One old saw that I wish people would once and for all recognize for what it is and laugh to scorn is the one about how the church is invalid and can be safely ignored because it has hypocrites in it

.  Big discovery!  Those who use this excuse have obviously never read their New Testaments.  Otherwise they would have learned who it was who got Jesus condemned, namely the man reputed to be God’s maximum representative on earth.  Nothing new under the sun, says the writer of Ecclesiastes.

Oh, yes; and then there were the people in the courtyard who overcame Pilate’s initially correct verdict of innocence and forced him to violate Roman law by reversing his decision.  They had tried just about everything when one of them happened to hit Pilate’s hot button:  “He said he was a king!”  Well, Pilate had already received a satisfactory answer from Jesus on that one, but since he was in big trouble with Tiberias, an emperor who was especially paranoid about treason and insurrection, he figured he’d better not let it get back to Rome that he had freed a pretender to the throne, true or not.

Then it was the turn of the rest of the mob.  Pilate realized he had one more card to play.  Since it was the Romans’ custom to release whatever prisoner the people wanted freed, he asked whether he should free their king.  Their answer is a classic of hypocrisy:  “We have no king but Caesar!”  They would have been only too glad to roast Tiberias over a slow fire, given the opportunity.

But the charge won’t die.  How many times have we seen television programs announced that are going to deal with the issue of how certain cynical power brokers in the early church managed to maneuver into the New Testament canon only the books that would serve their purposes, and to exclude those that would threaten their power?  If the early church leaders were like that, they were the dumbest people in the history of the world, because when they became bishops they made themselves stand out as prime objects for martyrdom.  Power doesn’t do one a whole lot of good when one is being torn to shreds by a hungry beast or burned at the stake.

The plain and simple fact about the formation of the New Testament canon is that from the beginning the church was virtually obsessed with admitting only books they were certain had been written by apostles or people closely associated with them.  The Gospel of Mark came into circulation early and was immediately accepted because the church knew Mark had long been in close contact with Peter.  (This is undoubtedly why Mark’s Gospel puts Peter down more than the others do; Peter wanted it known that he had failed and was repentant about it.)  In the second century a bishop produced a work that he placed Peter’s name on, clearly explaining that Peter had not written it.  Even at that, he was defrocked for his deed.

This is not exactly the work of a church deviously plotting to exclude from the canon legitimate works that were just as good and true as the 27 we have today, doing so because the rejected books had been produced by rivals for their power.

Something else that needs to be brought to light is the presupposition underlying all this stuff about rival Gospels and the like, which is that nothing supernatural was going on in those centuries—that the Christian movement was nothing more than a new religion invented out of whole cloth by a bunch of semi-literate people in a backwater province of the Roman Empire.  If so, it’s the greatest hoax ever perpetrated, and of course its first victims were its perpetrators, who were such complete fools that they willingly died for what they knew to be a lie.

The real hypocrisy here is on the part of those who refuse to take the history of the Middle East, Europe and Africa in those centuries seriously.

In the meantime, I’m never going to darken the door of a hospital again until they get rid of all the sick people in there.

Celebrations of death from Neanderthal to NASA and Beyond.

Funeral rites are as old as the human culture itself, predating modern homo sapiens, to at least 300,000 years ago. For example, in the Shanidar cave in Iraq, in Pontnewydd Cave in Wales and other sites across Europe and the Near East, Neanderthal skeletons have been discovered with a characteristic layer of pollen, which suggests that Neanderthals buried the dead with gifts of flowers.This has been interpreted as suggesting that Neanderthals believed in an afterlife

Humankinds obsession with death not only continues but is even accelerated by modern technology. Ten years ago NASA paid tribute to top US astronomer Eugene Shoemaker by carrying into space a portion of his cremated remains.

After a year in lunar orbit Shoemaker’s remains were intentionally planted on the moon’s south pole, the first time human remains have been landed on the lunar surface — but maybe not the last time.

Soon for $9,995 one gram of cremated remains can be sent to the moon according to a website for Celestis a space funeral company. Other funeral services besides the full lunar trip include sending ash into Earth’s orbit — the cheapest option, starting at $700 – and all the way up to launching remains far, far away into deep space, for which the company charges more than $37,000. Moon funerals could start in 2010. and the pricier packages by 2011.

