Are You a Seeker of Truth or a Believer in Lies?

DEBATES ON COVID - VACCINES, 30 Aug 2021

Michael J. Talmo – TRANSCEND Media Service

27 Aug 2021 – Truth, facts, and individual freedom don’t seem very important these days. As the COVID-19 epidemic rages on, our little blue planet is drowning in a sea of lies, oppression, and propaganda. Day after day, night after night, hour after hour ad nauseam our weary brains are being saturated with case numbers, death totals, and supposedly overcrowded hospitals while governments and private businesses are coercing and bullying us into taking so called vaccines that are killing and permanently disabling who knows how many tens of thousands. We are told that we must bow to the voice of authority and give up our freedom lest we be accused of being selfish and murdering our fellow earthlings.

But are we being told the truth? Does truth even matter? Even more important, how do we know the difference between the truth and a lie?

Matthew 7: 13-14  issues this warning:

“Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to    destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life and only a few find it.”

That passage applies to how we live and think.

The human mind is a complex and wonderful instrument. With it, we have soared to the heights of technical advancement, plumbed the psychic depths, and probed the mysteries of the universe. In fact, our journey has only just begun in those areas. There is so much more to know and do. But the mind can also be our tower of Babel and technology our prison. This is because the human brain is also a deeply flawed, imperfect instrument that is filled with biases and destructive thought patterns and impulses. It’s part of how we evolved, but it is also what we need to understand and overcome. In other words, we can often be our own worst enemy.

So, let’s clear out the mental cobwebs and understand a few things.

What You Need to Know

First, let’s address what you don’t need to know which can be summed up in one word: everything. You don’t need to know everything. It’s impossible to know everything anyway.

In 1980 Astronomer Carl Sagan (1934-1996) did a 13 part PBS miniseries, Cosmos. In episode 11 Sagan entered the New York Public Library. I had been there many times and I can tell you, the place is  breathtakingly awesome. Sagan went to one of the upper levels and walked passed about 30 feet of six shelves of books. He explained that reading that amount of books would take an entire lifetime which

is only a mere tenth of the some ten million books that are in there.

Sagan explained:

“The trick is to know which books to read.” Or, to put it another way, what is essential knowledge? What do you really need to know?

Since we are all unique individuals, the answer to that question will greatly vary in a lot of ways. But just as we all have to eat and go to the bathroom, there are some areas of knowledge that apply to all of us.

In my humble opinion, the most important thing to know is yourself, closely followed by those things that have the greatest impact on your life. COVID-19 certainly falls into the latter category as do politics and history.

What Is Truth?

There are two kinds of truth: inner truth and outer truth.

Inner truth is what is true for you as in what gives your life pleasure and meaning. For some that means being an artist, actor, or poet; for others it means being a physician or a scientist; for others it can mean owning a business like a restaurant or a construction company; for others it can mean being a teacher or a social reformer; for others it means being a laborer or a homemaker. It also has to do with whether it’s better to be married or remain single, to have or not have children, to be sexually monogamous or to have multiple lovers; it’s about what you like to do for fun and relaxation along with so much more.

In my experience addictions along with other forms of self-destructive behavior occur when you aren’t living truthfully. They are ways to numb and distract yourself from a life of quiet desperation. Unfortunately, too many people are living lives of quiet desperation. They have acquired a conditioned self, a persona, an image. They are living the way their parents, or their spouse, or how society thinks they should live rather than how they ought to live. Such individuals are lonely, angry, and confused. They loathe themselves because they have lost their way. They have forgotten how to live truthfully.

Outer truth is the truth we all share. It is reality. For example, two people in an art gallery looking at a painting. One person thinks it’s a beautiful painting while the other person thinks it’s the stupidest looking thing they ever saw. Both are right because each has different taste. It’s a matter of opinion or inner truth. But if someone asserts that the Earth is flat that is not a matter of opinion because the Earth isn’t flat. The ancient Greeks figured that out 2,700 years ago without flight or space travel. It doesn’t matter that people thought the earth was flat at one time. It doesn’t matter that a small  percentage of the world’s population still think it’s flat mainly due to the influence of Samuel Rowbotham (1816-1884). It isn’t flat.

