Politics vs. Faith.

 

 Politics vs. Faith.

Some people just say hi, and look as if they know me. Others ask me if I am the guy from the paper and say they like what I write. One mailed me a pleasant letter. It is all welcome since I write for them. One last week voiced a concern. He said he doesn’t believe in God and he doesn’t believe that the world is in trouble. He looks at things statistically and true enough: less than one percent of homes in BC burnt last summer. I felt like saying, yes, let’s do nothing until over 50% of homes are burnt. We will solve the problem later. Let us think positively.

I am being sarcastic here. I have strong feelings about beliefs and thinking, much based on primitive knowledge that is not popular in the Western world. It takes a lot of research to find out about the old knowledge that is not written down. With all of our outstanding medical technology, not many are interested in jungle spirituality.

I don’t follow any guru or shaman for my faith. I don’t go telling people that every word in my Christian bible is the word of God either. People should do the work and figure it out for themselves. Because I can read Hebrew, I know that there are variations in translations.

We live in times where the truth is the hardest thing to come by. Confusion is built into our nature. In the Bible, the humans were trying to be like God, so they built a tower to Heaven. God didn’t want the competition, so he made them/us speak in different languages. Soon we/they were at each other’s throats. Go forward in history to the time in which the resurrected son of God was forming a new religion and read on.

Jesus was sending twelve simple, probably illiterate fishermen, out to change the world. He gave them a gift of tongues that sounded much like a new version of Google Translate. They used it and today his religion is the largest in the world. The secret is to remove confusion and work towards one goal. We can do it, but we don’t. Our nature is to set ourselves apart and try to get ahead of each other. Presently, we do it by following political ideologies.

Private interests play a role in politics, making everything politicized and lacking genuine action. The politics are played with private interest in mind. As I am watching, my province is busy trying to break away from the Canada Pension Plan. It is one of the best pension systems in the world and it works because we all are in it. One province had its own before the rest started, so they are keeping theirs. Now Alberta wants out since we have a younger population. If we do that, the rest of Canada will have to cover our share and possibly ruin the Canada Pension Plan. People will be forced to purchase insurance and the poor who need it the most will be left out in the cold.

One of the first stories in the Bible, which so many of us claim to believe in, is about Cain and Abel. That comes from the beginning of our civilization. Cain killed his brother out of jealousy. God asked him where his brother was and he answered with a question. Am I my brother’s keeper? He was not. God punished him by marking him for everyone to see. That is not much. However, it was clear to the ancient people who wrote the story down that we can’t survive if we look only after ourselves. We are social animals and need each other.

Alberta now is becoming much like Cain from the Bible. The whole world is realizing that continuing to use the energy that we became addicted to is harmful, even if we insist it is most ethical against all the signs. We are trying to break the Health Care system by privatizing small portions and are harming the Canada Pension Plan. How long is it going to be before we will not dare to tell people where we are from?

Our government wants to determine our actions with referendums. They know that this is the easiest way to cheat. You can see what Brexit did to Great Britain. Referendum questions can be misleading. I look at what is happening to our insurance and worry. We have been hit with extreme weather events less than BC, but much of our personal wealth is uninsurable or very expensive to insure. Year after year is warmer than the one before. Believing in Global Warming is not determining if it happens or not.

My goal is to survive and not be ashamed to show my face as a Canadian from Alberta. I want politicians to represent me, not try to shape me.

Here is a link to my blog: https://thesimpleravenspost.blogspot.ca/  Feel free to check other articles and comment.

Is “Me” going to survive Death?

 

 Is “Me” going to survive Death?

Mom, I said, where was ”I“ before I was born? You were in mom’s tummy she said. But before that? She said something about angels but I didn’t get it. Later in life, I came back to that question many times as I was learning new things but never got an actual answer. It was obvious why. No one ever told me who “I” was. It wasn’t my body, and it wasn’t my soul. I am the one who has the body and soul, but I don’t know who is “I am”.

Now I am considered “old” and I am asking where will I be after this life is over. When the doctor said, “You have a tumor, and it’s cancerous,” the question became more urgent. There is only limited time for me to find out before I’ll go there and folks rarely come back to tell us. Some people think they are experts on the subject, but they leave me full of questions. Heaven, they call the place of the dead, or hell if you were bad enough, but they don’t say who is “me” that will go there. Will I look like my body? I hope not. I never felt that my body was that great at all.

The church that I was born into has many books and teachings, but even if you read them all, you can’t find the answer to my question. Who is me? I have a body that is designed carefully for this life. It starts as an embryo, grows, learns, and later works. It is always waiting for something in the future.

When I first asked my mom the question, I was only less than three feet tall. I was always waiting to be older, stronger, and smarter, but when I did, I was waiting to be older and smarter yet. Never reached the point at which I can say I know. I waited to be an adult, to graduate, get a promotion, have kids, raise them, and every year go for vacations.