One day relatives could visit the lunar cemetery. For transportation, Celestis has made deals with two other US private space companies, Odyssey Moon and Astrobotic Technology, which are currently working on making commercial flights to the moon.

Other companies offer space burials but a flight that was to orbit the Sun went haywire earlier plunging the hapless ash filled capsules into it.

For the ultimate a rather morbid “bling” Life Gems will turn human ashes into a manmade diamond so relatives can wear your around for eternity or until you are pawned.

Something important that we don’t often hear about today is the concept of the artist as prophet.  In treating the topic, we should first go back to the meaning of the word “prophet” in the Hebrew Scriptures.  The Hebrew word itself seems to mean something like “mutterer,” which isn’t all that flattering, but the way the theme is worked out is a bit more positive.  When Moses very eloquently tells Yahweh that he isn’t eloquent, Yahweh appoints Aaron to be Moses’s mouthpiece, and that situation is the model for what the prophets do for their Lord.  This is why the prophets so often declare, “Thus says the Lord.”  If they’re what John Madden calls “the real deal,” their words are not their own, but God’s, and they deliver them to the people.

It is essential to note, though, that there are two major aspects to prophecy.  Many people have deluded themselves into thinking that a prophet is just someone who foretells the future.  In fact, the criterion Yahweh gives for discerning whether a prophet is from him or is a phony is to have him predict an unlikely future event.  If it comes to pass, the prophet is real.  This appears to be the basis for one of Jonah’s gripes.  He has predicted that God will obliterate Nineveh, but he knows that if Nineveh repents God will relent.  Ergo, Jonah is viewed as a false prophet.

But just as important as the prophet’s role as foreteller is his role as forthteller, in which he tells the people what God wants them to know about the seriousness of their sin and what they should do about it in present time.

When we speak of the artist as prophet, we mean something of both roles is involved.  As forthteller, the artist shows us what is really going on in our societies, and as foreteller the same artist may give us a pretty good idea of what is coming.  One striking example is El Greco’s Burial of the Count of Orgaz, which on the surface appears to be the most Counter Reformation Catholic of paintings.  It shows the body of the count laid out in all its finery, and surrounding it are some of the greatest dignitaries of church and state.  On the

top, however, is the count’s soul, clad only in a loincloth, bowing before Christ as judge.  Traditional art critics have considered this one of the most important of all paintings in its ingenious and innovative melding of heaven and earth.

In recent times, however, it has been pointed out that the painting is subtly subversive of Counter Reformation Catholicism.  How?  It has two centers, two focal points.  This was the church’s issue with Copernicus and Galileo.  The earth-centered solar system was supposed to reflect the centeredness of the world in the papacy and the empire.  If the earth actually moves, and thus isn’t the center of the universe, then perhaps the papacy and the empire are in danger of being displaced as well.  See:  Luther and the Reformation.  And then there was Kepler, shouting out to the world that the planetary orbits aren’t even circular, for heaven’s sake (no pun intended).  So El Greco, deliberately or not, seems to have been giving us a symbol of a new way of being in the world, in which the observer can focus on more than one center.

In the same era, poised just before Descartes doubted everything right into a dustbin, stands Don Quixote, one foot firmly planted in the Medieval world view and the other stepping uncertainly into what would be Descartes’s new approach to epistemology.  Early on, this ambivalent Everyman lies defeated in a ditch and tells his neighbor that he knows very well who he is, but that he also knows he can be all sorts of heroes of the past.  You see, the latter part of his statement is right out of the Middle Ages, in which to reproduce the deeds of a hero is to become that hero.  The earlier part of his speech shows that he is not merely a psychotic.  The Cave of Montesinos episode, which turns out to be a dream, exposes in a thoroughly modern way the contents of his unconscious, his doubts as to whether he can really bring this thing off.  Even his idealized peasant lady love, Dulcinea, who is right out of the Platonic love tradition of the Middle Ages, shows her true vulgar colors in the dream as she asks him for a loan.

In the second part, Don Quixote stands undaunted in his hope that he can yet impose his will on objective reality.  He tells Sancho that two flocks of sheep raising a cloud of dust down below them

are two armies about to meet in a great battle he has read about.  Sancho cautions him that they are nothing but flocks of sheep, and the knight’s answer is startlingly close to what we would call postmodern; “I tell you, Sancho, and it is therefore true,” that those are the archetypal armies in question.  And he charges down the hill on Rocinante and spears some sheep, which he is then forced to pay for.  Probably no better example could be given of humankind poised between the ancient world, in which the truth or falsehood of a proposition is decided by an authority (in this case Don Quixote’s books), and the modern world, in which materialistic empiricism would reign.

