Armstrong and Getty use clips from Tucker Carlson to start out the show. Then a Facebook Fact Check of their “Fact-Check” is from 45-seconds in to about the 2-minute mark. This is worth listening to if nothing else – I will also have some related articles below as well. The rest of the commentary is golden. What a disgrace [not just the Biden Admin is] the progressive Left and Democrats are in their dealing with addiction. Great segment by A&G!
CrackPipeGate Just Got a Lot More Interesting—and Confusing (RED STATE)
‘Mostly False’ Free Crack Pipes: How ‘Fact-Checkers’ Debunked Reality … Again (DAILY WIRE)
Snopes Claims Biden Admin Funding Crack Pipes For Racial Equity Is ‘Mostly False’ (RED VOICE MEDIA)
It’s no secret that the Media is OBSESSED with President Trump, but this nut-job from 60 Minutes Australia takes that obsession to a whole new level. Propagandist Liam Bartlett is infatuated with our favorite President.
It was clear from the start that this was another Corporate Media Cabal hit-piece. And when it ended Liam became desperate–he seemed panicked he didn’t get the interview he wanted.
Dennis Prager discusses with two medical doctors and one Ph.D. in the biomedical field the efficacy of vaccines as well as the consequences of not using cheap, effective, medications to treat Covid.
bio’s
Dr. Paul Marik
Critical Care physician. Founding Member of the Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance
Co-Chief Medical Officer. Here’s his CV. Is he “anti-science”?
Dr. Pierre Kory
Former Chief of the Critical Care Service and Medical Director of the Trauma and Life
Support Center at the University of Wisconsin. Here’s his CV. Is he “anti-science”?
Asher Milgrom, PhD.
PhD in biomedical science, founder and chief science officer of AMA Regenerative Medicine in Southern California. Here’s his CV. Is he “anti-science”?
The ACLU — the American Civil Rights Union, supposedly — is challenging Youngkin’s optional masking order which… gives the right to choose masking, or choose not to mask, to Virginia citizens.
Or, as the Washington Post dysphemizes it (the opposite of euphemizes): “mandates choice.”
Imposes freedom!
The ACLU is now against the imposition of burdensome freedom and dangerous rights.
For those keeping track, the ACLU is now fighting on behalf of schools — government bodies — to take away the rights of citizen parents and citizen students.
Clay Travis and Buck Sexton want you to hear what this fired-up mom had to say at a Virginia school board meeting. You don’t want to mess with this mama bear.
Clay and Buck note the author of the Atlantic whom they had on to interview a couple weeks back wrote this in said article:
To our knowledge, the CDC has performed three studies to determine whether masking children in school reduces COVID-19 transmission. The first is a study of elementary schools in Georgia, conducted before vaccines became available, which found that masking teachers was associated with a statistically significant decrease in COVID-19 transmission, but masking students was not—a finding that the CDC’s masking guidelines do not account for.
A second and more recent study of Arizona schools in Maricopa and Pima Counties concluded that schools without mask mandates were more likely to have COVID-19 outbreaks than schools with mask mandates. Yet more than 90 percent of schools in the “no mask mandate” group were in Maricopa County, an area that has significantly lower vaccination rates than Pima County. This study had other serious shortcomings, including failure to quantify the size of outbreaks and failure to report testing protocols for the students.
The third CDC study found that U.S. counties without mask mandates saw larger increases in pediatric COVID-19 cases after schools opened, but again did not control for important differences in vaccination rates. The CDC has cited several other studies conducted in the previous school year to support its claim that masks are a key school-safety measure. However, none of these studies, including ones conducted in North Carolina, Utah, Wisconsin, and Missouri, isolated the impact of masks specifically, because all students were required to mask and no comparisons were made with schools that did not require masks.
Therefore, the overall takeaway from these studies—that schools with mask mandates have lower COVID-19 transmission rates than schools without mask mandates—is not justified by the data that have been gathered. In two of these studies, this conclusion is undercut by the fact that background vaccination rates, both of staff and of the surrounding community, were not controlled for or taken into consideration. At the time these studies were conducted, when breakthrough infections were much less common, this was a hugely important confounding variable undermining the CDC’s conclusions that masks in schools provide a concrete benefit in controlling COVID-19 spread: Communities with higher vaccination rates had less COVID-19 transmission everywhere, including in schools, and those same communities were more likely to have mask mandates.
[….]
Other studies—not randomized trials—have looked at the effects of masks in schools, and their results do not support pervasive, endless masking at school. A study from Brown University, analyzing 2020–21 data from schools in New York, Massachusetts, and Florida, found no correlation between student cases and mask mandates, but did see decreased cases associated with teacher vaccination. A study published in Science looking at individual mitigation measures in schools last winter found that, although teacher masking reduced COVID-19 positivity, student masking did not have a significant effect.
Even though the first half of this school year was dominated by the highly transmissible Delta variant, the picture in more recent studies looks similar. In Tennessee, two neighboring counties with similar vaccination rates, Davidson and Williamson, have virtually overlapping case-rate trends in their school-age populations, despite one having a mask mandate and one having a mask opt-out rate of about 23 percent. One would expect a quarter of the students opting out of masking to affect transmission rates if masks played any significant role in controlling COVID-19 spread, but that was not the case. Another recent analysis of data from Cass County, North Dakota, comparing school districts with and without mask mandates, concluded that mask-optional districts had lower prevalence of COVID-19 cases among students this fall. Analyses of COVID-19 cases in Alachua County, Florida, also suggest no differences in mask-required versus mask-optional schools. Similarly, the U.K. recently reported finding no statistically significant difference in absences traced to COVID-19 between secondary schools with mask mandates and those without mandates.
Despite how widespread all-day masking of children in school is, the short-term and long-term consequences of this practice are not well understood, in part because no one has successfully collected large-scale systematic data and few researchers have tried. Mental and social-emotional outcomes are hard to observe and measure, and can take years to manifest. Initial data, however, are not reassuring. Recent prospective studies from Greece and Italy found evidence that masking is a barrier to speech recognition, hearing, and communication, and that masks impede children’s ability to decode facial expressions, dampening children’s perceived trustworthiness of faces. Research has also suggested that hearing-impaired children have difficulty discerning individual sounds; opaque masks, of course, prevent lip-reading. Some teachers, parents, and speech pathologists have reported that masks can make learning difficult for some of America’s most vulnerable children, including those with cognitive delays, speech and hearing issues, and autism. Masks may also hinder language and speech development—especially important for students who do not speak English at home. Masks may impede emotion recognition, even in adults, but particularly in children. This fall, when children were asked, many said that prolonged mask wearing is uncomfortable and that they dislike it……….
Whoopi Goldberg is reportedly furious that she was suspended from ABC’s “The View” over highly controversial remarks that she made about the Holocaust. Shapiro weighs in.
According to People, the name “Whoopi” comes from, you guessed it, a whoopee cushion. Whoopi Goldberg told The New York Times how the name came about during an interview in 2006: “If you get a little gassy, you’ve got to let it go. So people used to say to me, ‘You’re like a whoopee cushion.’ And that’s where the name came from.”
As for “Goldberg,” it turns out that it is a name she has family connections to. Per the Jewish Chronicle, she revealed in 2011 that while Whoopi was not her mother’s choice for her name, Goldberg was, “Part of my family, part of my heritage. Just like being black.” It’s been rumored that her mother thought the name Johnson wasn’t “Jewish enough” for Goldberg to make it big, but that’s not been confirmed.
Either way, it’s clear that the name Whoopi Goldberg has a memorable quality that Goldberg’s birth name lacks, and it can’t have been a bad decision to change her name — she’s had a remarkably successful career, becoming one of the biggest and most-loved names in Hollywood……….
COVID Cases Inflated for Profit: ‘The Guy Went in for Multiple Gunshot Wounds and he was Coded as COVID’
Jeanne Stagg, a whistleblower who worked in Inpatient Utilization Management, approached Project Veritas after seeing cases coded as COVID-19 that she says should not have COVID-19 listed as the “primary diagnosis.”
