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I respond but you do not understand
I didn’t say you didn’t respond. What I said was that you didn’t respond to any of the specific points Michael raised. And you didn’t. Just as you didn’t respond to the specific points I or Steven raised.
Perhaps you can consider what Manufacturing Consent means.
But, there again, it would appear that you don’t see the need to engage in anything as grubby and lowly as actually responding to specific points. All you have to do is utter those magic words “Manufacturing Consent”. And then, in an instant, the fog will lift and us little people with realize that – unlike you who has seen the light – we’ve been so brainwashed for so many years.
ROFLMAO!
First, the Manufacturing Consent (MC) thesis relates to the mass media. But you erroneously assume that folk here have developed their position on Islam based on what they read/see/hear in the mass media. And that is despite Steven clearly saying
I evaluate religions by what they actually say in their actual books, not what’s on TV or what people claim and argue. People can say all kinds of stuff. I look at what it is actually written.
But if folk are formulating their views on Islam based on, for example, reading the core texts directly or by reading academic books, then the MC is irrelevant.
Do you think that my statement about Muhammad conducting 27 military campaigns in the last nine years of his life was gleaned from the Six O’Clock News? Do you think that I found the hadith I quoted in the Sunday Times? Do you think my remarks about dhimmitude in medieval Spain were based on something I heard on Radio Five Live? Strangely, the answer to all three questions is “no”. Because, strangely, this stuff isn’t covered much, if at all, in the mainstream media.
Second, when Islam is covered in the media, the range of views expressed is immensely diverse which – as I said in a previous post – you’d realize if you actually bothered to take a look. So even if folk were getting their info from the media, there really is no homogeneous, monolithic media viewpoint being rammed down people’s throats.
Third – and I know this will be hard for you to believe – but other people have actually come across the MC thesis. Hell, in my younger days I used to spend a lot of time on Media Lens which adopts an explicitly Chomskyian analysis of the mainstream media. So it’s entirely possible that some of us, if and when we engage with the media, are doing so with some understanding of the MC thesis.
For all these reasons, your attempts to dismiss views on Islam that differ from yours with the mere utterance of “Manufacturing Consent” are intellectually facile. Make that laughable and intellectually facile.
It seems to me that you’re not much interested in a reasoned discussion, an exchange of ideas. Rather, what you’re doing in your posts in playing a smug, self-satisfied game of signalling how stupid/brainwashed everyone else is and how oh-so-smart/unbrainwashed you are.
It ain’t big and it ain’t clever.
A well-informed post.
Noticeable how rideforever – once again – doesn’t respond to any specific points raised.
Plus ça change!
In previous posts you Islam isn’t violent.
Much of my previous post set out reasons why Islam is violent.
But you pretty much ignore what I said (see Steven’s posts), change the subject and return to your well-worn theme of the moral bankruptcy and degeneracy of the West. We get it. I mean, how could we not get it? After all, you’ve made your point many times before. And no doubt you’ll bore us by repeating it many (many) times further.
Then you repeat your point about brainwashing, something that, unlike us mere mortals, you’ve apparently transcended.
But even your vapid point about brainwashing doesn’t stack up. The mainstream media and mainstream politicians don’t relentlessly push the view the Islam is violent.
After Jihadi attacks, politicians have routinely protested that such attacks have “nothing to do with Islam” which, after all, is “a religion of peace”. What was it that Obama said? “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.” And parts of the mainstream media have articles ploughing the same furrow.
Contrary to your wildly simplistic view, opinions about Islam in the media, amongst politicians and amongst academics are not homogeneous but vary significantly. Which you’d know if you’d looked into the subject in any depth.
And, sorry, but the fact you’ve done a bit of travelling in Muslim countries doesn’t make you an authority on anything very much. To have something sensible to say about Islam, you need to have considered – amongst other things – its core texts and the resulting jurisprudence, its history and its contested nature in the present day.
