February, 2016 - Bettina Network's Blog

Archive for February, 2016

Conspiracy Theories?

Wednesday, February 24th, 2016

Breakfast at a Bettina Network Hedge School can be awesome as you talk to so many different people who come from amazing places with experiences that span the globe and includes ideas, history, remembrances and thought processes that sharpen your own.

I would not trade being a part of Bettina Network Hedge Schools for anything.  My intellect is stimulated on a daily basis, let alone my knowledge base.

We had an incredible conversation at breakfast about the Supreme Court nomination and  all of the push back for and against Barack Obama making that appointment.  Basically, I wanted to know what does all of this mess mean?????

What came back to me was awesome!!!!!

First was a question – why would Mitch McConnell and all of those pushing to keep Obama from making this appointment be fighting so hard against that possibility, especially if Hillary is going to be our next president?  I thought, as did others, that Hillary would more than likely make a more liberal appointment than would Obama.  He is and has been a great president, but he is, in many ways, tied to the establishment in ways that Hillary is not.

And, if Hillary is not elected president would Bernie be any more conservative?  He has shown by his Civil Rights involvements early on and his backing away from that commitment as he became more involved in his life’s work that he knows the establishment and he would not have been able to get as far as he has if he had kept his Civil Rights work active and if he had been actively involved bringing about those kind of changes in his environment.  Vermont can handle liberal, progressive, socialist changes, but it is still a very White state.  So, while his appointment to the Supreme Court would be quite liberal, his establishment ties said to some of us that he would be willing to accommodate his friends – especially those he needed to help push his presidency in the direction he wanted it to go.  But that accommodation would not be nearly close to what Mitch McConnell and those fighting with him would be fighting to achieve.  So why would Mitch McConnel and friends, not known for their liberal leanings, be working so hard to stop Obama’s appointment to give Bernie the go ahead to make this appointment?

It seems to me they know something we don’t and what they are working so hard for at the moment is for the appointment to be put on hold until someone more conservative becomes president and they can continue on with business as usual.  And who would that be?  Donald Trump or someone who will soon come out of hiding in the wings onto front stage?

There have been many conspiracy theories floating around this country connected to past presidents and presidential elections.

The one that sticks out in this discussion are the conspiracy theories around how Jack Kennedy was elected president.  Rumor had it that his father made a deal with the mafia to produce the votes needed for his son’s election – especially around the Chicago area – and they did.  Rumor continues that it was Marcello, the southern head of the Mafia in this country at the time,  who put in the demand for Kennedy’s assassination because  while the Mafia did its job for Jack Kennedy and his family, the Kennedy’s turned on the Mafia.  The father – with his Mafia connections – made the deal, but Bobby and Jack went ahead when elected, to move against the Mafia and it does not tolerate those kinds of actions without a particular kind of payback.

Looking at the candidates, it seemed to us that Donald Trump’s business interests are casinos, construction, and gambling with heavy involvements in Las Vegas and New Jersey.  That could be conspiratorialized to produce a Mafia connection linking Donald Trump’s success with the successful backing of his businesses by Mafia interests.  He may even be one of those at the top himself, as this conspiracy theory unrolled itself.

Connect that to the conspiracy theories around Jack Kennedy and you have the new President of the United States elected the way the conspiracy theorists claim Jack Kennedy was elected.  Although, according to those theories, someone intervened on Jack Kennedy’s behalf – he did not have the clout with the Mafia to do those negotiations on his own.  All those trying to understand the Donald Trump phenomenon have apparently either not made this connection or are too young to know this ‘history’.

Is that something Mitch McConnel and his group of friends would know about?  Would this be what they are structuring with this recalcitrance to allow Obama to even nominate a Supreme Court justice?  Do they know something the rest of us don’t and are acting on that knowledge to keep a clear path open for what they know is in our future?

Since we are not a part of that inner circle we can only look on and attempt to interpret what is happening from their public actions and their current public actions say they are expecting a President of these United States to be elected who would push their political and other interests and one of the biggest is who is appointed to the United States Supreme Court.  Who would be that swing vote that would bring the Court either one way or the other.

Given that Obama would probably appoint a more acceptable person to the Court in their eyes than would Hillary Clinton, we are seeing their hand tipped as to the fix that is in and the rest of us are supposed to sit back and be so involved in the fight, in the agenda they have set out for us to engage,  that our minds are engaged in a way that we cannot see and do not realize what the McConnell boys’ actions are telling us as clearly as if they had taken an airplane and done sky writing about what they know is coming down the pike.

For all of those yelling ‘racism’ that is keeping you from seeing what is actually happening here.  Clear your minds and think much more broadly.

