Bit sad to read this article as I do think it shows a dismissive tone that isn’t befitting of Transition. Wish I had seen it before.

Shane Hughes mentions discussing this subject with an organiser of Sunrise in the past. This was me, some 6 years ago, in a different stage of my life. I agree there is an element of religion in, in particular, the ‘Dreamspell’ groups – the main disseminators of the 2012 ideas – but that shouldn’t be ascribed to everybody who has an interest in this subject.

2012 ideas have been around since at least 1987, nearly twenty years prior to Transition, and it is a movement that has matured over time, as Transition has and will. Most of those who initially proposed the ideas have moved on, and others now embrace 2012 as a useful nodal point or something similar. The recently released ‘Everything Guide to 2012′ kindly embraces Transition as one of the solution-finding organisations on the planet. Hopefully the many thousand of readers, particularly in the Americas, will not be as dismissive of Transition as Rob has sadly been of 2012.

Personally, I neither subscribe to 2012 nor dismiss it, just as I refrain from judgement on the dominant ideas on Climate Change or Peak Oil. Everything is simply hearsay or an educated guess unless you have experienced it or know all there is to know about it. 2012ers, if we can call them that, come in many shapes and forms, from those choosing to use it to motivate planetary change (i.e. Worldshift 2012), to those deciding to build bunkers in the Pyrenees and go underground for two years.

I myself choose practical action, involvement in organizations like Transition and working to provide spaces for ideas to be openly discussed. Many people that I know who are intelligent folk, lights in our communities, still have a passing interest in 2012 and the potentials of what lies ahead. Its far from the dominant belief that the world is going to end or any such thing. That is Hollywood.

For an example, the movie trailer shown above is as accurate to the beliefs of the 2012 movement as a Hollywood movie about Transition would be – Rob Hopkins played by Val Kilmer, a gun-toting hero of a post-apocalyptic oil-free world.

Transition is capable of embracing a belief in world changes such as 2012, just as the 2012 movement can share a belief in Transition.

Unlike some, I have come to the conclusion that we are, and must be, driven to raise children.

The home, the place that a couple makes into a place to live, is an establishment of culture. The traditions, rituals, the amenities, beliefs, and definitions of right and wrong often reflect the values of the community and families of the couple (or assemblage of adults).

If you value and identify with the culture that raised you, how can you not also identify with the need to both parent in your own turn, and to preserve your culture, your beliefs and values, into the next generation?

What I don’t understand about your comment about just “being with” family, is that the cultures that created and produced you and your family should also be driving you to focus on raising and nurturing your children – for the generation to come. If you aren’t striving to build or maintain that environment, how can you be true to the cultures that produced you?

The Biblical stricture “Honor thy mother and thy father”, is, I think, interpreted too strictly. I find this passage – remember, it ends with “that it may be well with thee, and thou mayest live long on the earth” – ties one into beliefs and culture, binds one to the stream of time from parent to child, to the next generation unending. I don’t think one is permitted to say, “Here I am. Let the world take care of itself.”

But then, written that way, it starts to look like the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Player Manual, 2nd Edition. You know, in the appendix on player alignment, the difference (in the game) between good and evil. “Good”, in AD&D, is the habit of making decisions by considering “What is the best for the group; that is the best thing for me,” and evil turns that around to “What is best for me at the moment? Anything else would hurt the group.”

Look at this another way. The observation in social and biological sciences is that organizations and individuals “grow or die”.

It is by trying to transition that we learn what transition means. It is by building, and gardening, and raising children that we learn who we are. There just isn’t time to sit and wonder what comes next.

Even if the world is coming to an end or NOT, we should just sit back and relax, spend our time with our family and loved ones. We can’t predict the future, we are HUMANS! If the world is ‘coming to an end at 2012′, we can’t stop it. And if it does not, then so be it. Spending time with loved ones isn’t so bad anyways and can be ‘fun’ at times. =.=

THE END OF STORY! XP

Love,
My Opinion

As a devil’s advocate I wonder why you say:

“a failed fundamentalist Islamic state for example that gets its hands on nuclear weapons”

And not, e.g. US who already has them and is the only nation to have actually used them, twice. Or Israel, who spend more on weapons per head than any nations on Earth, by many orders of magnitude.

