an incessant noise, like that of a water-mill: and we conjecture it is either some unknown animal, or the god that he worships; but we are more inclined to the latter opinion, because he assured us, (if we understood him right, for he expressed himself very imperfectly) that he seldom did any thing without consulting it. He called it his oracle, and said, it pointed out the time for every action of his life.” — Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
We are indeed slaves to insufficient time! Our clocks, watches, cell phones, are all idols of religious worship or talismans to scare away Chronos and all his hungry minions! Working mothers in the West are perhaps the epitome of daily famines of time. Can you blame them as the father’s are away obsessing of gaining “more”? Time has become tyrannical in the U.S. and losing to it is a most sensitive and shaming fear.
You may be surprised how time lives in your language. ‘Time is money. Give me a moment of your time. Living on borrowed time. My time is my own. Take time off. It’s time to move on. What time is it? How much time do you need?’ Time has become a commodity; something to barter with to own or give. How ridiculously ego-centric to think we have ANY sort of time-management control over a cosmological force which is completely immune to our petty desires.
In western Texas near the town of Van Horn, writer Stewart Brand and musician Brian Eno founded The Long Now Foundation. They are two of many behind the constructions of prototype clocks and the final 10,000-year clock in Ely, Nevada. The concept and proposed paradigm shift offers “In a world of hurry,” explains Brand, “the Clock is a patience machine.” Its long slow bongs ring out only once every thousand years.
Since the Industrial Revolution humankind has been appallingly obsessed with minutes and seconds, the hear-and-now, and ‘Friday evening can’t arrive soon enough!’ The Long Now Foundation and Clock encourages our caffeinated species to bring it down several notches, to thinking bigger and broader in much longer terms, thus being more responsible and implementing an attitude against our environmental ravaging.
Put on a 10,000-year watch and think about the next time its chime resounds from your wrist. What will your home look like then? Hmm, another Untapped Worldtimeframe to explore! Are you simply living day-to-day, week-to-week or are you alive inside these 1,000 years? Both worlds are completely compatible.
Work
If you had been born in the Dark or Middle Ages, in all likelihood you would not have been a noble prince, princess, a knight with full armour with Clydesdale underneath, or a Lady-in-waiting. Despite our civil-social evolutions into the modern era from fate and family necessity to freedom and choice with our labors and spouses, there are still obstacles for some who do not enjoy a robust life in the 21st century.
In today’s labor markets it can often feel as if your duties and performance merely contribute toward the success, status, and wealth of a few owners, shareholders, or top executives. In most free-world economies this isn’t far from the truth. Losing one’s sense of purpose, much less finding one, has some devastating effects. How might purpose be protected and cultivated? How might losing it or neglecting it be avoided? Here are four ideas…
Value – Albert Einstein once said, “Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.” Albert Schweitzer understood exactly what that meant. After gaining many accolades in philosophy, theology, and music, Schweitzer’s life and social status were set and waiting. Instead of a life of comfort, luxury, and popularity, at the age of 38 he founded a hospital in French Equatorial Africa. He died there doing what he loved best: attending to other’s needs. “Even if it is a little thing,” he said, “do something for those who have need of man’s help, something for which you get no pay but the privilege of doing it.” In medieval times or centuries after, doing such things would have required your holiest vows to make such work and values coincide. Not today.
Calling – While in the Nazi camps Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and Dachau between 1942 and 1945, Viktor Frankl learns firsthand the meaning of life. He notes that between prisoners with a vigorous nature for the present do not survive as well as those less hardy but with an unfinished calling beyond the walled fences of barbed wire. On one such prisoner he wrote was an accomplished scientist who had not yet completed writing a series of books before the war started and his arrest. This author/scientist realized no one else could finish his work and write it correctly — he had to stay alive. He knew his calling and it was not dying in the concentration camps.
Respect – if there is anything in today’s rat-race that rivals wealth/money, it is surely recognition. Simply watch a live news interview, TV sporting events, or a tourist recording a trip to a landmark, and you’ll witness the popular act of “bomber-invasion” from random strangers wanting to be seen. It seems to be human nature to achieve some level of status, good or bad in some cases. Deeper respect and admiration are found through meaningful thriving human relationships. They are not found in corporate cubicles or on a factory-line as a cog-in-the-wheel where no human interaction exists. And real respect is rarely found within the mega-efficient lean-staffed corporations of 500-800+ employees spread out over 20-acres, or many sky-high floors, or regional-global offices unless the owner(s) strive and spend their “pocket-change” to make those intimate employee off-the-clock activities between coworkers and supervisors happen on a regular basis.
Talents – What does it mean to be a High-achiever rather than a Wide-achiever? One is extremely specialized and educated in one or two specific areas. The other is a craftsperson, a jack-of-all-trades capable of beginning a project, completing every phase, and finishing it all with little or no outside assistance. Diversity, or what financial investors term spreading out your risks or hedging your bets. From the 2014 film Interstellar, a 2-minute clip about the need for a diversity of talents:
Become a virtuoso like Leonardo De Vinci was of many fields transferring your natural and learned talents across a labors of love spectrum. Be a generalist happy to learn more in order to do more for others.
Job with Spirit – Everyone has a spirit, a youthful zeal just waiting to come out and play or work. But due to social occupational fears and low self-confidence, that enthusiasm rarely gets released, at least in public and at work. Why? Why must your spirit be left at home or for private enjoyment only? The days of feudalism and medieval strictures are long gone! Overcome those fears. Gain more self-confidence. Start or expand a new Renaissance! “Fear stifles, courage fulfills.” Tap into your youthful creative energy, that Wide-achiever and simply smile at naysayers as you pass them by. In fact, invite them to come along!
Our Natural World
Perceiving
In the first two parts of this series we explored how our brain imperfectly perceives our surroundings and others. Though our many senses — the organisms that feed our cerebral organ for interpretation and organizing — accurately pick up the details around us, but unfortunately the brain can create in various degrees a distorted reality. This happens more often than not.
The Myth of Five
To say our bodies have five senses does not do justice to how incredibly complex our body’s sensors really are and how ‘sensitive’ they should be in picking up information. Though neuroscience is still in its adolescence, many neuroscientists assert there are at least 12-14 different sensors and possibly up to twenty. A quick rundown:
Light sensors in the eyes; 2 types: rods and cones for intensity of light stimuli.
Sound sensors in the inner ear.
Orientation-Gravity sensors for your sense of balance.
Nerve sensors in your skin: heat, cold, pain, itch and pressure.
Chemical sensors in the nose for different odours.
Chemical receptors in the tongue for taste.
Muscle & Joint sensors telling the brain about motion and muscle tension.
Bladder, Intestinal & Colon sensors to inform the brain it is time to urinate, when you’re full, and when to excrete.
Hunger & Thirst sensors indicating those needs.
Various body sensations tell the brain when one of your legs have fallen asleep — a lack of proper blood circulation, for example. When your about to sneeze is another.
There are many people which have extra-sensory perceptions like sensing approaching weather changes, or psychic abilities such as clairvoyance, mediumship, precognition, or remote viewing that many law-enforcement increasingly use to solve otherwise unsolvable cases.
“Failing to nurture our senses not only detracts from our appreciation of the subtleties and beauties of everyday experience, but also strips away layers of meaning from our lives. Yet curing ourselves of sensory deprivation is not, as you might expect, about indulging in luxuries like dining on truffles or locking ourselves in a dark room and listening to a Beethoven symphony at full volume, exhilarating though this may be. It is much more about gaining a deeper understanding of how our various senses have come to shape, filter and even distort our interactions with the world — and also how culture has moulded our sensory experiences.” — How Should We Live?, Roman Krznaric.
Becoming more acutely aware of these additional sensory systems is the start to a more enhanced human experience. Yoga or juggling on one leg can refine the equilibrioceptors. Having someone pinch you, bind you, or spank you can refine the nociceptors. Varying temperatures like a cool bath/pool followed by a hot tub then repeat, refines the thermoceptors. Closing the eyes or being blindfolded while moving refines the proprioceptors. Embracing and expanding ALL of the human senses only widens and deepens one’s awareness and full interaction with this spectacular world! Tap deeper into it.
Eyesight’s Enslavement
Over the last 5-6 centuries the visual cortex has become the dominant and largest sensory bank in our brains. “We have fallen into a sensory decline” says author and cultural historian of the senses Constance Classen. And it might be worse than imagined.
Everywhere around us is non-stop visual bombardment. Mass advertising relies heavily on imagery — television, billboards becoming increasingly eye-catching and illuminated at night, websites are packed with pics and motion — more than any other medium. And our cell phones? Almost all iPhones and Androids are graphically interactive. In supermarkets produce is a kaleidoscope of vivid colors (genetically?) designed to please the eyes. Wealth and status are paraded by glitzy high-end vehicles, lavish large homes, and landscaping rivaling the Château Versailles. We often judge people by their appearance, facial features, the shape of their body, or the clothes they wear. As the popular diction goes ‘love at first sight’ represents how our English language is pervaded by visual idioms. How often do you hear ‘love at first sniff’ or ‘love at first honk/blast’? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, look before you leap, a sight for sore eyes, and seeing is believing are all common jargon. Vacations today are incomplete without an album of photos or phone video-clips. We now swim in a world largely governed by surface appearances.
What happened to the nose and ears? How can we return them to their natural equality with the eyes? One quick easy way is to close our eyes…more! Keep them closed for extended periods of time. Doing this on a consistent basis forces us to heighten the ears, tongue, nose, and other sensors and receptors. Return to the days of the 14th and 15th centuries when spices, perfumes and pomanders prevailed every day. Sitting in an arboretum or botanical garden, eyes closed, and breath long breaths picking out all possible aromas. If it is outdoors and secluded from noisy traffic and commotion, listen for every tiny insect or bird that sings. If you must, blindfold yourself or your companion to really absorb everything around you which isn’t visual. Do it for much more than 10 or 15 minutes; more like a half-hour or hour to genuinely tap into a world we too often ignore, take for granted, and eventually lose.