All of the above is simply the result of a few people having breakfast together conjecturing, adding bits and pieces of history and bits and pieces of conspiracy theories which have been floating around for decades.  Nothing serious and any similarities to the American Political scene at the moment are strictly coincidental.

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Ed. Note: Members of the Bettina Network Lifestyle Community can contribute to the Bettina Network Blog whenever they have anything they want to say and be heard by this fantastic group of people. Send your blog to bettinanetwork@comcast.net or mail it to us at P. O. Box 380585 Cambridge, MA. 02238 or call us on the telephone at 617-497-9166 to tell us what you want to say and we will write it for you.

Volunteer with Bettina Network Foundation, inc. to work estate sales; to help move items from one home to another; to contribute your ideas on how we can better use our resources in this effort to relieve and eliminate homelessness and poverty. We also need photographers; designers; and more. However much or little time you have, we are grateful.

Send your event information to be included in Bettina Network’s Menu of Events to: bettina-network@comcast.net

You Claim to Believe in God, but do you, really?

Monday, February 15th, 2016

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If asked, and it did not include a specific denomination or set of religious beliefs, most people would say – yes, they believe in God.  They would add that this does not mean the traditional Christian God with the long white beard sitting on a throne, but God – the real one!

I would say, even those who claim to believe in the traditional Christian God don’t really believe.  As many of those who claim to believe in Mohammed or Jehovah, don’t.

One of our perennial questions about God is -if there is a God why is there so much evil and destruction in the world? And that is the easiest question to answer – although we generally don’t want to hear, or read, or even come close to the answer.  Keep that in our deepest subconscious where we don’t have to deal with who we are and how we are living our lives.

Who is God?  The only comment I can make about that is – God is!

We have created many trappings around God, none of which we really believe, but we will die defending the right and truth of what we have created, or what our ancestors created and/or contributed to and passed on to us declaring their creation as eternal truth – and called it God, God’s Kingdom, heaven and more.

One small test of our belief system:

If God exists then death as we describe it and believe does not exist.

If God exists then there is another existence which we sometimes describe in our religions, but in which we do not believe because basically we don’t believe in God.  We have created religions with saints and martyrs and heaven and hell and we have peopled our religious universe with a terrain which is amazing and in which we really don’t believe.  And when the chips are down, we don’t believe in any of the supernatural world that we created and put forth as our religious belief..

We have and still fight wars over our religious belief systems.  Isn’t that what is going on with ISIS and other groups in the Middle East and isn’t that what went on with the Christian Wars and all the other wars which we based on religious beliefs that we outlined, but didn’t ever really believe?  We constructed them but knew they were nonsense when we were playing God in our creation and construction time.  If what we created was really God and of God there would be no need to fight over who was right, who was wrong because God would speak to all of us.  But we turned a deaf ear to God’s voice and ignored whatever God had to say because we wanted to control and wanted God out of the way.

Our strongest need seems to be the need for control and the best way to control is to set up a structure with an entity we call God at its head and put everybody under that structure demanding they conform to the behavior system which that structure promotes.  We enforce our system by killing, maiming, ostracizing and shunning those who don’t fit and won’t act the way the religions we developed demands.  Our religious beliefs are clearly not of God because they are full of fear.  They control, grow, and use fear to keep the generations that come after us under the control of our kind – our group.

How do we give ourselves away!  How can you look at us and know we don’t believe in the God we espouse?  We have limited ourselves to what we can see, feel and touch!  We have eliminated everything else because we don’t want anyone to come along to contradict what we have created – especially not anyone of God.

Instead of being a part of God’s universe, we have created a parallel universe that we inhabit; believe in; work towards building. This parallel universe has a god at its head who is really a thinly disguised man.  They say there was a religion eons ago where the god was a thinly disguised woman.  In Israel, there are the remains of a Synagogue whose altar has carved into it a Mr. & Mrs. Jahweh.

I’ve met a few people over the decades who believe God is – who know in ever fibre of their being that there is a God – that God exists.  Generally, the rest of society holds them at arms length and has a difficult time taking them seriously.  These are the people who have seen God.  Or they have talked to those who have died.  Or they have died themselves and been resuscitated. Or they were born with the gift of seeing more than what exists in this physical world.  They are incredible people to be around – especially since the one thing they all seem to lack is the ability to judge other human beings.  They also don’t seem to be able to see human beings as the only beings on this planet who are spiritual, above everything else.

It is so exquisitely beautiful to see beyond the limits we impose upon ourselves and each other because we need to control everything.   It is painful to be around people who declare themselves superior to others and to the rest of the world because of their cultural religion.  To give that up brings us into another reality where very few humans seem to be able to live.

