Making Peace With Enemies

Rabin was a moderate Prime Minister of Israel who had been assassinated by the extremist Zionist Party that still holds power there. Rabin once said that “one does not make peace with one’s friends”. This was a simple statement but it addressed a profound problem that still lingers on, that is that especially in democracies it is hugely unpopular to sit down with enemies in order to try to come to accommodations and compromises – the only avenues for any viable peace or reconciliation.

Democracies tend toward extremism, and attempting to make peace with one’s enemies is simply not extreme enough for popular democratic tastes, and so it is that War can be far more politically viable than Peace. No Right Wing Radio Personality ever boosted his rating by appealing for Peace and Understanding. And then, War mongers can spout such slogan as “Support Our Troops” which can be difficult to argue with, while it can be said of any Peacemaker that he is giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Well, yeah, as peace talks are indeed the first and most significant move away from War.

So we can begin to discern a trend, that while Peacemaking correlates so closely to political suicide in any democratic nation, we can begin to see why the History of Democracies are so punctuated with Wars.

And such wars tend to be more severe and devastating than they really need to be. Why? Well, since Democracies cannot make peace through negotiation, then if peace is achieved at all, then it is by means of the unconditional surrender of their enemies, that is, the enemies are driven to total despair and are apparently willing to sign off on any humiliation, agreeing to possible genocide, probable slavery, the desecration of their Religions. You see, unconditional means unconditional. Enemies must be willing to accept any fate. But is this really likely that anybody would agree to such a devastating proposition, or is it a fact that enemies don’t surrender at all but rather that they arrive at the point where they simply have no further means to resist, and that their entire nation has been laid to ruin.

The United States established the practice of demanding unconditional surrenders. It started honestly enough with one of their Civil War Generals who did not feel that he had the political authority to negotiate terms of peace, as that would have been in the province of his own civilian political overseers. So he specified that his opponents would simply have to surrender and trust that the civilian authorities from both sides would work out the appropriate details later.

But nowadays it is the American Executive Branch and State Department who refuse to negotiate and insist upon unconditional surrenders. This makes no sense, as they are exactly the people who are politically positioned to come to terms with an enemy for the sake of making peace.

There are several motives I can think of for why a Government would not negotiate for peace but insist upon an unconditional surrender – first, that the Government may have some secret agenda for its War which it wishes to remain unspoken and unspecified. For instance, if America really wants all the Oil in the Middle East and will go to War for it, but can’t ever say so, and hides its real agenda behind various ideological missionary concerns – the wish for Democracy and Human Rights in the Region. But then America goes on to kill hundreds of thousands of citizens of a country ostensively so they can be politically free, while half of them are sent to American prison camps to be tortured and held without any political or judicial rights. Well, the stated objectives of the War are totally at odds with what we see happening on the ground. Such inconsistencies point toward their being unspoken war agendas. Secondly, a government may demand an unconditional surrender in order to guarantee that a nation will be completely and utterly destroyed. We had such a situation in what is still called World War II, where the Germans had been repeatedly suing for peace since 1941, while the war continued on until 1945. You see, America and Great Britain had determined that the Post War World would be dominated by only a few Super Powers – Britain, America, Russia and China. It was felt that Germany would be so much more tractable to the plan if they were totally destroyed, starved out in an effective genocide – the best Germans would be dead Germans. What are called the Death Camps were probably more or less refugee centers where feeding stations could be set up. Food was getting low on the Continent and the Germans knew it, and the Camps were their response to the waves of starvation that were anticipated and expected, if Britain and America still insisted upon not ever negotiating a Peace. Yes, when the food ran out, these camps provided points of control where food riots could be easily suppressed, and the starving peoples warehoused to die. But where was the choice? The German Armies had TRIED to surrender but the Allies had refused to talk. Roosevelt and Churchill presided over the complete embargo of Europe and knew to a certainty that they were starving out millions of people, all while they rejected peace initiative after peace initiative.

As bad as it was, it could have ended far more badly. You see, before the war ended the obviously demonic Roosevelt died, no doubt because of the efficiency of prayers from some good souls somewhere, and that drunken killer Churchill was thrown out of office (remember that no Government in the history of the World had deliberately targeted more civilians for death than Churchill’s government during the war – dozens of purely civilian urban centers were firebombed with the express intent of maximizing civilian casualties). So, without Roosevelt or Churchill in power to maintain their plans for a complete Western European Genocide, relief supplies were sent into Europe and the millions of starving people were given food. But then the War Crimes trials went forward with never a single lawyer asking or answering the question of why it was thought that the NAZIS would deliberately kill millions of people who were starving to death anyway. Would so many millions have died in the Camps if Roosevelt and Churchill had allowed for humanitarian food shipments to be imported into Continental Europe? Since most deaths were of starvation, then the answer is clear, that the brunt of the so called Holocaust can be attributed to the Allied food embargo and to the ally’s refusal to discuss terms of peace, prolonging the War for 3 or 4 more years.

Curiously, it is a serious infringement of German Law, even today, to do any research into German History of the War. So history is left to believe the arguments of Lawyers from the War Crimes Trials. Well, would that not be the first time that lawyers had ever presented the truth about anything. What we actually suspect is that lawyers will say anything they can get away with in order to win their case. But now the History of that War is almost entirely based on such a suspect basis, that we should believe lawyers about anything. And then the lawyers took it one step further and have made it illegal to research or inquire beyond into the Truth. And yet the propaganda insists that we are Free.

The new variation on ‘unconditional surrender’ is the demand that opposing governments renounce all violence and surrender all arms and submit to complete inspections before any peace negotiations will even be considered. Well, again, this is perhaps the only viable path for any democracy which depends upon the extremist vote and extremist constituencies. As we have already established that it is political suicide to discuss peace – where enemies are defined as evil, and then the next step is to insist that to compromise with evil is in itself evil. So once such a war begins, the politicians have no choice but to keep dropping bombs forever. But then, there may be an element of deliberate genocide involved. The English told the Irish Catholics that peace would not even begin to be negotiated until the Irish had already totally surrendered which they knew would never happen, and so the English were then able to continue killing the Irish, which is probably what they wanted all along. Equally, the Israeli Zionists insist that there will be no peace negotiations until the Palestinians totally renounce violence and, furthermore, totally concede every political demand ever placed before them by the Zionists. Such is a puzzling demand, and one would wonder why any Palestinian would ever agree to it, because, well, isn’t it obvious, that if the Palestinians agreed to disarm, and agreed to surrender all of their rights to all of their old land and properties, that the Israeli Zionists would then have absolutely everything that they had ever wanted. Then, as far as the Zionists would be concerned, no peace negotiations would be required. If they already have everything they want, then what’s there to talk about? So I suspect that Israel makes impossible demands simply to keep up the killing, and for the fact that Israel continues to use its perpetual war to push out its borders more and more each decade, more and more each year. To them War is how they thrive. They are institutionalized predators. And it must be some incentive for Perpetual War that the Americans give Israel 5 billion dollars each year providing that the Israelis should never make Peace. This makes War their biggest money making business, the largest chunk of their GNP. Perhaps the Americans should consider paying for Peace rather than War.

America used somewhat the same strategy with Iraq. While Saddam Hussein repeatedly tried to negotiate terms of Peace – ‘if I did this, this, and this, then what would I get in return’? Well, America’s reply, from Bush, and even from Clinton, would be ‘You must do everything imaginable to surrender to every imaginable demand, and then we will tell you when you have finally done enough, if that should ever happen, and then we will decide what we will give you’. It was simply America refusing to talk. One can only conclude that the America’s true agenda was to destroy the Iraqi economy with its sanctions, and of course to eventually have Saddam Hussein hanged.

And then America wonders that the World has subsequently become so destabilized. America selected out Iraq, destroyed its economy and had its Leader murdered and its leading political party outlawed and run into exile. All while refusing to talk to anybody about it. It was all a foregone conclusion – America would destroy Iraq.

Then George Bush makes an announcement that Syria, Iran and Korea are just as bad as Iraq ever had been and that America would ‘retain the option to do the same thing to any of them’. My God! But isn’t that tantamount to a declaration of war? What do we expect of these Nations but that they would instantly prepare to defend themselves. Now, if America was predisposed toward Peace, then America could do exactly what it has been demanding of everybody else, and that is they could “renounce violence”. But again and again and again the Executive Branch and the American State Department repeat like a mantra “America reserves the right to exercise any option”. This means that America insists that it ultimately wants to resort to War, regime change, and murder.

If America really wanted Iran, Syria and Korea to settle down, then America could very easily achieve this end simply by guaranteeing that all Regimes would be respected and that bombing raids and invasions would never be resorted to unless in response to precisely the same kind of provocation. “If you do not resort to War, than we will not resort to War”. In short, if America could only finally renounce violence itself, it would be the first and most significant step toward World Peace. But that is the one thing America absolutely refuses to do, Democrat and Republican alike.

But it may be politically impossible. After all, what politician will not remember that George Bush won re-election simply because he was a ‘war-time’ president. Democracies may have so much invested in War that peace has become impossible. And with Democracy spreading throughout the World, perhaps the War Fever will only spread. We can see in the Palestinian election of their most extreme War Party, Hamas, an instance of this morbid trend in Democracy at work. When Palestine was a One Party Government it was able to approach the Peace Table, but now that it is a Democracy, it is just as intransigent as Israel, also under the sway of its own extremist parties that swept into power on the tide of blood lust.

I wish I could conclude with a hopeful note, but no end seems to be in sight for this continuous disaster.

The Dark Sides of Democracy

The most common misconception concerning Democracy is that it is a system of government by which the people are represented. Lincoln had said “of the People, by the People, and for the People”. Although it is not likely that one will ever find much that Lincoln was wrong about, in this particular instance he should have known better than anybody, that democracy only represents the winning party. Those who had voted against Lincoln soon had a war brought down upon their heads.

So it is that at best a Democracy will represent a majority of the people. But often that isn’t the case, for where there may be many parties and many candidates, then even the winner with the most votes may only represent just a minority of the complete electorate. Even where the System admits for runoff elections, one can hardly suppose that people are fully represented by their second choice candidate. Then in Parliamentary Systems where Governments must be formed from out of diverse coalitions, often the most extreme and radical parties must be courted by the center parties so they may claim a majority. Often these cases require that disproportionate influence be surrendered to these pivotal wedge minority parties. The NAZI party was such a minority party at first, just one party of a coalition. Ironically, Israel today is dominated by a small radical Zionist party because no Government can had a majority of seats without its 20% or so. So it is that Parliamentary Governments can be enslaved by their minorities. But even in the United States there are swing vote minority constituencies that control a disproportionate amount of power relative to their numbers.

But lets look more closely to these minorities, and even the majorities. When Democracy was still new, the greatest fear was that divisions would fall along the lines of class warfare. Well, often enough they do. Indeed, the Greeks who invented Democracy could not continue the experiment because it all collapsed amidst wars and social rebellions. Historians are perhaps trying too hard to pretend that Democracy had nothing to do with all of the troubles that soon developed alongside this system of government of Winners being the dictators over the Losers.