In that sense, Don Quixote is both a forthteller, warning his generation that things were changing radically, like it or not, and a foreteller, illustrating the conundrums with which humankind would find itself confronted.  One critic remarked that all subsequent novels are only variations on Don Quixote.

Of course, the readers of this column will be able to add dozens of worthy examples of the artist as prophet following Don Quixote, for example Diderot’s Jacques le Fataliste et son Maitre, in which the narrator presents an exciting scene portraying Jacques and his master with an angry mob in hot pursuit, only to inform the reader that it never happened.  That underscores the fact that fiction is only fiction, mocking the reader’s “willing suspension of disbelief.”  Of course, philosophers and then physicists got into the act, Kant warning us of the limits of pure reason and Berkeley pointing out that we can’t prove anything or anyone exists outside our own perceptions.  Now physicists inform us that the moon is not there when no one is looking and, as one friend of mine put it, we feel like just going out and playing in the sandbox.

And, true to form, the artists are still forthtelling and foretelling.  The abstract expressionists seem to be warning us, “There is no referent to what I’m painting; its only subject is the paint in a

certain configuration on the canvas.  Sorry, but that’s all the reality you’re going to get.”  So much for art’s “holding a mirror up to nature.”  Of course, one is free to feel that such a painting is beautiful, but that’s all subjective.  It relates to our being told that the only truth is what works for an individual at any given moment.  No wonder Paul Tillich assured us, in The Courage to Be, that

the central anxiety of our times is that of emptiness and meaninglessness.

Perhaps we should pay more attention to what the true artists of our generation might be telling us.  It just might help us understand some highly important sociopolitical processes more than superficially.

“Calvinist by Free Choice” is a sign illustrating my last entry at this website. It’s a clever little piece of tomfoolery, because everyone knows Calvinists don’t believe in free choice, right?

Wrong.

As the conundrum is expounded by Jonathan Edwards, whom many even in the secular world hold to have been the greatest of all American philosophers, we humans have freedom, but not free will.

Got that? Think it’s double-talk? I once angered a hyper-Calvinist pastor by challenging his statement, “You don’t have any choice about whether you’re saved or not.” The fact that John Calvin was abundantly clear on the biblical doctrine that “whosoever will may come” failed to move him.

In any case, Calvin only wrote about a page and a half in his Institutes of the Christian Religion on predestination, which comes as a shock to many who, never having read him, take him to be the ogre of determinism. Calvinism might be the most misunderstood ideology in the world. Calvin’s view, as expounded by Edwards in his masterful Freedom of the Will, holds that every person has the ability to make choices, in other words, possesses the freedom to choose, but that each choice is determined by all the influences working on that person.

