The seminary educated me to be a quack – Dealing with distant/unknown/invisible powers has been a profitable field for fakers/racketeers from time immemorial.

 

 

The seminary educated me to be a quack. What is a quack? A quack in short is one who pretends to have an inside wire or track. No priest, rabbi, minister or bishop or cardinal or pope has inside knowledge about heaven, hell and god but to hear me exhort you would have thought that I had influence with God. That is how all ministers sound when they pray (bray) with that old paranoiac voice of divine authority, which so many clergymen quickly develop, while thundering and re-echoing their god’s fiendish and diabolical warnings of future punishment. Pause and listen some Sunday to these circus freaks peddling their wares over the radio and please notice at the same time how subtly yet how brazenly they beg for gold to carry on their quackery. Listen to the tent revivalists who are the high pressure artists of the world’s greatest and cruellest racket. These pious swindlers prey on the aged, the widows, the poor and the sick. They deserve your censure. They should not be allowed to operate. If they were selling anything else but religion the police would be after them in a hurry. But our laws have made this racket legal.

Dealing with distant and unknown and invisible powers has been a profitable field for fakers and racketeers from time immemorial, and I am sorry to say that rabbis, priests and ministers must be included in this category. Everyone of them are quacks. You heard me correctly. The man in the pulpit who makes you think he is publicly praying to god is a quack. The man who comes to your home and offers to pray (or beg) to a god for a cure of anyone’s soul or body is a quack. He may not know it but he is. When the priest does his mumbo jumbo for fee or salary he is indulging in quackery. No, I will not exempt the protestant clergymen. Of course most of them are sincere just as many quacks of medicine are when they try to sell you their pet remedies. Do not be taken in. Do not be fooled by the clergymen’s neatly tailored black clothes and their cultured manners. It is all window dressing. Beware of these wolves (some of them are wolves) in sheep’s clothing. Have you ever noticed that the women far outnumber the men in every church service? It is not hard to know why. But I am not going to stick my neck out and say. I will let you think that out for yourself. I only know that many men who do go to church are dragged there. A few are henpecked. These male wolves in their black frocks go after the rich as well as the poor bleeding them of large amounts of their financial blood. As for the widows they love to be fleeced and buncoed by their good looking pastors. Why should they mind writing out those fat checks for the church? They figure they will receive a mansion in the sky in return. These rich communicants may not know it but they are very unbusiness like. They are buying a pig in a poke, buying blindly, as the eastern suckers used to do when they bought distant Florida real estate by mail, only to find out later that they had bought worthless swamp land. These rich contributors eventually will die without ever a deed for their heavenly real estate which they bought sight unseen, and which actually does not exist. After death it will be too late for the deceased to come back to get even with their fast talking pastors, who by then will have moved on to other cities to reap additional harvests.

Newspapers and magazines, TV and radio give these pious swindlers and sellers of heavenly property free space and time to publish their gibberish and double talk. Local governments unconstitutionally subsidize the churches by exempting them from taxes. This should be stopped. Churches be it known are our largest landowners. That is one reason why your taxes are so high. They pay no taxes and the remaining taxpayers such as you and I have to make it up for the expenses of government are enormous. Politicians are no help for they bow and scrape before the clergy as though these hypocritical salvationists were better than ordinary men. We put these glorified parasitical quacks who enjoy begging for a living on a pedestal. Yet they are on a level with fortune tellers and similar racketeers. Fortune tellers bad as they are do less harm because their racket is not so well organized nor are their teachings systematized to church proportions. The fortune tellers lack press agents to build up good will for them and to glorify their magic powers, and particularly the invisible supernatural powers, from whom they draw their secrets. These crystal gazers like the clergy are peddling mystical nonsense and false information. Both are pretenders of knowledge and both de al with the realm of the unseen and invisible. Did you know that fortune tellers in Los Angeles now operate under the cloak of religion in order to operate legally? They use the title Reverend before their names. Quite fitting isn’t it?