Perhaps the worst problem of Democracy is not how it divides the classes into warring factions, but how Democracy may establish power struggles between the various ethnic and religious groups within a national jurisdiction. Indeed, one of the great Historians who had theorized on Democracy was in fact the American President Woodrow Wilson, who pronounced explicitly and emphatically that ultimately Democracy would be an expression of Ethnic Self-determination. People would vote entirely along ethnic lines. In so many words, Woodrow Wilson had predicted the rise of the NAZI Party, for, after all, The NAZIS were almost the perfect expression of purely ethnic self-determinism. We might say the same thing about Yugoslavia and the Balkans – peaceful and calm for 50 years under Socialism, but it was not Democratic for 5 minutes before the bloodiest genocide broke out. Iraq is another example. Peaceful and calm under One Party Leadership, despite external wars and internal economic hardships, all the various ethnic groups and religious sects lived in a state of tranquility – neighborhoods were mixed, and even marriages were crossing sectarian and ethnic lines. But within 5 minutes of Democracy being imposed from without, the Wars and the factional killings began.

What happens to people who suddenly fall victim to Democracy. Well, it is not so bad for the Winners… the real winners who may not even be the majority, remembering that the winning coalitions in Germany and then in Israel were as much victimized by the NAZIS and Zionists as the out and out losers. But, yes, the out and out losers of elections really are very conscious that they are indeed disenfranchised by their Governments. The Losers in a Democracy may as well be the most helpless victims to the whims of the majority. Death Camps, genocide. Democratic Majorities really can do anything they like. Take America as a present example. While America does have a Constitution and a Bill of Rights that can be construed fairly to suppose that minority rights will be protected, in actual fact the Executive Branch, the Courts and the Legislative branches can conspire to largely do anything they like. Just look at America these last 7 years and pretend as much as you like that those who lost the election had retained even the least amount of influence. They haven’t. The Winning Extreme went off its own deep end, ignoring all that had gone before, throwing out law, setting aside treaties, out to conquer the World, or at least to make enemies of the entire World.

There is something about Democracy and Extremism. Yes, we have seen periods in history where political parties appeal to the vast middle range of the electorate. But it is disturbingly clear that repeatedly in history we have seen that electorates fracture into extremes, and there is no longer any significant Center to appeal to, and Democracy must decide between one fanatical extreme or the other. Can we expect the losers to be good losers? Or can we even expect the winners to be good winners? You see, where the winners may have only squeaked out a slim majority, or in some cases out and out had stolen the election, then even the winners may resort to genocidal violence in order to secure the next election. Losers also, though not having a share in Government may resort to self-help in order to slice away at the opposing majority. Indeed, again look at America, where during the decade of the Sixties all of the favorite liberal democratic politicians were assassinated, thus guaranteeing the eventual rise of the Extreme Right. That was hardly a coincidence. Also, in Pre-NAZI Germany the favorite statesmen were poisoned or shot. In Israel they also decided pivotal elections with assassination, killing Rabin. Oh, Israel loves the politics of assassination. The other day I heard that Israel had assassinated a man belonging to Hamas, saying that he was one of the Leaders. Well, the man was only 24 years old. They have killed so many that now the ‘Leaders’ are practically only just boys. It is no accident that they are bombing the school yards – they are after the new ‘Leaders’.

Anyway, Democracy is extremely dangerous. It had been Cold War propaganda that Democracies are inherently peaceful. Yet we only need to look at the History of Democracy, both with Ancient Democracy as it appeared in Greece, and then Republicanism as it appeared in Rome and then later in certain European City States; and then we can regard the most recent waves of Democracy for the last several hundred years. And it is a history of almost uninterrupted civil strife and expanding levels of warfare, foreign and domestic.

Well, it is almost a clique that if democracy is bad then everything else is worse. Churchill, that famous drunk, said it. But really if we look at history we can find far more stable systems of government. Even looking at the World today we can see certain Bureaucratic Meritocracies that seem to promise the highest levels of peace and prosperity. Indeed, all practical people can intuit the preference for Meritocracies over democracies. Simply look at the behavior of all of the World’s Stock Markets and their patterns of investment. Have they been investing in the New Democracies – in Latin America and Africa and in the Near East. Well, no. They are seen as too unstable. Then half of the Democracies are blamed for electing the ‘wrong’ parties and they are banished from the World Community. But look at all of the very stable One Party Meritocracy States – they are all growing at 10% a year. So while all the Propaganda is for Democracy, all of the serious money is going toward Merit and Stability. And, yes, while the propaganda for Democracy makes the most of telling people that elected governments represent the people, we need to remember that in a Meritocracy the leaders are not from Outer Space but likewise rise up from the people, but while they are not obliged to any particular faction or ethnic group, they really are free to represent the People in their Entirety. Only a Meritocracy can be óf the people, by the people, and for the people’ while democracies are inherently factional and divided… civil wars waiting to happen.

Of course, so conditioned are we to pro-democratic propaganda that we suppose every non-democratic form of government is some tyrannical dictatorship, deliberately intending to treat its people badly, as though by some perverse mandate. Indeed, let us look at this pro-democracy propaganda more closely. Let us suppose that a Stable Meritocracy has created a high level of order and prosperity, but that certain individuals and outsiders, well, those who have not enough merit to get anywhere in a Meritocracy, that they decide that if they can overthrow the System, then they can be the Dictators, the New Bosses, the “Haves”. Such is how Democracies are born – not by Idealists, but by Opportunists – those who would destroy a Golden Palace if only they could make off with a single candlestick they did not have before. Democracy is a tool for overthrowing a State. Indeed, even Aristotle could point out that Democracy was not the beginning of a Civilization but its End.

An interesting example of democracy as opportunism is seen with the Cultural Revolution in China in the Sixties and then with the Tiananmen Square Riots. There were groups early during the Great Cultural Revolution who used the words Democratic Reform to elicit support from the United States. But when they achieved power, well, they got all that they wanted and forgot all about democracy as they were fairly sure they could represent themselves (likewise in the American Revolution, only one party was recognized and all dissenting voices were outlawed, banished, exiled or killed). But then the Sixties became the Seventies and then came the Eighties, and the same young Rebels of the Cultural Revolution became the Established Party Hierarchy. So when Tiananmen Square erupted in Pro-Democracy Protests, as the American’s termed it, the Old Foxes were well aware of what the New Foxes were doing. The Old Leadership knew exactly how dangerous these protestors could be, and they could guess that these new Democratic Reformers were probably just as sincere about Democracy as they themselves had been. Actually, the cynical truth was that the protestors were willing to grab power and property over the dead bodies of those who already held them. We could maybe forgive such rebellion if it could help, if it could be productive of some good, but the History of it all tells us that the Cultural Rebellion simply wasted decades of development and millions of lives. Subsequently America and the West cited this Rebellion so as to blame and shame Institutionalized Socialism, as though the Cultural Revolution had been deliberately planned and all of its excesses had been scheduled, mapped and enumerated beforehand as matters of profound Marxist policy.

But now the West wants it both ways. They blame China for allowing the Cultural Revolution. Then they blame China for disallowed the Next Cultural Revolution, which is certainly what the Tiananmen Square Riots were brewing up to be. Actually the World should have congratulated China for maintaining the peace this time around, and China’s growing strength and prosperity today owe everything to those Leaders who had the sense to stamp out anarchy before it could spread across the entire country. Again, China would have had to wait for this new generation of thieves and killers to mature into responsible leaders. Oh, and in this regards, China can be grateful for its long tradition in the ways of deciding Leadership by Merit. Even among thousands of some of the worse people alive, the Chinese System was able to raise up what turned out to be a rather capable circle of Leadership. But eventual success for the generation of the Cultural Revolution is no argument for Tiananmen Square, as it would only waste another 20 years to arrive at where it would have already been.

So, anyway, we need to consider whether Democracy is even genuine, whether there is any degree of sincerity in all of its propaganda. It may be that Democracy was a creation of Free Masonry intended only as a tool to destroy the Old Regimes, and then to destroy all effective Government which is seen as the rival and enemy to these Isolated Pirates and Pillagers. (I think it is the truth that nearly every signer of the American Declaration of Independence, and then all of those of the Constitutional Convention had been Free Masons. It goes far in explaining how Washington, a very stupid General, had arrived at and retained so much power, and it was because he had been the highest ranking Mason in the Colonies and so already was entitled to everybody’s exact obedience. And then most of the French Revolution was of Free Masonry, and, indeed, most of today’s European Political Establishment is unapologetically Free Mason, while the European electorate is not the least bit curious about what Secret Orders their Statesmen are bound to follow, or even curious to know who ultimately is giving the orders and establishing the agendas. They are a Secret Organization, and their High Council simply does not publish the minutes to their meetings. At least Hitler told us his plans. Of the Free Masons we can only guess). Democracy may be a tool of the Rich, as they suppose that the Power of Wealth can easily out-maneuver any Democracy as hampered and hamstrung as it would be by all the constitutional checks and balances, and then all of the inherent squabbling between faction and party.

Oh, and that brings us to Corruption. As we well see in America today, the Big Money Lobbies not only decide the Elections, but they pick out who gets to run for political office in the first place. We need to wonder why the Richest Countries in the World are so intent upon insisting that every nation in the world adopt democratic institutions. The cynical answer would be that they suppose that democratic governments are the most available for their easy purchase and managed control. Take America as a very serious warning where those of the poorest classes and those with the lowest levels of education had voted en masse for the Party of the Rich Exploiters. The Rich have demonstrated the capability of manipulating media propaganda and in the allocation of the quality of Public Education, keeping the majority of people uneducated and undiscerning, so that they can virtually dictate the results of the democratic process, or that is what they assume that they can do, and we need to concede that they have been mostly successful so far.

Simply consider this Universal Truth as it applies to Democracies around the World, that stupid and uneducated people vote for Right Wing Reactionary Parties. Well, if such Parties can only win their first election, then they can easily set into motion an institutionalization for their continued success, that is, they have only to effectively destroy their public school systems and to limit the influence of their best universities. Again take America as an example, that after the Great American Universities had supported the Democrats, but when the Republicans won, all Federal subsidies to the Universities were slashed. America would destroy its schools to protect a Republican Ascendancy.

Indeed, this may be the most dangerous and dark aspect of Democracy, that there is such a great incentive inherent within the Democratic Process for destroying the Schools and suspending any significant learning. Mark my words that what are called Colleges and Universities will be reduced to high blown Vocational Schools where young adults will learn the skills of their trade and not a jot more. And all of the examples from History and Philosophy that support a life of reflection and wisdom will be totally inaccessible to a generation of Doctors, Lawyers and Engineers who are given no education beyond their narrow and parochial shop talk. These affluent but ignorant classes of people would be most vulnerable to Political Opportunists who have the least shame about manipulating the stupidity that they had designed and intended. Reasoned and intelligent appeals from sophisticated and conscientious minds, from any honest political party or politician, would bounce off the empty heads of those who had been taught to know nothing by the Bad Guys who will win every election by some stupid default. Elections will go to those who have no compunction about lying to Bubba.

