Today, a new essay, "Fire and Ice," under "Essays" on the website.  FK

I have often written of synchronicity, as it is the tip of the iceberg of fate that demonstrably affects us all.  In what could be an essay, my son reminded me of a synchronicity series that I had forgotten, most likely because it started with some very negative stuff, although most synchronized events are forgotten anyway as they don't fit into our normal relational pattern of thought. 

My son began with the police.  In a complex story, it happened that a friend's ex-con step brother called the police on the friend for robbing him of video games and an x-box.  The friend says he didn't do it, but it really doesn't matter - most of the games and the x-box itself were the friend's property until the friend had a fight with his brother and left the apartment, whereby his stuff was assumed by the brother.  Yes, complicated and silly, which is what I told my worried son; the police will push it aside as an in-family spat and a nuisance because of the anonymity of the missing property, its low value, and especially because of the personal nature of the actions taken.  This is the kind of headache that only Judge Judy would welcome to boost her daytime ratings.  However, it did remind me of the one time that I made a nuisance visit to the police, something that I am not proud of, but something that had profound consequences for our future lives.

I am also not ashamed of it, either.  It involved a dog fight, and a distant neighbor who claimed that it was my beagles, not his Labrador, who were the aggressors, ridiculous on its face, but I am not here to try my case.  Rather, I had thought nothing of it and had driven off, all the dogs involved being off leashes in the woods, but this neighbor (his 21 year old son, actually) followed me to my house and began making threats - either pay a large sum for some vet bills (again, laughable on its face, but who knows?) or else!  He continued with his threats for a few weeks, my argument being that his dog had been the aggressor - and anyway, he was coming to my home making physical threats at my doorstep!  However right or wrong, I went to the police before violence started and had them give him a call.  The direct threats stopped, but a "for sale" sign appeared mysteriously by the mailbox a few days later.  

My son had just been born and this was an extremely anxious time for us.  About 8 months later, I noticed a derelict house for sale that happened to have a large acreage in an extremely rural area to the north - just what I like - and in spite of the new child and partly because of the hostility of the neighbor, I decided to go for it.  My wife, for some odd reason, agreed, and for the next 2 and a half years I spent a life of sweat and anxiety rebuilding a very flawed house and out-building.  After that time, my wife's company had her move, and the property had to be put up for sale.  The first real estate agent gave us a low price, one that would barely recoup the money put into it, and when I balked, said smugly, "That's all right.  They all come back to me sooner or later." Our next agent gave us a much higher starting price, in hope, and put out a sign at the bottom of the driveway, where the house itself was hidden by the trees.  A day later, a man and his wife drove up, having seen the sign.  I showed him the place and gave him honest answers to the problems.  He was a builder, however, and knew right off, anyway.  A week later, we got the much higher price that we had wanted, with a satisfied buyer.  Selling a house had never been easier.

Because of the profit made, we were able to buy our current house - one that is small but has a large acreage.  Within a few years, something rare happened, especially for those who live in the country.  Along our road, we became good friends with our neighbors, all who happened to be in our age range, and they cemented friendships among themselves.  It has been a surprising and unexpected bonus of our move, one that I had vehemently resisted at first.  

And so a bunch of negatives led us quickly in a direction we did not want or did not expect, and ended with increased wealth and friendship.  It was as if the darkness and struggle had to come before the path was found - and once it was found, things went slicker than grass through a goose.  And such it is that the I Ching says, "(influences) are in harmony, so that all living things bloom and prosper. - T'ai, or "Peace."  This is followed eventually by the negative oracle, "Standstill," which then runs through its cycle again before reaching the positive.  It is said that the worst of low cycles can be avoided by proper behavior - did I do right by contacting the police? But certainly, somehow we got in tune with the positive when it was time, for the path was paved, whether it was initially wanted or not.  Synchronicity pointed the way - as it is meant to do, both in good times and bad.  It happens in all our lives, and we all can see it if we look.  How this happens will forever be a point of discussion here.  FK    

This long weekend I went alone to our small cabin in the Upper Peninsula for well-needed, if not particularly wanted, introspection.  More on that later in an essay, but given the long ride there and back, and the days spent with no one to talk to but myself, many random ideas coalesced from bits and pieces that have built up like so many emails in the inbox.  One was the hippie idea of "free love" and the remarkable success in recent years of mainstreaming same-sex sexual relations.  

