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Religion and Spirituality under Attack.
national |
history and heritage |
feature
Thursday April 15, 2021 22:58 by T
There is no doubt about it that religion and spirituality are under attack and the pressure has been massively increased on the back of the Covid Scamdemic. The level of suppression and repression now in force against the church has not been seen here for centuries. The irony is that the church hierarchy are largely going along with it. The attack on spirituality is a bit harder to discern but it is there and part of the wider trend. Overall what appears to be going on is the corporate takeover of society and that is the new religion and it is intolerant of any other belief systems. This is a characteristic of all totalitarian systems. They want you to transfer any beliefs you have to them. During the worst periods of the USSR we saw churches burned or closed down and all religious practice suppressed. Similar things happened during the Chinese cultural revolution. What it represents is a demand to turn towards the reigning power and an insistence that this is the only belief system. What the socialist revolution was promising was salvation through socialist organisation of society and by directing the productive forces to the benefit of all peoples, in effect creating heaven on Earth. It didn't quite turn out that way for various reasons. Now the corporate regime is trying the same without the promises Related Links: WATCH: Minister Arrested during Sunday Service by Gardai | WATCH: Three Mass-goers arrested outside Waterford cathedral | Councillor slammed for calling religious procession ‘far right’ | The law is an ass when it comes to Mass | Tensions grow during Holy Week as priest takes a stand | Irish priest fined €500 for saying Mass with parishioners present says he will continue to 'exercise my constitutional right' | BREAKING: Police raid Canadian church for defying COVID orders, erect barricade blocking entrance | GraceLife Becomes the First Church in Canada Forced Underground As Hundreds of Cops Continue to Guard Their Building | Furious Catholic church condemns cops for 'brutally exceeding their powers' after officers burst into London Easter service and shut it down - even though indoor worship IS allowed under Covid rules | British Police RAID Good Friday Liturgy and Hijack Altar | Police take license numbers, issue notices as Kentucky church holds in-person Easter service | California pastor cited for hiding congregants on Easter Sunday says church has right to assemble
The amazing part is that the media have been banging on for years on how we live in a democracy -clearly it was a facade given how we went from so-called freedom to giving up practically all our rights back in March 2020 to full lockdown with little respite since. -and that it was a society where all beliefs were tolerated. You were free to practice whatever your religion. The catholic church in Ireland needless to say laid the ground work for it's own demise with its many decades of repression, abuse and corruption. It was a classic case of those who find themselves in a position of unaccountable power, abuse it and in the end tarnish their own institution. What we saw in the last two decades or so was a huge reduction in those going to (catholic) mass in Ireland but in the interim other Christian denominations have grown somewhat. It would seem that it had reached its low point and there were signs of some possible regrowth albeit in modified form and more humble. Gone are the days where those who went to mass, did so because of public shaming / virtue signalling or because their parents told them to. Those who practice religion of late are probably more sincere in terms of their faith and really believe in it. And under our constitution they were perfectly free to do so. There will always people who believe in a God of some kind and many with spiritual beliefs who perhaps have less precise strictures than the trappings of an organised religion but a belief nevertheless that there is something more to life than our material existence. While there are many who are atheist, they don’t have a problem with people who have religious faith of one kind or another. However there are some atheists who strongly believe that their rational scientific view is and should be the only way. In many ways this is simply yet another ideology. We have had many ideologists in the course of history but it is the members in the extreme branch we need to look out for. And in the present climate there is a strong smell of extremism within the pro Covid lockdowns and restrictions camp and their authoritarian masters. Before we examine what has been happening over the past year, some other features about people and religion need to be highlighted. It seems humans are destined to create religions and believe in a God of some kind whether they are organised or more individualist and personal. The traits seem to be part of our brain hardware. Across all cultures and civilisations since the dawn of history, people have believed in an after-life of some form, whether these were nature based in the form of pagan gods, the spiritual religions of the Asia like Buddhism and Hinduism and all the numerous denomination of Christianity and of course Islam and it’s various splinter groups and any others left out. The "modern" liberal belief is that in this age of scientific reason or in the last year we should say the age of fear and propaganda, people are now educated and have moved beyond religion to a rational liberal thinking society. Actually there is little evidence of that now compared to even a few years ago. The idea is that we have cast off our religious beliefs. Throughout much of the West, church attendance and churches themselves have declined and that is definitely true. Or so it all seems on the surface. However we have to ask ourselves what role does religion play in our mind. It would seem that it is a way to side step endlessly pondering our existence and purpose and is a way to simplify our life especially at the societal level. What religious do, is give a set of straight forward beliefs and basic rules on how to live and in most cases they encourage a certain amount of harmony. Most people want an easy life and just want to know what they should do and shouldn't do in order to get along. As we know many a religion has been hijacked by it's hierarchy and have used their immense power at the top , to their own ends and sent many to their deaths in the process and all because the members of the flock have this incredibly strong tendency to follow blindly and unquestionably. For all we know religious beliefs have inhabited the human mind going back tens of thousands of years as evidenced by ancient rock art because it demonstrates that people even 30,000 or even 40,000 years ago had painted their symbolic thoughts of things