The Communist Origin of the Modern Conservative Movement VI

I am almost finished reading Richard Dawkins book “The God Delusion.” I bought the book several years ago while I had an online argument going on with a local preacher. I had only read a few pages and put it on the shelf for several years ago. I had bought several books on morality and other religious subjects and finished them but l just couldn’t find time to read Dawkins’ book. Toward the end his book Dawkins does come up with interesting idea when discussing children with imaginary friends. Some children have imaginary friends that they fully believe are a reality and some imaginary friends persists into the child’s adulthood and continue to council and comfort. Dawkins speculates that imaginary friends might be the origin of Gods who serves many of the same purposes. Some children would experience this phenomenon as a reality and convince others that there imaginary friend was a reality.

Even though only 17.7% of Americans regularly attend church religious philosophy affects everyone in America. The relatively new prosperity church movement over the last half of the twenty-century has radically affected the distribution of wealth in America. During the 1950’s America middle was expanding rapidly and 93% income tax rate on the ungodly greedy the improved the distribution of wealth. The ungodly greedy could invest their excess earning back into businesses or face the 93% tax rate. This rate assured that the American economy continued expansion. Prosperity Churches preach, “that financial blessings are the will of God for Christians, and that faith, positive speech, and donations to Christian Ministries will increase one’s material wealth.” This teaching led to declining middle class standard of living and distribution of wealth not seen since the beginning of the Great Depression. If great wealth is indeed a reward from God that it would be unfair for mere men to tax it and that has been clearly reflected in the tax rates as billionaires pay a far less percentage of their income in taxes. Special tax rates are handed out for God’s most “chosen people.”

Notice how the “Just World” belief is used rationalizes the world as it is. The underlying belief in religions is that the “World is Just” because God made it so. All one needs to do is rationalize every injustice as punishment visited on someone for displeasing God. If you are poor or have cancer it is because you are not right with God. Yesterday congress passed a law allowing the pension of millions to be slashed, if you had a $36,000 a year pension your pension can be cut to $13,000 a year. This affected only pensions based on several companies like trucking companies and others but it is the foot in the door. Up till yesterday the pension of a retired employee could not be cut. The pension money was invested and much of it lost on the stock market. Five hedge fund managers who specialize in ripping off pension funds made over a billion dollars a year one made over $5 billion but according to prosperity churches all that pension money is a “reward from God” in their rationalized “Just World.” Religions version of a “Just World” will keep us from achieving a world where justice is our goal. If God makes the World Just how could mere men improve on that?

Religions claim that they make the world more “Just” but in fact they make the world more “Unjust” by rationalizing many of the worlds injustices. Some of the worst atrocities in history are rationalized as “God’s will.” When the rich landowners in Ireland were faced with a blight on the potato crop they had to decide whether to grow more potatoes to feed the people and less of their cash crops. Of course the rich landowners decided to grow the cash crops and 100s of thousands starved to death but from pulpit the dying were told it was God’s Will. The clergy rationalized the starving of 100s of thousands to protect of the few. But God willed that the rich be rich it was his way of rewarding them. The children that starved to death must have offended a Good and Just God. Religion stands in the way of a “Just World.” Religions is every bit as much of a prevision as a guy with a flashlight leading the baby turtles away from the ocean.

The false light of religion has led many men away from the ocean of life telling you must kill thousands to make this a “Just World.”

Prosperity Church philosophy serves to rationalize the world as it is. The ungodly rich have literally stolen most of the money the baby boomers invested in their pension plans via the stock market. Pension plans were at one time only invested in very safest of investment. The stock market began in 1500s European carnivals were the debt of aristocracy was sold it was high risk gambling and if you think about it that is what buying stock is today. If a company wants to raise money for whatever reason they sell stock, in effect they are selling their debt. If you want to take someone money all you need do is get them to put it on a gambling table. If you are a better gambler and have more information the outcome is assured. The less skilled players will ultimately loss all their money. Manipulation is the key; you tell marks all the money they could “possibly make.” This is very attractive to those who don’t have enough to pay their bills they believe the manipulation that they can win and don’t considered that the game is fixed and they will most likely lose. Pension systems were traditionally invested in the safest investments and stayed away from the stock market but pension managers were no different when shortfall were projected in pension systems they decided it was time to gamble and to the stock market they went only to see massive losses in stock market crashes of 1999 and 2008.

