I cleared out much our garage this year (2015) during a book giveaway on this site:

By October I was able to end the giveaway and close that page of the website. Thanks to those of you who participated!  MM

News Roundup, January – June 2015 (1 of 3)

From time to time I like to round up the latest news and filter it through my understanding of our spiritual nature and the noble-savage dispositions that we humans carried along with us into this Second Epoch… from Atlantis.

I post those news roundups on my other website, and I then post a summary here on macyafterlife.

I’ve broken the current news roundup into three parts relating to how fragmented (disparate), fractured (broken), and fractious (unruly) the world seems to be today.

(You can find the first of three installments on Noble Savage World… )

And here, below, is a summary of that installment.

ҒrágmЄИted  Я  ЏS

We humans like to take a romantic view of our many cultural, racial and religious differences, even though differences lead to incompatibilities, and incompatibilities lead to misunderstandings, mistrust, and conflict. If we can’t eliminate the differences that divide us, we should at least make an effort to keep them compatible… harmonious… resonant.

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Disparate Happiness

This map from the 2015 World Happiness Report shows how contented we humans are across the world.

Six factors were used in the study to gauge happiness:

1. GDP per capita,
2. social support (as measured by having someone to count on in times of trouble),
3. healthy years of life expectancy,
4. perceived freedom to make life decisions,
5. generosity (as measured by recent donations, adjusted for differences in income), and
6. trust (as measured by a perceived absence of corruption in government and business).

 (View or download the entire World Happiness Report here…. )

It would be in the best interest of posterity if we, today, could enact solutions to raise every nation to a state of happiness.

Today there’s one gadget in the global toolbox that’s been specially designed for that purpose: The Vitality Ratio… a running correlation between a country’s resources and needs.

It’s my belief that if a society’s material and energy needs can be kept in line with its resources (through population control and other means)… if there are enough resources to go around and not too many mouths to feed… then and only under those conditions is it possible to have true and lasting contentment here on Earth.

The other factors of happiness will always be out of reach if a society’s needs exceed its resources. Social support, freedom, equality, generosity, and tolerance can be achieved and maintained only after everyone’s basic needs have been satisfied.

It’s when needs begin to exceed resource availability… when there are too many mouths to feed… when competition for dwindling resources becomes brutal… it’s then that the savage side of human nature rears its head and eventually goes berserk, spinning off into genocide and war… and contentment slips way out of reach.

One main purpose of the Vitality Ratio is to preserve human contentment by preventing scarcities that lead to brutality.

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7,000 Languages

Among the ancient ruins of the world are the ziggurats, which, back in the day, looked like massive temples / cathedrals / pyramids / skyscrapers. Some ziggurats were taller and bulkier and more elaborate than even the Great Pyramid at Giza.

(Read more about the ziggurats… )

Modern scholars can only speculate about the exact purpose of the ziggurats, but many think that the largest one, built in Babylon and named E-temen-an-ki (meaning “house of the foundation of heaven on earth”), may have been the legendary Tower of Babel. The Etemenanki ziggurat was associated with the Temple of Marduk, the Babylonian god that shared a name with the late, great planet Marduk, or Eden, where our earliest human ancestors came from (… despite what you read in all the history and anthropology books…).

The Tower of Babel, as described in the Bible, was built in Babylon after the flood (which would mean after the fall of Atlantis, at the start of the Second Epoch), and its purpose apparently was to provide a single bridge or connection point between the carnal world on Earth and the worlds of spirit. The ancient texts suggest that the intent with Babel was to have everyone on Earth speaking a common language… but something went wrong.

Apparently, misguided titans (whose assigned task it was to bring order to our world, not chaos) mishandled the original intent of one unifying world language… and instead fragmented human cultures into many different languages spread around the world… all stemming from the Tower of Babel.

The Tower, then, laid a groundwork of misunderstanding and mistrust within humanity that has lasted to present times. Today there are some 7,000 different languages spoken on Earth.

In recent centuries there have been efforts to gather humanity back together under an umbrella of a single global language… or at least to provide an international auxiliary language… such as Volapük and Esperanto.

But suddenly, in the last century, the world was transformed by the high-tech, Internet age, and the English language happened to be at the right place at the right time. English today is spoken by some 2 billion people, making it the closest thing we’ve ever had to a planetary language.

That’s a lucky come-about for native English-speakers like me, but a misfortune for the rest of the world, when you consider the many absurdities of the English language.

Bough – cough – dough – hiccough – thorough – through – tough – trough…   really?

With any luck, a good, simple world language will arise over the next century as globalization continues.

(Read a fun, fascinating article about the evolution and likely future of world languages… )

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Why Religions Split Apart Into Contentious Sects

Religions down through the ages divide naturally into various sects and denominations that appeal to different types of people with different dispositions.

• The more orthodox and conservative religious sects prescribe clear-cut morality and insist that their belief system is the truth. (Read more… ) There are certain types of people who feel stable and secure as part of a tenacious, final-word social group. They are typically organized, conscientious, dutiful, high-achieving, dependable, and strategical. They don’t like being faced with a lot of new information that can dilute or undermine those good, stable qualities. Those people often feel at home as part of an orthodox / conservative religion.
• The more liberal and contemporary religions advocate tolerance for other beliefs and personal responsibility in making moral choices, while downplaying the need for autocratic worldviews and moral codes. (Read more… ) Certain types of people are more comfortable when they can process new information and reconcile it with their own worldview, while giving strangers the benefit of the doubt. They are open to new experiences, curious, creative, and prefer novelty and variety. Those people often resonate with liberal religions.

These are the same contrasting personality traits that divide us humans politically into liberal and conservative camps. They’re two of the “Big Five” personality traits that have become a cornerstone of modern psychology over the past 30 years.

(Read more about the Big Five… )

This insight into the nature of liberal and conservative religions can give us clearer perspective on many of the religious crises that have been coming to light this year:

• The Catholic faith is losing members fastest of all. (Read more… )
• Hypersensitive religions, like hypersensitive people, continue to have their sensitivities tested by cruel forces in this noble-savage world… case in point, the massacre in the Charlie Hedbo office in Paris by religious militants who were offended by the vulgar, anti-religious humor published in the Charlie Hedbo satirical weekly newspaper. (Read more… )
• Sunni and Shia Muslim sects in the Middle East are becoming ever more polarized and contentious this year, stirred up by militant start-up groups like ISIS. (Read more… )
• If you wish to explore the fragmentation of modern Christianity from the heartfelt experiences of many bright Christian thinkers, there’s an interesting set of pages hidden away in a Texas bass-fishing website, of all places. (Simply click here to open that Christian subsite, then select some of the articles listed on the left, many of which speak openly and directly about Christian sectarianism.)

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The next installment of this news roundup will look at ways of healing a fractured (broken) world, and I’ll probably post it within the next week. I’m pleased to say I have more time lately to work on these two sites (macyafterlife and noblesavageworld), since I retired from my technical writing contract work a few weeks ago.