Just as Modern Capitalism has been leading the charge to the lowest possible wage structures, foreordaining a universal Poverty, so Modern Democracy is racing the World toward the deepest darkness of the deliberate destruction of education and learning, all because the worst political opportunists find it easier to deal with morons.

That’s democracy.

Wouldn’t it be better if the World were run from the Universities?

Downward Spiral of Collective Karma

Several evenings ago I had a dream in which I was giving a small room full of people a lecture on Karma, in answer to a question regarding the almost total absence of saints, miracles and providential occurrences during the most recent times (just even a century ago there was so much more spiritual activity).

Now, as all of us in the West have been trained to believe, we are all to suppose that the Spiritual World is a perfect mirror of the Political World of Liberal Free Trade Capitalists, and since that Political World insists that we each must be treated entirely on an individual basis, then it follows that Karma must be entirely the province of the individual. So we are not even to consider that God may consider us in terms of families, ethnic groups, nations, societies, or any such collective grouping. God, who must be following some as yet unwritten Constitution, must treat us entirely as individuals. Indeed, this view is given much currency in the propaganda outpourings of the Protestant Churches who have made it their primary extra-scriptural doctrine that the goal of their cults is for each individual to have a ‘personal relationship’ with the human god of their religion. There is no justification for such a view in their scriptures, as it is more likely that the opposite view should prevail, noting that their Bible details the rise and fall of Nations, Peoples, Families and Cities based entirely on their collective Karma. But the Doctrine of Personal Relationship does sound good at the Tent Meetings, and as their favorite Apostle had taught, it is never wrong to say anything that contributes toward success in a membership drive (1st Corinthians 9:22 “Pretend to be all things to all people in order to beguile them into the Church”).

If you are wondering, this favorite apostle of those who have created one of the worse religions in the World is Paul, the one apostle who had never met Jesus, unless to condemn him as his fellow Pharisees certainly had, but if it should count that he had met Jesus in a vision, then, even in his own account of that vision, the only thing that Jesus had to say to him was that he was effectively his worst enemy in the world … which can hardly be seen to be an endorsement. It is often said that this vision occurred at the moment of Paul’s ‘conversion’, only I can’t discern that Paul ever changed, or that Christ ever acknowledged such a change.

Indeed, was not Paul the only apostle to never deliver a miracle, by anyone’s account other than his own? By the standards used today by the Vatican to determine the validity of a miracle, all of Paul’s miracles would be tossed out as fabrications or coincidences – a young man falling out of a low window and arising after he caught his breath, and then the shocking ‘miracle’ of Paul yelling at some poor old man until the old guy had a stroke. Even if it could be demonstrated to have been supernatural, it would be tossed out today for simply being mean-spirited. Paul eventually went on to redefine the ‘gifts of the Holy Spirit’ in order to strip them of any hint of the Supernatural, and reverted to the argument used by the Pharisees against Jesus Himself, saying that Miracles were tools of the devil used to fool the righteous. Jesus had called this Pharisaical Argument the “Unforgivable Sin”, but Paul was to make it the cornerstone of his Church. You see, Paul’s Churches would have lost membership to the True Christian Churches of the True Apostles, being attracted by all the Things of the Spirit, so it was necessary for Paul to successfully demonize everything that was true, so that his falsehoods could stand an even chance.

Anyway, when Jerusalem and the True Church was destroyed in 71 A.D., just as the Book of Revelation said it would be, the only Church that was left was the Greek Gentile Church of Paul… not the authentic and genuine Church at all. The only Religion in the World that promotes free sin… something that simply cannot be right, and it is extremely odd that Christians don’t see the problem there.

Well... to get back on topic... We were speaking of individual vs. collective karma, and how the modern political atmosphere emphasizes individual responsibility and individual identity, and so there is very little consideration that we may actually be living in a Spiritual World in which the Karmic Dynamics are mostly social and collective. But first lets examine more closely the development of the modern perception that Karma is largely individualistic. We can trace back the current models of social and political belief to the Wars of the Protestant Rebellion which in their turn had precipitated a series of other rebellions and revolutions, and an entire series of wars between nations no longer held together by common religion (Catholicism), or a common language (Latin) or sense of a wider World View (Christendom). Individualism lead quite logically into anarchy. And while history shows us that the cry for freedom is the virtual trumpet blast heralding in each Dark Age of Barbarism, well, that is all we hear today – “freedom, freedom, freedom”. Its an odd situation, as freedom is a rich man’s game (even computer models bear out the proverbial wisdom that the “rich get richer and the poor get poorer”, so while the poor man may enjoy his freedom for a moment, to destroy a Palace of Gold so that he may make away with a single gilded shingle, still, in the end, it is those richer than himself who will finally screw him even out of that), but the Wealthy and the Powerful, with their Media, Movies, books, art and literature, have convinced us that we all have to play their Game by their Rules. Well, the only results can be that of so many billions of players, there can be in the end only one winner, and on the other side a world full of desperate losers. No civilization has yet ever won that Game. Cut-throat competition kills everybody.

But if individualism destroys Civilization, then, we might ask, what recreates Civilization? And then, what is it that distinguishes the more successful Civilizations from those less vibrant, less healthy? Well, it certainly isn’t the destructive embrace of divisive individualism. The most functional Civilizations are those that can support the greatest population densities (and as we anticipate a World that will soon number over 10 billions of people, isn’t our greatest priority to focus upon the institutions that best enable us to achieve the maximums as regards to density of population levels?) and those most densely populated civilizations in History had been those with the most integrated network of collective institutions – Religion emphasizing cooperation, moral protections of property, which advance prosperity during good times, as well as moral injunctions enjoining charity, to relieve the bad times.

It is all more than just laws and education. You see, these young Civilizations had recently just finished going through their Dark Ages of Barbarism. They’ve tasted of the fruits of individualism – of constant warfare and pillaging, of individuals making their own way in the World. It is all what Thomas Hobbes called war between each man against all others, where life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”.

Well, those who had wished to rise out of this horrible chaos came of necessity to experience themselves in terms of a collective identity. I simply have to suppose that it takes more than one or even a few generations before a person can automatically feel down into his very bones that he is a member of his Society rather than thinking, in 20th Century fashion, that he is simply just another individual Viking rapist and pillager out for his own pleasure, wealth, power and ambitions. Going from Selfish to Saintly seems to be one of those torches that must be passed from father to son, and sometimes we might suspect that the quest is interrupted before it can be successfully achieved. We can see this in European History, that the last peoples to become Civilized were also the first to go back completely into Barbarism. And as Chinese History teaches us, the easiest people to Civilize are those that had already been civilized the longest. China had just emerged from an insanely chaotic revolution, and after a mere couple of decades are already poised to become the greatest dynasty in their History. Which isn’t to say that they do not have their own problems… as quickly as their Dynasties rise, so also they have a speedy rate of collapse.

Anyway, what does that leave us if I am right – that Karma is largely collective, or that where it does involve the individual, then it would take lifetimes to see any result. Well, it would be demoralizing, wouldn’t it? Yes, we have all heard about the “journey of a thousand li starting with the first step”, but we had always been left to suppose it would be ourselves who would be allowed to finish. So, to surrender to practicalities, for this essay to be at all useful, I must relinquish arguments that insist upon developments that take more than one generation. My readers must feel as though there is something in their power. Well, yes, there is.

A friend of mine, a psychologist, had me review one of his papers before he was to submit it for publication, and it provides an interesting model for intellectually understanding some relevant dynamics here. A simple view of his Model is that we are each of us an amalgam of 1st Order, 2nd Order, and 3rd Order Selves. The 1st Order Self is what we are – our knowledge, our abilities, what we do, how people see us. Our 2nd Order Self is what we are working toward being, as a Medical Student is something of a 2nd Order Doctor, or student pilot is a 2nd Order Jumbo Jet captain. Finally, our 3rd Order Self, and it is a bit more complicated here, is what we wish we wanted to be. It seems similar to 2nd Order, but the difference is that no concrete effort is made to transition toward 2nd Order, or, really, the moment any effort was made to achieve a 3rd Order Wish, then simply by way of definition the 3rd Order daydream would become a 2nd Order agenda. An example here would be of a person wishing that he cared more about Classical Music, or a person wishing that he were multi-lingual, but that was as far as it would go. Now, what this does is that it determines the type of people that this person would admire. Our 3rd Order Being helps us decide whom in our Society we have respect for.

So, how does this apply to us and our present discussion. Well, we all want to be civilized. We all want our World to be successful and viable. We certainly do not all wish for a complete collapse of our economies as a few Winners decide to cash themselves out of the game and retire off to a few well stocked, fortified and hidden island retreats. But so far this has been all 3rd Order. It is what we have been wishing. Yes, we admire the Great People in our Culture who had been collectively oriented. But we have been doing nothing personally to achieve that realization. Now, yes, of course, the full realization of the Civilized Mindset is not likely to appear in just one generation. But any number of us now can make it a 2nd Order priority. We can begin to consciously strive toward it.

And, finally, this brings us to Karma. Again, Karma is not simply about the individual, though there probably is an individual strand within all of our Karmic momentums through life. Karma also follows families. For instance, I had noticed upon studying saints – Catholic, Hindu, Sufi – all kinds of saints, that saints generally come from very good families. Inversely, I encountered some anecdotal evidence that evil operates the same way on the inverse. One story I read had said that one particular superstition maintained that any child born of 3 consecutive generations outside of marriage – a 3rd generation bastard – would belong by default to the devil. Well, this particular story came as prelude to a frightful tale of demonic possession. It seems that this one 3rd generation bastard, a young lady in this case, converted to Catholicism but the devil himself challenged the conversion. Well, it was a stiff fight – several priests had to be hospitalized, and the nuns had to burn down their own convent just to get rid of the subsequent stink, but the girl was eventually saved.

Anyway, so while Family Karma can be substantially powerful, it is not absolute, and individual and social karma can be brought to bear in order to change its direction. You see, it is largely all about Will Power. Karma, after all, is all about applied Will Power. We use Will Power to educate ourselves into knowledge and abilities and then to set up life practices and daily routines, and then finally it all becomes habit and our Karma is fixed. But to change this Karma there only needs to be another application of Will Power – individual Will Power but also Social Karma as other people apply their own measure of Will Power in cooperative effort.

