Via Leftwing-Christian.net
By Richard Edmondson
In part one of this article I observed that the protesters we see in the Arab world presently have two things going in their favor that Western protesters, in places like Wisconsin, substantially lack:
1 ) a firm analysis of global Zionisn and its destructive impact on their lives, and
2 ) faith in God.
In my earlier post I focused mainly on the first of these two points. The second is what I would like to cover now. Before getting to that, however, I would mention that it is extremely important that what follows be considered within the context of the previous material, so in that regard, if you have not yet read What Western Protesters Can Learn from the People of the Middle East—part 1, I would encourage you to do so before going further. I would also like to say up front that the purpose here is not to debate whether God exists (for those wishing to make such an inquiry I would recommend God is Not Dead, by University of Oregon physicist Amit Goswami). The sole assertion to be made here is that faith in God—what some refer to as “spirituality”—gives us strength. It is the river that flows through us, a key part of what makes us into a whole human being, and without it we are incomplete; the river dries up.
The Political Left: Stuck in Irrelevancy
In part 1, I quoted from a recent interview with Gilad Atzmon by Silvia Cattori, and I would like to return there now, for in that interview Atzmon says some things regarding the Left and secularism that are relevant to our discussion here. A talented jazz musician, Atzmon is a former Israeli who exiled himself from the Zionist state and is now one of its most outspoken and widely-known critics. While he does not speak or write as one who has himself attained faith in God, Atzmon nonetheless has learned “to think outside the secular box,” as he puts it, an ability which he says is lacking in Western Leftists and which consequently has left the Left pretty far behind the curve on the uprisings sweeping North Africa and the Middle East.
What we see here may be an endemic problem with “the Left.” To speak in broad (or rather Germanic philosophical) terms, “the Left” is “forgetful of Being”—Instead of understanding what Being in the world is all about, it tries to suggest to us what being in the world ought to be. “The Left” has adopted a preaching mode that has led to a severe form of alienation, and this is probably why “the Left” has failed to come to terms with, fully understand, and grasp the significance and power of Islam. And this is why “the Left” is totally irrelevant to the current revolution in the Middle East. As we know by now, “the Left’s tolerance,” somehow evaporates when it comes to Islam and Muslims. I find it very problematic.
At this point Cattori breaks in and asks, “Can you explain why the Left is irrelevant?” Atzmon then replies:
Let us look at the current events in the Arab and Muslim world: where is “the Left”? All those years they were trying to tell us, the “public will rise,” but where is the Left now? Is it in Egypt? Is it in Libya or Bahrain? We hear about the Muslim Brotherhood, the middle class, the young Arabs and Muslims—indeed, we are hearing about anything but “the Left.” Did you see any interesting leftwing analysis of the regional emerging Intifada? Not really. Recently, I was searching for an analysis of the Egyptian uprising in a famous Socialist paper. I found one article—I then realized that the words “Islam” and “Muslim” did not appear in the article even once, yet the word “class” appeared no less than nineteen times. What we see here then, is actually an example of the ultimate form of detachment from humanity, humanism, and the human condition.
But I take it further: where is “the Left” in Europe? Where is “the Left” in America? Why can’t they stand up for the Muslims? Why can’t they bond with, or make allies with millions of Muslim immigrants, people who also happen to be amongst the new European working class? I will mention here what I consider to be a most crucial insight: It is an idea I borrowed from the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Lacan contends that love can be realized as making love to oneself via the other. The “Left solidarity” with Palestine in my opinion can be similarly grasped as making love to ourselves at the expense of the Palestinians. We do not want them to be Muslims. We tell them to be democratic—as long as they don’t vote Hamas. We tell them to be progressive, “like us.” I just can’t make up my mind whether such an attitude is rude, or simply pathetic
Religion, faith in God, is simply where the vast majority of the world’s people are at. This is where they find comfort. In spurning religious faith of any kind, the Left is committing “the ultimate form of detachment from humanity,” as Atzmon puts it. But I would suggest the problem, much to the Left’s detriment, goes even further than that. Faith in God is what gives us the courage to carry on in the face of what may appear to our eyes as benumbing or overwhelming odds. This does not mean that we stop fearing death. It simply means that in the back of our minds we know that when and if death does come, it is not the end. Spirituality, in other words, gives us the physical, emotional, and psychological tenacity to keep fighting. Consider the following video consisting of footage from a protest in Bahrain. When the demonstrators are fired upon they take cover, to be sure, but they do not drop their flags and flee the scene. And when the gunfire pauses, they emerge back out into the open again, still carrying their flags.
