World Trade Center 7 | Some “Trutherisms” Refuted

Published September 11, 2023September 11, 2023 by Papa Giorgio

Originally posted here in April of 2011

INTRO/CONTENTS

JUMP TO:

DEBUNKING 9/11 CONSPIRACIES is a resource kept up by METABUNK. It is dated and many links are bad and almost no media appears on it any longer, but still good reading.
POPULAR MECHANICS has and excellent article dealing with some issues as well.
I corralled some links out to some “COUNTER” 9/11 CONSPIRACY VIDEOS.
I also have a decent C-O-N-spiracy PAGE to start at for multiple conspiracy matters. (These posts are old, so media and/or links may be dead once you reach a post of mine.)

JUDGE NAPOLITANO AND GERALDO RIVERA (WTC-7)

(HOTAIR hat-tip) The Judge and Geraldo Rivera Truthers!? Building Seven’s collapse was explained then as it is now and below.

I was not surprised to find out the Judge is a truther… people cannot be convinced that mankind is finite and saturated with failure and stupidity to explain away our missteps. The would rather believe in a very complex set of steps to leading to irrationality than that. “There HAS to be something more… a grand conspiracy to fool the intellectual prowess we all possess.

This is a many years update and additional media and pictures added (2023-09-05) to keep this post alive and well. The debate on Tower 7 still rages, and I must say, it is fun to show how awkward the counter position is.

STEVE SPAK

Before starting this “funfest,” I will say that one of the best refutations of the truther movement was a video done by fireman and photographer, Steve Spak. I used his mini-documentary for a while, until it was removed from his video account.

I tracked him down and we talked over the phone (many years ago now). I asked him why he would pull such a great resource off the internet. He responded that these nutters would come by his work and interrupt his daily life… so he just didn’t want to deal with all the nonsense.

I did track down — finally — an interview with Steve where much of this pertinent information comes out. So this is the first time Steve (God Bless Him) is back on my site in what? Seven years (April 10, 2011) Enjoy:

STEVE SPAK was partly in charge of the firefighting efforts around WTC-7, and was one of the main persons involved in the decision to let it burn. I had heard a previous interview years before this one, but Steve pulled it from the internet. His reason? 9/11 Truther crazies would show up at his station and interfear with every day work firefighters do around their station. They would yell at him, call him a liar, etc. He said he had had enough of these nuts and went silent. I believe this interview is after he retired.

I am starting to get some truther (e.g., 9/11 conspiracy theorists) traffic so I will post a Tower Seven resource blog for those who wish to come here and see for themselves (or to send a friend).

EDWARD CURRENT 1

The last word on the collapse of the original 7 World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Running down the mainstream engineering explanation, debunking common Truther myths, and answering frequently asked questions. Comments may be intentionally demolished…make your own video if you want to spread misinformation about this engineering disaster, or about anything else.

The “truther” would have us believe that the building (WTC 7) received no structural damage. This is just not the case.

FUEL IN WTC-7

Nor do you hear them mention that there was diesel fuel throughout the building:

Tower 7 housed the city’s emergency command center, so there were a number of fuel tanks located throughout the building—including two 6000-gal. tanks in the basement that fed some generators in the building by pressurized lines. “Our working hypothesis is that this pressurized line was supplying fuel [to the fire] for a long period of time,” according to Sunder. Steel melts at about 2,750 degrees Fahrenheit—but it loses strength at temperatures as low as 400 F. When temperatures break 1000 degrees F, steel loses nearly 50 percent of its strength. It is unknown what temperatures were reached inside WTC7, but fires in the building raged for seven hours before the collapse.

See NCSTAR Report WTC7 pp. 60-63 (104-107) 3.4.2 Diesel Fuel

DAMAGE FROM FALLING DEBRIS

Below are some examples or the damage caused by the collapse of Tower 1 and 2 — that show some of the damage caused by falling debris. What the truthers don’t mention either is that the falling debris from the Twin Towers damaged many of the high-pressure water lines the fire department needed to fight the fires in WTC 7. (As already pointed out above by Steve Spak and Edward Current):

When it was completed in 1973, the World Trade Centre was the tallest building in the world, thanks to many of its revolutionary construction methods. But none of these methods was enough to survive the attacks on September 11th where jet fuel fires led to a weakening of the steel that held the structure together, and ultimately caused both buildings to collapse.

Now I want to show the debris ring and an example (Bankers Trust) of the destruction from the original two towers collapsing:

There are also video examples of some of this debris actually hitting WTC 7:

Another lie about WTC 7 is that it took under 7-seconds to collapse… showing a similarity to a controlled demolition.

DEMOLITION? FREE FALL?

As an example of how persistent this idea of “demolition” is of WTC-7, here is a chap on X noting this idea as if it is sound. Think of the power tools (noise and lugging them in and out), the noise, the dust (have you fixed your own drywall at any point?) — all unnoticed:

Frankie, below, I think is speaking about the Twin Towers, while I am speaking about Building Seven. The demolition teams required for the Twin Towers would defiantly number 2 teams of 75 people [or more] and take many months of prep with all the associated “mess” noted below — compounded for a larger building and time needed.

My oldest son commented on the above in a series of texts:

The most top notch team in the world !

A clandestine multi point dark demolition mission synchronized with a plane hijacking….while having no correlation to the terrorist who also invested months in training themselves…. [in other words: There’s no evidence of anyone in the demo team coordinating the strike]

Literally be the wildest operation [in our countries history] ever

And no witnesses

You would have to use the Men In Black mind swipers

MY TEXT BACK: And while I was talking about building 7, he was talking about the Twin Towers. So larger teams (doubled), more time and waste n tools, etc

Like magically hiding all the Det cord

And explosives…. are very closely watched via the ATF for demolition people

A building like that takes quality materials

MY TEXT BACK: All under the nose of New York unions

Honestly…. Macro evolution is looking more likely

FREE-FALLING

The times that the truthers originally gave to WTC-7 free-falling [in Loose Change and other sources] did not hold up, as this next video clearly shows:

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) conducted an extensive three-year scientific and technical investigation of the Sept. 11, 2001, collapse of the 47-story World Trade Center building 7 (WTC 7) in New York City. This video describes the results of this study, which concluded that fires on multiple floors in WTC 7–which were uncontrolled but otherwise similar to fires experienced in other tall buildings–caused an extraordinary event. Heating of floor beams and girders caused a critical support column to fail, initiating a fire-induced progressive collapse that brought the building down.

9/11 Debunked: Larry Silverstein’s “Pull It” Explained

I love the truth of a matter; it is the truth that shall set you free, not opinion. Be set free truther’s, be set free.

FIRES BURNED FOR HOURS!

I want to post some pictures and a video here that will curb some of the wild thoughts that the fire in the WTC-7 was small and contained. Often times this is the photo or scene shown on many of the conspiratorial “documentaries” or sites:

Then the Truther will say something like… “Wow! Such a rager of a fire.” HOWEVER, the fire burned for hours, and here are some accompanying pics that should be shared as well:

VIDEO OF FIRE – RPT’s RUMBLE:

Me hunting the WWW…

All Footage of WTC-7 from Steve Spak’s DVD:
“WTC 9-11-01 Day of Disaster”

MORE FOUND AT THE MAIL ONLINE:

It is easy to show the fact that there was a massive fire in WTC-7.

But people cannot be convinced easy… especially if they have thought this to be true for years.

MELTING STEEL?

Now I want to switch gears and repost an old blog on “MELTING STEEL,” another fallacy of the 9/11 truthers:

FUEL & STEEL

According to the 9/11 Truthers, gasoline doesn’t burn hot enough to melt steel. Remember that the type of heat experienced in the Twin Towers weakened the steel by more than 50%. This aside, what you see below is steel melted by gasoline. Apparently this can happen only in steel beams used in the construction of bridges, but not in buildings. (Watch your volume levels – static)

A newer edition to this “heat vs. bridges” is this one from BRETBART:

A section of Interstate 95 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, collapsed when a tanker truck went up in flames on Sunday, and officials warned drivers to stay clear of the area.

The truck was hauling a petroleum product when the blaze ignited, according to the Associated Press (AP).

Q & A

These are responses, positive and negative to this post. I am sharing a few over the years as they are me responding to some supposed challenges.

...Dayton Responds

very interesting indeed

...Luke Responds

Dayton introduced me to this blog of yours, and I gotta say, nice work.

...I Respond

Thanks Luke.

For many years I followed the New World Order stuff, reading many, many books on the subject, even going so far as to visit the local John Birch Society meeting once-in-awhile, and after many years I came to realize that if you critically looked into the evidences for this giant conspiracy to fool mankind knowingly, it is shown to be wanting.

Currently the conspiracy to fool mankind is backed by liberals, however, when Clinton was President, it was backed by conservatives. For a theory or model to explain every possible outcome and have completely different backers depending on who’s in office simply means that it is not a true theory or model because it is so elastic. And this is a conclusion that I came to a while back and had solidified by Michael Medved during his monthly Conspiracy Show (around the full moon). elastic.

Let me point something out though. The difference between the lib/con views of the giant conspiracy to fool mankind is that no leading political figure in the Republican Party accepted these crazy conspiracy myths as real. Today however, you have a huge chunk of the Democratic base accepting many of these wild stories and blame America first mentality, as well as many Democrat senators and representatives mentioning these crazy ideas.

