Reto

There are many people today that deny that there is a free will. In science they have discovered that a human decision is preceded by activity in the brain and hence they believe that there is no free will, but that it only seems to be so.

Other experiments contradict this again where it was shown that people can change this predetermined “decision” just before it is being executed.

In Zen Buddhism there is a common belief that the ego is an illusion. So called “enlightened” masters have said this and some of them go so far as to say that every thought activity is illusory, that the mind makes something up, that it's not one's own true nature as they say.

They teach that liberation comes through getting insight into one's own true nature, which is when the thinking stops and one penetrates to the core of existence.

Meditation is usually associated with bringing the mind to a halt, because thinking – that is the teaching – brings suffering: always having to decide – between good and bad, between right and wrong, to like and to dislike; and therefore never being able to have peace.

They call this dualistic thinking, and it is said that in a state of non-dualism, “higher consciousness” is revealed, or sometimes it's called “pure consciousness” or “cosmic consciousness”.

Often you can find this broken down into stages, starting from primitive consciousness, ascending to higher levels of consciousness, until one reaches the ultimate state of liberation: this is Nirvana in the teaching of the Buddha.

Now when you look at society and how we deal with each other, one thing is obvious: no one in his right mind believes that there is no free will. Free will is the very basis of every human interaction.

Free will enables us to follow rules – or to break them, free will is the very essence of personality, of originality. Without free will we would be just like robots, yes and that is exactly what some of these people that deny free will are essentially saying: that we are machines, a bunch of molecules, lumped together by accident, and that personality is just an illusion made up by “the brain”.

Now let's assume somebody would go out and kill some people. Nobody would then say, “Oh, it's alright, this guy is not really guilty, he just couldn't help it, he couldn't act in any other way”.

If somebody cannot make proper decisions anymore, when he has lost his ability to use his will freely, then he is considered to be mad, because freedom of will is sanity, and no freedom of will is madness.

Freedom of will is also closely related to intelligence and moral behavior. A man can choose good or bad, in every moment he can change his course of action to follow morality or amorality, just as he can choose to get up or stay in bed a little bit longer.

That brings responsibility: everyone is responsible for what he does. There are no excuses. Someone may have been lazy or slack – but why? Is it because he was not able, because that was just his “character”? No, he could have stopped being lazy every moment, but he didn't want to stop.

Intelligence, reason, moral behavior, free will: this is what marks us human, this is what distinguishes us from animals – that we can make sophisticated plans and carry them out, that we can distinguish between good and evil, that we can be reasonable.

The people that try to undermine reason are going against the very principles of our existence. It is not coherent, it doesn't make any sense, so why are they doing it?

Well, where does reasoning end when you have reasoned everything out? In my experience the conclusion was this: that there must be a higher intelligence behind everything. And not on only a higher intelligence, but an intelligence that is similar to how we are, because intelligence necessarily has these traits.

Maybe you have heard of elephants and how they are supposed to have a very good memory? They can even paint pictures. When an elephant dies, the others will stay with the corpse for days sometimes and mourn the loss. Not unlike humans. The higher the intelligence, the more human aspects. It follows that the intelligence that created everything must be similar to us, but higher, maybe a bit like us compared to an elephant.

Now if you don't want to come to this conclusion, you have to go against reason itself, then – maybe – you can escape from the consequences of thinking.

Francis Bacon wrote:

A little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion

wrote the apostle Paul in the letter to the Romans Chapter 10, Verse 17.

This is a popular verse among today's Christians. It is often used to lay emphasis on the preaching of the Word of God, which is – according to the Evangelicals – both the Bible and Jesus, because “in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God” etc. so the Word (or the Logos in Greek) is also Jesus, according to the Gospel of John.

It is the same reasoning as the sola scriptura motto by Martin Luther: to make the Bible itself an infallible book. Instead of reasoning about God and trying to find the truth about him by studying the world, oneself and the other people, it is all to be found solely in the scripture.

Enough “hearing of the Word” will give you faith, as Paul emphasizes. It's not a faith that is based on one's own investigations, but a blind faith, a faith in specific interpretations made by Christians like Paul that you have to accept in order to get accepted into the Christian community.

The Evangelical doctrine is quite clear in this regard and does not vary very much between denominations. Once you bow down before this God of Doctrine, you belong to the Christian family. But you need to keep up the “hearing of the Word”, never thinking too much for yourself or questioning the validity of the interpretations they hold as truth.

That's why you cannot find freedom in Evangelical circles, because it's more about keeping up the “blind faith”, and pressuring you and everyone to say the same prayers and formulas over and over again.

I believe in God and I do think he deserves better than this. Instead of putting him into a box, we should go out, explore and question everything to find the answers ourselves instead of relying only on a book. Who invented the idea that God is to be found through a book? Or by formulas you have to speak according to a book?

Intelligence always requires subject and object. If the object (= goal) of an action is not clear, the action cannot said to be intelligent. Also if the subject is not clearly defined, the action cannot be intelligent.

For example a madman has a distorted idea about himself and therefore also has a distorted idea about the world. His actions are not intelligent because intelligence requires a proper understanding of self and other.

In nature there are many unintelligent beings. They are unintelligent because they do not have an idea of self and other. They cannot form concepts, they have no understanding, they cannot plan. Yet we see these unintelligent beings performing intelligent work.

For example a Caddisfly can build a highly complex shell out of different materials like small stones:

It is not hard to recognize that the shell looks very much like a human built wall. We know that building a wall like that is not easy and requires skill and plenty of human intelligence. How can an unintelligent being do something like that?

I'd say it can only do it because it has been programmed to do it. It lacks the intelligence to build such a shell. And who was the programmer? It must have been an intelligence at least our level.