Now, how does all of this come to affect the amount of supernatural and spiritual activity we observes in the World today? Well, Karma is probably quantifiable, that is it takes a certain amount of karmic power to do anything significant. Each person’s personal supply of karma isn’t enough really to pack much of a punch. If everybody got together and pooled their Karma into a huge supply of collective karma, then there could be some huge manifestations, but with everybody so individual minded… with so many people with their own personal relationships with human god fixations, then there is not much collective karma to work with. And what little collective karma there is, from those few Catholics not deterred by the modern Catholic Bishops who in everything but words insist that their flocks start behaving exactly like protestants, dropping all penitential and spiritual practices from their lives; well from what little collective karma that remains, we might suspect that its energy is being saved up. Oh, and this is not to say that the other Higher Religions are not setting aside shares of collective karmic power, gained from whatever spiritual or ascetic practices that had been engaged in. Indeed, it is almost the definition of a Higher Religion that it recognize the importance of spiritual practice for collective ends.

Oh, regarding the insufficiency of individual karma, but that if individuals pool up their karma, if may begin to amount to something. Well, we have the example from the greatest saint in History, Vincent Ferrer, possibly greater than Jesus Christ. I believe that the secret of his success was that he went everywhere with a group of 10,000 ascetic prayerful penitents in his train, fasting and flailing themselves with whips. He would boast that he could march them about like that 30 miles a day, and none would drop out or get sick. What was happening was that all of these powerful karmic reserves were being concentrated into the hands of Vincent Ferrer. Well, today, how many people fast, or do anything much in the way of penitence and atonement for the sins of the World, not even beginning to suggest they march 30 miles a day touring all of southern Europe while whipping their backs raw the entire time. If one person should do that, then we could expect that it would carry a great deal of Karmic Intensity – think of how much Will Power such actions would require, and there we can see the intensity of the Karma involved. Now multiply that by ten thousand, and we can begin to explain a very powerful Saint.

So after all that, this brings us to an ambiguous conclusion. We may see little spiritual activity and next to nothing in the way of supernatural manifestations and phenomena because there is simply not enough karmic energy going toward generating such things. Or if there is sufficient karmic energy, then it is being stored away for some grand future event. Now, the skeptic might propose a third option, that there is no such thing as spiritual and supernatural manifestations and phenomena. Well, that is silly in that it is so misinformed. Even in relatively recent history there are any number of documented instances of the Supernatural. It is only puzzling that such things have seemed to drag to a halt.

Oh, yes, those of simplistic religious belief may say that people have lost their faith. Oh, blah! Faith was a concept made up to explain why miracles don’t happen. Think about it, that the concept of faith is always invoked in the negative – “the miracle you prayed for did not occur because of your lack of faith”. Only in stories do we hear of miracles occurring because of faith. In the real world, as we have always seen it, lack of faith is assigned as the cause for lack of miracles. Go back to first causes… Paul would yell at his congregations telling them that the only reason they were not getting the same miracles that all the other Apostles were getting in plenty was from lack of faith, effectively telling them that they were not throwing enough money into the pot. Jesus presented miracles before thousands of people constantly, and universal faith was never a requirement. My suspicion is that all instances of faith written into the gospels were included by later Paulists not so much to reflect what Jesus had actually said or done, but to superimpose Paulist doctrines onto Christ. If paul had never quoted Jesus a single time in all of his books and preachings, and he hadn’t, well the early Christian scribes and editors would be sure to make it so that Jesus would quote paul. So, anyway, faith explains nothing. What is important is simple Will Power and its psychological focus. If people actually begin to take actions for the good of their collective society – to work for the World View – then it is that which will give us miracles, or rather, the power upon which miracles depend.

Free Press Protection for Hostile Partisans

Lately there has been a great deal of violence done to journalists while they have been doing their jobs, and the intellectual habit is to bemoan all this hostility against journalists as a failure for people to honor the Freedom of the Press, Freedom of Speech, and all of that.

However, if one looks at a lot of this journalism, it is blatantly partisan. This journalism is targeting certain people and certain Movements and vilifying them. This journalism aims at solidifying material support against their partisan targets, their declared enemies. Well, then it should come as no surprise that the targets of these very damaging Media Attacks should lash out to stop the torrid flow of what must be interpreted by them as being one-sided extremist propaganda.

For instance, simply look at CNN coverage or BBC coverage. The us vs. them of it is obvious. It is ‘our’ troops when referring to the Coalition. And the Iraqi Fighters are referred to as terrorists or insurgents. Well, is that what they call themselves? We have interviews of Coalition Officers time and time again. But when has CNN or the BBC ever interviewed an Iraqi Anti-Invasion Patriot?

So what we have is not even the pretension of impartiality, but we have these big News Services providing propaganda support for their government’s war efforts. That is the job of these journalists. And I do hope they get paid a lot for it, because it should be very risky. Because their reporting is consciously done in order to support the War Effort against those whom they deliberately depict as enemies, it would make them fair targets for reprisal.

If you pick sides, then you join the war. And these journalists have been picking sides.

Now it may be argued that we will never learn anything if people keep killing journalists. Yes, this is a point. But how much do we learn from one sided partisan journalists anyway? Being given only one side of the story, it is likely we are more misinformed than anything else. Our Hatred is all stoked up and we are given nothing to offset it. We now live in a Society largely shaped by Lawyerisms – that it is enough to advocate only one side, and let someone else, with billions of dollars to spend, advocate the other. So we get extremist views that are so lopsided that nobody with discernment will believe anything while most idiots will end up believing either the extreme lies from the left or the worse lies from the right.

What we need if we do want the Truth is to employ non-partisan journalists. Certainly there are non-partisans. Finnish or Japanese Journalists, or anybody whose Nations or Organizations have no interest in the Wars, could cover the New Crusades and as long as they report fairly they would be treated fairly.

But my guess is that it is not about News or Truth. If one examines the management and ownership of these Media Organizations, then we can discern an interest in advancing a certain Propaganda Angle. The Media Organizations have their own War Agendas.

Their Reporters might as well be labeled as Combatants. Their job is to do damage to an enemy they declare themselves against in every daily edition. So when they are shot at, their only concern should be why it had not happened any sooner.

Yes, they can complain of violations of Liberal Government Freedom of Speech and Freedom of the Press. It all makes great propaganda. But lets look at Freedom of Speech and Freedom of the Press, the History of these concepts. When anarchists and revolutionaries wished to destabilize established societies and civilized institutions, then naturally they would wish to seek legal immunity for those who would incite rioters to open rebellion, or to encourage insiders to subvert and destroy from within. So it is that Freedom of the Press has always been considered most important when it was the aim to destroy the Present Regime. But lets reflect for a moment. Is it always a good thing to destroy our Civilization? Is Chaos always what we want? Do we really want this Dark Age to go on forever?

Nuclear Power Fresh Water Fix for Global Warming

First it must be clear to everybody that the World’s Petroleum Cartels have been and still are most successful in suppressing the Nuclear Energy Industries. Even Al Gore is intimidated into silence. The Oil Companies allow us to discuss silly alternatives such as wind energy or solar energy only because these alternatives can provide so little energy at such great expense. None of these alternative energies can be taken seriously when oil is still the cheaper and more efficient energy sourse.

But Nuclear Energy can be generated in tremendous quantities, and the more nuclear plants that go on line, then the cheaper it all gets. Nuclear Energy could replace all of the energy now coming from oil, coal, gas and bio-sources for a few bare percent of the present cost. And it all comes with absolutely no carbon dioxide. Electrical energy sourced from nuclear power plants could be directed towards producing hydrogen for a new generation of automobile that runs on hydrogen energy cells, or, for that matter, the nuclear power plants could run electric power into the roads and highways themselves for electric cars that pick up their electricity from induction.

But mostly Nuclear Energy can provide the power necessary to deal with the most frightening effects to be expected from Global Warming.

We know that the ice caps will melt. It is only a matter of time. The green house gas concentrates are already too high and cannot be reversed while already the icecaps are now mostly slush. So we now know for an absolute certainty that the ocean levels will rise and flood some of the most populated coastlines in the World. Are we just supposed to wait for it. If we have any sense then we would start right now towards moving water inland – to direct the Flood where we want it and where we could use it, into reservoirs, into newly created rain forests, into high rise greenhouse agricultural complexes.

Water, water everywhere.

Also, in putting this redirected water to use, it would solve another of our problems – in growing new rain forest territories and by creating higher density agricultural complexs (high rise multi-level greenhouses towering into the sky instead of single ground level one layer fields), we will be pulling carbon out of the atmosphere and effectively be storing it in new tree and plant growth.

Fresh water can be made by Nuclear Energy in two ways. First, the electrical power can be used to distill sea water, or where we have situations where the prevailing winds move from the sea to over continental areas, then the Nuclear Power Plants can simply heat up the water to boiling and pump out clouds that will move inland and translate into higher levels of rainfall.

This now must bring our attention to the great deal of engineering projects which must begin soon. We must engineer our landmasses so that we can capture all of the water we could get from the rainfall. It should be obvious that it is extremely stupid for us now to allow any fresh water to flow into rivers and then return to spill uselessly back into the oceans. It is simply a waste. We must set up the necessary pipelines and the canal networks and dig the reservoirs to retain all of this fresh water that is now being lost to the oceans. Now, it need not be envisioned as a permanent necessity, since it is understood that once new rain forests are in place, that they contain in themselves a great deal of water – in the trees and plant-life as well as being held in saturation by the soil. Even the higher humidity levels will account for a great deal of water volume. But to start the way to growing these new rain forests, we must start by moving in a great amount of fresh water.

Also, some amount of rains can be generated by clever and inexpensive means. For instance, black heat absorbing panels can be floated in the oceans just off the coasts of some of our dryer continents. The heat from these panels will increase oceanic evaporation which will send rain clouds inland. Also, for just a small area of heat absorption in the oceans that these black panels would be responsible for, by their increasing the white cloud cover downwind over the land masses, the over-all effect will be to reflect off more heat from the earth, and the earth will become on the balance cooler rather than warmer.

Is all of this possible? Well, certainly. Most of the world’s population is now greatly underemployed while much of the work now being done is directed towards weapon production and development. The monetary policies in America and Europe that aim for a real 10% level of unemployment is perhaps wonderful for bankers who represent .01% of the World’s Population. But given full employment towards these fresh water and nuclear energy initiatives, then we could easily anticipate not only surviving the Global Warming Disasters, but we could turn it all into a wonderful opportunity for engineering our Planet for better living in this Third Millennium.

The Joys of a Multi-Cat Household

I look about myself now, in the small hours of a weekend late-night, and count six sleeping cats, all within an easy throw of myself and realize they are situated so close around me out of love. Well, that feels good. A multi-cat household can be a wonderfully happy place.

But you can’t just go out and buy six cats and expect it to be instantly wonderful.