Its funny, I can show someone proof that “X” didn’t happen, but “B” in fact did. They will simply respond that that too was a cover up meant to fool the general public, e.g., me. There is no debating such a person. In fact, this was the original reason for my creating a MySpace, was to challenge a few of my oldest sons friends on this exact matter.

As for us Christians . . . I use to think that this giant conspiracy would fool mankind into following the Anti-Christ. Now I think the delusion of this theory will drive many people to accept almost anything . . . even a messianic type figure. In other words, it’s the conspiracy theory ITSELF that breaks down the critical thinking and road to truth that makes accepting incredible claims without evidence, logic, history, and the like, more common place. Which is why having a healthy eschatology as a Christian is very important.

Sorry for the rant, again, glad you enjoyed.

PapaG

BUILDING .. NUMBER .. SEVEN

This was in response to a discussion about the Twin Towers:

...Mark Joins In

You’ve got me almost convinced. But three words still ring in my ear.

Building

number

seven.

Building number 7 of the wtc was not hit by a 747, jet fuel or falling debris (aside from the dust that covered most of NYC) but mysteriously caught fire and imploded.

What – magic?

POPULAR MECHANICS BOOK (DEBUNKING 9/11 MYTHS) | FUEL

...I Respond

Thank you Mark for your interaction here, it is welcomed.

Actually, building seven was hit by a massive amount of debris from Tower 1 or 2 (I will look into which tower when I get the National Geographic DVD, since that has the best shots of falling debris I have seen yet). What you may not know is that building 7 housed the city’s emergency command post. The building was designed to remain operational if power were to be lost. How was this building designed to keep running if power were to go out? This is the part we don’t hear too much about:

…There were a number of fuel tanks throughout the building that may have supplied fuel to the fires for up to seven hours. In addition to smaller “day tanks” on each floor, two 6,000-gallon tanks in the basement fed most of the generators in the building….. Two generators, located on the fifth floor, were connected to the fuel tanks in the basement via a pressurized line. Says Sunder: “Our working hypothesis is that this pressurized line was supplying fuel [to the fire] for a long period of time”…. (p. 56)
….WTC 7 was built to straddle a Con Edison electrical substation. That required an unusual design in which a number of columns were engineered to carry exceptionally large loads, roughly 2,000 square feet of floor area for each floor. “What our preliminary analysis has shown is that if you take out just one column on one of the lower floors,” Sunder notes, “it could cause a vertical progression of collapse so that the entire section comes down.” (p. 55)

(Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can’t Stand Up to the Facts)

Also note that trusses on the fifth and seventh floors were designed (similarly to WTC 1 and 2) to transfer loads from one set of columns to another.

(The following is added for clarity even though already ): I want the skeptic to look here at the damage caused by debris [let alone the fires] from the falling Twin Tower to building 7:

Oooops, I guess the building was damaged after all!

...Ryan Joins In

Do you work for the government? lol… first off just because people have conflicting theories and haven’t figured out everything doesn’t mean there wrong. Ok I am pretty convinced that 9-11 was an inside job from the videos I have seen and you call people who believe in this wacko… not a very good thing if you want people from the other side to listen to you. I haven’t read everything you said yet… I get headaches when I read. Do you have any google videos or something that I could watch that supports your side?

POPULAR MECHANICS BOOK (DEBUNKING 9/11 MYTHS) | BEDFELLOWS

...I Respond

The best bet is to buy The Learning Channel’s video “World Trade Center: Anatomy of the Collapse”, this is a great resource. Dude, you are talking to a guy that is going to recommend books all-day long… so you may want to find someone else to talk to. Some of the largest demolition companies were approached by the authors of the book I recommend, and they said that it would take two-teams of 75-people (each team) months to plant and strip all the supports columns on three floors. This went unnoticed?

Also, the “Loose Change” people have strange bedfellows… something the conspiracists always try to make connections to in regards to Bush and the oil companies…. I would say for them to look at the log in their eye first:

[….]

I am including some edited comments I made from another post to make clear some thinking here:

...Additional Info

Grant,

First off let me welcome you to this site. While I will disagree with you you must keep in mind your opinion is welcome here.

Secondly, did you even read my post? There was a destructive agent involved, and it wasn’t Bush! Could it be… “SATAN?!” No, it was probably the 15,000 gallons of fuel in WTC-7. There are two important things to remember: there hasn’t been a building (1) like the Twin Towers Complex built that had (2) this amount of damage done to them. Keep in mind that the other buildings often used as “caught on fire and didn’t collapse” as proof that the Twin Towers or WTC-7 shouldn’t have were never hit by large debris [and in the case of the TT, planes] and then caught on fire with their particular architecture, 15,000-gallons of fuel in the building, and no water to fight it.

Another important thing to remember is that in those other buildings always mentioned, there was sufficient water to fight the fires and put them out or stop them from spreading. Most of the sites you probably visit do not show the photos and video I will show.

I will first – in the “UPDATE” section [photos shown above] – show the photo most see on conspiracy sites, and then show some video and shots that tell the whole story. But first, let’s review how this is different, than say a plane hitting the Empire State Building:

1) About 15,000 gallons of fuel, some of it high pressured “spouts of flames;”

2) Little to no water pressure to supply the firefighters hoses to fight the fire (damaged from the massive amount of debris from Tower 2);

3) Yes steel used in WTC-7… but no, not same design. The support structure of this building was wildly different than any other building’s design. So the factors of debris, architectural design, and fuel all were a deadly combination to any and all of these buildings.

A LATER UPDATE
FAKE VIDEO USED AS PROOF

UFOs and WTC-7

It’s funny because someone just posted this video that Eddie Current made. Here is the video posted on Twitter, with my response:

This video was put together by a well-known Truther on his way out of the movement to make a point. And his point is still being made: https://t.co/LxoKLTVjZW
.

— Papa No Good Very Bad “Ultra-MAGA” Bal Giorgio (@papagiorgio200) July 21, 2023

I guess the guy missed the UFO added as well! LOL:

Many 9/11 “Truthers” weren’t fooled by my ridiculous fake video of 7 World Trade Center being taken down by controlled demolition. But those who were, well….. gullible people are gullible.

A well-known leader in the truther movement, has left the movement — but not before creating a fake video that the 9-11 truthers fell for, hook-line-and-sinker. Here are two videos by him.

HERE IS HIS FIRST VIDEO ABOUT LEAVING THE MOVEMENT:

A semi-comedic — but dead serious — account of my embarrassing brush with the delusional “Truth” movement.

Here is a waaay more in-depth “Pull-It” response.

Pull It

I can’t believe I am revisiting this. At any rate, someone challenged me with the Pull-It “conspiracy,” proving [somehw] that the building was brought down by charges/detonation devices. I was asked to watch this:

This is from one of the best sites on this matter, Debunking 9/11’s post on Pull-It:

Silverstein’s Quote:

“I remember getting a call from the Fire Department commander, telling me they were not sure they were gonna be able to contain the fire, and I said, you know, ‘We’ve had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is just pull it.’ And they made that decision to pull and then we watched the building collapse.“

-Fact which is undisputed by either side, he was talking to the fire commander

-Fact which is undisputed by either side, both are not in the demolition business

Silverstein’s spokesperson, Mr. McQuillan, later clarified:

“In the afternoon of September 11, Mr. Silverstein spoke to the Fire Department Commander on site at Seven World Trade Center. The Commander told Mr. Silverstein that there were several firefighters in the building working to contain the fires. Mr. Silverstein expressed his view that the most important thing was to protect the safety of those firefighters, including, if necessary, to have them withdraw from the building.“

He could be lying, right? But here is the corroborating evidence…

“They told us to get out of there because they were worried about 7 World Trade Center, which is right behind it, coming down. We were up on the upper floors of the Verizon building looking at it. You could just see the whole bottom corner of the building was gone. We could look right out over to where the Trade Centers were because we were that high up. Looking over the smaller buildings. I just remember it was tremendous, tremendous fires going on. Finally they pulled us out. They said all right, get out of that building because that 7, they were really worried about. They pulled us out of there and then they regrouped everybody on Vesey Street, between the water and West Street. They put everybody back in there. Finally it did come down. From there – this is much later on in the day, because every day we were so worried about that building we didn’t really want to get people close. They were trying to limit the amount of people that were in there. Finally it did come down.” – Richard Banaciski

(NEW YORK TIMES – PDF)

Here is more evidence they pulled the teams out waiting for a normal collapse from fire…

“The most important operational decision to be made that afternoon was the collapse (Of the WTC towers) had damaged 7 World Trade Center, which is about a 50 story building, at Vesey between West Broadway and Washington Street. It had very heavy fire on many floors and I ordered the evacuation of an area sufficient around to protect our members, so we had to give up some rescue operations that were going on at the time and back the people away far enough so that if 7 World Trade did collapse, we [wouldn’t] lose any more people. We continued to operate on what we could from that distance and approximately an hour and a half after that order was [given], at 5:30 in the afternoon, World Trade Center collapsed completely” – Daniel Nigro, Chief of Department

(NEW YORK TIMES)

“Early on, there was concern that 7 World Trade Center might have been both impacted by the collapsing tower and had several fires in it and there was a concern that it might collapse. So we instructed that a collapse area — (Q. A collapse zone?) — Yeah — be set up and maintained so that when the expected collapse of 7 happened, we wouldn’t have people working in it. There was considerable discussion with Con Ed regarding the substation in that building and the feeders and the oil coolants and so on. And their concern was of the type of fire we might have when it collapsed.” – Chief Cruthers

(NEW YORK TIMES)

“Then we found out, I guess around 3:00 [o’clock], that they thought 7 was going to collapse. So, of course, [we’ve] got guys all in this pile over here and the main concern was get everybody out, and I guess it took us over an hour and a half, two hours to get everybody out of there. (Q. Initially when you were there, you had said you heard a few Maydays?) Oh, yes. We had Maydays like crazy…. The heat must have been tremendous. There was so much [expletive] fire there. This whole pile was burning like crazy. Just the heat and the smoke from all the other buildings on fire, you [couldn’t] see anything. So it took us a while and we ended up backing everybody out, and [that’s] when 7 collapsed…. Basically, we fell back for 7 to collapse, and then we waited a while and it got a lot more organized, I would guess.” – Lieutenant William Ryan

(NEW YORK TIMES)

“Firehouse: Did that chief give an assignment to go to building 7?

