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Tuesday, March 28, 2006

Water - a fascinating substance

From Gary Craig's EFT newsletter

By Deirdre Brocklebank

I have been asking myself could there be more to the vibrational impact of EFT on the body than we realise? For instance, how does the tapping impact on the body outside the energy system? As an adult body is about 70% water it seemed to be appropriate to begin my research on this. This focus led me to the fascinating work with water by internationally renowned Japanese scientist Dr Masaru Emoto and the correlation between his principles and those of EFT.

Of particular relevance to EFT is that after many years of research Dr Emoto has demonstrated that molecules of water are affected by our thoughts, words and feelings. Since the earth and humans are composed mainly of water his message can be seen as one for personal health, global environmental renewal, and a practical plan for the creation of peace that starts with each of us. Dr Emoto regards his work as a exploration of how the cosmos works. Water has taught him about the ‘delicacy of the human soul and the impact that “love and gratitude” can have on the world.’

Dr Emoto has visually recorded the impact of different vibrations on water by freezing it and by photographing the resulting crystal formations. Some of his photographs are shown in his books “The Hidden Messages in Water” and The True Power of Water.”

The following principles are basic to Dr Emoto’s work and of relevance for EFT.

  1. Water is the life force and it is sensitive to all vibration.
  2. The entire universe is vibrating and everything has a unique frequency (sound).
  3. The Universe is naturally in balance and harmony, and discord has a destructive vibration.
  4. The words “love” and “gratitude” form the fundamental principles of the laws of nature and also of the phenomenon of life.

Every living cell requires water and we are dependant on the fluid flow in all the different systems in our bodies including the body's electrical system. Dehydration, will cause the energy system to be sluggish or severely repressed and this is one of the recognised causes of Psychological Reversal (PR) in EFT. For this reason, and also because people can become very thirsty while doing EFT, it is necessary to drink water during the session. Correct hydration is also essential for accuracy with muscle testing.

Dr Emoto discovered a close correlation between peoples’ emotions and affected body parts. Of particular interest to EFT is that he found that excess fear resonated with the kidneys. The kidneys maintain the constancy of fluids to our internal environment. They filter fluid from the bloodstream and are the major excretory organs. His findings concur with the Five Elements Cycle in Chinese medicine in which the kidneys are affected by the negative emotion of fear. In EFT the collarbone point is also the Kidney 27 point in acupuncture. I have found this to be a very powerful point in EFT which is not surprising given its connection to the kidneys, water and the emotion of fear.

Einstein’s Theory of Relativity explains that physical matter including the human body is made of energy at the sub-atomic level. The principle is universally accepted in the scientific world and the Science of Quantum Mechanics generally recognises that substance is nothing more than vibration. EFT practitioners have been successfully applying this principle for years and the clinical results prove it.

Dr Emoto calls this universal vibration hado which means “all the subtle energy that exists in the Universe.” Water is sensitive to hado and according to Dr Emoto, water acts as a mirror of the vibrations created in the world. This energy can be positive or negative.

Humans are each vibrating with their own unique frequency and have the sensory skills necessary to feel the vibrations of others. My EFT experiences have enabled me to develop my skills in this regard. As a result, I now often intuitively tune into the subtle as well as the stronger more obvious emotions that my clients experience during EFT sessions with them.

I also feel a range of physical sensations that they too experience during the sessions. As our frequencies change, we literally resonate with one another. I believe this is because I tap together with the client and often speak the same or relevant words for the problems on which we are focussed. Gary has discussed this effect in his Borrowing Benefits concept.

Another phenomenon that I have experienced with EFT is that many of my clients tell me that after doing the technique they have unexpectedly been able to relate better to people with whom they previously had conflict. These were not necessarily people that they consciously addressed using EFT. So even though the person themselves has not necessarily made a conscious effort to “make peace” with another, their vibration had so changed after the EFT that they experienced greater resonance with the other’s energy. I believe that it is highly likely that this change has occurred as a result of tapping into the meridian system plus changes in the vibration of water in the body.

Dr Emoto has developed a device that measures various vibrations of the body at cellular level. He has expanded its use to measuring hado in his development of hado medicine for which the fundamental principles are vibration and resonance. According to Dr Emoto, “When the cellular vibrations in different parts of the body are disturbed due to various reasons, our body can make a wrong turn. When this situation occurs, a new external vibration can be given to the disturbed cell so as to resonate with it, thus, its intrinsic vibration is restored.”

The description of how these principles work aligns very closely to the Psychological Reversal phenomenon in EFT. This is caused by self-sabotaging, negative thinking which often occurs subconsciously and is therefore outside our awareness. It is a polarity reversal in the body’s energy system –the energy is there but it doesn’t flow correctly. It is generally present when a person confuses words, numbers and/or concepts and when they are thinking negatively, and acting irrationally and irritably when they are doing EFT.

In EFT, the correction for Psychological Reversal is made by tapping (ie introducing new external vibration) and making a Setup statement which acknowledges the problem (negative words) and creates self acceptance despite the problem being present (positive words). This changes the vibration in the meridian system, and most likely in the water in the body as well.

Of great significance to EFT is Dr Emoto’s contention that water carries information both negative and positive to all the cells in the body, coupled with his visual recording of water’s ability to understand the meaning of words.

He discovered that the vibration from negative words has the power to destroy, whereas, the vibration of the “good” words has a positive effect. The words may either be written or spoken. He considers that all the vibrations both good and bad impact on water in the body. This has a profound impact on our health and general attitude and demeanour.

Tapping into the meridian system with EFT while stating negative and positive words also has a profound effect. This is because when a disruption of the energy system is calmed and relieved, the person no longer experiences pain and/or or negative emotions from the original memory or thought, as the associated feeling has been “disconnected” according to Sylvia Hartmann, the founder of EmoTrance.

Dr Emoto also discovered that water exposed to the written words “love and gratitude” produced the most beautiful and perfect of all the crystals that he recorded. He contends that these words form the fundamental principles of the laws of nature and the phenomenon of life. He found that while “love” has healing powers on its own, the words “love and gratitude” together form immunity in healing. EFT incorporates the words “love” and “accept” into the Setup statement. Even though acceptance of oneself is a type of gratitude it could be even more beneficial, given Dr Emoto’s research, to incorporate the word “gratitude” and other similar words expressing thanks when doing EFT.

Dr Emoto states that words spoken with determination have strong powers. He was able to observe this in 1999 when 350 people assembled to pray for the cleansing of Lake Biwa in Japan. The algae that normally formed in the lake did not appear that year. He used Einstein’s equation of E=MC² to explain the phenomenon of the healing of the lake. He considers that the “C” can equate to “consciousness” as well as to the speed of light which is the normal interpretation. In this case “M” could equal the number of people consciously focussed. This concept is not new to EFT practitioners who have experienced Gary’s Borrowing Benefits phenomenon, as referred to earlier.

Everyone knows that negative emotions and feelings are a part of us. It is also quite obvious that with an attitude of positive thinking our health often improves.

Dr Emoto believes that we can correct our hado by using the opposite word. So for example, “hate” has a opposing frequency to “gratitude”, “anger” to “kindness”, “fear” to “courage”, “anxiety” to “peace of mind”, “pressure” to “presence of mind” and so forth. The EFT work by Patricia Carrington on choices beautifully exemplifies the efficacy of this.

Dr Emoto’s research has also demonstrated that while words have their own unique vibrational frequencies these can be effected by the vibrations of the person speaking or writing the words. The implications for EFT centre on the importance of using the individual’s own words rather than only those of the therapist when tapping, unless of course there is agreement on the words.

The following is another of Dr Emoto’s findings that is worth developing for EFT. He found that water responds to intent so we can say positive prayers to water which gains the power to potentially answer our prayers. He believes that we can send stronger hado to water by praying in the past tense rather than the future tense, as though the prayer has already been answered. According to Dr Emoto we can make our thoughts and intentions stronger by doing this. He also believes that it is important to have a strong image of the desired result. Loudly vocalising the words gives off a stronger hado than writing them on paper. He suggests that a practical way to create your own hado water is by writing words on a piece of paper and sticking it to your water bottle with the words facing inwards. Dr Emoto recommends drinking five glasses of this water per day. If you don’t have a specific wish then he suggests using the words love and gratitude.

