Letter #7 - Economic Sequestration and the Annual AIPAC Conference

Today begins the annual three day AIPAC lobbyist conference in Washington that epitomizes one of the most debilitating areas in American representative democracy governance, both in domestic and international policy making.  Over half the U.S. Congress will attend the most powerful lobbyist group’s gala, along with Vice President Biden.  Just days after the implementation of economic sequestration, all U.S. congressional representatives and cabinet members in attendance at the AIPAC conference will make further promises of economic and military support to a foreign government while American jobs are reduced, especially within the government, military and at the state levels.  I would like to be able to point at the large amounts of foreign aid, and the political foreign policies of the U.S., as an evenly laid problem across the globe, but I feel that if I even attempted to do so, it would be a gross misrepresentative of what is occurring, as the center of concentration seems to be focused on one foreign nation-state, that which is represented by the most powerful lobby in the United States.  Again, I will shout from the mountaintop and repeat what has already been observed.  The U.S. has provided the nation-state of Israel with over 3 billion dollars a year since the beginning of the 1950s, and in the face of American domestic budget reductions, you may or may not choose to tally up that total amount.  In addition, Egypt has been awarded over 2 billion dollars a year since Mubarak became leader of Egypt, in order to buy security for the south flank of Israel and protect the water and oil pipelines, and the Dimona nuclear facility, in the Negev.  In the aftermath of the Egyptian so-called Arab Spring, and the election of President Morsi, of the Muslim Brotherhood, U.S. policy makers have dangled the economic ‘carrots’ to the new regime of Egypt in order to attempt to continue the security to Israel’s southern flank.  Just over the weekend, the first weekend in March 2013, Secretary of State John Kerry was in Egypt and released 250 million dollars of “carrots” to the new regime, which is the first payment in an annual 1 billion dollar U.S. funding plan (which is a reduction from the annual aid given during the Mubarak regime, but is pending until the new regime in Egypt bends the knee.  Keep in mind that the first F-16s and Abram tanks, from a deal made with the Mubarak regime, were recently transferred to Egypt.  I will admit that there were a few congressional members that attempted to halt these transfer, but they did so for the wrong reasons (because they worried that Egypt under Morsi could not be bought).   Of course, U.S. foreign aid alone has not placed the United States under the levels of debt which has resulted in sequester.  Ten years of military occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan were notable contributions to that massive debt, and many domestic programs which the American people must reflect on and eventually reform.  The opening of the military occupation in Afghanistan, which was followed by heavy economic costs of state rebuilding, was in the aftermath of 9-11.  I do not divulge myself to conspiracy theories, but I also do not doubt any levels foreign or domestic political intrigue after studying the brutality of human history.  Iraq was a military intervention, occupation and state reconstruction heavily pushed by the lobbyist organization of AIPAC on behalf of their foreign masters.  The same political, and economic, push on U.S. congressional votes has been implemented towards Iran, and will be a heavy topic during the annual AIPAC lobbyist conference occurring over the next three days and beyond.

As these military events, underscored by private sector profiting, have led us to our current economic dilemma, we can look across the domestic United States to see several repercussions from reckless policy making in Washington.  Some of the largest domestic areas where Americans have been hit are on the federal and state levels.  The military is taking a large economic reduction, slated for the next decade, which will cost many American family leaders their careers due to the downsizing.  While many leftists do not support the military, it must be mentioned that the military is only an instrument of the government and it is Congress, vulnerable to influences through representative democracy, who votes for utilization of the military on behalf of the nation.  Using one branch of the military as an example, the United States Marine Corps is slated to be cut 1.4 billion dollars for the remainder of FY13 and 2 billion dollars each fiscal year for the next 9 years.  American civilians working for the U.S. military are beginning a furlough process significantly reducing work hours and income.  At the state level, states will also feel the trickle down cuts and there will be reductions in state law enforcement areas and education.  While the American streets are flooded with drugs and crime, the spending reductions at the state levels will result in early lost jobs, the inability to appoint civilian review boards, the early release of criminals, and suspended sentences.  The reason why this area is economically impacted is because when state facilities are filled to capacity and it must be noted that since the emergence of private prisons that the building of state facilities has been drastically reduced, the state is required to pay the private sector prison for housing the surplus inmates.  We will not discuss the issue of the so-called war on drugs that fill the prisons and drain the state budgets here, but even though this incarceration may be aimed to reduce employment rates on paper, create near slave labor, and generate profit for the shareholders of private sector corporations….each American should be teaching their children about the social-economic trap in advance.

As we come full circle through the economic condition of the United States after decades of irrational foreign aid amounts to Israel and policies solely on behalf of Israel’s protection, military occupations and the costs of rebuilding Israeli friendly regimes in places of the toppled regimes, we again prepare to watch our Congressional Representatives at the annual foreign lobbyist conference making promises of loyalty and economic-military assistance to Israel as if we have not been drained for half a century now.  While the nation begins our sequester, AIPAC aims to exempt Israel from U.S. foreign economic and military aid, and gain U.S. promises of support for a unilateral Israeli strike against Iran, or even better situated for our so-called ally…have the depleted U.S. military take on the economic, political and human costs of doing it for them (as we were hoodwinked into Iraq).

Here, we will once again briefly focus on the flaw of representative democracy and the vulnerability of corporate or foreign manipulation.  Each congressional representative represents a vote, and some are even strategically placed on important Congressional sub-committees that deal specifically with foreign policy or fiscal budgets.  While the average American, if they care to pay attention at all, is allotted one House representative and one Senator for their specific geographic location in which they may write or call (and talk to an intern), the lobbyist organization are able to work every House and Senate member (vote) across the board until they influence (or purchase) enough votes to accomplish their foreign government’s intent (such as foreign aid amounts, sanctions against other nation-states, and eventual U.S. military action).  And sadly, the human element is vulnerable to greed and individual career security (at the cost of the collective), and therein lies the vulnerability of representative democracy. 

The few Americans who will watch the AIPAC conference over the next three days will clearly see this process at work, even though it is a parasitic process that continues year round in Washington, and not just three days of televised lobbyist conference.

When is enough “ enough”?  How long will these Congressional representatives continue to sell out the United States of America?  How long will our fellow Americans walk about with no concerns for the future?  There is nothing worse than an empty headed American adult with no concerns for domestic or international events which directly impact their children’s future. 

Letter #6: 1.7 billion dollars, F-16s and a Superbowl

February 3, 2013 was a Super Bowl Sunday and the attention of the working class American people was focused on the big game, new commercials, Beyonce’s halftime concert, and personal inner-circle Super Bowl parties.  The Baltimore Ravens beat the San Francisco 49ers in a game decided in the last moments, and on Monday the talk in the work centers of America was concentrated on that game, Beyonce, and all the Super bowl commercials that seemed to be as humorous to five years as they were to adults.  What was not discussed among the American workers on Monday was the transfer of four F-16s to the nation-state government of Egypt.  The transfer was part of a 1.7 billion dollar ‘security’ agreement between the U.S. and Egypt, an agreement made during the rule of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, in which the U.S. would deliver a total of twenty F-16s and two hundred Abram tanks to Egypt.   Congress, influenced by AIPAC during the ‘American bought-and-paid-for’ puppet years of Mubarak, approved this deal prior to the 2011 Arab Spring.  With Mubarak forced out of power in Egypt and Mohamad Morsi, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, placed into power, a few members of Congress began to question this agreement.  After all, it is still uncertain whether Morsi will be a bribe taking puppet like Mubarak, an isolationist, an aggressor, or, what seems most important to our U.S. Congressional representatives, a friend or foe of the nation-state government of Israel.    There were some political attempts to halt the transfer.  One such attempt was made by the Senator out of Kentucky, Rand Paul, but the Senate voted 79-19 against Paul’s amendment on the passed House Resolution 325.