Darkness
The remarkable, mysterious, and later refuted tale of Kaspar Hauser, the imprisoned German boy deprived of any light in a dark 2-meter by 1-meter cell most his childhood, and the narrative of Helen Keller — blind and deaf her entire life since almost 2-years old — can both teach us about how acutely compensating the other human senses develop when one is denied or deprived of sight or sound.
In a post several months ago I shared the rising popularity of new restaurants serving in complete darkness. Here are Restaurant.com’stop 10 establishments for pitch black dining enhancing the body’s other multiple sensory receptors! Tap into their little world of alternate sensor-ramas! If you don’t live near these major cities, check for local or nearby 3-star (or higher) restaurants that might host the event once or twice a year.
Travel & Cultures
When you leave home for a long week or extended vacation, do you go looking to deepen your soul or suntan and gift baskets? The Roman poet Horace warns against merely getting from point A to B: “They change their climate, not their soul, who rush across the sea.” Visiting strange lands and its inhabitants should be the fullest experience possible, not just tolerated until B then back again to A. What are four methods of being a cultured traveler?
Tourist
Prior to the mid-19th century very few people had the means or luxury to travel beyond their region, much less their country or crossing oceans to far away continents. Tourism didn’t explode into a thriving market until the last third of the 19th century as the middle class began earning enough money for railway passenger trains and ocean liners. As this market began entrepreneurs like Karl Baedeker and Thomas Cook (of Thomas Cook & Son) stepped in to capitalize but with very contrasting ideas of travel. The former published step-by-step sequentially numbered tour guidebooks of exactly what to visit at what precise time. The latter, however, organized packaged trips to find literal sojourns to God with the assistance of pious ministers, pseudo-sabbaticals if you will.
Packaged tourism today with a tour guide isn’t much different. Visiting famous landmarks, museums, festivals, beachfront resorts, or hotels in mountain tops, are quite popular vacations. When you travel though what do you do? Follow an airtight itinerary by guidebook or tour group, or do you discover the human landscape, the human story behind and within the landmarks, museums, and inanimate objects in your camera?
There are living monuments not only in foreign lands, but just as well in your own backyard and hometown! Grand hotels should have as a standard feature open nurseries and playground where children of guests interact with native children while parents converse sharing family and cultural stories at nearby benches and tables. In Denmark and followed later in the U.K. social activists came up with an ingenious project in 2000 called Human Libraries where actual people share a story of their life from personal experience to a guest/visitor. The guest then interacts with the storyteller breaking down prejudices and other barriers that typically divide, cause unfounded fears, and subsequent fabricated contempt. Tap into the experience of being a living library for visitors.
Pilgrim
Pilgrims are perhaps the original traveler. The word travel is derived from “travail” which means to suffer or toil without much relief, conveniences or luxury. Matsuo Bashō and Satish Kumar are two perfect examples of pilgrimages. Both men set out on walking journeys without consideration of provisions, possible relief, or shelter. They began with just three destinations: deep significant self-meaning, very challenging, and cultivate the Wander spirit. In other words, find the roots of yourself as well as the journey’s and destination’s. Find the tiniest details of life and the world around you which are too often lost in convenient rapid travel. Have no strict dates or times. And do not obsess about arrival; find the art of living, not motion! Tap into the world of a pilgrimage.
Nomad
When you think of nomads how would you describe them? One popular image are the Bedouins of the Syrian and Arabian deserts prior to the 20th century. They were known to be traveling camel and goat herders across vast regions of North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, to the Middle East covering 21 various countries. In today’s highly urbanized and flourishing societies, these nomadic cultures are slowly being swallowed up by encroaching civilization. How then might we experience in the 21st century what is meant by gypsy or nomadic living according to necessity like the Bedouins? What might be the closest thing to Bedouin life?
It isn’t RV’ing like many retirees do trekking across the continent from national park to national park with all the amenities of a fully furnished 45-foot or larger $200,000 Class A motorhome. It isn’t even staying in a luxurious 3-room log-cabin with massive kitchen and hot-tub/sauna. No, the closest thing today to gypsy nomadic life is basic camping. In other words, throwing a light tent onto your large backpack and hiking to isolated locations camping for a week or two with friends or your tribe; living IN and with the land without your iPod, hairdryer, and television. All you need are what nomads and gypsies had over 100-years ago: some food, matches or fire-starter kit, a knife, and wet-weather gear. Everything else you might need find in or on the land. At night, have your fire going and gaze above, listen to every single sound, and smell the Earth around you — and perhaps your fellow hikers too (wink). Simplicity is the essence of the gypsy-nomadic experience. Tap into the simple world of basic camping.
Explorer
As a young boy I was spellbound by the stories and travels of the 13th century Venetian explorer Marco Polo along with his father Niccolò and uncle Maffeo. The vivid details of all their stops and their encounters with diverse peoples and cultures utterly captivated my imagination. The Travels of Marco Polo was not like the other romanticized tales of Columbus, Magellan, or Drake that we learned in school. It didn’t take too much reasoning to realize that most of the textbook stories of the Age of Exploration and Colonialization were simply about exploitation laced with racism. None of the 15th to 18th century world Empires had the least bit interest in being taught or enlightened. Neither should our modern desires to explore reflect the Age of Exploitation.
Instead, modern exploration should be derailing ourselves from local daily routine. This can be just as easily accomplished in a 10-mile radius as it can transcontinentally. The power of existential exploration — going without a specific destination — is a strange mix of certainty and uncertainty. Going but not knowing where. You feel compelled to leave the past (and its knowledge) behind, but in not knowing the destination you remain open to embrace other ways of living, thinking, and interacting beyond anything you could’ve possibly imagined. Ask yourself, how many world cultures have you experienced firsthand? Did you know that according to UNESCO World Heritage List there are over 800 cultural sites/regions around the world? Forty-eight of them are endangered of becoming extinct.
Jump off the ordinary vacation of “time off” and sit or walk firmly with time on travels tapping into the world and journey of the intrinsic and extrinsic explorer!
Nature
In the January 2016 issue of National Geographic magazine journalist Florence Williams wrote her article This Is Your Brain on Nature. The magazine issue and Williams’ article complimented the Jan. 10th Explorer television episode Call Of the Wild on the NatGeo Channel.
“Nature nurtures us. It boosts our mood too. According to the attention restoration theory, spending time in nature relieves the stress and mental fatigue caused by the ‘directed attention’ that work and city life require.
Directed Attention is the ability to voluntarily focus attention and ignore distractions crucial to solving problems and completing tasks. But modern life sometimes requires more of this resource than we have — and once it’s depleted, prolonged and concentrated effort leads to mental fatigue, loss of effectiveness, and stress.
Involuntary Attention is attending to the stimuli in peaceful, natural environments — trees, flowing water, mountain shadows — is a different type of experience. It doesn’t require a prolonged effort or an act of will to avoid distractions. Researchers say this kind of focus allows the brain to disengage and restore its capacity for directed attention.”
Williams continues stating that nature improves human creativity by up to 50% and every walk through a park and forest decreases stress hormones by as much as 16%. What does this tell us about too much hectic civilization? After all, aren’t we humans part of Nature since that is exactly where we originated? Is it any wonder that research studies are finding that human mortality rates are indirectly connected to an area’s forestation or trees? Millions of years ago they were literally our homes.
“In a ‘forest kindergarten’ in Langnau am Albis, a suburb of Zurich, Switzerland, children spend most of the school day in the woods, regardless of weather. They learn whittling, fire starting, and denbuilding; they’re able to explore. Supporters say such schools foster self-confidence and an independent spirit.”
Sounds very much like another school in England founded by A.S. Neill doesn’t it?
How should we view Nature today? Is it friend or foe? It wasn’t so long ago that humankind decidedly viewed it as foe. Throughout the Middle Ages, particularly in Northern Europe, the outside world was seen as owned by Darkness, very feared, and home to all sorts of hungry wild beasts, evil spirits, ogres and trolls. In Anglo-Saxon folklore like Beowulf, nature clearly was menacing and completely opposed to human happiness. J.R.R. Tolkien picked up that legacy in the 20th century with stories of hobbits being petrified if passing through the haunted Fangorn Forest or eery Mirkwood. Our words savage and panic are derived from these ancient and Medieval imagery: savage is from silva, meaning a wood; panic comes from the Greeks’ fear of encountering Pan, the half-man, half-goat Lord of the forests. When William Bradford — a conservative Separatist from Plymouth, England and the Church of England — first landed at Cape Cod, Massachusetts in 1620 he described his impressions of the scene as a “hideous and desolate wilderness.” In many parts of 17th century Europe mountains were criticized as deformities, warts, boils and monstrous excrescences, likely due to the harshness to cultivate. It wasn’t until the Romantic Movement that this view of nature significantly changed and it became no longer foe, but friend. And more than just friend.
Our Biosphere, Biodiversity, and Biophilia and the Ecological Self In the previous Untapped Worlds I introduced Harvard sociobiologist and naturalist E.O. Wilson. I was particularly intrigued by his definition of eusociality. But the social human side of Nature is only part of the story.