I have been to protests in America where the police turned violent, though not anything ever quite like this. The courage and conviction shown by these protesters is nothing short of heroic. Their stamina as well. From what reservoir are they able to draw upon such resources? I would suggest their faith has a lot to do with it. It is strength then—this is what faith gives us. And this is why over the past 40-50 years in America religion and spirituality have been de-emphasized in media and popular culture—because the elites who run America do not want us to be strong. They want us to remain weak and fearful. This is why the media constantly play up stories about “pedophile priests,” and why religious leaders, particularly those on the right, are poked fun of on comedy shows. Leaders of the religious Right certainly have at times said things that very much do warrant ridicule, but when have you ever seen a Jewish rabbi (Ovadia Yosef for instance) held up to similar mockery? It doesn’t happen. Not on TV shows in America. Being made the butt of jokes is reserved for Christianity. This is why Judaism, or Zionism at any rate, has in essence become the “state religion” in America. The attacks we see on Christianity are dissimilar from the attacks on Islam only in their intensity. When Muslims say America is waging a war against Islam, they are essentially correct.
These attacks on people’s faith would suggest something about faith is regarded as extremely dangerous to those who hold power in America. What might it be? Above I referred to faith as a “river that flows through us,” and I said that without it we are incomplete, and that something is missing. The Hindus refer to that “something” as the atman, or “self”—the aster, or astral constituent, within us which connects us to the universe, to the Great All. For his own part, Christ referred to this as a mustard seed. By itself, he said, the mustard is the smallest of seeds, but when watered and given sunlight it grows into a great plant providing nests for the birds of the air—and as Jesus said, you can move mountains with it. Faith, then, is a living presence within us. In certain rare people, such as Gandhi and Martin Luther King, this presence is even on visible display; it is noticeably and discernably detectable; you may see it in their faces, hear it in their words. Both King and Gandhi moved mountains in their lifetimes. It is no coincidence that both were also deeply spiritual.
Moreover, as the examples of King and Ghandi would suggest, it is the faith itself that is important, not the form or variety it takes. To me, it does not matter whether your faith is Christianity, Islam, or Torah-Judaism (Talmudic Judaism is an entirely different matter and needs to be distinguished, along with Christian Zionism, from other world religions). While I myself am a Christian, I have found that the sacred texts of other religions can and often do articulate profound truths. Take this passage from the Bhagavad Gita, for instance, containing the words of Krishna:
I look upon all creatures equally; none are less dear to me and none more dear. But those who worship me with love live in me, and I come to life in them. (Bhagavad Gita 9:29)
The above passage, for all of its remarkable brevity, contains what for me are two profoundly important truths: 1 ) that in the eyes of God we are all equal, and, 2 ) that God comes alive within us when we feel love for her/him.
