Here is an email I received in response to one of my essays.
Josh : 2000-08-06
I’ve been a fan of your site for a while but it just dawned on me I never contacted you. Well here I am. Your site was an important factor in helping me lose my religion about 2 years ago and I have been much happier ever since. I just turned 20 yesterday but having grown up K-8 in a Catholic grade school and then getting confirmed in high school, you can say I was saturated with religious brainwashing my whole life. I’m an intelligent person and very curious, and as such I was always disappointed to some extent with the nonanswers to by questioning of religion. If only someone had put it so plainly sooner!! I am appalled, absolutely appalled, that religion still pervades in today’s day and age. Why can’t these people (even my parents) see something so plain and obvious? It’s crystal clear that prayer doesn’t work, that the Bible is a farce and that most everything religion is about is a bogus pile of crap like praying to the rain gods in the Dark Ages to help the crops grow. As a gay man I am sure you especially can appreciate what benefits there exist if religion should get removed from society one day. Fortunately I remain optimistic about this. My generation is smarter than our parents and hardly anyone I know will even discuss religion even if they are religious because it is seen as so socially uncool.
Note: the dangling phrase, As a gay man refers to Roedy Green, not Josh. Bertrand Russell talked about how hard it is to discard beliefs we learned at nursemaid’s knee no matter how irrational. I’m glad you were able to take a long look and see the emperor had no clothes. Seeing that every other culture has its nutty religious belief system, blatantly contrary to evidence, ought to make one suspicious that one’s own culture is no different.
At any rate I like your site but I am having some difficulty understanding some parts of it. The notion that reality is a hallucination was an incredible one for me to think about for a while but then I read about the stuff you talked about your hallucinations of seeing things and determining outcomes of events and being able to change reality and I did indeed give it an open-minded honest chance but after evaluation I must say that I haven’t been able to accept it and unfortunately in my mind it seems to taint the rest of your site as well.
My assertion that reality is a hallucination is actually not controversial. I probably should have broken the essay into two parts. One where I tell all those weird stories and one where I explain why ordinary sober consciousness is still a creation, a hallucination, a model of reality. The weird stories perhaps belong better with my philosophy of life essay, since the philosophy came about trying to find some structure to explain the strange co-incidences and bizarre experiences.
Where do you stand on that? You are very legitimate and logical when it comes to debunking religion and the bible and society, but then there is this stuff about how you can change things by thinking about it and none of it seems real for me. If it indeed was drug induced then it is rather unfortunate that a great mind like yours was poisoned in such a way that it will be difficult to assure that any future thoughts are not also tainted in some way.
I did not take any drugs, but as I mentioned in the essay, it is possible somebody could have spiked some green Jello with LSD (d-Lysergic Acid Diethylamide). The weird thing is these experiences were not totally personal. There are living people who were present who could attest to some of them, like the strange appearance of the porn star on my door step, or the touchless orgasm, or by skating skill. The whole thing still has me puzzled. My current best explanation is somewhere between scrambled brain chemistry and the quantum effects described in my many worlds essay.
I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.
~ J.B.S. Haldane (1892-11-05 1964-12-01 age:72)
That reality is a hallucination seems plausible to me still though and that is why I am a little upset because I wish to explore this further but your site doesn’t offer much more intelligent discussion of this theory other than the hallucination material.
See my philosophy of life essay .
I think reality is very skewed as you have said. We base things from the point of our eyeballs. I realized it must be very enlightening to discuss reality with a person who has been blind from birth. What would they say? If you have done this please enlighten me, I think there would be much to learn. Also, not unlike the dumbshit Christians, all us humans kind of base things around us and the Earth. I mean this isn’t totally arrogant and stupid, after all, they are really all we can concern ourselves about because it is what we interact with daily. But I mean people get so artificial about things and their world revolves around fucking soccer games and comparing dollar values among one another and sports scores, to the extent that it is truly pathetic and laughable. I get odd looks and strange laughs when I talk about how all our progress is for naught if we don’t get mankind on another planet, in the event that something happens to this one. But no one thinks twice when the media goes into detail about what some celebrity is up to lately and where they were spotted shopping. This planet is full of morons!
The set of experiences did teach me one thing. Reality, including subjective experience, is a lot bigger than I imagined and I really don’t understand it all that well. My theories of the structure of reality may be no more accurate than those constructed by a dog. We are hopelessly arrogant to imagine we can understand it all with our limited brains. Those experiences kicked the certainty out of me. What the heck were they? Your guess is as good as mine. All I can say for certain is that I experienced them as completely real.
Also, don’t you have problems with listing so much extreme (from the viewpoint of the average person) material and listing directions to your house on your site? I was stalked.
Details omitted at writer’s request.
If I had listed my house address I would have difficulty sleeping at night. How come it isn’t an issue for you?
I was one of the first gay people in Canada to come out publicly. I wrote a book called A Guide For The Naïve Homosexual and gave away thousands of copies. I received about 300 abusive phone calls a day for many years. Most were taken by the answering machine, but we had to transcribe them to find legitimate requests for my book. My first answering machine caught fire from the continuous use. I bought a $1300 heavy duty model with a giant tape reel to handle the load. I received one to three death threats a day. Only once did anyone ever show up at my house and even then nothing too terrible happened. They just hit the house in a few places with baseball bats. One time in the middle of a TV interview a guy threatened to come down and shoot everyone in the station. Everyone was alarmed but me. I said, "Those sorts of guys are just blowing off steam. They never show up." Also remember I live in Canada. We are a lot less violent a society than the US. Perhaps my paranoia about such things just got bored to death. I got in the habit of being extraordinarily open to reassure naïve homosexuals they had little to fear. I am very tall and as such tend to intimidate others. I have a powerful voice that I can also use to frighten others. It may seem odd, but I have the ability to go almost anywhere, e.g. a black ghetto at night, in the company of crack users etc. without getting hurt. I think my fearlessness and general love for everyone somehow wards off attack.
I am not even gay or anything that is socially unacceptable in any way or to any extent. I am interested because I desire to open myself more and share details of my life on my website as you have. As long as I’m on the topic I also have a question. I am soon opening a shareware software site that will be my full time job (yes it’s a big risk but I have the opportunity). I wish to list all of my personal things and viewpoints all on the same site, so I can say this is me and this is what I do. you can read about me and/or shop my products. enjoy. . Unfortunately I am not sure if this is a good idea. Obviously I am selling to the general public, not my friends. Do you think it would be a mistake to link my personal views (which might include things like why I think religion is a farce) with my business? Or would be advantageous because I can feel 100% open to the world and people can really feel like they get to know me? Thanks in advance for your advice.
Since you have seen that I am overly expressive, to the point I often frighten or offend people, I am probably not the one to ask for advice.
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recommend book⇒Handbook to Higher Consciousness | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| by | Ken Keyes Jr. | 978-0-9600688-8-3 | paperback | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| birth | 1921-01-19 1995-12-20 age:74 | 978-0-9600688-9-0 | hardcover | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| publisher | Love Line | 978-0-940687-13-4 | audio | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| published | 1984-08-01 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Ken’s classic. This is by far his best selling book. You can read part of it online. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Greyed out stores probably do not have the item in stock. Try looking for it with a bookfinder. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
By this time internal alarms are going off in my mind warning me that I may have cost you too much of your time so I will play safe and end here, to wait for further discussion. Thanks and have a great day!
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