To see the good and the bad in another human being and still love them is special.  It is where God lives.  To give that up to set ourselves up as an imitation of God is such a sacrifice and such a paltry way to exist.  But we have done that, probably for as long as we have been on this earth.

What makes me think that fighting, killing, maiming, torturing others because they don’t believe the way I do is going to please my God and make me one of the martyrs when I die?  What makes me believe that I am doing something other than moving away from God as I insist that my religion is better than.  What makes me believe that God doesn’t want those people to live the lifestyle they have chosen?  What makes me call someone else’s lifestyle sinful and call on the religion I created to justify my call?  What makes me unable to see that maybe God lives that lifestyle, as well as others?

Is that my God bringing down that heavy judgment or my culture/class/ group – the people I hang-out with who make me feel better than everyone else – the people who define what is right and what is wrong – the people who have demolished their own ability to see beyond the physical and into God’s world because they might lose control if we all kept that ability?

Will we ever come to our senses one day or will we realize how wrong we have been when we are at that moment of death!  Hell must be that moment when the realization of what we have done brings us enormous, almost intolerable pain- an eternal pain –  born of the regrets when we realize at that moment that we cannot change how we have lived and we realize the preciousness of the gifts we gave up to take on the self-absorbed life we have lived limited to our own kind.  It is the moment when we realize we really did not believe in God throughout our lives; – when we realize we substituted our own belief and our own religious construct for a beauty and incredible world that we could have lived in and been a part of; – when we see our human sight drop away and in spite of how we have lived, we feel the love of a God who forgives us our iniquities and pardons our weaknesses.  When at that moment, our last human feeling is the one which wishes, if only we could have done the same!  And at that same moment we realize what a poor imitation of God we have been and what a pathetic religion we have created out of our own need instead of having opened ourselves throughout our lives to what should have been.

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Ed. Note: Members of the Bettina Network Lifestyle Community can contribute to the Bettina Network Blog whenever they have anything they want to say and be heard by this fantastic group of people. Send your blog to bettinanetwork@comcast.net or mail it to us at P. O. Box 380585 Cambridge, MA. 02238 or call us on the telephone at 617-497-9166 to tell us what you want to say and we will write it for you.

Volunteer with Bettina Network Foundation, inc. to work estate sales; to help move items from one home to another; to contribute your ideas on how we can better use our resources in this effort to relieve and eliminate homelessness and poverty. We also need photographers; designers; and more. However much or little time you have, we are grateful.

Send your event information to be included in Bettina Network’s Menu of Events to: bettina-network@comcast.net

 

 

 

Theologians Worldwide Join Us!

Tuesday, February 9th, 2016

What a wonderful resource for you and the rest of the world to add your home to Bettina Network Hedge Schools.

Where does one go to learn about your own religion, or other religions of the world?  Not from books which give a very stilted structure and outdated information, but from someone who is doing research, writing about particular interests of theirs and yours and even more.  Maybe there is someone who has a perspective, belief, expounding on something of interest to you – stay a few days and examine what both of you are doing.

And for the theologian – what a wonderful resource to be able to talk to people serendipitously to try out your thoughts, theories and to know where just ordinary people are coming from and their interest and interpretation of your work.

For the guest traveling the world – stay with a theologian.  Have a breakfast seminar and bring up all the issues you have pondered for decades or maybe within your family for generations.  Only thinkers allowed.  Non-believers welcomed – those of very different religious beliefs and very opposing or complimentary theologies welcome.  A theologian traveling?  Why not stay with a theologian who might be doing something in which you are interested?  Want an intense few days to talk with a theologian in a different area – not at a seminar, not presenting a paper, just the two or three or four of you – hanging out for a couple days?

Call us – email us – get more information about how you might fit and what this is all about.

Breakfast Table Talk – I am sure theologians know about kitchen table talk!  Just look at what that wrought for Martin Luther.

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Want to join us? Have a home that you want to open to become one of Bettina Network’s Hedge Schools? Call us and lets talk – or email us.

Ed. Note: Members of the Bettina Network Lifestyle Community can contribute to the Bettina Network Blog whenever they have anything they want to say and be heard by this fantastic group of people. Send your blog to bettinanetwork@comcast.net or mail it to us at P. O. Box 380585 Cambridge, MA. 02238 or call us on the telephone at 617-497-9166 to tell us what you want to say and we will write it for you.

Volunteer with Bettina Network Foundation, inc. to work estate sales; to help move items from one home to another; to contribute your ideas on how we can better use our resources in this effort to relieve and eliminate homelessness and poverty. We also need photographers; designers; and more. However much or little time you have, we are grateful.

Send your event information to be included in Bettina Network’s Menu of Events to: bettina-network@comcast.net


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