Why did the U.S. send F-16s to Egypt?  From a political analysis view, it appears that this is an attempt to accomplish two things at once.  1)  Support and Assist Egypt to solidify power for President Morsi in the face of civil unrest similar to what occurred in and around Tahrir Square during the Arab Spring during the final days of Mubarak’s regime.  Protesters and police have continuously clashed in the streets, in some cases caught on video and distributed on the internet, and the presidential palace in Cairo was firebombed.  2)  Pull Morsi into military reliance on Western funding using economic and military ‘carrots’.  One oddity that occurred prior to the Senate vote was that the pro-Israeli lobbies, especially AIPAC, were pushing Congressional members to support the first transfer of this agreement to Egypt.  The reason for the pro-Israeli lobby support is aimed at pulling the new Morsi regime into U.S.-Israeli pockets (paid for by the U.S.) in order to ensure that the new regime protects the Southern flank of Israel, the Negev, where there are vital water and oil pipelines, along with the supposed Israeli nuclear reactor facility located at Dimona (even though Israel has never signed the international non-proliferation treaty).  We must look at U.S. foreign aid and history to understand the previous ‘hook-up’ between Egypt and Israel, paid for in full by the American tax payers and international loans taken out by previous U.S. administrations.  After the assassination of Anwar al-Sadat in 1981, Hosni Mubarak became leader of Egypt which began a new era in U.S. foreign aid.  During Mubarak’s reign, from 1981 to the Arab uprising of 2011, Egypt received over 2 billion dollars a year in annual U.S. foreign aid, only second on the annual recipient list behind the three billion dollars plus a year that Israel had received from the U.S. before and during this period, and continues to receive each year.

How do these types of foreign aid ‘carrot’ gift baskets work?  A co-worker asked me the following question: “What would we do with those F-16s if we didn’t give them to Egypt?”  I must admit that this question elicited a short delay of silence from me because I suddenly realized that she honestly didn’t understand that the U.S. government didn’t just build their own F-16s and have them sitting around in stock, but purchased them from the private sector.  In the case of the F-16s and the tanks, the U.S. government is required to purchase them from Lockheed Martin.  Many people will argue that these types of military foreign aid packages help to maintain jobs inside of the U.S., but the fact remains that these purchases are paid for by the American taxpayers, and increased national debt under international financiers, in order to promote private sector profit.

The Foreign aid process is one of the very few times each year that Americans actually witness pure bipartisan cooperation in Congress.  Democrats and Republicans will argue to the point of almost shutting down the government over domestic cuts, but hold hands when it comes to dishing out billions of dollars in annual aid to nation-states that are economically well off, such as Israel, or nation-states that could be an enemy in the distant future.  Similar to the transfer of the four F-16s to Egypt in the shadow of the Super Bowl, the annual federal budget proposal, which contains proposed amounts of outgoing foreign aid, is released annually under the shadow of Valentine’s Day when most Americans are distracted.  Foreign lobbyist groups, who are allowed to influence all members of Congress while individual Americans are only allowed to call on their regional representatives, are prominent in shaping (or maintaining) this annual budget proposal concerning foreign aid.  The lobbyist presence behind the scenes can be detected by researching the top recipients in U.S. foreign aid over the past fifty years.

On Monday morning after the Super Bowl, all throughout American work places, garages, shipping hubs, and offices across the United States, no one conversed about the transfer of F-16s or the overall subject of foreign aid.  The conversations were dedicated to the Super bowl, a fourth and goal no call by the referees, Beyonce’s halftime outfit and the power outage, the Budweiser horse who loved his original owner and all of the other dumb ass television commercials that encouraged excess consumerism within a nation that doesn’t seem to see poverty, unemployment, or domestic government cuts caused by climbing international debt collecting above its own national structure.

Letter #5: Christianity

My daughters, many people that I love, like, respect and even admire will find what I write to you about in this letter as offensive and an affront on their ‘individual’ core values.  This is a result of decades-long religious indoctrination and mental conditioning.  When religious indoctrination is questioned or challenged in truth, parties involved often become ugly, vicious and, at times, even violent.  I have no choice in the matter because you are my daughters and if I avoided the subject entirely, or pretended that it was not important, I would be failing in my duties as a father by possibly leaving you vulnerable (in my absence, should it ever occur) to religious indoctrination, lies allowed to subsist through ignorance, and manipulation.  The following are some of the areas I have studied concerning Christianity.  I encourage you to verify what is written here, research and scrutinize the historic facts available to you, and through critical thinking develop your own opinions and ideology concerning this subject.  

Looking closely at the religion of Christianity, in all branches, there are many flaws in the foundations that comprise it, discrepancies in the religious historic value, and bloody blemishes on its organizational history.  While the majority of Christians are righteous people in nature and an overall caring, passionate people, it is incredulous that the majority of followers are willing to base utterly important decisional support, especially when it comes to community and national interests that will impact the future of their children, solely on the core delusional beliefs of this religion.

One of the largest ideological flaws concerning Christianity, which will be argued vehemently by Christians, is the individualistic nature of the religion.  Perhaps the origins of the religion were not as individualist as the Christian ideology has become in modern times, as we can easily discern several areas of the religion that have developed with additions and through translations over the centuries through the lips of kings, empires  and preachers.  The basis of the Christian ideology centers on individual salvation through the acceptance of Jesus, an individual who very little written history exists on, as a person’s “Lord” and savior.  Christians will often use the terms God and Jesus in the same sentence while applying both to the same creator, while others have grown accustom to praying directly to Jesus as God.  Was this purposely planned in the creation of this religion?  According to most Christians, Jesus, who was either God’s only begotten son or God in human form, or both, died on the Roman cross for the sins of all mankind.  This centrist Christian ideology is termed ‘substitutionary atonement’.  From a conscious and subconscious view, individualism can be seen in the divinity of one human being among all others who died as an individual sacrifice for every individual human’s sins.  This ideology is morally damning from the perspective that it discourages individual responsibility for individual and collective actions.  As previously mentioned, and evidenced by many criminals on death row for crimes against humanity, the ideology of this salvation and forgiveness is readily available and embraced in the aftermath of transgression.  A healthier, more collective, mindset would be one that teaches our children that they are responsible, and will be held accountable by God and peers, for their actions toward their fellow human beings and the society that they belong to.  The former slave Frederick Douglass once remarked that the most brutal slave owners were the most devout Christians on Sunday.  It is evident by the amount of surviving American slave narratives that slave masters would rape female slaves, beat and murder their male slaves (if required), and exploit fellow humans with forgiveness, and the biblical Ham justification, waiting for them each Sunday at the pulpit.  This statement by Douglass illustrates how little the Christian substitutionary atonement ideology has changed over a century and a half.  Even today, how many Christians, lukewarm or otherwise, transgress, on various levels, Monday through Saturday night and then pray and ask forgiveness on Sunday morning.  These transgressions can be minor in scope such as gossiping or tiny lies, but they are still damaging to a collective community or society, or they can be larger in scope such as adultery or criminal transgressions against fellow human beings.  A true man or woman would not consistently seek forgiveness for their transgressions; they would shoulder their own Roman instrument of death and take responsibility for their deeds and actions.  The following question may be conceived as offensive to many Christians, but I ask Christians and non-Christians alike: When was the last time you heard a Christian pray for a collective good?  Is it as often as individual prayers?  It is usually for individual wants or needs, or in close proximity of the individual.  The modern Christian for the most part, especially in America, seems to pray to God and Jesus only when they want a job, or are in some trouble, or someone is ill, or they need some fast food forgiveness.  When the waves are life are smooth and a good sailing wind is consistent with no problems, their worship and appreciation is usually focused elsewhere.    Overall, the subconscious ideology of Christianity is individualistic in nature.