For more than 3-million years we have lived and survived in an intricately connected environment. Tibetan Sherpas and Buddhist lamas say that we and all living things on this planet are always touching like smoke reaches everywhere in the wind. They would be absolutely correct. Every second of our lives we touch unseen elements and forces like the air we breath, the sound waves to our eardrums, and the traveling light-photons our retinas pick up. We are therefore very vital, integral, active parts of our biosphere. Whether we grasp this reality or not, we are effecting Nature even when we are not literally out in Nature. At any given time every single day we directly and indirectly influence our lithosphere, geosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere. Think about that impact for a moment. If you think your wood and brick home is ‘your home,’ think again.
Biodiversity isn’t just the categorization of living species on Earth. We must distinguish between genetic biodiversity and ecological biodiversity:
“Genetic Biodiversity is the variation in genes that exists within a species. A helpful way to understand genetic diversity is to think about dogs. All dogs are part of the same species, but their genes can dictate whether they are Chihuahua or a Great Dane. There can be a lot of variation in genes – just think about all the colors, sizes, and shapes that make up the genetic diversity of dogs.
Ecological Biodiversity is the diversity of ecosystems, natural communities and habitats. In essence, it’s the variety of ways that species interact with each other and their environment. The forests of Maine differ from the forests of Colorado by the types of species found in both ecosystems, as well as the temperature and rainfall. These two seemingly similar ecosystems have a lot of differences that make them both special.”
How important are every single genetic and ecological systems we live within? For starters the National Wildlife Federation lists these six reasons:
Foods and materials to live healthy and happy. Without the diversity of pollinators, plants, and soils, our supermarkets would have a lot less produce.
Medicinal uses. Research into plant and animal genetics and biology have allowed humans to live extended lives and cure diseases. Every time a species goes extinct our genetic diversity is lost, we will never know whether research would have given us a new vaccine or drug.
Ecological services. Biodiversity enables the cleaning of water and absorbing of chemicals, which wetlands do, to providing oxygen for us to breathe — one of the many things that plants do for everyone.
Ecosystem rebalancing. If given enough time, adjusting to eco-disturbances allows for ecosystems to adjust to interferences like extreme fires and floods. If a reptile species goes extinct, a forest with 20 other reptiles is likely to adapt better than another forest with only one reptile.
With genetic diversity disease prevention is more successful. This allows species to adjust to changes in their environment.
Sheer wonderment and intrigue. There are few things as beautiful and inspiring as the vast diversity of life — between 3-30 million species, possibly over 100-million — that exists on Earth. And that diversity is constantly changing.
Biophilic office space
Biophilia is a term and concept that E.O. Wilson popularized in the 1980’s. Earlier I was mentioning a few facts about how much Nature reduces stress hormones and significantly increases human creativity. Because we humans inherently enjoy the diversity of natural life, this is called biophilia. If we as a species do not become much more aware, educated, and a responsible part of Nature’s delicate interacting systems, we will permanently cut our and our descendant’s virtual umbilical cord to life. Period. It is (way?) past due that everyone become a scientist, a member of the Biophilia Foundation, a Naturalist that cares deeply about a quality life today and for our children, grandchildren, and the human species.
The real possibility that Nature could end should move us away from a high-carbon consumerist ethos and closer to a sustainable intimate ecological relationship with our fragile world. Tap into the many varieties of a low-carbon lifestyle and become a Conservationist rather than a programmed Consumerist.
Conventions and Baggage
In the scientific world, especially Quantum Physics, it is often said that the only thing that is permanent is impermanence. Fighting or denying this law is futile. Embracing it and working within it brings liberation and contentment. Progress is achieved by movement. Stagnation is achieved by an accumulation of heavy baggage. History has repeatedly shown that breaking away from antiquated socio-economic and religious norms begins small until it grows into an inevitable movement with sweeping change and enlightenment. But the overhaul and liberation cannot start without a few courageous movers and shakers; the “radicals” if you will.
What You Trust
Hand-me-Downs
When you purchase a computer or laptop, it typically comes preloaded with the newest MS Windows operating system, all the many drivers to run various external devices, programs to do office work, Norton or McAfee protection, perhaps Netflix for movies and TV shows, and also personal duties like online banking, perhaps home security and monitoring, and a few games that you and the family enjoy. Basically the computer/laptop is setup to hit the ground running moments after booting up. Seconds after birth the human brain is not setup to immediately perform adult tasks; not in the least.
The human operating system, the brain and neurology, are gradually programmed in through our 10-14 receptors over the span of about two decades. This is not to say that we are prenatally blank. We do receive a very basic genetic coding, a few simple sequences of 1’s and 0’s if you will, that give our bodies the necessary information to stay alive — or attempt to — with the mandatory help of our mother and (perhaps?) father.
The implications of these pre-natal facts are probably far more reaching than one realizes. It means that during those first years we learn an emotional risk-reward protocol; this behavior results in that reward or consequence. In the latter portion of those two decades based upon our parental, familial, and community, we develop the core of our beliefs on religion, nationalism — perhaps monarchy in certain countries — our young opinions, politics, various mechanisms of emotional relationships, and depending completely on our birthplace and the influences during the first two decades we develop how we “fit in” this world. Much of what we think are truths are simply shaped by our first 10-20 years.
To say it more poignantly, religious, political, and social beliefs are largely an accident of birth, geography, and history. There are degrees of “truth” scattered throughout those three accidents.
Facts and Impermanence
All throughout recorded history there have been monumental events or discoveries that forever change human civilization. For at least 100,000 years or more humans assumed that walking or running were the only means of transportation over distances. That truth was overturned around 3,500 BCE with the domestication of the horse. For about 4,500 years humans assumed precious metals or merchandise were the only forms of commercial trading until China began using paper currency in the 7th century CE. For some 50,000 years or more humans assumed the world and their entire existence entailed only what they could see with the naked eye, until the 13th century CE when magnifying lenses were invented. For approximately 4,500 years humans assumed there were only two methods of higher learning: verbal stories, pictographs, or from slow scribed papyrus that only ‘divine’ authors could record from the god(s). That truth was overturned by the invention of the printing press in the 15th century CE. For probably at least 5 or 6,000 years humans assumed that diseases, ailments, and physical malformities were from angry god(s) until the 19th and 20th centuries when antibiotics were introduced, followed by a growing plethora of other medical cures and treatments today.
I will not go into how monumental Galileo Galili’s confirmation of Copernicus’s heliocentric theorem was to humankind. It literally changed everything European and Near Eastern religious and political leaders had believed and taught their subjects and all the masses for almost three millenia. John Maynard Keynes is perhaps one apropos example of just how profound impermanence molds human facts or truths. During the Great Depression, Keynes shifted his position and monetary policy more than once and came under heavy criticism by other fellow economists. His response was “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do sir?” How often do we scrutinize our own beliefs, let alone change them, as so many forces, factors, and limitless diversity exists, moves, and evolves into newer forms? Often facts and truths are a matter of human perception, not necessarily universal permanence.
Beliefs vs. Practice
How much are your beliefs and practicing those beliefs worth to you? Can you put a price on them? Henry David Thoreau said “The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.” When you consider all the various definitions of what life is I believe Mr. Thoreau was spot on. What is most valuable to you in life? Why do people hold certain beliefs? The majority of the human race believe in a Divine Being or God. Why? Regional Director for the Council for Secular Humanism and a former Publicity Coordinator for the Campus Free-thought Alliance, Austin Cline lists seven reasons from his research:
Indoctrination — The high and consistent degree of religious concentrations suggests that people believe their religion because that’s the one they were indoctrinated into and which is consistently reinforced around them. People acquire a religion before critical thinking skills and that religion is promoted without most people noticing.
Indoctrination into Anti-Athiest Bigotry — questioning or going against social norms can be very risky; e.g. being a Zionist Jew inside Syria. Children learn in public schools that America is a nation for people who believe in God and this message is reinforced throughout their lives by preachers, politicians, and community leaders of all sorts. This leads to number 3…
Peer and Family Pressure — People who step outside [social] expectations are not simply choosing a different way of life, but can in fact be perceived as rejecting one of the most important bonds which keep a family or community together. Even if this is never communicated in so many words, people do learn that certain ideas, ideologies, and practices should be treated as vital to communal bonds and should therefore not be questioned. The role of peer pressure and familial pressure in maintaining at least a veneer of religiosity for many people cannot be denied.
Fear of Death — This is self-generated hope out of fear of what will happen after dying — either going to hell or simply ceasing to exist. People don’t want to think that [the possibility of] physical death is the end of all experiences, emotions, and thoughts so they insist on believing that somehow their “mind” will continue to exist without any physical brain in an eternity of sustained bliss — or even will be reincarnated in a new form.
Wishful Thinking — Many Christians seem to wish quite strongly that there exists a place of eternal punishment awaiting all those who dare to deny them political and cultural dominion in America. Many conservative believers from many religions seem to wish that there is a god which wants them to exercise unchecked power over women and minorities.
Fear of Freedom and Responsibility — I personally find this reason very telling. It promotes lack of ownership. [Believers] don’t have to be responsible for ensuring that justice is done because God will provide that. They don’t have to be responsible for solving environmental problems because God will do that. They don’t have to be responsible for developing strong moral rules because God has done that. They don’t have to be responsible for developing sound arguments in defense of their positions because God has done that. Believers deny their own freedom because freedom means responsibility and responsibility means that if we fail, no one will rescue us.
Lack of Basic Skills in Logic and Reasoning — Most people don’t learn nearly as much about logic, reason, and constructing sound arguments as they should. Given how important believers claim the existence of their god and truth of their religion are, you’d think that they would invest a lot of effort into constructing the best possible arguments and finding the best possible evidence. Instead, they invest a lot of effort into constructing circular rationalizations and finding anything that sounds even remotely plausible.