John Calvin, who had been expected to become one of the greats of French jurisprudence, laid down a principle for winning an argument:  Determine the most essential point of the issue under dispute and hammer away at it until your opponent has nowhere left to stand. In Freedom of the Will, Edwards does exactly that. The entire text consists of a close examination of a single act of the will. Edwards asks whether the person in question can be said to choose A or B without anything influencing that choice. In other words, is that will absolutely free to choose either alternative, without being moved in one direction or the other by anything at all, internal or external? He attempts to demonstrate that an affirmative answer is patently absurd because the free will advocate is postulating an effect without a cause. It is fairly obvious to most of us that any decision is moved by all the factors within the chooser’s psychological makeup.
Nevertheless, the person facing a choice is free to make that choice, and as such is responsible for it. Yes, says Edwards, this leaves us in an unresolvable mystery involving how a person can be condemned for making a choice determined by all the factors that have influenced his or her tendencies, but any other approach to the problem leads to difficulties which are as bad or worse.
Recently an individual with apparently solid credentials as an American historian made the statement that Calvinists are the most insecure of people because they believe it is impossible for anyone to know whether he or she is among the elect.  Curiously, Roman Catholics have traditionally faulted Calvinists for believing the exact opposite. To the Catholic it appears that the true Calvinist is arrogant in declaring his or her assurance of salvation. The truth is that Calvin taught that the appropriation of salvation by faith on the part of an individual constitutes proof that the individual is among the elect. Furthermore, he answered his Catholic critics, there is no arrogance to the acceptance of such an assurance, because the believer has done absolutely nothing to merit that salvation.
Still, the truth is that in colonial times in America the Calvinism that the Puritans and Separatists had brought from England decayed into what we call hyper-Calvinism, in which people really did believe they had no choice, and that no one could know who was among the elect. They came to believe that one had to prove one’s election to oneself and the community by being a diligent, hard-working person. Since such an attitude normally led to a certain affluence, that theory in turn deteriorated into a belief that the rich were good and the poor were bad. Needless to say, an enormous amount of damage was done by this ideology, because many came to believe the poor were unworthy of being helped or even treated with dignity.
Ironically, Marxism eventually crept into American thinking by degrees, with the result that quite often we are confronted with the idea that the poor are good and the rich are bad. The film Titanic is an excellent example. About the only upper class individual who is viewed in a positive light is the one who symbolically descends to steerage and dances and celebrates with the pure and innocent proletariat.
Neither of these extremes is anything but false and dangerous, of course, and Calvinism in its genuine form rejects them. I recall my first sight of a Presbyterian church in Bristol, Tennessee, a traditional one in that its membership was largely upper middle class. As I drove up I noticed that a very poorly dressed man was walking up the stairs. He was warmly welcomed and ushered in, as I recall, by the vice mayor, a judge and the CEO of the local Coca Cola bottling plant. That is genuine Calvinism in practice.
As an Orthodox Presbyterian friend wrote yesterday, “I’m thankful that God chose me and then freed me and empowered me to choose him.”

In the Middle Egyptian language there is one verb that means “to fare upstream” or “to fare southward,” and another bears the meaning, “to fare downstream” or “to fare northward.”  Those verbs worked perfectly well in the vicinity of the Nile, but when an Egyptian general issued an order using one of them as his troops were deployed next to the Jordan River, they didn’t know which way to go, since the Jordan flows south.  Military operations require unequivocal language.

The demise of the League of Nations was caused in part by the mistranslation of an expression from French into English.  The original stated that “la France demande . . . ,” which was translated as “France demands . . . .”  Many Americans felt that if, after we had bailed them out in World War I, the French were inclined to make demands, we weren’t interested in obliging them.  Demander in French actually means “to request.”

These are just a couple of examples of foulups in language that have made some difference in world history.  It should go without saying that great civilizations must take great care with their languages, using them with precision.  In fact, it has been noted that great civilizations tend to have complex languages—the Russians, the English and the Americans, for example.  The great Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges remarked that he would have preferred to write in English because, with both Latin and Anglo-Saxon roots, it lends itself to more subtlety of expression than does Spanish.

But at the present time it appears that precision in language is strictly optional.  The problem with this is that language structures thought, and if language is illogical or otherwise sloppy, thought too becomes chaotic.  I’ve noticed that the phase “just might” is almost always inverted today.  “Charlie might just wear a tie to the dance” has quite different connotations than “Charlie just might wear a tie to the dance.”  Or what about the tendency, perhaps based on the song, Nobody Does It Better, to say, “No gasoline cleans your car’s engine better than Chevron with Techron”?  That leaves open the possibility that every other gasoline on the market does it just as well.  “No other gasoline cleans your car’s engine as well . . . ” is not the same thing.

And then there are those lovely dependent clauses floating in space, looking for something to hang onto.  The best one I’ve come across was in a program on Russian rocketry.  In speaking of a particular rocket, the narrator said, “Launched into space three times, the factory that built it still exists.”

“Man, oh, man!,” I said to myself.  “Those Russian factories are formidable.”

Political correctness has also polluted the language, so that singular and plural become mixed up:  “Every person has their own viewpoint.”  Again I submit that when language becomes that dull, the thought expressed in it is not likely to be any sharper.  This goofiness has gone so far that the grammatical error in question is used even when there is no PC purpose for it:  “Each individual species has their own way of dealing with this challenge.”

Oh, but it gets better.  Sometimes an egregious error is made in an attempt to sound sophisticated.  I heard a college president with a Ph.D. in English begin a speech with “This has been an interesting summer for my wife and I.”

That is about as bad as a classic I heard uttered by a first grade teacher:  “Me and her was gonna do that.”  There are four errors in the first four words.