Of course, the original scriptural examples of the substitutionary atonement ideology derives from the New Testament, and since Paul/Saul wrote over 50 percent of that literary collection and the authorship of the synoptic Gospels are unverified (outside of Saul/Paul’s close affiliate Luke the Physician who is credited with the Gospel named Luke), the original Christian substitutionary atonement ideology should be accredited to him.  Paul was quite the genius, to be truthful.  All of the NT scriptural references to Jesus dying for the sins of mankind came out of the Pauline and post-Jesus text (Corinthians, Galatians, Peter) and were very vague in concrete meaning.    The one example outside of the New Testament examples is found in the Old Testament: Isaiah 53:12.

“Therefore I will divide him a portion with the many, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong, because he poured out his soul to death and was numbered with the transgressors; yet he bore the sin of many, and makes intercession for the transgressors.”

 The verse is very symbolic and, in my opinion, could hold multiple meanings which were common throughout the long historic line of prophet rejections throughout the Old Testament.  Remember that Isaiah was written six to seven centuries before the time of Jesus and could be referring to any prophet or person.  It is irrational to base individual actions on an unproven and quite irrational substitutionary atonement ideology that may or not be referring to a man seven hundred years in the future who may or may not be a divine God in human form.

As with several areas of Christianity, this ideology has grown in scope throughout the centuries through over-philosophical minds such as Irenaeus (130 CE-202 CE), Eusebius Pamphili of Caesarea (263 CE-339 CE), Athanasius of Alexandria (296 CE-373 CE), Augustine of Hippo (354 CE-450 CE), Anselm of Canterbury (1033 CE-1109 CE), Thomas Aquinas  (1225 CE-1274 CE), the protestant John Calvin (1509 CE-1564 CE), Hugo Gratius (1583 CE-1645 CE), and a slew of many others between and throughout history.  The individualist salvation ideology that gained its origins from symbolic scripture in the first century of the common-era has been molded, built on with additions and ambitions, and altered by Christian philosophers for two thousand years.  Up until the Protestant Reformation in 16^th century Europe, the church could simply adopt the philosophical modifications on the redemption atonement ideology when they found those modifications useful; and decline, by labeling the modifying philosopher as a heretic, any modifications and philosophies which conflicted with established and accepted church doctrine and political interests.

It is incredible to truly study history and see our human ideologies, which are widely accepted as irrefutable and divine today, developed over time similar to a poem that is started by one writer, with stanzas added by multiple writers, and then concluded by two new authors.  These additions go further than the pen in the white images of Jesus and Mary which emerged out of the Italian Renaissance; Caesar Borgia (previously Duke Valentine) was the model for white Jesus while Mary resembles Mona Lisa.  These foolish discrepancies and illusions are easy enough to verify, what is baffling is that a good majority of intelligent people have never even though deep enough to question the distance and ethnic diversity between Rome and Jerusalem (at the time of Jesus). 

Another example of Christian ideological philosophies created by a human mind is the philosophical creation of the trinity (interestingly similar to the three points of the Roman crucifix to exclude the planted point) that matches the Christian concept of father, son and Holy Spirit.  Once again we see the ideology, assumed divine, built upon by human philosophers throughout history:

Clement of Alexandria (150 CE-211 CE) (The Stromata, Chapter 10),Tertillian’s (160 CE – 220 CE) ‘Against Praxeas’, The Nicene Creed (325 CE when Christianity became mandated in the original Roman Empire), the defending arguments by Athanasius (297 CE-373 CE) against claims against the Nicene Creed, Gregory of Nyssa (335 CE-384 CE), Gregory of Nazianzus (329 CE-390 CE), John Chrysostom (347 CE-407 CE), Augustine (354 CE-430 CE), Boethius’ “The Trinity is One God Not Three Gods” (480 CE-525 CE), Anselm (1033 CE-1109 CE), Aquinas (1225 CE-1274 CE), and the Protestant Calvin (1509 CE-1564 CE). 

Many of the names we see here are names previously posted for the human philosophical development of the Christian substitutionary atonement ideology.  Just to understand what an uncertain foundation Christianity and the trinity stands upon, the church as late as the 5^th century CE was still attempting to figure how to best package the product.  In 431 CE the Ecumenical council at Ephesus refuted the philosophical ideology that Jesus was two separate entities, one human and one divine while in 451 CE, an Ecumenical council at Chalcedon declared that Christ was two distinct entities united in a Hypostatic Union.  Obviously, my daughters, the more you look into a history and the development of religious ideologies (through human creation and modification), it is rather easy to lose track of what is concrete fact and what is philosophical contemplation.

In order to provide an example of the philosophical nature of these ideologies, I had included a passage on the trinity from ‘the Stromata’ by Clement of Alexandria:

CHAPTER X - The Stromata - Clement of Alexandria

“But who are the two or three gathered in the name of Christ in whose midst the Lord is? Does he not by the "three" mean husband, wife, and child? For a wife is bound to her husband by God. If, however, a man wishes to be undistracted, and prefers to avoid begetting children because of the business it involves, "let him remain unmarried," says the apostle, "even as I am." They explain that what the Lord meant was this. By the plurality he means the Creator, the God who is the cause of the world's existence; and by the one, the elect, he meant the Savior who is Son of another God, the good God. But this is not correct. Through his Son, God is with those who are soberly married and have children. By the same mediation the same God is also with the man who exercises continence on rational grounds. According to another view the three may be passion, desire, and thought; another interpretation makes them flesh, soul, and spirit.

Perhaps the triad mentioned refers to the called, and in the second place to the chosen, and in the third place to the race appointed to receive the greatest honour . With them is the power of God watching over all things which is indivisibly divided among them. He, then, who uses the soul's natural powers as is right, desires those things which are appropriate, and hates what is harmful, as the commandments prescribe: "Thou shalt bless him who blesses thee and curse him who curses thee." But when he has risen above these, passion and desire, and in very deed has begun to love the creation of the God and Creator of all things, then he will live a gnostic life, as he has become like the Saviour and has attained to a state of continence no longer maintained with difficulty. He has united knowledge, faith, and love. Thenceforth he is one in his judgment and truly spiritual, wholly incapable of thoughts arising from passion and desire, one who is to be made perfect after the image of the Lord by the artist himself, a perfect man, already worthy to be called a brother to the Lord as well as his friend and son. Thus the "two" and the "three" come together into one and the same thing -- a gnostic man.