What unfounded cultural stories have you been swallowing lately?”

This is a big topic and clearly controversial! Im not going to attempt to deal with the whole issue of Islamic-Western relations here, and Im not saying that “western” irrational values are any better than “Islamic” irrational values; however, I think the western liberal meme has hugely underestimated the threat from medieval Islamic values in our midst; Islam is committed to spreading its ideology throughout the world, and is in conflict with the hard-won western liberal values of the west which presumably you hold as dear as I: freedom of speech,gender equality etc.. Part of our distorted cultural story is fueled by the retarded and irrational belief that 9-11 was an inside job done by Cheney and the CIA; I also used to entertain such beliefs, and enjoyed watching the “Loose Change ” films with Rob when they first came out.

However, since my beliefs around this were not religious, I was able to change as new information came to my attention. I recommend Lawrence Wright’s “The Looming Tower”. This whole issue throws down the gauntlet to western liberalism: how do we deal equitably and justly with other cultures who do not share our values of equity and justice? (Naturally, irrational fundamentalism from the Christian right may be just as bad and should be challenged for the same reasons -its not rational.)Another highly recommended read on this is Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s “Infidel” where she describes the inability of the liberal Dutch government to even accpet the problem of Muslim honor killings amongst immigrants: they couldnt even count them as honor killings because “that would be racist”.

“While you are at it, perhaps do a survey of statistical significance of all transitioners, permaculturalists, allotment keepers and urban gardeners on their religious beliefs.

If you find, as you surely will, that many of them are religious then perhaps you can explain how their pro-active efforts are “getting in the way of transition”.”

It would be a good survey to do, and would be fascinating to see what the ideological make up of transitioners is. My guess is that it would have a disproportionate number of new Agers, croppies and alternative therapists, and scientists and critical thinkers might be thinner on the ground. But to address your point we would have to define what being “pro-active for transition” actually means.
Obviously I am not saying that religious people are not able to participate in transition- my whole point is, unless we engage with this debate more fully, they are likely to have a disproportionate influence on the shape that transition actually takes, to everyone’s detriment. And this may already be the case.

Thus, there might be people who have religious or faith-based views who indeed accept AGW and PO as threats, but their responses may not be the best because they are not very rational, eg they may say we should pray more. Some may say the calamities coming to us are acts of god because of moral degradation. The whole issue of population and burth control is a hugely problematic area for some religions.

Some may become 2012-ers! The irony around the 2012 issue seems to be lost on you Josef! As it is on Rob: I repeat what i said before, the thinking behind 2012, 9-11 conspiracy theories and blind belief in alternative therapies have much more in common than people wish to acknowledge. They all stem from the same anti-science, anti-rational basis.

(A couple of years ago I did come across a website that was transition-inspired, nicely laid-out pages on PO and AGW, and the entire rest of the site was dedicated to every new age fantasy under the sun from homeopathy to shape-shifting lizards, and yes, you guessed it! The cult of 2012).

So if influential people in TT are only “rational” when it suits them, the actual paths we take to respond may be quite irrational, and because TT has no mechanism for deterring irrational beliefs- indeed it actually encourages them and, as with your stance, actively discourages a more critical approach, it has no way of contending with the darker sides of religion and superstition.
The whole problem with beliefs is that people really believe them and they inform their action by them. How many people attracted to TT are at least sympathetic to retarded ideologies like “The Secret” ?
My concerns here are not abstract theoretical ones; I come across people all the time who, while sympathetic in a general way to “environmentalism” are quite suspicious of AGW- they dont accept the science and tend to think it is a scam of some kind; they believe in “free energy machines” and extreme kinds of techno-fantasies; they are often inherently anti-science which they have no understanding of.

Many such people are involved in TT, and their responses of hanging pyramids in the garden to make the veggies grow, talking to nature spirits (“If you talk to God, that’s religion; if God talks to you, that’s psychosis”)are not just a waste of time, but discredit the movement in the eyes of the more conventional rationalists who from the outside may say: what a load of hippy nonsense.”