I decided to do a small practical experiment with four people and seven glasses of water to test some of Dr Emoto’s principles. The purpose of the experiment was to revise muscle testing in a workshop while testing whether written words could affect the taste of water. One person was muscle tested by three different people for glasses of water which were each exposed to one of seven words. These words were unseen by the person being tested and the testers, until after all the testing had been completed.

Results confirmed that water exposed to different words changed taste. When the person was muscle tested, “nice” tasting water tested strong and “not nice” tasting water tested weak. Three glasses tasted neutral. For these, the muscle response was very weak for water exposed to “ungrateful”, strong for “live” and very weak for “bad”.

The results were useful for finding issues to pursue with EFT. For example the person in this experiment liked the taste of, and muscle tested very strong to water exposed to the word “die”. However, on two occasions she didn’t like the taste of the water exposed to the word “live” and she muscle tested weak on this. When asked later how she felt about dying she answered that she was quite happy about the thought of it. By contrast, living was a challenge at the time because she was about to retire and was not sure about her financial future.

Conclusion

There is a strong correlation between Dr Emoto’s findings and EFT principles.

Dr Emoto’s pioneering research has provided sound evidence of the impact of thoughts, words and feelings on the body through the medium of water.

Whereas Dr Emoto’s work measures the impact at a personal and global level, EFT provides a therapeutic approach to influence and manage negative emotion at the individual level. Thanks to Dr Emoto’s work, it is now possible to understand more about the wider therapeutic implications of tapping into the meridian system through EFT.

Deirdre Brocklebank

Monday, March 27, 2006

Religious freedoms

I personally do not see how it is possible to live peaceably on the same planet as people who insist that you should follow only their religion. Isn't this just bigotry? Also, in this particular case, prevarication?

For me, the sooner Islam and other organised religions disappear, the better. Doesn't look as though it's going to happen soon, though. If I believed in Satan, I would agree with those who say that organised religion is Satan's most successful achievement.


Christian Science Monitor

from the March 27, 2006 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0327/p01s04-wosc.html

Conversion a thorny issue in Muslim world
By Rachel Morarjee and Dan Murphy
KABUL, AFGHANISTAN; AND CAIRO - Under pressure from the US, the Vatican, and other Western leaders, Afghanistan's fledgling democracy Sunday sidestepped a politically charged case in which prosecutors had sought the death penalty for a Muslim man who converted to Christianity.

Rather than pass judgment on Abdul Rahman, an Afghan who converted while living abroad 16 years ago, the court declared him mentally unfit for trial Sunday. "He is a sick person," said Mohammed Eshaq Aloko, Afghanistan's deputy attorney general. Afghan officials said Mr. Rahman would be transferred to a hospital for psychiatric evaluation.

The case has not only thrown a spotlight on the laws and practices of an Afghan government that the United States helped to install but is a reminder of the limits - sometimes severely enforced - placed on religious freedoms by many countries in the Muslim world.

While state executions for apostasy are rarely carried out, laws allowing them remain on the books in not only Afghanistan but in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Sudan.

More generally, while countries like Egypt and Pakistan guarantee religious freedoms in their constitutions, they limit religious speech and local police frequently lean on people to recant if they seek to convert.

In recent years, religious tension between Muslims and Christians has soared in many countries, and states like Egypt and Pakistan frequently find themselves caught between extremists on both sides.

Last year for instance, Egyptian Christians and Muslims clashed over a girl the Christians claimed had been forced to convert to Islam. The Muslim side said the girl was a willing convert, and had married a Muslim.

In Pakistan, while apostasy cases are rare, vigilante attacks against alleged apostates and others thought to offend Islam are common. "There's not been a single case of apostasy in Pakistan in the last 10 to 15 years, at least not one that has attracted a lot of attention," says Najam Sethi, editor of the liberal Lahore-based newspaper, Daily Times.

But as much of the Muslim world, including Pakistan, takes a more negative view of America and its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there has been greater popular pressure on religious freedoms, with courts and governments usually reluctant to intervene.

In Pakistani villages, Muslims who convert to Christianity are occasionally killed by their own family members, to protect the family's honor. In major cities, Islamic militant groups have launched attacks against Christian churches for their supposed sympathy for America. In Alexandria, Egypt, last October, three rioters died as they sought to attack a church for distributing DVDs of a play deemed offensive to Islam.

This context is what has made Rahman's case so difficult for the secular- leaning and pro-US Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

"Afghanistan is in the eye of the storm, in terms of anti-Western feeling," say Mr. Sethi. "If the Supreme Court [had] upheld its decision, and then passed the buck on to Mr. Karzai to say, 'OK, it's up to you, you have the power of clemency,' then that puts Karzai in a bad spot as far as Islamists are concerned."

Sunday's pronouncement of Rahman by prosecutors and the judge as unfit would now seem to spare President Karzai this embarrassing quandary.

Ansarullah Mawlavezada, the judge who had been set to try Rahman's case, as well as other court officials, say that the case came to court after the family reported him for being a Christian. A lawsuit had been filed in a child-custody dispute, and his ex-wife alleged that he beat one of his two daughters while she was reading the Koran.

Rahman has said that he converted to Christianity when he was working for an aid agency in Pakistan 16 years ago.

Afghanistan is a deeply conservative country where 99 percent of the population is Muslim and an estimated 10,000 Christians can practice only in secret. Out on the street, many ordinary Afghans chimed in with the mullahs calling out at Friday prayers for Abdul Rahman to be put to death.

"The order of God is execution for this person and no one can change it. This person has denied God and the Koran and he should be punished in a way that will stop other Muslims from converting," said Sayed Saber, a 32-year-old in Kabul.

President George Bush, who called the case "deeply troubling," phoned Karzai last week to press for Rahman's release. Simultaneously, mujahideen who had been funded by the US in their fight against the Soviet Union, mobilized supporters across the country to press for execution. Karzai was caught in the middle. "It is a question of a tightrope for Karzai," said Paul Fishstein, the director of the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit in Kabul.

The issue of religious freedoms is one in which, as in Afghanistan, modern laws are clashing with ancient traditions. Rahman's case illustrates a glaring contradiction between Afghanistan's constitution, which upholds the right to freedom of religion on one hand but enshrines the supremacy of sharia law on the other.

Most mainstream schools of Islamic jurisprudence call for converts to be executed. Though the Koran promises only hellfire for apostates and also says "there should be no compunction in religion,'' Islamic jurists have typically argued that execution is mandated, citing stories of comments made by the prophet Muhammad.

"The prophet Muhammad said that anyone who rejects Islam for another religion should be executed," said Mr. Mawlavezada, the judge.

Though some liberal Islamic scholars disagree, pointing out that no such rule exists in the Koran, they have been largely silenced in Afghanistan. Last year, Afghan writer Ali Mohaqeq Nasab spent almost three months in jail last autumn for an article questioning the traditional call for execution.

What happens next for Rahman is uncertain, though it appears likely that the government will find a way to sweep the case under the rug.

Officials said they're likely to allow him to go abroad for medical treatment.

"If his family can afford to send him overseas for medical treatment then of course we would give him a passport," says Mr. Aloko, the deputy attorney general. In that case, he would be free to seek asylum elsewhere and avoid a return to his homeland and its legal system.

• David Montero in Karachi, Pakistan, and Scott Baldauf in Delhi contributed to this report.

Monday, March 20, 2006

If like me your eyesight is deteriorating, read this and consider doing something about it.

From Gary Craig's regular EFT newsletter
:

Vision problems affect a major segment of the world's population. As a result, glasses and contact lenses compete for being the #1 health aid on the planet. Fortunately, EFT can be a material boost for those seeking better vision and this detailed, well written article by Christine Wheeler, MA (from Canada) gives us creative approaches and insights into her personal pursuits in this regard.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


By Christine Wheeler, MA

In third grade, the school nurse conducted eye tests, which resulted in my first pair of glasses. I had 20/200 vision at age nine. That means that what most people see from 200 feet, I needed to be at 20 feet to see. It was considered normal in my family as everybody wore glasses. It was like a rite of passage to be fitted with my first pair of glasses just before my 10th birthday.

My vision continued to deteriorate and I had a new, stronger prescription nearly every year for the next 30 years. Finally, in 2004 my vision had been stabilized for a couple of years so I decided to have laser vision correction in June 2004. At this point, my vision was “off the charts” meaning that I couldn’t see the biggest letter on the eye chart and my vision was estimated at about 20/400. My left eye was worse than my right eye at about 20/500.