Then there’s my personal favorite:  “these kinds of things” when “things of this kind” would be appropriate.  I get tired of shouting at the TV screen, “How many kinds of things are you referring to, idiot?”

Or how about what I call chain-link sentences?:  “That’s the problem with this team is that it has no running game.”

Many books have been sent to me with requests that I review them for one journal or another.  Some of them have interested me a great deal.  I recall one in particular, produced by a Jewish writer about the experience of his people in Colombia in the 1930s, when that country was one of two in the Americas that had concordats with the Vatican pledging that they would be purely and perpetually Roman Catholic.  I started reading the book with relish.  One image stuck out.  The narrator told of the Jews’ being so poor that the children were admitted free to a movie theater—but were only allowed to sit behind the screen.  This was their reality, the reverse of the accepted point of view in Colombia.

The problem with the book was that, despite the fact that the author was a native speaker of Spanish and held a Ph.D. degree in that language from an Ivy League university, the book contained thousands of errors in spelling, grammar and punctuation.  At one point a character wants to deny something, and says, “No, es verdad” (No, it’s true) instead of “No es verdad” (It’s not true).  I stopped reading and sent the book back to the book review editor of the journal in question.  Still, when I took a book manuscript of mine to a highly recommended typist and she introduced several thousand errors of the same kind (those kinds of errors?)  I began wondering whether that had happened to the Colombian writer as well.  But if so, where was the copy editor in all this?  Someone should have edited those errors out of the book.

Ours is an age when it seems accuracy is optional.  If “Me and her was gonna do that” gets the thought across, it’s acceptable—except in the business world, that is.  One growth industry is straightening up executives’ English usage.  Perhaps it’s time for primary school teachers to stop telling their pupils that grammar, punctuation and spelling don’t matter, that what matters is that they express themselves.  And it may also be time for university professors of English to stop claiming that there is no such thing as standard English.  Are we really to believe that “Me and her was gonna do that” is as correct as “She and I were going to do that”?  Just try speaking that way in your interview for a position in a serious business firm.

And, if I may be permitted just one business cliché, the bottom line here is that sloppy language does tend to reflect sloppy thinking.  We can’t afford that in a world of this kind.

Feel free to pick my little essays apart in search of errors in English usage.  However, if you find that I’ve ended a sentence with a preposition and call me on it, I’ll quote Winston Churchill:  “This is the sort of nonsense up with which I will not put.”

In his Eclogues, Virgil painted a picture of Elysian Fields where all was perfect.  His shepherdesses were all what we might call perfect 10s, and the shepherds who courted them were hunks with perfect manners.  The scene was known as a locus amoenus, a pleasant place.  In the Italian Renaissance, the poet Petrarch revived the form, and in Spain Garcilaso de la Vega also wrote sonnets in such a style.  The problem, as one bright observer pointed out, is that if one of the sheep smells, the entire scene disappears.

The fact is that Plato’s realm of Forms was being imposed on the material world.  All that heavenly perfection was being projected into what we all know is an imperfect setting.  Platonic thought was one of the aspects of the Classical world that were revived in the Renaissance.  Everyone knew Petrarch’s idealized landscapes and characters were impossible to find on earth, but they could nonetheless be experienced as literature.

Well, almost everyone knew it.  At one point in his wanderings, Don Quixote decides he will go mad and become a shepherd.  It goes without saying that his lady love, Dulcinea, who in real life is a peasant who smells of garlic, is the one he chooses to pine for.  As he establishes himself in the countryside, he meets some real shepherds and experiences their “crude hospitality.”  They are good people, but they do not fit in the world Don Quixote desires to experience.

It is but a small leap, then, to what was going on in Roman Catholic theology in those days.  It too was Platonic, based on a philosophy called realism, which was almost diametrically opposed to what is called realism today.  It held that an institution such as the Church was characterized by an ideal, Platonic perfection independent of the nature of its constituent elements.  Thus, the ultra-Catholic Dante could place some popes in the lowest regions of hell, even as, in their role as popes, they were considered to be perfect.  The point was that the Church and the papacy were viewed in terms of the realm of Forms, not in their material-world imperfection.