Well, you can buy six cats, but you need to be careful of the choices you make. So many people buy the kitties that they feel sorry for, or they go to the County Kennel and get the kitty that they suppose is the next to be selected out for euthanasia because of its undesirability. I once volunteered at the Kennels, and found that because people took home all the miserable, ugly, maladjusted cats, it was the GOOD cats that were euthanized because nobody wanted them. Now, how stupid is that!? And then the general public who visit households who had adopted these ugly maladjusted mean nasty psychologically damaged cats, they rightly soak in their negative experiences and then wonder aloud why anybody would ever own a cat.

Then there is the common sense of it, where one can hardly suppose one will be happier by adopting some sad cat than by adopting a happier and healthier animal.

So don’t buy a cat you feel sorry for. Indeed, DO let the pathetic cats be the ones who are euthanized. Rescue the best cat you can find. You will be doing the reputation of cats in general a favor, and, even better, you will be doing yourself a favor. You will be getting a much better companion. Remember that you may have to live with your choice for twenty or more years (cats do have an edge on dogs as per life expectancy).

Now, there are very beautiful cats, and some specific breeds can be relied upon to produce some cats that also have exquisite personalities. But to be honest, that while you can soon get used to the beauty of the most dazzling cat, what is really most ingratiating in a cat is its personality. Select your cat by personality first, and then, all else being equal, refer to beauty as a second level criteria.

What is a good personality in a cat, when one is shopping for cats? Well, in kittens… I call them ‘cage monkeys’ because the best ones climb the front of the cage to get closer to the customers… the best kittens are active and are oriented towards human beings. The kitten you want should show by its own attentions that it also wants you. It should look you in the eye and meow at you. It should be saying “Me! Me! Pick me up! Take me home!” Even if it is the stunted and has bold spots in its fur, if the other kittens are not so focused on you as this thing, then they are not as ‘good’. Personality first! Once you get it home, you can nurse it up to perfect health, but the best looking cat that is indifferent to you might always be indifferent to you, as that is its personality.

I remember looking for a new cat once. I went to the kennel and there was this beautiful Siamese, but all it thought to do when I petted it was to bite at my hand as though it were a toy. It didn’t think to look at my eyes. But not far away was a four year old Calico (a calico is in fact a very pretty cat that has patches of white, red and black; so arranged that it seems that a totally white cat was sprayed with spots of red and then hit with spots of black) and this calico in a very strident and raspy voice was calling to me. Looking me in the eye. And when I took her (all calicos are female, for some genetic reason) out of the cage, while she was not instantly loving and cuddly, she seemed to show a willingness toward beginning a budding relationship. She began to purr tentatively.

Well, I was cautious and reserved and so I went on with my shopping and came back later in the day to see if she would remember me specifically. She did. So I went away again and again and would come back later. Again she would recognize me and was beginning to become upset with me for not taking her home. Well, when they can get mad at you for not being devoted enough, THAT indicates the type of cat that one takes home. Oh, and while most people shop for kittens, one may consider that there are some advantages in getting full grown cats. They are so long lived that you need not worry too much about losing time with your cat. While kittens can be fun, they really can be very self-possessed until they are somewhat over a year old. An adult cat will behave more maturely and will have more consideration of your needs (being careful not to wake you up, and will be more aware of your modes). Older cats have more empathy.

Many people only get one cat. For a while my Calico was my only cat. I would go to work and then come back. She got fat. Slowly she got fat. I did not notice it happening, but there came a point when I wondered to myself “I never noticed before what a little piglet Calico Bunny was”. They had given me her old medical records when I got her and so I looked into them and discovered she had never been more than 8 pounds, but now she was 13. My guess was that she ate and slept when I was not around – her way of keeping busy instead of being lonely. Well, since I have gotten more cats, guess what, she is back down to 8 pounds. If you cannot be your single cat’s sole companion and must leave it alone for extended periods, then why not consider another cat?

Oh, this is not to say that the only reason some cats are fat is because they are lonely. I do own one fairly fat cat. Some kitties just like to eat.

If one does begin to acquire more and more cats then things can eventually become complicated. Firstly, don’t get all of your cats all at once. One should allow a good deal of time for each new cat to integrate into your household. I would advise giving each new cat a full year to be the baby of the family. It needs that long to get used to the other cats, and for the other cats to get used to it. Everyone needs to readjust their place in the Universe when another cat comes in and effectively says ‘move over’. A year is probably long enough. More on this later.

Then one needs to set up a regimen for managing a multi-cat household. For instance, every so many hours one should look about and count the cats. Are they all there? Good! But if some are off hiding or in the other rooms somewhere, well, this may mean that there is a problem. Find them and find out what the problem is. Indeed, sometimes a newer cat will go off specifically to determine whether you will notice whether or not it is gone. Now, while each cat is different and unique, bla bla bla, what seems to work best generally is to pretend to sleep with a newer cat that seems to be testing you for your dedication to it. Find it, pet it, and then put your head down on your arms and go to sleep for a minute or two. This will totally reassure it concerning your affection, trust and devotion.

Because there are so many dysfunctional cats out there, the general public sometimes communicates the assumption that cats only care about getting fed. While feeding time is important to them, they also can come to get used to their Quality Time rituals. In my household I have a Quality Time Box that is centrally located, and whenever I go by it, if there is a cat on the Quality Time Box, then it gets petted and brushed, or played with… whatever it likes. Well, once one sets up such an institution then one finds that the cats will set up their own Quality Time places and rituals, and they will train you regarding what they expect from you. One of their favorite games is something of a mix of ‘hide and seek’ and ‘tag your it’, that is, they will hide in the dark, and when you get close, they will jump out at you. The more it scares the crap out of you, the better they like it. Oh, play with the lights out, to give them the advantage. But you are allowed to win, rarely. If you are patient, then you can be the one who hides, and when they come looking for you, you can be the one who jumps out and scares them. No, they don’t mind, but will actually appreciate that you have taken the game to a new level for them.

Now, much does depend upon the interaction between the cats themselves. Cat Politics. The cats need to be able to get along with each other. The experts say that when one introduces a new cat into the house that one should keep it in a separate room for awhile. For a few days let the cats sniff at each other from the crack under the door. But then let them in together and just go away and let the cats work things out. This is good advice, but honestly you should remember that it can take years for cat politics to stabilize in a multi-cat household. Who becomes antagonists, who becomes best friends, who grooms with whom, who sleeps with whom, who plays ‘fight and bite’ with whom. It can take a very long while before a new cat finds its place and truly becomes settled in with your other cats. But in some cases you may find that one particular cat is simply not working out with the rest.

Keep in mind that everyone can make a mistake, even yourself. And then you must realize that if you do not remedy your mistake, then that counts as another mistake. When you have a disruptive and impossible cat in the house, then you need to get rid of it. I’ll give an example. There is this feral cat named Funny Face, the oldest female in all of my Feral Cat Feeding Stations (I call her ‘Mother of All Cats’… you see, I could never get close enough to catch her, and she was wise to all of my bait traps, and so she went on having litter after litter, and she would bring these babies of hers to the feeding stations, presenting me with more and more little mouths to feed. Today, nearly every one of my ferals is somehow related to Funny Face). I finally tricked her into one of my cage traps (I began to bring the same ‘feeding box’ out night after night, morning after morning, with all of the other feral cats eating out it, until Funny Face decided she should trust it, and then when she went inside I hit the button and the door slammed shut. Ha!) so I was able to take her to the Vet and get her spayed. Anyway, once I had her captured, I decided to give her a choice about whether she would like to live indoors. I brought her in. Well, she isolated herself in the highest closet spaces, only jumping down in order to poop in my bed. She wanted nothing to do with the indoor cats, and the indoor cats were frankly puzzled by her obnoxious behavior. After 3 or 4 weeks I decided it wasn’t working out and chased her back outside to the Feeding Station. For 3 days she disappeared and I suspected she changed territories, but then had an intuition that maybe her feelings had been hurt by me chasing her with a broom and that she would not show her face until I apologized. So I called her name apologetically and instantly she came walking out of the jungle (oh, I am on a tropical island in the Pacific, by the way)… my calling her was apparently enough to satisfy her damaged pride. So, anyway, the point here is that if one cat is simply not working out with the other cats, then don’t overly prolong the difficulties but throw the trouble maker out!

We humans can be sensitive and even delicate in our feelings. But the truth is that life is very hard on the majority cats. Most kennel cats end up being euthanized. Most outdoor cats don’t live longer than a year or two (Funny Face, at 5 years old, is the oldest outdoor feral cat I know, and my heart has been broken time and time again when relatively young beloved outdoor ferals are found dead or simply don’t come out of the jungle at feeding time anymore, falling prey to heaven knows what). So, with life being so generally tough for cats, don’t be so judgmental of yourself if you should have to toss out a nasty cat. It certainly will deserve its fate as much as any other cat would. And then consider that you are simply making room for a more deserving cat.

Oh, and this reminds me… not all cats are acquired at the Pet Stores. Many perfectly good pets – really good pets – they escape from those who adopted them and they look for better homes. So some of the best pets might come right up to your door. Of my 6 indoor cats, three of them, maybe four, were entirely socialized pet cats that I found outside who had been attracted to the food at my feral cat feeding stations. One of them was given to me by a lady who originally got the cat herself because it came to her door. A man would come and ask for his cat back, but then after a while the cat would again escape and come back to this lady. Finally the man stopped coming to ask for his cat to be returned. Anyway, when the lady had to leave the island for awhile, she asked me to watch after it. Well, this cat fit in so perfectly with my other cats, she let me keep it.
Two or three of my other cats had also probably escaped from the homes they had been adopted into. You see, while you are determining whether or not your new cats are ‘working out’, well, they may be determining whether or not they think you are working out, and, if not, they will find an opportunity to rush out through an open door and simply never come back.

But you shouldn’t simply take in a new outdoor cat instantly. After all, property is sacred in our Civilization. Some people do have indoor-outdoor cats (not very wise of them, since ‘indoor-outdoor’ cats have only about half the life expectancy of purely indoor cats) and so you must systematically prevent yourself from inadvertently stealing another person’s cat. What I do to keep myself honest is to put a collar on them with a tag that says “Is this your cat? I plan to take it.” And I include my name, address and phone number. If after three days the cat is still wearing the collar and I have heard nothing from anybody then I figure that it is mine to take.

Okay… what did those other owners do to drive away their cats? Well, I guess it is too much negative behavior – too much “bad cat bad cat bad cat”. Not enough Quality Time or play. It really doesn’t take much. One only needs to remember to look around for the cat and say “hello” once in awhile. It sounds odd coming from an intellectual such as myself, but I once met a very intuitive young lady who told me from her heart to remember that “animals are only human, you know”. So, yes, to succeed with our pets, we need to remember that they are “human”, that they have feelings. No, we can’t be entirely verbal with them and we must learn to some extent to communicate with them in their own terms.

And this brings us to Cat Communication. First, when a cat meows or warbles at you, then answer it. Simply say “yeah” every time that it meows for attention. It will take a while at first because it is testing the situation and can’t really believe that you are answering, but soon it will realize that it truly is speaking with you.