The surgery was quite miraculous and within four days, my vision was 20/40 in my right eye and 20/50 in my left eye. I had regular checkups over the next 6 months, and in December 2004, both eyes were 20/20.

I was working on the computer about 10 hours a day and noticed my vision changing in about February of 2005. I put it down to eyestrain and tried to take longer breaks from working on the computer. By the next month, the change in my vision was so alarming that I thought I might have a serious problem and made an emergency appointment with a specialist in eye diseases. Fortunately, he found nothing abnormal so I went back to my laser surgeon to see what might be wrong.

The vision in my left eye had deteriorated from 20/20 to 20/50 in just a couple of months. The optometrist said that this was very unusual and that I needed to come back in six weeks to see “how much worse it gets” and that the only thing they could do was another surgery on that eye. He took an infrared image of the eye that mapped the shape of the cornea.

Well, the challenge was issued and I decided to immediately start using EFT to correct my vision and avoid another laser surgery. I had six weeks.

So the tapping started and I tapped every day for about three weeks. I would tap every night before I went to sleep and sometimes I would sit and tap for 30 minutes during the day in addition to the bedtime ritual. I never rated my intensity when doing the tapping as I imagined the intensity to be the 20/50 eye test score. I did some general tapping on the issue and these I used daily:

Even though my vision keeps deteriorating, I deeply and completely accept myself.

Even though my left eye’s vision is only 20/50, I choose to have perfect vision in both eyes.

Even though everyone in my family has poor eyesight and I thought that was my destiny as well, I choose to have perfect vision.

Even though I can’t remember ever having perfect vision, I deeply and completely accept myself and forgive myself for any contribution that I might be making to my deteriorating vision.

Even though I can’t remember ever having perfect vision, I DESERVE to have perfect vision.

Even though the doctor expects my vision to get worse, I choose to believe that my vision can improve – it improved with this miracle surgery, it can improve with EFT.

Sometimes when the inclination to do so struck me, I did the entire EFT recipe including the 9 gamut and eye rolling. Sometimes I would rub the sore spot instead of the karate chop point, especially when I felt that I was tapping on issues that felt very deep rooted.

After a couple of days using the general statements, I thought about vision metaphorically and tapped on the following things:

Even though there are things ahead that I just don’t want to see....

Even though it is difficult for me to focus on a particular goal....

Even though it is hard for me to see something that is right in front of me....

These statements reflected the fact that I was coming to the completion of a large writing project and I was avoiding planning for the next stage in my career. While I was waiting until the end of the six weeks to test my vision, I was noticing that I started to see situations in my life more clearly and with more discernment. I was able to recognize more of those ‘coincidences’ that made life interesting.

After two weeks of tapping regularly, I sat down again for about an hour and thought about my eyes as entities separate from me. I had this huge realization that my eyes had been operating in a specific way for 75% of my life and they were in the habit of deteriorating – they didn’t know any better. Furthermore, I interfered with their deterioration by getting laser surgery so while I corrected the results of the deterioration; I had not corrected the Reasons for the deterioration of my vision. The following tapping phrases evolved during that hour.

Even though my eyes don’t know that it is ok to be able to see, I deeply and completely accept myself and give my eyes permission to see perfectly.

Even though my eyes are in the habit of getting worse and worse, I forgive my eyes and give them permission to get better and better.

Even though my sisters and I competed to see who had the worst eyesight, I forgive myself for playing this stupid game and I choose to have the best eyesight.

Even though everyone in my family has bad eyesight, I can still be a Wheeler and have perfect vision.

Even though I was taught to believe that nobody’s perfect, I deeply and completely accept myself and I choose to believe that I can have perfect vision.

While tapping on these phrases, there was a lot of yawning on my part and I knew that I was shifting something. When I felt inclined to do so, I included the 9-gamut and eye rolling.

Yet another thing occurred to me: I got my first pair of glasses just before my 10th birthday and got new, stronger lenses almost annually for the next 30 years. My laser surgery was a few weeks after my 43rd birthday. Following the intuition that I have come to rely on when using EFT for clients, and myself I tapped:

Even though my eyes always get worse for my birthday, I give my eyes permission to get better every year.

Even though one of the few things that I could always count on was that my eyes would get worse, I deeply and completely accept myself and forgive myself for being attached to deteriorating vision.

I tapped regularly for about 3= weeks and after that I tapped only when it occurred to me. At this point it no longer seemed very important to tap. A few days would go by and I realized that I had forgotten to tap. I was surprised to notice that the uncomfortable dryness that many people experience following laser surgery had subsided and despite the fact that I was still working on the computer for 8 hours a day, I was using eye drops twice a day instead of 5 or 6 times a day.

The six weeks finally passed and I had the infrared eye scan again to map the eye. The optometrist asked how my left eye vision seemed now. I told him that I thought that it was better about two weeks ago. He said that maybe I just got used to the lesser vision. He opened the eye chart to the last spot that I could read six weeks ago and with my left eye, I read the lines and kept reading, including the tiny letters at the side of the chart that said 20/20! He looked at the eye map and the shape of my cornea had changed slightly in six weeks. He had never seen that happen before.

In my six years of doing EFT, I have witnessed many remarkable shifts with clients, family, friends and myself. So, when I decided to do EFT for my vision, I did so with a sense of curiosity, hoping for the best. When I was told that my vision was 20/20 again, there was absolutely no doubt in my mind that it was because of my use of EFT. I had continued working on the computer and didn’t change anything else. As Gary says, “try it on everything”.

Chris

Christine Wheeler, MA is an EFT practitioner, writer, and researcher living and practicing in Vancouver, BC.

Thursday, March 16, 2006

In Defence of Polygamy. Found on Beliefnet.


excerpt

'I Would Never...Go Back to Being a Monogamous Wife'
Polygamous women speak out in defense of their lifestyle.
By Mary Batchelor, Marianne Watson, and Anne Wilde


In April 2000, the authors contacted more than 700 plural wives, asking them about their experience. They were promised anonymity because it is against the law and currently being prosecuted in Utah. Within six weeks, they received more than 100 responses. The comments were reprinted, organized according to the age of the respondent. Here is one from RS, a woman between 41 and 50 years old.

"I would never ever, worlds without end, even if I could control all events, willingly go back to being a monogamous wife. Even if I were to discount the possibility of eternal blessings, the blessings I enjoy here in this sphere are enough to cause me to become a she-bear when someone threatens them.

"As the only wife of a good man, I had a good marriage. We got along well, and our children were emotionally healthy. But at times I felt an unspoken demand to be all things to my husband: a great cook, an organized housekeeper, an inspired home-schooler and an individual who kept up with current events, pursued her talents, never fatigued, always remembered details, kept the family social calendar, emptied the mending and ironing baskets daily, never overspent, looked appealing at all times and looked forward anxiously for the moment he walked in the door. I tried to be all things, and my husband told me constantly that I was loved and appreciated. But I worried privately that my lapses stood out more vividly than my achievements.

"After a second wife entered the family, I saw my husband’s eyes full of new respect and approval as he looked at me. This approval came NOT from my willingness to let him have another wife, but from his deepened comprehension of who I was as a woman, what strengths and gifts I had that were not an automatic part of simply being female genetically but were uniquely mine. Suddenly, I was seen as I had always wanted to be seen.

"Our relationship improved in other ways. Simultaneously with the second marriage, we had to revamp the way we spent our time together. I couldn't be more cheerful tomorrow after a good night’s sleep because tomorrow he’d be elsewhere. He could’t vegetate in front of the TV tonight and spend time with the kids tomorrow because tomorrow there would be different kids. We couldn’t make tomorrow special as we were too busy today, since tomorrow wouldn’t be there for us. So we instantly found ourselves putting aside less important things to make time for the more important.

"Then there were the nights he was gone. At first I felt socially embarrassed trying to make new friends and having a "single’s" social life; but as I did, I found myself feeling more connected to all of God’s people on this earth than I ever had. I found that I hadn’t become a part-time wife, I had become a full-time human being.

"For years I prayed to know true joy, to have my marriage become the one I had dreamed of in my youth, and to understand myself and my place here among humanity. I would never have believed, had someone told me, that all my answered prayers would be wrapped up in one gift called plural marriage, but indeed they were. When I hear threats of our way of life being driven out of existence, the grief twists inside me. Please, please, don’t try to take away the thing that has made my life whole!