The philosophical debate in the time of the Reformation, then, was between the Roman Catholics’ realism and the nominalism of the Protestants.  To the Protestant mind, if the preponderance of elements constituting an entity are rotten, that entity itself is rotten and needs to be reformed.  The Catholics countered that the Church was perfect even though, for example, many Scottish priests were saying mass while seriously drunk, and a cardinal in Rome boasted that on account of his many conquests he had had upwards of 160 children born in one year.  “Of course the earthly representatives of the Church are imperfect.  They are material beings, and sinful in the nature of the case.”

It is out of nominalism that the observation  arises that if one sheep stinks the entire pastoral world disappears.

In our day we may be engaged in a perilous return to realism in the Medieval sense.  Certain automobiles that used to represent the height of elegance but are now engineered badly and built worse continue to be the standard against which other technological items are judged.  No one says, “This is the Lexus of attack aircraft.”  After a certain prominent televangelist fell and it was revealed that he was a smashing hypocrite, huge numbers of his followers remained faithful to him, saying, “Oh, but he’s done so much good.” Sure, for his own bank account.  It was notable that when the monster Stalin died, large numbers of Russians wept at the country’s loss.

The tendency is particularly frightening in politics.  There are those who would vote for their chosen  party even if a revived Joseph Stalin were its candidate.  In a day when only something like 43% of our country’s voters feel moral values are important in a candidate, one wonders to what extent we’re buying into the old philosophy that a party and its candidates are perfect in Plato’s realm of Forms, even when, as beings in the material world, they have been proven to be a pack of scoundrels.  It may not be just blind loyalty.  What is at work here just might be a revival of Medieval realism.

Of course, there is also a flip side to this.  Many of us have bought into the notion that our presidential candidates must be squeaky clean.  We even purge certain facts from the records of our Founders, who are then free to live in that realm of Forms where all is perfect.  That means we have unrealistic expectations of anyone in our age who wants to occupy the exalted seat of the presidency.  Perhaps the exposure of their imperfections to public view is what has made the majority decide that morals are not important at all.

This morning, when I realized that the milk for my cereal didn’t smell very good, I didn’t conclude that milk is perfect even when its earthly, material manifestation smells like a sheep.  I poured it out and went for a new bottle.  I’m a hopeless nominalist.

Louis Pasteur

I get a daily email from Reuters Health News that tells me all the up-to-date progress that Big Pharma is making with its drug research. But isn’t it peculiar that after nearly a century of modern medicine, after the discoveries of anti-biotics, vaccination, genome therapy, biotech, nanotechnology etc. we are still no closer to a cure for cancer or aids or heart disease or Alzheimer’s or HIV etc - the list goes on and on ?

All the drugs that are spewed out of Big Pharma’s labs are essentially anti-inflammatory painkillers for particular conditions. These drugs only make the patient feel more comfortable but very few of these drugs are outright curatives are they ? Perhaps I’m being too cynical here, but maybe this is the way Big Pharma likes it, maybe this is firm policy with the drugs companies. After all, if there was a cure for cancer, these patients would have no further need for their very expensive cancer drugs, radiotherapy or surgery would they? So Big Pharma seems to prefer inventing drugs/procedures that the patient will have to take for a long time. Look at the “Cancer Industry” for example. It’s HUGE. Hundreds of expensive drugs, Radiography machines, expensive surgery. My goodness — if a successful cure was found for cancer, what would happen to all this huge industry? Well perish the thought !! Dependency seems to be key to Big Pharm’s illusive strategy. Simply because this continuing dependency will naturally mean more profit for Big Pharma. This dependency is a bit like a drug pusher making the user so dependent on his drugs that he buys more and more and more. Hence the huge profits.

Or perhaps I’m being unkind here. Perhaps the whole basis of Medicine and Big Pharma - The Germ Theory - is incorrect ? So what does the Germ Theory say ? Basically put, this theory says this: One germ –>One disease –> One cure. But this theory evolved way back in the early 1900, and was “invented” by Louis Pasteur. However this wasn’t the only theory that was prevalent at the time - there was another theory, postulated by Antoine Bechamp (and backed up by Gunther Enderlein, Claude Bernarde, Royal Rife, Gaston Naessens etc.) called The Cellular Theory.