Stagg: “I’ve tried to raise awareness to my leadership and even with the Fraud, Waste, and Abuse Department, and it just kind of fell on deaf ears.”
The Chief Medical Officer for United Healthcare of Louisiana (Medicaid) opined in a recorded phone conversation that the Medicaid rate for reimbursement of COVID-19 patients, which is faster and significantly higher, could be the motivation for the improper “primary diagnosis” codes.
“Oh, yes. Yeah. I would think that there’s some motivation that it’s driving higher rates of reimbursement or quicker reimbursement, or something, because otherwise there’s no reason to put, you know, something like that as a leading diagnosis in an asymptom– basically asymptomatic patients,” said Dr. Morial, Chief Medical Officer for United Healthcare of Louisiana.
The Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals has suspended utilization review which is the process of determining whether health care is medically necessary for a patient or an insured individual. The whistleblower says this could be a major contributing factor to spikes in COVID numbers, which then influence public health decisions.
[Baton Rouge, La. – Feb. 2, 2022] A source who works for United Healthcare of Louisiana’s Inpatient Utilization Management Department is blowing the whistle on COVID-19 cases possibly being inflated for financial incentive. The brazen instance of such potential abuse was a patient who had multiple gunshot wounds with his primary diagnosis listed as COVID-19.
United Healthcare of Louisiana is the states’ Medicaid arm, and as the whistleblower Jeanne Stagg points out in a conversation with the Chief Medical Officer of United Healthcare of Louisiana, Dr. Julie Morial, there are several financial incentives for hospitals to prefer to code patients as COVID-19 hospitalizations.
“Well maybe that’s… maybe that’s driving some of the motivation,” said Dr. Morial before stating that the Medicaid rate for reimbursement of COVID-19 patients is both higher and faster.
Project Veritas also published footage of a leadership call within United Healthcare of Louisiana wherein the whistleblower’s attempt to discuss the improper primary diagnoses she is seeing was dismissed.
A major element of this story is the fact that recent actions by public officials have allowed the problem to persist, and the whistleblower believes erroneous codes could be the cause of COVID-19 spikes which influence major public health decisions.
A health plan advisory, which announced that all utilization management for all medical hospitalizations [including but not limited to initial service authorization and concurrent reviews], must be suspended was the action taken — which is in question.
“Now, this is not specific to COVID-19. This is every single hospital admission. We’re not allowed to do medical necessity review. So, it gives the hospitals free reign to admit anything they want. Code it however they want,” says the whistleblower, Jeanne Stagg.
United Healthcare of Louisiana’s Dr. Morial was contacted for comment on this story and said, “When I see a patient, and if a patient is presenting other symptoms that aren’t suggestive of a COVID infection, even though they may test positive for COVID, that’s not my primary diagnosis.”
There’s no doubt about it, the Left has transformed gender from a biological fact into an ideological opinion, but how did we get to this point? Why is everything the Left tells you about gender wrong?
Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh dispels the Left’s delusions of gender during a special event from The University of Texas at Austin. This event is part of Young America’s Foundation’s Robert and Patricia Herbold Lecture Series.
YAF makes every effort to host in-person campus events. Unfortunately, administrators at the University of Texas at Austin limited attendance to only 99 for this event.
‘What are your pronouns?” is a seemingly innocuous question that has become increasingly common. Pronouns are now frequently displayed prominently in social-media bios, email signatures and conference name tags. Vice President
Kamala Harris
features “she/her” pronouns in her
Twitter
bio, and Transportation Secretary
Pete Buttigieg
includes “he/him” in his. Then there are the singular “they/them” pronouns used by “nonbinary” people who identify as neither male nor female, as well as a growing list of bespoke “neopronouns” such as “ze/zir” or “fae/faer,” and the even stranger “noun-self” neopronouns like “bun/bunself” which, according to the
New York Times,
are identities that can encompass animals and fantasy characters.
A recent survey of 40,000 “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning (LGBTQ) youth” in the U.S. found that a full 25% use pronouns other than she/her and he/him exclusively. The Human Rights Campaign, which claims to be the “nation’s largest LGBTQ+ civil rights organization,” recently tweeted that we should all begin conversations with “Hi, my pronouns are __________. What are yours?” We are told that asking for, sharing and respecting pronouns is “inclusive” to trans and nonbinary people, and that failing to do so may even constitute violence and oppression.
If this all sounds confusing and makes you uncomfortable for reasons you find difficult to articulate, you’re not alone. While being subjected to constant rituals of pronoun exchanges may seem silly or annoying at best and exhausting at worst, in reality participating in this ostensibly benign practice helps to normalize a regressive ideology that is inflicting enormous harm on society. To understand why, you’ll need to familiarize yourself with its core tenets.
Proponents of gender ideology have completely decoupled the terms “man,” “woman,” “boy” and “girl” from biological sex. Gender ideology teaches that the terms “man/boy” and “woman/girl”—and their corresponding “he/his” and “she/her” pronouns—refer to a person’s gender identity, while “male” and “female” refer to biological sex. While you may define a woman as a female human adult, gender ideology contends that a “woman” is an adult of either sex who simply “identifies” as a woman.
But what does it mean to “identify” as a man or woman?
Gender activists believe that being a man or a woman requires embracing stereotypes of masculinity or femininity, respectively, or the different social roles and expectations society imposes on people because of their sex. Planned Parenthood explicitly states that gender identity is “how you feel inside,” defines “gender” as a “a social and legal status, a set of expectations from society, about behaviors, characteristics, and thoughts,” and asserts that “it’s more about how you’re expected to act, because of your sex.”
A recent New York Times piece refers to “men, women and gender nonconforming people,” as though gender nonconformity were incompatible with being a man or a woman. According to the Genderbread Person, a popular educational tool for teaching young children about gender identity, the properties of “man-ness” and “woman-ness” include certain stereotypical “personality traits, jobs, hobbies, likes, dislikes, roles, [and] expectations.”
The clear message of gender ideology is that, if you’re a female who doesn’t “identify with” the social roles and stereotypes of femininity, then you’re not a woman; if you’re a male who similarly rejects the social roles and stereotypes of masculinity, then you’re not a man. Instead, you’re considered either transgender or nonbinary, and Planned Parenthood assures you that “there are medical treatments you can use to help your body better reflect who you are.” According to this line of thinking, certain personalities, behaviors and preferences are incompatible with certain types of anatomy.
So when someone asks for your pronouns, and you respond with “she/her,” even though you may be communicating the simple fact that you’re female, a gender ideologue would interpret this as an admission that you embrace femininity and the social roles and expectations associated with being female. While women’s-rights movements fought for decades to decouple womanhood from rigid stereotypes and social roles, modern gender ideology has melded them back together.
Coercing people into publicly stating their pronouns in the name of “inclusion” is a Trojan horse that empowers gender ideology and expands its reach. It is the thin end of the gender activists’ wedge designed to normalize their worldview. Participating in pronoun rituals makes you complicit in gender ideology’s regressive belief system, thereby legitimizing it. Far from an innocuous act signaling support for inclusion, it serves as an implicit endorsement of gender ideology and all of its radical tenets.
Let me offer an analogy. Consider the Human Rights Campaign urging people to begin conversations with “Hi, my pronouns are ________. What are yours?” Now imagine a similar request from the American Federation of Astrologers encouraging everyone to begin conversations with, “Hi, I’m a Sagittarius. What’s your sign?” To respond with your own star sign would be to operate within and signal your tacit agreement with the belief system of astrology. If you reject astrology and respond to the question with “I don’t have a sign,” the reply might be “Of course you do! When were you born?” But that’s a completely different question.
Similarly, if you reject gender ideology’s claim that men and women are defined by their willful adherence to masculine and feminine roles and stereotypes, and so refuse to answer a request for pronouns, your interlocutor might say, “We all have pronouns! Do you identify as a man or a woman?” But because that concept of man and woman is nothing like yours, stating pronouns will only further normalize the ritual and validate a radical worldview.
