Weekend Rebel Science Excursion - 20

Regular readers know that we often deal with some scientific issue on Friday.

TGIF!

In today's post we will explore the evidence that indicates and informs us that ancient religion and ancient spiritual concepts still have a major impact on the most modern of current religion, spirituality, and the most modern science.

The fact of that reality will come from the words of modern scientists and religionists themselves.

Basically, the application of this to the modern scientific thinking involves odd ideas about time as well as space, while the application to religion and spirituality also relates to time and space, so, in that part of the post we will focus on ancient doctrines that are also modern doctrines in both religion and spirituality.

First, let's take a look at what a modern physicist says about our modern scientific thinking in terms of our concept of time and space being like those of ancient religion:

The main question I'm asking myself, the question that puts everything together, is how to do cosmology; how to make a theory of the universe as a whole system. This is said to be the golden age of cosmology and it is from an observational point of view, but from a theoretical point of view it's almost a disaster. It's crazy the kind of ideas that we find ourselves thinking about. And I find myself wanting to go back to basics—to basic ideas and basic principles—and understand how we describe the world in a physical theory.
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And the metaphor here—which comes from atomism that comes from Democritus [c. 460 – c. 370 BC] and Lucretius [c.99—c.55 BC] —is that physics is nothing but atoms moving in a void and the atoms never change. The atoms have properties like mass and charge that never change in time. The void—which is space in the old days never changed in time—was fixed and they moved according to laws ...
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Why are we confident of that? We're confident of that because we have a kind of metaphysical belief that there are laws of nature that are outside time and those laws of nature are causing the outcome of the experiment to be what it is. And laws of nature don't change in time. They're outside of time. They act on the system now, they acted on the system in the same way in the past, they will act the same way in a year or a million or a billion years, and so they'll give the same outcome. So nature will repeat itself and experiments will be repeatable because there are timeless laws of nature.

But that's a really weird idea [for scientists] if you think about it because it involves the kind of mystical and metaphysical notion of something that is not physical, something that is not part of the state of the world, something that is not changeable, acting from outside the system to cause things to happen. And, when I think about it, that is kind of a remnant of religion. It is a remnant of the idea that God is outside the system acting on it.

(Think About Nature, by Dr. Lee Smolin, emphasis added). Religion, spiritualism, and/or mysticism is still at the very core of many of the main pillars of today's scientific reasoning.

The religious history part of this post is one about Mithra, and its application to today's modern religion will concern the religion of the U.S. Military.

Let's set the stage with some ancient religious history about Mithra:

Because of its evident relationship to Christianity, special attention needs to be paid to the Persian/Roman religion of Mithraism. The worship of the Indo-Persian god Mithra dates back centuries to millennia preceding the common era. The god is found as "Mitra" in the Indian Vedic religion, which is over 3,500 years old, by conservative estimates. When the Iranians separated from their Indian brethren, Mitra became known as "Mithra" or "Mihr," as he is also called in Persian.

Hittite and Mitanni kingdoms around 1400 BCEBy around 1500 BCE, Mitra worship had made it to the Near East, in the Indian kingdom of the Mitanni, who at that time occupied Assyria. Mitra worship, however, was known also by that time as far west as the Hittite kingdom, only a few hundred miles east of the Mediterranean, as is evidenced by the Hittite-Mitanni tablets found at Bogaz-Köy in what is now Turkey. The gods of the Mitanni included Mitra, Varuna and Indra, all found in the Vedic texts.

The Indian Mitra was essentially a solar deity, representing the "friendly" aspect of the sun. So too was the Persian derivative Mithra, who was a "benevolent god" and the bestower of health, wealth and food. Mithra also seems to have been looked upon as a sort of Prometheus, for the gift of fire. (Schironi, 104) His worship purified and freed the devotee from sin and disease. Eventually, Mithra became more militant, and he is best known as a warrior.

(Mithra Oriented Religion). We have heard the word "warrior" a lot over the past two decades, when our soldiers are referred to.

In the recent Dredd Blog post Doing The Right Thing - Mithraism - 2 other subject-matter related series are linked to, which work hand and glove to show the strange obsession the current military has with warmonger religions.

In those posts Dredd Blog points out that the warrior ideology belies the Pentagon's assertion that the U.S. Military is all about Christianity.

The Pentagon asserts that notion even though a recent U.S. President wrote a letter to the French Head of State explaining his reason for invading Iraq.

