IN AMERICA,

WE ARE FREE

TO CHOOSE

HOW WE BELIEVE

MAN’S SEARCH FOR GOD

Zach had been gathering everything he could get his hands on that dealt with the subject of religion. He started with books he had read that had made a lasting impression. He grabbed Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged off the top shelf in his library. Down came The World’s Religions by Huston Smith, out came the Bible he’d had since the 5th grade, out came Sunday School lesson guides from years past. He grabbed Lake Wobegon by Garrison Keillor, Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt, More Than A Carpenter by Josh McDowell, and countless other books dealing with religion. And he pulled down a very interesting book he had recently run across, The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold by Acharya S.

He pulled up internet sites on religion, on Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Atheism. He read and printed articles, highlighted, searched, and amassed a great collection of information. He watched videos, read books and magazines, newspapers and pamphlets. He attended worship services at the Catholic Church, at the Baptist Church, at the Jewish synagogue, and various other temples and churches. He talked to Muslim friends, Hindus, and Mormons. He talked and talked, and listened even more.

As always, he totally immersed himself in the project. He knew the truth would not come find him – he had to search and dig and scrounge – and think – to find the truth.

One of his favorite books, Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand, had a special meaning for Zach. He loved the story of how the prime movers of the world made society work, how the inventors and creators and builders of the world were responsible for the greatness of man. That without the thinking and inventiveness and hard work of the prime movers the progress and improvements in our world would cease.

Several excerpts jumped out at Zach as he was deciding what information to include in his film. Much of it came from John Galt’s radio address to the world, where he was explaining the truth about how man and society grew to great strength and prosperity, and who the enemy is. He spoke of truth and the power of the thinking man.

Zach recorded these passages from John Galt's address, and noted the page numbers in parentheses:

Man must obtain his knowledge and choose his actions by a process of thinking, which nature will not force him to perform. Man has the power to act as his own destroyer - and that is the way he has acted through most of his history. The history of man has been a struggle to deny and destroy his mind. (931)

No, you do not have to think; it is an act of moral choice. (933)

Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man’s only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth.

... but if devotion to truth is the hallmark of morality, then there is no greater, nobler, more heroic form of devotion than the act of a man who assumes the responsibility of thinking.

That which you call your soul or spirit is your consciousness, and that which you call ‘free will’ is your mind’s freedom to think or not, then only will you have, your only freedom, the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and your character.

Thinking is man’s only basic virtue, from which all the others proceed. And his basic vice, the source of all his evils, is that nameless act which all of you practice, but struggle never to admit: the act of blanking out, the willful suspension of one’s consciousness, the refusal to think - not blindness, but the refusal to see; not ignorance, but the refusal to know. It is the act of unfocusing your mind and inducing an inner fog to escape the responsibility of judgment - on the unstated premise that a thing will not exist if only you refuse to identify it, that A will not be A so long as you do not pronounce the verdict ‘It is.’ Non-thinking is an act of annihilation, a wish to negate existence, an attempt to wipe out reality. (935)

If I were to speak your kind of language, I would say that man’s only moral commandment is: Thou shalt think. But a moral commandment is a contradiction in terms. The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.(936)

Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgment and nothing can help you escape it - that no substitute can do your thinking, as no pinch-hitter can live your life - that the vilest form of self-abasement and self-destruction is the subordination of your mind to the mind of another, the acceptance of an authority over your brain, the acceptance of his assertions as facts, his say-so as truth, his edicts as middle-man between your consciousness and your existence. (p. 936)

Zach loved those passages. Like John Galt, he just wanted people to think. Take the information, the facts. Observe, listen, discuss, question and analyze. And THINK. Then make choices. And keep thinking. But don’t let others do your thinking for you. THINK. Because if people keep thinking, there is hope for the future.

*****

Zach loved what Rand said about the truth. He also loved her analysis and interpretations regarding God and religion.