"I have no confidence that were I to be my husband’s only wife again, that the lessons learned here in plural marriage could successfully be applied in a monogamous relationship. I have the marriage of my dreams (No, that’s not true because I have never dreamed it would be this good) and two sweetheart sister wives who are my best friends and who sacrifice so that I might have happiness. So, my friend, this is no pretense. This principle is my happiness."



Excerpted by permission from 'Voices in Harmony: Contemporary Women Celebrate Plural Marriage,' written and compiled by Mary Batchelor, Marianne Watson, and Anne Wilde.

Wednesday, March 15, 2006

Religious lies - an exposure

This a review (written by an Amazon.com customer) of the book "The Laughing Jesus: Religious Lies and Gnostic Wisdom", By Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy.


Timely, Compelling Read: Put On Your Seatbelt, July 26, 2005
Reviewer: Frank MacEowen "Gnostic Druid" (Nomadic) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)
This is one of the most compelling books I've ever read.

MOST mainstream Christians will attack this book. MOST mainstream Jews probably will too. And, I predict the authors will be probably be denounced by Islamic clerics at some point for their treatment of the religious personality Muhammad (which is very illuminating).

Freke and Gandy, working on the premise that Christianity, Judaism, and Islam were all originally Gnostic (deep wisdom) traditions, completely pick apart the Literalist streams of each tradition, and their scholarship totally slams the self-serving ego-driven political shenanigans of each of the faiths as well--again, specifically in their Literalist forms.

The Jewish Fantasy Factory:

The section on the Jews is absolutely fascinating and asserts from the historical record how a monism of Jewish identity as a people is a problematic idea; the authors suggest multiple sources for the Jewish ethnic roots, and go on to suggest -- again from archaeological evidence and the historical record -- that their mythic odyssey out of Egypt, and the Israeli claim to Jerusalem, is a complete fabrication, driven, in essence, by a religious and cultural identity crisis of sorts that still fuels the conflicts of today and is driven by Literalist interpretations of what was originally a myth-line.

A number of the formative myths in the Jewish tradition, the authors assert, are actually derived and inspired from exposure to Greek tradition, while they go through the Tanakh/Torah (the Old Testament) with something of a fine-tooth comb and, in a truly riveting manner, show how its authors were essentially attempting to synthesize a number of competing desert Pagan traditions in the region.

The Most Famous Man Who Never Lived:

The premise of the section on Christianity I was already familiar with, having read one of their other equally powerful and controversial books, Jesus and the Lost Goddess: The Secret Teachings of the Original Christians. But, again, I found myself truly fascinated to learn that certain books that comprise the "universally agreed upon" Christian canon (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts--renditions of Peter and Paul) were almost single handedly emphasized (Bishop Irenaeus), whose word-sculpting was, quite intentionally, attempting to suppress and debunk the Gnostic stream of Christianity (which relates to the Jesus myth more as a personal initiatory, archetypal, and transformative process rather than a literal historical set of events involving a quasi-divine/human person).

Freke and Gandy articulate with a real shine how Irenaeus was simply attempting to compete for followers in Rome at a time when it had become a spiritual marketplace of sorts. Irenaeus sought to establish a viable tradition in Rome, and in time, thanks to Constantine, it worked, for the Literalist version of Christianity was offered political support by the state of Rome and all other versions were declared as heresy (funny, isn't it; heretics declaring those following the path closer to the original essence as heretics?)

Almost with the same deftness of a detective story one finds in such fictional works as The Da Vinci Code (only this book is real), The Laughing Jesus unveils how the theme, archetype, and imagery of: 1) the virgin birth, 2) the idea of the Son of God, 3) the murder/crucifixion of the "godman", and 4) the resurrection, are all connected to a number of Pagan myth lines (worked with symbolically in various Mediterranean mystery schools for thousands of years) that actually pre-date Christianity (and its myth formation) by 1,000 years.

Going through each tradition and their version of "Godman" -- Egypt (Osiris), Greece (Dionysus), Asia Minor (Attis), Syria (Adonis), Persia (Mithras), and Alexandria (Serapis), to name only a few -- Freke and Gandy articulate how the myth-formers of Christianity, in essence, borrowed (plagiarized) from these earlier compelling themes. They also clearly assert that such myth-forming and myth-following is not a threat in the Gnostic Christian context, whereas in the Literalist vein everything is, well, taken quite literally -- and therefore poses a real threat to the authority upon which the Church bases itself.

Muhammad: From Mystic to Mobster:

Pardon my French, so to speak, but Muhammad [The Religious Figure] in the book gets a serious ass-whipping. One senses the disappointment in the authors that such a beautiful tradition as Islam could fall prey to the clutches of the individual ego of Muhammad later on in his life (as he turned military war-lord), and then --really by example-- be hijacked by Literalists within the Islamic tradition to assert their own political goals, but the authors also reiterate that it was predictable; that it happened with the Christians and Jews as well.

They describe Muhammad as someone who was profoundly influenced by both Jewish and Christian thought (and culture), and -- as a response -- initially began a powerful process of bringing forth a mystical path of Gnosis for the Arab world. However, they then describe, again drawing straight from the historical record of battles, and from lines within the Qu'ran, how, after having been snubbed by both Jews and Christians (not acknowledged as a prophet), Muhammad began to interpret his divine mission as one of imposing Islam on the world (not at all different in tone from the early Christian Church's Inquisition, or the evangelizing, missionizing, and proselytizing of a great many Literalist Christians today).

The chapter on Muhammad, which does give a nod to the Gnostic Sufis within the cultural milieu of Islam, is a compelling read that requires that we look at the personality and full psychological range of Muhammad. I also found it personally very interesting that such Islamic customs as ordering women to wear veils actually was derived from early Byzantine Christian practices.

The first half of The Laughing Jesus is a radical debunking of all Literalist interpretations of each of these traditions. The second half of the book is dedicated to exploring Gnosis in the present day, as educated people, what the authors suggest certain Christians, Jews, and Muslims *knew* and *know* was the truly transformative core of the traditions but which were hijacked by political agendas.

The fact that the real spiritual essence of each of these traditions was overcome by Literalist propaganda shouldn't cause a person to lose sleep at night. The fact that the holders and followers of each of these Literalist traditions hold the seats of power in global politics, however, is disturbing. This book touches on how this reality is a phenomenon that is dictating decisions that determine what is happening to our economy, foreign policy, and the environment (note: Armageddon-minded Christian Literalists don't really care about global warming or the financial viability of future generations if they believe it's all going to end up in a fire ball in the end anyway; why concern ourselves with sustainability, environmentally or financially?).

On the one hand, I find such a book promising. It can potentially shock some people out of religious apathy and/or cultural sleepwalking, or out of the absurd cultural monism and religious conditioning that leads toward the huge barriers to interfaith dialogue.

On the other hand, I find some of my own personal conclusions that I derived from the book to be troublesome; that given the particular ideologies that are running this country (Christian Literalists), and the particular ideologies that are *required* to oppose the West (Islamic Literalists), we could be barreling full steam ahead toward a much more prolific global clash than the likes of 9/11 or the Iraq war.

Hopefully not.

But, that is probably one of the clearest articulations in the book of all -- that the environmental crisis, as well as the conflict in the Middle East is all tied to Literalist propaganda, not just by Islamic Literalist/Fundamentalists, but also by Jewish Literalists and Christian Literalists/Fundamentalists alike.

The conclusion of Part One of the book (called The Bathwater), which I completely agree with, is that all of this is a formula for disaster if the leaders of these faiths, the practitioners of these paths, and the larger society as a whole does not find its own authentic Gnosis. This is where Part Two of the book (called The Baby) comes into play...which I won't comment on because it would be like telling you the end of a really good movie.

Summary and Conclusion:

Practicing Christians, Jews, and Muslims definitely need to read this book. Everybody else probably should too, because much of what it describes assists greatly in understanding what is both truly redeeming in each of these wisdom traditions, while also helping to paint a clear picture why each of these traditions are also being hijacked by a narrow-but-widening band of religious psychopaths who could end up making Armageddon a self-fulfilling prophecy.
--Frank MacEowen, M.A., (...)

Tuesday, March 14, 2006

How to deal with a very big threat

True Story of Courage and Love - by Dave Kuzminski.

Walking down a path through some woods in Georgia in 1977, 1 saw a water puddle ahead on the path. I angled my direction to go around it on the part of the path that wasn’t covered by water and mud. As I reached the puddle, I was suddenly attacked!