Boyle: He gave out an assignment. I didn’t know exactly what it was,but he told the chief that we were heading down to the site.

Firehouse: How many companies?

Boyle: There were four engines and at least three trucks. So we’re heading east on Vesey, we couldn’t see much past Broadway. We couldn’t see Church Street. We couldn’t see what was down there. It was really smoky and dusty.”

“A little north of Vesey I said, we’ll go down, let’s see what’s going on. A couple of the other officers and I were going to see what was going on. We were told to go to Greenwich and Vesey and see what’s going on.So we go there and on the north and east side of 7 it didn’t look like there was any damage at all, but then you looked on the south side of 7 there had to be a hole 20 stories tall in the building, with fire on several floors. Debris was falling down on the building and it didn’t look good.

But they had a hoseline operating. Like I said, it was hitting the sidewalk across the street, but eventually they pulled back too. Then we received an order from Fellini, we’re going to make a move on 7. That was the first time really my stomach tightened up because the building didn’t look good. I was figuring probably the standpipe systems were shot. There was no hydrant pressure. I wasn’t really keen on the idea. Then this other officer I’m standing next to said, that building doesn’t look straight. So I’m standing there. I’m looking at the building. It didn’t look right, but, well, we’ll go in, we’ll see.

So we gathered up rollups and most of us had masks at that time. We headed toward 7. And just around we were about a hundred yards away and Butch Brandies came running up. He said forget it, nobody’s going into 7, there’s creaking, there are noises coming out of there, so we just stopped. And probably about 10 minutes after that, Visconti, he was on West Street, and I guess he had another report of further damage either in some basements and things like that, so Visconti said nobody goes into 7, so that was the final thing and that was abandoned.

Firehouse: When you looked at the south side, how close were you to the base of that side?

Boyle: I was standing right next to the building, probably right next to it.

Firehouse: When you had fire on the 20 floors, was it in one window or many?

Boyle: There was a huge gaping hole and it was scattered throughout there. It was a huge hole. I would say it was probably about a third of it, right in the middle of it. And so after Visconti came down and said nobody goes in 7, we said all right, we’ll head back to the command post. We lost touch with him. I never saw him again that day.

(FIREHOUSE MAGAZINE)

This proves there was a big hole on the south side of the building. From the photographic evidence and these quotes which aren’t meant to be technical, I suspect there was a large hole in the center of the building which may have gone up 10 stories connected to a large rip on the left side of the building which continued up another 10 or more stories. Together they would make “a hole 20 stories tall“.

Hayden: Yeah. There was enough there and we were marking off. There were a lot of damaged apparatus there that were covered. We tried to get searches in those areas. By now, this is going on into the afternoon, and we were concerned about additional collapse, not only of the Marriott, because there was a good portion of the Marriott still standing,but also we were pretty sure that 7 World Trade Center would collapse. Early on, we saw a bulge in the southwest corner between floors 10 and 13, and we had put a transit on that and we were pretty sure she was going to collapse. You actually could see there was a visible bulge, it ran up about three floors. It came down about 5 o’clock in the afternoon, but by about 2 o’clock in the afternoon we realized this thing was going to collapse.

Firehouse: Was there heavy fire in there right away?

Hayden: No, not right away, and that’s probably why it stood for so long because it took a while for that fire to develop. It was a heavy body of fire in there and then we didn’t make any attempt to fight it. That was just one of those wars we were just going to lose. We were concerned about the collapse of a 47-story building there. We were worried about additional collapse there of what was remaining standing of the towers and the Marriott, so we started pulling the people back after a couple of hours of surface removal and searches along thesurface of the debris. We started to pull guys back because we were concerned for their safety.

Firehouse: Chief Nigro said they made a collapse zone and wanted everybody away from number 7— did you have to get all of those people out?

Hayden: Yeah, we had to pull everybody back. It was very difficult. We had to be very forceful in getting the guys out. They didn’t want to come out. There were guys going into areas that I wasn’t even really comfortable with, because of the possibility of secondary collapses. We didn’t know how stable any of this area was. We pulled everybody back probably by 3 or 3:30 in the afternoon. We said, this building is going to come down, get back. It came down about 5 o’clock or so, but we had everybody backed away by then. At that point in time, it seemed like a somewhat smaller event, but under any normal circumstances, that’s a major event, a 47-story building collapsing. It seemed like a firecracker after the other ones came down, but I mean that’s a big building, and when it came down, it was quite an event. But having gone through the other two, it didn’t seem so bad. But that’s what we were concerned about. We had said to the guys, we lost as many as 300 guys. We didn’t want to lose any more people that day. And when those numbers start to set in among everybody… My feeling early on was we weren’t going to find any survivors. You either made it out or you didn’t make it out. It was a cataclysmic event. The idea of somebody living in that thing to me would have been only short of a miracle. This thing became geographically sectored because of the collapse. I was at West and Liberty. I couldn’t go further north on West Street. And I couldn’t go further east on Liberty because of the collapse of the south tower, so physically we were boxed in.

(FIREHOUSE MAGAZINE)

It mirrors what Silverstein said.

WTC Building 7 appears to have suffered significant damage at some point after the WTC Towers had collapsed, according to firefighters at the scene. Firefighter Butch Brandies tells other firefighters that nobody is to go into Building 7 because of creaking and noises coming out of there. [Firehouse Magazine, 8/02 — METABUNK]
Battalion Chief John Norman later recalls, “At the edge of the south face you could see that it is very heavily damaged.” [Firehouse Magazine, 5/02 — METABUNK]

Heavy, thick smoke rises near 7 World Trade Center. Smoke is visible from the upper floors of the 47-story building. Firefighters using transits to determine whether there was any movement in the structure were surprised to discover that is was moving. The area was evacuated and the building collapsed later in the afternoon of Sept. 11.

(FIREHOUSE MAGAZINE)

Is Alien Life Even A Possibility?

Published February 3, 2022February 8, 2022 by Papa Giorgio

WHY THE REVAMPING AND ADDITIONS TO THIS OLD POST ?

INTRODUCTION

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.

(See more here: “Worldviews 101 ~ What is a Worldview?“)

END

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.

UFO POST REVAMPED

(Originally posted July of 2018)

Excellent two part video series by God and Science:

– the author of these videos id Richard Deem –

2^nd Video Will Follow In A Bit….

DRAKE’S EQUATION

Here are three articles about an OXFORD study using Drake’s Equation:

Drake’s work can be expressed thus: N = R ∗ fp ∗ ne∗ fl ∗ fi ∗ fc ∗ L

R_* = How frequently are suns born whose light could conceivably sustain intelligent life?
f_p = What fraction of those stars have planets?
n_e = How many of those planets, per solar system, have environments suitable for life?
f_l = What fraction of those planets actually host life?
f_i = What fraction of those life-bearing planets have intelligent life?
f_c = What fraction of those intelligent civilizations broadcast detectable signals into space?
L = How long do those civilizations broadcast detectable signals into space?

GREG GUTFELD CHIMES IN

3 ARTICLES

Here is the first article via Michael Guillen at FOX NEWS:

…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.

The other is from COSMOS:

….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:

Here is that promised 2^nd video:

(This post is tied to a similar discussion of Ghost)

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:

And the best books on the subject are by William Alnor!

Another great book, and a quick read, is Ron Rhodes book,

Alien Obsession: What Lies Behind Abductions, Sightings, and the Attraction to the Paranormal

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:

➤ Is Alien Life A Possibility? (This post)
➤ Spiritism and Ghosts ~ The Christian View

[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.

★ Do You Believe in Ghosts? The Christian View of the Paranormal

Related 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

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)

Spiritism and Ghosts | The Christian View

Published February 3, 2022May 27, 2024 by Papa Giorgio

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.)

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”:

REINCARNATION

My own: “The Logic of Reincarnation“
ME: “Tackling Reincarnation on the Dennis Prager Show | RPT Views“
Apologetic Press: “Reincarnation and the Bible“
Christian Research Institute: “Logical and Biblical Defeaters of Reincarnation and Karma“
Christian Research Institute: “The Reincarnation of Reincarnation“
Apologetics Resource Center: “Does the Bible Teach Reincarnation?“

PAST LIVES

The John Ankerberg Show: “The Spirits Behind The Channeling“
North American Mission Board: “New Age Channeling: An Overview“
Cross Examined (YouTube): “Do Past Lives Prove Reincarnation is True? A Christian Response“

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

(ORIGINAL FILE HERE)

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.