For those who were too young to remember or not even born, a large part of the hippie movement - something that has contributed hugely to today's changing social arena - was encapsulated in the bumper-sticker slogan of "free love."  This was not a new idea, and had been tried at times throughout the millennium in the Christian nations by radicals attempting to free themselves from the yoke of the Imperial Church - and always being viciously crushed for it.  In the pagan era of the Roman Empire, orgies were not the norm but they were not forbidden either, and they did occur here and there, often cushioned in spiritual beliefs.  But it is with the crushing of millennial movements in Christendom and the much later belief by Freud that much of our unhappiness was caused by repressed sexuality that I think the general view of the hippies was born.  Free love meant free sex, which meant no more repression and no more wars or psychological problems.


Obviously, open sex of every kind done in the context of the Roman Empire did not lead to peace and love and harmony (anything but), as it did not or would not here and now.  Homosexuality was then not considered a sin and practiced freely, although the idea of gay marriage was unthinkable - marriage was for offspring, or the "gens", which can only occur naturally one way.  Passing on power and wealth to males outside the family was then done by adoption - regardless of the age of those involved.  


Yet still, more than a vestige of the idea of free love and social harmony has been passed on to the political left.  While their critics on the right believe that the left is only interested in destroying traditional society, this is not always the case.  Many on the left do believe that freedom to have sex with anyone and with as many as the parties involved choose, along with the subsequent social legitimization of such groups or couples, will break down the selfishness that they see encapsulated in capitalistic societies.  


There is indeed a neat fit here if done as a rational exercise, but the past has shown - perhaps sadly - that such arrangements will not make for a more peaceful and advanced society (there were groups of people throughout  the world who until recently had any number of odd sexual practices.  None, to my knowledge, were utopias).  As usual, though, in this blog contemporary politics is never the main focus.  Instead, I would like to point out that something much more than rationalization was going on for the true soul-searching hippies of the 60's.  


It had to do with the resolution of internal conflict while using powerful psychotropic drugs.  I have had experience with such things, and much correspondence with others who have as well. As those of us know well, as one approaches the peak experience, a panic sets in, for to reach the "peak" or revelation, ones' ideas of self and society must be broken away - and are often done so forcefully by the workings of the chemicals involved.  The feeling one gets is part and partial with the feeling of going insane, about as uncomfortable an experience as one can have in this world. Because certain types of sex are especially taboo for our society - as they are for just about any society - the crumbling of this taboo (of its meaning, not in actuality) is particularly painful to the normal "self."  It makes it far easier to say, as many said than, "if it feels good, do it" - that is, don't feel guilty or worry about internal challenges to this taboo.  For as we all know, to be told to NOT think about pink elephants is a guarantee that one WILL think of pink elephants.  Get the sexual "hang-ups" out of the way and prepare for a much easier trip - or so it was thought.   This does not minimize the feeling of universal love that often comes with revelation - but this never, as far as I know, translates into rampant sexual energy.  This love is of a different sort, "agape" as the Greeks and Christians called it.  