Yet I did nothing for the attack was so unpredictable and from a source so totally unexpected. I was startled as well as unhurt, despite having been struck four or five times already. I backed up a foot and my attacker stopped attacking me. Instead of attacking more, he hovered in the air on graceful butterfly wings in front of me. Had I been hurt I wouldn’t have found it amusing, but I was unhurt, it was funny, and I was laughing. After all, I was being attacked by a butterfly!

Having stopped laughing, I took a step forward. My attacker rushed me again. He rammed me in the chest with his head and body, striking me over and over again with all his might, still to no avail. For a second time, I retreated a step while my attacker relented in his attack.

Yet again, I tried moving forward. My attacker charged me again. I was rammed in the chest over and over again. I wasn’t sure what to do, other than to retreat a third time, after all, it’s just not everyday that one is attacked by a butterfly. This time, though, I stepped back several paces to look the situation over. My attacker moved back as well to land on the ground. That’s when I discovered why my attacker was charging me only moments earlier.

He had a mate and she was dying. She was beside the puddle where he landed. Sitting close beside her, he opened and closed his wings as if to fan her. I could only admire the love and courage of that butterfly in his concern for his mate. He had taken it upon himself to attack me for his mate’s sake, even though she was clearly dying and I was so large. He did so just to give her those extra few precious moments of life, should I have been careless enough to step on her.

Now I knew why and what he was fighting for. There was really only one option left for me. I carefully made my way around the puddle to the other side of the path, though it was only inches wide and extremely muddy. His courage in attacking something thousands of times larger and heavier than himself just for his mate’s safety justified it. I couldn’t do anything other than reward him by walking on the more difficult side of the puddle. He had truly earned those moments to be with her, undisturbed. I left them in peace for those last few moments, cleaning the mud from my boots when I later reached my car.

Since then, I’ve always tried to remember the courage of that butterfly whenever I see huge obstacles facing me. I use that butterfly’s courage as an inspiration and to remind myself that good things are worth fighting for.


Copyright 1997 Dave Kuzminski


This story courtesy of http://www.homeholidaysfamilyandfun.com

Saturday, March 11, 2006

A voice of reason that deserves support. From New York Times

March 11, 2006
The Saturday Profile
For Muslim Who Says Violence Destroys Islam, Violent Threats
By JOHN M. BRODER

LOS ANGELES, March 10 — Three weeks ago, Dr. Wafa Sultan was a largely unknown Syrian-American psychiatrist living outside Los Angeles, nursing a deep anger and despair about her fellow Muslims.

Today, thanks to an unusually blunt and provocative interview on Al Jazeera television on Feb. 21, she is an international sensation, hailed as a fresh voice of reason by some, and by others as a heretic and infidel who deserves to die.

In the interview, which has been viewed on the Internet more than a million times and has reached the e-mail of hundreds of thousands around the world, Dr. Sultan bitterly criticized the Muslim clerics, holy warriors and political leaders who she believes have distorted the teachings of Muhammad and the Koran for 14 centuries.

She said the world's Muslims, whom she compares unfavorably with the Jews, have descended into a vortex of self-pity and violence.

Dr. Sultan said the world was not witnessing a clash of religions or cultures, but a battle between modernity and barbarism, a battle that the forces of violent, reactionary Islam are destined to lose.

In response, clerics throughout the Muslim world have condemned her, and her telephone answering machine has filled with dark threats. But Islamic reformers have praised her for saying out loud, in Arabic and on the most widely seen television network in the Arab world, what few Muslims dare to say even in private.

"I believe our people are hostages to our own beliefs and teachings," she said in an interview this week in her home in a Los Angeles suburb.

Dr. Sultan, who is 47, wears a prim sweater and skirt, with fleece-lined slippers and heavy stockings. Her eyes and hair are jet black and her modest manner belies her intense words: "Knowledge has released me from this backward thinking. Somebody has to help free the Muslim people from these wrong beliefs."

Perhaps her most provocative words on Al Jazeera were those comparing how the Jews and Muslims have reacted to adversity. Speaking of the Holocaust, she said, "The Jews have come from the tragedy and forced the world to respect them, with their knowledge, not with their terror; with their work, not with their crying and yelling."

She went on, "We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant. We have not seen a single Jew destroy a church. We have not seen a single Jew protest by killing people."

She concluded, "Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down churches, killing people and destroying embassies. This path will not yield any results. The Muslims must ask themselves what they can do for humankind, before they demand that humankind respect them."

Her views caught the ear of the American Jewish Congress, which has invited her to speak in May at a conference in Israel. "We have been discussing with her the importance of her message and trying to devise the right venue for her to address Jewish leaders," said Neil B. Goldstein, executive director of the organization.

She is probably more welcome in Tel Aviv than she would be in Damascus. Shortly after the broadcast, clerics in Syria denounced her as an infidel. One said she had done Islam more damage than the Danish cartoons mocking the Prophet Muhammad, a wire service reported.

DR. SULTAN is "working on a book that — if it is published — it's going to turn the Islamic world upside down."

"I have reached the point that doesn't allow any U-turn. I have no choice. I am questioning every single teaching of our holy book."

The working title is, "The Escaped Prisoner: When God Is a Monster."

Dr. Sultan grew up in a large traditional Muslim family in Banias, Syria, a small city on the Mediterranean about a two-hour drive north of Beirut. Her father was a grain trader and a devout Muslim, and she followed the faith's strictures into adulthood.

But, she said, her life changed in 1979 when she was a medical student at the University of Aleppo, in northern Syria. At that time, the radical Muslim Brotherhood was using terrorism to try to undermine the government of President Hafez al-Assad. Gunmen of the Muslim Brotherhood burst into a classroom at the university and killed her professor as she watched, she said.

"They shot hundreds of bullets into him, shouting, 'God is great!' " she said. "At that point, I lost my trust in their god and began to question all our teachings. It was the turning point of my life, and it has led me to this present point. I had to leave. I had to look for another god."

She and her husband, who now goes by the Americanized name of David, laid plans to leave for the United States. Their visas finally came in 1989, and the Sultans and their two children (they have since had a third) settled in with friends in Cerritos, Calif., a prosperous bedroom community on the edge of Los Angeles County.

After a succession of jobs and struggles with language, Dr. Sultan has completed her American medical licensing, with the exception of a hospital residency program, which she hopes to do within a year. David operates an automotive-smog-check station. They bought a home in the Los Angeles area and put their children through local public schools. All are now American citizens.

BUT even as she settled into a comfortable middle-class American life, Dr. Sultan's anger burned within. She took to writing, first for herself, then for an Islamic reform Web site called Annaqed (The Critic), run by a Syrian expatriate in Phoenix.

An angry essay on that site by Dr. Sultan about the Muslim Brotherhood caught the attention of Al Jazeera, which invited her to debate an Algerian cleric on the air last July.

In the debate, she questioned the religious teachings that prompt young people to commit suicide in the name of God. "Why does a young Muslim man, in the prime of life, with a full life ahead, go and blow himself up?" she asked. "In our countries, religion is the sole source of education and is the only spring from which that terrorist drank until his thirst was quenched."

Her remarks set off debates around the globe and her name began appearing in Arabic newspapers and Web sites. But her fame grew exponentially when she appeared on Al Jazeera again on Feb. 21, an appearance that was translated and widely distributed by the Middle East Media Research Institute, known as Memri.

Memri said the clip of her February appearance had been viewed more than a million times.

"The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of religions or a clash of civilizations," Dr. Sultan said. "It is a clash between two opposites, between two eras. It is a clash between a mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages and another mentality that belongs to the 21st century. It is a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality."

She said she no longer practiced Islam. "I am a secular human being," she said.

The other guest on the program, identified as an Egyptian professor of religious studies, Dr. Ibrahim al-Khouli, asked, "Are you a heretic?" He then said there was no point in rebuking or debating her, because she had blasphemed against Islam, the Prophet Muhammad and the Koran.

Dr. Sultan said she took those words as a formal fatwa, a religious condemnation. Since then, she said, she has received numerous death threats on her answering machine and by e-mail.

One message said: "Oh, you are still alive? Wait and see." She received an e-mail message the other day, in Arabic, that said, "If someone were to kill you, it would be me."

