Culture Wars.Edu #23 The Role of Beliefs in Learning and Human Development
They Are Religious Wars. Restoring the Spirit to Learning and Education
Recent Survey Proves State Sponsored Religions Have Indoctrinated Generations in the U.S.
We now have proof that since the federal government, in violation of our U.S. Constitution established a Department of Education 43 years ago, there has been an organized effort to replace faith in God and the values expressed by traditional religion with first humanism and now even transhumanism. The survey conducted by the Wall Street Journal/NORC recently showed that only slightly more than 39% placed religion and faith as important. The results showed a decrease from 25 years ago of 62%.
https://nypost.com/2023/03/27/values-like-patriotism-religion-falling-out-of-favor-among-americans-poll/
Similar trends in Great Britain as well.
England and Wales are no longer majority Christian: Is this the future for America? (denisonforum.org)
England and Wales are no longer majority Christian according to newly released census data. The two British nations have fallen from 59 percent who called themselves Christians in 2011 to 46 percent who did so in 2021; the number of respondents saying they had no religion has risen from 25 percent a decade ago to 37 percent now.
For Decades Court Cases Against People of Faith Have Been Nonstop.
As this website shows there has been no lack of attacks by the state against traditional people of faith:
https://billofrightsinstitute.org/e-lessons/religious-liberty
But, people of faith have been afraid or reluctant to call a spade a spade by taking the state to court for advancing their unconstitutional state religion. As an anthropologist and a historian, I know that there is not a culture then and now that can function without faith and a belief. I also know that in Western “Civilization” with the Protestant Reformation and its resulting Age of Reason and Enlightenment, war was declared on the supernatural and a mechanistic world view with man as the measure of all things became the official doctrine and belief. Like all facets of human existence, you can trace its origing in our language.
superstition (n.)
early 13c., "false religious belief; irrational faith in supernatural powers," from Latin superstitionem (nominative superstitio) "prophecy, soothsaying; dread of the supernatural, excessive fear of the gods, religious belief based on fear or ignorance and considered incompatible with truth or reason," literally "a standing over," noun of action from past participle stem of superstare "stand on or over; survive," from super "above" (see super-) + stare "to stand," from PIE root *sta- "to stand, make or be firm."
There are many theories to explain the Latin sense development, but none has yet been generally accepted; de Vaan suggests the sense is "cause to remain in existence." Originally in English especially of religion; sense of "unreasonable notion" is from 1794.
As physicist Fritjof Capra so aptly described in his 1982 book The Turning Point, Science, Society and The Rising Culture, the events and people of the emerging Age of Reason initiated a Regligous War. To quote Capra:
The ancient concept of the earth as nuturing mother was radically transformed in Bacon’s writings, and it disappeared completely as the Scientific Revolution proceeded to replace the organic view of nature with the metaphor of the world as a machine. This shift, which was to become of overwhelming importance for the futher development of Western civilization, was initiated and completed by two towerinf figures of the seventeenth century, Descartes and Newton.
One could argue that those femine qualities and aspects of the world came under attack and then subjugated by the masculine. But rest assured that which is a belief in the Divine was destroyed.
There are still those of us today who are ready to argue for the inclusion of protohuman, healthy and adaptive beliefs in our schools. Everyone has beliefs and therefore every organization in turns has underlying beliefs that motivate their actions ( Dilt’s Levels of organization. Here I wish to draw attention to those beliefs in the supernatural. For the longest time in human development, some 400,000 years the world paradigm included the spirit.
In 1980-1983 I had the benefit of training in NLP ( Neuro-Linguistic Programming). An incredible technology based on neuroscience and linguistics, NLP could accomplish in one brief session what traditional psychology would take years if not fail to help the individual or organization’s needs at all. Allied with the technology’s development by Bandler and Grinder was Robert Dilts whose research was in beliefs and belief systems. I have made it a pillar of my complete redo of learning and education Essential Learning. In Dilt’s groundbreaking work in 1990, he states:
Our beliefs can shape, affect or even determine our degree of intelligence, health, relationships, creativity, and even our degree of happiness and personal success. Yet, if indeed our beliefs are so powerful a force in our lives, how do we get control of them so they don’t control us?
When education is used as a tool of brainwashing and indoctrination, a population who is able to access the beliefs running their lives and then able to control them makes them a threat. Hence our present culture wars are being played out in our schools.
Beliefs are so much of our human existence that we forget they exist separate from truth and reality. But years of working with individuals and groups, and even on my own beliefs, one this is sure. Beliefs are either healthy and beneficial or unhealthy and detrimental. I have yet to run into a neutral belief. I learned from Dilts and then from experience that beliefs exist in relationship other logical dimensions. That there is an ecology of sorts and it is a part of the Divine Plan for humankind.