In that letter Bush II quoted from the Christian text of the Bible's Book of Revelation (The Dogma of The High Priest In Chief) and even stated that God had told him to do the invasion (Bush: God told me to invade Iraq).

Such loser ideology from the ancient past should not guide our future aspirations (The Tenets of Ecocosmology).

Have a good weekend.

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.

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Doing The Right Thing - Mithraism - 2

The Modern Mithraeum

With the first post of this series we began to take a look at the curious bent of the military to try to associate itself with Christianity.

Later we found out that they even make soldiers "go to Sunday school" or else (Marine Corps Officially Decries Lack of Spiritual Faith).

It was then that Dredd Blog began to ponder that dichotomy in greater detail.

Think about what kind of intelligence demands "spirituality" within a vast military killing machine (MOMCOM - A Mean Welfare Queen).

A vast killing machine which is sucking the prosperity of the nation down into a dark abyss --even as it kills maims, and destroys people, places, and things around the world (see e.g. The Virgin MOMCOM - 6, On The Origin of The Bully Religion, and Bully Worship: The Universal Religion).

In the first post of this series we noted:

People like to compare empires to other and older empires of history.

For example, some writers have been comparing the declining empire of the United States to the Roman Empire of old.

Mithraism was a well known religion of the Roman Empire, just prior to its final demise:

Mithraism ... was a mystery religion centered on the god Mithras, [which] became popular among the military in the Roman Empire, from the 1st to 4th centuries AD.

(Wikipedia, emphasis added). There is general agreement about that part of the history, the fact of Mithraism being a religion of soldiers and their commanders.

Then another commenter, on the Dredd Blog post we were talking about, went on to comment:

There is lots of debate on the origins of Mithraism, but as far as it went in the Roman Empire, where some scholars believe it originated (others do not) it clearly is a militaristic religion:

"Upon enlistment, the first act of a Roman soldier was to pledge obedience and devotion to the emperor. Absolute loyalty to authority and to fellow soldiers was the cardinal virtue, and the Mithraic religion became the ultimate vehicle for this fraternal obedience. The Mithras worshippers compared the practice of their religion to their military service."

(quoting David Fingrut, emphasis added). Remember recently that in Afghanistan U.S. soldiers were killing Muslims with rifles with Christian New Testament verses on their gun sights?

This version of "Christianity" practiced by U.S. military religionists is far more like Roman Mithraism than was the religion the Christians were thrown to the lion's dens of Rome for practicing.

The religion which Emperor Constantine made the state religion of the Roman Empire, circa 300 AD, was called "Christianity", but it was Mithraism more than anything else.

(Doing the Right Thing - Mithraism, 4/6/2010, emphasis in original). There have been some criticisms leveled at some of the structural similarities between Mithraism and Christianity which Dredd Blog has pointed out:

1) Mithras was “the Light of the World“ (Jesus said “I am the light of the world.” John 8:12).

2) Mithras was a member of a Holy Trinity (“Christians are baptized ‘in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’ … ‘The faith of all Christians rests on the Trinity.’ St. Caesarius of Arles, Sermo 9, Exp. symb.: CCL 103, 47″; see also Mt 28:19).

3) Mithras was born of a virgin (Jesus was born of a virgin. see Matthew 1:18-25).

4) Worshippers of Mithras held strong beliefs in a celestial heaven and an infernal hell (“The Bible speaks clearly of the existence of Heaven … Hell is also spoken of in the Bible, but its nature is even more sketchy. When Jesus described the destiny of sinners who refused to change their ways, he compared it to Gehenna, which was a rubbish dump outside Jerusalem. People in wretched poverty picked their way through it to find scraps, and fires burned”).

5) Worshippers of Mithras believed they would be given endless life (“For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality” I Cor 15:53).

6) Worshippers of Mithras believed in a final day of judgement in which the dead would resurrect (“But if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead?” I Cor 15:12).

7) Worshippers of Mithras believed in a final conflict that would destroy the existing order of all things (“Then I saw the beast and the kings of the earth and their armies gathered together to make war against the rider on the horse and his army” Rev 19:19; “Then they gathered the kings together to the place that in Hebrew is called Armageddon” Rev 16:16).

8) Mithras worshippers believed that a ritualistic baptism was required of the faithful (“Then Jesus came to them and said, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit …’” Matthew 28:18-20).