Lessons from the Light: Liberation and God
Kenneth Ring with Swiss
researcher Evelyn Elsa-
esser Valarino
In late December of ’08, and again in mid-January ’09, both immediately before and during Israel’s onslaught upon Gaza, a certain professor emeritus of Psychology at the University of Connecticut posted online a collection of emails he had received from people living inside the besieged territory. The emails described the fear and horror felt by the senders—first as the attack was growing imminent, and then as Israel’s bombs began to fall around them. The name of the professor who published the collections is Kenneth Ring. His two articles, the one in December and later one in January, made the rounds on a number of websites, including Antiwar.com (see here and here ), and both posts make for compelling reading. What many, perhaps most, people were unaware of at the time (Antiwar.com identified Ring only as a professor at the University of Connecticut) is that the author has been a leading researcher in the field of near-death experiences (NDE), having published several books on the subject, perhaps most notably Lessons from the Light, which Ring wrote with Swiss researcher Evelyn Elsaesser Valarino. I should mention here that literally thousands of people have undergone NDEs, their reports typically involving an “out-of-body episode” in which the person experiences a tunnel and a light as well as possibly an encounter with deceased loved ones, while a smaller number have also spoken of coming into the presence of a spiritual entity—often described as bearing unconditional love toward them. In an interview with the New York Times, Ring described NDEs in the following manner:
It often happens to individuals who find themselves on the verge of imminent biological death. It involves a pattern of feelings and images and sensations which include a sense of the most profound peace and well-being that is possible to imagine. It’s a sense of being separate from the physical body and sometimes being able to see it as though a spectator off to one side or from up above.
These people have a sense of moving through a dark space or tunnel toward a radiantly beautiful white or golden light. They are absorbed in that light, having in some cases a panoramic life review in which virtually everything that they’ve ever done in their life they’re able to see; perhaps meeting the spirits of deceased loved ones or friends. And in some cases, they are asked to make a decision as to whether they would like to continue or go back to their body.
I discussed Ring’s work briefly in the foreword to my novel, The Memoirs of Saint John, where I noted that despite the meticulous research done on NDEs by people like Ring, a number of skeptics remain. One favored argument is the neurological one. Thus, Carol Zaleski writes in the Oxford Handbook of Eschatology (Oxford University Press, p. 619):
The second caveat is that the dying or nearly dying person is a fortress under siege, experiencing the mind-altering effects of drugs, anesthetics, sensory isolation and confinement, oxygen deprivation, or a host of other physiological and psychological stresses. Endorphins rush in to mute the pain and anxiety, sometimes resulting in ecstatic feelings; the temporal lobe creates a storm of fireworks, triggering panoramic replays of childhood memories and geometrically patterned visual hallucinations.
In other words, “It’s all in your mind,” is what the argument boils down to. To such legitimate criticisms NDE researchers have responded with accounts of “veridical” NDEs—episodes in which some aspect of the experience is verified by third-party testimony. A comatose patient, for instance, might later accurately report a conversation between doctors or nurses or even family members sitting out in the waiting room. But still skeptics persist.
In his book Lessons from the Light, Ring offers the case histories of literally dozens of NDEers, including those who have undergone veridical NDEs, but what I would like to focus on here are the stories of four in particular—Virginia Rivers, Howard Storm, Norman Paulsen, and Beverly Brodsky. Ring saves their stories for one of the final chapters in his book, a chapter in which he discusses what might be thought of as the “ultimate” NDE. These are the cases of “those who have actually journeyed beyond the Light,” as Ring describes it, who at some point during their NDE found themselves in the presence of God (or at very least, we might say, what each believed to have been God), and whose “excursion into the afterdeath realms brings us close to the heart of the mystery of creation itself.” Of the four, Paulsen and Brodsky did not have what could be defined precisely as an NDE per se. As will be explained more fully below, neither was, clinically speaking, close to death at the time their experience occurred. But all four experiences imply what Ring refers to as “the existence of a second light, which is at once, a kind of ultimate Light, the source of everything, a place where we come from and to which we will inevitably return.”