that mattered to them and demonstrates they were pondering the world they lived in. The last 50,000 to 100,000 years is what has probably shaped the human psyche which drives much of our ingrained behaviour today. Yet we are supposed to believe we have cast all of this off. For those a bit older, they will easily remember the devote level of practice and belief of much of the population in catholic Ireland as recently as the 1970s or even 1960s and before. The praying, kneeling, genuflecting, blessing one self and even bowing before the altar or stations of the cross. There was a certain composure that people had then when they were at mass or any other ceremony. The strange thing is all of this came rushing back the instant lockdowns, hand-washing and masks appeared. The way people dutifully queue in-line at shops and wash their hands with sanitizer is reminiscent of dipping their hands in the holy water fonts (which was a feature of many churches in old catholic Ireland) and blessing themselves, except this time instead of cleansing them of sins, it cleanses them of germs. All the trappings of religion are right there. They have returned in full force. Except the new God is not Jesus, it is NPHET and the daily decrees from our glorious, caring and omnipresent government. All religious have a certain amount of fear built in because of the promise of heaven. The implication if you don't measure up, you don't get in. The catholic religion of course has the devil to explain the evil that humans are capable of and in catholic Ireland, there was a fair amount of the fear of God, for you might end up burning in the flames of Hell for eternity if you clocked up too many mortal sins. Today in our new religion, the Covid Pandemic religion, we certainly have the fear. There is no escaping it because it is broadcast 24 x 7 and if you do not follow their rules which are essentially anti-human rules you are basically told you will go to Hell, in the form of terrible Covid agony, even though of course they have grossly exaggerated or more accurately lied about the risks of either getting seriously ill or dying from it. In fact there is only one cause of death now and it is Covid as the new fraudulent rules for death certificates ensure it is. But what do we see from the population of people too smart to belief in religion? We see blind obedience and a strong desire to unquestionably follow the rules regardless of how idiotic, self-destructive, harmful and anti-human they are. And like religions of the past, those in power at the top of this new religious hierarchy are taking advantage of their power and using their minions for their own ends. Lambs to the slaughter as usual. This new Covid religion has supplanted the belief in "never ending progress and technology" religion which on one level is on hold and on another fused with the Covid Pandemic one. The fusion is seen in the blind naive belief behind everything the government and media say about Covid and that science is leading the charge through the rapid development of vaccines to lead us out of this slight bump in the road to nirvana. In actual fact, no real science is being done by the government because the real science is showing this is not the problem they say it is and they are in fact trashing science and it's reputation along with the medical bureaucrats and their shrills thrashing the medical establishment likewise while doctors in the know stay silent in fear lest they be struck off by the medical council attack dogs and cancelled by the mob. The so called vaccines of course are just a reckless drive to use the experimental gene therapy jab to usher in a completely controlled society on the back of "health" passports for every aspect of your life from this point on, to the end of time. You would imagine though that traditional religion is not a threat to those in power given their success of their own Covid Pandemic one, so it really was quite a shock to come to the realisation that all the churches in this country had been closed for months and were no longer carrying out religious ceremonies. And funerals which are such a central part of Irish life and intertwined with religion and an essential part of what it is to act like a human, have basically been outlawed except for a very small number of the closest relatives. The puzzling part is why the church hierarchy lay down and took it. There has to be some people in it who can see through the lies and fear mongering to realize none of it is justified and what in fact was happening was the removal of their constitutional rights and imposition of tyranny. According to numerous Covid Pandemic religious officials and their promoters like Sam McConkey, these lockdowns and restrictions could go on for another 3 to 5 years. But why end there? It seems the bishops and priests no longer believed in their own religion anymore otherwise they would stand up for it? So it was with some shock to learn that when Fr P. Hughes in the village of Mullahoran in Co. Cavan held mass with all the correct social distancing in place, the Garda arrived and fined him €500 and the national press dutifully parroted the official government line. In keeping with previous behaviour the church hierarchy proved to have no backbone and did not support him. So here we were a priest standing up for what he believes in and not only the state attacks him but his own institution stands mute. But just to finish covering this little incident, The Garda setup checkpoints on approach roads to Mullahoran and stopped all traffic and questioned motorists. The names, details and car registrations of several dozen people who appeared on the day were noted. Pure intimidation. There are still people out there for whom attending church means something and religious "reasons" used to be an excuse to opt out of a lot of things. If you don't find these actions sinister given the history of this country, given on the one hand the brutal suppression of the catholic religion by Cromwell and on the other, the central role it had in Irish life for centuries, for it all to be swept away now, then it is hard to know what more one can say. All the signals are flashing red of bad times ahead. Perhaps the non-religious think it does not matter or apply to them but all these actions show a chilling level of authoritarianism and a ruthless determination to see that everyone follows the new order. No dissenters however meek will be tolerated. This religious repression has not been limited to Ireland. After all the Covid hoax is not just an Irish project, it is a global project rolled out in each country with uncanny similarity and timing. In the run up to Easter Sunday, perhaps the holiest day in Christianity, we would have expected to see those who truly believe in their religion to take some stand but it was fairly subdued but that did not stop forceful effort across several countries to firmly stamp out