So what is the explanation for these apparent metaphysical encounters?

Well, you will have to see and watch for yourself:

➤ Is Alien Life A Possibility?
➤ Spiritism and Ghosts ~ The Christian View (the above post)

…are borrowing from other worldviews and cutting-n-tapping it into the worldview of Christianity.

★ Do You Believe in Ghosts? The Christian View of the Paranormal

MEDITATION AND THE NEW AGE

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.

Joe Rogan “METABUNKS” UFO’s with Mick West

Published September 14, 2019 by Papa Giorgio

There were a specific event mentioned by Mick West… here is the Chilean UFO mention: “Explained: Chilean Navy “UFO” video – Aerodynamic Contrails, Flight IB6830”

Farrakhan’s Batshit Crazy UFO Sermon (Updated w/Ayatollah)

Published September 5, 2016July 7, 2024 by Papa Giorgio

Islam in Iran has joined the wacky world of the NEW AGE UFO CULTS category via the Ayatollah. Remember, the Nation of Islam is already in this category (among others)…

Iranian Ayatollah: The ‘Hidden Imam’ Will Come To Earth In A Vessel ‘Like A Spaceship’

TEL AVIV – An Iranian Grand Ayatollah recently said that the Mahdi – the Shi’ite version of the messiah – will arrive in a “super-modern vessel like a spaceship” and that until that time there will be no “peace, security, or decency” on earth.

Ayatollah Naser Makarem Shirazi was answering questions about the arrival of the Mahdi, otherwise known as the Hidden Imam, who according to Islamic eschatology will conquer the world before the Day of Judgment, ridding it of evil. Shirazi’s explanations, translated and published Friday by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), were based on Islamic teachings and hadiths, as well as quotes from preceding Imams.

[….]

When this vessel moves, it sounds like thunder and has the speed of lightening, the Ayatollah said, “slashing the heart of the sky with extraordinary force, and in this way it can advance to any point in the firmament.”

“Therefore, this is a super-modern vessel, and there is none like it today. It is like a spaceship and like other swift and amazing space vessels that are found [only] in stories today, but nobody knows how close [these vessels] come to truth and reality. Maybe it will be like [a spaceship], but in any case it is not a spaceship.”

A VERY long sermon by Farrakhan is HERE.

Saviours’ Day 2010 part 2 at Mosque Maryam; The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan discusses his relationship to The Wheel, what is ahead for America and the world, and how to prepare ourselves.

White Racism Bad / Black Racism Good

Published April 9, 2012September 12, 2023 by Papa Giorgio

“White religionists are not capable of perceiving the blackness of God, because their satanic whiteness is a denial of the very essence of divinity. That is why whites are finding and will continue to find the black experience a disturbing reality.”

~ quoted from James Cone’s book, A Black Theology of Liberation, page 64.

A recent story by the Blaze brings to mind some older posts that I will partially import from my old blog to this newer post… combining it with the newer information. The Blaze (video and more at their site) bullet points some of Rev. Wrights new rants, which causes me to import some older posts to this site:

♆ Rev. Jeremiah Wright delivered three fiery sermons about faith, race and politics at Metropolitan Baptist Church in S.C.
♆ Wright said Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas worships “some other God” outside of “Allah and Yahweh” (who are the “same” he says)
♆ Obama’s former pastor called Thomas Jefferson “a pedophile”
♆ He sees “white supremacy” driving “world policy”
♆ Wright condemned the U.S. military, saying, “fighting for peace is like raping for virginity.”

Obama’s Pastor went to Libya with Farrakhan to meet Islamisists! Yet, other are the extremist, not his view of theology and God. Hannity and Colmes years ago had the Reverend Jeremiah Wright on their show, and this is how the reverend defended himself:

“How many books of Cones have you read!?”
(Money quote from the interview above with Obama’s pastor.)

Take note the Rev. Wright camps out on the point of reading James Cone’s books, books that were sold in his churches book store the entirety of Obama’s time at Trinity United Church of Christ.

(This section was updated 12-4-2014, see below the links for the update)

❂ Link to Africentric Theology at Trinity United Church of Christ;

❂ Also the Akiba Bookstore main page.

The churches bookstore has been sanitized since this was written. I managed to grab a couple of cached pages. Not nearly what it was, but the few I could find are here: Page 1, page 2, page 3. On page three for instance there are some resources for women, one of the books, “Feminist Theologies: Legacy and Prospect” ~ by Rosemary Radford Ruether, has this review: “it is a collection of academic papers and perspectives from a feminist conference…. Some essays are clearly stronger than others – particularly on Islam.” Strong on Islam? This author has written books on Gaia and God, pro Palestinian (anti-Israel) books, and books on “Goddesses and the Divine,” as well as radically left leaning feminist theology.

E.g., not a Christian book or author at all. More Marxist and Islamic in reality.

So got on Trinities website and bought Dr. Cones’ books, and read them. This lead me to make an early “documentary” (Sept of 2008) called Obama-Con. In it I mention some of the following ideas that Obama’s church paralleled:

...See For Yourself

(From an older post) Of course the money quote is the Rev. Wright recommending some authors/books. I love books, so I went out and bought them and read them. I was amazed the media didn’t do what I had just done! Could you imagine if McCain or Bush went to a church for twenty years headed by a pastor whom — a) brought you to your faith, b) married you and your wife, c) baptized your kids, and was d) on your campaign staff — sold Hitler’s Mein Kampf in the church’s bookstore. Not only that but on national television recommended this same book? We would never hear the end of it. Never. In fact, this fictitious person would never make it on a ballot.

“The personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew” ~ Adolf Hitler – Mein Kampf

“The goal of black theology is the destruction of everything white, so that blacks can be liberated from alien gods” ~ James Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, p.62
“White religionists are not capable of perceiving the blackness of God, because their satanic whiteness is a denial of the very essence of divinity. That is why whites are finding and will continue to find the black experience a disturbing reality” ~ James Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, p.64

“I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord” ~ Adolf Hitler – Mein Kampf

“There is no place in black theology for a colorless God in a society where human beings suffer precisely because of their color. The black theologian must reject any conception of God which stifles black self-determination by picturing God as a God of all peoples” ~ James Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, p.63
“Christianity is not alien to Black Power, Christianity is Black Power” ~ James Cone, Black Theology & Black Power, p.38
“In contrast to this racist view of God, black theology proclaims God’s blackness. Those who want to know who God is and what God is doing must know who black persons are and what they are doing” ~ James Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, p.65

“The [Nazi party] should not become a constable of public opinion, but must dominate it. It must not become a servant of the masses, but their master!” ~ Adolf Hitler – Mein Kampf

“These new theologians of the Third World argue that Christians [liberation theology accepting Christians] should not shun violence but should initiate it” ~ James Cone, Black Theology & Black Power, p.32
“It is important to make a further distinction here among black hatred, black racism, and Black Power. Black hatred is the black man’s strong aversion to white society. No black man living in white America can escape it” ~ James Cone, Black Theology & Black Power, p.14
“It is this fact that makes all white churches anti-Christian in their essence. To be Christian is to be one of those whom God has chosen. God has chosen black people!” ~ James Cone, Black Theology & Black Power, p.151
“It [black liberation theology] is dangerous because the true prophet of the gospel of God must become both “anti-Christian” and “unpatriotic.”…. Because whiteness by its very nature is against blackness, the black prophet is a prophet of national doom. He proclaims the end of the American Way” ~ James Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, p.55-56

Here is The New Yorker commenting on some of the issues herein I concern myself with:

The rise of Jeremiah Wright, in the seventies and eighties, coincided with the rebirth of the Nation of Islam under Minister Louis Farrakhan. In fact, the uproar over Obama and Wright has been, in part, an uproar over Farrakhan, who keeps sneaking into the frame. He and Wright were twinned at the Democratic Presidential debate in Cleveland, on February 26th, when Tim Russert, of NBC, ascribed to Wright the claim that Farrakhan “epitomizes greatness.” (Actually, the statement came from an article by Rhoda McKinney-Jones in Trumpet, a Trinity-associated magazine published by Wright’s daughter Jeri L. Wright; as has been widely noted since then, Farrakhan was given a lifetime-achievement award at a Trumpet banquet in November.) Last summer, the Trinity Bulletin reprinted an open letter by a Farrakhan ally convinced that Israel and apartheid South Africa had “worked on an ethnic bomb that kills blacks and Arabs.” Yet Wright seems to have a complicated relationship with Farrakhan, whose national headquarters are in the South Shore neighborhood, a few miles from Trinity. His remarks about Farrakhan veer from the fulsome (the minister’s analysis of America’s racial ills is “astounding and eye opening”) to the equivocal (he is “sincere about his faith and his purpose”), but for the most part Wright chooses his words with tactical care, the way Cone did when he wrote about Elijah Muhammad. It is the language of a respectful, and possibly anxious, rival. Like Cone in the nineteen-sixties, Wright may have worried that he would be judged, and found wanting, by purer and less forgiving forms of black nationalism. Farrakhan represented the threat; his followers—particularly the young black men whom churches sometimes had trouble reaching—represented the prize.