In the case of alternative therapies, one of the negative effects of their promotion is the return of measles. On this specific case, I think the “Heart and Soul” groups should make a point of informing people truthfully about the safety of the MMR vaccine.
Re your other points:

“Maybe you will discover in your research that Roger Bacon, recognised at one of the earliest advocates of the modern scientific method, was himself a Christian.

Or that Copernicus, the first astronomer to formulate a comprehensive heliocentric cosmology, which displaced the Earth from the center of the universe, was Catholic. So was Galileo. And Descartes”

In those days EVERYONE was religious- there wasnt any other option on offer. Science was as you say in its infancy. This was the beginning however of the rational challenge to religion, a struggle still going on. (Pre-Darwin it was very hard to dispute the God Hypothesis; it was only with the establishment of evolution as fact that science could reject it definitively). Planck may have been a member of his church, which again in those days was much stronger , but this may not reflect on his actual beliefs.

Of course I know lots of scientists were and are religious, that doesnt discredit my arguments in any way! Proportionately though, scientists are far less likely to be religious, and there is a REASON for that. The fact that some still are does not mean it is a good thing or harmless.

So what about Houghton? While his science is impeccable, his religion is unlikely to help chart a clear path for an effective response. I am obviously not saying religious people are always going to make irrational decisions, but their beliefs are going to be a hindrance rather than a help, and may lead to quite reactionary policies.

Ghandhi- one of my early inspirations and a real Holy Cow of liberalism and environmentalism- is widely held responsible for the partition of India. Because of his rigidly held religious beliefs he was unable to compromise in the way a secular leader may have been able to. (Ironic indeed that he was killed by an even more extreme religious fanatic.)

Even Martin Luther King similarly may have done better had he been more critical of the religion which did not serve his people well.

I am not intolerant of religious people, nor do I have any problem with working with them. What I have consistently argued is that irrational beliefs and religion should not be actively
promoted by Transition in the way that they are; and that the understanding of science should be a much stronger priority.

Instead, people’s already shaky understanding of science is constantly being undermined from within transition, including on this forum, by simplistic, ignorant ideas like “science has been wrong before”, “science doesnt know everything” “science is rigid and closed to ‘new’ideas” (like Medieval superstition!). f you really believe these things about science, why would you give credibility to climate science? And while some people are able to hold the two ideas together apparently without conflict, many others do not.

These obvious fallacies are just excuses for making things up whenever we feel like it.

Your last comments from your friend Rob actually support my case- it is not science that rigidly claims to know everything, its religion! Its faith! Isnt this completely obvious?

It is not my views which are arrogant and rude, Josef, but those of religion and superstition, which unlike science and rational thought have no mechanism for learning or opening to new evidence. They just know for sure they are right, and this attitude I am arguing is very, very dangerous.

The other 2012 is more problematical for me. I mean, Yeah! The Mayans predicted the end of their calendar . . . yet managed to overlook, and fail to survive, a bunch of roughnecks in wood boats.

Personally I find the KGB analysts predictions of 2010 more enlightened – that California and New York will refuse to surrended collected taxes, leading to a fragmentation of the US. I presume there would be disarray about the world, since I cannot conceive of any single fragment of the US that would fail to shout, “Collect the national debt from them guys!” There are also the “sometime in the next 15 years” guys looking at the exploding debt to GDP ratio of the US, and advocating a voluntary deflation collapse now, instead of waiting until it gets worse later. There are the Peak Oil and Global Warming arguments, and I recall the Harmonica Virgins celebrations (Apologies, I make light of something I held but lightly at the time, the Harmonic Convergence of the Solar System.) I recall that fluorocarbons were depleting the ozone layer, about the time Dow Chemical’s patents ran out on R-12 refrigerant, but a newly patented alternate formula wasn’t a problem at all, so we should just keep on expending energy with refrigeration and air conditioning. I recall that many credible people were deeply affected by concerns over these matters.