Unfortunately the "free love" slogan of the hippies, as with most things dealing with spiritual things that are reduced to bumper stickers, has been down-graded in secular society.  But the hippies were only partially right as well.  There are fears that are worse than breaking sexual taboos.  The greatest serves as the obstacle to total trust, or what the religious call "faith."  While we might be able to convince ourselves that sexual desires are just another thing to not worry about, it is hard to lay everything we know as ourselves out on the line - about as difficult as putting your body on the line for almost certain death, depending only on some "god" or some holy power that will save you.  It is the basic existential fear and there is no shortcut to alleviate it.  Sexual openness does not hold a candle to total personal dissolution regarding fear.  To overcome this takes intense faith in a supreme and omnipresent power, however we might wish to envision it or call it.  A society that is looking for utopia but that does not understand this will simply continue to break the mold of the old while making cheaper imitations for a new.  FK           

Today, a new essay, "Chaco Canyon," under Essays in the website. FK

Writing this blog, I have found that there are a few main questions that rise again and again.  Laura George's book, "Truth," brings up the conflict between future- minded modernists (including George) who believe that we are advancing spiritually  in an evolutionary way, and those (the Perennialists) who believe we are cratering big time into the bottom of the materialist pit.  Perhaps it would help to write a list of pros and cons to these perceptions and compare them to see where it takes us.  It seems at this  point that some clarification is necessary, but I will leave it for another day.  

For now, I have started an autobiography by Joseph McConeagle, "Stargate Chronicles," that has left a certain impression at the very beginning.  McConeagle was THE star of the military Stargate program that experimented with and used remote viewing for information gathering purposes in the 1980's and 90's.  Since portions of the once top-secret program have become de-classified, at least one movie and several books have been made concerning it.  McConeagle was the outstanding player in this program, and he later verified publicly in double-blind experiments his incredible psychic talents.  Why the greater world has not come to believe in the "effect" must be as frustrating to people such as McConeagle as it was for Galileo to convince the Catholic Church of a sun-centered solar system, but we will leave that for another day as well.  

Instead, I'd like to focus on the initial part of the book, where Joe tells us what a miserable upbringing he had.   His parents were alcoholics, he lived in an impoverished slum, and he later joined the service to get away, only to end up in Vietnam.  He hated war - he called it "pure hate" - and yet stayed with the military as a career man because, we can suppose, he felt he had few options.  His first marriage was destroyed by military life, leaving him without his son who he adored, and a later marriage proved to be a monumental mistake.  He often drank too much and was frustrated by the military mind-set at nearly every turn.  He was nearly poisoned to death, on purpose, which led to his first near-death experience, and later suffered life-threatening illnesses from exotic stations in SE Asia.  Even after he entered the Stargate program, he was subjected to ridicule by many of those who knew his mission.  So far, tough, tough, tough.

And so I have found with the life stories of most psychics.  They have earlier lives of abuse or sickness or poverty or emotional loss. Coincidentally, shamans - the traditional psychic healers of tribal peoples - often also undergo great trauma before they are "called" to the spirits.  It is as if the steely facade of society - regardless of the society - must be weakened before a person is capable of grasping another or a parallel or a deeper reality.  If one satisfied with what one has, why change?   And so it seems that the greater kingdom is indeed inherited by the sick and the outcast and the lowly.  It also seems that it is not just our society that binds us to a limited reality.  Why is this so if we are otherwise capable of such knowledge?  It is, I believe, what is meant by an "age" : that at certain epochs of human existence, we all collectively fall in line with certain thought patterns.  Thus we might have an age of wonder at one stretch, and a countering age of materialism and cynicism at another.  

So for now, in our age, the psychically gifted must suffer for their gift. We might suppose that one should be careful what one wished for, but how many really want psychic abilities?  Is it worth the final price of being forever an outsider?  Perhaps the autobiography will answer this clearly, but I suspect we will be left in doubt - were the adventures from his gift worth the price?  FK     
    
               

The last essay given, "Finding Dharma," was not particularly poetic and certainly not beautiful.  Instead is was simply fact - that chance played a big role in my life and, I'm betting, in everyone's life.  And not only chance - the circumstances in this case were timed so precisely as to confound the idea of random chance.  

