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Pray for Helene's Victims
Sep. 30th, 2024 08:47 pm
I was an atheist ten years ago. Atheism worked well for me in some respects. In my own case, it was a life lesson to absorb certain forms of pragmatism. Atheism helped me sort through religious and superstitious claptrap with a keen eye. Later on, as I put my atheism behind me, the skepticism I cultivated as an atheist came in handy when I had to judge whether I was talking to myself, to an angel, human ghost, demon, or none of the above. I have always talked to myself; the trouble with atheism is that it taught me that all voices ultimately were versions of myself. I now know the voices in my head to be an ecosystem just like any other -- a collection of selves and outside forces. Atheism taught me that I could create my own reality. Atheism's fatal mistake is its presumption that any human can create his or her entire reality. We most certainly cannot.The concept of applying shrewd, skeptical discrimination to the various voices in one's own head leads me to today's conversation about the current victims of Hurricane Helene. It is fitting that the bitch's name begins with hell, because Helene has brought hell on earth for both the people and animals in her path. It began a little before the weekend of September 27, when an airborne tsunami was dumped on Florida, the Carolinas, and some parts of Tennessee. The Appalachians and Western South Carolina were especially hard hit. Some hurricanes can be ridden out, but the people caught in Helene have either died or are currently at extreme risk of dying from lack of food, lack of clean water, crazed looters, or if all else fails, drowning.
I Heart Conspiracy Theories
Rumors are flying about that the Great Flood of 2024, a.k.a. Katrina on Steroids, may have been geo-engineered. If you'll don a tinfoil hat with me, it is highly coincidental that this disaster happened near a defunct lithium mine that will likely be quietly bought once the rubble stops bouncing/sinking. It's also rather funny that Helene happened in election season and specifically concentrated itself in Trump-supporting places where it is more common to see a pickup truck than a Tesla. Another uncanny coincidence is the mainstream media's scanty coverage of the disaster, placing it somewhere behind Gaza and Ukraine. You may know about Sean "Diddy" Combs gay rage and his immense dildo and baby oil collections, but I'll bet you did not know the Biden government deployed 700 National Guardsmen to Kuwait the same weekend the people of Asheville, NC waited for rescuers that never arrived. Only on TikTok and Twitter could we see them as they floated down the flooded street on air mattresses and sinking, crumbling roofs through electrified water.
As usual, there was nothing you or I could do, or that is how it seemed. Our literally senile leaders who cannot manage to get through a single coherent sentence of a speech they did not write aren't about to grow the capacity to handle the nation's problems. A flood of a different sort inundates the country, bringing with it entire new nations of child traffickers along with a stupid way of life that does not deserve to exist. Meanwhile, the elite salary classes in my neck of the woods think that now is an appropriate time to go on tropical vacations that cost more than the full purchase price of my suburban house. In their clueless bubble, it seems like a good idea to construct hulking luxury homes with multiple $12,000 range tops and outdoor patio setups that dwarf the costs of sending a young adult to college. They're not worried. I guesstimate that this sort of unearned wealth-wallowing will earn them multi-lifetime stints earning it back, fair and square, and that's why you'll always find me running for the nearest exit when unearned wealth beckons in my direction. But what do I know... I could be wrong!
I feel helpless in the face of my fellow humans suffering and I do not like to feel helpless. I feel grateful and guilty for my own comparative privilege, sitting here well-fed in my dry room. I wish it was different, therefore I pray. When I was atheist, I dismissed prayer as useless. Prayer was a way to think of oneself as virtuous and helpful while remaining a couch potato.
Those Angry Atheists
Atheists inherently believe they are the smartest beings on Earth. A refusal to believe in God is often a statement of inherent intellectual superiority. To the atheist, the only type of being that can exist must by default be perceptible by human senses. If a tree falls in the forest and there is no human to see and hear it, the tree did not exist. I once suffered through an atheist's animated speculation about the end of time. The hypothesis, presented as a theory, included a scenario where humans learned to jump universes in order to escape the human race going extinct. It is blackly hilarious how hard atheists cling to human incarnation, especially considering how many of them seem to hate this world and the people in it.