The small State of WV lost $500 million in the crash making its pension system one of the two most under funded public pension system in America. In WV it was illegal to put the pension money in risky investments like the stock market until a statewide vote was held overturning a decades old law. “You don’t count your money while your sitting at the table,” and WV did not have much of the pension money the public employees paid in left to count and that was just one crash. The stock market recovered you say, it did but many investors lost big time, they bought stock when it was high and sold it at bargain basement prices. The money was still there but it was the riverboat gamblers who became billionaires feeding on the pension systems money. The high paid pension system managers have large egos and were easily seduced by the far more sophisticated and knowledgeable hedge fund managers. Those with mega wealth can easily manipulate the system tilting the table toward them. But the gospel of Prosperity tells their congregation that God must have wanted those thieves to have all of a generation pension money it is God’s will because they are better more devout people.

America has been fortunate not to have a religious political party for most of the last 200 years. In Germany you have the Christian Democratic Union and in France you have the Christian Democratic Party these parties exist for the purpose of trying to impose a theocracy on the rest of the population. America was built on the principal of separating church and state. In the Middle Ages Europe, the state and church had been in effect co-rulers with the church holding much of the political power. In fact the church was seen as conveying the power to the King, as the King was appointed by God and derived his power directly from God. When the Catholic Church disintegrated into fragments their power was fragmented also. The Church of England was formed to rubber stamp the legitimacy of crown, except the crown now controlled the church.

In America after 200 years a religious party shows signs of evolving, not a new party but taking control of an existing political party, the Republican Party. Organized religion in America began moving away from the position that if you belonged to church across the street you were going to hell, a position that one of the first things that made me as a child question the legitimacy of their entire philosophy. By 1988 Pat Robertson, an influential Christian Broadcaster, made a bid for the Republican Presidential nomination. In 2008 Mike Huckabee, a Baptist Preacher, ran against Mitt Romney and John McCain for the Republican Presidential nomination. Huckabee was the elected governor of Arkansas between 1996-2007. America is fast moving away from a period or recognized separation of church and state toward an America Theocracy. The Republican Party has long courted and pandered to religious organizations to gain political power but now organized religion seems poised to take over working control of the Republican Party.

The North won the Civil War but South may have won the cultural war. The spread of the Southern Baptist Church across the country is unmistakable. Centered in the old south during the Civil War the Southern Baptist church spread into the border states and then westward into California and states between. The Southern Baptists are the dominant protestant religion in the old south but are among the top four religious dominations in much of the rest of the country. Once this political power was harnessed the South could use this political power to impose their political philosophy on America. The south lost the war but in a hundred years they usurped the North’s political power. Many of the recent Presidents have been from southern states, Jimmy Carter from Georgia, Bill Clinton from Arkansas, and George Bush Senior and Junior from Texas.

The Southern Baptists philosophy has all but destroyed the economic progress of the middle class made in the three decades after WWII. Why? Because the Southern Baptist Philosophy is centered in justify what is. There should be no interference by government in what God has decreed. If god has decreed that people should be poor that is God’s will and it is a form of blasphemy for government to interfere. If God has decreed that another make $5 billion a year by stealing from gullible pension fund managers no move should be made by the government to impose 90% tax rates on massive amounts of wealth that prevailed most of the 20th century. To interfere with great wealth is to thwart the will of an all seeing and all knowing God.

Congress has passed a budget with riders, one that takes the restrictions off of big banks and that allows them to make the riskiest investments and insure those losses with taxpayer money. If the bankers lose 100s of billions the taxpayers will make sure their $300 million a year salaries get paid. The other was to eliminate the law that said pension system could not cut the pensions of retired employees. Most the affected pensioners are blue color workers, truckers, and others with an average pension of $15,000 a year they have been told to expect up to 60% cuts. But don’t worry the millionaire bankers pensions are safe; the taxpayers will take care of them after they bankrupt the bank.

This morning there is an ongoing ISIS inspired attack in Australia where hostages are being held. The gunman wants the world to know that ISIS is good religious organization formed for the glory of God in the highest. Where did ISIS come from? ISIS was originally created as Al Qaeda of Iraq, a direct reaction to the invasion of an innocent country followed by what can only be called the out right murder of a 100,000 people by George Bush, the Chicken Hawks and the radical right. The reaction to 9/11 was the old biblical an eye for and eye but Baby Bush didn’t care whose eye they just wanted Arab blood and plenty of it to show the American public on the evening news. Soon al Qaeda of Iraq evolved into it’s own religious movement called ISIS. The ungodly greedy in America wanted control of the Iraq oil fields it is always nice if you can gain on the eye for an eye transaction

When George Bush and Osama bin Laden speeches were analyzed they were much the same in substance they both saw themselves as trying to impose God’s will on an unwilling world. Bush believed in the right of Kings and saw himself as appointed by God and as he was appointed by God he would impose his version of God’s will on the world. Osama just wanted to impose his version of God’s will.
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“Fundamentalism arises in times of crisis, real or perceived. The sense of change may be keyed to oppressive and threatening social, economic or political conditions, but the ensuing crisis is perceived as a crisis of identity by those who fear extinction as a people.”

