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Real Help for Real People

Wanted to let all readers know of these people, especially if you need a quick $500-1,000 NOW!

"GenerousGeorge.com has just awarded their 30^th Grant Award. Generous George, a giving organization gives out 1 award per day to needy Americans. The awards (maximum amount $1,000.00) are given to people who post their request at www.GenerousGeorge.org/signup and are then awarded by the Generous George editorial board based on the most heartfelt story that day."

They seem like pretty decent people...

One Common Faith: 5

The reawakened interest in religion is clearly far from having reached its peak, in either its explicitly religious or is less definable spiritual manifestations. On the contrary. The phenomenon is the product of historical forces that steadily gather momentum. Their common effect is to erode the certainty, bequeathed to the world by the twentieth century, that material existence represents ultimate reality.

The most obvious cause of these re-evaluations has been the bankruptcy of the materialist enterprise itself.

For well over a hundred years, the idea of progress was identified with economic development, and with its capacity to motivate and shape social improvement. Those differences of opinion that existed did not challenge this worldview, but only conceptions as to how its goals might best be attained.

Its most extreme form, the iron dogma of "scientific materialism", sought to reinterpret every aspect of history and human behavior in its own narrow terms. Whatever humanitarian ideals may have inspired some of its early proponents, the universal consequence was to produce regimes of totalitarian control prepared to use any means of coercion in regulating the lives of hapless populations subjected to them. The goal held up as justification of such abuses was the creation of a new kind of society that would ensure not only freedom from want but fulfilment for the human spirit.

At the end, after eight decades of mounting folly and brutality, the movement collapsed as a credible guide to the world's future.
Tomorrow: Other systems of social experimentation

Karridine

One Common Faith: 4

Beyond the attention that religion, as formally conceived, has begun to command is a widespread revival of spiritual search. Expressed most commmonly as an urge to discover a personal identity that transcends the merely physical, the development encourages a multitude of pursuits, both positive and negative in character. On the one hand, the search for justice and the promotion of the cause of international peace tend to have the effect of also arousing new perceptions of the individual's role in society.

Similarly, although focused on the mobilization of support for changes in social decision-making, movements like environmentalism and feminism induce a re-examination of people's sense of themselves and of their purpose in life.

A reorientation occurring in all the major religious communities is the accelerated migration of believers from traditional branches of the parent faiths to sects that attach primary importance to the spiritual search and personal experiences of their members.

At the opposite pole, extraterrestrial sightings, "self-discovery" regimens, wilderness retreats, charismatic exaltation, various New Age enthusiasms, and the consciousness-raising efficacy attributed to narcotics and hallucinogens attract followings far larger and more diverse than anything enjoyed by spiritualism or theosophy at a similar historical turning point a century ago.

For one Dedicated to the Glory of God, the proliferation even of cults and practices that may arouse aversion in the minds of many serves primarily as a reminder of the insight embodied in the ancient tale of Majnun, who sifted the dust in his search for the beloved Layli, although aware that she was pure spirit:

"I seek her everywhere; haply somewhere I shall find her."

One Common Faith: 3

As the twentieth century approached its close, therefore, nothing seemed less likely than a sudden resurgence of religion as a subject of consuming global importance. Yet that is precisely what has now occurred in the form of a groundswell of anxiety and discontent, much of it still only dimly conscious of the sense of spiritual emptiness that is producing it.

Ancient sectarian conflicts, apparently unresponsive to the patient arts of diplomacy, have re-emerged with a virulence as great as anything known before. Scriptural themes, miraculous phenomena and theological dogmas that, until recently, had been dismissed as relics of an age of ignorance find themselves solemnly, if indiscriminately, explored in influential media.

In many lands, religious credentials take on new and compelling significance in the candidature of aspirants to political office. A world, which had assumed that with the collapse of the Berlin Wall an age of international peace had dawned, is warned that it is in the grip of a war of civilizations whose defining character is irreconcilable religious antipathies. Bookstores, magazine stands, Web sites and libraries struggle to satisfy an apparently inexhaustible public appetite for information on religious and spiritual subjects.

Perhaps the most insistent factor in producing the change is reluctant recognition that there is NO CREDIBLE REPLACEMENT for religious belief as a force capable of generating self-discipline and restoring commitment to moral behaviour.