The agreement of many, which is indicated by the number "three," with whom the Lord is present, might also be the one Church, the one man, and the one race. Or could it mean this? The Lord when he gave the law was with the one, that is the Jew. Later when he inspired the prophets and sent Jeremiah to Babylon and, moreover, called believers from the Gentiles by the teaching of the prophets, he brought the two peoples together. And was not the third the one which is made out of the two into a new man in which he walks and dwells, in the Church itself? And the law, the prophets, and also the gospel were brought together in Christ's name into a single knowledge. Accordingly, those who from hatred do not marry or from desire use the flesh as if it were not a matter of right and wrong,6 are not in the number of the saved with whom the Lord is present. “- Clement of Alexandria

Is this not mere philosophical contemplation and babble?  Please, I encourage you to read more of these church philosophers in chronological order and watch these Christian ideologies collect more and more addendums.

Another noteworthy element of Christian belief that is often deemed irrefutable, and divine fact, is the virgin birthing account of Mary, another individualized character, a virgin void of all sin.  The first thing that must be noted about this New Testament account is that the virgin birth myth in the gospel of Luke was not the first virgin myth.  We see similar virgin birth stories that predate Pauline Christianity in the accounts of Mut-em-ua, the virgin Queen of Egypt (approx. 1700 before Jesus) who gave birth to Amenkept III, and we see it with the Egyptian sun god Ra, we it with Attis, the Phrygian god, who was supposedly born of a virgin named Nana, and is claimed to have died three days before being brought back to life, we see it with Dionysos, and we see it with Mithra (Persian God).  We know today through technological advancements that artificial insemination and cloning is possible, but was it possible over 2000 years ago?  Most realistically, they probably did not possess that technology unless there was some technologically advanced alien race in the sky above.  Can this phenomenon of human birth without physical reproduction occur naturally?  Is not natural childbirth the most incredible miracle to ever be witnessed? The Earth and the life on it are indeed an incredible miracle with many extraordinary elements that, as human beings, we have not gained insight or technology to, yet the human mind, in all its greatness and fallacies, has historically sought to create more and more miracles by creating them throughout their flat, monster filled earth.

Continuing with the theme of inaccuracy based on philosophy, we encounter the man-made phenomenon of Christmas, now regarded after centuries as irrefutable in divinity by a majority of Christians (who lack self-education and research), and the winter solstice birth of Jesus, God in human form, or God’s son…who is considered part of one God, only in a different distinct portion (just trying to track all the philosophies), as argued by Boethius, Gregory of Nazianzus and the other philosophers.  Even Christian scholars, using the approximated dating of the historical records for the Herodian tax consensus mentioned in the synoptic Gospels and the argument that shepherds would not be flocking at that time of year, acknowledge that the date of December 25 is probably not accurate.  An interesting fact that I have uncovered in my research is that even in 200 CE, within the philosophers of the early church, there was debate concerning the birthdate of Jesus.  A notable written contemplation on the birthdate of Jesus was by Clement of Alexandria (150 CE-211 CE), whose philosophical writings are interesting as well as extensive.  Another philosopher, who actually argued in support of a December 25^th date, was Hippolytus (165 CE-235 CE).   In any case, it appears that the holiday of Christmas, and the widespread belief that Jesus was born at the Solstice, was correlated with the annual winter solstice festivals that actually predate Pauline Christianity and the holiday known today as Christmas was formalized as December 25th by the Catholic Church around the end of the 17^th century.  Even many of the modern traditions of the holiday, such as the yule log, tree and mistletoe customs were pagan in origins.  Yet, many American Christians walk around in December blindly thinking God was born on December 25^th in the year zero and many others, outside of storming Wal-Mart on Black Friday, give no thoughts to the historical development at all.

Finally, looking at ideologies, we come to the ethnical inferiority philosophy of Christianity, another individualistic aspect, aimed toward an individual ethnic group in this case, as Christians are taught early in childhood that God has chosen a special group of people, similar to how God chose a single son, that are God’s people above all other human beings even though God created all life.  Oddly, the mass majority of Christians are not ethnic members of this chosen ethnic group that they are ingrained to almost worship, while the main scriptural doctrines of the Christian religion were written by orthodox-raised members of the identified exalted and chosen ethnic groups, such as Saul/Paul of Tarsus and his affiliates who were children of the Sanhedrin (priesthood).  Just how did this philosophy of division among humanity develop?  Of course, the Old Testament chronology of original tribes of Jacob (Israel) and, later, the Hebrew flight from Egypt, with God’s covenant and promise through Moses, and the ideology was enhanced through literature of unknown authorship that emerged during the era of the Kingdom of Judah, where the Jewish identity was solidified, despite the conversion of many gentiles during the kingdom’s existence, under that name.  Since the original establishment of the gentile church was based on the Old Testament teachings, and built upon by the New Testament writings of Saul, who was raised under the orthodox Jewish priesthood, with changes to distinguish (or divide) original Jewish law from the new gentile laws of Pauline Christianity, we understand that the elevated distinction of the esteemed ethnic group was already in place at the beginning of the early Christian church network,  and began taking wider regional roots (away from Jerusalem) when the early church branched out to Antioch (present day Turkey), Alexandria and Rome.

On top of the deep rooted reverence of the Old Testament text in Christian ideology, I would have to consider two other smaller elements that occurred to assist with this inferiority worship of a small group of humans by a larger group of humans.  Those two events were the Jewish diaspora after the destruction of the temple in 70 CE, which spread the element of Judaic ethnicity throughout the gentile realms of the Roman Empire, which would soon after adopt Christianity as an official religion (but exempt Jews from the mandate), and the expansion of land occupation by the Christian Roman Empire.  We can see the importance of the Promised Land in the Old Testament text and the Christian empire certainly wanted to maintain control of that land throughout the centuries.  The Crusades was about religion, but it was more about the land.  Was the feverish, and often bloody, fixation with this land always based on Old Testament religious ideologies that Christians had strengthened over the centuries?  Or was it a combination of the two?  The area of Jerusalem, and modern day Israel and Palestine, certainly was a valuable tract of land.  Even before Jesus, the area was a major crossroad for trade with trade routes stemming out to Europe, South to Egypt and Africa, and Eastward.  As the world expanded, the Mediterranean was the center of trade and empire, and even during the bi-polar hegemony of the 20^th century World and Cold Wars, the area was a strategic asset for the Christian capitalist West.  Today, Christian Zionist preachers, such as Hagee, who claim that the establishment and defense of a Jewish state, Israel, plays into the biblical return of Jesus and the establishment of the kingdom of God on Earth, and even less conservative Christians regard the modern nation-state of Israel as essential to their core religious ideologies, but why?  From a rational, political perspective today, I ask what is so pertinent about providing that nation-state with over 3 billion dollars in U.S. economic and military aid at the cost of one’s own national economic, military and political well-being, and damaging the future of their Christian gentile children.  Has the original religious ideology of Christians toward the Jewish people and the Promised Land become so ingrained that it no longer requires political relevance, or protecting one’s own practical interests first before others, for rational decision making? 

In closing this letter, I acknowledge that there is still the issue of history concerning Christianity.  In two thousand years, many things have happened and I truly encourage you to devour the history books during your lifetime.  Hey, your father is a realist.  Five pages of reading and contemplation a day is better than no reading and contemplation at all.  The largest historical blemishes on Christianity that come to my mind, after working all day, are obviously the Crusades, which I consider a land conflict guised in religion (which are everywhere throughout history and still exist on the modern international stage), the Spanish Inquisition, Papal Bull Dum Diversas in 1452 from Pope Nicholas V to King Alfonso of Portugal which authorized the capturing and enslavement of non-Christians (beginning of the trans-Atlantic slave trade), and an interesting American account of the Salem Witch Trials in late 1600s (which EJ is currently doing a paper on). 