ARE THE CLERGY WELL EDUCATED?

Did I hear you say that the clergy are well educated and therefore not in the same category with the fortune tellers and other quacks who claim to do business with the supernatural powers? Ah yes there is the rub. Your pastor has been to school true, but he has never been taught to think. He is a parrot. Forgive him. He can’t think for himself. His thinking has been warped because he has been indoctrinated with religious superstition. His education has been slanted. He has been told what to believe. It has been poured into him through a funnel. When he is graduated he is a beautiful bird who wears a colorful robe on Sundays and repeats the same lingo week after week. A moron could do just as well.

Actually the educational level of the average clergyman has always been low though slightly higher than the people in the pews. There are of course exceptions. His little education formerly never mattered as long as the people in the pews were ignorant but it matters now because church members today are getting higher education and they can be greatly bored by a 2×4 preacher who does not know what he is talking about. Some denominations have higher standards than others, but mark you, thousands of ministers have had no college education.

Many take non-accredited home study courses of required reading, designed to make them full fledged shouting robots. Some of these non-schooled clergymen when not too lazy to stick their noses in books do pick up a degree of culture and if they possess literary or oratorical ability are able to put on a good show. Ministers of the literary type produce some brilliant essays. These essays if stripped of meaningless pious phrases would be worth listening to. Many of these men are creative and original. It is too bad they are confined to a mental cage. They should be on the lecture platform speaking their wisdom secularly. In my humble opinion all the good that is done in the name of religion could be done just as well if not better secularly. For diversion I attend the movies once a week. I have perhaps learned more good moral lessons from selected movies than from any other source in life. You do not need to go to church if you are a sincere seeker after that which is good. You can find it in books, in plays, in forums, in lectures, in night schools, in art galleries and music academies. You can waste your time in church. On Sundays both radio and television offer their best educational programs. Relax and listen to them. Improve yourself. The people in the pews are often fooled by the gift of gab of their pseudo-educated pastors who are nothing but ventriloquists’ dummies speaking their pieces. Some of the pulpiteers in the nicer sections of the city dispense discourses that are polished with a little more veneer than the emotional sermons of the shouting ranting revivalists more often found in the poorer sections of town. This is how many people are fooled. The better class of trade must be taken care of.

 

Read the whole story here:

 

Background And Education
How Long A Pastor?
Was I Sincere?
Was I Paid To Quit?
Was My Motive Publicity?
What Am I Rebelling Against?
Why Did I Turn My Back On God?
What Events Led To My Conversion To Atheism?
Humanists And Atheists Drove Me To My Books
I Renounce Religion
The Most Important Day Of My Life
Ministers And Priests Are Quacks
Are The Clergy Better Educated?
What About Revelation?
Why Not Compromise?
Religion By Mail
Knowledge Is Like A Sword
What Harm Has The Bible Done?
If The Churches Do Good Why Not Leave Them Alone?
The Problem Of Behavior
Am I A Communist?
A Word To My Brethren In The Ministry
Agnostic Or Atheist?
Cheer Up! It Is Not So Bad
The World Is In A State Of Flux
Books For The Novice

 

 

You are the creator of your life ………………… one “perception” and “belief system” at a time.

 

 

 

You are the creator of your life. You created what you deem your world, one “perception” and “belief system” at a time. It is the collective pool of your perceptions that later took on a life of its own.