Dr. Sultan said her mother, who still lives in Syria, is afraid to contact her directly, speaking only through a sister who lives in Qatar. She said she worried more about the safety of family members here and in Syria than she did for her own.

"I have no fear," she said. "I believe in my message. It is like a million-mile journey, and I believe I have walked the first and hardest 10 miles."

Friday, March 10, 2006

A very good idea in support of human rights

From David Pogue's column in New York Times

I wanted to share some of what I learned in this e-column, but I'm aware that some of this column's readers get cranky when the topic strays from consumer technology. But one memorable talk involved BOTH consumer tech AND doing good in the world, which I thought I'd share with you. (I'll be back with gadget reviews next week.)

It was a talk by Peter Gabriel, the pop star. He didn't play or even mention music; instead, he described the progress of an outfit called Witness (www.witness.org), which he co-founded in 1992 for the purposes of what he calls "video advocacy."

What he means is helping native citizens film human-rights violations as they happen, so that the world can see what's really going on. It's much harder for wealthy countries to ignore the violence and oppression, Gabriel said, when they're watching a video of it.

So Witness sprouted up to supply camcorders and training to, so far, 200 human-rights groups ("partners") in 60 countries. It sounded like such a cool and important project that I decided to interview Gillian Caldwell, the group's executive director, for today's e-column.

DP: Strikes me that lots of the human-rights violations are in, well, hot, humid places that would be the enemy of camcorders. How have the cameras and tapes fared?

GC: Our team definitely has to keep climate in mind when they select the equipment packages, since some fare better in humid climates than others. As for the tapes, we try to get them shipped relatively quickly to our archivists, where they're catalogued, duplicated and stored in climate-controlled vaults for the production work.

DP: Isn't this technology new to, say, impoverished Africans? How do they know how to operate the camcorder, ship the tapes back, etc.?

GC: Most of the people we're training have never held a video camera before, so the relationship begins with an intensive, onsite training program that teaches them how to shoot, as well as what to shoot and why.

DP: Does every camcorder "seeding" bear fruit? Do you actually capture violence and stuff on film?

GC: Well, unlike, say, the Rodney King incident, our primary intention is not to capture human rights abuses in action, although that has on occasion happened. Instead, most of our footage highlights the aftermath.

For example, a reluctant Philippine government is now prosecuting the murderers of activists who were legally pursuing ancestral land claims--after footage taken of the attacks was broadcast nationwide in the Philippines and delivered to the Philippine president at the World Economic Forum. While Witness's partner did not actually capture the attack on tape (it took place early in the morning while everyone was sleeping), they were first on the scene of the attack, and captured irrefutable evidence.

DP: How do the people you supply with camcorders keep them from getting stolen, broken, lost, and so on?

GC: With the exception of some problems with theft in Nigeria, we've actually been pretty lucky. Our partners manage to maintain their equipment very well, and when the time comes for an upgrade, we provide it.

Power is a challenge; we generally provide extra battery packs. Some partners even have solar chargers for their equipment.

DP: At TED, Peter Gabriel mentioned a shift from camcorders to cameraphones?

GC: Staying ahead of the technology curve is a major challenge for us. Communications media have changed dramatically in the 14 years since Witness was founded.

In the coming months, we will launch an initiative called the Witness Video Hub (www.witness.org/technology). Our hope is to let people around the world use cellphones and computers to upload media to a central Web site built to promote human rights.

We're facing an unprecedented frontier, with digital technology and the "participatory culture" it has inspired poised to explode. Witness needs to be at the forefront of this transition.

DP: Once the hub site goes up, how can you be sure that the filmed events are genuine?

GC: We're still thinking this through. Currently, we're committed to an open and participatory environment, allowing anyone anywhere to contribute footage. There may be a limited amount of material that we will be able to authenticate, but our goal is to not play a big role in this area. We don't want to serve as gatekeepers ourselves, but to allow for peer review to foster a sense of community responsibility and accountability.

Thursday, March 02, 2006

A very thoughtful piece from NY Times with many good points raised about the position of American hegemony now and in the future.

February 19, 2006

After Neoconservatism

As we approach the third anniversary of the onset of the Iraq war, it seems very unlikely that history will judge either the intervention itself or the ideas animating it kindly. By invading Iraq, the Bush administration created a self-fulfilling prophecy: Iraq has now replaced Afghanistan as a magnet, a training ground and an operational base for jihadist terrorists, with plenty of American targets to shoot at. The United States still has a chance of creating a Shiite-dominated democratic Iraq, but the new government will be very weak for years to come; the resulting power vacuum will invite outside influence from all of Iraq's neighbors, including Iran. There are clear benefits to the Iraqi people from the removal of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, and perhaps some positive spillover effects in Lebanon and Syria. But it is very hard to see how these developments in themselves justify the blood and treasure that the United States has spent on the project to this point.

The so-called Bush Doctrine that set the framework for the administration's first term is now in shambles. The doctrine (elaborated, among other places, in the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States) argued that, in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, America would have to launch periodic preventive wars to defend itself against rogue states and terrorists with weapons of mass destruction; that it would do this alone, if necessary; and that it would work to democratize the greater Middle East as a long-term solution to the terrorist problem. But successful pre-emption depends on the ability to predict the future accurately and on good intelligence, which was not forthcoming, while America's perceived unilateralism has isolated it as never before. It is not surprising that in its second term, the administration has been distancing itself from these policies and is in the process of rewriting the National Security Strategy document.

But it is the idealistic effort to use American power to promote democracy and human rights abroad that may suffer the greatest setback. Perceived failure in Iraq has restored the authority of foreign policy "realists" in the tradition of Henry Kissinger. Already there is a host of books and articles decrying America's naïve Wilsonianism and attacking the notion of trying to democratize the world. The administration's second-term efforts to push for greater Middle Eastern democracy, introduced with the soaring rhetoric of Bush's second Inaugural Address, have borne very problematic fruits. The Islamist Muslim Brotherhood made a strong showing in Egypt's parliamentary elections in November and December. While the holding of elections in Iraq this past December was an achievement in itself, the vote led to the ascendance of a Shiite bloc with close ties to Iran (following on the election of the conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president of Iran in June). But the clincher was the decisive Hamas victory in the Palestinian election last month, which brought to power a movement overtly dedicated to the destruction of Israel. In his second inaugural, Bush said that "America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one," but the charge will be made with increasing frequency that the Bush administration made a big mistake when it stirred the pot, and that the United States would have done better to stick by its traditional authoritarian friends in the Middle East. Indeed, the effort to promote democracy around the world has been attacked as an illegitimate activity both by people on the left like Jeffrey Sachs and by traditional conservatives like Pat Buchanan.

The reaction against democracy promotion and an activist foreign policy may not end there. Those whom Walter Russell Mead labels Jacksonian conservatives — red-state Americans whose sons and daughters are fighting and dying in the Middle East — supported the Iraq war because they believed that their children were fighting to defend the United States against nuclear terrorism, not to promote democracy. They don't want to abandon the president in the middle of a vicious war, but down the road the perceived failure of the Iraq intervention may push them to favor a more isolationist foreign policy, which is a more natural political position for them. A recent Pew poll indicates a swing in public opinion toward isolationism; the percentage of Americans saying that the United States "should mind its own business" has never been higher since the end of the Vietnam War.

More than any other group, it was the neoconservatives both inside and outside the Bush administration who pushed for democratizing Iraq and the broader Middle East. They are widely credited (or blamed) for being the decisive voices promoting regime change in Iraq, and yet it is their idealistic agenda that in the coming months and years will be the most directly threatened. Were the United States to retreat from the world stage, following a drawdown in Iraq, it would in my view be a huge tragedy, because American power and influence have been critical to the maintenance of an open and increasingly democratic order around the world. The problem with neoconservatism's agenda lies not in its ends, which are as American as apple pie, but rather in the overmilitarized means by which it has sought to accomplish them. What American foreign policy needs is not a return to a narrow and cynical realism, but rather the formulation of a "realistic Wilsonianism" that better matches means to ends.


The Neoconservative Legacy

How did the neoconservatives end up overreaching to such an extent that they risk undermining their own goals? The Bush administration's first-term foreign policy did not flow ineluctably from the views of earlier generations of people who considered themselves neoconservatives, since those views were themselves complex and subject to differing interpretations. Four common principles or threads ran through much of this thought up through the end of the cold war: a concern with democracy, human rights and, more generally, the internal politics of states; a belief that American power can be used for moral purposes; a skepticism about the ability of international law and institutions to solve serious security problems; and finally, a view that ambitious social engineering often leads to unexpected consequences and thereby undermines its own ends.