‘Yet I knew it was Him’
Virginia Rivers is a Florida resident who in 1986 suffered a near-fatal bout of pneumonia and was hospitalized. It was while in the hospital that she had her NDE. The following, including the ellipses as well as the parenthetical notation about them, are verbatim from the text and are a direct quote from Rivers’ account of her NDE:
There was total peace: I was surrounded on all sides by a black void. I was no longer frightened. I was comfortable and content to be where I was. No fear…no pain…just peace and comfort and amazingly undaunted curiosity. [All ellipses in this account are Ginny’s. Nothing has been left out.] Immediately the blackness began to erupt into a myriad of stars and I felt as if I were at the center of the Universe with a complete panoramic view in all directions. The next instant I began to feel a forward surge of movement. The stars seemed to fly past me so rapidly that they formed a tunnel around me. I began to sense awareness, knowledge. The farther forward I was propelled the more knowledge I received. My mind felt like a sponge, growing and expanding in size with each addition. The knowledge came in single words and in whole idea blocks. I just seemed to be able to understand everything as it was being soaked up or absorbed. I could feel my mind expanding and absorbing and each new piece of information somehow seemed to belong. It was as if I had known already but forgotten or mislaid it, as if it were waiting here for me to pick it up on my way by. I kept growing with knowledge, evolving, expanding and thirsting for more. It was amazing, like being a child again and experiencing something knew and beautiful, a wonderful new playground. As each second passed, there was more to learn, answers to questions, meanings and definitions, philosophies and reasons, histories, mysteries, and so much more, all pouring into my mind. I remember thinking, “I knew that, I know I did. Where has it all been?”
The stars began to change shapes before my eyes. They began to dance and deliberately draw themselves into intricate designs and colors which I had never seen before. They moved and swayed to a kind of rhythm or music with a quality and beauty I had never heard and yet…remembered. A melody man could not possibly have composed, yet so totally familiar and in complete harmony with the very core of my being. As if it were the rhythm of my existence, the reason for my being. The extravagance of imagery and coloration pulsed in splendid unison with the magnificent ensemble.
Rivers described it as a “pulse of love and beauty” and felt herself continue to be propelled forward as the knowledge expanded and became increasingly absorbed into her mind. Then:
At once there was total and absolute awareness. There was not a question I could ask for which I did not already have the answer. I looked over to the presence I knew would be there and thought, “God, it was so simple, why didn’t I know that?” I could not see God as I can see you. Yet I knew it was Him. A Light, a beauty emitting from within, infinitely in all directions to touch every atom of being. The harmony of coloration, design and melody originated here with the Light. It was God, his love, his light, his very essence, the force of creation emanating to the ends of all eternity…reaching out as a pulsing beacon of love to bring me “Home.”
There was a time of exchange, in one moment or one eon, complete and absolute knowing and approval of me and what I had become. In that instant or millennium, I knew he had seen my entire life and he loved me still. Pure unadulterated, unselfish, ever-flowing, unconditional Love. God had seen my life and still loved me endlessly, eternally for myself, for my existence. He never spoke to me in words that I could hear with my ears, yet I heard his thoughts as clearly as words. The quality of his word, his thought, his voice in my head, was magnificent, enchanting, compelling without demand, gentle and kind and filled with more love than is possible to describe. To be in his presence was more inspiring, more inviting, than any kind of love or harmony ever discovered in this reality. No experience, no closeness has ever been so complete.
In her NDE, God eventually told her many things, though Rivers says she only remembers two: “First, God told me there were only two things that we could bring back with us when we died…LOVE and KNOWLEDGE.” She says she was instructed to learn as much as possible about both. The second thing she was told was that she had to return, even though:
I begged not to leave. I pled. I told him how no one would miss me. My children would be better off without me. My mother and father and brother would take better care of them than I. My heart ached as if it were physically crushed. Again he told me there was something I must accomplish and his love began to soothe my tears and sorrow, I understood and he knew from the bottom of my soul that I wanted to be with him as soon as I did what was to be done.
Rivers informed Ring she could not now remember the specific task God had directed her to accomplish upon her return, but as Ring comments, “I personally cannot help thinking that in some way it must certainly be intimately related to her telling her story, and I feel privileged to be able to share a portion of it with you here.”