 

It took me the best part of my life to grasp that we all have the power to create happy and successful lives if we give up our tendency to play silly games with other people and ourselves. We tend to automatically go on the defensive when anyone dares to request us to stop playing games. Our often bloated egos react like a bull when a red rag is waved in front on him. You are the creator of your life. You created what you deem your world, one “perception” and “belief system” at a time. It is the collective pool of your perceptions that later took on a life of its own. You were convinced by your programmers that your “belief systems” (implanted dogma) reflects who you are. You have been led astray by these clever operators even more when they convinced you that you are your history. Your programmers, some with good intentions made you into the rat on a treadmill that you turned out to be. Guilt and fear became your prison guards. All your efforts to become a productive, loving and caring individual as prescribed failed. You failed because you can never work fast enough to clean up behind your ego. Your daily good intentions faded into nothingness as soon as you made your first mistake for the day. The only way to escape the treadmill of life is to accept that you are not your ego, mistakes or history. You can make a fresh start today and create a wonderful life for yourself. You need to take back the creation function from your ego. Your ego (defective program) is responsible for the mess your thought you made to date. The real you have been waiting patiently for you to wake up and discover this powerful, life changing truth that you are not the defective soft-ware that ran your show to date.

 

Rene

The only way to escape the treadmill of life is to accept that you are not your ego, mistakes or history. You can make a fresh start today and create a wonderful life for yourself.

 

You can’t be a victim and be a success in life. You can be one or the other, but not both at the same time.

What do all of the following statements have in common?

• *Ever notice as soon as you get in the Express Line at the grocery store the line slows down?

• *When I was growing up my mother was very distant and since then I have had a hard time relating to women.

• *Just when I was getting ahead my ex-wife’s lawyer came after me for the unpaid child support.

• *I’d like to have more money, but I have so many financial problems I will never get out of debt.

• *I enjoy personal growth, but my husband thinks all that stuff is nonsense and doesn’t like me to participate in it.

• *I’d like to open a business of my own, but my wife thinks it is too risky, so I guess I had better stay at this secure and boring job I dislike going to every day.

What all these statements have in common is the nature of the person making the statement. As diverse as all of these statements are and as diverse as the people who make them appear to be, each statement reflects the same type of individual – a person with low self-worth and a predisposition toward negative expectations.

The biggest common denominator all these people share is that they are desperately holding onto being a victim. They live at the Victim Level of Awareness. They almost celebrate the fact that they are victimized. Their “stories” are always about their past and the latest problems and tragedies that have befallen them. Of course they are not really victims, but volunteers. They have made a choice – usually unconscious- to remain a victim.

You can’t be a victim and be a success in life. You can be one or the other, but not both at the same time. If you want to feel like a victim and that’s what you affirm to the people around you, you will continue to create a self-fulfilling prophecy. You will repel love, defer happiness, attract illness or injuries and sabotage any financial or business success. The problem is you tell your story so well to everyone around you that you end up following your own script.

The good news is REMAINING a victim is a choice. If the above describes you then ask yourself this question. “Is remaining a victim moving me TOWARDS or AWAY from what I want?” If it is moving you away, then you are paying a very high price to hold onto your victim-hood  Now is the time to release it and move up to a higher Level of Awareness.

Dr Robert Anthony

Thank you for this contribution Anton!!

 

Instead of drowning in the sorrow of the ending, stay focused on the new beginning.

 

 

Whether you’ve just gotten divorced, just gotten laid off, just had to move out of your hometown for the first time, or suffered something equally as earth-shattering, you know endings are sad and scary. In fact, there are few things in life that actually cause more sadness than an ending.

Why?

Because you’re losing a part of yourself. Even if your marriage wasn’t a good one, it defined part of who you are. Or, the job you went to every day made you feel “whole”. Or, simply growing up and living in your hometown helped to shape who you are. When things like that come to an end, you can feel empty and disconnected from the rest of the world. You may feel like you don’t even know who you are anymore!

So, how do you get through it and start anew?

 

You need to focus on the positives – and, specifically, feel grateful for them.

Instead of drowning in the sorrow of the ending, stay focused on the new beginning. For example, if you’re grateful for the new people you’re about to meet as a new found single, grateful for the new job opportunities you’ll grateful,  discover in your employment search, or grateful for the new town you’re about to become a part of, it will soften the blow of your loss.

OK, that’s easy to say… But how do you actually go about doing it?