I’m afraid waxing lyrical about “the beautiful song of the Imam singing the Quran from the minarets I heard in Marrakesh” (the Koran which btw you concede is violent) or about couscous doesn’t cut it.
To patronizingly suggest, as you do, that anyone with a different view on Islam to you is somehow the subject of media brainwashing is arrogant and laughable in equal measure.
Your posts on Islam are ill-informed, childish and arrogant.
ILL-INFORMED
Is there violence in the Quran? Yes.
Well at least you got that one right. But even though the founding text is riddled with violence, apparently
Islam is not violent…
Really?
The founder of Islam was deeply violent. He was a warlord who fought in 27 military campaigns in the last nine years of his life. He ordered the beheading of hundred of Jews of the Banu Qurayza tribe.
Not only is the Koran deeply violent, so are the Hadith. Here’s the charming Hadith (from Sahih Muslim) that’s included in the Hamas Covenant.
Abu Huraira reported Allah’s Messenger (may peace be upon him) as saying: The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him; but the tree Gharqad would not say, for it is the tree of the Jews.
Unsurprisingly, the doctrines that developed from the Koran and Hadith are deeply violent. I suggest you go back and reflect upon the Lewis quote about jihad.
Islamic history is deeply violent. Centuries of violent conquest. How do you think the Islamic empire managed to expand so quickly after Muhammad’s death?
Apologists for Islam assert that Medieval Spain was a multicultural paradise under Muslim rule. Nonsense. Dhimmitude weren’t no picnic.
…it’s not like they spend their days killing each other.
Huh? Muslims are currently doing just that in the Middle East. ISIS has killed far more Muslims that non-Muslims. And the Shias and Sunnis were at it long before the evil West came upon the scene.
Islam was created many years ago to regulate the society of the time, judge it in that context. That is the place to judge it if you want to be objective. Against it’s own time.
Well if all Muslims judged the Koran as a work of its time, there’d be no problem. They’d assign it to the dustbin of history. But the majority treat it as the word of God and as true for all time. And many regard Muhammad as the perfect example of human conduct. (After all, that’s what it says in the Koran.)
Why do you think Khomeini legalized child marriage after the Iranian Revolution? Because of Muhammad’s marriage to child-bride Aisha. Why do you think ISIS took Yazidi women as sex slaves? Because sex slavery’s sanctioned in the Koran. Why do you think ISIS levied the jizya on Iraqi Christians? Hmmm. I wonder.
Now Islamic people are angry because their countries are destroyed and they react violently, but … anyone would.
Simplistic in the extreme. Lots of terrorists were born, raised and educated in the west.
CHILDISH
Your world view is typical of regressive lefists/SJW types. And it’s basically a childish, fairy-tale view in which one side is all bad (the evil, diabolical West) and one side is all good (the Rose of Islam). The adult world tends to be a tad more complex.
I’m no fanboy of Western foreign policy but I don’t peddle starry-eyed, cotton-candy fairy tales about the so-called “religion of peace”.
And it is a mistake for any person to imagine they live in Disney world.
Disney? Fairy tales?
ARROGANT
You accuse others of being brainwashed by the Matrix whilst you are able to see through it. Puh-lease.
Remind me. What was it that Michael said about ”wanna be guru-types”?
Bart Jordan’s an interesting guy. Here’s an extended interview with him on YouTube. And here’s one of Jordan’s articles, Ice Age Art and Science. Michael references this and another Jordan piece in his Magic Numbers, Planetary Tones and the Body: The Evolution of Daoist Inner Alchemy into Modern Sacred Science.
The two Daily Bell articles and Björkman claim that atomic bombs weren’t very effective, certainly not nearly as effective as mainstream history suggests.
At the same time, we are told that Bart Jordan was channelling esoteric info from very ancient Greece in an attempt to make the bombs effective.
The implication would thus appear to be that, even though Jordan channelled all this remarkable info, it still wasn’t sufficient to make the bombs effective?
Have I got this right or have I missed something?