Wright attended (but didn’t address) the Million Man March, the 1995 gathering in Washington that Farrakhan convened to promote self-reliance and “spiritual renewal” among black men. In the months afterward, Wright delivered a series of sermons that were reprinted in a book, “When Black Men Stand Up for God,” which presents a Christian response to the challenge posed by the Nation of Islam. In it, he lambastes the preachers who opposed the march on political or religious grounds: they had missed a prime opportunity to present their case to African-American men. And, by way of establishing his bona fides, he reminds readers that he studied Islam at the University of Chicago. “I have a different perspective on Islam than the average preacher,” he writes. “Islam and Christianity are a whole lot closer than you may realize. Islam comes out of Christianity.” That’s interfaith dialogue, served with a hint of one-upmanship.

But remember, the reverend says “I’m not divisive, the media is divisive,” which merely redefines anti-Semitic/racist statements as non-divisive:

While reading these books cover-to-cover and doing some looking around, I also noted that Louise Farrakhan was given a lifetime achievement award at Obama’s church. Not only that though, but Farrakhan was given three cover spreads on the church’s magazine, the Trumpet. One of those his face shot put alongside Obama as well as Elijah Muhammad, the second leader of the Nation of Islam. His [Elijah Muhammad’s] many books are sold by the Nation of Islam not Old Testament mention being taught by Louise Farrakhan as theological doctrine. Since Obama’s church gave such a prestigious award to the current leader of the Nation of Islam, whom Obama’s pastor was a part of in his younger years, let us see what some of these books they tout say as well:

“It is due to your ignorance of God, or you are one deceived by the devil, whose nature is to mislead you in the knowledge of God. You originally came from the God of Righteousness and have the opportunity to return, while the devils are from the man devil (Yakub) who has ruled the world for the past 6,000 years under falsehood, labeled under the name of God and His prophets. The worst thing to ever happen to ‘the devils is: The truth of them made manifest that they are really the devils whom the righteous (all members of the black nation) should shun and never accept as truthful guides of God! This is why the devils have always persecuted and killed the righteous. But the time has at last arrived that Allah (God) will put an end to their persecuting and killing the righteous (the black nation).”

~ Elijah Muhammad, Message to the Blackman In America, p.6 [Yakub is an evil scientist who created the white race 6,000 years ago in Nation of Islam theology]

“…they are a prey in the hands of the white race, the world’s archdeceivers (the real devils in person). You are made to believe that you worship the true God, but you do not! God is unknown to you in that which the white race teaches you (a mystery God). The great archdeceivers (the white race) were taught by their father, Yakub, 6,000 years ago, how to teach that God is a spirit (spook) and not a man. In the grafting of his people (the white race), Mr. Yakub taught his people to contend with us over the reality of God by asking us of the whereabouts of that first One (God) who created the heavens and the earth, and that, Yakub said, we cannot do.”

~ Elijah Muhammad, Message to the Blackman In America, p. 9

According to Elijah Muhammad, Jesus was a black African and only a mortal man like the Prophet Muhammad of Islam. He also taught that Jesus was the product of sexual intercourse between Mary and Allah (who is a black man). Louis Farrakhan said this of the second leader of the Nation of Islam:

“The Honorable Elijah Muhammad, I am here to declare, is risen. The Jesus you have been seeking and waiting for His return has been in your midst for 40 years, but you knew not who He was. A Holy One was working among us, and It is only now, after He is gone, that we realize who He was.” ~ Louis Farrakhan

Again, for clarity:

“If you understand the Bible right, you will agree with me that the whole caucasion race is a race of devils. They have proved to be devils in the Garden of Paradise and were condemned … by Jesus.” ~ Elijah Muhammad, Message to the Blackman In America, p. 23-24.
“Christianity is the Devil’s religion created to mislead black people.” ~ Elijah Muhammad, Message to the Blackman In America, p. 11.

Louis Farrakhan, the guy who was given an award by Wright, knew personally that Elijah Muhammad had risen because…

Obama’s church gave a “Lifetime Achievement Award” to this guy. Remember that he believes he was taken up in a UFO and told explicit things about himself and white people. Here are four pages from the book, Cults, New Religious Movements, and Your Family: A Guide to Ten Non-Christian Groups Out to Convert Your Loved Ones, (click on them to enlarge – and again to get it even bigger):

So you can see that there are some very occultic beliefs tied to Rev. Wright. Which may explain why the Reverend Wright believes Allah and YHWH are the same God, something you would never hear a Christian minister say. One reason is the Rev. Wright use to be a part of the Nation of Islam, and often times Black Panthers and Nation of Islam adherents would sit in on these “Christian” services. But remember, it isn’t the Rev. Wright that is divisive, it is the media:

An Apologetic “Aside”

What are some of the differences between Yahweh and Allah?

How do the Democrats let this type of stuff slide… year after year? One reason is that the Democratic party has become more-and-more leftist every year:

Democrats More Left Every Year

…..congressional Democrats have not moved to the political center — they have all but deserted it. Employing statistics from the Americans for Democratic Action, a self-defined liberal activist group, we analyzed House and Senate voting records dating back to 1974. Using as a definition of ”liberal” someone who votes with the ADA recommendation at least two-thirds of the time, we found that in 1995 nearly four out of five Democrats in the House (78 per cent) qualified as liberal. That is more than double the 34 per cent of 1974.

In fact, the liberal quotient for Democrats has risen steadily over the past 11 Congresses, while the percentage of Democrats qualifying as conservative has shrunk to virtually nil. Even the number of moderate Democrats is dwindling. According to the ADA’s ratings there are now only 45 moderate Democrats, down from 75 in 1980

In short, last year House Democrats’ voting record was more liberal than it had been in at least twenty years. The Democrats were more left-wing in the 104th Congress than when the House was under the command of Speakers like Tip O’Neill or Jim Wright; and more left-wing than it was during the ascendancy of the post-Watergate class of 1974.

In the Senate, the statistics are equally grim. In 1974, only 55 per cent of Democrats were classified as liberal; by 1995, that figure had risen to 93.5 per cent. Only Sam Nunn of Georgia, Bennett Johnston of Louisiana, and James Exon of Nebraska (all of whom are also retiring this year) are not liberal — contradicting the conventional wisdom that the Senate Democrats are a pack of political pragmatists. How’s this for a depressing statistic: nine of Ted Kennedy’s Senate colleagues had more liberal voting records than he did last year.

Let’s examine some key votes. Back in 1977 there were 63 House Democrats who voted against increasing the minimum wage; in almost every subsequent vote on the issue that number has declined. In this summer’s vote, only 2 Democrats (the aforementioned Hall and Geren from Texas) opposed the mandatory-job-loss bill. When the Balanced Budget Amendment was defeated in 1982, President Reagan told American voters to ”count heads and take names” — to make note of who in Congress was fiscally rational and who was not. Those voters who took the President’s advice counted 69 Democrats in support of the amendment and 167 opposed to it. In contrast, in the landmark January 1995 vote in which the House finally passed the Balanced Budget Amendment, a record-low 33 Democrats voted in favor.

A recent comprehensive study by political analysts Mark Melcher and David Tappan of Prudential Securities examined vote ratings by the ADA and the American Conservative Union and came to much the same conclusion as we did: the political center in Congress is shrinking. The ACU ratings, for example, tell us that, in 1995, 47 House Democrats had more liberal voting records than Bernie Sanders of Vermont — an avowed socialist. If this trend keeps up Sanders will have to stop caucusing with the Democrats: he’s too anti-government for them….

What are the numbers today of those Democrats calling themselves, voluntarily, anti-American?

The Socialist Party of America announced in their October 2009 newsletter that 70 Congressional democrats currently belong to their caucus. This admission was recently posted on Scribd.com:

American Socialist Voter–(PDF)

Q: How many members of the U.S. Congress are also members of the DSA?
A: Seventy

Q: How many of the DSA members sit on the Judiciary Committee?
A: Eleven: John Conyers [Chairman of the Judiciary Committee], Tammy Baldwin, Jerrold Nadler, Luis Gutierrez,
Melvin Watt, Maxine Waters, Hank Johnson, Steve Cohen, Barbara Lee, Robert Wexler, Linda Sanchez [there are 23 Democrats on the Judiciary Committee of which eleven, almost half, are now members of the DSA].