Freud said that there are no accidents - that everything we do and say and everything we don't do and say are determined by an apparent super-intelligence that he labeled the unconscious. But bigger still are the synchronicities in life that must come, at least partially, from "without." This was discovered by Carl Jung, Freud's student and later rival, although he would not say exactly what agency was responsible for this outside influence.  He would not say, we might speculate, because it gets too close to the idea of an outside intelligent force that affects our lives.  For a scientist who wants to be taken seriously, this is a tricky issue.  But that is certainly the most logical conclusion, and a fundamental reason, besides a fundamental disagreement over the centrality of sex, that caused the rivalry between the two psychiatrists.  On the one hand we had the atheist who conjured an invisible interior intelligence; on the other, a closet believer who cautiously pointed to an outside, or general, intelligence.  

I have to say that my own essay gave me a great deal of hope - I often forget the reality of an outside agency.  We are often like the Jews in the desert with Moses, who quickly forgot the miracle of the Red Sea and started to worship the golden calf.  We are subject to the same sort of amnesia, but a little reflection from everyone on how their life got to the point where it is should cause astonishment.  There is cause and effect, but there is also something else - reminding us that reality is a miracle all and by itself.

Cause and effect; we watched the last of the Matrix movies last night, "Matrix Revolutions," and that was the message, as well as that 'something beyond.'  First, it presented what might be the Freudian view, as espoused by a character of east Indian, and probably of Hindu, background.  "Each action leads to a reaction, and nothing is without meaning - every decision we make is part of the plan."  We are at first led to see that this plan is highly structured and artificial, based on mathematical probabilities created by the high priest of the artificial intelligence that has taken over the world, a being called "the Architect."  As this being explained with great arrogance to our hero, Neo, all his (and all most people's) memories and actions were decided by the program -  except there had to be an element of "chance" to convince humans that the reality the machines had made for them was true.  But with that "chance" came anomalies, and Neo, our savior, was just such an anomaly, and one that would be and had to be destroyed.  The probabilities were geared towards this fate.  Of course, he was not destroyed, and through a display of Christ- like martyr actions, he was able to force a truce between man and machine.  Within the truce, those who wished to be freed from the matrix - the AI program - would be, without hostile consequences.  Oddly, and this is another point that we do not have time to discuss here, many would choose to remain in an artificial reality rather than give up what they had within it - that is, they would rather live in a limited fantasy world than accept the truth.  

But for others, they were thrown into the real world again - where uncertainty and chance reign.  It is here, at the end, where the great wise woman of humanity, The Oracle, lets us in on our, rather than the Architect's, view on life; asked whether she had foreseen the triumph of Neo, she replied, "No.  But I believed."  She could have said, "I had hoped," and meant the same thing, for here she is admitting to the reality of an outside agency which we do not control and know little about.  This is Jung's "synchronous" mind, which somehow involves us with something outside ourselves that is inexplicable.  While we do, then, live in a world of cause and effect and Karma, we also have to deal with something from the outside, an "X" factor that can and often does play a central role in our lives.  Some call it God, others the Will of Heaven.  To believe in it is not only to have hope, but to understand life and truth just that much better - for this power does exist and does - although not at our bidding but by its own - strongly affect our lives.  FK         

For today, a new essay, "Finding Dharma," under Essays in the website.  FK

Here's one for the "easier said than done" department: 

It started with a letter from a relative who admitted to waking at 4 in the morning filled with regrets and hopelessness, even as his life is taking a sudden and dramatic turn for the better.  Ah, yes, those 4 in the morning moments!  Have them all the time myself, and did last night.  It comes as an assault on the self, ruthless and unadorned - if it were another age, it would be the harsh cry of "sinner!" from the clergy, although now it is more personal: you are a loser and a fool.  One might think that this is the conscience working, but that is not it; the conscience of spiritual name works to guide our actions and thoughts, not pummel us for our irredeemable transgressions.  More than that, a proper conscience would not call us a "loser" because we had not measured up to a social standard of success. 