Why do I point these areas of Christianity out to you?  Because in the larger scope of our world, religious ideologies impact the way people reason, behave, act, segregate, vote, and react (among many other things). 

 

Letter #4 Organized Religion, Indocrination and Religious Ideologies

My daughters, there is no phenomenon recorded in human history such as the phenomenon of organized religion.  For over three thousand years religion has played heavily into the ideologies of men, the control of organized power, the engineering of bloody wars, land conflicts and revolutions, and an element that has been a means to controlling human masses.  I want to break each of the Abrahamic religions down in separate letters in order to present you with my analysis, ideological views, and what I have learned during my studies of these religions and the history surrounding them in order to provide you will a platform to begin your pursuit of knowledge, analysis and your own development of theological and political thought.  In order to begin this endeavor, I believe it is important to first explain to you the history of your father’s evolution of religious ideologies to this point and where I stand on the ideology.

Like most people, my first experience with religion was through my parent and it was the religion of my parent’s parents.  We were a small, lower economic family headed only by our mother, who worked and went to school while taking care of my younger brother and me.  Her parents and their parents before them brought Catholicism out of Germany and Ireland through the post-1865 immigration boom to the United States and passed it down from generation to generation.  In hindsight, I now realize that religious indoctrination is a powerful addiction that allows the ludicrous to appear rational and undisputable, paralyzing the natural instinct of questioning or verifying, through a process of emotional attachment to parental ancestry, especially after the death of a parent has occurred.  After all, after being taught a religious ideology since childhood by their parent’s example, it is emotionally difficult to accept the possibility that a deceased loved one was incorrect or not in the heaven or with the image of God described by their religion.

As a child, one quickly learns to trust their parents in this world.  When a parent tells a child at an early age that they should not run so fast and spin around so quickly or they will fall and bump their head, the child soon realizes that the parent was correct.  When a parent teaches their children letters and words to communicate, the child grows to trust the knowledge that comes from that nurturing parent.  When the parent holds the child in their arms and protects the child from infancy onward, the child develops a trust in the protective strength and solace of the parent.  The problem with religious indoctrination, and the originating point of an ideologically reproductive cycle, is when a parent is embedded from childhood with the teachings of the organized religion of their parents before them, and those parents indoctrinated from their parents before them, without actual contemplation, critical thought, historical verification or analysis of what is being passed down from generation to generation.  Would a human being eat something which they did not know the ingredients?  Would a human being jump into a hole without knowing what was below? 

The case of your father was no different, my daughters.  My first memory of being exposed to organized religion was early in my youth, perhaps at the age of 5 or 6 before being able to read or write, when our mother, on some occasion or another, took us to church thinking she was doing the proper thing for her small family.  I did not understand the concept of God at such a young age and I can remember going into the church aisle where, if I remember correctly, it was custom to kneel and pray upon entrance prior to the start of a Catholic service.  Mimicking those around me, I followed custom and can remember looking to the front of the church where the decorative altar was and seeing the enormous idol of a white European man nailed to a cross.  As a child, I had no knowledge of what I was looking at and instantly began an assumption that this was God.  In retrospect and after years of study, I can now look back at the absurdity of it because the historical figure of Jesus, which outside of the New Testament is not mentioned besides the brief references in writings by the first century Jewish historian Josephus under the Roman Empire (which may or may not be authentic).  As a child staring at this massive idol, I had no understanding of the political structure or land expansion of the Roman Empire or the Roman instrument of crucifixion used on so-called criminals (or reformers and revolutionaries), nor did I understand economics, military occupation or government.  As I said, I did not even know how to form complete sentences in written format at this stage of childhood.  I was indoctrinated to believe that the New Testament was divinely written by God, instead of the truth which I would research later that Saul of Tarsus had written over half of it and the other portions were questionable in authorship, and that many different written accounts of Jesus were excluded from the canon collection (which would become the New Testament) at the Council of Nicaea (325 CE) about the same time that this new gentile religion of Christianity became mandatory for all Roman Empire citizens except citizens of Jewish ethnicity (313 CE).

Throughout our youth, my family never really fell into routine with the Catholic Church or any other Christian church, but the basic subconscious, indoctrinated Christian norms and values were injected into me over the years throughout our American society: Jesus died for our sins (which subconsciously taught me not to take responsibility for my actions and to pray for forgiveness after transgressions), the false magic of Christmas (which taught economic irresponsibility, and the falsehood that you would be given free things if you were “good”) and the deception that this holiday was about the birth of God in human form or God’s individual son instead of the truth that it was based off pagan rituals such as Saturnalia and astrology, and the ever present ideology that there was an ethnic group in the world that was God’s favorite above all others (causing division among humanity).  The individualistic, automatic forgiveness ideology has provided an entire sub-population of death row prison inmates, many who have committed the most atrocious crimes against humanity and are an economic drain on the American tax payers, which have conveniently asked Jesus for forgiveness and have become staunch Christians.  Ask any Christian the question “What if a murderer of a family on death row repents and accepts Jesus as his lord and savior”?

At any point, when my family came into contact with the Catholic community where we grew up, we were often looked down upon as lower economic children with a divorced single parent.  I didn’t comprehend the way they looked at us and spoke to us during our youth, but once I began to study religion and economics, it became clear in retrospect.  I must add here that you should not judge every person or family on their religious affiliation (once you have studied and understand the different areas and ideologies of organized religion), because it is a person’s (or people’s) daily actions that is the true reflection of their moral construction.  It is most important to always judge a person or families by their actions and words, not their religious affiliation (because they may never have had someone encourage them to look into history more keenly).  The letters I write to you on religion are not aimed to judge or attack individuals or families, but to analyze, produce critical thought and contemplation on the religious ideologies of organized religion.  There are many moral and righteous people who have been brought up and still embrace various organized religions such as Christianity, Islam and Judaism.   One example of this that I recall is a family that was very heavily involved in the Catholic Church community in our area.  The family was probably upper middle class back in those days and was led by a strong mother, who taught at the Catholic school in that community.  This family always embraced us, treated us warmly and fairly, and never really pushed religion on us.  They were good people.  And your father and his friends were not always the best behaved young men during the years of their youth.

Another childhood observation about organized religion that I witnessed during my youth was an example of adults, who lived what Christians called a life of sin, suddenly change their behavioral pattern, open a small church, and became devout Christians to the point of no longer listening to popular music.  Further in-depth details I will not go into here, but the metamorphosis completely baffled and perplexed my child mind until later in my adult studies I learned that organized religious organizations are tax exempt on federal and state levels.  In retrospect, I suspect that the small church they opened and began preaching from may have had ulterior motives and when I see small, lower economic churches today I still think back to whether the opening of that church was for economic benefits and tax exemption.  I will never know for certain and possibly these people simply fell into Christian thinking they were doing the right thing for their children.  I would assume that qualifying tax exemptions for these organizations have become more stringent since the late 1970s and very early 1980s.