Marry E Marty and R Scott Appleby
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Osama feared our culture would bury his. In America the Christian right realized that attendance at church had reached an all time low of 17.7% and they felt threatened in an increasingly secular world. The rise of fundamentalist theocracy in the Middle East and the ascendance of a fundamentalist theocracy to power in America was an explosive situation.

The goal of ISIS is to make the world a Muslim world but the goal of the Christians is to not only make this America a Christian nation but to make the world a Christian world. The Christians have sent missionaries all over the world to destroy native religions and convert them to Christianity. When one of the leading spokesmen for the right, Ann Coulter, says of Muslim countries, “Kill their leaders and convert them.” When ISIS takes over a town they tell the residents, “Convert or die.” The mindset of the right in America and mindset of ISIS is the same that a religious organization has the “God given right” to tell others not only how to live their lives but what to think. Christians and Muslims aren’t the problem they are just symptoms of the real problem, which is religion. The religious will always believe they have right to tell others how to live.

One United States General in a series of lectures across America told his audiences that Baby Bush was not elected by the American people (which was true he lost the popular vote in 2000) Baby Bush was appointed by God. Bush not only believed this himself but told radical right Christian audiences across America. Imagine how proud Baby Bush was of himself that after a lifetime of drugging and drinking God had anointed him his personal prophet on earth. Personally, I think Bush’s lifetime of drinking and drugging had much more to do with his delusions than God did. But as the rhetoric of the Christian right came from the Whitehouse began to frighten the rest of the world.

____________________________________________________________________” Charles Kimball identified five perverse principals of fundamentalism tendencies.

1) Claiming absolute truth.
2) Seizing on an ideal time.
3) Fostering blind obedience.
4) Using ends to justify the means.
5) Pursuing “holy war” as in the Crusades.

The 1991 Gulf War pursued by Bush Senior shows similar aspects to the Crusades. The Iraq war however had a lot more in common with the Crusades. We didn’t go after religious artifacts just something more valuable black gold.

The Presidency of George W Bush was a thinly veiled American theocracy. I worked the 2004 Presidential election and had absolutely no idea that organized religion had formed a de-facto third political party that had allied with the Republican Party. The fundamentalist churches targeted Cleveland, Ohio, which was in a battleground state. With a budget of $2.5 million they bought operatives from all over the United States to form new more politically operative churches in Cleveland. This showed more than signs of a budding theocracy. The Question had become had the Republican Party harnessed the power of fundamental religion or had the fundamentalists began the take over of the Republican Party? More moderates in the churches realized that the churches had become little more than political organizations.

Christian fundamentalism is a function of fear and a flight toward certainty but the certainty is only an illusion. In this country in the 1960s as the baby boomers came of age they questioned the very foundation of our society, they looked out and saw the hypocrisy of the older generations. They not only questioned government decision to wage an immoral war they openly opposed it on almost every college campus. The baby boomers sat out to stop the racist from publicly lynching black people while local governments pretended not to notice. The sexual revolution publicly changed the traditional sexual morays while others turned to drugs and decided to dropout. Never had a generation questioned authority on so many fronts. The demographic of numbers made the baby boomers a powerful force.

When the churches realized that even the authority of government was being questioned they knew the authority of churches would come into question also. The traditional position of Christian denominations was that if you did not attend their church they felt sorry for you because you were going to hell. With a church on almost every corner the hypocrisy of this statement bordered on the absurd. In the 60s while I was in High School I could publicly speak out in class against the existence of God without retaliation from school authorities but this would not have been possible a decade earlier. Science was explaining away many of the mysteries of life. The unknown and unexplainable has always been the ground the supernatural explanations were built on. Now the very ground the churches were standing on was shrinking like an ice burg in warm water.


The reaction of the churches was a move toward the right, toward fundamentalism. If they did not have absolute truth they could at least claim to have absolute truth. When I was a child and attended church every week much of the bible was being taught as not literally true but as parables with a lesson. Fundamentalists took the position that the bible was both factually accurate and literally true. Noah’s ark is a true story where two of every creature on face of the earth were loaded onto a boat until the flood subsided despite the fact that Archeologists have found no evidence of such a worldwide flood.