The redefining of “man,” “woman,” “boy” and “girl” around sex-related stereotypes has serious real-world implications. The rejection of these stereotypes is now commonly viewed as a medical condition (gender dysphoria) to be treated with puberty blockers (for children), cross-sex hormones and surgeries that result in permanent sterility and consign patients to a lifetime of medical bills. The redefinition is also threatening the safety of women in prisons, as well as compromising the safety, fairness and dignity of women and girls in sports, as males who simply “identify” as girls or women are allowed access to these protected spaces.
The effort to resist gender ideology is reality’s last stand. We simply can’t ignore fundamental realities of our biology and expect positive outcomes for society. Pronoun rituals are extremely effective at normalizing and institutionalizing the abolition of biological sex in favor of gender identity. These rituals take advantage of people’s confusion and compassion to achieve compliance. But the time for politeness has long passed. The only proper response to the question “What are your pronouns?” is to reject the premise and refuse to answer.
Mr. Wright, an evolutionary biologist, is managing editor of Quillette.
This is a WASHINGTON POST article but is behind a pay wall. Here it is, though… a must read Thiessen article!
Biden Blocked A Black Woman Justice by, Marc Thiessen
President Joe Biden wants credit for nominating the first Black woman to the Supreme Court.
But here is the shameful irony: As a senator, Biden warned President George W. Bush that if he nominated the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court, he would filibuster and kill her nomination.
The story begins in 2003, when Bush nominated Judge Janice Rogers Brown to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The D.C. Circuit is considered the country’s second-most important court, and has produced more Supreme Court justices than any other federal court.
Brown was immediately hailed as a potential Supreme Court nominee. She was highly qualified, having served for seven years as an associate justice of the California Supreme Court — the first Black woman to do so.
She was the daughter and granddaughter of sharecroppers, and grew up in rural Alabama during the dark days of segregation, when her family refused to enter restaurants or theaters with separate entrances for Black customers.
She rose from poverty and put herself through college and UCLA law school as a working single mother. She was a self-made African American legal star. But she was an outspoken conservative — so Biden set out to destroy her.
Biden and his fellow Democrats filibustered her nomination, along with several other Bush circuit court nominees, all of whom had majority support in the Senate. Columnist Robert Novak called it “the first full-scale effort in American history to prevent a president from picking the federal judges he wants.”
Democrats argued that she was out of the legal mainstream, but Republicans responded that she had written more majority opinions than any other justice on the California Supreme Court — and she was reelected with 76% of the vote, the highest percentage of all the justices on the ballot.
When Democrats derailed her nomination, Bush renominated her in 2005. Brown eventually was confirmed by a vote of 56 to 43 — after Democrats released her and several other Bush nominees in exchange for Republican agreement not to eliminate the filibuster for judicial nominations.
Biden voted a second time against her nomination. He never explained why, if Brown was so radical, Democrats let her through but killed 10 other Bush nominees.
The following month, when Justice Sandra Day O’Connor announced her retirement, Brown was on Bush’s shortlist to replace her. She would have been the first Black woman ever nominated to serve as an associate justice of the Supreme Court.
But Biden appeared on CBS’s “Face the Nation” to warn that if Bush nominated Brown, she would face a filibuster. “I can assure you that would be a very, very, very difficult fight and she probably would be filibustered,” Biden said.
Asked by moderator John Roberts “Wasn’t she just confirmed?,” Biden replied that the Supreme Court is a “totally different ballgame” because “a circuit court judge is bound by stare decisis. They don’t get to make new law.”
What Biden threatened was unprecedented. There has never been a successful filibuster of a nominee for associate justice in the history of the republic. Biden wanted to make a Black woman the first in history to have her nomination killed by filibuster.
Bush eventually nominated Samuel A. Alito Jr.
Today, Biden calls the filibuster a “relic of the Jim Crow era.” But he threatened to use that relic as a tool to keep a Black woman who actually lived under Jim Crow off the highest court in the land.
The irony is that now he wants to get rid of the filibuster, and claim credit for putting the first Black woman on the court.
There were many conservatives on Bush’s shortlist whose legal philosophy Biden opposed. But Biden only promised to filibuster the one Black woman. Why? Perhaps a clue lies in another confirmation fight that Biden helped wage.
In 2001, Democrats blocked the nomination of Miguel Estrada to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. According to internal strategy memos obtained by The Wall Street Journal, they targeted Estrada at the request of liberal interest groups who said Estrada was “especially dangerous” because “he is Latino, and the White House seems to be grooming him for a Supreme Court appointment.”
They did not want Republicans to put the first Hispanic on the Supreme Court. So, Biden and his fellow Democrats killed Estrada’s nomination — the first appeals court nominee in history to be filibustered successfully.
It paid off when President Barack Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor as the first Hispanic justice.
Democrats’ commitment to diversity is a ruse. Biden was willing to destroy the careers of an accomplished Latino lawyer and a respected Black female judge, and stop Republicans from putting either on the Supreme Court.
For Democrats, it’s all about identity politics. Indeed, Biden might not have become president had he not made the pledge to nominate a Black woman. That promise helped secure the endorsement of Rep. James E. Clyburn, D-South Carolina — which won Biden the South Carolina primary and rescued his faltering campaign.
So, when Biden tries to bask in the glory of his historic nomination, remember Janice Rogers Brown — the Black woman who does not sit on the Supreme Court today because of Biden’s disgraceful obstruction.
My audio follows…. but here is the SAGE’Sofficial video:
President Joe Biden recently held a two-hour press conference in which he was asked if he would question the legitimacy of the 2022 midterm elections if new voting laws were not passed. “I think it could easily be illegitimate,” he answered, surprising many pundits who previously criticized Donald Trump for questioning the results of the 2020 election. But is it really that unusual or unreasonable for a U.S. president or presidential candidate to question certain aspects of an election?
This is one of the best Commentaries by “Clear Eyed” Larry Elder… The SAGE hits it out of the park. (Yes it’s long, but worth your time.)
This is definitely a “clean up on aisle ‘State Department’.” I include video where Elder uses audio, I also add some more “swerve” as well. Enjoy.
A young co-worker and another coworking compatriot asked if I thought there was life elsewhere in the universe. Being me, I just cannot say no, so I explained the idea in conversational form (while getting stuff ready for my run) the following: “Scientific and Anecdotal Evidence for the Beginning of the Universe.”
Albert Einstein developed his general theory of relativity in 1915;
Around the same time evidence of an expanding universe was being presented to the American Astronomical Society by Vesto Slipher;
In the 1920s using Einstein’s theory, a Russian mathematician (Alexander Friedman) and the Belgium astronomer (George Lemaitre) predicted the universe was expanding;
In 1929, Hubble discovered evidence confirming earlier work on the Red-Light shift showing that galaxies are moving away from us;
In the 1940’s, George Gamow predicted a particular temperature to the universe if the Big Bang happened;
In 1965, two scientists (Arno Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson) discovered the universe’s background radiation — and it was only about 3.7 degrees above absolute zero.
After explaining quickly the ideas therein, and noting that the Greeks, Sumerians, Hindus, Buddhists, Janists, etc-etc, in fact, all the world religions and various worldviews — save theism — posit some sort of eternal nature.
BREAK: DEFINING A WORLDVIEW For those that have never heard of something they express (often illogically and in parts)
A worldview is a commitment, a fundamental orientation of the heart, that can be expressed as a story or in a set of presuppositions (assumptions which may be true, partially true or entirely false) which we hold (consciously or subconsciously, consistently or inconsistently) about the basic constitution of reality, and that provides the foundation on which we live and move and have our well being. — James W. Sire, Naming the Elephant: Worldview as a Concept (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2004), 122.
The German word is Weltanschauung, meaning a ‘world and life view,’ or ‘a paradigm.’ It is a framework through which or by which one makes sense of the data of life. A worldview makes a world of difference in one’s view of God, origins, evil, human nature, values, and destiny” — Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics [Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1999], 785-786.
