C.G.Ayling

Tag: religion

  • Negative, turned about, is positive.

    How did it come about that society has so indoctrinated us into believing that questioning how things are is “being negative”, while accepting our miserable lot in life is “being positive”? I look at our world, for that is what it is, our world – least for the short time we dwell upon it, and I wonder how it came about that so very very few ride upon the hog’s back, and that we are the hogs upon which they ride.

    The few and precious memories of my childhood seemed so carefree, and so different to the moments of my children’s. Were things that different only fifty years ago? I know they were, for then a universal trait of people was that they put other people before themselves. That trait has largely died, extinguished by another now held in much higher esteem than selflessness, and that trait is selfishness. We are taught to “do whatever it takes”. Before we succumb to such an insidious demand we should realize that for us to take, others must give. Do we ask ourselves if they give willingly? For if they do not, then we have become the instruments of the single source of evil in our world. What is that, do I hear you ask? It is something current society holds in highest esteem.

    The source of all evil in our world is not some unseen, malevolent force. It is human greed.

    Modern society teaches us that…

    • We should work harder so we can have more.
    • We should compete with one another with intent to win.
    • We should be content with our lot in life.
    • We should obey the government.
    • We should abase ourselves before whatever deity the religion foisted on us holds high.

    The truth is none of the things society, under the direction of unscrupulous, greedy people, teaches us. The best lies are those that seem as though they might be truths. Society’s teaching are some of the best lies.

    We should work harder so we can have more.

    We should work as hard as required to sustain ourselves and grant sufficient excess to be generous to those more needy than ourselves.

    We should compete with one another with intent to win.

    Rather than compete, we should cooperate.  When we compete, we should compete for fun.

    We should be content with our lot in life.

    Regardless of our position on society’s pyramid, we should never be content with our lot in life. Never.

    Those who are monetarily rich are spiritually poor. How can they be content when they know they have more than their share? Only a spiritually impoverished person is incapable of recognizing their own greed. Should they be content? No, they should strive to balance the scales of eternity by using their largess to better the lives of the multitudes.

    There are varying degrees of  financial insecurity, ranging from the impoverished through to the apparently well off and so-called middle class. Regardless of where on that scale people dwell, those who are financially insecure are nothing more than modern day slaves. I have said it before, and I’ll say it again.


    The best slaves are those who think they are free… You own your own home, you’re making a decent wage, you have investments, you have medical insurance.

    You think you’re free.  You’re not.

    Do you have a mortgage? Then you don’t own your own home, the bank does. And who owns the bank?  And how is it that after hundreds of generations people are still struggling to own a home of their own?  Did their parents not succeed in that goal?  Who owns the home their parents eventually owned?  How is such a rudimentary debt never repaid?

    You’re making a decent wage.  What if you lose your job?  How will you survive then?  What else will the loss of your job cause? Your home, your health, your family?

    Investments are subject to market crashes. Where is the security in worrying your future can be destroyed at any time?  What happened to pensions that guaranteed we’d have an income once we retired?  How did it come to pass that we became responsible for the savings that our employers once looked after for us?  Now we must not only do our job, we must also become an investment expert as well.  We must assume a responsibility that once belonged to another. Where is the security in that?

    What happens to your medical insurance when you can’t pay the premium?  Are you still feeling secure?

    Now for the base truth.  If you owe anyone anything, then they own you. That is what owe and owner mean. If you are owned, another word for you is slave. Should slaves be content? Not until they throw off the shackles of their unseen and unknown masters.

    There are no classes of people. There are only people. Yet the powers that be have somehow segregated society into two very distinct classes. Those who have far far more than they could ever consume or need, and those who are indebted. If you are not one, then you are the other.  Neither segment of our segregated society should be content.

    We should obey the government.

    Government has only one purpose, only one. To serve its citizens. Precisely how this twisted through one hundred and eighty degrees to become citizens should serve the government, I don’t know. Do you see how close this particular lie is to the truth? When two lines lie in parallel how does one determine which line is the lie?

    We should abase ourselves before whatever deity the religion foisted on us holds high.

    Let me be absolutely clear. I do not believe in your god. It does not matter what name your god bears, they are not mine.

    Does this mean I don’t believe in the divine? No, it does not.