It has been my personal experience living most of my life in the Deep South (Texas is on the fringe of the Bible Belt) that the most common foundation for fundamental beliefs once a person reaches their 20’s and 30’s is a question of convenience really. What do I stand to lose or gain with these beliefs? What is worth dying for or spending years in prison? What is my personal integrity worth? How would this belief-system benefit me? In my opinion, those are the more pragmatic questions the majority of adults ask about religions and not anything concerning a consensus of truth or what extensive scrutiny reveals.
Transcendence Things are very often bigger than ourselves. We cannot possibly understand all extenuating factors that contribute to human behavior. Though the weight of peer pressure, governments, family, social trends, money, or global dynamics can push us to apathy, paralysis, or disillusionment, we must find ways to take the higher road. A blind ideologue or unexamined do-gooder is not enough. Healthy scepticism should always remain active. Fortunately Gandhi and Galileo understood this risky concept for the eventual betterment of all.
Tap into the unexamined life and your belief systems beyond your own tiny world.
Creating
Many Fortune 500 companies have latched on to the new idea that creativity within their workforce is a valuable asset and should be encouraged. Modern psychologists are in general agreement that a blue-sky attitude at the office and home have many health benefits. But what exactly is the act of creating and creativity? What are the best ways to cultivate a thriving ambiance of creativity? Let’s start with what isn’t.
Conformity: The Subtle Virus
The Renaissance of the 14th through 16th centuries undoubtedly ushered in a rebirth of classical learning and values. It ushered in a broader spectrum of science, language, and literature. For the most part feudalism and religious dogma crushed any spirit of self-expression or free thinking throughout the Middle Ages. But the Renaissance brought about greats such as Da Vinci, Machiavelli, and Dante. However, it also created an eventual elitist and disempowering movement by the 17th and early 18th centuries: individual creative genius. In other words, touched by the divine and untouchable by mediocrity. Michelangelo and Mozart received this illustrious title with full honors postmortem too.
Fortunately for all aspiring virtuosos and maestros, by the 1960’s the history of creativity shifted from innate, divine genetic gifting… to ‘technique’ that could be learned just like typing, riding a horse, or playing an instrument. The trick was to learn all the various techniques to find your own unique style! Instead of God’s favour, creativity (within all of us) stems from a grounding of appropriate techniques and hard work through extensive broad education or training. For example, Edward de Bono’s technique-based approach to “lateral thinking.” See exercise below:
Have you tapped into the untapped worlds of non-conformity? How many technique-based creativity skills have you really unleashed?
Self-Expression
A long held practice in Buddhism is to seek out life’s marrow in mindful awareness to ordinary routine tasks like brushing your teeth or singing in the shower Need You Tonight by INXS. This is how it should be with creating too. Whether it is cooking, spice and/or vegetable gardening, learning and playing an instrument, writing-blogging, beginning new friendships and romances outside of convention, painting, making wood furniture or interior decorations, walking the family pet, give yourself a daily or at least weekly varied dose of complete self-expression. Tap into that simmering creativity and let it all burst out and consume! Homo faber is good… very, very good!
Wider Freedom
Creativity and creating has been one of the most historic heavily mythologized aspects of human endeavor. Too many people still believe it is the preserve, the jurisdiction of a small group chosen or born with a ‘special gift’ whereas fuller history tells us it is so much more inclusive! And the methods the elite geniuses implement to keep their lofty social, religious, or economic status is cunningly specialized through guilds, dominions, or foundations. Yet real joy, real fulfillment, real challenge, and real accomplishment doesn’t strictly depend on current convention, especially within a macro and subatomic existence that is always impermanent. Fear stifles, courage fulfills.
The Trinsics
There is an old saying in professional sports that you are only as good as your last defeat. In other words, in the highly competitive field of modern professional sports and coaching resting on your laurels is very bad for job security, even if your overall record is worthy of an eventual Hall of Fame induction. There is literally just a miniscule amount of grace to be mediocre, let alone losers. I argue up and down, sideways and backwards with U.S. men’s soccer fans about our national team performances, players, and coach Jurgen Klinsmann all the time because they ignorantly feel that the United States should now be competing for the World Cup semi-finals and soon the World Cup Championship — hysterically being in the world’s top four or top two TODAY! — like we dominated in baseball and basketball decades ago, and like we will dominate if the rest of the world starts playing American football NFL style as they are promoting (in hopes to expand the revenue markets) in Great Britain and Europe.
What fair-weather naive American futebol fans don’t realize or thoroughly understand is the intrinsic value — and to a degree extrinsic value — Jurgen Klinsmann brings to our USMNT and youth feeder programs. They have no clue as to what and where Klinsmann grew up inside (Germany), played with and against, and intimately understands about world class futebol/soccer in Germany, and Europe inside UEFA. That wasn’t something the average American sports fan was even remotely interested in the 1980’s and 90’s. American sports fans and the financial backers/sponsors are mostly (only?) concerned about revenue and profits via high winning percentages and dynasties. Today, I think pro coaches, their staff, and general managers have less than 3-years to make it all happen. Win, win, win; nothing more than extrinsic value. Period.
Measuring something or someone’s value cannot and is not strictly done by a dollar amount or the win column. And it certainly cannot be accurately measured in one or two years, let alone a few months.
Have you tapped into both the intrinsic and extrinsic values of yourself, someone or something?
Deathstyle
Death is always as close and real as life. The minute you are born, every subsequent minute gets you closer to death. In the Western mindset death has become more distant, more detached from every day life than any other point in history. I feel this growing separation is undermining our ability to live more fully.
The rise in medicalized death in hospital or hospice and the erosion of old funeral and mourning ceremonies attended by all family and community have pushed death into an invisible state in modern society. Death and dying has become a taboo topic of conversation or awkward silence at a dinner party. Why? Why has ‘out of sight, out of mind‘ become so trendy and expected? What has become of the old deathstyle of growing old, facing our mortality with courage, dignity, honor, and dying well? First of all, this can only be reintroduced if we talk about death openly and frankly, as if it were our intimate dance partner. It is a little known fact that being equally obsessed with death as we are with an inspiring life, creates an INTENSE appreciation for the value of life.
A Danse Macabre
In medieval and Renaissance Europe as well as Native North and South American tribal cultures, death was viewed as an unavoidable bed partner. Cemeteries of medieval London, Paris, and Rome were popular meeting places where wine, beer, and linen tradesmen, especially on Saints Day when pilgrims travelled through, were the busiest bustling places in town. People strolled, socialized, and made merry amongst the graves — children played with human bones in the charnel houses by the churches because skeletons were stacked to make way, make room for new residents. Auguste Bernard, historian of French burial locations, wrote cemeteries were “the noisiest, busiest, most boisterous, and most commercial place in the rural and urban community.” The morbid fascination with skulls, arm and leg bones, and cadavers that filled medieval life is more than a historical curiosity: it holds a crucial lesson for us today. It is the same concept, the same lesson as appreciating something immensely valuable when you no longer have it.
The Reach of Death
There was a time when a death in a community affected everyone in the community. Before the 20th century in Western countries, death of an individual caused a major social occasion altering the space and time of everyone in town. It was part of everyday life like the passing of the seasons. In the 21st century this is no longer the case. Death is treated like an unwanted guest and should be ignored and out of sight of our youth and children.
If life is to be respected, cherished, and held as momentary, then death should be equally respected, cherished, and held as a visiting next-door neighbor.
Caring For Our Elderly
There is no denying that the modern longevity of life has increased exponentially. Medical advancements have improved the quantity of extended years, but in Western nations has the quality of life for eighty, ninety, and centurion aged retirees kept up? Prior to and during the 1950’s many elderly moved in and lived with their children. However, this practice has been in steady decline as more and more women entered the workplace and left behind the traditional roles as caregivers to the children and grandparents. This accounts for the extraordinary rise in nursing homes and hospice. Are there alternatives?
Generational integration
Yes there are alternatives. In Japan and China the Confucian lifestyle of filial piety as lived by the great and learned emperor Han Wendi in caring for his ailing mother at the expense of his own luxury and convenience, is one alternative. If one or both of your parents were emotional or illegal causes of tremendous hurt and instability in your childhood and reconciliation is an impossible outcome, there are plenty of other good, funny, and deeply wise elderly patients without family visitors and caring loving treatment at their nursing home where both of you would benefit immeasurably. Otherwise, there are few legitimate reasons not to invite your parents or grandparents to live with you or for you to move in with them. Much life-and-death wisdom can be shared and learned with those on the doorstep of death; any nearby St. Jude’s Childrens Hospital could teach the same lessons. But our parents helped bring us into this world, survive it, and grow to be adults so we can help them leave it with contentment and dignity whether we always saw things eye to eye or not.
How much have you tapped into the world of the aging and elderly? How immediate, frank, and open is a dignifying death promoted and taught in your house? Do you have a danse macabre that deepens the beauty and frailty of life… the paradox of death giving more life?
* * * * * * * * * *
“He who cannot draw on three thousand years
is living from hand to mouth.”
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?”
— Cicero
This final message from Goethe and Cicero is this: if we truly want to change how we live, to be more human, live a fuller extraordinary life, there may come a point where we simply stop thinking, stop planning, and act, go, just do it. There is another aspect to this command: giving is very good for you and those around you. Examining 3 – 4,000 years of history enable us to rethink our habitual (blind?) ways of loving, creating, working, and dying and are NOT the only choices facing us! All we have to do is throw open the wonderbox of all life, people, and Nature and discover a perpetual art of better deeper living.
