Journey 31 - SEEDS OF EVIL, 9/11

Nothing can justify the terrible evil of 9/11. It was a completely unprovoked attack on innocent
victims, who never did anything against our attackers. Our actions since 9/11 are not acts of
revenge, but of self-defense, since the collapse of the Twin Trade Towers showed us we are
vulnerable to suicidal fanatics, domestic or foreign. We will do whatever we must to protect
ourselves from additional attacks. This will be difficult, though not impossible, and provides
another reason for the identity and location databases and the unforgable ID cards and the
checkpoints discussed in "Lady Justice."

It is this event more than any other that convinced me that all religions are evil. It was the Mullahs
of Saudi Arabia (Islamic Preachers) who taught the fanatics of Al Qaeda. These Wahhabists are
supported by the oil-rich Princes of Saudi Arabia, which pretends to be a friend and ally of the
West.

Mohammed did not preach intolerance of Christians or Jews, nor did he tolerate suicide. In a
similar vein, Christ taught tolerance in his parable of the Good Samaritan. Yet, in the first Crusade,
the so-called Christian knights killed every inhabitant of Jerusalem. Now that we have some actual
scientific knowledge of reincarnation and of the closer regions of the between, there is no need to
take anything on faith. All religions teach sectarian intolerance, in their present decadent state.
This is the root of all the evil in the Middle East, the root of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the
root of terrorist acts between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland.

Why do they hate us so much? At first, we could only attribute the events of 9/11 to the outbreak of
some unfathomable new evil, like Fascism in the 1930s. As we learned more about the terrorists,
new hypotheses arose. It turned out that the terrorists were not the poor and downtrodden, not even
people brought up in the fundamentalist tradition of pure Islam, where the only book read was the
Koran. No, the terrorists were rich, urbane, well-educated men, who lived and moved without
notice in the West. Some of them were born in the West, educated in the West. They begin to seem
more like traitors from within, like the American Taliban fighter, than traitors from without.
Enormous rage is required to turn an intelligent and well-educated person into a suicidal killer. The
presence of an Islamic background leads them to the Mosques of the radical Mullahs, who can give
them a specific focus for their rage, and can tell them where to go and who to see to become a
suicide pilot or a suicide bomber.

Western religion is not Christianity and Judaism, as you might imagine. It is the religion of science.
The distinction between "science" and "the religion of science" is that the former refers to
"anything learned by scientific method," while the latter refers to a specific set of articles of faith.
Followers of the religion of science would not see this distinction. The usual rules of scientific
method establish the reality of such things as reincarnation, NDEs, OBEs and UFOs. Here I use the
term "UFO" not in its original sense, but in its popular sense as spacecraft piloted by humanoids
from other stars. One can easily detect the followers of the religion of science by offering to show
them the studies that establish the reality of reincarnation, NDEs, OOBEs, and UFOs, using
scientific method. They will refuse, just as Galileo's colleagues refused to look through his
telescope. Galileo challenged a core set of beliefs that were resistant to empirical refutation. That is
the definition of a worldview, another name for religion.

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Science is a seductive and powerful religion, draining the lifeblood out of all the older religions,
and forcing its way everywhere. The reason is, scientists do not call it a religion, but confidently
present it as "the truth that only ignorant fools reject." The high priests of the religion of science
chart the spread of irrationality with polls testing to see how many people believe in reincarnation,
ESP or UFOs. In the eyes of the high priests of science, belief in any of these forbidden doctrines is
sufficient proof of irrationality.
Western religion is seductive in other ways as well. People in Pakistan or India or Saudi Arabia can
easily see that many good things come along with the religion of science, including Western
luxuries, high technology, democracy and wealthy economies. All it will cost you is the loss of
everything sacred. In the religion of science, there is no soul, no divinity, and no life after death, no
immortality, no meaning to our existence. As Nobel Laureate Steven Weinberg said at the end of his
book The First Three Minutes "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also
seems pointless."

Once a sensitive young man recognizes the nihilistic character of the religion of science, he may
begin to despise all the outward signs of Westernization, such as the growth of huge, impersonal
boxes for architecture, or the spread of tawdry strip malls, or the cancerous spread of McDonalds
and Wal-Marts, a cancer which destroys the distinctive soul or the small towns painted by Norman
Rockwell. He may become frustrated that nothing seems capable of halting the march of
reductionist materialism.

I become pessimistic myself when I see the high priests and Grand Inquisitors of the religion of
science (Psi-cops) in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN and on the Discovery Science channel on cable
TV. Does no scientist object? Can't anyone see that this is the end of scientific method? You have to
choose. Either scientific method applied to all things, known and unknown, or the religion of
science.

The Psi-cops (CSICOP) want to close the books. They don’t want to allow new sciences. They
want to define rationality as whatever is in the current textbooks, and irrationality is everything
else. After three centuries, the grand adventure of ideas is over and science becomes just another
faith, another superstition. One can easily see why this leads to a desperate search for any
alternative.

Islam provides an alternative, one that seeks to destroy the West. It may now be clear why the most
westernized of Moslems and the most intelligent are the first to raise the bloody flag of Jihad. They
know better than anyone the cost to the soul of the soft luxury and gadgets of the West. A good
example of the core terrorists is Ahmed Omar Sheikh, abductor of the Wall Street Journal reporter
Daniel Pearl. Sheikh is Pakistani, but raised in a middle-class neighborhood in East London
(NEWSWEEK, 2/18/02/ p.42), educated in an elite private high school and the London School of
Economics. It would seem that merely educating Moslems in the ways of the West would be
counter-productive. It would be much better to teach them the modern liberal forms of Islam, taught
in Dearborn, Michigan, the center of Moslem emigrants to the US.

We must change too, and offer kinds of spirituality that are compatible with science. No spirituality
is compatible with the religion of science that we must vigorously reject, as we reject all other

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religions, as irrational dogma, unsupported by experience. Religions have outlived their usefulness.
They all induce sectarian intolerance, and they all teach fear, where there need be no fear. We need
not fear death. It has no terror for those who have had an NDE. Death has no terror for those who
know Professor Stevenson's Twenty Cases. We need not fear "the end times." This universe has
lasted 13.7 billion years, and if it is closed, it has a minimum lifetime of 2000 billion years. If it is
not closed, it will last forever, but will not be habitable forever. There are no discernible
discontinuities in time, except at the Big Bang. It is odd that this is a common fear among religions,
including ones as different as the Aztec and the Christian. Perhaps those who have read nothing but
the Koran or the Bible do not understand why the sun comes up every day, or why one season
follows another.

What is emerging is a new metaphysics that shall be the basis for a renaissance of art and
architecture. It will be rich in mysticism and symbolic revelation. Anyone can have a symbolic
revelation. All they have to do is make a Mandala. This new metaphysics will be open to all seven
ways, and there shall be no credo, nor any social hierarchy. It will be open to ceremonial magick,
and to every form of meditation, and to every kind of entheogen, as we party and frolic our way
towards a brighter day. Freedom! Liberation from our Puritanical past, and a repressive and
tyrannical present. Throw off the shackles! Begin the long journey. It will not be a hardship. It will
be a party, as we live, and love, and express ourselves, and grow. Let spiritual evolution and the
divine purpose be our goal. Let our motto be SIC ITUR AD ASTRA, "the way to the stars--and to
immortality."