Stop the World, I want to Get Off! Part II

Before we can defeat the enemy, we must first identify him!

I know we are politically incorrect, but to be less than that would be to take away our remaining clean water, our remaining acceptable climate, our ability to love freely, and to enter and end our life on this Earth as proud people, unafraid and unbowed!

Science, at least in the terms of the Church, was languishing until the mid-1830. Prior to that, according to the "accepted" dogma, the Church had been the area for scientific advancement. Before then, the only reason to study science was curiosity or religious piety. Christians believed that God created the universe and ordained the laws of nature. To study the natural world was to admire the work of God. This could be a religious duty and inspire science when there were few other reasons to bother with it.

Galileo was put on trial for claiming it is a fact that the Earth goes around the sun, rather than just a hypothesis as the Catholic Church demanded.

Oh the stories they tell!

The truths and half-truths they have promoted for hundreds of years...

You see, it all falls apart when you examine the underlying reasoning.  I mean you can pretend all these "scholars" are simply looking at God's creations, smiling benignly out the chapel windows, but it would simply not be true.

In truth there was, and is, a titanic struggle going on...a struggle not just between the many admittedly brilliant minds of the theologians, who were compelled to fit the truth to the dogma, but against the ludicrous dogmas such as a devil, woman not being allowed meaning in the Church, Priests who could not marry, purgatory, virgin birth, immaculate conception and so much more.  Oh, you can talk from now until the end of time, but the TRUTH is that the Church wanted to dominate our thinking, regardless of the TRUTH of any issue.

Through all of this, old AFRICAN Babalawo's continued to ply their trade, continued to make Nature their laboratory and continued to fight off the incursion of the Catholic minister who declared Orisa Esu "the devil”!

Worse yet they were "sold" on the concept that only through Catholicism could they go to heaven!

Once again, like the American Indians and so many other earth-based cultures who had traded their most treasured asset for shining beads and empty promises, and ultimately for pollution, slavery, global warming, corruption, and eternal inequality!

I know we are politically incorrect, but to be less than that would be to take away our remaining clean water, our remaining acceptable climate, our ability to love freely, and to enter and end our life on this Earth as proud people, unafraid and unbowed.

Love and blessing

Oluwo Philip Neimark

(c) 2015