(line break)
Live Well — Love Much — Laugh Often — Learn Always
The April 28th, 2015 New York Times reads: Gay Marriage Arguments Divide Supreme Court Justices. Our country’s highest court will reconvene in June to hopefully put an end to individual states banning same-sex marriage. Supreme Court correspondent Adam Liptak for the NY Times described the proceedings and debate “…illuminated [Justices opposing same-sex marriage] conflicting views on history, tradition, biology, constitutional interpretation, the democratic process and the role of the courts prodding social change.” Their decision next month will probably go down as another landmark decision in the Supreme Court’s 200+ year history.
However, like President Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation declared “that all persons held as slaves” within the Confederate rebellious states “are, and henceforward shall be free” did not mean freed slaves were suddenly treated fairly or not discriminated against for the following 122 years in housing, employment, or public programs as America’s Civil Rights history hideously documents. Despite the probable Supreme Court ruling in favor of same-sex marriage, there will be many states throughout the Midwest and South that will notprotect gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered people. If abiding to the explicit or implicit letter-of-the-law put to the states by the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 followed by the 13th Amendment in 1865 were any indications of comprehensive state obedience, based on those historical reactions, though today the LGBT community has won a battle, the 122-year war is far from over. It might even get repulsive in some regions.
The controversy centers over the institution of marriage and its nature over at least the last couple of millenia. Conservatives advocate it is a sacred union before God between a man and woman. This is of course based upon Judeo-Christian dogma and traditions. The conservative right further claims these longstanding Christian tenets are woven into the nation’s Constitution, Bill of Rights, and Declaration of Independence by our Christian forefathers. By default, they claim, that makes the United States — including our Supreme Court frame-of-reference — a Christian nation.
Unfortunately for radical ultra Conservatives, this claim, that the U.S. and her founding fathers were always Christian, does not bear out in the historical records of those men. From James Huber:
“The Founding Fathers were brilliant men. They spent months and months working on the Constitution. They were very, very careful about what they wrote, discussing and debating every passage at great length. It seems to me that if they had intended this to be a Christian nation they would have said so somewhere in the Constitution. The Founding Fathers had no reason to be vague. There was no ACLU, no “Activist judges.” If they had wanted a Christian Nation they could have written:
“God Almighty, in Order to form a true Christian Nation, establish Divine Justice, insure adherence to His Laws, provide for the defense of His Church, promote His Word, and secure His Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, has led us to ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
The words “Jesus” “Christ” “Bible” “God” and even “Creator” appear nowhere in the Constitution (“Endowed by their Creator” is in the Declaration of Independence.) Just how stupid would someone have to be to create a Christian nation then forget to mention Christ in the Constitution?
Also notice that nobody ever asks what the Founding Mothers might have said. There were no Founding Mothers. The Founders were all men; White men, many of them slave owners. White male slave owners who may or may not have been Christians, but explicitly forbade any kind of religious test for office. In other words, you have a far stronger case if you’d like to argue that the Founding Fathers intended us to be a racist and sexist nation.
The United States is historically and globally a very young adolescent nation. As such it has a few/many adolescent behaviors — depending on what segment of the near 320-million highly diverse population you hail from — that are good and bad on the human-decency human-rights meter. One such convoluted quagmire is our “religious history.”
Ignoring completely the already long-established Native American tribes in the 15th, 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries — well before any Europeans or Asians set foot here — immigrants from the European continent arrived, ironically, to escape religious oppression and forced beliefs by state-affiliated churches in Rome (Catholicism) and London (Church of England). Therefore, when modern evangelical conservative groups and organizations here yell the United States of America is and was created as a Christian nation by Christian forefathers, what exactly are they wailing? What is “Christian” or Christianity? It certainly doesn’t describe America’s very first settlers: the Native American tribes! Who then are they really describing?
The leaders and immigrants of our pre-American Revolutionary Era (1775) were primarily from the British Isles (63.1%) and in significantly fewer numbers from other European countries, mostly Spain (7%) and Germany/Prussia (6.9%). Twenty percent were slaves from the African continent. All of our nation’s forefather’s who created and debated our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, our Bill of Rights, had British and French heritage. Clearly the most influential forefathers of our country’s most hallowed documents have their roots in England and French-Huguenot civil history. A tiny lens when you ask 1,000, or 10,000, or even 500,000 Americans What is Christian? Ask the same number of Christian-believers outside of the U.S. the same question, and you will get various answers. Why different?
Simple. There are over 32,000 different denominations (from 6 primary designations) of Christianity that have different interpretations of the Canonical New Testament stories of the nature of Jesus and the authority of teaching his nature. Without getting neck-deep into that 2,000 year old mess that keeps getting messier, let’s focus on the English/French but clearly American forefathers and what they stated and inferred supporting the Separation of State and Church.
Thomas Jefferson (1742-1826)
Thomas Jefferson was a genius writer and obviously the one voted by the Founding Fathers to write our Declaration of Independence and a major contributor to other federal documents. He also authored Virginia’s Statute for Religious Freedom in 1777 and became our third President in 1801. Following are some of his written views about religion and government.
Convinced that religious liberty must, most assuredly, be built into the structural frame of the new [state] government, Jefferson proposed this language [for the new Virginia constitution]: “All persons shall have full and free liberty of religious opinion; nor shall any be compelled to frequent or maintain any religious institution”: freedom for religion, but also freedom from religion.(Edwin S. Gaustad, Faith of Our Fathers: Religion and the New Nation, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987, p. 38. Jefferson proposed his language in 1776.)
Our[Virginia’s]act for freedom of religion is extremely applauded. The Ambassadors and ministers of the several nations of Europe resident at this court have asked me copies of it to send to their sovereigns, and it is inserted at full length in several books now in the press; among others, in the new Encyclopedie. I think it will produce considerable good even in those countries where ignorance, superstition, poverty and oppression of body and mind in every form, are so firmly settled on the mass of the people, that their redemption from them can never be hoped.(Thomas Jefferson, letter to George Wythe from Paris, August 13, 1786.)
The Virginia act for religious freedom has been received with infinite approbation in Europe, and propagated with enthusiasm. I do not mean by governments, but by the individuals who compose them. It has been translated into French and Italian; has been sent to most of the courts of Europe, and has been the best evidence of the falsehood of those reports which stated us to be in anarchy. It is inserted in the new “Encyclopédie,” and is appearing in most of the publications respecting America. In fact, it is comfortable to see the standard of reason at length erected, after so many ages, during which the human mind has been held in vassalage by kings, priests, and nobles; and it is honorable for us, to have produced the first legislature who had the courage to declare, that the reason of man may be trusted with the formation of his own opinions….(Thomas Jefferson, letter to James Madison from Paris, Dec. 16, 1786.)
Subject opinion to coercion: whom will you make your inquisitors? Fallible men; men governed by bad passions, by private as well as public reasons. And why subject it to coercion? To produce uniformity. But is uniformity of opinion desirable? No more than of face and stature.(Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782)
Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth.(Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782)
No man complains of his neighbor for ill management of his affairs, for an error in sowing his land, or marrying his daughter, for consuming his substance in taverns … in all these he has liberty; but if he does not frequent the church, or then conform in ceremonies, there is an immediate uproar.(Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782)
In the Notes[on the State of Virginia]Jefferson elaborated his views on government’s keeping its distance from all religious affairs and religious opinions. “The legitimate powers of government,” he wrote, “extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”(Edwin S. Gaustad, Faith of Our Fathers: Religion and the New Nation, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987, pp. 42-43)
I am for freedom of religion and against all maneuvers to bring about a legal ascendancy of one sect over another.(Thomas Jefferson, letter to Elbridge Gerry, January 26, 1799.)
All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal laws must protect, and to violate which would be oppression.(Thomas Jefferson, “First Inaugural Address,” March 4, 1801)
…And let us reflect that, having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions. …error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it. …I deem the essential principles of our government. ..[:]Equal and exact justice to all men, of whatever state or persuasion, religious or political; …freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and freedom of person under the protection of the habeas corpus, and trial by juries impartially selected.(Thomas Jefferson, “First Inaugural Address,” March 4, 1801)
It behoves every man who values liberty of conscience for himself, to resist invasions of it in the case of others; or their case may, by change of circumstances, become his own.(Thomas Jefferson, letter to Benjamin Rush, April 21, 1803)
Jefferson wrote voluminously to prove that Christianity was not part of the law of the land and that religion or irreligion was purely a private matter, not cognizable by the state.(Leonard W. Levy, Treason Against God: A History of the Offense of Blasphemy, New York: Schocken Books, 1981, p. 335)
There are some thirty-three to forty more quotes from Thomas Jefferson regarding his stance on religious liberties and keeping questions of faith utterly separate from government enforcement but necessary for protecting any faith or belief. Feel free to research him and reconfirm these bibliographical references.
John Adams (1735-1826)
John Adams was our 2nd U.S. President from 1797 to 1801 and a prolific leader at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. These are some of his opinions on government and religion.