Source: Changing Belief Systems with NLP, Robert Dilts, 1990
Note where beliefs are. Notice that beliefs/values bridge between the critical personal development areas of capability and identity, two of Eric Erikson’s critical developmental stages in the immediate, and between the environment and spiritual in the long term.
The course I wrote and taught had as its objective to identify a belief in adults that has negatively impacted their lives and prevents them from fulfilling their goals and capabilities. Beliefs were of two kinds: internal/ beliefs about yourself ( what you are not, or what you are not capable of, or external/ how things outside yourself hurt or inhibit you. One hundred percent of the core beliefs that I found and then changed were formed around an experience when the person was around four to five years old. That’s right, that which is holding you back had its origins when you were not critically thinking. Many times the belief or fear has no logical association with what happened.
No matter where you go around the world and the age of the person and their professed beliefs, unless someone trained in NLP changed your core dysfunctional belief created when you were a child, you will never have fulfillment in that area.
Belief systems are those beliefs we associate with the original core belief over time in an effort to keep validating the truth of the core belief. I use the spider’s web as an analogy. At the center is the original core belief. By the time you are seventy, you can have dozens of related beliefs that have proceeded from that singular experience.
So imagine you are four years old and you are very proud of something and you keep trying to get your mother’s attention. She is busy with friends. You finally get to tell her and she breaks out into laughter. Then her friends laugh as well. You tell yourself one of two things. I‘m an idiot or the world is not a nice place. As you grow and get older, maybe you get bullied repeatedly in middle school. You tell yourself the world is a dangerous place. By high school, you are all about defending yourself and when you are twenty-eight and you watch the media, you think about the Christian grammar school you attended, buy 152 rounds, write a manifesto, and murder three children and three adults.
I streamlined the above, but it would not surprise me if something akin to it actually happened. With NLP mainstreamed in our systems of learning, at a predesignated checkpoint a trained professional (who does not have to be a licensed psychologist) would have elicited the belief and event say by age twelve or even sixteen, found the critical modality (visual, auditory or kinesthetic and using the technology altered/diffused that modality so that a subconscious remembering of it was permanently neutralized. More on this to come.
Essential Learning recognizes the important role spirituality plays in human and societal development. Spirituality allows all human development to acknowledge both our limits, as well as our exceptionalism as a species. Prior to Rene Descartes in the seventeenth century, knowledge was three legs of the triangle.
spir·it·u·al·i·ty
[ˌspirəCHəˈwalədē]
NOUN
1. the quality of being concerned with the human spirit or soul as opposed to material or physical things:
"the shift in priorities allows us to embrace our spirituality in a more profound way" · "a deep sense of spirituality that connects them to the natural environment" · "an interest in other cultures and spiritualities"
Since the seventeenth century humanism which is a belief that denies the existence of the spirit has become by definition a religion. In the entire Western world and most problematic in the United States where a state-sponsored religion is expressly forbidden, is taught to all of our students.
humanism
hu·man·ism ˈhyü-mə-ˌni-zəm
ˈyü-
: a doctrine, attitude, or way of life centered on human interests or values
especially : a philosophy that usually rejects supernaturalism and stresses an individual's dignity and worth and capacity for self-realization through reason : SECULAR HUMANISM
Communism with its dismissal of and contempt for religion fit well with the new secular religion. The philosophy married well with the new economic system. You can see those generations more recently the products of public education being receptive to communism strictly as a humanitarian and social justice philosophy when they have never experienced it firsthand.
There will be the argument that we cannot include spirituality in our education system based on the Separation of Church and State. Sorry, we already have a state-sponsored religion in our schools. I am not remotely talking about religion in our schools, but rather spirituality, two distinctly different things. There is not a peep in the Bill of Rights about baring spirituality from how we teach and learn in our schools.
We now need to thank God for the push for transgenderism.
You might be saying after such a headline, is this guy nuts? Since the 1980s, Climate which has no basis in science has been propagandized to all students to the point where it is a religion. Because it has no basis in fact and has a dark ant-human hidden agenda, it qualifies then by definition as superstition. But it is professional suicide to research and publish the truth, Therefore the predominance of high-educated scientific types supporting climate change orthodoxy protects it from being exposed.