Then one should know that cats can speak with their eyes – a slow blink at a distance is a sign of respect or affection. And then if a cat should look at you and lick its lips, you should do the same, or make a ‘kissy kissy’ sound which it will consider the same thing. Once a cat feels that it has opened up a genuine line of communication with you, it is so much less likely that it will escape from you to seek other adopted parents.

Often I have volunteered with Kennels and Pet Stores as a placement advisor. I had seen people actually holding a cat that is repeatedly meowing at them, and they won’t answer it – completely oblivious to it. Adults. Children. It doesn’t seem to matter. Some people even while going through all the efforts to become pet owners don’t seem to have much of an intuition about communicating with animals. Perhaps the first lesson in being a ‘cat whisperer’ is to simply be willing to listen too and respond to the cats own vocalizations and communications. Take the little thing seriously. Remember that is ‘human’.

Now, back to our primary subject concerning multi-cat households. If one participates in play, communication, grooming and quality time with one’s cats, then what I have found is that the ‘alpha’ or leader cats in your household will begin to live up to your very example – in their own funny ways they will begin to emulate your behavior. For instance, in my household of six cats, I have two neutered toms and they seem to be acting more and more like myself. They will go through the house counting the other cats, and will try to administer grooming and quality times. While they don’t have the key to the food cabinet, they take it upon themselves to remind me of the feeding times.

So the important thing to remember about this is that one must not habitually perform any behaviors that you do not want your alphas to try to copy. So you should refrain from any hostile or aggressive behaviors which could only reinforce such behaviors in your cats – don’t hit the kitties in anger.

Then we must remember the old adage “to get a friend one must be a friend”. Don’t depend upon the kitties to automatically show affection for you, that is, to automatically sit on your lap or jump up and sleep at the foot of your bed. You should consider doing some inviting behavior. Go and get a cat and put it on your lap, and even if it jumps off after a second, well, it knows it had been invited. The same with bedtime. Go and get the cat and put it on the foot of the bed and then it knows it has been invited. Cats are terribly cerebral and they seem to want to think everything out (cats do in fact come when they are called, but often it takes a few minutes since they have to think it entirely through first), but soon enough you will see that they suddenly want to participate in the behaviors you had been inviting them to. Oh, and this reminds me about their feeding behavior, that while they may seem to shun some new food, well, don’t necessarily believe it, as they may eat just a little bit of something they actually like, but if it is new, they wait to see if it makes them sick. So if it appears to you as though they don’t like a new brand of food, well, give it a third or fourth chance and you might find that your kitties actually have a new favorite.

Perhaps now we should examine the notion of socialization – what goes into socializing a kitten so that it can become the best of possible house pets. One never knows when one might be put in charge of a small kitty who has been separated from its mother. Or you should know enough about proper socialization so you can inquire intelligently of breeders concerning whether they have been properly socializing their kittens. Well, as I said before, one should answer meows and then, if the kitten is at all aggressive then one should take it by its scruff and bring it to one’s breast bone where it will hear your heart beat. Here we get involved with its instincts. When it hears your heart, it thinks you are its mother and this automatically inhibits their aggression. You see, Nature has hardwired these kittens behavior so that they might NEVER bite the tit that feeds them. Aggression is impossible from a kitten while it hears its mothers heartbeat. So bringing a kitten up to your chest will automatically quiet it down. This works for every kitten that is still young enough to have that pointy pin-feather like fur. But a kitten old enough to be weaned and who has fur that lays back like adult fur, well, nothing will ‘automatically’ inhibit aggression in a kitten that far along in age, and they can be dangerous if not already socialized. But while they are young, you can take demonic little hissing and spitting kittens and put them up on your breast bone to calm them, and they you should engage in grooming behavior – give them little kisses while moving your head back and forth so it does seem exactly like grooming. In a few days, with just some minutes each day, the most horrible kitties will become socialized. They will go from being virtual little evil demons to being angelic little sweethearts, climbing up the front of the cage when they see you coming – perfect little cage monkeys.

Oh, and this reminds me again of an interesting point, that is, another behavioral difference between socialized cats and ferals. As I had said above, a socialized cat will interpret a kiss as an act of grooming. But ferals live in a rough world and almost any action is interpreted in terms of aggression and the tools of aggression – they see kisses as gentle and harmless bites, and they see petting and thumping as gentle and harmless clawing. This goes far in explaining why ferals are at first very hesitant to receive your affection, since they expect any touch to bring with it some sting of aggression. But once they do get used to your expressions of affection, in their own terms, then they may begin to return such affection. In their little minds they must be thinking “when in Rome, do as the Romans do”. They think they are being friendly. They will gently swipe their claws at you, and they will gently bite at your hands and nose. Often at first the biting and the clawing may not be so entirely gentle, as at first ferals greatly over-estimate the toughness of us human beings, but if you yelp in pain when the cat bites down a bit too hard, then it will soon get the idea and ease up a bit from then on. But the important point here is that it can be somewhat disconcerting to have a cat biting and scratching at one. One hardly sees that as affection. But I remind you that the ferals at first had a difficult time being touched themselves, having seen the human behaviors of kissing and petting in terms of biting and scratching. And when the cats have finally gotten over their fear of you and begin to return your affection, the only way they know how, they are puzzled when you back away from them. So, really, it is best to hold still and let them swat and bite at you a little bit. They mean well. Even some socialized cats will sometimes use their teeth to grip your hand, when it wants more petting. This is often times misinterpreted. I have seen mothers in Pet Stores complain of cats ‘biting’ their children, and then I need to explain to them that a cat who really bites will go at a person like an industrial sewing machine – quick repeated bites that go as deep as their teeth are long, biting down to your bones. There is always a lot of bleeding from real cat bites. If the cat does not break the skin, then it really was not a bite. The cat only wanted your attention… to take your hand by holding it in its mouth, like it would carry one of its own kittens. Remember that they do not have opposable thumbs for gripping, and so they will use their teeth or reach out their claws gently to pull you in. It is nothing to be afraid of, once you find that you can trust the cat not to harm you.

I have brought several of the ferals indoors and from interacting with the socialized cats they do eventually learn socialized grooming behavior and will begin to act more as the socialized cats do. It is always a wonderful moment the first time an ex-feral licks one’s hand in genuine grooming behavior style.

Oh, and then we must talk a little bit about the matter of choice between having cats or having dogs. Now, dogs are great, but they do have different needs. Do you go off to work? Dogs tend toward demoralized loneliness when their masters are away. While cats will be happy when one comes home, greeting one at the door, one rarely hears complaints from the neighbors that one’s cats are crying plaintively when one is out. Dogs will. But I must admit here that often times cats can be lonely if left alone, and it is my opinion that if one finds a few cats that can be friends and can get along with each other, then one should keep them both and they will probably be happier than if they were in single cat households.

Dogs can be annoying as they will defend territory with barking behavior, and they will bark at other dogs, and will begin howling if they hear other dogs howl – pack behavior. Neighbors will complain. And then there is biting and attack behavior. One should be careful about what kind of dog one acquires. Many image obsessed men will get fighting breed dogs as macho-accessories for themselves, and they are fooled by their pet’s submissive behavior towards themselves while forgetting that thousands of years of targeted breeding has focused on turning these animals into reflex killers. Such pets are legal liabilities at the least, and can often be actually dangerous to your guests or to your neighbors. No one’s pet kitty ever ripped out the throat of the little girl next door, but such nightmares have often played out for dog owners.

Then there is hygiene to consider. Cats are inherently clean. One hears stories of Tomcats ‘spraying’ their territory with stinky urine, but if a boy cat is neutered before it is some large mature Tomcat already habituated to marking its territory, then there is almost no chance at all that your Tomcat will ever mark. Indeed, I have found neutered Tomcats to be really the better companions, though of my 6 cats, I have 4 females. Each sex can make a wonderful companion.

Cats naturally will sand box train themselves – their version of being toilet trained. Indeed, some people actually toilet train their kitties. But dogs will poop and pee on the floor. Dogs really need to be walked. They also need to be trained carefully enough so that they do not become more of a list of problems than they are worth. And so it is that dogs require a good deal more time and attention than do cats. If one is retired or works out of the home and can be there for a dog, then a dog’s close companionability can be very enticing. But allow me to repeat, that if one chooses one’s cats well, then one can be sure of having some very companionable cats. People really love their cats, and visa versa.

Before I close out this essay, let me add a word regarding the commonly held generalization that people who keep cats are in some manner dysfunctional in their human relationships – that they are pathetic lonely souls. Well, the truth is rather the opposite. Yes, a keeper of cats may go out less frequently than those who have no cats, but this is because they are rather less lonely. It is loneliness that drives ordinary people out to the bars and the clubs. I used to be one of them. I never thought my life would change drastically just because I began to keep a few cats, but imperceptibly and slowly I progressed toward going out less and less often. I was happier to simply stay at home. This is in no way pathetic or indicative of any human to human dysfunctions. It is contentment, pure and simple. And so if having cats can make one more content with one’s life, then that should rather be seen as a good thing.

Why I Converted to Catholicism

Just more than several years ago I converted to Catholicism, which by all accounts seems a very rare and peculiar thing for any non-Catholic to do. Many people, both Catholic and non-Catholic would wonder why a person would do such a thing, especially as officially converting takes too much work to be done simply on a whim. So to answer this general curiosity, here I will attempt to explain why I decided to convert.

Of course, the entire story would be complicated even if the core motivations were simple, so please expect a depiction of all of the textures and terrain undulations of not a perfect situation but of a real one.

First, let me begin by telling of a precipitating moment, a catalytic prelude to my Conversion. I was visited by my adult daughter in the American Southwest and we decided to pass our time sightseeing. We went to quite a famous old Catholic Mission. I had seen it all before, but when asked by my daughter to go inside the Church with her, I felt some discomfort at the notion and sent her ahead by herself without me. I would have had no hesitation about walking in alone, but as my daughter was a Catholic and I was not, I felt it would be incongruous – the mixing of a tourist with a true believer would have presented a clash against my sense of good taste. And then there was another dynamic involved. I had once been a Protestant, and was still tinged with that strange complex which effects nearly all Protestants, which is a hate for Catholicism that is carefully and repeatedly indoctrinated from the earliest Sunday school lessons, paired with an unavoidable envy for the apparent genuine religiosity of the Catholic Experience – a pageantry and flow of religious emotions which Protestantism is at a complete loss to match, which is the very reason why the Leaders of Protestantism find it so necessary to carefully and repeatedly instruct upon the necessity for hating Catholicism. You can see it is a spiraling set of dynamics which feed upon themselves. Hate is the Protestant’s best defense against Envy. So where I could have gone into that Mission Church alone, I was afraid my envy would show to my quite perceptive daughter. But there was no hate, and this I will have to explain in the bulk of this presentation.