(Tomorrow, beyond the attention that religion has begun to command...)

One Common Faith: 2

This posture (humanity has solved, through rational experimentation and discourse all basic issues related to human governance and development) was reinforced by the assumption that the values, ideals and disciplines cultivated over the centuries were now reliably fixed and enduring features of human nature. They needed merely to be refined by education and reinforced by legislative action.

The moral legacy of the past was just that: humanity's indefeasible inheritance, requiring no further religious interventions. Admittedly, undisciplined individuals, groups or even NATIONS would continue to threaten the stability of the social order and call for correction. The universal civilization towards the realization of which all the forces of history had been bearing the human race, however, was irresistibly emerging, inspired by secular conceptions of reality. People's happiness would be the natural result of better health, better food, better education, better living conditions--- and the attainment of these unquestionably desirable goals now seemed to be within the reach of a society single-mindedly focused on their pursuit.

Throughout that part of the world where the vast majority of the earth's population live, facile announcements that "God is Dead" had passed largely unnoticed (comments by Art V). The experience of the peoples of Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Pacific had long confirmed them in the view not only that human nature is deeply influenced by spiritual forces, but that its very identity is spiritual.

Consequently, religion continued, as had always been the case, to function as the ultimate authority in life. These convictions, while not directly confronted by the ideological revolution taking place in the West, were effectively marginalized by it, insofar as interaction among peoples and nations was concerned. Having penetrated and captured all significant centres of power and information at the global level, dogmatic materialism ensured that no compteting voices would retain the ability to challenge projects of world wide econimic exploitation.

To the cultural damage inflicted already by two centuries of colonial rule was added an agonizing dysjunction between the inner and outer experience of the masses affected, a condition invading virtually all aspects of life.

Helpless to exercise any real influence over the shaping of their futures or even to preserve the moral well-being of their children, these populations were plunged into a crisis different from but in many ways even more devastating (cf. Art V) than the one gathering momentum in Europe and America. Although retaining its central role in consciousness, faith appeared impotent to influence the course of events.

One Common Faith

There is every reason for confidence that the period of history now opening will be far more receptive to efforts to spread The Glory of God's message than was the case in the century just ended. All the signs indicate that a sea change in human consciousness is under way.

Early in the twentieth century, a materialistic interpretation of reality had consolidated itself so completely as to become the dominant world faith insofar as the direction of society was concerned. In the process, the civilizing of human nature had been violently wrenched out of the orbit it had followed for millenia. For many in the West, the Divine authority that had functioned as the focal centre of guidance -- however diverse the interpretations of its nature-- seemed simply to have dissolved and vanished. In large measure, the individual was left free to maintain whatever relationship he believed connected his life to a world transcending material existence, but society as a whole proceeded with growing confidence to sever dependence on a conception of the universe that was judged to be at best a fiction and at worst an opiate, in either case inhibiting progress. Humanity had taken its destiny into its own hands. It had solved through rational experimentation and discourse -- so people were given to believe -- ALL of the fundamental issues related to human governance and development.

Tomorrow, a bit more...

Free Speech? We don' need no steenkin' freedom

The carefully imams-from-Denmark-incited 'riots' by Muslims worldwide shows the depth and extent of their fear of the independent investigation of truth, a principle established by the Lord of Hosts in all His writings, including the Book of Certitude (Kitab-i-Iqan) and the Book of Laws (Kitab-i-Aqdas).

By establishing, in writing, that God wants all humans to know the Love of God and love the Knowledge of God, He '...gave power to the people...' and disempowered two classes, who had jealously guarded that power for 7,000 years: '...kings and ecclesiastics.'

When we recall that it was the kingly-caste amongst humankind, and their political cohorts/enemies, the ecclesiastic priesthoods of the world, who guarded the power of reading and writing from We, the People, it isn't surprising that today's imams and mullahs and (to a lesser extent) popes and bishops, monks and priests, long for the former times, when THEY could place a king on his throne or pull him off it!

How the mighty have fallen! The only pope to have been imprisoned in the Vatican and stripped of all spiritual and temporal power, forced to escape in the dead of night disguised as a monk, was THE POPE who received a tablet from the Prisoner at Akka, commanding him to recognize Him and lead his people back to the Glory of God or lose all power!

God and Jesus, 1 : popes, 0