Here is a comparison of the two theories:

If you are interested, here is some further evidence concerning both The Germ Theory and The Cellular Theories:

Louis Pasteur Plagiarized Antoine Bechamp’s Work and Lied about Certain Aspects of His Germ Theory

Antoine Bechamp

The Current State and Behaviour of Big Pharm Today

On the Curious Working Practices of the FDA

Pasteur’s Mistakes

Claude Bernard

Gunther Enderlein

Antoine Bechamp

Gaston Naessens

Royal Raymond Rife

Virginia Livingston

A Simple Cancer Treatment - Treating the “Terrain” and not the Germ

Hodgkin’s Disease - Research Evidence of Pleomorphic Bacteria

In Praise of Four Women Against Cancer

Alan Cantwell M.D.

Notable also, is that the Germ Theory is the only theory that Big Pharma dares to allow — perhaps because this theory fits their money-making “business model” so well. This model conveniently allows Big Pharma to continuously invent thousands of expensive, singular drugs that are only useful for one particular disease or condition. They invent a drug or procedure, patent it and then make huge profits off their sales despite the drug’s or procedure’s usually vicious side-affects. The Cellular Theory would kill this business practice dead.

And you might well ask, why hasn’t anyone set out to prove, by way of research, the efficacy of The Cellular Theory then? In America, it takes $200 million to prove safe proof of purpose for just one drug to the satisfaction of the FDA. And the only sector that has that kind of funding is Big Pharma. There are no small start-up biotech companies or Alternative Therapy clinics that have this kind of money. So they are completely shut out of this drug loop by both Big Pharma and the FDA.

On his deathbed, with his scientific adversary Claude Bernard present, Louis Pasteur finally admitted :”…You are right, microbes are nothing, the terrain is everything…”

But too late, the wheels of Big Pharma had already started to spin, twist and dance to The Germ Theory….

Also see the article Part 1 - Big Pharma : An Ethics and Morals Vacuum

We Gentiles miss the point of some passages in the Hebrew Scriptures because we fail to understand the Jewish sense of humor.  The Book of Jonah, for example, is meant to be taken as the very funny story of a man who tries to escape from God by leaving the territory he thinks God is limited to, but then is very happy to learn that even the belly of a submerged fish is within God’s domain.  At the end Jonah is grumpy because, even though his preaching has resulted in wholesale repentance (and who wouldn’t listen to a prophet in rags who smells like the belly of a fish?), he’s afraid God is going to spare the hated Ninevites.  You see, if the destruction you foretell doesn’t take place, you’re to be stoned as a false prophet.  So God has to give Jonah a lesson in perspective.  Funny stories often have a serious point to them.

The Book of Judges, though, is a comic masterpiece, matching genre to subject matter.  For the author, everything is topsy-turvy in Israel, and he writes accordingly.  We read about a long series of judges, none of whom ever does any judging.  You have a crack regiment of left-handed slingshot artists from the tribe of Benjamin, which means “son of my right hand.”  There is Gideon, whose astounding military victory leads the people to ask him to be their king.  He says, “Naw, I don’t think so.  God is supposed to be our only king.”  Then he goes home and names his son Abimelech, which means “my father is king.”

Chapter four of Judges has the story of a dramatic victory of God’s people over the Canaanites, but again everything is out of kilter.  It seems the obvious choice of a man to lead the Israelite army in battle against them is Barak, whose name means “thunderbolt.”  Barak doesn’t like the odds of a bunch of foot soldiers going out against 900 iron chariots, though, so a prophetess named Deborah, which means “bee,” stings him hard, essentially calling him a wimp, which he is.  Finally he agrees to attack, but only if Deborah goes with him.  Well, sir, this is the age of male dominance, and she says, “Fine, but I’m warning you that a woman will get the credit.”

The Lord fights for Israel and gives them so great a victory that even muy macho General Sisera of the Canaanite army flees for his life.  His people have been on friendly terms with a segment of the Jews known as the Kenites.  Their name is a little strange, because it seems to mean they were descended from Cain, who murdered his brother Abel.  For this reason they were somewhat marginalized from mainline Israelite society.  The Kenites were blacksmiths and did contract work for the Canaanites on their iron chariots and the like, so Sisera felt he would be safe in the tent of a lady named Jael.  Well, Jael’s name means “mountain goat” (whose idea was it to put that on her birth certificate?), but it also sounds like “Yahweh is God.”  Along with her family history of bashing people’s heads in, that should have been a clue for Sisera about where his friend’s ultimate loyalties lay.

Jael invites the exhausted Sisera in and says, essentially, “You look