The article that Michael posts states
If one is clear-eyed, one is supposed to explain that Islam is a religion of violence and that Muslims have been at war with Christians for more than a thousand years.
In fact, to be properly anti-PC one is supposed to acknowledge that the conflict between East and West goes back many thousands of years…
Those who consider themselves as anti-PC realists may not be as sensible as they believe.
In fact, they too may be manipulated.
In other words, the article seems to be suggesting that it’s wrong to claim that Islam is a religion of violence. I disagree in the sense that, historically within Islam, the mainstream scholarly interpretation of the core texts has been one of violence. In my view, far too many folk have a cotton-candy view of Islamic doctrine.
However, I also agree with your comments re American foreign policy. And thus I would argue that, for example, the rise of the Taliban, al Quaeda and ISIS can neither be explained solely by reference to the core texts of Islam nor solely by Western foreign policy intervention. Both are necessary but neither are sufficient causes.
Trouble is the debate too often becomes polarized into those aiming all their firepower at Islam. Or, alternatively, those aiming all their firepower at Western foreign policy.
Clearly, a minority of Muslims are violent. But that violence finds ample justification in the core texts of Islam and from the classical jurisprudence based upon those texts. Clearly, the texts are not a sufficient cause of jihadi violence but they are certainly a necessary cause.
As Bernard Lewis, described by the New York Times as the doyen of Middle Eastern Studies, puts it
One of the basic tasks bequeathed to Muslims by the Prophet was jihad. This word, which literally means striving, was usually cited in the Koranic phrase striving in the path of God and was interpreted to mean armed struggle for the defense or advancement of Muslim power. In principle, the world was divided into two houses: the House of Islam, in which a Muslim government ruled and Muslim law prevailed, and the House of War, the rest of the world, still inhabited and, more important, ruled by infidels. Between the two, there was to be a perpetual state of war until the entire world either embraced Islam or submitted to the rule of the Muslim state.
And as Graeme Wood notes in his Atlantic article What ISIS Really Wants
Many mainstream Muslim organizations have gone so far as to say the Islamic State is, in fact, un-Islamic. It is, of course, reassuring to know that the vast majority of Muslims have zero interest in replacing Hollywood movies with public executions as evening entertainment. But Muslims who call the Islamic State un-Islamic are typically, as the Princeton scholar Bernard Haykel, the leading expert on the groups theology, told me, embarrassed and politically correct, with a cotton-candy view of their own religion that neglects what their religion has historically and legally required. Many denials of the Islamic States religious nature, he said, are rooted in an interfaith-Christian-nonsense tradition.
I’m massively looking forward to Michael’s book(s) on Primordial, but suspect they will emerge in their own good time!!! As Michael wrote in 2014
I’ve been talking about my forthcoming book on Primordial Qigong/Tai Chi for several years! It has now become two books, there was too much deep information on Tao Cosmology and new insights into how apply it to daily life. Amazing testimonials from all around the world. This meant I had to rewrite Book 1, soon ready to be released.
I’m less interested in stories and technical theory, then I am in practices and actual direct experience. People can say all kinds of things, but it doesn’t mean that they are true. The only real truth is what you can uncover for yourself through direct experience via potent spiritual methods.
You may just have a point!!
Thanks for clarifying.
I should perhaps have clarified in my previous post that I was including the oversoul quotes/links simply as a resource for those like me who know little about oversoul stuff. Wasn’t trying to entice you into writing a long essay!
Been doing a bit of a web search on oversouls. Thought it worth mentioning that those folk into Ascenscion/Ascended Master stuff (about which I know very little) use the term in a rather different way. To them an oversoul is a cluster of up to 12 souls – see for example here and here.
I see Michael has noted certain similarities between Alchemy and Ascension.
You are looking at this on the wrong level.
Indeed I am! Thanks for clarifying. I’ll have another go.