The problem was that two of these principles were in potential collision. The skeptical stance toward ambitious social engineering — which in earlier years had been applied mostly to domestic policies like affirmative action, busing and welfare — suggested a cautious approach toward remaking the world and an awareness that ambitious initiatives always have unanticipated consequences. The belief in the potential moral uses of American power, on the other hand, implied that American activism could reshape the structure of global politics. By the time of the Iraq war, the belief in the transformational uses of power had prevailed over the doubts about social engineering.

In retrospect, things did not have to develop this way. The roots of neoconservatism lie in a remarkable group of largely Jewish intellectuals who attended City College of New York (C.C.N.Y.) in the mid- to late 1930's and early 1940's, a group that included Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, Nathan Glazer and, a bit later, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. The story of this group has been told in a number of places, most notably in a documentary film by Joseph Dorman called "Arguing the World." The most important inheritance from the C.C.N.Y. group was an idealistic belief in social progress and the universality of rights, coupled with intense anti-Communism.

It is not an accident that many in the C.C.N.Y. group started out as Trotskyites. Leon Trotsky was, of course, himself a Communist, but his supporters came to understand better than most people the utter cynicism and brutality of the Stalinist regime. The anti-Communist left, in contrast to the traditional American right, sympathized with the social and economic aims of Communism, but in the course of the 1930's and 1940's came to realize that "real existing socialism" had become a monstrosity of unintended consequences that completely undermined the idealistic goals it espoused. While not all of the C.C.N.Y. thinkers became neoconservatives, the danger of good intentions carried to extremes was a theme that would underlie the life work of many members of this group.

If there was a single overarching theme to the domestic social policy critiques issued by those who wrote for the neoconservative journal The Public Interest, founded by Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Bell in 1965, it was the limits of social engineering. Writers like Glazer, Moynihan and, later, Glenn Loury argued that ambitious efforts to seek social justice often left societies worse off than before because they either required massive state intervention that disrupted pre-existing social relations (for example, forced busing) or else produced unanticipated consequences (like an increase in single-parent families as a result of welfare). A major theme running through James Q. Wilson's extensive writings on crime was the idea that you could not lower crime rates by trying to solve deep underlying problems like poverty and racism; effective policies needed to focus on shorter-term measures that went after symptoms of social distress (like subway graffiti or panhandling) rather than root causes.

How, then, did a group with such a pedigree come to decide that the "root cause" of terrorism lay in the Middle East's lack of democracy, that the United States had both the wisdom and the ability to fix this problem and that democracy would come quickly and painlessly to Iraq? Neoconservatives would not have taken this turn but for the peculiar way that the cold war ended.

Ronald Reagan was ridiculed by sophisticated people on the American left and in Europe for labeling the Soviet Union and its allies an "evil empire" and for challenging Mikhail Gorbachev not just to reform his system but also to "tear down this wall." His assistant secretary of defense for international security policy, Richard Perle, was denounced as the "prince of darkness" for this uncompromising, hard-line position; his proposal for a double-zero in the intermediate-range nuclear arms negotiations (that is, the complete elimination of medium-range missiles) was attacked as hopelessly out of touch by the bien-pensant centrist foreign-policy experts at places like the Council on Foreign Relations and the State Department. That community felt that the Reaganites were dangerously utopian in their hopes for actually winning, as opposed to managing, the cold war.

And yet total victory in the cold war is exactly what happened in 1989-91. Gorbachev accepted not only the double zero but also deep cuts in conventional forces, and then failed to stop the Polish, Hungarian and East German defections from the empire. Communism collapsed within a couple of years because of its internal moral weaknesses and contradictions, and with regime change in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact threat to the West evaporated.

The way the cold war ended shaped the thinking of supporters of the Iraq war, including younger neoconservatives like William Kristol and Robert Kagan, in two ways. First, it seems to have created an expectation that all totalitarian regimes were hollow at the core and would crumble with a small push from outside. The model for this was Romania under the Ceausescus: once the wicked witch was dead, the munchkins would rise up and start singing joyously about their liberation. As Kristol and Kagan put it in their 2000 book "Present Dangers": "To many the idea of America using its power to promote changes of regime in nations ruled by dictators rings of utopianism. But in fact, it is eminently realistic. There is something perverse in declaring the impossibility of promoting democratic change abroad in light of the record of the past three decades."

This overoptimism about postwar transitions to democracy helps explain the Bush administration's incomprehensible failure to plan adequately for the insurgency that subsequently emerged in Iraq. The war's supporters seemed to think that democracy was a kind of default condition to which societies reverted once the heavy lifting of coercive regime change occurred, rather than a long-term process of institution-building and reform. While they now assert that they knew all along that the democratic transformation of Iraq would be long and hard, they were clearly taken by surprise. According to George Packer's recent book on Iraq, "The Assassins' Gate," the Pentagon planned a drawdown of American forces to some 25,000 troops by the end of the summer following the invasion.

By the 1990's, neoconservatism had been fed by several other intellectual streams. One came from the students of the German Jewish political theorist Leo Strauss, who, contrary to much of the nonsense written about him by people like Anne Norton and Shadia Drury, was a serious reader of philosophical texts who did not express opinions on contemporary politics or policy issues. Rather, he was concerned with the "crisis of modernity" brought on by the relativism of Nietzsche and Heidegger, as well as the fact that neither the claims of religion nor deeply-held opinions about the nature of the good life could be banished from politics, as the thinkers of the European Enlightenment had hoped. Another stream came from Albert Wohlstetter, a Rand Corporation strategist who was the teacher of Richard Perle, Zalmay Khalilzad (the current American ambassador to Iraq) and Paul Wolfowitz (the former deputy secretary of defense), among other people. Wohlstetter was intensely concerned with the problem of nuclear proliferation and the way that the 1968 Nonproliferation Treaty left loopholes, in its support for "peaceful" nuclear energy, large enough for countries like Iraq and Iran to walk through.

I have numerous affiliations with the different strands of the neoconservative movement. I was a student of Strauss's protégé Allan Bloom, who wrote the bestseller "The Closing of the American Mind"; worked at Rand and with Wohlstetter on Persian Gulf issues; and worked also on two occasions for Wolfowitz. Many people have also interpreted my book "The End of History and the Last Man" (1992) as a neoconservative tract, one that argued in favor of the view that there is a universal hunger for liberty in all people that will inevitably lead them to liberal democracy, and that we are living in the midst of an accelerating, transnational movement in favor of that liberal democracy. This is a misreading of the argument. "The End of History" is in the end an argument about modernization. What is initially universal is not the desire for liberal democracy but rather the desire to live in a modern — that is, technologically advanced and prosperous — society, which, if satisfied, tends to drive demands for political participation. Liberal democracy is one of the byproducts of this modernization process, something that becomes a universal aspiration only in the course of historical time.

"The End of History," in other words, presented a kind of Marxist argument for the existence of a long-term process of social evolution, but one that terminates in liberal democracy rather than communism. In the formulation of the scholar Ken Jowitt, the neoconservative position articulated by people like Kristol and Kagan was, by contrast, Leninist; they believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States. Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support.


The Failure of Benevolent Hegemony

The Bush administration and its neoconservative supporters did not simply underestimate the difficulty of bringing about congenial political outcomes in places like Iraq; they also misunderstood the way the world would react to the use of American power. Of course, the cold war was replete with instances of what the foreign policy analyst Stephen Sestanovich calls American maximalism, wherein Washington acted first and sought legitimacy and support from its allies only after the fact. But in the post-cold-war period, the structural situation of world politics changed in ways that made this kind of exercise of power much more problematic in the eyes of even close allies. After the fall of the Soviet Union, various neoconservative authors like Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol and Robert Kagan suggested that the United States would use its margin of power to exert a kind of "benevolent hegemony" over the rest of the world, fixing problems like rogue states with W.M.D., human rights abuses and terrorist threats as they came up. Writing before the Iraq war, Kristol and Kagan considered whether this posture would provoke resistance from the rest of the world, and concluded, "It is precisely because American foreign policy is infused with an unusually high degree of morality that other nations find they have less to fear from its otherwise daunting power." (Italics added.)