Simply stated: Inner truth is about being real and outer truth is about what is objectively real.

Sadly, a lot of people can’t tell the difference between inner and outer truth. For example, way back in 1985 I had a 22 year old girlfriend who believed in Santa Claus. I was 31. When I tried to explain to her why there couldn’t possibly be a Santa Claus she would just keep saying “It’s true for me.” She actually believed that if she went to the North Pole she would find Santa in his workshop because he exists for her, but that I wouldn’t find Santa in his workshop if I went to the North Pole because he doesn’t exist for me. I tried to explain to her that reality is reality and that something either exists or it doesn’t regardless of what we choose to believe, but to no avail. Obviously, one of the dimmer bulbs on the Christmas Tree, but I was in love so what can I say.

Understand Science

The word scientist was invented in 1833 by William Whewell (1794-1866). Prior to that and even long after, into the 1890s, scientists were usually called natural philosophers. Whewell was a philosopher. Galileo (1564-1642), Copernicus (1473-1543), Newton (1642-1727), etc. never were called scientists because the word didn’t exist in their time. Even Charles Darwin (1809-1882) and other great scientists of the 19^th Century continued to call  themselves natural philosophers. Rarely were they referred to as scientists. Most of today’s scientists are PhDs. A PhD is a doctor of philosophy. The world’s oldest scientific journal after over 350 years still calls itself “Philosophical Transactions.”

As Historian Dr. Richard Carrier, PhD puts it:

   “Science is just philosophy with better data.”

Philosophy was invented by the ancient Greeks. It comes from the Greek words Philo + Sophia which means the love of wisdom. But as Dr. Carrier explains in his 2016  lecture “Is Philosophy Stupid,” there is a lot more to this branch of knowledge than science.

Though it existed prior to his time, the father of modern philosophy is Aristotle (384 BC-322 BC). He also gave us the laws of thought or basic logic: The Law of Identity, The Law of Non-Contradiction, and The Law of the Excluded Middle. Inductive and deductive reasoning also comes from Aristotle. But not Abductive Reasoning. That was invented by Charles Sanders Pierce (1839-1914).

Aristotle, as Dr. Carrier explains in his lecture, formalized and structured philosophy into six areas that are essential to a sound epistemology.  Meaning, the way we gather knowledge and process information which results in the conclusions and judgments that we make. The six areas are: Epistemology, Physics, (meaning all science, not just one area as it does today), Metaphysics (means after the physics, or  science, the  conclusions you make from scientific data), Aesthetics, Ethics, and Politics.

Most modern philosophers only want to be concerned with the analysis of concepts and not facts, which Dr Carrier points out are false. Philosophy is a conclusion about facts and data provided by science, relationships, and personal experience. It deals with factual questions that science and religion alone can’t answer. It teaches you to see the whole picture.

So, when pondering life’s big questions: why am I here? What am I supposed to be? Should I marry this or that person? Is there life on other worlds? How did this universe come to be? Is Elvis still alive? Whether you call it religion, meditation, deep thought, or mental masturbation, you are doing philosophy. Learn to do it well.

Know History

Most people are abysmally ignorant when it come to history. I cringe when I hear them support wearing masks, mandatory vaccinations, and other oppressive measures.  They refuse to resist the hand that’s choking them to death, but will gladly wear the mask that’s suffocating them.

Most of the public doesn’t realize how utterly corrupt and dishonest government and medical science have become because they don’t know history. If you doubt me, read what the scientific literature has to say about it here, here, and here. And that’s only a small sample.

Former U.K. Prime Minister Winston Churchill (1874-1965) in a 1948 speech declared:

   “Those who fail to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.”