The flight toward certainty doesn’t come without costs once you begin to believe that you are in possession of the absolute truth you begin to believe that you have not only the right to impose that truth on others but a duty to impose that truth on others. ISIS demonstrates what fundamentalism really is, to be sure fundamentalism in America has not reached that extreme but if you have the absolute truth cutting a child’s head off is just saving his soul or at the very least the souls of others he might corrupt with his non belief.

When historians studied the fall of Roman Empire they realized that Christian religion played a role, if not the key role in the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. When Rome adopted the Christian Religion as the official religion of Roman Empire they adopted religious intolerance also. After Christianity was adopted as the official religion the Roman Empire was split into an Eastern and Western sections. Polytheists tend to be tolerant but monotheist belief systems cannot tolerate even the remote possibility the existence of other Gods. “You shall have no other Gods before me.”

Once Christianity was firmly ensconced in the Roman Empire the decline began. Christianity did what it dose best extinguished the light of knowledge with a curtain of darkness and superstition. One of the first things the Christians did was close the libraries including the famous one at Alexandria. Limited the availability of books and discarded the works of Aristotle and Ptolemy. Christian like other religions attempt to make knowledge secret and accessible to only the elite. The propagation of their faith requires ignorance; faith depends on keeping the faithful as ignorant as possible. In America as well as other countries religious school schools are set up to ensure the children will not be taught key pieces of knowledge that might be in conflict with gospel according to ignorance. Charles Freeman tells us in his book “The Closing of the Western Mind” tells us Christians in Rome elevated faith over logic an stifled inquiry in the West. Though the Roman Empire had made many significant advances before Christianity none were made after Christianity became predominate. The roman minds stagnated on a diet of ignorance.

Arab Mathematicians, doctors, and astronomers would make the next significant advances for mankind but they would also not be able to withstand the avalanche of ignorance that awaited them which would take their civilization back to near dark age conditions.

One of the key-founding principals of the United States government is the separation of church and state. The founding fathers did not want a king that was anointed or appointed by a particular religion. They wanted no state sanctioned religion, no religious shadow government. During the election of Kennedy many people voted against him worried that if he were elected that the Pope would run America by proxy. By the time Baby Bush was elected 70% of the electorate saw nothing wrong with religious figures running America. Pat Robertson had managed to win a few primaries and Mike Huckabee was a strong presidential candidate a few years after Robertson’s run. It seems the American public no longer has a problem with religion-based government only with the type of religion.

Bush bought us faith-based initiatives putting taxpayer dollars in the hands of private church based cults to use as recruiting tools for church based cults. Being able to hand out government money to those who are down and out is one of the strongest recruiting tools any church or cult could imagine. Those being recruited would not be told the money came from taxpayers but that the money came from God. At no time should churches or cults be given taxpayer money to dole out as they see fit. People who benefit from these church based government giveaways will then adopt the theology of the church group and curse the government for welfare programs never realizing that the money they are getting from the church came from taxpayers in the first place.

Many Republican Senators now insist that there is no such thing as separation of church and state and they may be more right than American publicly realizes. Under Baby Bush the area in front of the Government Services Agency was used for daily prayer meetings. While many people might feel comfortable with the leaders of their church running government and implementing their particular brand of religion they would be uncomfortable with another religion running our government. Catholics running the country might make some uncomfortable but Muslims running America would frighten most. If it is all right for one religious sect to run America than it must be all right for other religious sects to run America.

The steps to the extreme right are not made in large leaps and bounds but in tiny baby steps but you get there all the same.

Why should we worry about Baby Bush now? He is out of office and can never run again. His brother Jeb Bush is posed to run in 2016. We tend to think of presidential candidates as individuals but in actuality presidential candidates are products of a political machine. Jeb Bush is likely to be backed by the same far right religious fundamentalist that supported baby Bush. Many of the same people that made up the elder Bush’s political machine like Dick Cheney, came to power under Baby Bush term in office. The neocons and the Christian fundamentalists share the same world vision a world in perpetual war just like their biblical heroes. The conquest of the world was Hitler’s dream but it is a reality for the Christian Fundamentalists they like the Blues Brothers are on a mission from God and there is no higher charge on earth than your own imagination.