‘More Love than One can Imagine’
Howard Storm is an art professor who was an atheist prior to his NDE in 1985. That year he was leading a group of students on a three-week long European art tour, when suddenly, while in a Paris hotel room, he “collapsed in horrific pain, as if he had been shot.” Storm was taken to a hospital where doctors discovered he had suffered a perforated duodenum, a condition he was told needed to be corrected by surgery if he was to live. The NDE he subsequently underwent in the Paris hospital had, as Ring describes it, “both hellish and heavenly aspects,” with Storm initially being caught up in “some extremely frightening episodes.” At this point, however, despite Storm’s years of atheism, he began to pray. Almost as if in response, a “radiant being of light” appeared, a figure emanating “more love than one can imagine,” as he described it:
It was loving me with overwhelming power. After what I had been through, to be completely known, accepted, and intensely loved by this being of light surpassed anything I had known or could have imagined. I began to cry, and the tears kept coming and coming.
At this point Storm, surrounded and engulfed by the being, felt himself being raised upward—gradually at first, then faster—until “we shot out of that dark and detestable place.” Off in the distance he began to see what looked like a galaxy of stars, where “countless millions of spheres of light were flying about, entering and leaving what was a great Beingness at the center.” You will notice in his account certain similarities to the NDE reported by Rivers:
The radiance emanating from the luminous spheres contained exquisite colors of a range and intensity that far exceeded anything I as an artist had ever experienced. It was similar to looking at the opalescence one experiences looking into a white pearl or the brilliance of a diamond.
As we approached the great luminous center I was permeated with palpable radiation, which I experienced as intense feelings and thoughts. People who have had near-death experiences, I have since learned, have described encounters with the light as being exposed to complete knowledge. Yet when they are asked what they remember, they recall few if any specifics. That’s the way it was for me. At the time, I felt that I was in touch with everything, but subsequently, I couldn’t recall the knowledge. And there was a period of time, during my presence in the great light, when I was beyond any thoughts. It is not possible to articulate the exchange that occurred. Simply stated, I knew God loved me.
‘Journey to the Center of the Sun’
The story Ring relates concerning Norman Paulsen does not, as I mentioned above, involve an NDE in the strictest sense of the term. Back in the 1950s, as a young man, Paulsen became a student of the famed Indian yogi, Paramahansa Yogananda, and on February 4, 1952, he undertook a seven-hour meditation in which, practicing the Kriya yoga technique he had learned from his guru, he found himself on a “journey to the center of the Great Central Sun.” As Ring describes it, Paulsen “first became aware of ‘tremendous and intense energy’ at the base of his spine, rising up like flames.” Ring then comments, “presumably, he had activated here the mechanism of kundalini.” The account which follows is drawn from Paulsen’s book, Christ Consciousness, which was published in 2002. After the rise of the kundalini, Paulsen saw before him, in his own words, as taken from his book, a
colossal sphere of brilliance…It’s hurtling toward me! There is [an] incredible voice coming as if from everywhere, “My son, are you ready to die today and be with me?”…”Yes, my Lord, I am ready to die and leave with you.” I feel no fear within. I am going to die and go with him whom I love more than anything else. That shimmering, pulsating orb, it’s exploding all around me with a brilliance beyond anything I have ever seen. I am now whirling within this incredible light...(p. 197)
…I am expanding as a sphere, moving outward in all directions at an incredible rate…Now there are all aroundme, creation’s light abounding. Yes, your images ar floating right through me—star systems, galzxies, universes. I exist in them and they in me…Ecstasy, I fee beyond the limits of all that I have ever conceived. (p. 198)
The voice…speaks again, but from where does it proceed? It is mine and yet not mine. What does it say? “My son, my son, now you have seen: now I must put you back…” Now there within me, the image of the great Sphere of Creation appears, floating like an iridescent bubble in the infinite sea of life and consciousness of which I am a part. (p. 199)
Ring notes some “obvious points of commonality” with reports from NDEers, and points out that the experience “appears to have been triggered by Paulsen’s inner assent that he was willing to die, so in a sense it, too, might actually be regarded as a type of NDE in its own right.”