    Every successful organized religion shares certain common traits. They all align neatly with societal lies. They all instruct the masses to obey those in power, the only difference is that those in power are the clergy of whatever religion you subscribe to. They all make promises they cannot fulfill by offering rewards that only come after life ends. No organized religion provides any evidence the rewards they dangle before the hypnotized eyes of their lay exist, none of them, not a single one. What every organized religion offers, is eternal salvation in exchange for cold hard cash.

    Don’t be fooled. You cannot buy passage into eternity. No ticket any human sells will ever cover the cost of your soul.

    In every organized religion there are two classes of people. If this sounds familiar, it should. There are the ordained, and there are the lay. And once again, every organized religion shares the same fundamental problem. The ordained, are ordained by humans, not by the divine.

    Every organized religion has strange, often ancient, writings they hold as sacrosanct. These writings, sometimes called scriptures, are allegedly the words of divinity. Once again these writing all share something. They are written in human language. Now ask yourself this, what need have the divine of language created by humankind? Were a divine entity to talk to us would we not understand them? We must. Yet if a divine entity were to speak in a human language we don’t speak then we could not possibly understand them. The language of the divine is universal, yet it is not a language created by humankind. It is the language our soul speaks, and it is the language every single human ever born can comprehend if they choose to listen. It whispers in our inner ear, it tells us when we do wrong, and it tells us how to do right. Do we listen, or have we long single forgotten conscience call?

    The base measure of societal success is money. An early and elementary lesson, repeated ad nauseam, holds that the more we have the better. How foolish are we to believe that more than we need is not greed, but good?

    Foolish indeed…

    If you’ve got this far you might be asking yourself why I titled this post as I did. I did so because I am gradually realizing I really am a positive person, not the negative one society has taught me to believe I am. I want to see better things for all humanity, and to try to achieve that goal I am willing to strip away the superficial truths society uses to cover its deepest lies. I am struggling to show that the world is capable of sustaining all its life, and humanity is merely a subset of that life. We can sustain each other, but first we must throw of the shackles of lies with which we bind ourselves. Is that not a positive aspiration?

    {PS. If you are interested in another view of true, then please subscribe to my blog. It always holds my truths. I’ll promise you one thing only, that my truths are not the same as yours. You might also be interested in my philosophy, which though simple is couched in complex fantasy with a lyrical lilt. If you are, then start reading a substantial sample of Beltamar’s War right here in your browser, for free. I hope it encourages you to spend a few of your hard-earned dollars and buy a copy.}

  • Submissive, to Society.

    Does society serve us, or do we serve society?

    In a conversation with a female friend she mentioned how she had been brought up to be submissive.  I felt an inexplicable pleasure at this and since I believe inexplicable deserves explanation, it set me to thinking.  The rather shame filled results of those thoughts appear below.

    There are powerful feelings embedded in words like submissive.  Powerful things I have realized are not all the good we’re raised to believe they are.  As a boy, I was trained to not show emotion, to “be strong”.

    What a crock of nonsense!

    Being strong bears no relationship whatsoever to our ability to suppress emotion.  Yet our loving parents are so conned by an uncaring, manipulative society that they raise their kids to fit neatly into predefined stereotypical roles.  Roles that religion reinforces to the benefit of a system structured to churn out obedient, unthinking thralls who will marry, and raise another generation of obedient, unthinking thralls.

    Society makes me sick.

    So why did my hearing a woman admit to being submissive make me feel good?  Because just like her, I’ve been raised in a stereotypic fashion.  My parents loved me, yet they also raised me to believe men should be dominant and women submissive.  That is wrong.

    It is incredibly difficult to break the mold in which we were shaped. If we’re to achieve a system where people actually matter more than their ability to serve society till they’re worn out…  If we’re to achieve a family that serves for more than churning out another generation for corporate mills or uncaring governments to use and discard…  If we’re to achieve something that matters then we must break the mold in which our characters where formed.

    We must teach our children that what lies in their hearts is theirs to decide, not ours to determine.  We must teach our children that they are valued, that they are loved, and that they are free. We must teach them to question, not to obey.  We must teach them that they are free to chart a course outside of the serfdom society needs to keep its skewed systems functioning.  They must learn that they are free to chart a course to happiness, wherever and with whomever they find it.  We must teach them that their happiness cannot be at the expense of others, and that if they are to matter then they must treat everyone they meet as also mattering.