Thirteen governments[of the original states]thus founded on the natural authority of the people alone, without a pretence of miracle or mystery, and which are destined to spread over the northern part of that whole quarter of the globe, are a great point gained in favor of the rights of mankind. (John Adams, “A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America” (1787-1788)
We think ourselves possessed, or, at least, we boast that we are so, of liberty of conscience on all subjects, and of the right of free inquiry and private judgment in all cases, and yet how far are we from these exalted privileges in fact! There exists, I believe, throughout the whole Christian world, a law which makes it blasphemy to deny or doubt the divine inspiration of all the books of the Old and New Testaments, from Genesis to Revelations. In most countries of Europe it is punished by fire at the stake, or the rack, or the wheel. In England itself it is punished by boring through the tongue with a red-hot poker. In America it is not better; even in our own Massachusetts, which I believe, upon the whole, is as temperate and moderate in religious zeal as most of the States, a law was made in the latter end of the last century, repealing the cruel punishments of the former laws, but substituting fine and imprisonment upon all those blasphemers upon any book of the Old Testament or New. Now, what free inquiry, when a writer must surely encounter the risk of fine or imprisonment for adducing any argument for investigating into the divine authority of those books? Who would run the risk of translating Dupuis? But I cannot enlarge upon this subject, though I have it much at heart. I think such laws a great embarrassment, great obstructions to the improvement of the human mind. Books that cannot bear examination, certainly ought not to be established as divine inspiration by penal laws. It is true, few persons appear desirous to put such laws in execution, and it is also true that some few persons are hardy enough to venture to depart from them. But as long as they continue in force as laws, the human mind must make an awkward and clumsy progress in its investigations. I wish they were repealed. The substance and essence of Christianity, as I understand it, is eternal and unchangeable, and will bear examination forever, but it has been mixed with extraneous ingredients, which I think will not bear examination, and they ought to be separated. Adieu. (John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson, January 23, 1825)
In his youth John Adams (1735-1826) thought to become a minister, but soon realized that his independent opinions would create much difficulty. At the age of twenty-one, therefore, he resolved to become a lawyer, noting that in following law rather than divinity, “I shall have liberty to think for myself without molesting others or being molested myself.” (Edwin S. Gaustad, Faith of Our Fathers: Religion and the New Nation, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987, p. 88. The Adams quote from his letter to Richard Cranch, August 29, 1756.)
The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature; and if men are now sufficiently enlightened to disabuse themselves of artifice, imposture, hypocrisy, and superstition, they will consider this event as an era in their history. Although the detail of the formation of the American governments is at present little known or regarded either in Europe or in America, it may hereafter become an object of curiosity. It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the influence of Heaven, more than those at work upon ships or houses, or laboring in merchandise or agriculture; it will forever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses…. (John Adams, “A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America” (1787-1788)
We should begin by setting conscience free. When all men of all religions … shall enjoy equal liberty, property, and an equal chance for honors and power … we may expect that improvements will be made in the human character and the state of society. (John Adams, letter to Dr. Price, as quoted by Albert Menendez and Edd Doerr, compilers, The Great Quotations on Religious Liberty, Long Beach, CA: Centerline Press, 1991, p. 1.)
Let the human mind loose. It must be loose. It will be loose. Superstition and Dogmatism cannot confine it. (John Adams, letter to John Quincy Adams, November 13, 1816)
James Madison (1751-1836)
James Madison was the fourth U.S. President from 1809 to 1817. He was the primary author of our Bill of Rights and Constitution. Following are his ideas of church and state separation.
At age eighty-one[therefore, in 1832?], both looking back at the American experience and looking forward with vision sharpened by practical experience, Madison summed up his views of church and state relations in a letter to a “Reverend Adams”: “I must admit moreover that it may not be easy, in every possible case, to trace the line of separation between the rights of religion and the Civil authority with such distinctness as to avoid collisions and doubts on unessential points. The tendency of a usurpation on one side or the other, or to a corrupting coalition or alliance between them, will be best guarded by an entire abstinence of the Government from interference in any way whatever, beyond the necessity of preserving public order, and protecting each sect against trespass on its legal rights by others.”(Robert L. Maddox, Separation of Church and State: Guarantor of Religious Freedom, New York: Crossroad, 1987, p. 39.)
This assertion[that Madison was committed to total and complete separation of church and state]would be challenged by the nonpreferentialists, who agree with Justice Rehnquist’s dissent in the Jaffree case. Contrasted with the analysis set forth above, Rehnquist insisted that Madison’s “original language ‘nor shall any national religion be established’ obviously does not conform to the ‘wall of separation’ between church and state which latter day commentators have ascribed to him.” Rehnquist believes Madison was seeking merely to restrict Congress from establishing a particular national church. There are three problems with this contention. First, nothing in Madison’s acts or words support such a proposition. Indeed, his opposition to the General Assessment Bill in Virginia, detailed in the “Memorial and Remonstrance,” contradicts Rehnquist directly. Secondly, all of Madison’s writings after 1789 support the Court’s twentieth-century understanding of the term “wall of separation.” Third, the reference to Madison’s use of “national” simply misses his definition of the word. Madison had an expansive intention when he used the term national. He believed that “religious proclamations by the Executive recommending thanksgiving and fasts… imply and certainly nourish the erroneous idea of a national religion.” He commented in a similar way about chaplains for the House and Senate. Historical evidence lends no support to the Rehnquist thesis. And clearly Jefferson, even though absent from the First Congress, seems a far more secure source of “original intent” than Justice Rehnquist.(Robert S. Alley, ed., The Supreme Court on Church and State, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988, p. 13)
Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprize [sic], every expanded prospect.(James Madison, in a letter to William Bradford, April 1, 1774)
Congress, in voting a plan for the government of the Western territories, retained a clause setting aside one section in each township for the support of public schools, while striking out the provision reserving a section for the support of religion. Commented Madison: “How a regulation so unjust in itself, so foreign to the authority of Congress, and so hurtful to the sale of public land, and smelling so strongly of an antiquated bigotry, could have received the countenance of a committee is truly a matter of astonishment.” (Richard B. Morris, Seven Who Shaped Our Destiny: The Founding Fathers as Revolutionaries, Harper & Row, 1973, p. 206. The Congress here referred to was the Continental Congress; the Madison quote is from his letter to James Monroe, May 29, 1785)
Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity in exclusion of all other religions may establish, with the same ease, any particular sect of Christians in exclusion of all other sects? That the same authority which can force a citizen to contribute threepence only of his property for the support of any one establishment may force him to conform to any other establishment in all cases whatsoever? (James Madison, “A Memorial and Remonstrance,” addressed to the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia, 1785; from George Seldes, ed., The Great Quotations, Secaucus, New Jersey: The Citadel Press, pp. 459-460. According to Edwin S. Gaustad, Faith of Our Fathers: Religion and the New Nation, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987, pp. 39 ff., Madison’s “Remonstrance” was instrumental in blocking the multiple establishment of all denominations of Christianity in Virginia.)
Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression. In our Governments, the real power lies in the majority of the Community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from the acts of Government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the constituents. (James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, October 17, 1788)
Strongly guarded as is the separation between Religion & Govt in the Constitution of the United States the danger of encroachment by Ecclesiastical Bodies may be illustrated by precedents already furnished in their short history. (See the cases in which negatives were put by J. M. on two bills passd by Congs and his signature withheld from another. See also attempt in Kentucky for example, where it was proposed to exempt Houses of Worship from taxes. (James Madison, “Monopolies. Perpetuities. Corporations. Ecclesiastical Endowments,” as reprinted in Elizabeth Fleet, “Madison’s Detatched Memoranda,” William & Mary Quarterly, Third series: Vol. III, No. 4 [October, 1946], p. 555. The parenthetical note at the end, which lacks a closed parenthesis in Fleet, was apparently a note Madison made to himself regarding examples of improper encroachment to use when the “Detatched Memoranda” were edited and published, and seems to imply clearly that Madison supported taxing churches.)
On Feb. 21, 1811, Madison vetoed a bill for incorporating the Episcopal Church in Alexandria and on Feb. 28, 1811, one reserving land in Mississippi territory for a Baptist Church. (James D. Richardson, Messages and Papers of the Presidents [Washington, 1896-1899], I, 489-490, as cited in a footnote, Elizabeth Fleet, “Madison’s Detatched Memoranda,” William & Mary Quarterly, Third series: Vol. III, No. 4 [October, 1946], p. 555)
Whilst we assert for ourselves a freedom to embrace, to profess and observe the Religion which we believe to be of divine origin, we cannot deny equal freedom to those whose minds have not yet yielded to the evidence which has convinced us. If this freedom be abused, it is an offense against God, not against man: To God, therefore, not to man, must an account of it be rendered. (James Madison, according to Leonard W. Levy, Treason Against God: A History of the Offense of Blasphemy, New York: Schocken Books, 1981, p. xii)
George Washington (1732-1799)
America’s first President after commanding the Continental Army against Great Britain, he is considered the Father of His Country and had these ideas about church and state.