Also heed the words of Richard Carrier in his book “Proving History,”  Page 115: “…our bias against the supernatural is warranted, just as our bias against the honesty of politicians is warranted: we’ve caught them being dishonest so many times it would be foolish to implicitly trust anyone in politics.”

And that includes so-called public health officials like Anthony Fauci and CDC director Rochelle Walensky because they are also politicians.

It is important to understand that all history is probabilistic. We don’t have a time machine. We weren’t there. All historians can do is determine what happened in the past based on surviving archaeological and documentary evidence, and on how the world works through science. And on establishing prior probability—what normally happens in the case of what you are looking at. This also applies to modern times. History is history and the past is the past whether it happened ten minutes ago or ten thousand years ago.

In the case of COVID-19, the prior probability, that governments lie, makes it highly unlikely that we are being told the truth. Only strong solid evidence would reverse that prior probability. Instead, the evidence shows that what usually happens is happening–we are being lied to.

The word radical is defined as going to the root of the matter. So, let’s ignore all the rhetoric and the fear mongering and look at two basic facts when it comes to testing and deaths.

The con job with the COVID-19 PCR test works like this: the test is run in cycles. The more cycles that are run the greater the chance of someone testing positive. Page 35 of the PCR diagnostic panel on the FDA website instructs labs to run the test at 40 cycles. Yale New Haven Hospital on page 4 of their report also states that PCR tests are usually run at 40 cycles and that the cycle threshold used “is never included in the results sent to clinicians.” This fact was also reported in the New York Times. Yet, on a July 2020 program, “This Week In Virology,” Fauci explained that if you run the PCR test at 35 or more cycles it’s pretty much worthless because the chances of any active infectious virus being present are “miniscule.” He said that all you will get are “dead nucleotides.” POW! SOCK! WHAM! There you have it. Nothing more needs to be said. The PCR test isn’t accurate.

As for the number of COVID-19 deaths in this country, to get an accurate unbiased picture of what’s going on you have to look at all deaths from all causes in ratio to the population by the year. As the population goes up the number of deaths go up. But does the percentage of the population that dies in a given year go up? The figures below came from the 2021 World Almanac and from the CDC’s provisional deaths web page.

As you can see, while more people died in 2020 than in previous years, there was no statistically significant excess mortality. Other studies have shown that there was excess mortality in some states, the ones with the strictest lockdown measures—especially states like New York that transferred hospital patients into nursing homes. But not for the country as a whole.

Year              Deaths              Population                 Percentage of Deaths

1960             1,711,982         179,323,175               0.95%

1970             1,921,031         203,302,031               0.95%

1980             1,989,841         226,542,199               0.88%

1990             2,148,463         248,718,302               0.87%

2000             2,403,351         281,434,603               0.86%

2010             2,468,435         308,746,065               0.8%

2015             2,712,630         320,700,000               0.85%

2020             3,358,814         330,890,000               1.01%

Bottom line: Ignore the shock and awe tactics. It’s all empty rhetoric. Don’t let it distract you. The tests are worthless and there is no excess mortality. That’s the root of the matter. And that is all that matters.

Faith Is Not Fact

If someone asserts to me that COVID-19 is a real pandemic I ask them the following: what scientific papers have you read that convinced you that COVID-19 and the virus that supposedly causes it are real? How do you know what you know about COVID-19? Did you look at the actual science as in  read the studies in the scientific literature–would you even know how to interpret them? Or are you just believing what some authority figure or media personality is telling you?

I then further explain to them that if they’re getting their information from the TV and other various  mainstream sources, their position on COVID-19 is a religious one. It is a faith-based opinion that naively assumes that government and medical science are honest and have their best interests at heart.

They are assuming on faith that the COVID narrative is true.

There is a wise old saying:

   “Never assume because when you assume you make an ass of you and me.”