The churches of Christianity never pulled our family into its clutches although the subconscious ideological damage was done and would not be broken until I was a young adult lost in the social and economic struggle of being a working class youth with no technical skills, no formal or self-education, no understanding of politics, economics, the justice system or how to be a real man.  Your father had no consistent strong, positive mentors (outside of your grandmother) while growing up and, like many of the youth today, was raised by the lies and misconceptions of television, movies and music.  Your father was also a very hard headed and stubborn youth, a quality I already see in you at an early age, Khadijah, and I hope that with imbued education it will help you avoid many of the mistakes I made in my early lifetime.  I made mistakes during my early adulthood which landed me in jail a few times, luckily not for very long stints and for minor issues with heavy economic ramifications, and I managed to isolated myself for advancement (and opportunity) in American society as all quality employers conducted background checks and I was not educated enough to attend university, even if I would have had the financial backing to do so.  Today, employment reviews are even more stringent and there is much less room for mistakes.  I am a strong believer that everything happens for reason and, by the grace of God, these difficult times led me to the pursuit of knowledge which began with reading, and eventually became a vast self-education process.  The first area of that self-education process came through religious study.  I picked up a copy of the Old Testament and the New Testament, and without knowing what I was selecting; I randomly pulled a copy of the Quran off a book shelf.  Without realizing that the two books were related and that both collections of writings taught about the same prophets (or reformers), I began reading five pages a night starting at the beginning of the Torah (first five books of the Old Testament) while at the same time reading five pages of the Quran.  I had no idea at the beginning of this process that I had the core doctrines and teachings before me of all three Abrahamic religions: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.  This was the period where I began to understand monotheism and how powerful the belief in one God, a God that created all and everything with no divisions, could unify the human element.  During this period of early self-education I feel like became a man.  Prior to this, I may have been a man physically, but not mentally or morally.  I began to understand morals.  I began to understand that for every action there was a consequence.  I began to understand that I must be responsible for my actions and that I must strive not for solely myself or individualism, but that I must strive to do the best I could for God, community and humanity.  It was amazing how the history contained in the pages of the Old Testament flowed with only minor contradictions alongside the often repeated moral lessons and teachings of the Quran.  It was truly an amazing and unique experience reading those books at the same time.

And then I got to the New Testament and the contradictions between that collection of writings from the Old Testament and Quran were like rain water and salt water, or night and day.  The Old Testament and the Quran taught about one God.  In the Old Testament, the Israelites had a covenant with God, and that covenant was also taught in the Quran (although in Islam the covenant had been broken after the Jewish denial of Jesus).  Toward the end of the Old Testament, the descendants of the Tribes of Judah and Benjamin were called Jews and proclaimed themselves to be God’s chosen people (based off the Old Testament covenant).  In the Quran, approximately 1000 years later, it was taught that anyone, regardless of ethnicity, could submit to God and do right and that there were no ethnic divisions or barriers under God.  Both Judaism and Islam both practiced monotheism, and quite frankly as a gentile I favored the monotheism and moral teachings of Islam because it was not ethnically exclusive and it was community based. 

The basic conflicting ideology between Judaism and Islam, which basically taught the same religion and studied the same prophets, was that Muslims believed that after the covenant between God and the Israelites-Jews ended, the prophet-hood was taken from the descendants of the Israelites-Jews and given to the gentiles (through Muhammad).  It all stemmed back to the Biblical figures of Isaac and Ishmael, and again sub-divided by Jacob and Esau.   Of course, members of Judaism would not want to relinquish such rights.  When looking at these conflicting ideologies, which still exist on the international stage today contributing to land conflicts and political affiliations, you must understand the timeline as it unfolded.  I will cover this timeline more in-depth in the letters addressing each individual religion and how they relate to each other in the larger historical picture.  I will only recommend to you that the surrounding geographic and political histories are very important in understanding these religions and to understand each specific history it is vital to go outside of the pages of scripture.  Never constrain your research to a single source of information, especially if you are unable to identify an author or the author’s political, religious, economic or ideological background.

It was very simple to see the similarities between Judaism and Islam.  There were many more similarities than differences between the two religions, with the main difference being the ethnic exclusivity of Judaism, and the minor differences being geographic location and historical time period.  Christianity, which originated from Judaism and before Islam, was the odd ideology from the other two (Judaism and Islam).  I had always felt in my soul that something was not correct with Christianity and as I embarked to read and understand the New Testament and the synoptic Gospels, my doubts were solidified.  What had happened?  I had already read the creation story where God supposedly created the Earth, and now there was a rewritten story where Jesus was with God at the creation?  And how was it that the gospels were different accounts of the same events?  I carefully read these accounts of Jesus being God’s begotten son or even God in human form born of a virgin (which didn’t appear until Luke).  How did events go from the worship of one God, creator of everything, to God in human form and God’s son dying for mankind’s sins?  Who were the witnesses?  Who wrote these accounts?  Were these plausible events or folklore? Questions formed and compiled in my mind and I was forced to go outside of these scriptures for answers.  In my research, I found that Saul of Tarsus, raised under the priesthood of Orthodox Judaism, was accredited by historians to have written over 50% of the New Testament and was accredited with the creation of organized Christianity (Pauline Christianity).  I found that the authors of the synoptic Gospels (the accounts of Jesus) were unknown and not the actual accounts of the apostles that supposedly walked with the reformer Jesus as most Christians are allowed to believe.  I found that the Gospel of Luke was not written by the apostle Luke, as most Christians believed, but by a man called Luke the Physician and a close affiliate of Paul/Saul.  Understanding that Jerusalem was a cross road sea port and a great center of trade between Europe and Africa and the east, and that many gentiles during this period of history were becoming interested in the regional monotheism of Judaism, I began to question if the creation of Pauline Christianity may not have been originated as an effort to protect the ethnic monopoly on monotheism from gentiles.  After long consideration, I was forced to discard Christianity as a religion based on inconsistencies which continued to compile, along with blood on the Christian hand, throughout the centuries, and an ideology that greatly expanded during the Holy Roman Empire and European colonialism.  We will discuss the impact of Christianity on the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the methods to justify slavery with Biblical scripture in the letter on Christianity.

I embraced the basic monotheism without ethnic barriers of Islam and began to practice the basic pillars in my own manner and on my own.  I concentrated on the areas that I learned such as prayer and self-reflection, giving to the poor (zakat), treating parents and women respectfully, not judging others, enjoining good on others, avoidance of backbiting and the talking of others which causes mischief among society, neighborhood and family, concentrating on taking responsibility for my actions, and avoiding idolatry.  Many of these positive concepts I still practice today as they have become a part of my moral construction.  As long as I considered Islamic teachings directly and solely from the Quran, I was able to consider myself Islamic to an extent.  The problem with the organized religion of Islam, which was minor compared to the discrepancies of Christianity, began to show itself as I branched out and began to have discussions with other Islamic minds and I studied Islamic scholars. 

The first common sense problem was that, while the basic concepts of Islam were very good, the cultural norms and values surrounding these teachings had been concreted in 7^th century Arabic culture and the majority of organized Orthodox Islam refused to budge from a 1300 year old culture when it came to modern American culture, which prevents the majority of Americans from being able to adapt to the morally uplifting basic components of Islamic teachings.  The lawful marriage of more than one woman is one of several problem areas that clearly show the outdated mode of culture surrounding orthodox Islam.  In my letter concerning Islam, we will discuss how this culture emerged.  It was not simply sexual or social to have more than one wife, it developed during a time of war when many Muslim men died on the field of battle and the taking of more than one wife was aimed at provision and protection for the widows and orphans.  Like many areas of various organized religions, this is another example of religious norms and values which have been exploited over the centuries and has quite frankly outlived its cultural relativity.  The Orthodox Muslim will argue that everything contained in the Quran is divinely revealed by God and that Muhammad was the last messenger, resulting in the resistance to cultural change.