It is hard to read these lines without irony in the wake of the global reaction to the Iraq war, which succeeded in uniting much of the world in a frenzy of anti-Americanism. The idea that the United States is a hegemon more benevolent than most is not an absurd one, but there were warning signs that things had changed in America's relationship to the world long before the start of the Iraq war. The structural imbalance in global power had grown enormous. America surpassed the rest of the world in every dimension of power by an unprecedented margin, with its defense spending nearly equal to that of the rest of the world combined. Already during the Clinton years, American economic hegemony had generated enormous hostility to an American-dominated process of globalization, frequently on the part of close democratic allies who thought the United States was seeking to impose its antistatist social model on them.

There were other reasons as well why the world did not accept American benevolent hegemony. In the first place, it was premised on American exceptionalism, the idea that America could use its power in instances where others could not because it was more virtuous than other countries. The doctrine of pre-emption against terrorist threats contained in the 2002 National Security Strategy was one that could not safely be generalized through the international system; America would be the first country to object if Russia, China, India or France declared a similar right of unilateral action. The United States was seeking to pass judgment on others while being unwilling to have its own conduct questioned in places like the International Criminal Court.

Another problem with benevolent hegemony was domestic. There are sharp limits to the American people's attention to foreign affairs and willingness to finance projects overseas that do not have clear benefits to American interests. Sept. 11 changed that calculus in many ways, providing popular support for two wars in the Middle East and large increases in defense spending. But the durability of the support is uncertain: although most Americans want to do what is necessary to make the project of rebuilding Iraq succeed, the aftermath of the invasion did not increase the public appetite for further costly interventions. Americans are not, at heart, an imperial people. Even benevolent hegemons sometimes have to act ruthlessly, and they need a staying power that does not come easily to people who are reasonably content with their own lives and society.

Finally, benevolent hegemony presumed that the hegemon was not only well intentioned but competent as well. Much of the criticism of the Iraq intervention from Europeans and others was not based on a normative case that the United States was not getting authorization from the United Nations Security Council, but rather on the belief that it had not made an adequate case for invading Iraq in the first place and didn't know what it was doing in trying to democratize Iraq. In this, the critics were unfortunately quite prescient.

The most basic misjudgment was an overestimation of the threat facing the United States from radical Islamism. Although the new and ominous possibility of undeterrable terrorists armed with weapons of mass destruction did indeed present itself, advocates of the war wrongly conflated this with the threat presented by Iraq and with the rogue state/proliferation problem more generally. The misjudgment was based in part on the massive failure of the American intelligence community to correctly assess the state of Iraq's W.M.D. programs before the war. But the intelligence community never took nearly as alarmist a view of the terrorist/W.M.D. threat as the war's supporters did. Overestimation of this threat was then used to justify the elevation of preventive war to the centerpiece of a new security strategy, as well as a whole series of measures that infringed on civil liberties, from detention policy to domestic eavesdropping.


What to Do

Now that the neoconservative moment appears to have passed, the United States needs to reconceptualize its foreign policy in several fundamental ways. In the first instance, we need to demilitarize what we have been calling the global war on terrorism and shift to other types of policy instruments. We are fighting hot counterinsurgency wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and against the international jihadist movement, wars in which we need to prevail. But "war" is the wrong metaphor for the broader struggle, since wars are fought at full intensity and have clear beginnings and endings. Meeting the jihadist challenge is more of a "long, twilight struggle" whose core is not a military campaign but a political contest for the hearts and minds of ordinary Muslims around the world. As recent events in France and Denmark suggest, Europe will be a central battleground in this fight.

The United States needs to come up with something better than "coalitions of the willing" to legitimate its dealings with other countries. The world today lacks effective international institutions that can confer legitimacy on collective action; creating new organizations that will better balance the dual requirements of legitimacy and effectiveness will be the primary task for the coming generation. As a result of more than 200 years of political evolution, we have a relatively good understanding of how to create institutions that are rulebound, accountable and reasonably effective in the vertical silos we call states. What we do not have are adequate mechanisms of horizontal accountability among states.

The conservative critique of the United Nations is all too cogent: while useful for certain peacekeeping and nation-building operations, the United Nations lacks both democratic legitimacy and effectiveness in dealing with serious security issues. The solution is not to strengthen a single global body, but rather to promote what has been emerging in any event, a "multi-multilateral world" of overlapping and occasionally competing international institutions that are organized on regional or functional lines. Kosovo in 1999 was a model: when the Russian veto prevented the Security Council from acting, the United States and its NATO allies simply shifted the venue to NATO, where the Russians could not block action.

The final area that needs rethinking, and the one that will be the most contested in the coming months and years, is the place of democracy promotion in American foreign policy. The worst legacy that could come from the Iraq war would be an anti-neoconservative backlash that coupled a sharp turn toward isolation with a cynical realist policy aligning the United States with friendly authoritarians. Good governance, which involves not just democracy but also the rule of law and economic development, is critical to a host of outcomes we desire, from alleviating poverty to dealing with pandemics to controlling violent conflicts. A Wilsonian policy that pays attention to how rulers treat their citizens is therefore right, but it needs to be informed by a certain realism that was missing from the thinking of the Bush administration in its first term and of its neoconservative allies.

We need in the first instance to understand that promoting democracy and modernization in the Middle East is not a solution to the problem of jihadist terrorism; in all likelihood it will make the short-term problem worse, as we have seen in the case of the Palestinian election bringing Hamas to power. Radical Islamism is a byproduct of modernization itself, arising from the loss of identity that accompanies the transition to a modern, pluralist society. It is no accident that so many recent terrorists, from Sept. 11's Mohamed Atta to the murderer of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh to the London subway bombers, were radicalized in democratic Europe and intimately familiar with all of democracy's blessings. More democracy will mean more alienation, radicalization and — yes, unfortunately — terrorism.

But greater political participation by Islamist groups is very likely to occur whatever we do, and it will be the only way that the poison of radical Islamism can ultimately work its way through the body politic of Muslim communities around the world. The age is long since gone when friendly authoritarians could rule over passive populations and produce stability indefinitely. New social actors are mobilizing everywhere, from Bolivia and Venezuela to South Africa and the Persian Gulf. A durable Israeli-Palestinian peace could not be built upon a corrupt, illegitimate Fatah that constantly had to worry about Hamas challenging its authority. Peace might emerge, sometime down the road, from a Palestine run by a formerly radical terrorist group that had been forced to deal with the realities of governing.

If we are serious about the good governance agenda, we have to shift our focus to the reform, reorganization and proper financing of those institutions of the United States government that actually promote democracy, development and the rule of law around the world, organizations like the State Department, U.S.A.I.D., the National Endowment for Democracy and the like. The United States has played an often decisive role in helping along many recent democratic transitions, including in the Philippines in 1986; South Korea and Taiwan in 1987; Chile in 1988; Poland and Hungary in 1989; Serbia in 2000; Georgia in 2003; and Ukraine in 2004-5. But the overarching lesson that emerges from these cases is that the United States does not get to decide when and where democracy comes about. By definition, outsiders can't "impose" democracy on a country that doesn't want it; demand for democracy and reform must be domestic. Democracy promotion is therefore a long-term and opportunistic process that has to await the gradual ripening of political and economic conditions to be effective.

The Bush administration has been walking — indeed, sprinting — away from the legacy of its first term, as evidenced by the cautious multilateral approach it has taken toward the nuclear programs of Iran and North Korea. Condoleezza Rice gave a serious speech in January about "transformational diplomacy" and has begun an effort to reorganize the nonmilitary side of the foreign-policy establishment, and the National Security Strategy document is being rewritten. All of these are welcome changes, but the legacy of the Bush first-term foreign policy and its neoconservative supporters has been so polarizing that it is going to be hard to have a reasoned debate about how to appropriately balance American ideals and interests in the coming years. The reaction against a flawed policy can be as damaging as the policy itself, and such a reaction is an indulgence we cannot afford, given the critical moment we have arrived at in global politics.

Neoconservatism, whatever its complex roots, has become indelibly associated with concepts like coercive regime change, unilateralism and American hegemony. What is needed now are new ideas, neither neoconservative nor realist, for how America is to relate to the rest of the world — ideas that retain the neoconservative belief in the universality of human rights, but without its illusions about the efficacy of American power and hegemony to bring these ends about.

Francis Fukuyama teaches at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. This essay is adapted from his book "America at the Crossroads," which will be published this month by Yale University Press.

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