Even Republican Senators have conceded that the Republican Party has become a theocracy. Republican Congressmen are like children anxiously awaiting their report cards. The Congressmen try very hard to get 100% on their NRA report cards, and Grover Norquist not a penny more taxes on the ungodly greedy organization but more recently several right wing Christian organization began issuing report cards. The Republican Party has long catered to the right wing fringe but now the Christian right is demanding obedience of Republican Congressman. Political correctness is expected of political leaders but now the Christian right is demanding that Republican congressmen be theologically correct. Republican Congressmen should never side with a scientific explanation when a theological explanation exists. The Bible is absolute truth and should never be questioned according to true believers. No matter that science can show beyond a doubt that the Bible is wrong no amount of logic can trump ignorance. The right wing Christians now demand that ignorance be taught in our schools and that science is just another competing religion.

As the Christian right asserts control over the Republican Party and local school boards learned ignorance abounds. American children are now considered the some of the most ignorant in the industrialized world.
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“Something else young Americans don’t seem to understand- perhaps not surprisingly- is evolution. In a 1993 international social survey ranked Americans last—behind Bulgaria and Slovenia in knowledge in the basic facts of evolution.”

Kevin Philips from his book “American Theocracy”
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How could this be? America was considered at one time the most advance civilization on the face of the earth. History always repeats itself. The Muslims countries were at one time the most advanced civilization on earth giving the world advanced mathematic and preserving the works of Greeks philosophers as Christians burnt books as evil. Now as we look out at what was once a great empire we see third world countries wallowing in the evil ignorance that is religion.

The American Taliban has exactly the same goals for America. The American Taliban is of course the Christian right and they have fare more influence over our government than any of us can possibly imagine. The Christian Right may not call itself the American Taliban but it serves the same purpose. Republican members of the House and Senate now anxiously await their Christian right score card after each and every vote in congress, like figure skaters in the Olympics. The national press makes much of the fact that ISIS wants to impose Sharia law on Iraq but say absolutely nothing about those in America wanting to replace America’s laws with Biblical Law. Biblical law calls for the death penalty for adultery, homosexuality, among other grievous offences like working on he Sabbath. Sharia Law was no doubt derived from Biblical Law as the Muslim Religion was built on the first two books of the Bible.

A group called the Christian Reconstructionists has been pushing Biblical Law and the group claim to have placed many people in the leadership roles of the Southern Baptist Convention. It claims to have influenced the political agenda of the Southern Baptist Convention. Of all the great empires on earth the greatest threats were not from without but within. The seeds of an Empires destruction are sew from within. We overestimate the threat from without and ignore the threat from within.

When people in America hear about ISIS imposing Sharia Law in Iraq they are horrified but if you tell these same people that that organized groups in America were trying to replace the secular law in United States with Biblical Law they would not bat an eye. Why would they be so unconcerned? Sharia Law is derived from Biblical Law. Many people think that America secular rule of law was in fact derived from Biblical Law. It has been many years since an adulator was stoned to death in America. While killing and stealing are punished under both secular law and Biblical Law much of Biblical Law concerns itself with enforcing religious dictates as not worshiping false Gods.

The religious right is bound and determined to eliminate the separation of church and state in America. The Baby Bush regime came the closest to eliminating the separation between church and state declaring what many saw as a Holy War on a foreign country with a competing major religion almost as soon as shock and awe was over missionaries were preparing in mass to go to Iraq and start converting the heathens to the one true religion in preparation for Armageddon.

The interest of the ungodly greedy and the Christian Right are converging. The Christian right believes it is wrong to tax the ungodly greedy because doing so interferes with “God’s plan.” It is quite obvious to Christian right that it was God’s plan for the billionaire hedge fund mangers to bleed the pension system of a generation dry to take back part of the money “God” gave them would be morally wrong. The Southern Baptist Convention’s philosophy of “personal responsibility,” is that wealth is a blessing from God. To increase that wealth all you need is faith, positive speech, and donations to Christian ministries. If great wealth is a blessing from God than taxing great wealth to control distribution of wealth would be morally wrong. The answer is obvious you just need to give more of your meager income to Christian ministries and have more “faith” in God. Conmen would love this con just give me more of your money and the imaginary man in the shy will give you more money. This would be hilarious if millions Americans didn’t fall for this con every year.