Q: Who are these members of 111th Congress?
A: See the listing below

Co-Chairs

Hon. Raúl M. Grijalva (AZ-07)
Hon. Lynn Woolsey (CA-06)

Vice Chairs

Hon. Diane Watson (CA-33)
Hon. Sheila Jackson-Lee (TX-18)
Hon. Mazie Hirono (HI-02)
Hon. Dennis Kucinich (OH-10)

Senate Members

Hon. Bernie Sanders (VT)

House Members

Hon. Neil Abercrombie (HI-01)
Hon. Tammy Baldwin (WI-02)
Hon. Xavier Becerra (CA-31)
Hon. Madeleine Bordallo (GU-AL)
Hon. Robert Brady (PA-01)
Hon. Corrine Brown (FL-03)
Hon. Michael Capuano (MA-08)
Hon. André Carson (IN-07)
Hon. Donna Christensen (VI-AL)
Hon. Yvette Clarke (NY-11)
Hon. William “Lacy” Clay (MO-01)
Hon. Emanuel Cleaver (MO-05)
Hon. Steve Cohen (TN-09)
Hon. John Conyers (MI-14)
Hon. Elijah Cummings (MD-07)
Hon. Danny Davis (IL-07)
Hon. Peter DeFazio (OR-04)
Hon. Rosa DeLauro (CT-03)
Rep. Donna F. Edwards (MD-04)
Hon. Keith Ellison (MN-05)
Hon. Sam Farr (CA-17)
Hon. Chaka Fattah (PA-02)
Hon. Bob Filner (CA-51)
Hon. Barney Frank (MA-04)
Hon. Marcia L. Fudge (OH-11)
Hon. Alan Grayson (FL-08)
Hon. Luis Gutierrez (IL-04)
Hon. John Hall (NY-19)
Hon. Phil Hare (IL-17)
Hon. Maurice Hinchey (NY-22)
Hon. Michael Honda (CA-15)
Hon. Jesse Jackson, Jr. (IL-02)
Hon. Eddie Bernice Johnson (TX-30)
Hon. Hank Johnson (GA-04)
Hon. Marcy Kaptur (OH-09)
Hon. Carolyn Kilpatrick (MI-13)
Hon. Barbara Lee (CA-09)
Hon. John Lewis (GA-05)
Hon. David Loebsack (IA-02)
Hon. Ben R. Lujan (NM-3)
Hon. Carolyn Maloney (NY-14)
Hon. Ed Markey (MA-07)
Hon. Jim McDermott (WA-07)
Hon. James McGovern (MA-03)
Hon. George Miller (CA-07)
Hon. Gwen Moore (WI-04)
Hon. Jerrold Nadler (NY-08)
Hon. Eleanor Holmes-Norton (DC-AL)
Hon. John Olver (MA-01)
Hon. Ed Pastor (AZ-04)
Hon. Donald Payne (NJ-10)
Hon. Chellie Pingree (ME-01)
Hon. Charles Rangel (NY-15)
Hon. Laura Richardson (CA-37)
Hon. Lucille Roybal-Allard (CA-34)
Hon. Bobby Rush (IL-01)
Hon. Linda Sánchez (CA-47)
Hon. Jan Schakowsky (IL-09)
Hon. José Serrano (NY-16)
Hon. Louise Slaughter (NY-28)
Hon. Pete Stark (CA-13)
Hon. Bennie Thompson (MS-02)
Hon. John Tierney (MA-06)
Hon. Nydia Velazquez (NY-12)
Hon. Maxine Waters (CA-35)
Hon. Mel Watt (NC-12)
Hon. Henry Waxman (CA-30)
Hon. Peter Welch (VT-AL)
Hon. Robert Wexler (FL-19)

Radical does as radical is! Some quotes from James Cone’s book, A Black Theology of Liberation (A book sold in Obama’s church the entire 20-years he attended).

“It is dangerous because the true prophet of the gospel of God must become both ‘anti-Christian’ and ‘unpatriotic.’ (55) …. Because whiteness by its very nature is against blackness, the black prophet is a prophet of national doom. He proclaims the end of the ‘American Way…'” (56) ~ James Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation (A book sold in Obama’s church the entire 20-years he attended).

But this does not mean that religion is irrelevant altogether; it only means that religion unrelated to black liberation is irrelevant. (58-59)

… it is that whites are incapable of making any valid judgment about human existence. The goal of black theology is the destruction of everything white, so that blacks can be liberated from alien gods. The God of black liberation will not be confused with a blood’ thirsty white idol. Black theology must show that the black God has nothing to do with the God worshiped in white churches whose primary purpose is to sanctify the racism of whites and to daub the wounds of blacks. Putting new wine in new wineskins means that the black theology view of God has nothing in common with those who prayed for an American victory in Vietnam or who pray for a “cool” summer in the ghetto…. There is no place in black theology for a colorless God in a society where human beings suffer precisely because of their color. The black theologian must reject any conception of God which stifles black self-determination by picturing God as a God of all peoples. Either God is identified with the oppressed to the point that their experience becomes God’s experience, or God is a God of racism…. Because God has made the goal of blacks God’s own goal, black theology believes that it is not only appropriate but necessary to begin the doctrine of God with an insistence on God’s blackness. (62-63)

White religionists are not capable of perceiving the blackness of God, because their satanic whiteness is a denial of the very essence of divinity. That is why whites are finding and will continue to find the black experience a disturbing reality. (64)

In contrast to this racist view of God, black theology proclaims God’s blackness. Those who want to know who God is and what God is doing must know who black persons are and what they are doing. (65)

God comes to us in God’s blackness, which is wholly unlike whiteness. To receive God’s revelation is to become black with God by joining God in the work of liberation…. Becoming one of God’s disciples means rejecting whiteness and accepting themselves as they are in all their physical blackness. (66)

Black theology cannot accept a view of God which does not represent God as being for oppressed blacks and thus against white oppressors. Living in a world of white oppressors, blacks have no time for a neutral God. The brutalities are too great and the pain too severe, and this means we must know where God is and what God is doing in the revolution…. What we need is the divine love as expressed in black power, which is the power of blacks to destroy their oppressors, here and now, by any means at their disposal. Unless God is participating in this holy activity, we must reject God’s love. (70)

God is black because God loves us; and God loves us because we are black. Righteousness is that side of God which expresses itself through black liberation. God makes black what humans have made white…. Love is a refusal to accept whiteness. (73-74)

If creation “involves a bringing into existence of something that did not exist before,” then to say God is creator means that my being finds its source in God. I am black because God is black! God as creator is the ground of my blackness (being), the point of reference for meaning and purpose in the universe…. Rather it is incumbent upon me by the freedom granted by the creator to deny whiteness and affirm blackness as the essence of God. That is why it is necessary to speak of the black revolution rather than reformation. The idea of reformation suggests that there is still something “good” in the system itself, which needs only to be cleaned up a bit. This is a false perception of reality. The system is based on whiteness, and what is necessary is a replacement of whiteness with blackness. (75-76)

Being white excludes them from the black community and thus whatever concern they have for blacks will invariably work against black freedom…. Certainly if whites expect to be able to say anything relevant to the self-determination of the black community, it will be necessary for them to destroy their whiteness by becoming members of an oppressed community. Whites will be free only when they become new persons—when their white being has passed away and they are created anew in black being. When this happens, they are no longer white but free, and thus capable of making decisions about the destiny of the black community. (97)

“Born Again” redefined: They [white people] would destroy themselves and be born again as beautiful black persons. (103)
“Sin” redefined: This means that whites, despite their self-proclaimed religiousness, are rendered incapable of making valid judgments on the character of sin…. In a word, sin is whiteness… (106, 108)
“Salvation” redefined: Salvation, then, primarily has to do with earthly reality and the injustice inflicted on those who are helpless and poor. To see the salvation of God is to see this people rise up against its oppressors, demanding that justice become a reality now, not tomorrow. (128)

LaRouchites In The SCV (from UFOs to KGB death squads-Democratic Nuts)

Published September 14, 2010October 4, 2019 by Papa Giorgio

We have some LaRouchite’s in our valley, and I hope to “stake out” there sites here-and-there as they talk to unsuspecting people. One lady today said she was just fed up with Obama, and I presume just grasping at straws in her political dissatisfaction. When I mentioned that they are technically a political cult she responded that, “she doesn’t judge the way ‘he is’ [Larouche] because she wants the government to run properly.” I can only laugh to myself and wag my head at the thought of how bad government would be (worse than Obama’s made it) if these guys were in charge. She later said “I want what God wants me to do,” somehow equating her giving $25 dollars to a political cult who practices brainwashing techniques, anti-Semitism, large swings in policy, and its members indicted in murder as something God wants her to do. The lack of thinking in today’s culture (religious, non-religious, Democratic or Republican) never ceases to amaze me. Never. (It reminds me of the recent story of Pastor Terry Jones saying God told him to burn the Qur’an and then telling him to not burn it, and then saying God said to postpone it with a possibility of burning [rain]. God is made into a weather forecaster for the person’s current emotional likes or dislikes and the exegetical study of the Bible and the already spoken “plan” for us is rejected in light of these emotional whims.)

So lets deal with a few items of interest for those walking up to their table. Anti-Semitism:

Given such views, it should be no surprise that the LaRouche organization has demonized the U.S. Justice Department unit charged with tracking down and deporting Nazi war criminals; indeed, the LaRouche organization, including such fronts as the Schiller Institute and the Fusion Energy Foundation, went all out in the 1980s to defend (as patriotic Americans and innocent victims of a Zionist vendetta) the likes of John “Ivan the Terrible” Demjanjuk of the Treblinka death camp; Karl Linnas, the butcher of the Tartu camp; Waffen SS mass murderer Tscherim Soobzokov; and Nazi rocket engineer Arthur Rudolph (who ran the an underground factory using slave labor from the Dora-Nordhausen camp—over 5,000 of his slaves died or were killed by the SS). (See “Old Nazis and New Dreams” in Dennis King, Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism, pp. 75-81.)

9/11 Trutherism:

“This Israeli spy network inside the United States was unable to achieve their objective [war with Iraq] until President Bush was entrapped by the events of Sept. 11, 2001….Lyndon LaRouche demands to know: Is this not the motive that explains the who and why of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001?” — “The Pollard Affair Never Ended!” leaflet issued in 2002 by “LaRouche in 2004” (LaRouche’s Democratic primary Presidential campaign committee).