One does not ever instantly know why one feels certain things, until one has had time to think about one’s feelings. We conduct much of our behaviors by the dictates of our feelings, and would not know why we act the way we do until we find time to reflect upon our conduct with our intellect. Not accompanying my daughter into that Mission Church puzzled me and I found myself going over that decision like a philosopher trying to solve the Riddle of the Sphinx. It finally occurred to me that if I was envious, than there was nothing to prevent myself from becoming Catholic. My parents were dead, and probably would not have cared if they had still been alive. Of course, if my early protestant conditioning, to hate Catholicism inveterately in my heart and soul, had still been entirely intact, it would have never occurred to me to even consider a Conversion. So, what made Catholicism even a little bit sympathetic to me?

First, for years I had studied and participated in some of the movements of the World’s Higher Moral Religions – Sufism (which better represents old Zoroastrianism more than it does modern Islam, no matter what the Sufis themselves say about it, as they are all quite under duress to pretend to be good Muslims), Spiritual Hinduism and Yoga, and Mahayana Buddhism, together with the other Traditions that had borrowed all of their Spiritual Capital from these sources, along as from elements of Spiritual Catholicism. I had been a Monk at an Aurobindo Ashram, a high initiate in Kundalini Yoga, and had followed a number of Gurus (along with a stint in the Peace Corps, as I believe actual service to Humanity must go hand in hand with one’s Spiritual Quest). And what did I notice in my active acquaintance and experience with the adherents and followers of these Higher Religions? It was that there was in every case some interaction and sympathetic communications between these Spiritual Groups and those of various Catholic Religious Orders. Indeed, Monks, Catholic and Non-Catholic alike, would visit each other’s Monasteries, Shrines and other establishments and partake somewhat in each other’s spiritual practices hoping to gain some insight, in the spirit of Spiritual Fellowship. It was no small matter to me that Spiritual Catholicism was not held in disgrace by the other Higher Religions of the World, as the same cannot be said of Protestantism (which is seen not so much as a Religion but as an excuse the West has contrived to not have any Religion at all – Protestant Salvation is represented as coming from a free Grace that requires neither spiritual practice nor even morality, and Christians are encouraged to refer to themselves as ‘sinners’, while Good Works are shunned. Where is Religion in any of that? Civilization can survive only on a basis of a wide acceptance of moral and spiritual assumptions and a lot of very hard good work, all of which Paulist Christianity dismisses as non-essential, and even as detrimental to their Salvation by based upon Faith alone). One would not willingly associate oneself with a Religion that would bring a moral or spiritual scandal to oneself. One needs to be able to correctly discern both Christ and the Devil. Something can call itself a Religion, but if it propagates the Devil and puts forward Satanic interests and Doctrines, I should hardly suppose we should concede to its Religious pretensions. Charity and Christian Love does not demand we hand our Sheep over to the Wolves, no matter how well-tailored be their Sheep’s Clothing.

Then there was the matter of History. I’ve always studied and read History – in College I majored in it, before going over to Philosophy. I’ve always considered that Catholic Civilization did rather well for itself, though many would argue the point, but when all things were considered in the balance, Catholic Civilization grew and even thrived, and lived up to not only some Spiritual Ideals but even some material ones as well. Indeed, from the Papacy of Gregory the Great to the defeat and the collapse of Catholic Christendom in the Wars of the Protestant Rebellion, was it not almost exactly the “Thousand Year Reign of Christ on Earth” promised by the New Testament Prophesies. Oh, and perhaps I should point out that the “1000 Year Reign of Christ” could not have begun until a Pope arose who would challenge Paul’s strangle-hold on Christian Doctrines, and particularly that doctrine requiring the submission of The Church to secular political authority found in the Epistle to the Romans. Christian Civilization would have been impossible had Pope Gregory the Great, and others in his footsteps, not established the Catholic Church as a central political power, a final arbiter of disputes and a court of last resort, which alone could make peace and commerce possible over what would have been a cluster of perpetually warring cities and states.

Back a few years ago, while still very much a Non-Catholic, I would often go Online and discuss my political and religious views, and would occasionally be surprised to find myself, a disinterested bystander, so to speak, defending the role of Catholicism in History. However spotted the History of Secular Catholicism, the facts point out that as a Civilization, Catholic Christendom was the most successful Civilization in the world this last two thousands years – the only Civilization which had been able to stand against the invasions of first the Huns, in the 6th and 7th Centuries, and then the Mongols in the 12th to 14th. The much maligned Crusades were actually a political and military success in preserving Christendom, that is, Catholic Civilization (for which no one today is grateful, no, not even the officials of the Catholic Church as even the Popes themselves nowadays issue hand-wringing apologies for having deployed armies that were solely responsible for having saved Christendom when everywhere else less hardy civilizations were swept into the basest and cruelest barbarism, not because they morally renounced an active defense or because they did not make what must have been the most valiant efforts to defend themselves, but because the imperfections of their Institutions made an effective defense impossible). Such successes, in Catholic Christendom, were only possible as the Church was able to exercise an effective Secular Authority over a body of nationalities that behaved effectively like the component states of a great Catholic Empire. The policies that could sustain this Jurisdiction, the saving Grace of our Civilization, are to be commended… not apologized for. This is not to say that the Catholic Church did not often have to resolve Social and Religious Conflicts of its own making. If certain Bishops had gratuitously and even foolishly provoked civil wars, we can certainly lament their inexcusable stupidity while still understanding the absolute necessity of re-establishing Territorial Integrity. One should not provoke Rebellion, but at the same time one can also not excuse Rebellion. It is silly for Protestants and Anti-clerical Masons (who dominate the politics of almost every Nation we would suppose to be Catholic) to accuse the Catholics of having fiercely suppressed Rebellion when certainly no Protestant or Masonic Nation has ever permitted such liberties in their own jurisdictions. The American’s who killed millions in their own Civil War must be disingenuous when they accuse Catholics of killing in order to sustain their Union. And the modern Non- Catholic and Anti-Clerical European Nations have committed genocide with far less justification than Christendom ever demanded.

But Spiritual and Historical Respectability are only incidental factors in my Conversion – reasons why it would not be considered disgraceful to convert to Catholicism, but not yet providing any positive incentive for Converting. As I indicated before, I already suppose that there are other Higher Spiritual Religions – the World outside of Catholicism is not entirely devoid of Grace. How can I say such a thing, now, as a Catholic? Well, because there are Saints of God who have been manifest in all of the Higher Religions of the World. One can hardly expect that the Cosmic Christ would limit His Dispensation only to those people who would have the audacity to claim some Divine Benefits for having murdered the Messiah of God. We must remember some of those important though mostly tacit lessons of the Bible, one of which is that The People’s of the Three Kings of the East did not inflict violence upon The Christ but rather paid their Tribute to the King of Kings and asked only for Christ’s Glory. They did not reject Christ… but in point of fact they were the first and perhaps the only peoples to ever have actually bowed before Our Lord while He was still among us. Certainly that should be rewarded with Grace as equally as with those who offered Christ only suffering and then murder, not so much bowing before Christ or Worshipping Christ as attempting to trade His Body to God for that License of Free Sin which Christians call Salvation.

And the Fruits of this Approval from the Cosmic Christ appear in the miraculous lives of the Saints, both Catholic and Non-Catholic. The Proof of Divine Favor is in the Supernatural Fruits of the Saints. This is pivotal. This is very important. One needs to remember the Logic of the Prophet Elijah. Elijah did not propose to argue for a Belief System. Elijah did not emphasize the aesthetics of his doctrines – how the religion he proposed could appeal to the sensibilities of each individual’s self-interests. No. Elijah wagered that he could bring down fire from Heaven to validate his own Religious Views, while betting that those with opposing Religious Views could not – That Spirit would only answer to True Religion. The Validity of Religion would rest upon the Evidence of the Miraculous – the Supernatural Mandate from Heaven. We would know True Religion by the Divine Power invested in Its Saints – this is the Lesson of Elijah (And as Catholics we should understand that Elijah was the Prophet who would found the Order of Monks at Mount Carmel which would later, during the Crusades, be the foundation for the Catholic Carmelite Order, whose habit seems to be a favorite of Our Lady, who, when She appears in Religious Garb at all, is perhaps always dressed as a Carmelite, representing an Order that began with Elijah… an Order both Jewish and Catholic simultaneously. This is expressive of a Religious Unity which Catholicism’s apparent Gentile Fixation largely renounces, even while Our Blessed Virgin Mary wears the cloths of Judaism. And do we forget that the Magnificat is a Jewish Prayer? Catholicism may one day need to review its position that this first Schism in the Church was entirely necessary – the Schism which separated the Gentile Congregations from the Apostolic Church of Messianic Judaism. Following Paul into separation, faction and division seems to have been only a House dividing against itself). Catholicism has never had a total monopoly of Saints. But then it occurred to me, that the Catholics, over the last two thousand years, have perhaps had the greater number of First Magnitude Saints. Catholicism has had a dozen Great Saints where between all of the other Religions combined there may have been only about half as many (Protestantism, the Religion of Paul, having had none over the period of five hundred years). The Spiritual Communities of the World could hardly ignore Catholicism’s fine winning record. The Vine of Christ is identified by its fruits, no? Now, if one would desire to be a Saint oneself, does not one’s odds improve by joining the Team that has shown the most successes in that Endeavor?

Then there is the matter of Divine Revelation. My first acquaintance with any notions of a particular Divine Revelation going exclusively to Catholics (though Heaven does not seem to distinguish between the Roman, Orthodox, Coptic or Thomasian Rites) was not through any formal education or reading, but came by a chance encounter with a rather special Catholic Priest of my acquaintance. You see, back in the nineteen-eighties while I was still affiliated with one of the Oriental Religions, I became acquainted through a Hare Krishna girl, who was also a Catholic, with a Dominican Priest, Father Tom, who was then running a relief operation to feed the poor – mostly migrant farm workers. I found myself with time on my hands and so I asked Father Tom if he could use a volunteer. He became quite a spiritual mentor and gave me my first informal lessons regarding the Blessed Virgin Mary. I had already acquired some pictures of the Blessed Virgin which added to the population of the Pantheon which cluttered my Spiritual Altar and took up much of the space on many of my walls, and told Father Tom of the ones I recognized in his own collection. His eyes quite lit up when he found he had uncovered a Marian from such an unexpected source, and I was from then on inundated with all kinds of Marian information and intelligence, particularly regarding the instances of recent Revelation in the Apparitions of Our Lady. Of particular remembrance, he made a gift to me of a Supernatural Photo of the Blessed Virgin’s Apparition in Medjugorje Herzegovina. It showed a translucent Lady against a granite wall in which one could see both Our Lady and the granite stones immediately behind Her. Perhaps Father Tom prayed for my Conversion, but it would take years for that prayer, if there had been one, to come to fruition.