This how belief in myth destroys a country, economists know that a country cannot long endure extreme distribution of wealth. The old saying is that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. All previous world empires went through periods of enlightenment that led to their rise as a world power only to be followed years later, in some cases hundred of years later, by stage called disenlightenment preceding their decline and fall. Most Americans realize that America is currently going through their disenlightenment stage currently where many of the American people faced with a choice, chose myth instead of fact. Preachers teach that myth is as valid as facts that all you need to do is believe and any myth becomes true or at least the myth they are pushing. If you believe you are a vampire that you are a vampire, if you believe you are George Washington than you are George Washington, if you just believe you are Jesus Christ than you are Jesus Christ or at very least his chosen representative on earth. Just as Nero fiddled while Rome burned and many Americans are wallowing in ignorance while the once late great America is devoured in economic firestorm of uncontrolled greed.

It is Sunday morning again and many Americans are getting ready to go off to ignorance school. Of course everybody is ignorant to one degree or another no one has mastered all the fields of knowledge available today. But learned ignorance is a completely different problem. These people for the most part know that the supernatural is not real but it is what they wish to be true. They believe if wish hard enough they can wish it into reality.

Religion is about death and how to avoid it. Religious practices can be traced back a hundred thousand years. Archeologists found 100,000 year old human remains in a cave in Nazareth, Israel. The bones were painted red with magic seashells scattered about and the skulls were placed facing north. Man has been trying to escape death ever since he discovered it and realized it was his ultimate fate. To escape of death would be the ultimate magic trick and so it remained in the realm of magic, a magic called religion.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross gave us the Five Stages of Grief that we go through when someone dies.

1) Denial
2) Anger
3) Bargaining
4) Depression
5) Acceptance

Kubler-Ross Five Stages of Grief apply to us also as soon as we find out that our ultimate fate is death we begin to morn our own death.

Denial: The first step is denial and organized religion gives us a plausible way to deny our death. Religions tell us we will live forever in paradise.

Anger: If we would admit it to ourselves we are all angry to one a degree or another when we find out that only death awaits us. After all we were given the gift of life and death will take that gift away. Depriving us of a possession always angers us.

Bargaining: This has religion stamped all over it. I will give you my days and my money; I will live by your rules all the days of my life if you will grant to me life everlasting. Like the dog walking over the bridge with a bone when he sees his reflection in the water he jumps in to take the other dog’s bone only to lose the bone he has before he realizes it was only a reflection. Eternal life is only a reflection.

Depression: Depression is inevitable when one comes to realization that one is indeed going to die. The bitterness in many old people is spurred by depression. Even many who have been religious all their lives begin to realize that though life everlasting is a nice fantasy but death is the reality. No matter of wishing will delay the grim reaper.

Acceptance: This is the end point where we reach the end of the grieving process of grieving for our own death. When someone dies we work our way through these steps in a few years and come to accept their death but most grieve a lifetime for there own deaths Those lost in religion never get beyond the Bargaining step they are still bringing their deity silver and gold.

What does it say about us as a specie if we cannot accept the simple facts of life?

When it comes to our own death I think there is another step it would actually be before the first step and reorder the ensuing steps. The first step is fear we are born with the fear of death while this step would not apply to someone else’s death because you cannot fear what has already happened. Fear is a strong motivator.

I for one worked through my grieving process for my own death many decades ago. I stopped chasing rainbows. I worked through the Five Stages of Grief about my own death when I was teenager. A life spent grieving about your ultimate death is wasted.

When someone accepts part of a con it is much easier to sell him the rest of the con. There is a town near here called St Albans I never realized it was named after an actual saint. St Albans was the first Englishman to be made a saint. It seems St Albans was a pagan farmer when he hid a priest from the Romans. When the Romans came looking for the priest St Albans put on his vestments and the Romans arrested him instead. The local magistrate knew St Albans was not the priest but sentenced him to death anyway. On the way to his execution it was necessary for St Albans to cross a crowed bridge. He knew the Romans would clear it with there swords so he led the Romans to the river bank and parted the waters so they might cross. The Romans evidently heard of the parting of the Red Sea and this parting of a river would only be a minor miracle. Once at the site of his execution the executioner refused to execute him. A volunteer offered to execute him and immediately chopped St Alban’s head off. Next the first executioner who had converted at the speed of light to Christianity had his head removed. At this point as the second executioner admires his work his face begins to burn and his eyeballs pop out of his head and roll across the ground coming to rest looking at the heads of the decapitated Christians.

I know that Saints are usually the patron saint of this or that but I never kept up but I would levy guess that St Albans is the patron Saint of idiots. There is a town a few miles from London that also carries the name St Albans. All these years I have lived near a town that honors this Saint but this was the first time I ever heard the real story behind it. I wonder if the reason was no one wanted to repeat such ridicules story. If you believe as instructed, as a little child believes, you might believe this story.