In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand has John Galt say:

The good, say the mystics of spirit, is God, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man’s power to conceive – a definition that invalidates man’s consciousness and nullifies its concepts of existence… Man’s mind, say the mystics of spirit, must be subordinated to the will of God…. Man’s standard of value, says the mystics of spirit, is the pleasure of God, whose standards are beyond man’s power of comprehension and must be accepted on faith…The purpose of man’s life, say both, is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question. His reward, say the mystics of spirit, will be given to him beyond the grave. (944)

For centuries, the mystics of spirit had existed by running a protection racket - by making life on earth unbearable, then charging you for consolation and relief, by forbidding all the virtues that make existence possible, then riding on the shoulders of your guilt, by declaring production and joy to be sins, then collecting blackmail from the sinners. (955)

All your gang of mystics, of spirit or muscle, are fighting one another for power to rule you, snarling that love is the solution for all the problems of your spirit .... (960)

Every dictator is a mystic, and every mystic is a potential dictator. A mystic craves obedience from men, not their agreement. He wants them to surrender their consciousness to his assertions, his edicts, his wishes, his whims - as his consciousness is surrendered to theirs… (961)

Zach also noted these passages Rand wrote about free will and the supernatural:
From the rites of the jungle witch-doctors, which distorted reality into grotesque absurdities, stunted the minds of their victims and kept them in terror of the supernatural for stagnant stretches of centuries - to the supernatural doctrines of the Middle Ages, which kept men huddling on the mud floors of their hovels, in terror that the devil might steal the soup they had worked eighteen hours to earn ......who assures you that you have no means of perception and must blindly obey the omnipotent will of that supernatural force ....

But it cannot be done to you without your consent. If you permit it to be done, you deserve it.” (960)

At the crossroads of the choice between ‘I know’ and ‘They say,’ he chose the authority of others, he chose to submit rather than to understand, to believe rather than to think. Faith in the supernatural begins as faith in the superiority of others. His surrender took the form of the feeling that he must hide his lack of understanding, that others possess some mysterious knowledge of which he alone is deprived, that reality is whatever they want it to be, through some means forever denied to him.

From then on, afraid to think, he is left at the mercy of unidentified feelings.

Every period ruled by mystics was an era of stagnation and want, when most men were on strike against existence, working for their barest survival, leaving nothing but scraps for their rulers to loot, refusing to think, to venture, to produce, when the ultimate collector of their profits and the final authority on truth or error was the whim of some gilded degenerate sanctioned as superior to reason by divine right and by grace of a club. The road of human history was a string of blank-outs over sterile stretches eroded by faith and force, with only a few brief bursts of sunlight, when the released energy of the mind performed the wonders you gaped at, admired and promptly extinguished again. (967)

The mystics of both schools, who preach the creed of sacrifice, are germs that attack you through a single sore; your fear of relying on your mind. They tell you that they possess a means of knowledge higher than the mind, a mode of consciousness superior to reason- like a special pull with some bureaucrat of the universe who gives them secret tips withheld from others. The mystics of spirit declare that they possess an extra sense you lack: this special sixth sense consists of contradicting the whole of the knowledge of your five…...demand that you invalidate your own consciousness and surrender yourself into their power.

They claim that they perceive a mode of being superior to your existence on this earth. The mystics of spirit call it ‘another dimension,’ which consist of denying dimensions…. All their identifications consist of negating: God is that which no human mind can know, they say – and proceed to demand that you consider it knowledge – God is non-man, heaven is non-earth, soul is non-body, virtue is non-profit….Their definitions are not acts of defining, but of wiping out. (951)

There is no honest revolt against reason – and when you accept any part of their creed, your motive is to get away with something your reason would not permit you to attempt. (952)

How many people could read these words or think these thoughts, and still allow others to tell them what to do, what to believe, and how to think? As Zach well realized, lots of folks were willing to do just that – assume others are more intelligent and superior than they are, and that others had some inside information from God that they were not privy to. And then, because they were inferior, they would do and believe as these other “superior” beings told them to.

Atlas Shrugged, a classic from over 50 years ago, proved to be a great source of information for Zach. Another great source was a much more recent source, but just as valuable. During his Internet searches, Zach came across a website called www.truthbeknown.com.

The name caught his eye, and directed him to a goldmine of information. At this website, he also found information about a book called The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold. The website and the book were both written by Acharya S. They proved to be very insightful and well researched, and they asked lots of questions and provided many answers for the thinking individual.

As always, Zach dug in and went to work.

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