The second perturbing area in the organized religion of Islam was that I began to notice an emphasis on Muhammad on being “His (God’s) prophet”.  In the Uranic verses taught by Muhammad, the teachings always stated that no human being or idol should ever be elevated to the same level as God, creator of all and that prophethood was the greatest level of achievement that any human being could obtain, and that there was no distinction between these servants to humanity.  It was disappointing to hear more and more Muslims make statements such as “There is no God but God and Muhammad is his prophet”.  What about the other prophets?  It was evident to me that by elevating Muhammad above Moses, Abraham, or the others, that this type of special emphasis was similar to the elevation of Jesus by Christians.

A third area, and the largest problem area, that I found with organized Islam stemmed from the largest discrepancy that I found within Christianity, the reliance on the divine authority of the New Testament.  By this time, I had come firmly to believe that Christianity was a genius creation by Saul/Paul (the self-proclaimed apostle who had no witnesses for Jesus’ appearance to him on the road to Damascus) to give the gentiles a religion separate from the ethnic monopoly of Judaism (since being a chosen people of God was politically and economically lucrative, and therefore to allow all of the various gentiles to integrate into Judaic monotheism would strip, or diminish, that exclusive world reputation).  Elements of Christianity and Judaism were present in Arabia during Muhammad’s historical period and while Muslims will argue that every portion of Muhammad’s teachings were divine (from God), I find it very difficult to believe that these Christian and Judaic influences did not impact his teachings and the moral reformation he led.  The problem that results from this theory is that if the questionable credentials of the New Testament are considered and found to be disputable, then Muhammad’s teachings matching the many accounts contained in the New Testament will cast all of Muhammad’s divine revelation in doubt and make his historical position as a prophet vulnerable to attack.  In my opinion, the good he did in Arabia is beyond reproach or discredit.  When I asked Muslims about modern Western culture and 8^th century Arab culture and how society has changed over the centuries, Muslims again responded that everything revealed to Muhammad was divinely revealed and that the cultural norms could not be changed.  Just as a Christian will tell you that you must take Jesus as your “Lord” and savior or you will not get into Christian heaven (no matter how righteous you live), the Muslims will not budge from the belief that everything taught by Muhammad was divinely revealed by God and is unable to be modified.  Make a note, my daughters, that Muhammad was reputed to be illiterate before he began his teachings and in my research, I have become convinced that it was his first wife, Khadijah, who educated him on the religions of Judaism and Christianity because, as the daughter of a prominent trading family in Arabia, Khadijah had been exposed to Christianity and Judaic ideologies and teachings.  Truly, the woman is the first teacher. 

I broke with any hopes of organized Islam based on these arguments, although I will always be appreciative for the lessons that I have learned and the moral values that I embedded in myself from studying the Quran and Hadiths.  I truly understand what Malcolm X understood when he saw human beings from all ethnic groups and colors praying collectively to one God.

As for Judaism, while Christianity and Islam both study the prophets of the Israelites with respect, the religion is an ethnic based religion and this prejudice can clearly be seen in the text of the Old Testament and the Talmud.  What else can I say besides “you, my daughters, are gentiles” and are considered by some orthodox as second class citizens and even secretly slandered as goyim.  It is a sad and pathetic form of human racism based on the oldest origins of the Abrahamic scriptures, but it is a quiet reality which still exists today and it is my duty to educate you concerning its existence instead of remaining silent over an uneasy topic.  In the forthcoming letter that discusses Judaism, I will be sure to discuss the dangerous area of being proclaimed an anti-Semite for any analysis that, does not prove positive, or any intellectual criticism to Judaism or the modern political entity of Israel.  It is a very tricky slope indeed.

As I write this opening letter on organized religion to you, I must express my hopes that you will research, study and self-educate yourselves in these historical and theological fields while always treating all fellow human beings with the utmost respect while avoiding those who are dominated by their prejudices and lower base desires.  Always remember, a religious ideology may influence a person’s actions or views, but it is ultimately their actions and words that give exposure to their actual moral or immoral structure. 

In closing this introduction on the topic of organized religion, I tell you that I believe in God.  I believe in a higher power.  When I look at this Earth, the elements, the sky during the day and planets at night, and all of the amazing varieties of life on this amazing planet, I simply am unable to take the atheist’s view of a bang explosion that created the random development of such complex life chains after a vague pre-big bang theory anomaly.  Watching your mother give birth, observing the human element in its glory and despair, studying human history, technology, and understanding the human abilities of memory, learning, communication, feeling, and emotion …I simply find myself unable to accept man made doctrine that individualizes or humanizes that higher power that no human being has seen or returned from.  I believe in God and try my best to live a righteous life, respectful of all humans, as I believe in the great potential of the human element and I hope (and pray) for a stable future for your sisters and you.

Supplemental Note #1 - The Question: What will become of our children after we are gone?

What is the heaviest question that every parent has, either quietly within themselves or in confidence with their partner, considered and heavily reflected on many times; a question that if not considered would call into question the quality, responsibility and true character of the human element?  It is the reoccurring question of what will become of our children after we are gone.  What if we died tomorrow?  What if we died ten years from now?  What if we lived to an old age?  Many people may consider this a morbid query, and perhaps it is, although it is a realistic and required mental planning exercise.  Many will retort with confidence that they have set up trust funds or savings for their children, but are these sufficient measures for the future?  I certainly would not discourage the effort, but is it enough?  A prime example of the devaluation of a currency can be found in 1991 with the decline of the Russian Ruble after the disintegration of the Soviet Union.   Do you believe the American dollar will reign supreme forever?  Will setting money to the side be enough?  More importantly, not all citizens are able to establish an economic cushion for their offspring.  Look at the world around us and especially at the current society and culture of our United States.  Will our children’s generation be the generation that grows up in the ashes of the Roman Empire, or will it be their children’s children?  Our society is in moral decline as morally void crimes and drug abuse are rampant, and the economy continues to decline as the nation, often by the hands of the oft-lobbyist corruptible politicians, increases an irreparable fiscal deficit that will eventually devalue the paper money.  Will our children be prepared to enter into such a world?  Have we laid a sufficient moral, intellectual, and physical foundation for their well-being?  Have we instructed them well enough concerning the brutal atrocities and victimizations that can be found daily, and have been viewed many times over, within the current cultural condition of the American human element that they are born into?  Have we provided them with critical thinking abilities flexible enough to span from the university to the lower economic streets, and the ability to listen, watch and make solid character judgments (even though many men attempt to conceal their true character or do not display their true character until faced with their own lower base desires)?

How does one prepare their children for social, economic, and community self-sufficiency?  Five areas of teaching and understanding come to mind: (1) Understanding the base and animal elements in the composition of the human element (2) Understanding the composition of demographics and history  (3) Understanding the economic classes  (4) Understanding religious ideologies, history of the religious ideologies and religious factions within those ideologies  (5) Understanding the political composition of the American government system and how those ideologies impact human decision making.

Understanding the composition of the human element is the root lesson that must be introduced to our children.  Humanity is an incredibly unique creation with choice, the ability to rationalize, feel emotions, remember memories, and learn.  Sadly, the American human element is often in a weak intellectual condition as a result of force fed mass corporate produced influences (television, movies, music, video games) which our children have become dependent on because their parents have become dependent on, and poor public schooling (with no parental mentoring or education at home).  When left in an intellectually state of malnutrition, the human element becomes quite vulnerable to lower base desires. 