A worldview consists of a series of assumptions/presuppositions that a person holds about reality. A worldview, consciously or subconsciously, affects the way a person evaluates every aspect of reality. Every person adheres to some sort of worldview, although one person may not be as consciously aware of it as another person. These presuppositions affect the thinking of every person in the world. It logically follows that the way a person thinks affects what a person does. — Biblical Archaeology
People have presuppositions, and they will live more consistently on the basis of these presuppositions than even they themselves may realize. By “presuppositions” we mean the basic way an individual looks at life, his basic worldview, the grid through which he sees the world. Presuppositions rest upon that which a person considers to be the truth of what exists. People’s presuppositions lay a grid for all they bring forth into the external world. Their presuppositions also provide the basis for their values and therefore the basis for their decisions. “As a man thinketh, so he is,” is really profound. An individual is not just the product of the forces around him. He has a mind, an inner world. Then, having thought, a person can bring forth actions into the external world and thus influence it. People are apt to look at the outer theater of action, forgetting the actor who “lives in the mind” and who therefore is the true actor in the external world. The inner thought world determines the outward action. Most people catch their presuppositions from their family and surrounding society the way a child catches measles. But people with more understanding realize that their presuppositions should be chosen after a careful consideration of what worldview is true. When all is done, when all the alternatives have been explored, “not many men are in the room” — that is, although worldviews have many variations, there are not many basic worldviews or presuppositions. — Francis A. Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 1976), 19-20.
The only religious text that posits creation ex nihilo [creation from nothing] confirming the latest discoveries of science from Einstein’s theory of relativity to now is the Hebraic Bible [specifically, Genesis — the Bible]. as part of this discussion I noted quickly the just over 10,000 religions in the world fall into just 7-categories/worldviews at most — and stressed again that only theism predicting modern scientific discovery…
QUOTE BREAK FOR MY READERS
“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountain of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”
— Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers (New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Company, 1992), 107 | [Additional bio info] Dr. Jastrow ( 1925–2008) became the founding director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and served as its director until his retirement from NASA in 1981. Concurrently he was a professor of Geophysics at Columbia University. Jastrow became the first chairman of NASA’s Lunar Exploration Committee, which established the scientific goals for the exploration of the moon during the Apollo lunar landings. In 1981 Jastrow left NASA to join the faculty of Dartmouth College as professor of Earth Sciences. He left Dartmouth in 1992 to take up duties as director and chairman of the Mount Wilson Institute, managing the Mount Wilson Observatory in California. Dr. Jastrow was an agnostic, not a Christian.
END
…and along with philosophy, history, and science [noted in the convo], I do not believe in alien life. In fact, I am informed of other lifeforms, angels.
The young lady involved in the conversation after I noted “I could have just said ‘no’ to the question” thanked me for the thorough response. Which was very kind of her. I then noted that I wish many other people in my sub-group, Christians, could also respond in similar fashion… the quote I always have in mind about this I texted to the young man while in bumper-to-bumper traffic on my way to deliver product:
TEXT
After reading many books on extraterrestrial encounters, ghosts, spirit mediums, and demons, I do believe there is interdimensional life. There is more evidence for that, and less blind faith that is required to say “life is possible somewhere” in the material universe. BTW, one of my favorite quotes (talking about faith vs informed faith):
“I suspect that most of the individuals who have religious faith are content with blind faith. They feel no obligation to understand what they believe. They may even wish not to have their beliefs disturbed by thought. But if God in whom they believe created them with intellectual and rational powers, that imposes upon them the duty to try to understand the creed of their religion. Not to do so is to verge on superstition.”
Morimer J. Adler, [chapter titled] “A Philosopher’s Religious Faith,” in, Kelly James Clark, ed., Philosophers Who Believe: The Spiritual Journeys of 11 Leading Thinkers (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1993), 207. | [Additional bio info] Dr. Adler (1902-2001) was Chairman and Cofounder with Max Weismann of the Center for the Study of The Great Ideas and Editor in Chief of its journal Philosophy is Everybody’s Business, co-founder and director of the Institute for Philosophical Research, Chairman of the Board of Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica, Editor in Chief of the Great Books of the Western World and The Syntopicon: An Index to the Great Ideas, Editor of The Great Ideas Today (all published by Encyclopedia Britannica), Co-Founder and Honorary Trustee of The Aspen Institute, past Instructor at Columbia University, Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago (1930-52).
In other words, my worldview supported by evidence, negates such beliefs.
All this being said, I sometimes feel like the guy explaining stuff in this funny meme:
At the end of this post I will include the entire “Privileged Planet” documentary… it will expand the thinking of just how improbable another planet exists that can support life. As well as other media.
…According to a team of researchers at Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, it’s because we’ve been using the wrong factors in the Drake Equation. We – including usually hard-nosed scientists – want so badly for there to be LGM, we’ve been grossly overestimating the values of Drake’s factors, resulting in a flagrant overestimation of the number of civilizations that should exist out there.
When the Oxford folks assign realistic numerical values to the seven factors – based on an honest evaluation of the uncertainties in our very best chemical, biological, physical, and astronomical knowledge – Frank’s famous equation predicts a much, much, much smaller number than 1,000 – 100,000,000 intelligent civilizations per galaxy. The median number plummets to something as low as 0.00000000000000000000000000000000008 (that’s an eight preceded by thirty-four zeroes).
In plain English, explain the authors in a paper submitted to the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, “we find a substantial probability that we are alone in our galaxy, and perhaps even in our observable universe.” If any LGM do exist out there somewhere, the researchers conclude, it is somewhere over the rainbow, so to speak – “quite possibly beyond the cosmological horizon and forever unreachable.”
So, next time you look up at the night sky and say to yourself, “There has to be someone out there!” think again. Even though it sounds like a possibility more fantastic than the Tooth Fairy, science itself is presently telling us we are very likely it – the only intelligent creatures inhabiting this immense and incredible universe.
….Sandberg, Drexler and Ord use a different approach in their modelling, incorporating current scientific uncertainties that produce values for different parts of the equation ranging over tens and hundreds of orders of magnitude. Some of these concern critical questions regarding the emergence of life from non-living material – a process known as abiogenesis – and the subsequent likelihoods of early RNA-like life evolving into more adaptive DNA-like life.
Then there is the essential matter of that primitive DNA-like life undergoing the sort of evolutionary symbiotic development that occurred on Earth, when a relationship between two different types of simple organisms resulted in the complex “eukaryotic” cells that constitute every species on the planet more complicated than bacteria.
The results are depressing enough to send a thousand science-fiction writers into catatonic shock. The Fermi Paradox, they find, dissolves.
“When we take account of realistic uncertainty, replacing point estimates by probability distributions that reflect current scientific understanding, we find no reason to be highly confident that the galaxy (or observable universe) contains other civilizations,” they conclude.
“When we update this prior in light of the Fermi observation, we find a substantial probability that we are alone in our galaxy, and perhaps even in our observable universe.
“‘Where are they?’ — probably extremely far away, and quite possibly beyond the cosmological horizon and forever unreachable.”
And the NEW YORK POST wrote on the OXFORD study as well:
…..Researchers at Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute came to the conclusion that humans are alone in the universe while examining the so-called “Fermi Paradox” — which ponders why scientists believe in extraterrestrials despite having zero proof.
“We find a substantial probability of there being no other intelligent life in our observable universe, and thus that there should be little surprise when we fail to detect any signs of it,” researchers say in the report, published in the online journal Arxiv.org earlier this month.
There’s likely no intelligent life outside of Earth — so there’s no need to waste time theorizing about humanity’s relationship with aliens, notes the paper, dubbed “Dissolving the Fermi Paradox.”
The paradox, named after physicist Enrico Fermi, questions how there could be “a high probability” of extraterrestrial life when there’s no solid proof.
“Where is everyone?” Fermi asked in the 1950s while pondering the possibility of interstellar travel.
Past scientific theories have said alien civilizations may be living in our galaxy based on seven factors — including the position of star formations and how long creatures are able to survive.
But Oxford researchers Anders Sandberg, Eric Drexler and Toby Ord say the simplest solution is likely the truth: There’s no one else out there……
So What Of Alien Abductions?
