Torbay weblog davecathy

 

Books such as The Da Vinci Code and The Holy Grail are fiction, despite the fact that many people believe them to be far more than that. They are no more than a hypothesis, a proposition, conjecture based on a few ancient documents (which do not all agree with each other), plus a few known facts, added together with a great deal of tradition, and a lot of inventive thinking.

 

Exactly the same can be said for the Bible, the only difference being that we are inculcated or indoctrinated from birth to believe that The Bible is the word of God; that Gospel equals truth. If we dare question, we are dubbed a Doubting Thomas, if not a heretic. But belief is not knowledge. Knowledge can be proven; belief, by its definition, cannot.

 

God gave us the power to think, to reason, so it is therefore quite legitimate, and in our God-given nature to question, to challenge, and to ask why? Only a fool believes everything he is told, or swallows everything he reads; we have to set what we hear alongside our common sense, our experience, what we know and can prove to be true.

Even in modern times, we have seen how easy it is for the truth to be buried under layers of myths, the deaths of President Kennedy and Princess Diana for example.

The Stalins, Hitlers and Sadam Husseins of this world demand loyalty on pain of death. Christianity demands loyalty on pain of eternal damnation.

 

I find it difficult, in fact it goes against all my life experience, to believe in a personal God who works through middle-men or priests, a God that expects all credit for the good things, yet ascribes all bad things as the work of the devil or of flawed mankind. We are told that God works many miracles, but we never see any of them. God used to offer proof of his being, by way of phials of holy blood, fragments of the Holy Cross, the Shroud of Turin, etc, but without exception, those things have been found to be fraudulent. And is that God the all seeing, loving God of the New Testament, or is he the jealous, vengeful God of the Old Testament?

 

I do not KNOW where the truth lies, and I can only BELIEVE in what makes sense to me, does not stretch my credulity beyond reason, and offers at least some proof.

What follows does all those things, and the more I have studied it, the more I have come to believe it.

 

YUS ASSEF

 

Kashmir lies in the northwest region of India. Within its borders live a people who claim to be one of the lost tribes of Israel, having been driven there by the Assyrians.

They are Buddhist by religion, and Buddhists believe, rightly or wrongly, in reincarnation, and that when a holy man, or Lama, dies, his spirit is reincarnated into a newborn baby, and a great search is begun to find him. Living examples of this are the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama.

2000 years ago, when a Lama died, the search took the wise men (3 wise men from the orient) to Palestine, where they discovered the newborn baby, Yus Assef. His parents were told that their son was 'The chosen one', and that he would have great works to do in his life.

The baby was left to grow up with his parents, and only taken to Kashmir at the age of 14, where he began to learn the great wisdoms of his calling.

Eventually, he returned to Palestine, where he began his ministry, as detailed in the New Testament. Yus Assef preached about a new vision of God, not the angry God of the Jews, who sought an eye for an eye, and said ‘Vengeance is mine’ and demanded the stoning of adulterers and homosexuals, and killed off the whole of humanity save for Noah and his family. The new God spoke of peace and forgiveness, of turning the other cheek, of loving thy neighbour. Such teachings belong to the Buddhist tradition, not the Jewish.

Yus Assef, Issa, the Leader of Men, did not die on the cross, and was restored to health. I will give my justification for this and other claims in a later article. He could not remain in Palestine, as he was now a wanted man. After meeting his disciples and promising to return eventually (the second coming), he travelled east, away from the Roman Empire, along the Silk Road, back to Kashmir, where he lived a long life, eventually dying at the age of 80, and was buried in a tomb in Shrinagar, which still exists to this day 

 

 

President George W Bush says that the American health service is the best in the world. To none-Americans that is so obviously untrue as to be laughable, and must sound arrogant and offensive to the millions of Americans who struggle to pay their medical and drug bills.

We all know that the British Health Service is NOT the best in the world, and we are struggling to improve it, but it is far better than the American system, as a new survey from Cambridge and Harvard Universities prove.

In a study of WHITE ONLY males, it was found that Brits live almost a year longer than Americans, and that infant mortality rates are lower in the UK.

The research found that rates of disease such as diabetes, lung cancer, and high blood pressure among Americans were up to twice as high as in the UK, and Americans also had higher rates of heart disease, heart attacks and strokes, and obesity and high cholesterol are much more likely in America. All this despite the fact that Americans spend almost twice as much on health as we do, and if you were to include Hispanics and coloured people into the survey, the figures would be even worse, as they tend to be the poorer end of American society, and in America, poor often means less medical care.

In this, as in so many things, Bush should hang his head in shame rather than boast, or at least keep his mouth firmly shut.