Life is a gift of time in a human body in which we play a game. The game has billions of potential moves since we play it with all the billions of people who are also playing and with the entire world. It doesn’t stop with the world since there is a universe that houses the world and it has no end. The part that makes it more interesting is the human invention called time. We are designed to function for up to about a hundred years and we know it. Do what you wish, if you can, but there will be an end. What comes after the end is a mystery that we can’t solve, only guess at.

I am not good at guessing. However, if I knew what comes after death, would I be the same? I refuse to believe that after this life I will sleep forever and all that I learned will be wasted.

As I struggle with those philosophical questions, another dimension arrives and gains popularity. It comes mostly with the young people playing with artificial intelligence gadgets. What if all that I learned is wrong and reality is not what we think it is? Young people are playing with very advanced virtual reality that keeps getting more sophisticated and convincing every day. When we will develop quantum computers, the border between what’s real and what is imagined will become blurrier. All we need is the computing power.

Serious scientists, including physicists, are awakening to new possibilities investigating old ideas with new technology. We built our modern science upon our ability to test and measure theories. There are many theories out there. Multiple universes, Matrix, and others. People have been questioning the validity of what we call reality for thousands of years. Major worldwide religions came up with ideas that seemed to contradict our Western beliefs until recently. Now, with renewed interest in spirituality, we see some similarities.

We are discovering astonishing facts when we use the latest technologies. The material world that we didn’t question for most of written history seems to be less solid than we thought. If we magnify what we assume are the building blocks of reality, we come up with nothing. The smallest particles of the atoms are mostly energy, with hardly any material substance at all. What we consider solid is only so at a certain frequency. 

Other scientists are deep into the study of dreams. In the biblical days, dreams were very important but later became fairy tales with no significant value. Now they are making a comeback. There is money invested into the study of dreams and their psychological values. There are books published by serious universities and professors.

Another so-called New Age idea that’s becoming a more serious study is the effect of human thoughts, not only on our own bodies but on events in reality. For a long time, people dismissed the idea as just prayers that do not affect reality, but now studies are designed to provide scientific proof that our thoughts can influence events. Researchers have recently been using water for demonstration purposes. The results are indisputable. Human thoughts and beliefs change material substance.

I don’t know where I was pre-birth or will be after this life. I am sure that, that which I call “me” will still be conscious.

Here is a link to my blog: https://thesimpleravenspost.blogspot.ca/  Feel free to check other articles and comment.

Rural life and Communities.

 

 Rural life and Communities.

I am beginning to feel like a writer from the past. Often my articles start with a line similar to the old children’s stories that used to open with, “a long time ago in a faraway land”. I don’t have a time machine. The truth is that my stories were in my lifetime and here in Alberta. It feels as if it was in history in some other place. We like nostalgia and remember mostly the good things, but Alberta was a better place in many ways. People didn’t go on cruises, didn’t have homes full of unneeded, often unused stuff, and having a telephone and a black-and-white TV was the limit of technology we used. We had real walking talking friends instead of Facebook friends and told them what we liked instead of clicking “likes” and counting them.

Friends often met someplace and went together. Some groups met over kids’ activities, community sports, and, in those days, some church activities. Later, we went for coffee or even a meal together. Even those who made minimum wages could afford to go out. Since I didn’t belong to a social group with money to spare, we looked for places that cost little. One option in those years was to go to a hospital cafeteria.

The hospital kitchen served nutritious meals to patients, staff, and outsiders who could sit together at long tables and meet new people. It wasn’t fancy, but outsiders were welcome and had a nutritious, safe meal. We sat at the long tables and met nurses, doctors, and perhaps some homeless people.

Schools had cafeterias, daycares did, and some places provided meals for the needy, free of charge. The point I’d like to make is that we didn’t have situations where hundreds of people were catching diseases from one central kitchen. Now we do.

Last week a whole chain of daycares spread E’coli to their little trusting customers. Some kids are probably still hospitalized as you are reading this. It couldn’t have happened under the old system. They all share a central kitchen.

I look with tears in my eyes at the parents whose kids are fighting for their lives. Many had to stay away from work, causing problems all over the place and they don’t know where to leave their kids next week. They talk about class action lawsuits, but how will that help? We can’t buy kids for money or purchase health.

The Alberta that I remember, was built on communities that copied our rural life. A village had a doctor, a town had a clinic with some most needed equipment, and for big problems, we went to the nearest city. A village had a daycare where they cooked food for their kids. They cared. The same was true for a community in the city.

Now economics is the driving force. It is cheaper to cook on an industrial level, so we did away with kitchens in each hospital or school. Efficiency was prioritized over human interaction to benefit investors, but this caused a gap between producers and consumers. They don’t live happy lives but exist to produce and consume. They are always pursuing happiness, but happiness in the form of lots of money never comes close to most people. We buy lottery tickets even if only one in millions ever wins and mostly don’t keep it long.