No, this voice is ourselves (that is, a part of our contemporary selves) , what Freud termed the "super conscious," that harsh dictator of social control.  Ruthless, it tries to whip us into action to appease the ego that is socially allowed, and to chastise the part of the ego that is forbidden.  It often works in contradictory ways - social success might have to be bought by social transgression - that is, one might have to remain distant from raising one's children to satisfy the drive for success in the marketplace, causing more 4 in the morning moments.  And it is this voice that I described and criticized in yesterday's long-winded blog, Nebraska.  Yet here I am, admitting to my own early morning horror story.

"Nebraska" is giving in to this voice, this nag that will never give us peace.   We should be smarter than this, but this is not such an easy path.  Like the Believer who shines in public but sins in private, following what we know to be best must be done with "impeccability" as Don Juan of Carlos Castaneda fame often said.  It means careful discrimination between what we, the social animal, wants, and what we, the spiritual being, must have.  Enlightenment is not bought with guilt and self-recrimination.  That was the way of the villagers and Pharisees in Jesus's time - sin once and get caught, and one is an outcast and unworthy for all time.  But this is not so.  We will sin, but we must then recognize it and walk away, free, to try to sin no more.  But past sins (inadequacies) cannot be bought off by internal torment.  Such is a useless thing.  And the future should not be run for public approval.  Thus all the prophets have told us to go into the wilderness to find ourselves - that is, to get away from the social noise and expectations (to, as Jesus put it, "despise one's family and leave it behind) to find the true path, the only worthwhile path, the path to enlightenment. 

But no one who knows anything said it was easy.  It is easy to leave the state of Nebraska, but much harder to leave the Nebraska state of mind.  FK           

I will pass it by today, but what a web author Laura George weaves of the sordid history of the Catholic Church!  She outlines the entire Albigensian, Knights Templar, Holy Grail, Merovingian, Black Madonna, Priory of Sion, House of David/Jesus's child tale referred to in Dan Brown's "The DaVinci Code" which I thought was an hysterical string of paranoia, but apparently not, at least according to the author.  It is a fascinating story, damning the Catholic Church in the process, and the Albigensian massacres were genuine.  Perhaps for tomorrow, if I can catch my breath.  

For now, though, a meditation on the movie "Nebraska" which I watched on the VCR this weekend as the thunderstorms rolled in.  It is a remarkably small movie, with little ambition.  Meant to tug at the heartstrings, it did not, at least mine.  Yet it had a point to make about how we hurt our lives and the lives of others through small acts of selfishness and the larger act of allowing ourselves to be swallowed up by the devastating demands of the ego.  

Starring Bruce Dern as an unsympathetic drunk / retiree, we first find him walking along a highway in Billings, Montana (in black and white - the entire movie is black and white, for the purpose of underscoring the bleakness of life in the Heartland), where he explains to a paternalistic state trooper that he is "going to Nebraska to claim my 1 million dollar prize." He has gotten a magazine subscription add that promises him that he is a WINNER! in big print, while adding in small "if your number matches the winning prize number."  We quickly gather by his grubby house and his unsympathetic family that he is a loser who is now stumbling over the line of fantasy to make something of  himself - to win a big award.  He insists against all reason that he will go to Omaha to get his prize no matter what, and so our journey begins, as his unsuccessful but nice-guy son travel under gray skies through a sparse early spring landscape.  At one point, Dern (I forget his stage name) falls while drunk and has to spend the day in a hospital - on a Friday, which means they will not make it to Omaha before the weekend.  As his son has a job, it is concluded that they will only stop by Dern's hometown a few hours away for an impromptu family reunion.  The get-together is spectacularly boring, as apparently is all of Nebraska - boring and lacking in hope.  When Dern lets out the fantasy that he has one a million bucks, suddenly family and an old associate become very interested in collecting money they feel he owes them.  It gets ugly, and it is here where we are to find sympathy for Dern.  We discover that he is a very sensitive, simple and generous man who has always been taken advantage of.  He has been at the bottom of the social pyramid all his life, and all he wants is for ONCE to be looked up to as a winner.  We also find that those looking to collect from him really owe him and have used him shamelessly.  When they learn the real nature of his "prize" he again becomes the goat to everyone in town.  In the end, his son helps him rectify this to his satisfaction, but what I found most interesting was the bleakness - not of the landscape, but of the people.  They seemed to live in spite of themselves, only because the alternative was death.  There were no interesting conversations, no allusions to the landscape or greater meaning or even existential despair.  They did live in despair, but it was locked inside themselves, whittling away at any dreams they once may have garnered from action and adventure stories.  No, they were Nebraskan, and like the landscape, they would live out flat, colorless lives and finally become part of the earth, the great expanse filled with life-giving corn, almost with a sigh of relief.