“Under no circumstances, LaRouche assesses, could the attacks of Sept. 11 have been organized and directed by Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda apparatus, based out of Afghanistan. […] LaRouche also emphasizes that the recent years’ massive Israeli espionage against and covert-operations penetration of the United States—including the U.S national security and military institutions—may suggest a more direct Israeli involvement in the military coup activities that facilitated the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington. […] This apparatus is part of the “Mega” network of prominent wealthy North American Zionists led by Edgar Bronfman, Ronald Lauder, Michael Steinhardt, et al., who are the leading promoters of Ariel Sharon’s suicidal war drive, and who wish to draw the United States into that effort to assure a global conflagration on a scale of the First World War or worse.” “Lyndon H. LaRouche Exposes Sept. 11 Coup-Plotters: “Zbigniew Brzezinski and Sept. 11th””, by Jeffrey Steinberg, Press Release, Jan. 2002

Conspiracy Theories:

LaRouche steered the NCLC away from the Marxist left while retaining some of the slogans and attitudes of the left. LaRouche’s critics, particularly Dennis King and Chip Berlet, characterize his new orientation as being a conspiracy theory worldview, or conspiracism. They say the Marxist concept of the ruling class was converted by LaRouche into a conspiracy theory, in which world capitalism was controlled by a cabal including the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, Henry Kissinger, and the Council on Foreign (Source Watch)

In 2002 the LaRouche campaign issued a press release titled “Israeli Moles Behind 911 and Iraq War,” claiming Israeli government policies had been “foisted on the President by a nest of Israeli agents inside the U.S. government.”3 That this “Israeli spy network inside the United States” 4 was related to the policy formulations of the group of Bush advisers known as the Neoconservatives was made clear later when the LaRouchites began issuing a series of pamphlets with the running title “Children of Satan.” (PublicEye)

AIDS:

The best example is the AIDS issue. By the fall of 1985, LaRouche recognized that it was about to become the scariest issue of the decade. He concocted the slogan “Spread Panic, not AIDS!” The entire human race, he claimed, would face extinction if stern measures weren’t taken immediately against gay people and mosquitoes. Offering himself as the only leader willing to act with the necessary ruthlessness, he picked California as his first battleground. In the summer of 1986 his followers fanned out through most of the state’s fifty-eight counties. Operating through a committee called PANIC, they collected over 700,000 signatures for a ballot initiative calling for quarantine of AIDS victims. The signatures withstood all legal challenges, and the measure was placed on the ballot as Proposition 64. It received nationwide publicity and became a major issue in California politics. Congressman William Dannemeyer (R.-Cal.) championed it and became its respectable front man. Ironically, Dannemeyer had chaired the Republican Study Committee two years earlier when it produced a report warning conservatives not to be taken in by LaRouche propaganda and pointing out that LaRouche’s intent was to “disrupt our democratic system.” Dannemeyer now said, as did some other California conservatives, that he was supporting Proposition 64 solely on its merits. Gay organizations, the health professions, labor unions, and the Democratic Party launched a counter-effort, warning the public that “political extremist Lyndon LaRouche” was behind the measure. (One of the anti-Proposition 64 groups was even called “Stop LaRouche.”) Gay organizations charged that when LaRouche said quarantine he really meant concentration camps.

LaRouche’s cadres were preprogrammed for the quarantine campaign. For years words like “faggot” and “queer” had peppered NCLC publications, along with allegations that child molesters, Satanists, and Communists control the gay rights movement, The articles also suggested that homosexuality is a characteristically Jewish condition and that rich Jews encourage it to undermine Western civilization. When the AIDS crisis erupted, LaRouche blamed the “shylocks” for being too cheap to pay for research crash programs.

His gay-equals-Jewish canard dates back to the 1970s, when New Solidarity raved against the “faggot politics” of “Zionist-supporting” gay activists. New Solidarity published a cartoon series in which prominent New York Jews were shown in Roman togas at a banquet sponsored by the “Emperor of Homohattan,” Mayor Ed Koch. In the early 1980s LaRouchian publications accused prominent Jews and pro-Zionist Gentiles of being part of an international “Homintern.” LaRouche wrote “Kissinger: The Politics of Faggotry,” a crude and defamatory leaflet on his longtime Symbolic Jew. According to LaRouche, Kissinger’s alleged “heathen sexual inclinations are merely an integral part of a larger evil,” and Kissinger is “psychologically” part of a “distinct species.” In the context of LaRouche’s biological-racial theories about the Jewish “species,” the equation of Jewishness and “faggotry” was unmistakable.

LaRouche also taught that the alleged pathology of the Jewish family, especially the mother’s possessiveness, produces psychosexual aberrations in young Jews. A 1986 New Solidarity item, “Jewish Mothers in the Age of Aquarius,” joked that homosexuality is the natural result.

That the Jewish oligarchy deliberately promotes homosexuality is suggested by LaRouche’s references to “sodomic,” “pederastic,” and “lesbian” practices within oligarchy-controlled “cults” such as Freemasonry and the Quakers. In a November 1985 speech, he said AIDS was a “man-made evil” linked to these “cults out of Babylon.” He further developed this theme in “The End of the Age of Aquarius?,” a rambling discourse on AIDS that included attacks on the “Babylonians,” the “British,” “usurers,” and “cabalists.” His conclusion; “Homosexuality was organized in the United States. It wasn’t something that sprang from the weeds. . . .It was organized. . .” (an excerpt from New American fascists, chapter 16)

The Re-Writing of History

True, about a million and a half Jews did die as a result of the Nazi policy of labor-intensive “appropriate technology” for the employment of “inferior races,” a small fraction of the tens of millions of others – especially Slavs – who were murdered in the same way Jewish refugee Felix Rohatyn proposes today.

Even on a relative scale, what the Nazis did to Jewish victims was mild compared with the virtual extermination of gypsies and the butchery of Communists. The point is that Adolf Hitler was put into power largely on the initiative of the Rothschilds, Warburgs and Oppenheimers, among other Jewish and non-Jewish financial interests centered in the City of London. [….] The Jews who did die at the hands of Nazism were the victims of fascism, the victims of the Schactian form of “fiscal austerity.”

The “Holocaust” simply proves that the failure of the Nuremberg tribunal to hang Hjalmar Schacht made the whole proceeding a travesty of justice. The murderers of the million and a half or more Jews who died in the “holocaust” are any group, Jewish or non-Jewish, which supported then or now the policies advocated by Felix Rohatyn or Milton Freidman [sic]. Either you, as a Jew, join with the U.S. Labor Party to stop Rohatyn, Friedman the Mont Pelerin Society now, or you are implicitly just as guilty of the death of millions of Jews as Adolf Hitler. (New Solidarity, 8 Dec.1978, p.4) A scanned version available online

…(read more)…

Brainwashing Techniques:

I AM GOING TO MAKE YOU ORGANIZERS – by taking your bedrooms away from you … What I shall do is expose to you the cruel act of your sexual impotence … I will take away from you all hope that you can flee the terrors of politics to the safety of ‘personal life.’ I shall do this by showing to you that your frightened personal sexual life contains for you such terrors as the outside world could never offer you. I will thus destroy your rabbit-holes, mental as well as physical. I shall destroy your sense of safety in the place to which you ordinarily imagine you can flee…Can we imagine anything much more viciously sadistic than the Black Ghetto mother.” (“Ideological Odyssey: From Old Left to Far Right,” and, “No Joke“)

“Don’t let her leave!” The group leader had thoroughly worked her over, hammering her with guilt about her previous actions, accusing her of being delusional, telling her to confess, until she was no longer recognizable as a woman, but only as a blubbering mess of tearful convulsions. The tearful woman got up to flee the room.

“Don’t let her leave! Keep her in here!” Someone got up and physically blocked her from leaving the room.

“SIT DOWN. Now M—–,” the leader said in a calm voice, “You know you’ve got to stop doing this…” She went on calmly for some time, and then everyone else left the room. I sat across the room and watched her sob hysterically with her face in her hands, and not for the first time wondered what the LaRouche organization was all about.

Throughout the summer I witnessed similar scenes over and over again in different forms; in personal meetings with the leadership, in small group meetings, Sunday “Field Meetings,” at “retreats,” and one-on-one conversations. There was a clear pattern being used in each case; the sowing of guilt (real or imagined), fear, confusion, and the use of “sore spots” (personal shames or shortcomings) to browbeat someone into an extremely worked up emotional state. Once the person has been whipped up she is then questioned until she contradicts herself on some minute point. This contradiction is then used as a stick to beat her with until there is a complete emotional breakdown, then they admit their faults (confess), after which the leadership then redefines the “mission” for them. I recognized it as manipulation. I recently took interest in a book by William Sargant, “The Battle for the Mind,” and he had another name for it: Brainwashing. (Freedom of Mind Center)

I realize I only put two conspiracy quotes, but the LaRouches pretty much believe in most of them. A short bio from an article about Lyndon LaRouche displays a quick synapsis of some hisghlites from Larouche’s political career:

1976: Lyndon LaRouche makes first bid for U.S. presidency under the U.S. Labor Party.
1982-83: LaRouche engages in exploratory talks with the Soviet Union which lead to the development of President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative
1984: LaRouche founds the Schiller Institute, a non-profit formed to “defend the rights of all humanity to progress –material, moral and intellectual”
1986: LaRouche followers draft California ballot initiative calling for the isolation or quarantining of people infected with AIDS
1987: Roy Frankhouser, ~~former~~ Klu Klux Klan grand dragon and LaRouche advisor, convicted of obstruction of justice.
1988: LaRouche and six associates convicted on federal conspiracy charges. LaRouche spends five years in prison.
2004: LaRouche makes his fifth bid for the U.S. presidency, this time running a candidate under the Democratic Party.