any activity. It is surprising that in one year, that we can go from an illusory democracy to one where when priest attempts to say mass on Good Friday, the force of the state is used to shut it down. Saying mass or going to mass is now an act of defiance and a revolutionary act. How mad is that? In London police actually entered a Polish church on Good Friday and forced a stop to proceedings. As if they were really concerned about anyone’s health. In Canada Pastor James Coates in Alberta was jailed for a month in mid February for defying Covid orders. Then in an early morning raid on April 7th the Canadian police constructed a barricade around the Christian church. In the USA, in Kentucky police took take license numbers and issued while a church in Hillview, Ky held Easter service. More sinister was that pastor Roberts said he arrived at the church Sunday morning to find several piles of nails dumped at the church entrances to the parking lot. Many more reports can be found online if you look with a non-censoring search engine and it is likely a far greater number either went unreported or their Facebook or Twitter reports buried by Big Tech. The real concerning thing is, people have been so brainwashed that they did not even see it as a problem. What the f**k ? There is an interesting parallel between the numbers of people taking a stand and protesting against the Covid lockdown and restrictions and of course religious repression. The numbers, and I mean those on the streets rather than those too scared to do so, are in fact tiny. They are at least 1%, if not 0.1% or less. People might be aware that back in 1916, the year of the Rising in Ireland that approximately 2,000 Irish men turned up for the rebellion against the 600 years of British rule. It was a small turnout. Yet at the same time, over 200,000 Irish men went to fight in the First World War for the British of which approximately 50,000 died. Isn't it ironic, that the vast majority sheepishly and unquestionably follow Covid rules and queue up for the vaccines which may well kill them in similar numbers and it mirrors the same relative numbers who fought on the side of the British rulers as opposed to those who for our freedom. So where is the attack on spirituality? It is quite well described in a recent essay by John Michael Greer here .It is more subtle than the very visible attack on religion but the first signs of it can be detected in the way certain parts of the New Age scene have somewhat embraced the alternative narratives that seek to explain what is happening in society otherwise known as conspiracy theories. The way the establishment sets out conspiracy theories is quite simple. If it is not the mainstream official narrative, then it is a conspiracy theory. The problem with this is that it says there is only one absolute truth and everything else is wrong. In reality of course there are essentially an infinite set of possible alternative explanations. Many of them on the extreme fringes of thought would of course not make sense and until recently it was these which were labelled conspiracy. But the conspiracy branding project has been so successful in the past few years, it can now be applied to anything and it scares people away. If there is one thing people fear more than death, it is social ostracisation and it is enough to scare people from reading anything labelled as such. Picking your way through alternative views or explanations of our world is a tricky process and is helped with copious amounts of learning, knowledge, scepticism, logic and crucially looking for consistency and inconsistencies. Many get side tracked and mis-directed. Once again the religious element is there for there are many offering easy, simplistic explanations that tidy all the facts up, in the same way God stands in for an explanation of why we are here avoiding the need for spending time thinking about it. It all works so long as you make no real effort to check if that is really the case. It is related to the search in physics for the theory of everything where the central desire is for an equation that explains the universe. In the field of non-mainstream theories, there is a sub-field which is basically a form of strategic analysis that looks at all the technical, political and institutional activity and works out a narrative that is a lot more consistent, holds more predictive power and explains motives a lot better. The trouble is, it is a lot more work and requires more critical thinking than either accepting the mainstream narrative or the more simplified versions of various alternative theories but it is the propagation of these that is the real target of the conspiracy branding project because the most terrifying thing to all forms of power is the fear people in significant numbers begin to get an inkling of how the system works and what it does and how it ticks. This is perhaps a slight digression. It is into this vast landscape that is not the mainstream narrative, that ideas like “The Great Awakening” and other similar ideas of the zeitgeist that attracts people with spiritual and or New Age beliefs. You could label the very idea of any such awakening in spiritual terms such as one’s destiny or fate. They are definitely more in the camp of faith and religion than hard analysis using facts. But then facts are such a contentious idea these days because the mainstream now apparently decides what are and aren’t facts. But it is meant in the old sense here. The media are already onto this and have come up with the term “conspirituality” and they take some extreme examples of the mix of New Agers and conspiracy to show they are merging. But this is simply the opening salvo of a campaign to broaden this term. Before we know it, anyone practicing spirituality will be labelled in with the conspiracy camp and labelled as cranks, far-right, extremist and of course the mandatory Q-Anon label. It will include anyone practicing religion too. Some might have wondered how the cancel culture is connected and why other than Covid, is one of the only few things to remain in the news cycle these days. It is because the cancel culture is the magic wand to wave over designated groups that need to be silenced and there is a lot of work cut out for them in the new world so well described in the essay sponsored by the World Economic Forum describing life in 2030 when apparently you will own nothing but will rent everything. You will also have no privacy. The leave out the question of who owns the things you will be renting. The answer of course is global corporations since it will be a totalitarian corporate run society Perhaps the globalists in the background are preparing a new narrative and crafting their own religion for the masses once the current fear campaign has achieved it’s goals and can be scaled back to make way for the next act of the show.
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