So, after years of reading books and studying eyewitness encounters and watching TV specials on spirit mediums, alien abductions, past lives, the occult, new age, automatic writing, altered states of consciousness, and hauntings (and more)… the messages and encounters in all these different mediums have a common thread. And since my worldview is informed by the Judeo-Christian God and Scripture… I can come to only one conclusion…. which follows:
Please keep in mind this documentary was made in the 80’s. It has spooky music and is very much dated… the “disclaimer” below it applies as well. All that said, there are some great points made that are still relevant, and most importantly, true.
Take note I do not endorse everything noted in this documentary or the articles, but the similarity between alien encounters, spiritism (like mediums), ghosts, the occult, and the like, is the important issue here ~ NOT “government conspiracies” or the like.
While this documentary is dated, the DVD for purchase (I did edit it a bit), and HERE.
Two decent articles on the issue of UFOs and the Christian worldview, are as follows:
A note from my Facebook about this and my other post:
I posted two older documentaries (they are from the 80’s, so expect the pat narrator and eerie music) and some links of my own thoughts on the matter.
These two posts give a theistic-Christian interpretation to UFOs, ghosts, spirit mediums, and the like. You can break the world’s 10,000 religious beliefs down to a handful of worldviews and each worldview has a distinct interpretation of the evidence. So if you are a Christian, you cannot believe a ghost is a departed love one or a soul lost and wandering the earth (Hebrews 9:27[note]).
So what is the explanation for these apparent metaphysical encounters?
Well, you will have to see and watch for yourself:
[Note] Mind you, it seems clear that before their real conversion to the idea of who Jesus was (God Almighty), the Disciple also believed in ghosts (https://carm.org/did-the-disciples-of-Jesus-believe-in-ghosts).
So I am not saying the person who does believe in these things are retarded or dumb. All I am saying is in the Christian worldview these interpretations do not fit the evidence. I would challenge the believer to mature in their understanding of what their view says and how believing in ghosts being departed people, ETs that posses people, etc,…
…are borrowing from other worldviews and cutting-n-tapping it into the worldview of Christianity.
The Culting of America, by Ron Rhodes (especially chapter 12)
Alien Obsession: What Lies Behind Abductions, Sightings, and the Attraction to the Paranormal, by Ron Rhodes
Dictionary of Cults, Sects, Religioons and the Occult, by Mather and Nichols
Occult Invasion: The Subtle Seduction of the World & the Church, by Dave Hunt
Biblical Demonology: A Study of Spiritual Forces at Work Today, by Merrill F. Unger
Encyclopedia of New Age Beliefs, by Ankerberg and Weldon
The Facts on the New Age Movement, Ankerberg and Weldon
Occult ABC, by Kurt Koch
Christian Counseling & Occultism, by Kurt Koch
Occult Bondage and Deliverance, by Kurt Koch
Demonology, Past & Present, by Kurt Koch
Handbook of Today’s Religions, by McDowell and Stewart
The Occult Shock and Psychic Forces, Wilson and Weldon
Cults: And the Occult, by Edmond Gruss
The Ouija Board: A Doorway to the Occult, by Edmund Gruss
Ouija: The Most Dangerous Game, by Stoker Hunt
The Beautiful Side of Evil, by Johanna Michaelsen
The Occult Roots of Nazism, by Nicholas Goodrick
Witchcraft: Exploring the World of Wicca, by Craig Hawkins
UFO’s and the Alien Agenda: Uncovering the Mystery Behind UFO’s and the Paranormal, by Bob Larson
Encounters with UFO’s, by Weldon and Levitt
UFOs in the New Age: Extraterrestrial Messages & the Truth of Scripture, by William Alnor
UFO Cults & the New Millennium, by William Alnor
Alien Encounters: The Secret Behind the UFO Phenomenon, by Missler and Eastman
The New Age Cult, by Walter Martin
Beware! Deception & Delusion in the Church, by Bill Rudge
Non Christian
Communion: A True Story: Encounters with the Unknown, by Whitley Strieber
The Unexplained, by Allen Spraggett
Mediums, Mystics and the Occult, by Milbourne Christopher
Ghosts Among Us: True Stories of Spirit Encounters, by Leslie Rule
Possessed: The True Story of an Exorcism, by Thomas B. Allen
Thirty Years Among the Dead: Historic Studies in Spiritualism; A Psychiatrist’s Investigation of Spirit Mediums and Psychic Possession in his Patients, by Carl August Wickland
Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue, Book 1, by Neale Donald Walsch
A Course in Miracles, by Helen Schucman
The Urantia Book: Revealing the Mysteries of God, the Universe, World History, Jesus, and Ourselves, “Multiple” authors
PRIVILEGED PLANET
Video Description
For centuries scientists and philosophers have marveled at an eerie coincidence. Mathematics, a creation of human reason, can predict the nature of the universe, a fact physicist Eugene Wigner referred to as the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the physical sciences.” In the last three decades astronomers and cosmologists have noticed another, seemingly unrelated, mystery. Contrary to all expectations, the laws of physics seem precisely “fine-tuned” for the existence of complex life.
Could these two wonders actually be isolated pieces of a wider pattern? Both are prerequisites for science, yet what about the process of scientific discovery itself? What are its necessary conditions? Why is it even possible? Read any book on the history of science, and you’ll learn about magnificent tales of human ingenuity, persistence, and dumb luck. But that’s only part of the story, and not even the most important part. Our location is much more critical to science than it is to real estate. For some reason our Earthly location is extraordinarily well suited to allow us to peer into the heavens and discover its secrets.
Elsewhere, you might learn that Earth and its local environment provide a delicate, and probably exceedingly rare, cradle for complex life. But there’s another, even more startling, fact, described in The Privileged Planet: those same rare conditions that produce a habitable planet-that allow for the existence of complex observers like ourselves-also provide the best overall place for observing. What does this mean? At the least, it turns our view of the universe inside out. The universe is not “pointless” (Steven Weinberg), Earth merely “a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark,” (Carl Sagan) and human existence “just a more-or-less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents” (Steven Weinberg). On the contrary, the evidence we can uncover from our Earthly home points to a universe that is designed for life, and designed for discovery.
PRIVILEGED LIFE
This is an old podcast of Dr. Norman Geisler discussing ex-atheist Antony Flew’s book that detailed his leaving atheism. Here is a “Flewism”
“My whole life has been guided by the principle of Plato’s Socrates: Follow the evidence, wherever it leads.” After chewing on his scientific worldview for more than five decades, Flew concluded, “A super-intelligence is the only good explanation for the origin of life and the complexity of nature.” Previously, in his central work, The Presumption of Atheism (1976), Flew argued that the “onus of proof [of God] must lie upon the theist.” However, at the age of 81, Flew shocked the world when he renounced his atheism because “the argument for Intelligent Design is enormously stronger than it was when I first met it.” (See my DNA post: RNA/DNA = Information | Or, What “IS” Information)
Flew’s God was: immutable, immaterial, omnipotent, omniscient, whole [one, or indivisible, perfectly good and necessary exists].
I call Dr. Flew the long-time “Pope of atheism.” He was the “go-to” guy… until his move to deism in 2004. He was a British philosopher belonging to the analytic and evidentialist schools of thought, he is notable for his works on the philosophy of religion. Flew was a strong advocate of atheism, arguing that one should presuppose atheism until evidence of a God surfaces. He has also criticised the idea of life after death, the free will defense to the problem of evil, and the meaningfulness of the concept of God. However, in 2004 he stated an allegiance to deism, and later wrote the book There is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, with contributions from Roy Abraham Varghese. Dr. Flew’s God sounded a lot like the theistic God apologist Dr. William Lane Craig describes:
What properties must such a cause of the universe possess? By the very nature of the case, the cause of space and time must transcend space and time and therefore exist timelessly and nonspatially (at least without the universe). This transcendent cause must therefore be changeless and immaterial, since anything that is timeless must also be unchanging, and anything that is changeless must be nonphysical and immaterial (since material things are constantly changing at the molecular and atomic levels). Such an entity must be beginningless and uncaused, at least in the sense of lacking any prior causal conditions, since there cannot be an infinite regress of causes. Ockham’s razor—the principle which states that we should not multiply causes beyond necessity—will shave away any other causes, since only one cause is required to explain the effect. This entity must be unimaginably powerful, if not omnipotent, since it created the universe without any material cause.