‘There is no death, nor does Love Ever End’
In 1970, at the age of 20, Beverly Brodsky suffered a motorcycle crash in Los Angeles which, while not bringing her to the point of death, did nonetheless leave her with some scarring and devastating injuries, including a fractured skull and a number of broken bones. Raised in a nonobservant Jewish family, Brodsky had learned of the Holocaust as an eight-year-old child, whereupon she became an atheist, or as she puts it, “I had turned angrily against any early belief in God. How could God exist and permit such a thing to occur?” The motorcycle accident left Brodsky in a severe state of depression, having “torn off half the skin from my face” and shattered her self-image, and Ring supplies her story as an example of “how a condition of the most desolate hopelessness can bring forth the love and healing power of the Light.” After returning home from the hospital, says he, “Beverly’s only wish was to die.” Or as she describes it:
I lay down on the bed and, becoming an agnostic in this moment of trial, as many atheists do, prayed fervently for God to take me; I could not live another day. At twenty I had no goals but to enjoy life and find someone to share it with. The pain was unbearable; no man would ever love me; there was, for me, no reason to continue living.
At that point, however, she experienced an “unexpected peace” as well as an out-of-body episode in which she floated up to the ceiling. Here, she says, she was joined by a “radiant being” that emanated so much love and gentleness she felt as if she were “in the presence of the messiah.” The encounter deepened her serenity as “he took my hand and we flew right through the window,” up and out over the Pacific Ocean. At this point, Brodsky’s journey began to take on characteristics of a typical NDE as she found herself on a deep and circular path with a white light glowing at the far end.
I then remember traveling a long distance upward toward the light. I believe that I was moving very fast, but this entire realm seemed to be outside of time. Finally, I reached my destination. It was only when I emerged from the other end that I realized that I was no longer accompanied by the being who had brought me there. But I wasn’t alone. There, before me, was the living presence of the Light. Within it I sensed an all-pervading intelligence, wisdom, compassion, love, and truth. There was neither form nor sex to this perfect Being. It, which I shall in the future call He, in keeping with our commonly accepted syntax, contained everything, as white light contains all the colors of a rainbow when penetrating a prism. And deep within me came an instant and wondrous recognition: I, even I, was facing God.
I immediately lashed out at Him with all the questions I had ever wondered about; all the injustices I had seen in the physical world. I don’t know if I did this deliberately, but I discovered that God knows all your thoughts immediately and responds telepathically. My mind was naked; in fact, I became pure mind. The ethereal body which I had traveled in through the tunnel seemed to be no more; it was just my personal intelligence confronting that Universal Mind, which clothed itself in a glorious, living light that was more felt than seen, since no eye could absorb its splendor.”
At this point, she went through an experience similar to that described by Rivers and Storm, i.e. of suddenly regaining lost knowledge, while also being “treated to an extraordinary voyage through the universe” in which she remembers being confronted with “supernovas exploding, and many other glorious celestial events for which I have no name.” Eventually Brodsky was returned to her broken body, although the love and joy she experienced on her “heavenly voyage” returned to her body with her.
Although it’s been twenty years since my heavenly voyage, I have never forgotten it. Nor have I, in the face of ridicule and disbelief, ever doubted its reality. Nothing that intense and life-changing could possibly have been a dream or hallucination. To the contrary, I consider the rest of my life to be a passing fantasy, a brief dream, that will end when I again awaken in the permanent presence of that giver of life and bliss.
For those who grieve or fear, I assure you of this: There is no death, nor does love ever end. And remember also that we are aspects of the one perfect whole, and as such are part of God, and of each other. Someday you who are reading this and I will be together in light, love, and unending bliss.
Reality or Scientific Objectivity?
So what did Brodsky, Paulsen, Rivers, and Storm really encounter? Ring seems to set aside the mantle of “scientific objectivity” on the question of a higher being when he offers the following:
The persons whose stories we are telling in this section have had a direct experience of and a personal revelation from God, and their inspired eloquence leaves us in no doubt that in returning to life, they have become his messengers…
Can there be any doubt that Ginny Rivers and Beverly Brodsky both went to the same place—the Ultimate Source, the Greate Central Sun, the Second Light, the Bosom of God (whatever term you may prefer)—where they both received and brought back essentially the same divine revelation to share with the rest of us? And reading their words, after reading so many similar words throughout this book from other NDEers, can you have any doubt that the voices you have listened to in this chapter attest to the highest teachings NDEs have to offer us?