We moved to Wisconsin farm country 15 years ago, and at first I was impressed - almost awed - by the openness of the sky.  By winter, I was crushed by the dead fields and endless wind and cold. The landscape (or so it seemed) then succeeded in causing a slow-moving depression which lasted for a few years or a little more - it is hard to tell exactly when a subtle energy such as that begins or ends.  And then things lightened up.  Nothing else changed but perspective - winter became a time for firewood and skiing and other recreations, and the other seasons were greeted for their low-key beauty.  In my book "Dream Weaver," I refer to Wisconsin as the homely girl next door - the one you always came back to. This is true in my case, and I have come to appreciate her charms.  With such a bleak winter, never is spring and summer more appreciated.  And fall - although it lacks the colors and grand views of my native New England, the weather manages to balance in the perfect range for anywhere from a few weeks to almost two months.  It has become a good place, and few are the people I know here who are locked in random despair.  There is always hope, mobility and finally, a lakeside with barbecue and beer (or snowmobiles and ice fishing).  

Wisconsin is not Nebraska, for better or worse and perhaps for the better, but it is not a hopping place and not a  place of spectacular beauty.  Is Nebraska really a land filled with dead-enders?  In the movie, there is a scene at the old homestead as well as at the family burial plot where whippoorwills call from the cotton woods and the wind pushes great white clouds through the ocean-like sky.  Beautiful in its stark fashion.  Might not the people be like this also? This is not the Depression era dust bowl, but a land where no one is starving and everyone seems to have enough to buy a beer (or several) and a used pick-up (if the movie is at all accurate).  If the people are dead inside, it is not the fault of the land or extreme poverty.  Rather it is their perceived  need to be somewhere else, to be doing something SPECIAL- as if any but a few of us can ever do or be anything special.  In my dark days in Wisconsin, I found that it was frustration that kept me imprisoned - I was not where I wanted to be or doing what I wanted to do.  Through luck or persistence or whatever, I learned to do something else and to see the land as the special place it is - as are all natural settings.  While there is little in the way of classic scenic wonder about, this isn't an uninspired place, either, for the land grows and greens and shivers under storms and bakes under sun all for me to see.  It is, when I am fully awake, a blessing.  

What then of the movie people of Nebraska?  I feel I am crowing about my luck, and need to pull back.  A bleakness of spirit may find me again, but I hope I will remember that, if it is not from some internally-caused chemical imbalance, it is from myself- that is, from self-expectations that have not been met; that is, from the special-ness that I am demanding for my destiny that is really not special, anymore than is any one else's.  But that is special, too, for in one moment and another, the wind and the clouds and the whippoorwills move and sing only for me. 