Finally, and most remarkably, such a transcendent first cause is plausibly personal. Two reasons can be given for this conclusion. First, the personhood of the first cause of the universe is implied by its timelessness and immateriality. The only entities which can possess such properties are either minds or abstract objects, like numbers. But abstract objects don’t stand in causal relations. The number 7, for example, can’t cause anything. Therefore, the transcendent cause of the origin of the universe must be an unembodied mind.
Second, this same conclusion is implied by the origin of an effect with a beginning from a beginningless cause. We’ve concluded that the beginning of the universe was the effect of a first cause. By the nature of the case, that cause cannot have either a beginning of its existence or any prior cause. It just exists changelessly without beginning, and a finite time ago it brought the universe into existence. Now this is exceedingly odd. The cause is in some sense eternal and yet the effect which it produced is not eternal but began to exist a finite time ago. How can this be? If the necessary and sufficient conditions for the effect are eternal, then why isn’t the effect also eternal? How can the cause exist without the effect?
There seems to be only one way out of this dilemma, and that is to say that the cause of the universe’s beginning is a personal agent who freely chooses to create a universe in time. Philosophers call this type of causation “agent causation,” and because the agent is free, he can initiate new effects by freely bringing about conditions which were not previously present. Thus, a finite time ago a Creator endowed with free will could have freely brought the world into being at that moment. In this way, the Creator could exist changelessly and eternally but freely create the world in time. By exercising his causal power, he brings it about that a world with a beginning comes to exist? So the cause is eternal, but the effect is not. In this way, then, it is possible for the temporal universe to have come to exist from an eternal cause: through the free will of a personal Creator.
We may therefore conclude that a personal Creator of the universe exists, who is uncaused, beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless and unimaginably powerful.
William Lane Craig and Chad Meister, God Is Great, God Is Good: Why Believing in God Is Reasonable and Responsible (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2009), 16-17.
Here is another video explaining the impossibility of life even in the time allotted by evolution (video description to follow):
This is a combining of two videos into one to strengthen the points made in them… as well as to preserve them for future use.
FIRST VIDEO[split in two]: “Stephen Meyer Critiques Richard Dawkins’s ‘Mount Improbable’ Illustration” (YouTube)
SECOND VIDEO[tucked between the above]: “Origin: Probability of a Single Protein Forming by Chance” (YouTube)
Other posts related to this on my site:
Not Enough Evolutionary Time For Simple Life (RPT)
RNA/DNA < Information | Or, What “IS” Information (RPT)
The Two Books of Faith – Nature and Revelatory (50+ Evidences) (RPT)
Originally posted in February 2016… the original written part under “GHOSTS” was a response to a family member’s question was sometime in the early 2000’s.
(This is connected with my post on UFOs, they are a related topic.)
(Jump to Bibliography) Are there ghosts? Spirits that can posses a mediums body? Spirit guides? This is an interesting video that attempts to answer this with eyewitness encounters. (Please keep in mind this documentary was made in the 80’s. It has spooky music and is very much dated… the “disclaimer” below it applies as well. All that said, there are some great points made that are still relevant, and most importantly, true.)
(For more documentaries like this you must visit Jeremiah Films.)
Take note I do not endorse everything noted in this documentary or the articles, but the similarity between alien encounters, spiritism (like mediums), ghosts, the occult, and the like, is the important issue here, NOT “government conspiracies” or the like.
Reincarnation is a theme by these “spirits,” who seem committed in “guiding” people away from Christ. Here are a couple resources regarding this idea as well as a few for “past lives”:
An excerpt from a PDF I liked: “Why do PLR [‘past life regression’ through hypnosis] Sessions Often Lead to Famous/Prestigious Lives?”
So, back to one of my original questions: why do so many people who are under PLR recall famous, prestigious, or exceptional lives? Why are there so many Cleopatras [RPT insert: or Marilyn Monroe, Joan of Arc, Napoleon, or Julius Caesar – as examples] and so few serfs?
[….]
…special people appear over and over in PLR subjects’ memories. People claim to remember being emperors, or French nobility. They remember being mythic heroes and cultural icons. They remember being Nazi officers, architects in ancient Greece, heretics in the Middle Ages, and powerful priestesses. They remember being Earls and running afoul of Oliver Cromwell, or being John Wilkes Booth, or courier to the King of France. They remember dramatic deaths and harrowing drama, and they remember rich tapestries of life.
In other words, when you have 50 or more people claiming to be “Cleopatra,” and speaking about their reign and interactions, we insert logic here to test that claim. Being that many people claim to be the same leading figures in the past, we can be reasonably skeptical of the reality of “past lives,” and start to wonder “what” or “where” the seeming “experiential, first person information” is coming from.
Here is a reading from Joe Fisher’s book mentioned above …. it is long (2 hours), but well worth the listen if investigating this topic. HOWEVER, it is a reading and commentary by a non-Christian who is himself into spiritism – so be warned and separate the “wheat from the chaff,” so-to-speak. The author of the afore mentioned book did in fact commit suicide:
(John 10:10) The thief comes only to steal, slaughter, and destroy. I’ve come that they may have life, and have it abundantly.
(1st Peter 5:8) Be clear-minded and alert. Your opponent, the Devil, is prowling around like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour.
VIDEO DESRIPTION: The Siren Call of Hungry Ghosts is a spell binding paranormal detective story, elegantly written, and as haunting and irresistible as its title implies. The implications of what British paranormal investigator and writer Joe Fisher discovers, at the apparent cost of his life, are staggering, and have such profound implications for all inhabitants of this particular plane of reality, that as over the top as this may sound, this book may be one of the more important ever written.
The title capsulates, in perfect microcosm, the subject of the book, and also the effect of the book on the reader… at least this reader. I actually had a paranormal experience the last night of reading this book, which I will relate later, that was of a type related to phenomena reported in the book and also related to the “mind parasite” subject which I have written about extensively. This book is itself a rabbit hole, a rabbit hole with a certain suction, an undertow pulling you in as the author is pulled into an ever more high stakes involvement with the phenomenon.
Joe Fisher experiences the classic pitfall of the paranormal researcher. He begins as an observer, but becomes ever more obsessed and affected, even over-powered by the object of investigation.
“If you fight monsters, be careful that you don’t become a monster. If you gaze over long into an abyss, the abyss gazes back at you.” — Nietzche
Here is a poorly referenced paper of mine (really, it was part of a letter to a family member):
Ghosts
Defining Terms
Most poles of late show that only about 5 to 7 percent of the American public are bona fide atheists. This leaves quite a bit of room for people who believe in some form of “life-after-death.” However, before I venture into this subject of life-after-death, and all the implications that follow (i.e., ghosts, specters, the paranormal, etc.), lets define some terms. According to the Dictionary of Cults, Sects, Religions and the Occult, the word Ghost means: “(occult). An APPARITION; a manifestation or appearance of a spirit being, usually one who has departed this life.”
Occult [in the same resource] is defined as: “Beyond the realm of empirical knowledge; the supernatural; that which is secret or hidden, the study of the occult is generally classified into three different areas: (1) SPIRITISM, (2)FORTUNE-TELLING, and (3) MAGIC.”
The word “occult” comes from the Latin word “Occultis” and it carries the idea of things hidden, secret and mysterious. David Hoover, in his book How to Respond to the Occult, lists three distinct characteristics of the occult:
The occult deals with things secret or hidden;
The occult deals with operations or events which seem to depend on human powers that go beyond the five senses;
The occult deals with the supernatural, the presence of angelic or demonic forces.
Under the above definitions, the following practices can be listed under the occult (not meant as a complete list): witchcraft, magic, palm reading, fortune telling, ouija boards, tarot cards, Satanism, spiritism, demons and the use of crystal balls.
Avoiding Extremes
C. S. Lewis once commented,
“There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the ‘devils.’ One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight” (The Screwtape Letters, preface).
Of course, C. S. Lewis believed in the Biblical form of life-after-death and all that that belief encompasses (i.e., fallen angels and the like), as do I. So for someone who doesn’t hold to the belief in situ that “demons” could be behind supernatural occurrences, I sympathize, but only ask that you read on.