    Both you and I have shackles we must break.  Those shackles bind us into a society of extreme disparity where the vast majority serve, and the miniscule minority do not.  Those shackles demand that we train our children to obedience over thought.  Those shackles are what make us favor the normal over the unique.  Those shackles make us value inanimate material objects over living beings.  Those shackles bind us, and in return they grant us nothing but an illusion of safety.  Those shackles don’t even attempt to grant us an illusion of dignity.

    I am no man’s servant.  Are you?

    Instead of clinging to an illusion of freedom let us cling instead to the hope of an understanding love.

  • Places, that shiver.

    We’re all concerned with things larger than life. For the religious, that translates into belief of a greater, guiding power. For those lacking the comfort of religion, the same thoughts are troubling. Regardless of which camp you fall into, each of us knows that there is more to life than, well, just being alive.

    Experiencing, firsthand, the power of certain mystic places drives this intuitive knowledge home. I call such, the places that shiver, and I’ve been fortunate enough to find a few. Where are they, and why the connection? I’ll describe several of them, and expand on my thoughts as to what causes the electric shiver that makes these places so powerful.

    The first time I experienced a connection was in the country of my origin. Rhodesia at the time, Zimbabwe now. I was travelling with my Godfather, who drove us to a small solid granite mound protruding perhaps a hundred feet from the ground. He never told me what it was, just stopped the car and asked if I felt anything. I did – a wave of goose bumps on a warm day. My Godfather pointed out the remains of an uncharacteristic, low stone wall about a hundred yards off the road. He made no move to approach, and I didn’t feel like moving – not with such an extraordinary feeling washing over me. After a few minutes of shivering beneath the sun, we got back in the car and drove away. Apparently, there were hundreds of similar places throughout the countryside, generally avoided by the local tribes, who held them sacred. After agreeing sacred might be an appropriate description for the strange feeling, I asked what he meant by “generally avoided”. He replied that we were on our way to visit the most famous one of all – the Zimbabwe Ruins, and that people are often willing to disregard their intuition for pay.

    A long time passed before I felt the shiver again, this time during a visit to Spain, where we visited a place called the Alcázar. It happened again while travelling around Ireland, at a place called the Riasc Monastic Settlement. More recently, I visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial with my wife – though the site is impressive and solemn, I felt no shiver and left somewhat disappointed.

    Looking back, I notice several similarities. Each of them contains worked stone. Each has a dark past in which I suspect people suffered, and died in substantial numbers. On each occasion, I accompanied my Godfather. There are probably more, all of which collapse before logical analysis. As someone who considers themselves logical, it should be simple to dismiss them out of hand as the working of an overactive imagination. However, I can’t – you see, I was there, I know what I felt, and I also know nothing had been said beforehand to suggest something strange was about to happen.

    Perhaps you’ve felt something similar without need to travel to exotic places. I’ve experienced the graveyard chill, and it does hold similarities. However, the creepy feeling we get venturing into a place we know holds the mortal remains of people, is weak in comparison. Sort of like dipping your fingertips into a cold stream, versus falling into an icy lake you had no idea was there. The graveyard chill is also quite unpleasant, while the shiver of a mystic place is very strange, but not scary – rather, it serves to focus your mind, which renders you fully alert and open to other possibilities.

    Some things are larger than life, and that’s OK. After all, life is magical, and connected. I’d love to hear your feelings and experiences, contact me on Twitter where you can find me as @CGAyling. Till then, search out the places that shiver, in a good way.

    {Originally posted here.}

  • Belief vs. Un-Belief

    Why belief versus non-belief is so often reduced to a matter of conflict, I simply don’t know. I am an individual, as are you and every other person inhabiting this world. We all hold an essential right – the right to self-determination. Even within countries suffering beneath oppression does this right exist.

    You can take a person to church, but you cannot compel belief. Likewise, though you tear a person from their church, you cannot separate them from their God.

    Neither you, nor I has any right to inflict our viewpoints on anyone else. Whether you are a theist, or an atheist – your beliefs are your own and you have no implicit right to shove them down anyone else’s throat.

    So… the next time you find yourself thinking you must do what you believe is the right thing to do – don’t.

    (At least, not when it pertains to “correcting” someone in regard to their religion or lack thereof.)