Then, coming back to the near present, several weeks after the incident with my daughter at the Mission Church, I saw a tabloid newspaper that had one of those ubiquitous stories, largely fictional, regarding Our Lady the Blessed Virgin. It intrigued me. It brought back my memories of Father Tom. I bought it and took it home and began to do a series of Web Searches in hopes of validating the story. There was just enough Truth in the tabloid story to provide me with some more reliable links. It seems Father Tom had not gone into quite enough detail 20 years before. There had been hundreds of Revelatory Appearances of the Blessed Virgin during our Christian Era. Some, such as in the instances of Guadalupe and Fatima, have objectively and certainly been proven to be of miraculous origins. And then there were the hundreds of other instances of Divine Apparitions which must be miraculous if the anecdotes regarding them can be believed, as they certainly should be, as they carry the weight of any number of credible witnesses whose testimony could well meet legal muster. We must remember that not all evidence is Scientific, yet atheists often insist that Evidence that would be entirely sufficient in a Court of Law should not count at all in the judgments of our own minds.

While other Religions may have had Saints, it seems that Catholicism is the only Higher Religion to enjoy a sustained Revelation from Heaven. Unfortunately there have always been factions in the Catholic Church who would oppose these Revelations – I would suggest they are the ‘weeds’ Christ spoke of, rising up to choke out the Wheat. The Bishops seem to have often acted as though they were jealous of Our Lady. For instance, in the early centuries the Bishops forbade any New Revelation being added to what they called “The Depository of Faith” – apparently, they had no appetite for digesting ever new communications from Heaven, and would save themselves from such responsibilities by deliberately cutting off all commerce with God. This slamming shut the Door of Revelation could easily be seen as a deliberate affront to the ongoing Revelations from the Blessed Virgin Mary. But, despite the obstructionist Bishops, the Revelations would continue, coming to the Religious Orders and the Holy Laity, while the Bishops, despite themselves, would be forced to recognize it, calling it ‘Private Revelation’. Yes, the Bishops may have been reluctant to show their approval, but it was a case of their either following their flock or their being left behind without a flock. This, in fact, accounts for all those differences between Protestantism and Catholicism, where Catholicism had opened itself to the influences of these Revelatory Apparitions of Our Lady and the teachings and experiences of the Saints. After all, had we been left with only the Depository of Faith, that is, only the Bible, would we today not be in much the same deplorable shape as Protestantism, which only allows itself the Bible, to be cut off from all current and continuous Revelation from Heaven. It is often argued that Absolute Truth need not be updated regularly, but we need to remember that the Bible was published containing 14 Letters from Paul, who most certainly could bear with quite a great deal of updating. Also, I might add that it seems as though it should be some kind of Divine Law, that those who deliberately make it their policy to reject Revelation should never receive Revelation. Protestants then have shut themselves off from God. But thank the Good Lord that Catholicism left open that ‘Private Revelation’ Loop Hole. Indeed, Catholic Openness to these almost continuous Marian and Saintly Revelations would be instrumental in establishing a High Christian Civilization, a Civilization that would peak in the 11th and 12th Centuries, where a Kingdom of a thousand Cathedrals would rise up, all referred to in short as an “Our Lady’s of ‘This’” or an “Our Lady’s of ‘That’”. Catholicism, in its highest moments and manifestations, was a Religion of Our Lady. Christ was appreciated and worshipped mostly because He came so well recommended by His Blessed Virgin Mother.

As the Apparitions of Our Lady had converted Europe, so they would convert the New World, primarily through the instrumentality of the Miraculous Apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe, which remains a visibly verifiable Miracle to this day.

So… back to the Weekend of the Tabloid Newspaper – remembering back, I largely went sleepless while searching the Web and studying the History of Our Lady and Her Apparitions. Approaching Monday morning, I decided to convert. Still feeling some discomfort with walking onto Catholic soil without belonging or having been invited (When has any Non-Catholic ever been invited by anybody to Convert? If there is such a thing as a Catholic Missionary, he must be the member of the most secret of Religious Orders). It had not occurred to me to research the actual process of becoming a Catholic. If I had, it may have significantly altered what turned out to be a very positive experience. I went off to pursue my Conversion with only the vaguest ideas of what would be expected of me. I thought that appealing to the Church’s bureaucracy would only perhaps bog me down, and it would be better to start with the advice of a knowledgeable Lay Person. So, I went to a small Catholic Bookstore in my neighborhood. I’ve always found I could trust Business People in the Religious Markets for their ability to provide practical and to the point spiritual advice, where the official Clergy can often be profound but mystifying, and even discouraging where they think they are not doing their jobs unless they can enumerate every single possible negative and toss up every possible barrier they can conceive of (these are the same Clergy who find it so difficult to recruit new Clergy. Hmmmm, I wonder why). It turned out this Shop was owned by a Third Order Carmelite Lady. I walked in and wasted no time in asking, “I suppose one needs a Sponsor in order to become a Catholic?” It only took this Lady a few seconds to size me up with her gaze and then she replied “Yes, you will”, and she proceeded to give me a list of details -- places to go, people to see, and she told me that she would consent to be my Sponsor -- my ‘Godmother’. I did not know at the time that she was the most fearsome of all God Mothers in the American Southwest, and that all of the Clergy were quite terrified of her. I would be her 18th God Child to be sponsored into the Catholic Church, and I received quite the red carpet treatment owing to her ‘intercessions’.

But back to that day. I asked if she had a 24K gold Miraculous Medal to sell, but her shop was on the poor side of town and she didn’t carry the more expensive inventory items, and so she drew a map to the more upscale Catholic Store across town where I was able to purchase a medium size Miraculous Medal, which I still wear. I needed some token of Catholicism because my decision to Convert came right after Easter and so I would be in the ‘pipeline’ for a complete year before becoming officially a Catholic, that is, before being allowed to receive the Holy Sacrament (I’m sure they must have taught me why it is necessary to violate all the rules of Civilized Hospitality by refusing to Feed the Hungry, especially those who Hunger for Things of the Spirit, who Hunger for Christ; and why it became the Policy of our Modern ‘Peters’ NOT to feed His Sheep as soon as they might complain of their Hunger. But apparently this Sensible Teaching didn’t make enough of an impression for me to remember it).

Not much later I learned from my God Mother, a Third Order Carmelite we must remember, of the Sacramental Nature of the Brown Scapular (which sources from the Carmelite Order). It instantly seemed to me to be a most indispensable item, and so we both insisted, God Mother and God Child, to the Carmelite Parish Priest that the ‘rule books’ said nothing about the need for being a fully Baptized and Confirmed Catholic before one can be enrolled into the Order of those who wear the Brown Scapular, and so I received The Brown Scapular, which made my waiting for the Holy Sacrament that much more tolerable. Then a little later I received the Chord of Saint Philomena, and then my God Mother insisted that I take the Chord of Saint Joseph, and memorize his famous Prayer from the Fifth Century ( “Hail Saint Joseph whose Protection is so great, so strong so prompt…”). I was instructed on how to multiply up Holy Water. All the while I read or became familiar with most of the books in her little Shop. And among the Statues and Paintings, I learned my Catholic Saints. By the time the RCIC Classes began, I was fairly well settled in and prepared for them. There was rarely any assigned work besides reading, but I would try to hand in at least one ‘Paper’ a month, so that the deacons could report favorably back to my Godmother… I wanted her to be proud of her newest protégé.

So that is the Story of what lead up to my Conversion. I wanted to become a Catholic and carried through and became a Catholic. But am I entirely satisfied? Do I wish the Catholic Church were different, were better? Well, certainly. We all must keep in mind that Christ prophesized that His Church would be a mixture of Wheat and Weeds. What rational person would wish to have the same appetite for Weeds as for Wheat? And yet I see very little discernment among the Catholic Intelligentsia, if there even is such a thing, for differentiating between the Good and the Evil within the Church. I have never found an open Forum for Catholic Discussion… everything sensible seems to be at the same time ‘heretical’, making discussion impossible… nobody is allowed to think. Questions can be asked and the Same Answers are given in reply that have always lead in the past to all of the Divisions and Unrest which have marred our Catholic History, as though nobody had ever heard the Words of Christ which say that Bad Doctrine can be recognized by its Bad Results.

Well, what good does complaining do? After all, Christ DID say that the Weeds would be with the Wheat well until the End of Time, that is, until the Final Harvest. Well, soon enough this Day of this Final Harvest will come, when the useless, barren and even positively evil Doctrines that have crowded out the Good in Our Church will no longer be able to sustain a defense based on duress, suppression and forced silence. Mary will confront Her Bishops and suddenly it won’t seem so obvious that they should have chosen Paul over Christ. Perhaps, the drive for Revenues always made Paul’s Popular Wide Way attractive to the Bishops who were mercenary enough even from the time of Peter’s murdering Ananias and Sapphira for their money. But hadn’t Christ quite condemned the Wide Way as the Way to destruction, and did He not advocate the less appealing but the only effectual Way – the Narrow Way of the Teachings of Righteousness and Perfection. On the Day of the Harvest we must decide whether we belong to the Church of the Wide Way, or of the Narrow? The Catholic Church contains Both. The Catholic Church provides a Choice, a Test – a Great Fork in the Road. It is both the Church of the Paul’s Bishops and the Church of the Holy Religious Orders, the Righteous Laity, and of Mary the Blessed Virgin. It is both the Church of Christ Her Son, and the Church of Paul, whose credentials must be wondered at considering that he never spoke a single word commending the Blessed Virgin or indeed ever quoted a single statement of Christ.

Yes, I know that these matters of Doctrine may be confusing, but we should remember that we have not been left without guidance. While we still receive the Revelations and Apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary, there is hope that Her Patronage and Sponsorship will bring us through to completion and perfection, and that She, with Her Angels and Saints, will sustain the Wheat while holding back the encroachments of the Weeds.

So, in short, I converted to Catholicism because it is the World’s Last and Only Living Religion, experiencing an Active Communication with Heaven, through Saints, and Seers (once called Prophets and Oracles), and receiving Revelations from Divinity Itself through the Intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary. I have not converted to a mere Belief System, but to an Institution that embodies the Living Vine of Christ on Earth, nurtured and watered by the Blessed Virgin Mary Mother of God Herself. To be a Catholic is to be under the Pall of Her Grace.
….Oh, allow me to add some subsequent history. I had noticed that after each Holiday Season, I and many others would come down with symptoms of respiratory illness, and I was able to infer that the smoke from the incense was making myself and others sick. I mentioned this to both the Parish Priests and the Arch Bishop of the Diocese and was frankly smiled at. Well, I suffered the indignity until the next set of Holidays whereupon they again brought out the Smoke. And then there was the election of Cardinal Ratzinger to Pope. The man had given every one of the Cardinals who voted for him their jobs. “I make you Cardinal, and you can make me Pope”. It simply was not honest and ethical behavior. So while I enjoyed the Sacraments for a number of years, I suppose that the Catholic Church of the Secular Clergy, the Bishops and the Pope must get along without me.