I now read Michael to be saying that, in terms of expendability and mourning, an individual’s skin cells are to that individual as individuals are to Humanity/the Oversoul. That is, just as an individual regards their skin cells as entirely expendable and does not mourn their passing, so the Oversoul regards individuals as entirely expendable and does not mourn their passing.
I’d heard Michael mention the Oversoul a few times and a couple of weeks ago had a root around the HT website to try and learn more. I’ve included a few links/quotes below. Perhaps relevant to this discussion is Michael’s view that there are multiple Oversouls who can fight amongst themselves.
In many cultures its personified as twelve creator gods & goddesses, who generate twelve great soul tribes and all human archetypes. When they fight amongst themselves, we call it the Battle in Heaven, mirrored on Earth as the struggle between good and evil.
A few questions occur to me re Michal’s perspective. If it makes sense to say that an Oversoul “thinks” with a single mind, then why would an Oversoul regard individual humans as expendable? Perhaps because it understands that death is not the end and that the soul will continue its journey/learning/evolution? If we all have an Oversoul level of consciousness, is there any difference between saying the Oversoul mapped out the manner of the Connecticut children’s death and saying that, on some level, the children’s souls chose their own death?
Anyway, Steven, I understand your main point to be that, whilst, like Michael, you hold that the Oversoul level exists, unlike Michael you don’t regard it as carrying out some grand evolutionary plan. According to Michael this plan includes bringing about heart opening designed to “serve the greater good” by “ultimately creating a less violent society”. Thus, Michael seems to be suggesting that the result of heart opening – for example, 9/11 – is a net positive. As you say, 9/11 unleashed both positives and negatives and I wonder whether it’s actually possible to calculate/determine whether the aftermath has been, or will be, a net positive?!
___________________
A few Oversoul links/quotesFrom here.
Here is an excerpt from my book: Primordial Tai Chi: Way of Enlightened Love, chapter 3 on Tao Cosmology that describe the function of oversoul or da shen:
Great Spirit (da shen). Oversouls or group consciousness at cosmic level. Da shen is the moving expression of tai yisstillness, the Original Birth of Multiplicity from Unity. Its Natures collective consciousness at the impersonal causal level, a.k.a. the Spirit Body of the Tao. In many cultures its personified as twelve creator gods & goddesses, who generate twelve great soul tribes and all human archetypes. When they fight amongst themselves, we call it the Battle in Heaven, mirrored on Earth as the struggle between good and evil.
Different oversouls are said to overshadow humans with extraordinary spiritual powers and insight in order to become prophets (e.g. examples are how ordinary humans who merged into their oversoul to become Jesus Christ and Gautama Buddha). Its one of many ways that oversouls shape the evolution of Humankind.
In Tao model, the Three Pure Ones arise from tai yi (the Great Oneness), divide into three heavens and the four cardinal directions, forming a zodiac with twelve pentagons (dodecahedron, depicted above). This sacred geometric architecture is called Pre-natal Heaven, the matrix of Inner Time-Space-Beings that flows in yin-yang and five phase cycles. The Chinese calendar is based on this five phase, twelve-sided zodiac. Over souls or da shen are guided by the impulse of Pure Love and Free Will received from tai yi which compel them to create new realms within this cosmos. They are not creators of the muliti-verse, although they may guard the boundary of this cosmos.
Oversouls co-create and manage the destiny timelines of Humanity. Christian angels and Buddhist boddisattvas are cultural perceptions of messengers from Great Spirit. In Tao, star beings or immortals are the most common messengers.
And here.
In my understanding, both achieved and unachieved souls end up in the same realm, that of the Over Soul (Collective Higher Self, or metaphorically, the Stellar Mind). There are 12 of these Over Souls, that’s where we get the archetypes of the 12 signs of the zodiac, the Chinese calendar’s 12 Terrestrial Branches, and famously, the 12 Gods who live atop Mt. Olympus. But the achieved and unachieved souls have very different experiences, once they arrive in the celestial realm.