We can ask no more of these people, make no further inquiries, or insist on additional proofs. Hearing what we have heard in these testimonies, we can only try, if we are open to them, for one last time, to take them into ourselves, to make them our own, and to practice the lessons from the Light in our own lives and thereby spread the Light to all the world.
From Palestine to the World at Large
As Jesus said, faith can move mountains, and it is certainly doing so presently in Northern Africa and the Middle East. While the Western media have portrayed the uprisings there as largely secular in nature (mostly, one suspects, in an effort to assuage their own fears), the truth of the matter is quite different. Religion, for Muslims, plays a major role in daily life and has been a significant factor in the protests in Egypt and elsewhere—a point which is underscored by Palestinian writer Nahida Izzat in a recent essay published at Uprooted Palestinians.
It’s absurd to continue reading reports insisting that the Arab revolutions witnessed today are “secular” revolutions. This repeated mantra—by MSM as well as progressive media—becomes more meaningless as we look at live broadcasts and pictures of Egyptians, Tunisians, and Libyans praying even at the darkest hours of their demonstration when viciously attacked by army killing machines.
Here Izzat supplies links to videos (see here for example) depicting protesters in Egypt praying while being attacked by government forces, and she also reports on polls taken in the Middle East showing overwhelming majorities favoring a political system in which religion plays a large role. Then she comments:
Contrary to the West, in the Arab world our experience with religion was and remains, for the most part, positive, constructive, energizing, enlightening and even liberating.
Furthermore, the revolutions that we witness today, were revolutions against Secular regimes with Secular, Liberal and Westernized DICTATORS who have strangled, oppressed, tortured and worked systematically against the wishes of the Arab people for decades. These regimes have silenced any call for reform or change under the pretext of fighting “Islamists” and keeping Islam away from politics.
This centrality of religion to daily life discussed by Izzat is also suggested in Ring’s emails from Palestine, which I should mention here were eventually published in book form—entitled Letters from Palestine (click here to read a review by Stuart Littlewood). One of the Gazans whose communications to Ring are quoted comments that her brother is an engineering student who “listens to music and plays the guitar and prays regularly.”
In her essay, Izzat takes to task Western secular Leftists who have preached to Palestinians that they must discard their religion and adopt secularism. Given the history of the “Judeo-Christian heritage,” along with its use of religion to justify a variety of evils, from war to slavery, Izzat says she can fully understand why Western Leftists adopted the mentality they today possess. But she says they have “arrived and got stuck in this cul-de-sac, in their way of thinking, in terms of looking at and perceiving the world, fragmented, disconnected and boxed in.” And she wants them to understand that in the Muslim world things are different. In the Muslim world, religion:
has managed to intertwine beautifully with politics, religion has formed the moral foundation and ethical backbone of the political arena. Through the moral code inherent in Islam, the world of politics was protected against corruption and misuse of power. Religion, as manifested by Islam, was viewed by many as a natural and organic safeguard against the rise of egoistic, fraudulent and oppressive rulers.
Fraudulent and oppressive rulers such as we presently find throughout the West, I might add. I would like to call people’s attention once more to the video, above, of the protest in Bahrain where the police/military opened fire with automatic weapons. It’s important to keep in mind that as recently as December of last year Hillary Clinton was effusively praising the government of Bahrain for its alleged commitment to democracy. The following is from The Guardian:
In 2003, Bahrain was named by George Bush as a major non-Nato ally. The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, during a visit to Manama in December, called Bahrain a “model partner”, not only for the US but other countries in the region.