I also recall the era when people were building bomb shelters intended to ride out an intercontinental nuclear exchange. As far as I know, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and maybe Venezuela, would just as soon the US still felt the chill of that nuclear umbrella.

I guess what I am getting at, is the world has been ending for a long time, and many of us have faced the end – and the unpredictability of the end. Sometimes the arguments again ring persuasive, other times skepticism holds sway. I am even getting proclamations, this week, that the free world produces so few babies they cannot persist another 25 years – while the Muslim cultures and nations are producing four times the number of progeny to maintain their population for generations to come.

Younger folk, those that were shielded by community, work, or family from the full brunt of earlier crises are perhaps more susceptible to proclamations of the end of the world. I don’t think gullible is the only explanation, and seems disdainful and disrespectful of those following other drummers. Where preparation for meeting multiple concurrent dooms – which our politicians seem intent on bringing about – can be accomplished through cooperation, that seems a worthwhile prospect.

If I am drowning, I don’t need someone of my faith, or my race, or my political aspirations – I just need someone willing and able to help. It makes sense, then, to try to be that helpful one when we are able.

“the sum of all you can know (even a whole society, even a society as advanced as ours) is ALWAYS infinitely less than the sum of all that can be known”

“majik is just physics for which we have forgotten the logic”

Fair points.

As a devil’s advocate I wonder why you say:

“a failed fundamentalist Islamic state for example that gets its hands on nuclear weapons”

And not, e.g. US who already has them and is the only nation to have actually used them, twice. Or Israel, who spend more on weapons per head than any nations on Earth, by many orders of magnitude.

What unfounded cultural stories have you been swallowing lately?

More to the point:

Can you please substantiate, using the scientific methodology, your claim that:

“irrational belief of any kind will get-and are getting in the way of transition” ?!?

While you are at it, perhaps do a survey of statistical significance of all transitioners, permaculturalists, allotment keepers and urban gardeners on their religious beliefs.

If you find, as you surely will, that many of them are religious then perhaps you can explain how their pro-active efforts are “getting in the way of transition”.

You might also like to do a similar survey on scientists. Are you aware than some scientists are also religious? How does that fit in with your oh so very empathetic world view?

Maybe you will discover in your research that Roger Bacon, recognised at one of the earliest advocates of the modern scientific method, was himself a Christian.

Or that Copernicus, the first astronomer to formulate a comprehensive heliocentric cosmology, which displaced the Earth from the center of the universe, was Catholic. So was Galileo. And Descartes.

Or what about the Russian mathematician who defended religion during the Soviet era, was imprisoned as a “religious sectarian.” and died of a hunger strike in protest, Dmitri Egorov.

Even Charles Babbage, for forefather of modern computing was reportedly and Anglican.

And despite saying “the faith in miracles must yield, step by step, before the steady and firm advance of the facts of science, and its total defeat is undoubtedly a matter of time” Max Planck, winner of 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics and founder of Quantum mechanics was an elder in his church to his death.

Or Charles Hard Townes, another winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics who in 1966 wrote “The Convergence of Science and Religion”.

Or John Polkinghorne, British particle physicist and Anglican priest.

Or Francis Collins, director of the US National Human Genome Research Institute.

Or, my favourite example, how about John T. Houghton who was the co-chair of the Nobel Peace Prize winning IPCC scientific assessment working group and lead editor of first three IPCC reports?! Did you know he is the former Vice President of Christians in Science?!

Are Sharon Astyk’s religious beliefs getting in the way of her transition related work?

Did Martin Luther King Jr’s religious beliefs get in the way of the civil rights movement? Or was his connection to faith communities one of the movements biggest strengths?

Did Gandhi’s Hinduism hinder his work?

I could go on and on and on. And on.

Frankly I find your claim that “”irrational belief of any kind will get-and are getting in the way of transition”" to be preposterous, arrogant and rude.

BTW, I agree that many (most!?) of the beliefs held by religious people are utterly ludicrous but there is absolutely no doubt that many people do great work because of those very same beliefs. Strange, but true.