Two Examples of “Hauntings”
#1) Milbourne Cristopher, known as one of America’s foremost magicians, was also a psychic researcher. He was convinced that the accounts of ghosts and haunted houses could be explained on a natural level. He wrote in his book, ESP, Seers and Psychics, about an undated clipping, preserved by Houdini about a once attractive two-story cottage that was rented out to a family who lived there for quite a few years, undisturbed by anything unusual, they moved out…
[This is a paraphrase] The following family, however, complained to the real estate agent that a wailing cry could be heard through the house at night. After the agent gave the house a “once over,” and the howling continued, the tenants moved out. The next family that rented the house came to see the agent a week after moving in. The man asked if there was a murder at the residence, the agent said he knew of none. Three more families were in and out within the year. By this time, the story of the “haunted” house had spread all over the little town of Union, New York. It became impossible to rent the house out anymore and it went uncared for, and gradually took on an appearance that only a ghost would relish.
Early in December, a man came by to see the real estate agent about renting the house for a short time, explaining that he was interested in haunted houses. The agent obliged and the man went his way. About a week later the man returned and the agent asked, expecting the same old story: “Have you found the ghost?” His visitor replied: “I have, and here it is.” The man reached in his pocket and took out a small metal object he had found in the garret. “A child’s whistle had been fastened in a knothole,” he said. The first tenants children were the source of this house being haunted.
#2) Allen Spraggett describes the following event in his book, The Unexplained.
One winter night, in Northern Ontario, Canada, during the early days of World War Two, a middle-aged widow awakened from a troubled sleep to see her younger brother standing at the foot of the bed. The eerie thing was that she knew her brother was in England serving with the Royal Canadian Air Force. Yet, she saw him clearly, dressed in his pilots flying suit, his face deathly pale and solemn beyond description. The effect was horrific. The woman screamed. Abruptly the strange phantasm vanished.
When the woman’s three teen-aged children rushed into the room, they found her sobbing, “He’s dead, I know he’s dead.” The premonition proved to be correct. Sometime later, word came that the brothers Spitfire had been shot down over the English Channel on the same day – possibly the same hour – that the woman saw the specter in her room.
Two stories, one shown to be of a natural cause, the other, not. The real question is, can we contact the dead? Alternatively, can they contact us?
From a Diary to the Big-Screen
One of the most famous stories known of a lost loved one being contacted is that of a fourteen-year-old boy named Douglas Deen. The movie The Exorcist was based on this boy’s well-documented experience. The boy’s parent reported odd occurrences in the boy’s room, marks appearing on him, as well as noises coming from his room at night. Then objects were seen moving and thumping about in the boy’s room. The boy was studied at two hospitals (Georgetown University Hospital and the other was St. Louis University), by multiple psychiatrists, therapists, and other medical personnel who all reported seeing objects being moved, thrown, or people knocked down by unseen forces.
Skeptical neighbors even had the boy stay at their “un-haunted” house, only to see the same. “Brandings” appeared on the boy that spelled words such as SPITE, HELL, and EXIT. Dr. J. B. Rhine, director of the famed parapsychology laboratory at Duke University, came out to study the case. He was quoted as saying it was “the most impressive case of a poltergeist [German for: noisy ghost] phenomenon that had come to his attention” in his years of celebrated investigation in the field.
The Exorcism
The ultimate process of deliverance was lengthy and difficult. During the ordeal, the exorcist – Rev. William Bowdern – underwent a fast of bread and water (referred to as the “black fast”) and subsequently lost more than forty pounds. The process of exorcism took about two months and twenty to thirty performances of the rite itself. The final exorcism was performed in May, of 1949, when the possessing spirit identified itself as one of the fallen angels mentioned in the Bible and then departed.
Was the boy really demon possessed? The doctors at two catholic hospitals, various catholic authorities, and other specialists were unable to help the boy through medical or psychiatric means. The parents exhausted every possible medical or psychiatric avenue before they turned to the ritual of exorcism. Permission to use the ritual is granted only when there is strong physical, emotional, and spiritual evidence of demon possession (my dad was an observer, of sorts, in one of these authorized exorcisms).
William Freidkin, director of The Exorcist, spent almost a year researching for the film before shooting began. His information and reaction on the case are very interesting:
This particular boy in the 1949 case on which the film was based met all the requirements for exorcism as set forth by the church. He was speaking in a voice not his own, a language not his own. He was possessed of superhuman powers. He broke the arm of the priest performing the exorcism [and another priests nose]. His bed shook up and down….
The priest spent the night in the room on a mat that slid all over the floor. The furniture tried to attack him. A bottle jumped off the wall and broke the tiles on the floor at his feet and yet the bottle didn’t break. The boy would vomit strange-smelling fluids. Doctors, psychiatrists, everyone they could get, examined him and nobody could figure out what was wrong….
The original exorcism was performed at a hospital in St. Louis. It didn’t happen in someone’s house or in a church or some place private where someone might’ve been carried away. Doctors and nurses were in attendance and I have day-to-day account of what happened. It’s the most incredible thing I have ever known.
The Root of the Problem
“How did this all begin?” is the next logical question I can see being asked. It all began when the boy’s beloved aunt (who used a Ouija board and tarot cards and other New Age items on a regular basis) died, and he missed her so much that he tried to contact her through the Ouija board. And it worked! The “spirit” identified itself, at first as his aunt, and even told the boy things that only he and his aunt knew or talked about. However, the contact became more prominent until this spirit inhabited the boy’s body.
Let me break here to recommend two books on the incident, one by an investigative journalist (a non-Christian) and the other by the ex-Professor (Ed Gruss) of history and apologetics at Masters College, in Santa Clarita, California. Professor Gruss is a local resident, a past acquaintance, and a Christian.
Book One:Possessed: The True Story of an Exorcism, by Thomas B. Allen
Book Two:The Ouija Board: A Doorway to the Occult, by Edmund C. Gruss
Okay, let me begin this part with an interesting factoid: The December 1994 Consumer Reports published the results of a survey among 17,000 young people ages 10 to 14. They answered a query concerning what games they played with and which they enjoyed the most. Out of 83 games listed, Monopoly was number one and the Ouija Board was number two.
~ Side Note: Some of the following quotes are by “psychics,” who, I would contend, are involved with the same entities; the psychics, at least, that seem to give information above and beyond their realm of knowledge (which is very few). Non-the-less, even they realize the dangers of occultism (or at least some forms of it, of course not the kind that pays their bills)
Some Quotes
Psychic Alan Vaughan points out the following information,
“It is significant, however, that the greatest outcry against the use of Ouijas has come from the Spiritualists [and] not the parapsychologists. In England, Spiritualist groups are petitioning to ban the sale of Ouijas as toys for children–not because of vague dangers of ‘unhealthy effects on naive, suggestible persons’ — but because they fear that the children will become possessed.”
Psychic / spiritist Harold Sherman, president of ESP Research Associates Foundation in Little Rock, Arkansas, agrees:
“The majority who have become involved with possessive and other entities came by this experience through the ouija board.”
The irony however, is that, despite the warnings, most people continue to view the Ouija board as a harmless pastime:
“Spiritualists, psychologists, psychiatrists, medical doctors, theologians, and other informed persons have all given warnings on the hazards of using the ouija board and similar devices. In spite of all they have said, it is evident that many persons are still ignorant that dangers exist. Those who know little or nothing about the occult and ouija board experiences do not understand these warnings concerning the “innocent” use of the board. One who speaks of physical, mental, spiritual, or other problems which might relate to Ouija use is often viewed as an extremist, obsessed with groundless fears. How could the use of so simple a device result in anything detrimental to the user? This is often the attitude until, through personal involvement, the reality of the dangers is experienced, and the warnings are then remembered. Often by this time permanent damage has occurred.” (Edmond Gruss, The Ouija Board: Doorway to the Occult).