As the self-proclaimed smartest beings in the Universe, atheists insist no being could possibly have the power to alleviate suffering, because if it did, it would not have created suffering to begin with. The notion that Meatworld may be a particularly brutal set of tests meant to beat lead into gold terrifies them. He won't admit it, but the alchemical prospect of being tested for his character causes the atheist to shrink from the yawning abyss he thought he was proud to surf.
Part of Meatworld's hideous testing process seems to involve individual choices of what to do and how to act when others are suffering. As the Rush song goes, by not choosing, you still have made a choice. You and I cannot help by physically going down to flooded areas unless we can fly helicopters. If not, we merely add ourselves to the hungry and waterlogged.
Here Come the Celebrity Shills
Donating money -- well, you have to be careful. I am seeing reports of people clearing dangerous roads, taking each other in, and sharing what little they have while church doors remain locked. Christ consciousness is apparently alive and well, just not among Christian priests, pastors, or reverends. If there are any churches that are honest down there, maybe I will donate to them. The Red Cross proved itself to be a disaster just like Katrina where it was enlisted to "help". Red Cross helped itself to people's donations just like Hillary Clinton (allegedly) helped herself in Haiti.
Soon, multi-millionaire and billionaire celebrities will take a breather from adrenochrome partying to shill for disaster donations. Never will it occur to them not to ask for money from a population that can barely afford groceries, let alone a single family home. Never will it cross a celebrity's Monarch-split mind that true charity starts at home.
If going to Western South Carolina will not help and if monetary donations merely trickle up towards that same elite class that may have geoengineered the hurricane, what should we do?
We pray. Prayer is an act of trust. To pray is to imply deference to beings who are smarter, kinder, and better than humans. I like to generally call these beings Divine or The Divine. Calling these mysterious mentors does not always yield perceptible, understandable results. God works in mysterious ways. Meatworld sucks and the truth is sometimes nothing can stop it from sucking in the way it is going to suck. By praying, we may not be able to re-orient the world, but we can re-orient ourselves. I guess in this way, the atheist condemnation of prayer as selfish is correct. Prayer is an act of changing the self when it is sincere. Unfortunately, a great deal of prayer is not sincere, especially in its Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, and Muslim forms. When prayer is one-sided and makes a laundry list of ways God is supposed to act from a badly-remembered dogma, it quickly turns septic. Sincere prayer rests in the acknowledgement of the Divine as superior, despite the Divine not materializing and outright stating its superiority. Asking such a being for help does not guarantee help. Dismissing the Divine ecosystem for your own narrow concept of what the Divine is supposed to entail according to a book or a powerful human being is not prayer, because prayer is a two-way street.
The genius of prayer lies in Hermes Trismegistus's old statement "as above, so below." If you orient yourself towards helpful beings by acting like a mini-helpful being in your mundane life, you build an astral pyramid that joins to those who also want peace and prosperity for all humans. The small reflects and refracts the large; the large reflects and refracts the small. For instance, if you want to encourage people to heal from addictions, you must embody sanity and temperance in everyday life. If you want to lead others to spirituality, it makes no sense to compel friends or family members into your particular church. What does make sense is to live a life according to the Word and to embody gratitude, which soon draws people to you like honey.
When we earnestly pray to higher beings, we invite their grateful, harmonious, balanced spirits into our lives. We grow into the only kind of force that can topple the opposition. Consider the opposition has nearly all of the money and power. When we lust after their money and power, hoping to kick them down where they belong so we can take it, we become them because we become just like them. When you pray and wish well for your fellow human beings, it makes you into the kind of person who wishes to raise up the whole rather than the sort who hopes to climb a ladder built of the corpses of the defeated. When you choose to pray, it is a choice to become better than you were yesterday, if only by the slightest bit. When you choose to live simply even when you have the choice of taking unearned wealth, it matters, because you save a group of people for earning your wealth for you.
So please send prayers to the deity or deities (especially Earth goddesses) of your choice for Helene's victims. May they have help from gods, angels, and saints. Every little bit counts.
