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This blog will likely offend a great many people. I assure you the intention is not to create anger and resentment but to get you to think for and by yourselves.

Thinking for yourself is not always easy in the hyped up media world of today. Mind control and subliminal manipulation of the mind are practiced by big business and by big government.

Then there are the religious orders of the world. As a believer you are taught how not to think but to accept. Faith can be a wonderful supporting influence in ours lives but accepting dogma without giving it any thought at all is not such a good thing for your personal development.

Having strong religious beliefs is fine as it helps many to operate their lives with a beneficial moral code of conduct but one should study a religion so that you really know what it is you say that you believe in.

Colleges and universities have a steady flow of young minds to shape and to mold. While education is supposed to teach one how to reason and to think the temptation to teach with a hidden agenda in mind is too great for many educators to resist.

Especially if the professors are on the governments payroll one way or the other. Research grants can be corruptive in nature even to a respected academian.

Mind control is not anything new. Governments have for thousands of years found it useful to have populations of citizens who will blindly accept whatever the government wants them to accept. It’s amazing that otherwise peaceful citizens will blindly follow orders even to the point of marching off all together to kill and plunder people whom they perhaps had not even thought about much before they were told that they are enemies and should be destroyed.

The herd instinct is truly scary. People will believe almost anything if a BIG LIE is repeated often enough and they will do things in a mob that they would never do on their own. Everyone needs to learn to think independently and stand up for what is right, not for what everyone else is doing. And that unfortunately is not so easy for most poor humans to do.

First of all you must have beliefs that are truly yours, that have been reasoned out, that you are entirely comfortable with. Then you have a foundation in place to help you to reject the poison or perhaps only silliness that others are trying to force you to accept. You really do need to know what you believe in and why to be your own master in this world.

I challenge you to take part in a short mind expanding exercise. Take a sheet of paper and draw a line right down the middle, creating two columns. Make the title of the left column “What I Believe”. The title of the second column is “Why?” Then down the page make a list of the things that you feel you have strong beliefs about.

These could include form of government, religion, marriage, relationships, investments, immigration and immigrants, stem cell research, abortion, and so forth. Anything that you feel strongly about.

This may sound like a silly exercise but bear with me. If you take a little time to think about your areas of strong beliefs and then honestly write down the “why” you will likely be surprised to learn that often you don’t know exactly why. You have been conditioned over the years to respond without thinking.

If your response is a conditioned reflex response you can even complete the exercise without thinking. You just write down the whys according to the party line. However, you should have something working inside your consciousness that will make you feel uneasy if you answer too quickly and too glibly.

It’s just not so easy to really know the why about the way we think. To really, honestly know the why requires some careful thought.

For example, Americans are repeatedly told by our politicians that we have the greatest country in the world, we are the richest, the most productive, the most democratic. So the believe is that America is the greatest country ever and remains so until this very day. Of course, citizens of other countries are told very much the same thing by their leaders.

But when we get to the whys we find that as is the case with many grand sweeping statements the facts are just not there to support the claim.
Probably if you are an American you have not thought too much about the why. You just happily accepted what the politicians told you. The fact that greatest means different things to people in different cultures complicates things as well. On my. This may be harder than you first thought.
There are measurable things that statisticians and demographers point to in estimating living conditions and living standards in a country. One of them is life expectancy. Generally, The higher the life expectancy, the better shape a country is in. Currently, micro states Andorra, San Marino, and Singapore along with Japan have the world’s highest life expectancies (83.5, 82.1, 81.6 and 81.15, respectively).

According to the US Department of Health and Human Services life expectancy in the year 2004 for the US was : 77.9 years. So the US is near the top of the list but more than three years less than the number four country, Japan.

Another measure of the condition that a country is in are infant mortality rates. These are expressed in deaths per thousand births. You would think that with all of the attention to health care in the US and the high expense of health care services that surely here we can believe the politicians. The US should be at or near the top of the list, right?

This is a shocker. The facts as presented by GeographyIQ taken from the U.S. Dept. of State and the CIA World Fact Book of 2002 show Singapore in the number one position (lowest deaths per 1,000 births) and the US in the number 36 position. Even Cuba is ahead of the US. Castro must relish this fact.

I could go on but I’m sure that you get the idea. When it comes to “whys” the facts often just don’t match up with the publics beliefs and certainly not with the politicians self serving statements. While the US is most certainly a great country saying that it is the greatest over and over is really meaningless unless you have facts to back the statement up. In addition, facts are not that easy to compare between countries as statistics are collected and  massaged in different ways in different countries.  Once again the “why” can be difficult to back up in a senseable reasoned way.
The point of this blog is that if you have and express strong beliefs about anything of importance you should have completed a good bit of research and given your beliefs a good bit of independent thought before living your life as if they are true.
Upon close examination you will likely find that many of the “truths” that we are expected to accept are at best half truths or distortions or are not at all true.

To lead your own life you must have the courage and the energy to think for yourself. By examining what you believe and why you may well find you will have a lot of thinking to do. The exercise is worthwhile and empowering. You will find that you will operate at a higher level of consciousness and most certainly will learn a lot about yourself and the world around you.

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