This movement, and the young men and women involved in this group, is considered a cult (some say more than a cult). In fact, a site put together by former LaRouchites (LaRouche Planet) defines this topic well in their From a Political Sect to a Political Cult:

It is NOT a political democratic organization that respects individual freedom. It is a cult that uses politics to its own ends, it is a political cult which uses cult method of mind-control.

It is therefore totalitarian by definition (LaRouche would say “authoritarian”). A “cult of personality” reminiscent of the cults of personality which Stalin, Mao or Hitler once enjoyed.

The nearest representation of LaRouche’s world is the world described in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four novel. Politically, it shares many (not all) features with the so-called “Third Position” of our contemporary political spectrum.

Similarly to the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four, in the LaRouche cult, politics is not just “war-like”, IT IS WAR; a never ending war between “Oceania” and “Eurasia”, or between “Eastasia” and “Oceania” etc., a war against the enemies of Mankind and Civilization, i.e. the enemies of LaRouche. These enemies are “exposed” by LaRouche and his obsessive and wild “conspiracy-theories”. The world is about to be plunged at any time into the abysses of a New Dark Ages, a World War III, etc. Their clock always shows “One minute to midnight” for the last thirty-five years and LaRouche (a self-professed economist) has “predicted” a world financial crashnearly every year… for the last thirty-five years! The larouchies believe that “saving the world” is the “end-goal” of the “LaRouche organization”.

So, to use this lady (who is probably very nice) as my whipping boy, would God have anything to do with the above? Murder, hatred of Jews, brainwashing, quarantining people, multiple conspiracy theories, etc??? And their comparison of Obama’s health plan — horrible monstrosity that it is — is like Hitler’s T4 program is just plain weird.

The medias lack of care for the LaRouchites showing up at meetings with Obama/Hitler signs (as mentioned in a previous blog) is pointed out by the Weekly Standard as well:

CNN’s Larry King showed the above video of Barney Frank laying the smack down on a woman at a townhall meeting who compared Obama to Hitler. CNN left out the fact that this woman is a Lyndon LaRouche Democrat.

In the full video (via Allahpundit), the woman says, “This policy is already on the way out. It already has been defeated by LaRouche.” She also underscores her crazy LaRouchite beliefs by claiming that the U.S. has “30% real unemployment”. No one disputes that LaRouchites are on the fringe — but it’s indisputable that they are fringe Democrats. They oppose Obamacare because they want a single-payer plan.

While Nancy Pelosi and liberal talk-show host Bill Press have been smearing protesters as fascists and Nazis, left-wing bloggers have been attacking protesters for comparing Obama to Hitler. It seems townhall attendees just can’t win….

I have nothing but contempt for their organization and bewilderment at people who say they love Glenn Beck and want to do what God wants them to, and then proceed to write checks to this wacky organization.

Ideological Swings:

In 1977-78, LaRouche initiated an ideological change, an evolution from “socialism” to “nationalism”, well documented by Denis King and Chip Berlet.

This “evolution” was marked by a radical re-definition of “Fascism”. To this purpose he wrote in 1977 “What Actually Is Fascism?” where he said:

“The Nazi propaganda emphasis on “Krupp steel” and other symbols of industrial development points up the fact that to rule Germany the Nazis were obliged to play upon the deep desire for industrial and technological progress within even the ranks of numerous layers of nominal Nazi supporters and party members. There was a profound discrepancy between the systematic destruction of industry and the labor force under Schacht and the nationalist impulses of important varieties of German citizens who went over to support of the Nazis largely on the basis of hatred of Versailles and a commitment to restoration of Germany’s industrial progress.” “In short, all of those features of Nazi Germany’s policy which are generally attributed to fascism are not the ideological excretion of a fascist “sociological phenomenon” but are properly termed Schachtianism in its natural course and consequences. The essence of fascism, if we mean by fascism the deprecated features of the Nazi order, is Schachtian economics.” ⁽⁶⁾

In other words there are “good” and “bad” Nazis:

“The majority of Nazi supporters were not fascists, but nationalists.” ⁽⁶⁾

and consequentially:

“What is to be stressed most emphatically in this connection is the fallacy of the “conservatism tends to fascism” argument.” ⁽⁶⁾

To confirm his ideological move from “socialism” to “nationalism”, he wrote that year:

“I never had the conception of founding a “true Marxist” association. […] We have never been Marxists, except as regarding Marx as the highest preceding advancement of essential human knowledge. […] More profoundly, as we change we do not change.” ⁽⁷⁾

contradicting himself from what he wrote a year earlier:

“Labor Committee and allied Communist forces within the capitalist sector generally are working overnight, constantly, to bring into being a new Marxist International throughout the capitalist sector.” ⁽¹¹⁾

when he wanted to establish “socialism” world-wide:

“The important point to be added to that, is that such a form of society is within reach during this century. We have before us the immediate need and possibility to establish an intermediate form of society known as workers’ government, out of which in approximately a generation’ s time, an actual socialist form of human existence can emerge.” ⁽⁴⁾

LaRouche redefined Marxism from a “higher”, philosophical standpoint; “higher” Marxism meant “good” industrial Capitalism, Marx and Benjamin Franklin were said to share the same, common ancestry and philosophical outlook: Plato’s Republic, trying to combine “socialism” (Soviet Republics) and… the Republican party! ({“republican” in LaRouche’s code-words, meaning Plato’s “Republic”).
In his “Creating a Republican Labor Party” pamphlet, LaRouche wrote:

“The republican party is thousands of years old. It is traced in terms of formal historical knowledge available to us today to the writings of Plato and Plato’s Academy at Athens, and to Alexander the Great’s city-building policies.”

The “new” Karl Marx was redefined in “The Karl Marx Karl Marx Did Not Know” (Fall 1977).

His 1980 U.S. presidential election was based on an alliance between “labor” (socialist) forces and “republican” (nationalist) forces and geopolitically between the “East” (USSR) and the “West”.

This ideological and philosophical reshaping can be measured with help of three key-documents during that period: 1/ “The Case of Walter Lippmann” (May 1977), 2/ “Two Tactics of the Inner PCI” (April 1978) and 3/ “The Secret Known Only to the Inner Elites” (May-June 1978). This last document is still considered by the LaRouchies as the real founding document of LaRouche’s Organisation.

In this 1977 revisionist document “What Actually Is Fascism?” he explained that “Fascism” was in fact synonymous with… “financial austerity” imposed by Hjalmar Schacht, a “cannibalization” of the German economy which led to Hitler’s war!

Capitalism therefore still leads to Fascism/Imperialism…
The “real enemy” is still “Capitalism” or rather “Capitalists”, not Fascists who are victims of these “Capitalists”.

But who was Schacht? What really happened to the German economy under his influence? Why does LaRouche focuses exclusively on somebody who was a German financial expert and Minister of Economics from 1935 until 1937 only (and who began to lose power after the implementation of the Four Year Plan in 1936 by Hermann Göring which put Germany on the brink of bankruptcy)?

Because by reducing “nazism” only to one single cause: “Hjalmar Schacht”, it is more convenient to re-write History. Forget about Hitler’s and the Nazis’ open intentions to start a war against their neighbors from the onset…\\ LaRouche only needs to claim Hjalmar Schacht was a “British agent”, an “environmentalist” or a “Jewish protege” and then, LaRouche could conclude that “Nazism” was an “ecologist”, a “British” or a “Jewish” conspiracy (and vice-versa)! Consequently, any economic policy or economist or politician could be labeled as “schachtian” or “nazi”!…

…(read more and follow footnotes)…

Swastikas:

…The LaRouche committee has staged dozens of protests nears Trader Joe’s entrance and exit doors, of which there are usually only two, the grocer claims in Superior Count. It says LaRouche’s members display pictures of Obama with a Hitler-style moustache and of Obama Photoshopped next to Hitler.

“At the Trader Joe’s in Irvine, the LaRouche Activists wore swastikas, which brought some customers to tears,” according to the complaint.

Tension between activists and customers nearly led to a fistfight outside one store, and in screaming matches have forced police to be called to remove the activists, driving customers away, the complaint states…

…(read more)…

Religio-Political Talk (RPT)

"I never discuss anything except politics and religion. There is nothing else to discuss." ~ G.K. Chesterton

UFOs

World Trade Center 7 | Some “Trutherisms” Refuted

Is Alien Life Even A Possibility?

Spiritism and Ghosts | The Christian View

Joe Rogan “METABUNKS” UFO’s with Mick West

Farrakhan’s Batshit Crazy UFO Sermon (Updated w/Ayatollah)

White Racism Bad / Black Racism Good

LaRouchites In The SCV (from UFOs to KGB death squads-Democratic Nuts)