Worries and anxieties about meaningless things are not a big problem as long as they don’t completely overwhelm you. Unpleasant, yes, but they don’t kill you. They are a part of human life and should not be medicated. It is the same thing with selfishness. To be selfish is, to some extent, healthy. And it is not necessary to be 100% truthful about everything. Sometimes, one has to add a little; sometimes, one has to keep things to oneself. Problems begin when one is lying too much. Many people are incredibly selfish and thundering liars. They lie to themselves as much as they lie to others. Their whole life is nothing but lies, self-deceptions, and deceits. Some people are into money and power and stop at nothing to get it, but they hide it behind a mask of big, warm smiles, Christianity, and charity. That is a problem.

*

Why Hitler became such an evil man is not that interesting. Did he have a terrible childhood? Did he suffer from syphilis? Did an evil spirit maybe possess him? Was he a victim of circumstances, and what was his time in history? These are uninteresting questions. What is interesting is why so many people came to love him so madly. Professors, priests, office clerks, farmers, workers, everybody was shouting hysterically at the mass rallies. Many women who met him personally have testified that they were trembling with excitement when he looked at them. “Oh, Hitler! I love you so.”

When we look at old newsreels today, it is hard for us to understand what people saw in him. To us, he looks like nothing but a yelling and shouting little crackpot.

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What difference does it make if the world was created 6000 years ago or 15 billion years ago? Is that something to argue about? Maybe it was created 300 billion years ago. So what? How we live our life here and now is, as I see it, so much more important.


The Great Scandal: Christianity's Role in the Rise of the Nazis
by Gregory S. Paul

The following is from Free Inquiry magazine, Volume 23, Number 4.

“You know what happens when atheists take over—remember Nazi Germany?” Many Christians point to Nazism, alongside Stalinism, to illustrate the perils of atheism in power.1 At the other extreme, some authors paint the Vatican as Hitler’s eager ally. Meanwhile, the Nazis are generally portrayed as using terror to bend a modern civilization to their agenda; yet we recognize that Hitler was initially popular. Amid these contradictions, where is the truth?

A growing body of scholarly research, some based on careful analysis of Nazi records, is clarifying this complex history.2 It reveals a convoluted pattern of religious and moral failure in which atheism and the nonreligious played little role, except as victims of the Nazis and their allies. In contrast, Christianity had the capacity to stop Nazism before it came to power, and to reduce or moderate its practices afterwards, but repeatedly failed to do so because the principal churches were complicit with—indeed, in the pay of—the Nazis.

Most German Christians supported the Reich; many continued to do so in the face of mounting evidence that the dictatorship was depraved and murderously cruel. Elsewhere in Europe the story was often the same. Only with Christianity’s forbearance and frequent cooperation could fascistic movements gain majority support in Christian nations. European fascism was the fruit of a Christian culture. Millions of Christians actively supported these notorious regimes. Thousands participated in their atrocities.

What, in God’s name, were they thinking?

If I don’t live for ever, if I don’t go to heaven when I die or wake up on the judgment day or if I don’t, at least, reincarnate, then life must be completely meaningless, materialistic and nonspiritual.

Life is short. I will never see something like this again. Death is not a mystery, life is. It is amazing! All the colors, all the birds, the wind and the sun and the moon, everything. I cant believe my eyes. I can’t believe that I am here. But I know very well that I will disappear in a few years and I will not come back and I will not go anywhere else. I will go to where I came from, nonexistence.

You are not the person you think you are, you are someone else. Isn’t that a strange thought? The world is not what you think it is. Things are not what they seem to be. We will never know how things really are. The things we know about are only a tiny little fraction of what there is to know. Our brains are to small. We are so small and the universe is so big. And maybe there are many more universes out there. We will never know. Some people think they know, but they don’t. They have fooled themselves. We are good at fooling ourselves.

What is the true nature of human beings? Are we good or bad? Are we egoistic or altruistic? Maybe we don’t have a true nature. We can be good or bad or both, sometimes good, sometimes bad, depending on the circumstances. Maybe we don’t have a true self, a core, an essence.

There is the thinking mind and a background awareness that “hear” the thinking chatter, the inner voice. The right brain half is listening to the left half. I believe that when I die both the inner voice and the awareness of it will come to an end. Both the left and the right brain half dies. That is nirvana, a flame that goes out.

The brain is, among other things, an instrument that detects electromagnetic waves (light), sounds, smells. It detects emotional vibrations and vibrations from dreams, synchronicities, anticipations and hunches. Eckhart seems to believe that awareness is not generated in the brain, that it is some kind of cosmic background radiation that the brain detects. The brain is pretty amazing, yes, but when I die, I believe, all brain activity comes to an end. "My" awareness will live on in other human beings but not by itself, without human brain matter. And there is no “me” in there that will go anywhere or live on somewhere else. This is of course a belief. To believe that the ego will reincarnate or goes to heaven is also beliefs. There are so many different beliefs. Some beliefs are true beliefs, that are beliefs a person truly believe. Other beliefs are just talk. For example, many people pretend that they are Christians. They think it looks good to be a Christian. Also hard core scientists hold a lot of beliefs. A scientist can deny para-psychological explanations just because he doesn’t like para-psychological ideas. He doesn’t have any proof but he believes that the para psychological dimension doesn’t exist. We live in a dream word. We live in an world of beliefs.

Men who have spent many years in prison will often get very confused and unhappy when they eventually are released. They don’t know what to do. They don’t have any friends out there. Often they commit a crime again just to be put back I jail again. There they feel at home.

To wake up, to be released from mind prisons, is not necessarily like a walk in the park.

Appearances are deceptive. Some people pretend that they are happy, friendly and straightforward, but in reality they have a secret dark agenda. They love their big smiles but are completely unaware of their negative and egoistic plotting. They have a perfect cover. So, stay away from very positive, loving and friendly people. You will never know what they are after. It is so much easier to deal with assholes, because then you know for sure that what you see is what you get.

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The desire for food is inborn. We want something to eat if we are hungry. But eating can turn into a disease. Some people just can’t stop eating. They eat and eat till they end up in hospital.
Egoism is also inborn, I believe, and egoism can also turn into a disease. Some people just want more and more, but they don’t end up in hospitals or addiction clinics.

It is hard for those with riches to enter the kingdom of God, but it is not impossible, absolutely not. It is said in the Bible that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God, but one has to remember that the eye of a needle here refers to one of the gates to Jerusalem called the Needles Eye. This entry point was so low that camels had problems passing through it.

Well, there are literal and metaphorical interpretations of the Bible. Rich people will find their interpretations, and poor people will find theirs. Isn’t it clear now that anyone can interpret the Bible or any scripture completely how he or she feels? No one is right, and no one is wrong. George Bush makes his interpretations, and Eckhart makes his. I have mine, and you have yours. We are free now. And we are free to not read the Bible at all if we don’t feel like it. We are free to say no to all religions and ideologies. We are free now after thousands of years in religious and ideological dungeons.

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A professor in History with right-wing views will find a different story and a different truth compared to a left-wing professor. Their ideological glasses will distort their research. A professor in biology with a right-wing conditioning will, in the same way, look at life through right-wing glasses.

Someone with right-wing views will read the Bible or any spiritual literature with right-wing glasses. Someone with left-wing views will see something completely different.

So, how does one free oneself from ideological and religious conditioning? Is it possible? Is it like taking off a pair of colored sunglasses? Is it painful? Does it take a lot of effort?