Enter the fluidity of sexual identity argument. One of the essential biological realities of life is now being not only challenged but reversed and its new false replacement is ENFORCED by the federal government and blue state sympathizers. So that is good news. Not a single bonafide scientist can agree. They have gone so far this time, that the whole house of cards will fall. Unfortunately, those in the medical practice are supporting it for the money they make doing sex reassignment surgeries and transitioning. This you can see in a recent post on the AMA Journal of Ethics website:
Transgender Rights as Human Rights
We argue, in contrast, that transgender rights stem from human rights, i.e., those fundamental rights belonging to every person. Persons with either cisgender (in which assigned and experienced gender are the same) or transgender identities deserve to live and flourish in their communities—with freedom to learn, work, love, and play—and build lives connected with others at home, in the work place, and in public settings without fear for their safety and survival. These deeply personal decisions are and should be the prerogative of the individual and deserve the law’s protection. The United States protects religious freedom in the First Amendment, and religion is quintessentially a choice. We owe the same respect to all members of our communities. We don’t yet know if gender identity emerges from genes, hormones, environmental factors or, most likely, an intricate combination of all these factors and more. It is unlikely that people with a transgender identity simply choose their gender identity, any more than cisgender people do. However, it is crucial that associated choices about the expression of gender—affecting vital aspects of identity in school, the workplace, and the community—are supported by our laws and policies. Supporters of transgender rights should avoid arguments that are logically flawed and that fail to acknowledge current scientific evidence about gender identity. Our best arguments must rely on the concept of inalienable human rights, including the right to live safely, freely, and without fear of discrimination.
Imagine, using the First Amendment and freedom of religion to argue for gender identity?
Viewing the redo of learning and education as a reawakening.
Throughout my articulation of Essential Learning I will reference language and a word’s etymology. The words used as tools un us unsuspecting good-natured folk needs to be exposed. Words like future, global and lately gender based on there history reveal they are but recent social constructs and have no history with humankind and a suspect reality for we as a species. Here is the etymology of the word gender.
The "male-or-female sex" sense of the word is attested in English from early 15c. As sex (n.) took on erotic qualities in 20c., gender came to be the usual English word for "sex of a human being," in which use it was at first regarded as colloquial or humorous. Later often in feminist writing with reference to social attributes as much as biological qualities; this sense first attested 1963. Gender-bender is from 1977, popularized from 1980, with reference to pop star David Bowie.
Therefore it is once again a lie when well-educated people in education, psychology and medicine state that gender is a part of being human and the human experience.
Essential Learning having as its basic philosophy the awakening of who we are as a species, as opposed to what we fantasized we are is essentially to rely on biological anthropology. All of the hard work was achieved by our hunter-gathering ancestors. As we know in the discipline the human brain has not changed since the Early Paleolithic. As Robin Fox so often remarks, we are all Paleolithic hunter-gatherers in a strange new environment. Essential Learning takes into consideration the “wisdom of the ages”. It is an opportunity to get off our self-deluding high horse of technological / species superiority and get a life en-mass. Also to stop the devotion to the latest fad which has no basis in 400,000 years of human and cultural development.
My eighth book now in progress I have dedicated to a spiritual and indigenous pottery teacher from the Apache people of the Southwest who is two-spirited. As far back as Native Americans can recall gender-fluid members of the group were not only accepted, they were viewed as gifted. Many traditionally became healers. After a week with my new teacher Phillipe, he exemplified the gifted part of the two-spirited man.
So regarding cultural norms, Native Americans give us insights into a time when spirituality was essential and infused into every aspect of culture. In the West, we still look down on these cultures and view them as primitive.
The beliefs held by the majority of indigenous people resulted in outcomes that benefited both the two-spirited individual and the society. Tribal societies waited till the beginning of ‘adulthood’ before the recognition of a member being two-spirited. As with every other aspect of their lives, spirit ran through individual identity and the individual was also inseparable from the group.
The belief now being pushed by the government, the Democrat Party, the media, and academia that a person can be born in the wrong biological body and that it is beneficial, even with children to “change their sex”, chemically, surgically, and behaviorally is historically the sickest and most appalling practice of all time.
Because of the Marxist/ Soviet/Maoist belief in the destruction of the nuclear family, a belief incompatible with our founding principles and values as a nation, its usefulness to their objectives is logical. That is it makes sense for the radical base of the Democrat Party. But what does it say about the others? Of course, there will be a culture war with this being introduced into our schools!
Coming Soon
Essential Learning not only incorporates the wisdom of the ages but employs when beneficial newer knowledge that fulfills its goals and objectives. As I have illustrated here is that one critical new knowledge is from Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). NLP is a new technology that has resulted from recent research in neuroscience and linguistics. A contributor Robert Dilts has done exceptional research in beliefs and belief systems. Like any technology, in the wrong hands, it can be used toward evil as well. When NLP first was taught, individuals soon learned how to reach the subconscious mind and with subliminal messaging motivate people to do things they might not have elected to do. My use in education dictates that ethics determine an agreement with the individual and parents on the needed change as well as the resulting process to effect the needed change. It is totally transparent.