9) Mithras worshippers took part in a ceremony in which they drank wine and ate bread to symbolize the body and blood of Mithras (“While they were eating, Jesus took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to his disciples, saying, ‘Take and eat; this is my body’” Matthew 26:26; “And he took a cup of wine and gave thanks to God for it. He gave it to them and said, “Each of you drink from it, for this is my blood, which confirms the covenant between God and his people. It is poured out as a sacrifice to forgive the sins of many” Matthew 26:26-28).

10) Mithras worshippers believed that Sundays were held sacred (“the majority observance of Christian Sabbath is as Sunday rest” - Wikipedia).

11) The birth of Mithras was celebrated annually on December the 25th (“Christmas … is an annual commemoration of the birth of Jesus Christ and a widely observed holiday, celebrated generally on December 25 by billions of people around the world” - Wikipedia).

12) Mithras took part in a Last Supper with his companions before ascending to heaven (“The Last Supper is the final meal that, according to Christian belief, Jesus shared with his Apostles in Jerusalem before his crucifixion.” Wikipedia; “Men of Galilee,” they said, “why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.” Acts 1:11).

(On The Origin of The Bully Religion). But what does separate the two religions, what shows they are entirely different at heart, is the practice of war vs. the practice of peace:

“Polybius claimed that the [Roman army] deliberately caused as much destruction as possible, slaughtering and dismembering animals as well as people, to deter other communities from resisting Roman demands to surrender; mercy. Male inhabitants were usually slaughtered, women raped, though only in exceptional circumstances killed in the initial orgy of destruction. After that, as tempers cooled and the desire for profit took over, prisoners would be taken for sale as slaves, though at times any considered to have a low market value, such as the very old, were still massacred.”
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According to John Dear in his post this is what it was:

When the nonviolent Jesus was born two thousand years ago into abject poverty to homeless refugees on the outskirts of a brutal empire, the story goes that angels appeared in the sky to impoverished shepherds singing, "Glory to God in the highest and peace on earth!"

Peace was coming to the world! They were so excited, they couldn't contain themselves.

That's what Christmas is about -- the coming of "peace on earth."

That child grew up to become, in Gandhi's words, "the greatest nonviolent resister in the history of the world." Jesus taught peace, lived peace and blessed peacemakers. "My peace is my gift to you," he said. When we refused to learn "the things that make for peace," he broke down and wept. He took action to end systemic injustice, and he did it in a nonviolent way and, for his civil disobedience, he was brutally executed by the Roman Empire and died forgiving his killers.

(Christmas 'Peace on Earth' Means 'No More War'). Did you notice the last sentence containing "he was brutally executed by the Roman Empire", and did you read up-thread that Mithraism was the religion of the Roman soldiers who crucified Jesus?

(On The Origin of The Bully Religion, cf. Jonah Peace). Some of the twelve similarities are disputed among scholars in various degrees, but there are more than just twelve of them:

Over the centuries—in fact, from the earliest Christian times—Mithraism has been compared to Christianity, revealing numerous similarities between the two faiths' doctrines and traditions, including as concerns stories of their respective godmen. In developing this analysis, it should be kept in mind that elements from Roman, Armenian and Persian Mithraism are utilized, not as a whole ideology but as separate items that may have affected the creation of Christianity, whether directly through the mechanism of Mithraism or through another Pagan source within the Roman Empire and beyond. The evidence points to these motifs and elements being adopted into Christianity not as a whole from one source but singularly from many sources, including Mithraism.
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Thus, the following list represents not a solidified mythos or narrative of one particular Mithra or form of the god as developed in one particular culture and era but, rather, a combination of them all for ease of reference as to any possible influences upon Christianity under the name of Mitra/Mithra/Mithras.

Mithra has the following in common with the Jesus character ...

(Truth Be Known - Mithra The Pagan Christ). At some point in time in the military the two were conflated, but the one that allows wars to replace peace is the one the military selected, like their forerunners in the Roman military, and they became a warmongering spiritual group:

The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine and barbarism. We are always moving forward with high mission, a destiny imposed by the Deity to regenerate our victims, while incidentally capturing their markets; to civilise savage and senile and paranoid peoples, while blundering accidentally into their oil wells.

(As We Go Marching, by John T. Flynn, 1944, page 222, emphasis added). If you read The Universal Smedley - 2 and Viva Egypt - 2 you will see how a supposed Christian belief about a battle of Armageddon is also a Mithraic tradition (see #7 in the list above).