“Indeed, the dangers of the ouija board have been noted long before our modern revival of the occult. Almost seventy years ago, the medium Carl Wickland, M.D. referred to his own encounters when he wrote of ‘the cases of several persons whose seemingly harmless experiences with automatic writing and the ouija board resulted in such wild insanity that commitment to asylums was necessitated…. Many other disastrous results which followed the use of the supposedly innocent ouija board came to my notice’” (Carl A. Wickland, Thirty Years Among the Dead).
Professor Gruss refers to a clipping from the files of the famous magician Houdini concerning a Dr. Curry, a medical director of the State Insane Asylum of New Jersey, who stated the Ouija board was a “dangerous factor” in unbalancing the mind and predicted that insane asylums would be flooded with patients if interest in them did not wane.
Noted psychic researchers Ed and Lorraine Warren refer to one instance where the Ouija board was used “as little more than a joke” – and yet it led to the house becoming “infested” with evil spirits. Noted occultist Manly P. Hall founder of the Philosophical Research Society is considered as one of the leading authorities on the occult in this century. In Horizon magazine for October-December 1944, pages 76-77 he recalls,
“During the last 20-5 years I have had considerable personal experience with persons who have complicated their lives through dabbling with the Ouija board. Out of every hundred such cases, at least 95 are worse off for the experience…. I know of broken homes, estranged families, and even suicides that can be traced directly to this source.”
Ed and Lorraine Warren, whom I cited above, state in their book Graveyard that (pp. 137-38):
“Ouija boards are just as dangerous as drugs. They’re not to be played with… just as parents are responsible for other aspects of the children’s lives, they should take equal care to keep the tools of the devil from their children… especially in an error when satanic cults are on the rise. Remember: Seances and Ouija boards and other occult paraphernalia are dangerous because evil spirits often disguise themselves as your loved ones – and take over your life” (Edmond Gruss, The Ouija Board: A Doorway to the Occult)
Dr. Thelma Moss, a parapsychologist on the staff of UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute prefaced her discussion of the Ouija board in The Probability of the Impossible with: “Warning! For certain persons, the Ouija board is no game and can cause serious dissociation’s of personality.”
To Conclude
Why such a long treatise on the Ouija board? Because this is the most popular way to call up the spirits of the dead, as well as loved ones… or so-called. These occurrences of contacting spirits via the Ouija, is very similar to those of spirits contacted by mediums, or in seances, or even – believe it or not – UFO abductions. After the initial contact, the entities are either violent, or most often, lie and mislead. And they lie and mislead on one subject more than any other… the religious subject. They most often give a religious message (mostly by automatic writing, like the Urantia Book, A Course In Miracles, or Conversations With God, to name a few) that always deals with Christ not being God, but an “avatar” or a “good teacher”, like Buddha or Confucius. These messages are relevant because, if, and what a big if, the Biblical account of spiritual warfare is true, then this would be proof – of sorts – that these “spirits” main goal is to get people involved in doctrines that would lead people away from the one true God. How many people have you known that have been contacted by a spirit, or a departed “loved one” join a healthy, well-balanced church and become a member? How many start getting involved in New Age metaphysics that include the Ojai Board, tarot readings, meditations, and the like?
Again, for those who don’t believe in the Christian (theistic) presupposition or worldview, I sympathize, but after studying this array of supernatural events, and investigating story after story of abductions, possessions, and spirit contact, there is no better explanation that I have found. Mind you, there are other explanations, but most are reached by people who neither take the time to really investigate all avenues of research, or feel complacent with where they are with they’re own beliefs and lot in life. With the recent rise and popularity of neo-paganism and in all that the New Age movement encompasses, is it any wonder that spiritual contacts, UFO sightings, ghosts, etc., (real and fraudulent) are on the rise?
Bibliography
Christian
Testing the Spirits, by Elizebeth L. Hillstrom
The Culting of America, by Ron Rhodes (especially chapter 12)
Alien Obsession: What Lies Behind Abductions, Sightings, and the Attraction to the Paranormal, by Ron Rhodes
Dictionary of Cults, Sects, Religioons and the Occult, by Mather and Nichols
Occult Invasion: The Subtle Seduction of the World & the Church, by Dave Hunt
Biblical Demonology: A Study of Spiritual Forces at Work Today, by Merrill F. Unger
Encyclopedia of New Age Beliefs, by Ankerberg and Weldon
The Facts on the New Age Movement, Ankerberg and Weldon
Occult ABC, by Kurt Koch
Christian Counseling & Occultism, by Kurt Koch
Occult Bondage and Deliverance, by Kurt Koch
Demonology, Past & Present, by Kurt Koch
Handbook of Today’s Religions, by McDowell and Stewart
The Occult Shock and Psychic Forces, Wilson and Weldon
Cults: And the Occult, by Edmond Gruss
The Ouija Board: A Doorway to the Occult, by Edmund Gruss
Ouija: The Most Dangerous Game, by Stoker Hunt
The Beautiful Side of Evil, by Johanna Michaelsen
The Occult Roots of Nazism, by Nicholas Goodrick
Witchcraft: Exploring the World of Wicca, by Craig Hawkins
UFO’s and the Alien Agenda: Uncovering the Mystery Behind UFO’s and the Paranormal, by Bob Larson
Encounters with UFO’s, by Weldon and Levitt
UFOs in the New Age: Extraterrestrial Messages & the Truth of Scripture, by William Alnor
UFO Cults & the New Millennium, by William Alnor
Alien Encounters: The Secret Behind the UFO Phenomenon, by Missler and Eastman
The New Age Cult, by Walter Martin
Beware! Deception & Delusion in the Church, by Bill Rudge
Non Christian
Communion: A True Story: Encounters with the Unknown, by Whitley Strieber
The Unexplained, by Allen Spraggett
Mediums, Mystics and the Occult, by Milbourne Christopher
Ghosts Among Us: True Stories of Spirit Encounters, by Leslie Rule
Possessed: The True Story of an Exorcism, by Thomas B. Allen
Thirty Years Among the Dead: Historic Studies in Spiritualism; A Psychiatrist’s Investigation of Spirit Mediums and Psychic Possession in his Patients, by Carl August Wickland
Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue, Book 1, by Neale Donald Walsch
A Course in Miracles, by Helen Schucman
The Urantia Book: Revealing the Mysteries of God, the Universe, World History, Jesus, and Ourselves, “Multiple” authors
A note from my Facebook about this and my other post:
I posted two older documentaries (they are from the 80’s, so expect the pat narrator and eerie music) and some links of my own thoughts on the matter.
These two posts give a theistic-Christian interpretation to UFOs, ghosts, spirit mediums, and the like. You can break the world’s 10,000 religious beliefs down to a handful of worldviews and each worldview has a distinct interpretation of the evidence. So if you are a Christian, you cannot believe a ghost is a departed love one or a soul lost and wandering the earth (Hebrews 9:27[note]).
So what is the explanation for these apparent metaphysical encounters?
Well, you will have to see and watch for yourself:
[Note] Mind you, it seems clear that before their real conversion to the idea of who Jesus was (God Almighty), the Disciple also believed in ghosts (https://carm.org/did-the-disciples-of-Jesus-believe-in-ghosts).
So I am not saying the person who does believe in these things are retarded or dumb. All I am saying is in the Christian worldview these interpretations do not fit the evidence. I would challenge the believer to mature in their understanding of what their view says and how believing in ghosts being departed people, ETs that posses people, etc,…
…are borrowing from other worldviews and cutting-n-tapping it into the worldview of Christianity.
VIDEO DESCRIPTION: This film explores the eerie world of ego-maniacal gurus and their Western counterparts, known as “New Agers”. In a series of exclusive, candid interviews, you will share the thoughts of the Hindu “Master”, and witness the blind devotion and unquestioning obedience of his disciples.
Gods of the New Age takes you from the rebellion against the values and morals of Christian belief seen in the early sixties and the mindless devotion toward the gurus who began to be worshiped as gods by their followers, to today’s U.S corridors, American schoolrooms, and even some churches, where occultism and New Age techniques and practices are openly embraced.
Though this film is based on footage which is now decades old, it still uncovers the chilling parallels between today’s Western culture which increasingly embraces occult philosophies and integrates it into music, film, and books, and where it may ultimately lead us.