Government being, among other purposes, instituted to protect the consciences of men from oppression, it is certainly the duty of Rulers, not only to abstain from it themselves, but according to their stations, to prevent it in others.(George Washington, letter to the Religious Society called the Quakers, September 28, 1789)
It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it was by the indulgence of one class of the people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that those who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it, on all occasions, their effectual support.(George Washington, letter to the congregation of Touro Synagogue Jews, Newport, Rhode Island, August, 1790)
The following year[1784], when asking Tench Tilghman to secure a carpenter and a bricklayer for his Mount Vernon estate, he[Washington]remarked: “If they are good workmen, they may be of Asia, Africa, or Europe. They may be Mohometans, Jews or Christians of any Sect, or they may be Atheists.” As he told a Mennonite minister who sought refuge in the United States after the Revolution: “I had always hoped that this land might become a safe and agreeable Asylum to the virtuous and persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong….” He was, as John Bell pointed out in 1779, “a total stranger to religious prejudices, which have so often excited Christians of one denomination to cut the throats of those of another.”(Paul F. Boller, George Washington & Religion, Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1963, p. 118. According to Boller, Washington wrote his remarks to Tilghman in a letter dated March 24, 1784; his remarks to the Mennonite–Francis Adrian Van der Kemp–were in a letter dated May 28, 1788)
Of all the animosities which have existed among mankind, those which are caused by difference of sentiments in religion appear to be the most inveterate and distressing, and ought most to be deprecated. I was in hopes that the enlightened and liberal policy, which has marked the present age, would at least have reconciled Christians of every denomination so far that we should never again see the religious disputes carried to such a pitch as to endanger the peace of society.(George Washington, letter to Edward Newenham, October 20, 1792)
In the Enlightened Age and in this Land of equal Liberty it is our boast, that a man’s religious tenets will not forfeit the protection of the Laws, nor deprive him of the right of attaining and holding the highest Offices that are known in the United States.(George Washington, letter to the members of the New Church in Baltimore, January 27, 1793)
Unlike Thomas Jefferson — and Thomas Paine, for that matter — Washington never even got around to recording his belief that Christ was a great ethical teacher. His reticence on the subject was truly remarkable. Washington frequently alluded to Providence in his private correspondence. But the name of Christ, in any correspondence whatsoever, does not appear anywhere in his many letters to friends and associates throughout his life. (Paul F. Boller, George Washington & Religion, Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1963, pp. 74-75)
Washington’s religious belief was that of the enlightenment: deism. He practically never used the word “God,” preferring the more impersonal word “Providence.” How little he visualized Providence in personal form is shown by the fact that he interchangeably applied to that force all three possible pronouns: he, she, and it. (James Thomas Flexner, George Washington: Anguish and Farewell [1793-1799], Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1972, p. 490)
As President, Washington regularly attended Christian services, and he was friendly in his attitude toward Christian values. However, he repeatedly declined the church’s sacraments. Never did he take communion, and when his wife, Martha, did, he waited for her outside the sanctuary…. Even on his deathbed, Washington asked for no ritual, uttered no prayer to Christ, and expressed no wish to be attended by His representative. George Washington’s practice of Christianity was limited and superficial because he was not himself a Christian. In the enlightened tradition of his day, he was a devout Deist — just as many of the clergymen who knew him suspected. (Barry Schwartz, George Washington: The Making of an American Symbol, New York: The Free Press, 1987, pp. 174-175)
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
Benjamin Franklin is one of America’s founding fathers, most well-known earliest scientist, outstanding statesman and foreign ambassador. Here are three of his known ideas about religion and government.
Though himself surely a freethinker, Franklin cautioned other freethinkers to be careful about dismissing institutional religion too lightly or too quickly. “Think how great a proportion of Mankind,” he warned in 1757, “consists of weak and ignorant Men and Women, and of inexperienc’d Youth of both Sexes, who have need of the Motives of Religion to restrain them from Vice, to support their Virtue, and retain them in the Practice of it till it becomes habitual, which is the great Point for its Security.” (Edwin S. Gaustad, Faith of Our Fathers: Religion and the New Nation, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987, p. 61)
[Benjamin]Franklin drank deep of the Protestant ethic and then, discomforted by church constraints, became a freethinker. All his life he kept Sundays free for reading, but would visit any church to hear a great speaker, no doubt recognizing a talent he himself did not possess. With typical honesty and humor he wrote out his creed in 1790, the year he died: “I believe in one God, Creator of the universe…. That the most acceptable service we can render Him is doing good to His other children…. As to Jesus … I have … some doubts as to his divinity; though it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the truth with less trouble.” (Alice J. Hall, “Philosopher of Dissent: Benj. Franklin,” National Geographic, Vol. 148, No. 1, July, 1975, p. 94)
I am fully of your Opinion respecting religious Tests; but, tho’ the People of Massachusetts have not in their new Constitution kept quite clear of them, yet, if we consider what that People were 100 Years ago, we must allow they have gone great Lengths in Liberality of Sentiment on religious Subjects; and we may hope for greater Degrees of Perfection, when their Constitution, some years hence, shall be revised. If Christian Preachers had continued to teach as Christ and his Apostles did, without Salaries, and as the Quakers now do, I imagine Tests would never have existed; for I think they were invented, not so much to secure Religion itself, as the Emoluments of it. When a Religion is good, I conceive it will support itself; and when it does not support itself, and God does not take care to support it so that its Professors are obliged to call for help of the Civil Power, it is a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one. (Benjamin Franklin, from a letter to Richard Price, October 9, 1780)
Thomas Paine (1737-1809)
Paine was one of only a handful of English-born American revolutionaries. He was a philosopher, political theorist and activist, and wrote several influential pamphlets during the revolution. These are his ideas about religion with government.
As to religion, I hold it to be the indispensable duty of government to protect all conscientious protesters thereof, and I know of no other business government has to do therewith. (Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 1776. As quoted by Leo Pfeffer, “The Establishment Clause: The Never-Ending Conflict,” in Ronald C. White and Albright G. Zimmerman, An Unsettled Arena: Religion and the Bill of Rights, Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1990, p. 72)
Persecution is not an original feature in any religion; but it is always the strongly-marked feature of all law-religions, or religions established by law. Take away the law-establishment, and every religion re-assumes its original benignity. (Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man, 1791-1792. From Gorton Carruth and Eugene Ehrlich, eds., The Harper Book of American Quotations, New York: Harper & Row, 1988, pp. 499-500)
Toleration is not the opposite of intolerance but the counterfeit of it. Both are despotisms: the one assumes to itself the right of withholding liberty of conscience, the other of granting it. (Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man, p. 58. As quoted by John M. Swomley, Religious Liberty and the Secular State: The Constitutional Context, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1987, p. 7. Swomley added, “Toleration is a concession; religious liberty is a right.”)
All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish[Muslim], appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit. I do not mean by this declaration to condemn those who believe otherwise; they have the same right to their belief as I have to mine. But it is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe. It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime. He takes up the profession of a priest for the sake of gain, and in order to qualify himself for that trade he begins with a perjury. Can we conceive anything more destructive to morality than this? (Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, 1794-1795. From Paul Blanshard, ed., Classics of Free Thought, Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books, 1977, pp. 134-135)
Take away from Genesis the belief that Moses was the author, on which only the strange belief that it is the word of God has stood, and there remains nothing of Genesis but an anonymous book of stories, fables, and traditionary or invented absurdities, or of downright lies. (Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, 1794-1795. From Gorton Carruth and Eugene Ehrlich, eds., The Harper Book of American Quotations, New York: Harper & Row, 1988, p. 494)
The most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion. It has been the most dishonorable belief against the character of the Divinity, the most destructive to morality and the peace and happiness of man, that ever was propagated since man began to exist. (Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, 1794-1795. From Gorton Carruth and Eugene Ehrlich, eds., The Harper Book of American Quotations, New York: Harper & Row, 1988, p. 494)
The adulterous connection of church and state. (Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, 1794-1795. From Gorton Carruth and Eugene Ehrlich, eds., The Harper Book of American Quotations, New York: Harper & Row, 1988, p. 500)
Past U.S. Supreme Court Positions
For the simple reason that there are too many perceptions and interpretations of the nature of divinity, some a little more “plausible” than others, a constitutional democracy has no choice but to have a justice court system to protect its highly diverse citizens against abuses and tyranny of the arrogant and self-righteous. Impeding or halting attempts for one singular religious standard in civil government is paramount for the purest forms of liberty and freedom. Following are some U.S. Supreme Court cases toward that fight.