It is the belief that got us into the addiction to Middle East oil and oil wars (see The Universal Smedley - 2).

The U.S. military is the world's number one single user of oil (Oil is Biggest Military Weakness).

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.

Government Climate Change Report - 6

In this series we are discussing what we have been calling the "Government Climate Change Report" which is a shortened version of the name.

The long version of the name refers to a "60-person Federal Advisory Committee (The "National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee" or NCADAC), which has produced a draft report called the "Federal Advisory Committee Draft Climate Assessment":

The public review period is now closed; over 4,000 public comments were received and are being addressed by the authors. The National Academy review is complete and can be read here. The public review draft remains available below while the report is revised by the author teams. Thank you for your interest in the National Climate Assessment.

(Global Change Dot Gov, emphasis in original). One interesting aspect of all this was pointed out in the first post of the series:

The report's focus was mandated by legislation of the U.S. Congress, and was signed into law by President George H. W. Bush in 1990.

The law specified that major reports were to be produced periodically (Global Climate Change Research Act, [they moved it so use this Wayback Machine Version]).

(Government Climate Change Report). It may be surprising to some that a Republican President, Bush I, signed the legislation into law over two decades ago.

Surprising because the Republican Party is now the seat of the "denier movement", those who say that global warming science is the biggest hoax ever fostered on the American people.

In fact their last Republican presidential candidate, who lost the election, scoffed at those scientists and members of the public who accept the scientific research, and also accept their eyes and feelings when they go outdoors to see that things are in fact changing.

That surprise can be explained by propaganda campaigns paid for and spear headed by Oil-Qaeda (also see university history lecture video below).

Anyway, Dredd Blog has complained in various posts, not about what the report contains, rather, the complaint is about what the report and many scientific papers alike don't contain (if you haven't yet, see the previous post).

What that complaint amounts to is that we as a society are ignoring some truth to what both deniers and non-deniers can agree upon.

Which is that climate is always naturally changing, but not enough detail has been provided about how that change is taking place.

That detail is not irrelevant simply because the deniers do not comprehend the damage that has been done and is being done to the global climate system by human civilization, which we call anthropogenic climate change.

Note that Dredd Blog is saying: "yes you deniers are correct that climate is always changing, but you don't properly know what that means."

"Because you conflate it with the bad change human civilization is injecting into the environment to thereby override those natural climate change dynamics" (Agnotology: The Surge - 4).

And to the non-deniers who do understand that civilization is in fact damaging the global climate system, and damaging it to the point that the natural climate change is being overridden by catastrophe-producing pollution, Dredd Blog is saying that you need to acknowledge the natural climate change built into the global climate system.

That natural, constantly ongoing change is so gradual that it is practically imperceptible (A Savvy Ecocosmological Earth Calendar - 2).

We should acknowledge natural climate change even though current anthropogenic pollution is a glaringly obvious damaging mechanism (Scientists discover what’s killing the bees, 1700 U.S. Cities Face Sea-level Rise) which overrides those natural climate change dynamics.

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.

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Note: Key times in the video are shown below in min:sec format.
(Note also: GW = global warming; GG = greenhouse gas, CC = climate change):

00:40 - Schwarzenegger: no debate, GW is happening.
06:20 - Proper amount of GG is good, keeps us warm.
07:00 - Too much GG is a bad thing.
07:09 - Tyndall in mid 1800's began research into GG.
07:45 - Arrhenius did first degree calculations re: CO2 content.
08:25 - Callendar discovered GG increases in 1930's.
09:02 - Hulburt accord in 1930's.
09:43 - Depression / war stopped GG research.
10:00 - Gilbert N. Plass developed CO2 atmospheric calculations.
10:49 - Suess & Revelle do paper in 1957 warning of GW dangers.
12:30 - Dr. Revelle warned of polar ice cap melt in TIME interview.
13:25 - CO2 levels discovered to be high.
16:30 - Lyndon Johnson in 1965 says fossil fuels causing GW.
17:00 - GW, CC not political originally.
18:20 - White of NOAA, 1978, warns of GW dangers.
20:52 - Polar Areas to be impacted 4 times more than other areas.
24:20 - IPCC formed in 1979 with consensus on GW.
26:00 - Bush I signed GW treaty.
26:45 - Denial of GW begins.
27:40 - Luntz injects GW denial propaganda into political debate.
28:25 - Oil baron Cheney propagates GW denial.
29:00 - Oil companies do massive scale denial propaganda.
29:30 - Marshall Institute
30:30 - Marshall Institute formed to support Reagan SDI (star wars)
32:50 - Marshall Institute "cigarettes not related to cancer".
36:50 - Marshall Institute does GW denial campaign.
42:54 - Marshall member Seitz worked for big tobacco.
47:20 - Singer of Marshall Institute politically attacks GW.
53:35 - Cigarette smoking is ok rhetoric applied against GW science.