And so the movie was greater than it wished to be, in spite of itself. Dern remained an old fool, unable to live without the external recognition that he was special, although he did gain the sympathy of his son.  If he could only have looked beyond the bitterness of others and grasped the openness of the sky!  As if that is easy for any of us, but so the movie tells me to do, in its bleak tale of frustrated ego on the edge of the infinite plains.  FK 

We are coming to the more crucial parts of Laura George's book, "The Truth (about the five major religions)", where she argues the weaknesses - and ultimate failures - of today's major religions.  But she has already hit Christianity hard.  For many Christians, the very act of being a Christian relies on the belief in the divinity of Christ (a special divinity, as in "one with the Father").  We learn, however, that this has not always been the case.  According to her research, the first head of Christianity - those who were making the sayings of Jesus into a religion, or body of texts - was James, the brother (either through Joseph and Mary, or Joseph alone), who remained in Jerusalem as a Jew.  He and his followers continued to observe Mosaic law, but, unlike other Jews, believed that Jesus was the prophesied Messiah.  In Jewish tradition, the Messiah was akin to King David, a special emissary from God - but NOT God - who would reclaim Israel for the Jews and bring worldly peace.   Although this did not happen, they took Jesus as the Messiah none-the-less, with a different literal understanding of the prophesies.  In any case, he was NOT considered divine - only a very special son of Man.

At the same time, the Gnostics (ie, Wisdom seekers) were also Jews living in Qumran, or the village near where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found.  They also took Jesus to be the Messiah - although not God - but differed from James in that they did not practice Mosaic law.  That, they declared, was ended by the acts of Jesus himself, who often defied the rules.  Both they and the James faction believed that Jesus had indeed opened the door to heaven for the common man, but believed to the core that God could only be ONE God - that any other notion would be idolatrous.


Finally, there was Paul.  Viewed with suspicion by the other Christians - he had persecuted them before his fabled epiphany on the road to Damascus - he was kept out of the inner circle and forced out of Jerusalem.  He thereby became the Gentile evangelist, and as he stated himself, he would "be a pagan to the pagans, a Jew to the Jews, anything to spread the word..." (my paraphrase).  It is George's view, taken from other scholars, that it was HE who insisted on the divinity of Christ, as it was more compatible with pagan costume.  They liked multiple gods, and perhaps would not have respected a mere mortal as the spiritual founder of a religion.  It was also Paul who instituted a hierarchy within the church, one that latter would be absorbed by the Roman Empire.  


For the author, the institutionalization of Christianity was the beginning of its greatest problem - and it is obvious that the Church has not only strayed from Christ's teachings, but also become, by their very hierarchy and institutions, the hypocrites declaimed by Jesus for keeping the law and not the spirit.  She also sees a problem with the  deification of Jesus - for as God, he then becomes the premier prophet of all prophets, making His religion arguably the greatest of the Great Religions.  It is in such a  context that John, writing 70 years after Jesus's death, could quote Jesus as saying "I am the only  way..."  For the author, this formed the source of the bigotry and violence that the original Christian Church is so famously guilty of.  


Tonight I will read more, but it is not hard to see that Christianity will fair especially poorly under this author, herself a cradle Catholic, for such is often the case in the West.  It is almost a pathology of our Euro-culture to hate ourselves for our own shortcomings far more than we dislike othres for their own the shortcomings - if we are allowed to recognize the shortcomings of "others" at all without accusations of bigotry.  This aside, though, she does have a point which concerns all religions: her overriding idea is that we are put here on Earth to learn the path to God.  To have it closed because of orthodoxy or exclusion is anathema to her, and to a large extent, I agree.  One of the greatest things about our often awful times is the openness with which we may pursue God or Truth, as well as the world-wide availability of information about and by others who have also traveled along the path to truth.  It may well be that many will find that the Old Time Religion (whatever that  might be for them) is the best path, regardless of its historic shortcomings, but that the path or paths are open to all is a guarded blessing.  It can lead to confusion and wrong conclusions, but it can also lead to each finding his or her own path based on their own free will - something that Christians as well as others insist we must have to reach heaven.  FK