The more integrated your body-mind (ego identity), and soul (true self) are at the moment of death, the greater free will you will be given by the Over Soul in your ensuing re-birth. The lazy, fragmented, addicted, or self-hating egos just get parked, like cars in a cosmic junkyard, until the Over Souls pick out their traumatized parts and recycle the fragments into hopefully more productive lives. In this theory, the incomplete soul and its “egoic fragments” do NOT re-incarnate, but its “pieces” (5 vital organ spirits or wu jing shen) do find themselves implanted into brand new soul patterns.
Then there are the souls who spiritually worked hard to overcome the challenges dealt to them, and who materialized some degree of unconditional love while on Earth. They also get put to work by the Over Soul. But they hold a more integrated identity and get to consciously choose their ongoing process of cosmic creativity. In short, they graduated from Earth School and can choose to move on to higher dimensional playgrounds where their earth-learned Free Will can be put to responsible good use.
Steven, enjoyed reading your trenchant thoughts. A few thoughts of my own. Michael writes
Individual humans are like tiny cells in the body of Humanity – we are totally expendable. Do you hold a funeral and sob when a few cells on your skin die? It is the same for Humanity. Souls flux in, souls flux out. The deaths of those children serve the greater good, by opening the hearts of millions just before this galactic alignment.
Michael seems to be saying here that skin cells are to the skin as individuals are to humanity. So is Michael arguing that, just as we don’t mourn the death of a few of the cells comprising the skin, so we shouldn’t mourn the death of a few of the individuals comprising humanity?
But surely this contradicts natural human behaviour. For whilst humans don’t naturally mourn the death of their skin cells, they do naturally mourn the death of their loved ones.
The same thing happened at 9/11 – a global heart opening was triggered by those 3000 deaths.
9/11 may have caused some people’s hearts to open. But, in the Middle East, some openly celebrated the attack. And 9/11 lead to, for example, the War on Terror, the Bush Doctrine, the invasion of Afghanistan and the second Iraq war. Not a great deal of heart opening there. So, in my view, it’s not at all obvious that 9/11 led to a net opening of hearts.
Came across this by Michael a few weeks ago. Seems relevant to this discussion. (The bold in the quote is mine.)
Q. Is there any connection between the mass murder of 28 school kids & teachers in Connecticut and the timing of this Galactic alignment?
A. I feel they are deeply connected. Tao is about synchronicity. The murders happened on the Dark Moon before the Dark Sun of Winter Solstice. (I listed Dec. 12 as one of the most powerful times in my last newsletter). The dark moon pulls on our deepest unconscious negativity. There was nothing found to predict the extreme murderous behavior of 20 year old Greg Lanza. Everyone is puzzled, why did it happen, how could we prevent it again?
Greg did not personally have the will to committ the mass murders. I believe he was overshadowed by dark forces that are being forced out into the open by the Earth’s expanding galactic alignment. The very space between the molecules and cells in our body is being expanded. This increased neutral force in our body is reducing the hiding space available to negative ancestral and collective karmic forces buried in the psyche of humanity. So they are acting out, a desperate last ditch attempt to exert power. It’s been happening all over the world in recent years.
Yes, it was deeply tragic for all the families involved. But don’t be fooled by outer appearances. Individual humans are like tiny cells in the body of Humanity – we are totally expendable. Do you hold a funeral and sob when a few cells on your skin die? It is the same for Humanity. Souls flux in, souls flux out. The deaths of those children serve the greater good, by opening the hearts of millions just before this galactic alignment.
The same thing happened at 9/11 – a global heart opening was triggered by those 3000 deaths. These children in Connecticut 11 years later also sacrificed their lives to allow the current alignment to have more powerful effect in ultimately creating a less violent society. Senseless death motivates people to choose a future timeline of love and peace. I love the dark side, in that it strengthens our Light side. It makes us value our creative free will and our power to love, by showing us the terrible alternative.
Interesting that Michael suggests that the Children in Connecticut chose their life path, in this case getting shot.