What are some of the base desires that impact the human element and prevents society from collective growth?  One base desire is greed, the love of money and possessions and power (or the illusion that these things can be compiled quickly without hard work and dedication), like a child that does not understand sharing (for community) or similar to an animal taking a physically weaker species’ food.  Is this Darwinism?  Yet, unlike animals, we are human beings with the ability to think, choose, and feel.  When a person is controlled by base desires such as greed, that person will steal, rob or betray their fellow human being without contemplation or reflection.   Lust is another base desire that leads to betrayal, broken families and even sexual assault or rape.  The point here is that we must somehow teach our children to be able, to the best of their ability, to identify those within the human group, who can be identified by daily deeds and words, which are most likely controlled by base desires in order to avoid interaction with them.  Some people can still be educated and civilized in order to contribute to human society, but many are beyond that window and are ingrained by lower base desires.

Understanding the composition of demographics, history, and economic classes are also vital to understanding.  How I often have considered what it would be like if the various peoples of the United States were one, at minimum in mind and respect.  During my years in Japan, I watched and observed the Japanese people and, while I am sure there were demographical differences that I could not comprehend as a foreigner, they were all of black hair and specific ethnicity.  They obviously did not have the racial discord that we face due to our ugly slave history in the United States.  Our children must be taught to research true history, no matter how ugly, for their understanding of current society.  In the United States, the media and the public schools will teach about the holocaust in Europe while barely brushing over the transatlantic slave trade, domestic American slavery and racial segregation.  Slavery and segregation were massive portions of American history and the economic and social ramifications are still present today.  Another example is the history of land confiscation and corrupt treatment toward the original people of North America as well as the geographic locations and interior political, economic structures of remaining reservations.  There are many more examples, but those are the two that come to the forefront of my thoughts while writing this supplemental note.  As America has a vast diversity of ethnic groups, each group has a history and not all of them have been pleasant, and all are tied together in the movement toward the future.  There are many members of various ethnic groups that are positive members of the American human element and willing to work among ethnic groups to pursue a healthy future for American children, but there are also those who make profits and a living by inciting division and hate among American ethnic groups.  I believe that American children require the understanding of true American history in order to understand the social, economic, ethnic and political segregation (division) caused by those histories.  The people of the United States will never advance and secure a better future with so many isolated groups, which resemble a power of balance model pertaining to nation-states in international politics allowing the most powerful to keep the less powerful pitted against each other in competition.  By keeping the masses segregated into small conflicting groups, those pulling the strings can divert collective domestic attention and keep the masses suspicious and against each other.  Economic demographics is important for our teachings because once our children truly understand history, they will begin to view the American economic caste differently.  They will be able to identify the economic gap between (a majority of) descendants of slavery and the descendants of banking systems which dealt in slavery and land, while distinguishing poor ethnic groups and post-Civil War immigration waves that population the lower economic class in the United States.  They will be able to identify the working class whites who immigrated after 1865.  They will be able to understand the actual wealth distribution in the United States (if it lasts in the face of globalization, consolidation, and internationalization of corporations) where 5% of the American population own over 90% of the wealth leaving 95% of the population to fight over the 10% crumbs.  We want our children to be able to research the facts and understand how the government uses money acquired by taxation for private sector profiteering, foreign aid, nation rebuilding, and debt foolishness while at the same time being able to identify demographic groups which do not attempt to contribute to American society and are satisfied with collecting government entitlements and cheese while draining the taxed working class.  Our children are free to make their decisions for the future, but it is recommended that they avoid interaction with those who do not want to positively build for the future.   Indeed, this is a very broad category, but if we think about the amount of time that our American children spend on television and video games, we realize that there is ample time to encourage our children to learn in-depth about their history, and the back alley corridors of our American economic-political structure surrounding them and their peers.  To truly have positive collective advancement, every child, regardless of ethnicity, must understand the history whether it humiliates them, makes them feel ashamed, shocks them or upsets them, in order to comprehend the many ideologies within their society, include all members of a society, and advance the most positive ideologies and efforts while discarding the negative …only then can we come to terms and advance as one people.

One of the heaviest influences on the thinking and actions of people is in their core religious ideologies.  Even in the absence of religious and moral ideologies, the thinking (or non-thinking) and actions of people can be viewed and contemplated to predict and understand behavior patterns.  It is a dark gray area between the indoctrinations of man-made organized religions and no spiritual structure at all.  Religious and moral ideologies, along with all ideologies in general, are established through three main venues: Indoctrination, life experiences and self-education.  Therefore, understanding religious ideologies and the various ideological factions within major religions impacting the United States, the West and the overall international stage is very important.  It would seem that as humanity has made technological leaps and bounds that the majority of humans would have broken free of ancient flat-world religious ideologies long ago, but that is not the case.  The three largest religions, and most politically impacting religions, are the religions that emerged from the biblical figure of Abram: Christianity, Judaism and Islam.  Especially in the west, these religious ideologies heavily influence political decisions, political support (domestically and internationally), and individual prejudices.  It is vital to our children to understand these ideologies, and the actual proven history surrounding these ideologies, in order to understand the various groups within their communities and nation.  This is clearly the most difficult arena for rational thought because indoctrination and fear prevent people from rational thought.  Another cementing agent for religious indoctrination is when one is brought up under family religious indoctrination, no matter how irrational the ideology may be to an educated mind, it is extremely difficult for an adult to break the indoctrination of a parent, especially after the parents have died and passed on.  It is a flaw in the human element that creates iron deniability based on emotional pain which attaches itself to the blind reassurance of the religious ideology linking it with the memory of the lost parents that loved them and could never have been wrong.    I plan to break this category into multiple letters for my daughters in order to provide them with the findings I have compiled during my years of studies, my views after much critical thought on religion, my personal evolution and my hopes that along with their own studies and contemplation that they will advance further in understanding and action that I was able to during my lifetime.

Finally, understanding the political, economic and social composition of the government system in which they were born under, and their children will be born under, is considered essential to positive advancement and positive national advancement.  The history of our government may not be beautiful as it was once white-washed to us in public schools, but this is the soil and nation that our children will grow into adulthood under and birth their children under.  We need to teach our youth the economic caste and their positioning within the caste, and provide them with the intellectual and moral tools to advance that position.  Many Americans do not really begin to follow current political events and political policy-making, and how it impacts them, until they are middle age adults with families.  We need to ensure that our children understand the structure of American government and all the elements of it, from representative democracy to the corporate and foreign lobbyists that influence it, before adulthood.  It is vital for future American adults to be able to understand the previously discussed influences on human behavior when it comes to the representatives allowed to vote on their domestic and foreign policies, and hopefully it is an educational process and understanding that will allow more of our children to participate in the direction of this nation instead of allowing dual-citizenship politicians from the upper 10% of the economic caste, with their dual citizenships and questionable loyalties to bow at altars of corporate profits, foreign allegiances and individual greed.

In conclusion, I am not attempting to say that our children should not take time to enjoy their youth.  What I am suggesting is that the current encouragement for apathy, non-educational values and total disregard of important economic, political, historical and social issues is not a viable building platform for our American children.  There is an enough time each day to do both, allow our children to enjoy their youth while preparing them for the day that we are no longer here to guide and protect them.   This is my answer to the question that every parent asks themselves.  I would like to know your view on the question.