I am not trying to tell you that Canada was perfect in those days. It wasn’t. The people who felt most oppressed were in Quebec and they rebelled in the quiet revolution. African Canadians and First Nations began to demand equality and acknowledgment of their legal rights. People who were different asked for better treatment. There was a big argument in the country about abortion and birth control rights for women. Draft dodgers from the US came by the thousands and we had demonstrations against the US policies about Vietnam. Canada was discovering its soul.

None of the disturbances were as noticeable as the women and their sympathizers fighting for equality, especially on pay. It was legal and common to pay women half or three-quarters of what we pay men for the same work.

Canada chose a new flag and a new Prime Minister wanted to bring the Constitution home and be free from British rule. Slowly the people won some rights but also lost the spirit of community living and small business being important for the new economy.

Now we can’t find anything made in Canada and we must sell our resources for a price determined by forces outside of our country. We can’t compete in the market if our local daycare cooks their own meals. We hardly have any communities left that can be as self-sufficient as they used to be. People in our cities don’t know their neighbors.

I owe my life to technical advancement and modern development. Yet I am nostalgic about the communities we had and miss knowing who cooked the meals in the hospital, daycare, and school.

Here is a link to my blog: https://thesimpleravenspost.blogspot.ca/  Feel free to check other articles and comment.

Lucky or Blessed?

 

Lucky or Blessed?

These days when I have time away from my cancer concerns, we visit friends who also have cancer issues and we talk. Now we talk about fires. A friend’s daughter visiting from Vancouver told us happily that the problem with fires is over. It’s not Global Warming she said. They caught the people who were starting the fires. It was interesting to hear that the authorities caught the people who were starting the fires. They must have been very special to start thousands of fires from Kelowna to the North-West Territories. On their time off, they started fires in Greece, Portugal, Hawaii, the eastern provinces, the Western States, and much more. Global Warming is being blamed also for floods in many places, but perhaps “they” will catch who is doing it soon.

I hope we will catch those guys soon since we have other problems to deal with. The African nations are rebelling against their governments. As people are losing their meager ways to survive through hard work and saving what they can, they do the only other thing they can. Trying to migrate into the more affluent parts of the world is not working, but they still have guns. Give them more time and they will purchase more modern weapons and learn how to use them. We may catch a few careless campers setting fires, but Africa has hundreds of millions of people. Those people know how to build armies, buy weapons, and attack others who accumulate wealth from their resources. Fires, floods, looming wars, and it’s more scary than cancer.

When we see the migrants looking to get in, we wish them to go back to their countries. After all, Africa and other continents are rich in many ways. Why do they not develop their own countries and take care of their people? Because their ex-colonial masters take it all telling them to be happy they have some jobs. Sounds familiar.

I remember some sixty years ago or more when those countries were fighting for independence. The colonial masters figured it would be cheaper to join the freedom fighters and rule remotely. One after the other, the leaders of independence movements mysteriously found help in the old colonial powers. France trained a presidential guard to keep a powerful family in Gabon in power for years in exchange for resource exploitation contracts. It only worked until now when Global Warming is reducing people’s ability to produce and purchase food. Now Gabon is the latest African country to rebel against their government and lock up the president.

We have a worldwide problem. The Particulates that are produced by burning things act as a blanket over the planet, keeping heat in. It’s a blanket that we can’t take off. Droughts and dryness caused by heat lead to more burning, increasing the problem. When the hot air meets cooler temperatures, it releases the collected moisture, leading to floods in places we never imagined. Governments are responding to public pressure and helping the devastated areas. None of us knows if we will not be next.

The money that we spend on fighting fires and floods is not available for regular government expenses or to help those affected by the droughts and floods, which brings food insecurity and makes people consider war as a possible solution. I end up thinking that perhaps dying from cancer will be easier than living in the world we made so hostile.

Looking through my window, I see paradise and realize that for some reason my community of the Crowsnest Pass is doing very well compared to the world I see on the various news. I go for a stroll downtown and notice how the community picked up in the last little while.

Some people believe in luck. Am I and so many others lucky to have cancer, heart problems, and other issues? Of course not. But we are here and even with governments that have been causing problems to our healthcare system over and over, we still have a great system. We have a problem with Global Warming but here the climate is moderate and even the winters are fun. Yet, how often can a person be lucky? I choose to skip the popular idea that we are lucky and change the word to “blessed.” You can be lucky only sometimes. The casino always wins, but you can be blessed all the time. It has something to do with the Universal Mind that governs the universe.

Ours is a place where there are many faiths living in harmony with each other. I am starting to consider that perhaps the Universal Mind, or God as I call it, is using us to demonstrate a point. Here there are older folks who worked underground and lived modestly. Their children built a community that is resourceful and welcoming. Others noticed it, and the natural beauty, and moved in. It is not the playground of the rich, but life here is more attractive than in the cities and their bedroom communities.

Each day I meet kind and helpful residents mixed with a steady stream of visitors who are reading the real estate boards and considering life here.

I place cancer aside and enjoy the place I am in, remembering to be grateful for the blessings. Somehow, the universe knows. I also pray for a tomorrow.