Christianity is not established by law, and the genius of our institutions requires that the Church and the State should be kept separate…The state confesses its incompetency to judge spiritual matters between men or between man and his maker… spiritual matters are exclusively in the hands of teachers of religion.(U. S. Supreme Court, Melvin v. Easley, 1860)
The law knows no heresy, and is committed to the support of no dogma, the establishment of no sect.(U. S. Supreme Court, Watson v. Jones, 1872)
[Chief Justice Morrison Waite, in Reynolds vs. U.S., a Supreme Court decision in 1878]cited Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance of 1785, in which, said Waite, “he demonstrated ‘that religion, or the duty we owe the Creator,’ was not within the cognizance of civil government.” This was followed, said Waite, by passage of the Virginia statute “for establishing religious freedom,” written by Jefferson, which proclaimed complete liberty of opinion and allowed no interference by government until ill tendencies “break out into overt acts against peace and good order.” Finally, the Chief Justice cited Jefferson’s letter of 1802 to the Danbury Baptist association, describing the First Amendment as “building a wall of separation between church and state.” Coming as this does, said Waite, “from an acknowledged leader of the advocates of the measure, it may be accepted almost as an authoritative declaration of the scope and effect of the amendment thus secured.”(Irving Brant, The Bill of Rights: Its Origin and Meaning, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., Inc., 1965, p. 407)
… the First Amendment of the Constitution… was intended to allow everyone under the jurisdiction of the United States to entertain such notions respecting his relations to his maker, and the duties they impose, as may be approved by his conscience, and to exhibit his sentiments in such form of worship as he may think proper, not injurious to the rights of others, and to prohibit legislation for the support of any religious tenets, or the modes of worship of any sect.(U. S. Supreme Court, 1890, Darwin v. Beason)
If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein. If there are any circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us.(Justice Robert H. Jackson, U. S. Supreme Court, West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 1943)
The “establishment of religion” clause of the First Amendment means at least this: Neither a state nor the Federal Government can set up a church. Neither can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another. Neither can force nor influence a person to go to or remain away from church against his will or force him to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion. No person can be punished for entertaining or professing religious beliefs or disbeliefs, for church attendance or non-attendance. No tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion. Neither a state nor the Federal Government, can openly or secretly, participate in the affairs of any religious organization or groups and vice versa. In the words of Jefferson, the clause against establishment of religion by law was intended to erect “a wall of separation between church and State.”(Justice Hugo Black, U. S. Supreme Court, Everson v. Board of Education, 1947)
The First Amendment has erected a wall between church and state. That wall must be kept high and impregnable. We could not approve the slightest breach.(Justice Hugo Black, U. S. Supreme Court, Everson v. Board of Education, 1947)
In efforts to force loyalty to whatever religious group happened to be on top and in league with the government of a particular time and place, men and women had been fined, cast in jail, cruelly tortured, and killed. Among the offenses for which these punishments had been inflicted were such things as speaking disrespectfully of the views of ministers of government-established churches, nonattendance at those churches, expressions of nonbelief in their doctrines, and failure to pay taxes and tithes to support them.(Justice Hugo Black, U. S. Supreme Court, Everson v. Board of Education, 1947)
As the momentum for popular education increased and in turn evoked strong claims for state support of religious education, contests not unlike that which in Virginia had produced Madison’s Remonstrance appeared in various forms in other states. New York and Massachusetts provide famous chapters in the history that established dissociation of religious teaching from state-maintained schools. In New York, the rise of the common schools led, despite fierce sectarian opposition, to the barring of tax funds to church schools, and later to any school in which sectarian doctrine was taught. In Massachusetts, largely through the efforts of Horace Mann, all sectarian teachings were barred from the common school to save it from being rent by denominational conflict. The upshot of these controversies, often long and fierce, is fairly summarized by saying that long before the Fourteenth Amendment subjected the states to new limitations, the prohibition of furtherance by the state of religious instruction became the guiding principle, in law and in feeling, of the American people….(Justice Felix Frankfurter, U. S. Supreme Court, in McCollum v. Board of Education, the 1948 decision that forbid public schools in Illinois from commingling sectarian and secular instruction)
We find that the basic Constitutional principle of absolute separation was violated when the State of Illinois, speaking through its Supreme Court, sustained the school authorities of Champaign in sponsoring and effectively furthering religious beliefs by its educational arrangement. Separation means separation, not something less. Jefferson’s metaphor in describing the relation between church and state speaks of a “wall of separation,” not of a fine line easily overstepped. The public school is at once the symbol of our democracy and the most pervasive means for promoting our common destiny. In no activity of the state is it more vital to keep out divisive forces than in its schools, to avoid confusing, not to say fusing, what the Constitution sought to keep strictly apart. “The great American principle of eternal separation”–Elihu Root’s phrase bears repetition–is one of the vital reliances of our Constitutional system for assuring unities among our people stronger than our diversities. It is the Court’s duty to enforce this principle in its full integrity. We renew our conviction that “we have staked the very existence of our country on the faith that complete separation between the state and religion is best for the state and best for religion.”(Justice Felix Frankfurter, U. S. Supreme Court, in McCollum v. Board of Education, the 1948 decision that forbid public schools in Illinois from commingling sectarian and secular instruction)
The day that this country ceases to be free for irreligion, it will cease to be free for religion–except for the sect that can win political power.(Justice Robert H. Jackson, dissenting opinion, U. S. Supreme Court, Zorach v. Clausor, April 7, 1952)
We repeat and again reaffirm that neither a state nor the federal government can constitutionally force a person “to profess a belief or disbelief in any religion.” Neither can constitutionally pass laws nor impose requirements which aid all religions as against non-believers, and neither can aid those religions based on a belief in the existence of a God as against those religions founded on different beliefs.(Justice Hugo Black, U. S. Supreme Court, in Torcaso v. Watkins, the 1961 decision that Torcaso could not be required by Maryland to declare a belief in God before being sworn in as a notary public)
The government must pursue a course of complete neutrality toward religion. (John Paul Stevens, majority opinion, U. S. Supreme Court, Wallace v. Jaffree, June 4, 1985)
Protecting religious freedoms may be more important in the late twentieth century than it was when the Bill of Rights was ratified. We live in a pluralistic society, with people of widely divergent religious backgrounds or with none at all. Government cannot endorse beliefs of one group without sending a clear message to non-adherents that they are outsiders. (Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, in a speech to a Philadelphia conference on religion in public life, May 1991)
Religious beliefs and religious expression are too precious to be either proscribed or prescribed by the state. (Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, according to Mark S. Hoffman, editor, “Notable Quotes in 1992,” The World Almanac and Book of Facts 1993, New York: Pharos Books, 1992, p. 32)
These Supreme Court references to church and state separation are just a few of many more I omitted from listing here due to time and length constraints. Yet a close and thorough examination of the principle contributors of the U.S. Constitution clearly reveals the spirit of prohibiting the government to favor one religion over another or favoring religion over non-religion. Since 1971 state and lower federal courts have used with good success The Lemon Test to gauge whether a law or action violates the First Amendment.
But nothing in life is absolute, black or white, and immutable in all cases all the time. And try convincing a radical evangelical fundamentalist of impermanence and they will look at you like you have three eyes and two mouths.
The Purpose of Marriage
Ignoring and aside from the unreliability and contradictions of Christian theology, as well as the Holy Bible, many mainstream Christian institutions and organizations teach anywhere from 3 to 6 biblically based principles or reasons for marriage:
To reflect God’s nature or the covenant between Christ and His Church
To reproduce children
To reign and protect each other in spiritual warfare
To have companionship
To enjoy intimacy
To become complete
Again, without getting neck-deep into the validity or non-validity of the “Holy Scriptures” and its convoluted theology, a neutral bystander could easily ask “Out of these 6 reasons, what does gender have to do with ANY of them besides possibly #2!?” And #2 begs the question — in light of adoption — is conceiving children the primary reason for marriage? Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg addressed that non-issue:
“If the purpose of marriage is procreation, why are two 70-year-olds[or 80!]allowed to marry?”
We are back to the original problem…radical absolutism and those individuals or groups seeking to impose their life-beliefs onto others, even into private homes and bedrooms…exactly what European immigrants were fleeing in the 18th and 19th centuries when they arrived here. What I find ironic is that on a broader scale these same ultra Conservative American groups oppose — and are even willing to go to war over — the same type of radical absolutism in Islāmic nations like Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, northern Caucasus of Russia, Syria, and parts of central Asia where extremists seek to impose Sharia laws. It’s a fascinating comparison to say the least! But for peculiar reasons they don’t recognize the similarities.
The purpose of marriage, or a commitment to a person or persons, is quite simple. It is to become a more wholesome human being with the assistance of another desiring the same. You further enhance each other’s qualities to the benefit of your partner and to the benefit of society. This can absolutely be accomplished despite genders. Yet, to protect this intuitive truth, we as a nation need a Supreme Court. A highest court to inhibit those who wish to destroy what our Founding Fathers desired and authored to protect.
Next month, let’s hope the court falls on the correct side of history.
Added Oct. 29, 2019: Andrew L. Seidel is an American constitutional and civil rights attorney, activist, and author. He is a graduate of Tulane University (’04 and ’09) with high honors. He studied human rights and international law at the University of Amsterdam. His 2019 book The Founding Myth: Why Christian Nationalism Is Un-American has been described by his colleagues and American historians as a work that “explodes a frequently expressed myth: that the United States was created as a Christian nation.” I highly recommend reading at least twice his exceptional legal examination of what our premier, core Founding Fathers actually intended for governing the United States of America through our three most hallowed documents. From the book’s forward:
[Seidel]makes the vital point that when faith is politically weaponized, religion itself is “weakened and tainted.”[…]
[Seidel quotes Benjamin Franklin]…when “a Religion is good, I conceive that it will support itself; and when it cannot support itself, and God does not take care to support [it], so that its Professors are oblig’d to call for the help of the Civil Power, ’tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one.”
Seidel’s Table of Contents should be enough to spark your interest. From a Constitutional Law point-of-view it should force you to not only better understand that the U.S. is governed by the laws of the land, but also demand you recheck and reassess what you think you know about the founding of this nation’s federal and state governments, and what you don’t know. I mean, how many of you are board-certified Constitutional lawyers? Exactly. So take a look at the Table of Contents:
PART I
THE FOUNDERS, INDEPENDENCE, AND THE COLONIES
1 Interesting and Irrelevant, the Religion of the Founders 2 “Religion and Morality”: Religion for the Masses, Reason for the Founders 3 Declaring Independence from Judeo-Christianity 4 Referrals: The Declaration’s References to a Higher Power 5 Christian Settlements: Colonizing the Continent, Not Building a Nation
PART II
UNITED STATES v. THE BIBLE
6 Biblical Influence 7 Christian Arrogance and the Golden Rule 8 Biblical Obedience or American Freedom? 9 Crime and Punishment: Biblical Vengeance or American Justice? 10 Redemption and Original Sin or Personal Responsibility and the Presumption of Innocence 11 The American Experiment: Religious Faith or Reason? 12 A Monarchy and “the morrow” or a Republic and “our posterity”
PART III
THE TEN COMMANDMENTS v. THE CONSTITUTION
13 Which Ten? 14 The Threat Display: The First Commandment 15 Punishing the Innocent: The Second Commandment 16 Suppressed Speech: The Third Commandment 17 Forced Rest: The Fourth Commandment 18 On Family Honor: The Fifth Commandment 19 Unoriginal and Tribal: The Sixth, Eighth, and Ninth Commandments 20 Perverting Sex and Love: The Seventh Commandment 21 Misogyny, Slavery, Thoughtcrime, and Anti-Capitalism: The Tenth Commandment 22 The Ten Commandments: A Religious, Not a Moral Code
PART IV
AMERICAN VERBIAGE
23 Argument by Idiom 24 “In God We Trust”: The Belligerent Motto 25 “One nation under God”: The Divisive Motto 26 “God bless America”: The Diversionary Motto
Conclusion: Take alarm, this is the first experiment on our liberties
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Live Well — Love Much — Laugh Often — Learn Always
I have zero expectation that anything I ever say will end someone’s belief in their God. Not my goal or purpose. That alone belongs to the individual. ~ Zoe
'Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it' - Terry Pratchett
Over the years the discussions usually go something like this as did this one… “What are your plans for Good Friday and Easter weekend?” I respond, 
The Professor's Convatorium 