Just look at what we can make robots do today. We probably cannot make a robot yet that can build a shell like that but we will soon be able to do it.

It follows that the creator of life must have been intelligent.

After many years of unfruitful seeking, tossed from one error to the next I think I have finally found what is at the bottom of all our issues, what is so wrong with us.

Now if I tell you, you might not be able to believe me, because the very idea of what I'm going to say is so foreign to us that we usually don't even give it a second thought, nay, not even a chance.

We think we know better, we think we have left behind that primitive idea that there is a God. We think that our ancestors that once believed in God were blinded by a primitive worldview. We think we have understood, that we have evolved from apes, and everything, including us, is just a funny accident – a mistake by nature – or is it?

Well now, this wasn't what I intended to tell you, that there is a God, but as a matter of fact, and now that I said it: yes, I believe that there is a God. But the all encompassing universal problem we face is not that there is a God, but it is connected to God.

In one word, it is – sin.

Our lives are entrenched with sin. We live and breathe sin. We don't even know anymore what a life without sin, what holiness is. Even in the churches you can spend ages seeking just one holy man and you probably will not find one.

But God is holy, you see, and that is where the problem lies. Because we are living sinful lives we are more and more confronted with unsolvable issues – personally and in the whole society – because God makes things to go right only for the person that lives after God's standards.

But since there is almost nobody that does that today we see everything going down the drain. And the more our morality and manners decline, the worse it gets. What we do today, what we accept as right and wrong is by no means right and wrong in God's eyes.

We have made our own standard of right and wrong. Do you remember that this was the original sin of Adam and Eve? Eve wanted to be like God and have knowledge of good and evil. That is what the snake promised to Eve, that when they ate of the forbidden fruit they would be like God and know about good and evil, which could be understood to mean that they decided for themselves what was right and wrong, and this is called the fall of humanity.

I don't know if this story is true, but the essential problem is just the same: as long as we do not seek to do what is right in God's eyes we will never have peace, both personally and universally.

In another post I'm hopefully going to explain what I found to be the most important rules to follow. Once you start living by these rules you will slowly start to understand what I'm talking about, because also to me it only began to make sense after I had started trying to follow this way of living.

One thing I can tell you right away, it is all contained in this simple instruction: love your neighbor as yourself.

But you see, the problem is that it is by no means simple to put this into practice. And only by doing it you can find out its deeper meaning and how it applies to all circumstances of your life. So stay tuned, see you next time!

The Salassi were a Celtic or Celticized Italic or Ligurian tribe whose lands lay on the Italian side of the Little St Bernard Pass across the Graian Alps to Lyons, and the Great St Bernard Pass over the Pennine Alps. The Romans finally defeated and enslaved many of them in 25 BCE, and founded the city of Augusta Praetoria Salassorum, modern Aosta, in their territory.

The end for the Salassi came swiftly:

For their last decade of freedom the Salassi (with some other, mainly Alpine, tribes subjugated by 14 BCE) were almost the only remaining groups not under Roman control in the Mediterranean basin. After the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE the Roman world was united under one ruler, Augustus, who could concentrate Roman forces against remaining holdouts. The end of independence for the Salassi came at the hands of Aulus Terentius Varro Murena in 25 BCE. Strabo records that two thousand Salassi were killed and all the survivors, nearly 40,000 men, women, and children, were taken to Eporedia and sold into slavery.

40'000 Salassis, the whole remaining tribe was sold into slavery by the Romans! Imagine if we as Switzerland would go and conquer Lichtenstein and sell all the people to our fellow Swiss as slaves. That's just what the Romans were doing then.

Wikipedia Link from where I quoted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salassi

Do you want to know my opinion about God?

No: please stop reading.

Yes: well, here it is... I think God exists and is not unlike what the Hebrews taught about God – but minus all the man-made laws, rules, fanaticism etc.

In my opinion Jesus described God best and he also outlined how to live according to God's standards, or how to enter the kingdom of heaven which – he said – is within you.

Later the Christians built some other stuff onto the message of Jesus, beginning with Paul: he went all over the place to preach the remission of sin through Christ's sacrifice as a religion and spread that everywhere. This then became Christianity.

If you want to know more about God, find it out yourself. Jesus said,

Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.

Do not rely on anyone to tell you about God. Inquire it for yourself.

10 o'clock – I'm in Goppenstein on my way back to Bern with the BLS train. Now I'm glad to be back in Switzerland. Domodossola is such a desolate place. The people have high walls and fences around their homes and almost everyone has a “beware of the dog” sign, dogs barking everywhere. The atmosphere is tense and smells of danger. Many houses are in in a bad state. In Switzerland only deserted houses look like that.

Now I appreciate being back among the Swiss with clean streets and punctual trains. The friendliness here goes deeper. In Italy there is a lot of mistrust behind the facade of friendliness.

In German we have a word for misery called Elend. It evolved from “Ausland”, or “foreign land”. When you messed up at home you were banished from the country, which resulted in misery or Elend. I can understand this now.

The only thing that strikes me as odd is the fact that Swiss people mostly lack the facilities to properly clean up their arse. In Italy and France they have the bido to rinse and clean it with water. In Switzerland there is no such thing. This means people are walking around here mostly with dirty arses. Isn't that kind of weird seeing that we Swiss are keeping everything else much cleaner?

A passage from the New Testament comes to mind, where Jesus rebuked a Pharisee:

When Jesus had finished speaking, a Pharisee invited him to eat with him; so he went in and reclined at the table. But the Pharisee was surprised when he noticed that Jesus did not first wash before the meal. Then the Lord said to him, “Now then, you Pharisees clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside you are full of greed and wickedness. You foolish people! Did not the one who made the outside make the inside also? But now as for what is inside you—be generous to the poor, and everything will be clean for you.