1. Purge your grief.

Take out a piece of paper and write down everything you’re sad about. Be sure to include the way you feel now that your situation is over and how you think this ending is going to affect the rest of your life.

By getting everything down on paper, you’re not keeping things bottled up – which can be unhealthy and damaging. Instead, you’re getting everything out, so you can move forward.

2. Remember the good things.

Take out another piece of paper and list all of the good things that came out of the situation. For example, even if your marriage didn’t work out, your two kids are great examples of the good that came from it. Without your soon-to-be ex-spouse, you never would’ve had those two kids, so you need to feel grateful for it – even if it didn’t turn out the way you wanted it to.

3. Look towards the future.

Pull out another piece of paper and write down all the ways your life can benefit from this ending. For example, if you’re getting divorced, list the possibilities that can come from new relationships – like finding a partner who truly values and respects you. Or, if you just lost your job, write down all of the great things that can come out of a new job – like a better salary, more time with your family, a shorter commute, etc.

If you don’t immediately feel better when you go through these exercises, that’s OK. In fact, it’s not uncommon. Remember, things are always darkest before dawn. Even though you may feel like your world is crashing down on top of you, you’ll be able to move on. As long as you’re willing to look for hidden blessings – instead of simply dwelling in negativity – you’ll be able to pick yourself back up.

Don’t be ashamed to do these exercises on a regular basis. After all, spending some time making lists and jotting down your feelings is proactive; simply sitting around feeling devastated is reactive. By working hard to focus on the good things to come – instead of dwelling on the good things you’ve lost – eventually, you’ll be just fine.

 

By Tony Mase / Source: The Personal Power Course

 

There is a saying “the Teacher arrives when the student is ready”. Every person and every opportunity is a “teacher” (learning experience) for us.

 

As we go about our work each day we should keep our minds open to new ideas and possibilities. Life is about learning and developing new skills and experiencing new opportunities – and by opening our minds to possibilities we leave ourselves ready and able to hear and see opportunities that a more limiting mind may be denied. We need to ask ourselves the question – Are we ready and willing to change our behaviour in order to widen our minds to possibilities? For instance, if we are poor listeners are we ready and willing to make the necessary changes in behaviour that will allow us to hear new ideas and thereby experience new possibilities. What possibilities are we missing out on because of having closed minds? It is not just “ideas” we miss out on when we consider this across all areas of our lives – this could include opportunities that will bring us laughter, joy, happiness and love into our lives. When we approach each area of our life with positive expectation and flexibility it opens up a whole range of possibilities for us to enjoy.

We should also be prepared to encounter some “fear” in our lives. When we encounter fear it is a sign that we are stretching ourselves, and therefore we are learning and growing. Many people avoid fear because it gives us that terrible feeling in the pit of our stomach. Recognise fear for what it is – it is the Opportunity for Growth!! If we never experience fear we are not stretching ourselves.

There is a saying “the Teacher arrives when the student is ready”. Every person and every opportunity is a “teacher” (learning experience) for us – we learn from positive experiences and we learn from negative experiences – just as we learn from negative people and positive people. For example – if we exceed the speed limit when driving we receive a fine – we can learn from that negative experience and decide not to speed in the future, or we can continue to speed and keep receiving the same negative result. Children learn in similar ways. When parents praise their child for doing something well the child will continue to try to make repeat attempts at the task before them, thereby developing their skills and enhancing their interest in exploring new possibilities. They may fall down many times along their journey however their persistence will eventually gain positive results.

Like the children we once were, we need to continue to approach life with open minds and fearless spirits believing in our ability to persist and eventually succeed in any endeavour we undertake.

When we resist fear we are stifling growth. If we meet fear head on, our lives will become more expansive and our new learning experiences will enable us to thrive and flourish. We cultivate fear on our journey through life partly because we are afraid to fail. What we need to realize is that failure is part of our journey to success. Many very successful business people have failed many times before going on to create extremely successful businesses.

 

By: Barbara Elisjones

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