Naturally, many people can’t handle being confronted with reality. They will either call me a conspiracy theorist or question my credibility because I’m not an M.D. or a PhD even though what I’m doing is reporting on what M.D.s and PhDs who haven’t been corrupted by globalists and corporations are saying. Or they will say it’s my opinion.

Nothing rubs my rhubarb the wrong way more than when someone tries to invalidate facts by calling them opinions. I understand why people do this: to shut down the conversation and avoid having to think. They don’t want to know that they have been lied to. They don’t want to know how irresponsible, stupid, and selfish they are being by allowing their freedom, their health, and their country to be destroyed. They don’t want to see the cruel totalitarian world they will be leaving to their children. They need to believe that they are virtuous and patriotic by following the rules.

Hebrews 11:1 declares:

    “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

But facts are the substance of what we already have and the evidence of things that are seen. Blind faith, on the other hand, has never been a path to knowledge—it has often been a path to destruction.

A strong moral lesson about misplaced faith can be found in I Kings chapter 18. It doesn’t matter if the story is a myth because that’s one of the purposes of myths: to teach you something. The prophet Elijah challenges 450 false prophets of Baal to prove that their god is God because the people of Israel have turned to worshiping Baal. So, Elijah challenges all 450 of them to meet him on Mt. Carmel where each will build a sacrificial altar. Each kills a bullock, or steer, and places it on the altar. Whichever side can cause fire to come down from heaven to burn the dead animal wins. The prophets of Baal accepted the challenge and they got to go first. For hours they cry out to Baal to nuke the altar. Finally, they get desperate and even cut themselves so that their blood gushes onto the altar. But no response from Baal. Then, it’s Elijah’s turn. Naturally, God sends down the fire for his altar and Elijah gets to kill the false prophets of Baal.

The point here is that the prophets of Baal were sincere in their beliefs. They really thought Baal was god and freaked-out when they found out that he wasn’t. There were 450 of them and only one Elijah. They were the majority. But the majority was wrong. Their false belief cost them their lives.

So, if you feel strongly and passionately about something ask yourself if it’s faith based or fact based. Recognize that no matter how strongly you feel about something, if you don’t know the facts, if you haven’t looked at the evidence, if there is no evidence at all, then you really don’t know what you think you know. Your position is weak, superficial, and could very well be blatantly wrong.

The Mark of the Beast

A lot of conservative religious people believe that the COVID vaccination program is the fulfillment of Bible prophecy. Chapter 13 in the Book of Revelation describes two beasts that serve the dragon (Satan, the Devil, Rev. 12:9). Verses 16 and 17 talk about the second beast forcing everyone to get a mark in their right hand or forehead or they wouldn’t be allowed to buy or sell anything.

A big problem with this way of thinking is that it can make a lot of people complacent. They think that they don’t have to do anything because Jesus is coming back to rescue them. It’s the same with people who think that Donald Trump is going to get back in office and rescue them from the evil Democrats when both parties are in on the COVID scam.

But things aren’t always what they seem.

Example: for over 20 years I resided in Elizabeth, N.J. It’s a city and the county seat of Union County. It had more furniture stores than you could shake a stick at. If you wanted good quality furniture cheap Elizabeth was the place to go. One furniture store in particular made a lasting impression on me. It was on the city’s main road. The letters of its name were on large individual sheets of painted plywood. Those letters were P- I -T- U -S -A. My mind read that as Pit U.S.A. Nearly every day on my way to work for years I would pass that store and think Pit U.S.A.

Then, one day, I was driving by the store with a former girlfriend in the car. We weren’t getting along so to break the ice and make conversation I said, “Look, Pit U.S.A. Isn’t that an odd name for a store?” She looks at the sign and then she glares at me and shouts: “THAT’S PITUSA.” A noise when off in my head: BOING! And I thought “Oh yeah, wow, It is Pitusa.” And this in spite of the fact that they had another store in the neighboring city of Newark where the name was written out on a smaller sign. I still wasn’t able to see the obvious: Pit U.S.A. was really Pitusa until my ex snapped me out of it.