NOTE: you can dismiss anything I say/ write/ believe, because I am certain that homeopathic remedies have helped to heal my cuts and bruises faster than they otherwise would

This:

“The idea that 5,000 years ago, the Mayans (good astronomers, but fairly brutal and unpleasant in many other ways) were able to predict that on December 12th 2012 something of extraordinary significance was definitely going to occur is bonkers.”

Is such an ignorant asinine statement, betraying such a personal
prejudice it fills me with anger. So now we can’t predict that every 28-32 years Saturn returns to the same spot in its orbit around the sun?

That is a prediction, and the Mayans understood the complex
inter-relationship of planets and the galaxy we inhabit, possessing knowledge which is difficult for our scientific materialist logic to comprehend. They were aware of planetary cycles and 2012 represents the return point of a major cycle that Mayan astronomy was aware of. Do some research.

And this

“Adam Rutherfold, writing in the Guardian last year, pointed to the absurdity of two more of the 2012 predictions. The first is that ‘the Earth and the sun will come into alignment’, when surely, he writes, two objects are always in alignment with each other? ”

Actually the alignment is with Earth, sun and the galactic centre.
Adam Rutherford is a blatant Guardian hack who wears his prejudice on his sleeve. He gets his commissions writing deliberately provocative anti-spiritual tripe. It doesn’t matter that he does little or no research. As long as you write for the establishment, you can make any number of journalistic errors and no one seems to pull him up on it.

Quite frankly, he’s full of shit!

And this:

“I look forward to December 13th 2012″

In fact the suggestion is that it is December 21st 2012. Not even the barest hint of proper research. Just rabid prejudice. God there is so much to contend with. If this represents the peace movement (and i know it only represents one section), then there is no movement.

That is not to say that there is not an industry growing around this that is exploiting people’s fears. Like alternative therapies, there are charlatans, as there are in any walk of life. but this kind of wishy-washy prejudice seems to be acceptable in the so-called “established” view. where science demands evidence, it seems that those who back the limited scientific materialism pushed by Dawkins et al seem quite content, like Dawkins himself, to attack anything resembling a differing world view.

I think the 2012 phenomenon and indeed the limited world view of scientific materialism should be a topic for discussion, because i feel that any people’s movement that attempts to ignore this growing sense of change, where the interface of science and spirituality is coming to is making a serious error of judgment and failing to see where the problem lies.

Many scientists in the fields of quantum physics, genetics and biology are putting forward radical world views. They are being ignored, because the old order makes money out of people’s suffering. take a closer look at the link between the pharmaceutical industry and the BMA.

As well as regimented church-based religion, it is the old order of scientific materialism that is in its death throes and we would do well to realise how capitalism owes much of its power and ignorance to the ideology of scientific materialism. Both Marx and Darwin are lauded, yet one can be said to have led to an oppressive regime that ignored the spirit of the people, while the other can be said to have influenced colonialism and eugenics.

It’s time we moved past the old regimes, recognise the positives that came from both ideologies, but recognise also that the spiritual nature of indigenous cultures throughout the world also
had world views that served them for centuries. It is ignorant
Eurocentrism to view these cultures as purveyors of supernatural mumbo jumbo. And I notice that the more spikier elements of the activist movement slip very readily into this sterile, limited world view.

Recognise your own prejudice and subjective belief systems before criticising others, without putting forward a shred of evidence to support your case.

First quote:

and the Hebrew revelations of the Bible of virgin births and second comings have real scholarship behind them?!

Second quote:

and many people go the other way, especially if they start investigating their experiences scientifically rather than through the lens of a particular cultural form

<>

In the sense that the Hebrews or Christians really did believe in those things, yes.

<>

As I say, that’s where I was ten years ago. I’m very familiar indeed with the current spiritual sciences, and myself (as I think I have said before) practice no form of religion. But if you go for personal experiential knowledge yourself your perspective can often change in many interesting ways. I find a great deal of value in the current spiritual sciences, but personally, very much less value in the idea that those sciences in some way definitively devalue religions of all kinds simply by existing. But people can make up their own minds if they are familiar with the research.

http://www.hotconflict.com/blog/stories-of-the-prophets.html