“I am impressed by the commitment that the government has to the democratic path that Bahrain is walking on,” Clinton said. “It takes time; we know that from our own experience. There are obstacles and difficulties along the way. But America will continue working with you to promote a vigorous civil society and to ensure that democracy, human rights and civil liberties are protected by the rule of law.”
It would seem, then, that the type of “democracy” Hillary and her fellow Zionists in the U.S. government would prefer to export to the world would be the kind that shoots down people in the streets. A “democracy” with similar characteristics in the U.S. would most likely suit them as well, and of course over the past several decades we have been inching further and further in that direction, with the passage of ever more draconian laws such as the Patriot Act, and with police presently being able to shoot people in poor neighborhoods with almost as much impunity as that enjoyed by the Israeli military in murdering Palestinians. The progressive/secularist approach to activism has been a complete and utter failure at preventing these curtailments of rights and liberties; it has failed at bringing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to an end; it has failed at addressing economic disparities, or halting the ever increasing cuts to social programs for the poor; it failed at getting “single payer healthcare”, a system of insuring people that virtually the entire left end of the political spectrum, from center-to-far-left, agreed was desirable and necessary. But perhaps the American Left’s greatest failure of all is its failure to challenge the power of the Israeli lobby. The war in Iraq has been fought for Israel. Protesting that war without addressing the power of the Lobby is like treating a symptom instead of a disease. It has been said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result. Such could be said of the American Left and its secular approach to politics—it doesn’t produce change. In fact, things keep going from bad to worse.
Awakening
Before closing, I would like to return once more to Kenneth Ring’s work, Lessons from the Light, for there is a suggestion here that a spiritual awakening of sorts may be on the horizon, even in the darkened and benighted West. The question to be considered is whether or not having an NDE permanently alters ones thinking about God and an afterlife. Ring cites several studies, most notably perhaps a study conducted by Australian NDE researcher Cherie Sutherland, showing that in virtually all NDEers this is the case.
In her (Sutherland’s) study, based on fifty Australian NDEers, she found that prior to their NDE, belief in life after death was essentially a “fifty-fifty” proposition; in other words, about half of her sample were believers, whereas the others either were not, or, in a few cases, had formed no opinion on the question. Afterward, there was not a single NDEer who did not believe in some form of life after death! In short, following an NDE, there was complete unanimity of belief on this matter. Regardless of what her respondents had believed before and why, the NDE was manifestly sufficient to override all doubt—in everyone.
But perhaps even more striking than the above is the effect all of this is having upon the public at large. It was in the seventies that pioneer researchers Raymond Moody and Elisabeth Kubler-Ross first published books on the subject of NDEs, and since then, as more books have come out, public interest in the phenomenon has grown. Ring believes the NDE, as a result, is functioning essentially as a “benign virus”—a virus spreading not death and disease but love and spirituality. He emphasizes that the evidence for this is limited, based in large part upon surveys he has conducted among his students at the University of Connecticut as well as evidence of a more anecdotal nature, and he stresses that a more complete and definitive study needs to be done…
But when hoards of NDEers from all over the world—including scientists, physicians, and philosophers, as well as religious persons—begin speaking, as in a single voice, of their certainty concerning a postmortem life, based upon their own experience with death, an embarrassing fracture in the wall of received opinion begins to show itself…
In short, here, too, we can already discern still another facet of the NDE as a benign virus. Increasing familiarity on the part of a large public with the effects of these experiences on belief in life after death is forcing a contemporary reconsideration of the issue, and, for many, it seems, the collective surety of NDEers on this point has been persuasive. As a result, the attention given to NDEs these days is not only bringing about a new view of death, as I argued in the last chapter, but is currently renewing a traditional belief in an afterlife that appeared to be heading toward extinction in the modern secular world.
Coming up in the third and final part of this series—will apartheid become Israel’s chief export to the world?—plus—Resistance in Wisconsin: general strike... or a vote at the ballot box? Richard Edmondson is author of The Memoirs of Saint John: No Greater Love
River to Sea
Uprooted Palestinian
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