As what happened with me, some people get so caught up in a belief or a concept that their mind becomes locked. They can’t see things any other way but the way they see it. They don’t take into account that there could be another explanation and that their way of looking at things could be wrong.

In the case of Bible prophecy, 81% of the world’s population have access to a Bible in their language.  It’s the world’s bestselling and most popular book.  Is it not possible that someone could read the prophecies and try to fulfill them in some way? Is it equally possible that someone out there has already done this? The answer is yes.

Example: Herbert W. Armstrong (1892-1986) head and founder of the Worldwide Church of God  claimed to have fulfilled a prophecy that Jesus made on the Mt. of Olives (Mat. 24:14). Jesus predicted that the end wouldn’t come until his gospel of the kingdom would “be preached in the entire world for a witness unto all nations.”

The gospel isn’t the stories about Jesus’ life that appear in the New Testament. The gospel is the message about the government of God replacing the governments of the world on Earth.

Mr. Armstrong traveled all over the world in his private jet, and met with various world leaders to give them the gospel message as well as through his radio and later television show The World Tomorrow. It was reported that he gave various world leaders expensive gifts in order to meet with them. Obviously, the supernatural isn’t required to do something like this. All you need is motivation, your own private jet, and lots of money.

Incidentally, it was Mr. Armstrong who inspired me to intensely study the Bible starting in 1980 when I came across his television show. This also led me to study theology and comparative religion. What I liked about Mr. Armstrong was that he never asked for money on the air like all of the other TV evangelists. His sermons were educational lectures and any church literature as well as a subscription to their magazine, “The Plain Truth,” was free. But if you joined his church you would get tithed up the wazoo. But I never joined his church so I never had to give them any money and was never asked to.

Another example of not jumping to conclusions and taking the time to look at things more deeply was something that happened to me a long time ago. I was always fascinated by UFOs and the high probability of life on other planets. I was envious of people who claimed to have had close encounters with extraterrestrials. I hoped that someday I would have such an experience.

In 1975 I got my wish.

It was the wee hours of the morning in Rutherford, N.J. and I was on my way home from a friend’s house. The roads were deserted. I was all alone. I got on the exit ramp to the highway when I saw  strange colored lights in the sky. I stopped my car to look at them. As they got closer I got scared. Now I didn’t want to encounter a UFO. I thought to duck down in my car and hide. But I said to myself “No! I’m going to see what this is even if I get abducted or killed. I have to know.” So, I got out of my car stood tall and watched as the lights approached. It was flying low and suddenly I could see that the lights were attached to a huge black shape. But it wasn’t saucer shaped–it was cigar shaped. No matter, some UFOS were described as cigar shaped. The object wasn’t making a sound either. Then, letters started to run across the side of it and I thought, “It’s trying to communicate with me and in my language.” Soon, the entire message appeared before me:

GOODYEAR.

Yep, it was the Goodyear Blimp. But if I had chickened out and hid in my car cowering in fear to this day I would have been convinced that I saw an honest-to-goodness genuine UFO.

So, consider the fact that just maybe the billionaire globalists that created the COVID death cult read the Book of Revelation and decided that they liked the devil’s style and are attempting to fulfill the prophecies on their own. There are some people out there who like being bad. And since they like to play God why not play Devil too?

Don’t Worship Science

When it comes to COVID-19 I’m especially disappointed in atheists. These are people who claim to place a high value on science. Yet they have fallen for the phony COVID narrative hook, line, and sinker. I’m not talking about all atheists only the ones that I call the mechanistic atheists who dominate the organizations.

I consider myself spiritual, but not religious. In spite of this, atheists consider me atheist because I don’t believe in God as a man in the sky with a personality who worries about what’s going on down here. I see God as the life force energy that flows within us and outside of us. All things come from that life energy and all things return to it. The essence of this life energy is love. I John 4:16 says that “God is love.” The Chinese call it Chi, the Japanese call it Ki, the Hindus call it prana, Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) called it orgone, and Semyon Kirlian (1898-1978) made it visible via Kirlian photography. As I see it, you’re spiritual to the degree that you can love yourself and others unconditionally.

Mechanistic atheists don’t follow science they worship it. Science has become their false god, their graven image. They wave science around like an evangelical waves a Bible around. It’s their badge of righteousness and superiority. They fail to understand that Fauci and his ilk are not following science—they are following the dictates of billionaire globalists and Big Pharma. Just as religious snake oil salesmen like Peter Popoff who has been exposed faking healings and Jimmy Swaggart who has been caught with prostitutes, claim to represent God, today’s public health officials are corporate shills who claim to represent science.

Scientists and the scientific method are meant to serve humanity—not be worshiped by it. Science is not a cult—it is a tool by which we can learn about ourselves and the world. The scientific method works and was invented to counteract the cognitive bias inherent in our flawed thinking processes. But cults can be formed around the word science and can be used by governments and corporations to exploit people.

A blogger I recently came across said it best:

   “Science is the word used to convince stupid people that something made up is fact.”

Don’t Go Quietly into the Night

Whether we choose to call someone president, king, fuhrer, emperor, high priest, reverend, grand high imperial mystic ruler, or just an average Joe schmoe,  in the unlimited vastness and eternity of the space time continuum, we’re all just mere blips on the radar screen of life. Mere hangnails on the fickle finger of fate. Mere specks of consciousness afloat in a universe without end or purpose. But just as a stone  thrown into a pond causes ripples to radiate out in all directions, what we do hear and now will ripple across time for generations to come.

How will future history judge us I wonder. More important, how will we judge ourselves? Global economies a shambles, billions of lives shattered, human liberty trampled into the dirt, and people walking around in face diapers in fear of the sniffles.

Face reality people, we can’t encase the world in a plastic bubble to accommodate the frail and the immuno-compromised any more than we can turn the planet into one big safe space to accommodate the easily offended.

Our liberties are not mere trinkets to be doled out or withheld at the pleasure of some bureaucrat, employer, or pompous quack in a white lab coat. They are inalienable rights that cannot be taken from us. Ask yourselves this: is life without liberty better than no life at all? In my opinion neither are worth very much without the other. Guard your liberties jealously. Cherish them, Value them. For without them it is you and not the proverbial emperor who will be naked.

So, rise up, take a load off those knees. Lift your head up out of the muck, stop cowering in fear. and say enough is enough. Stop listening to these simpering bureaucratic jackasses. Peacefully resist, open your business. Coordinate with other businesses and defy them as a group. If you’re an employee organize a strike if they demand that you wear a mask or get vaccinated. If you’re a medical professional refuse to participate in any COVID vaccination programs. If you’re a parent take your kids out of school if they want to put masks on them. Show up at school board meetings and raise hell. If you’re a college student protest like they did in the 1960s. Support mass protests and demand that the architects of this COVID nightmare be brought to justice.

The politicians didn’t shut the economy down, put a mask on your face, or a needle in your arm—you did because you obeyed them. Stop Obeying them. Stop believing them. And stop believing in them.

Take back your country and your world.

___________________________________________

Michael J. Talmo has been a professional writer for over 40 years and is strongly committed to the protection of civil liberties. He also did three music videos on COVID-19: The Masker Mash, COVID Vaccine Man, and The Corona Globalists. He can be reached at michaeltalmo@aol.com.

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 30 Aug 2021.

Anticopyright: Editorials and articles originated on TMS may be freely reprinted, disseminated, translated and used as background material, provided an acknowledgement and link to the source, TMS: Are You a Seeker of Truth or a Believer in Lies?, is included. Thank you.

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