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ACLU vs. Clapper, Alexander, Hagel, Holder, and Mueller - 4

The ACLU filed a lawsuit against the military NSA because the ACLU was being spied upon by the NSA (Complaint, Request For Preliminary Injunction).

The judge has now set a schedule for oral argument and written briefing concerning the issues in the case.

The scheduling order concerns the defendants' Motion To Dismiss, and at the same time, the plaintiffs' Motion For Preliminary Injunction.

The scheduling order reads as follows:

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WILLIAM H. PAULEY III, District Judge:

Counsel for the parties having appeared for a conference on July 25, 2013, the following schedule is established:

1. Plaintiffs will file a motion for a preliminary injunction and Defendants will file a motion to dismiss by August 26, 2013;

2. Opposition briefs are due September 26, 2013;

3. Third parties may file motions for leave to file amici briefs by October 3, 2013 with their proposed briefs attached;

4. Reply briefs are due October 10, 2013;

5. The Court will hear oral argument on November 1, 2013 at 12:00 p.m;

6. Moving and opposition briefs may be 40 pages in length, reply briefs may be 20 pages.

Dated: July 25, 2013 New York, New York

SO ORDERED: WILLIAM H. PAULEY III U.S.D.J.

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Stay tuned because Dredd Blog will post the briefs after they are filed by the parties or amici ("friend of the court").

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.

In the Fog of The Presstitutes

What am I bid for a 'good' story?

One of the definitions of "prostitution" is: "a person who offers his talent or work for unworthy purposes."

The word "presstitute" is said to have arisen in the poetic cognition of Gerald Celente.

In the blogosphere the term is used as a way to describe those who wear a mask of free press journalists, but who in reality are something else: "A member of the media who will alter their story and reporting based on financial interests or other ties with usually partisan individuals or groups."

We can deduce, then, that the business of owning media empires which cater most to the corporate epigovernment Johns, can be referred to as the illegitimate business of presstitution.

The graphic-photo above alludes to females, but the greatest American propagandists so far have been male (The Ways of Bernays, Exceptional American Propaganda Inspired NAZI Goebbels).

In fact, some writers state that one is doomed to stay terribly uninformed if one does not understand the greatest propagandist in American history:

It is impossible to fundamentally grasp the social, political, economic and cultural developments of the past 100 years without some understanding of Bernays and his professional heirs in the public relations industry. PR is a 20th century phenomenon, and Bernays -- widely eulogized as the "father of public relations" at the time of his death in 1995 -- played a major role in defining the industry's philosophy and methods.

(The Matriarch of the Matrix - 3). After sanitation by PR descendants of Bernays (the presstitutes) government propaganda is called "spin", while intentional deceit of business is called "advertising."

The "free press" mentioned in the First Amendment has morphed into a multi-billion dollar presstitution business called "the media" (Blind Willie McTell News).

That is why we tend not to know of the millions of innocent people religiously slaughtered by the U.S. military (The Virgin MOMCOM - 6); that we have been fighting oil wars since Winston Churchill made a fateful decision a century ago (The Universal Smedley - 2); or that current problems in the Middle East, including Egypt, are related to a century of struggle to control the oil of that region (Viva Egypt - 2).

That is also why we tend not to know that the military is not the most competent American institution (Stockholm Syndrome on Steroids? - 2), because among other very bad things, it spies on every American as if that American is an enemy (ACLU vs. Clapper, Alexander, Hagel, Holder, and Mueller - 3).

That is also why we tend not to know that our once-middle-class-economy has been plundered into what is now a plutocracy (The Homeland: Big Brother Plutonomy - 7).

That is also why we tend not to know (until it is too late to prevent it) that 80% of American adults face unemployment and/or poverty (Huffington Post).

That is also why we tend not to know that such plunder has taken place via warmongering policies of war profiteers (War is the Highway 61 of the 1%).

That is enough for one post.

The next post in this series is here.

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More information which the presstitutes have kept hidden from 92% of us: