Exercise to detox from cult thinking

I just thought of this exercise for you, which is part history lesson and part a detox study for debunking cults and their warped thinking.

Let's start with setting the stage for this exercise before I explain the background. Suppose that President Obama developed the ideal comprehensive health care plan, one that is absolutely solid, just, fair and would work. The only problem is that for some reason no American can have an individual name nor know their birth date. That is the only "price" for this health care plan. This is just a mental exercise, so don't worry about hidden reasons for this... there are none, this is a totally innocent and obvious case study. So everyone agrees that they will no longer have a name and they will no longer know their date of birth. What do you think would happen? Would the world end? The universe implode? Everyone go crazy?

No...obviously not. People would start to have nicknames "Like brown eyed dumb ass" or "The tall guy who is son of the short guy." People would celebrate "birthday parties" whenever they want. And a lot of computer systems would have to be rewritten, LOL. Life would go on, and better than it ever did before because in this case study we are assuming that President Obama really did come up with an actual great health care plan.

How do we know that there would not be chaos or, more to my point, that there is no "spiritual" or "apocalyptic" fallout of having no names or knowledge of birthdays?

Because that is how most of human life already has been lived.

Young people, you must realize that no one even owned a calendar, say nothing of caring about the day a child was born, until very recently in human history. Only a hundred years ago plenty of people had no idea of their birth date.

And the giving and having of a formal individual name is also a very recent phenomenon. People were forced to think of names for themselves when governments organized enough that they wanted to draft and tax them. This reached its height in the Middle Ages, when people were forced to think of last names for themselves. This is why many Jews have pretty last names (when translated), meaning things like gold, roses, etc. Since they were forced to think of last names, they just picked out really cool names for themselves.

Most of the world did not (and many still do not) have last names. Even their first names were not unique. I remember when "Mary" was the most popular name for girls. In Islamic countries they continue to use the most frequent, often of the Qur'an, names, with last names being the lineage of who was the father, then grandfather.

Why am I teaching this to you? Well, what is the cornerstone of most crazy occult beliefs? That there is "significance" to a person's name and birth date. Cultists who are by definition totally delusional over analyze and become control freaks over names and birth dates, deriving sounds, anagrams, synonyms, numerology, "symbolic meanings," astrology bull crap, supposed reincarnation bull crap.... all from information that ninety nine percent of humans did not have and did not track during their entire history.

Whenever you are tempted, young people, to believe some baloney about the "significance" of your name or your date of birth (and hence numbers etc), think of this scenario that I have now presented to you above. What if President Obama wrote and funded a perfect health plan, but all one had to do for some innocent reason was give up having a formal name and knowing one's date of birth. I mean, would the universe "fall apart" because there is this bat crap crazy notion that it is secretly "controlled" via that information? Information that still does not exist for much of the world AND did not exist at all, since people had no names or "dates" of birth, for most of the thousands of years of civilization. Um, obviously not because you all are here, aren't you? You are descended from great great grandparents who didn't even necessarily have last names and/or didn't record the date of birth of their kids, even if they knew what it was. If you are of my age you probably knew when you were a child elderly people who remember the times when large families barely kept track of birth years and months, say nothing of the date.

I hope that you have found this helpful as another way to 1) use logic when confronted with a dubious theory 2) use reasoning to think through "test cases" of comparative examples of scenarios and 3) to train your mind away from believing stuff that has absolutely no logic when closely examined and 4) use the truth of real human history to study what actually happened. I mean, have countries where most of the people still have only one casual name, no last name, and no clue as to the exact date that person was born, and name generation after generation of daughters Mary and sons Abdullah have some sort of black hole hovering over them because freak cults aren't "in control" to keep "the universe in so called 'balance?'" Obviously not.

Read for example any newspaper article in countries like Indonesia, India, China and so forth. When interviewing bystanders the reporters often have to say something like "Witnessing the incident was a man who only goes by one name, Chan...." etc. I see that all the time, where in those cultures people still have just one name, a common name. If you go there and talk to them, many would have no clue as to their birth date. That is how humans developed and how they were for most of their history, not with crazy bat crap notions that have reached almost Nazi type of control hysteria that names or dates of birth have "spiritual" significance. They do not, obviously.

I did a blog a while ago where people could watch me calculate how you can divide the population of the earth by 365 to see how many people have the "same birth date." It means nothing and you can see that because human beings exist today at all, and thrive in numbers, if not in mental health, precisely because they were, until recently, reality based, and not moon calf imagining about the "meaning" of alphabets and numbers in a personal life or societal well being. It is such crap I cannot believe that anyone who is not on drugs or drunk has ever believed it.

But you, young people, have been taught by teachers who secretly believe this, and parents who believe it, and who themselves are the victims of not bothering to learn the basics of real science, real arithmatic, real geology, real sociology, or logical thought etc. Too much "whatever" and "correctness" being shoved down kids throats instead of their minds being filled with strength, integrity and knowledge. Hope this has helped!