Hi Mike,

Thanks for the encouragement about the site. Yes, humankind has slid into the extreme depths of materialism, where the illumination of spiritual awareness is a dim point of light, far above in a darkened sky. In the West, Christianity substituted the church for Jesus' teachings, and people ceased their spiritual progression toward the compassion, love, and brotherhood Christ modeled. When rationalism and science found that humankind doesn't need the church to understand the universe, they discarded the church and the church's God altogether. Two world wars dimmed the church's flame even further in Europe. In the United States, Christianity, always eager to adapt itself to fit the culture and political climate, assumed the contours of capitalism with ease. Today, Christians are as firmly materialist as their atheist and agnostic neighbors. They have little feeling of brotherhood, have a list of people to exclude and abhor, focus on gaining material belongings and wealth, and have such a great fear of death that they whisper about it briefly at funerals, then avoid mentioning it at any other time, even when with someone who is dying.

Committees will be formed to try to find a way to stem the rise of school shootings and violence among ever-younger groups of children. They will fail. The violence will increase unabated. People are looking for material answers in material resources to a material problem. The problem isn't material; it's spiritual.

Of course, when people hear "spiritual," they think the speaker is a Bible thumper. "Spiritual" is to most synonymous with church, and especially fundamentalist church. They don't realize that being spiritual means growing to be compassionate, loving, peaceful, and unafraid of death. We shouldn't say a person "is" spiritual; instead, a person is "growing" spiritually.

And, as you say, fundamental to being able to loosen the grip of the physical realm and travel towards the illumination of the spiritual is the knowledge that Earth is just a nursery where we're prepared for continued spiritual development. Our progression is eternal, and where we are when we leave the Earthly plane will determine where we continue when we step into the next realm. If people only realized that, they could relax their hold on the physical realm and see that the greater their compulsion to consume mindlessly, the deeper into the cold, violent, lonely, cruel depths of this abyss they fall.

If children are to stop killing children, we as a society need to stop believing and acting as though people are separate and that whatever someone can get from life at whatever cost is all that matters. We need to stop teaching children to compete, be violent, believe others to be enemies, and grab all they can get because only possessions have value in life. Most of all, we need to stop teaching them that death is the end of existence and there is nothing spiritual in the universe. When we, as a species, grow to know that we are all one, in an eternal brotherhood, and at death we step quietly into another realm where we'll look back at who we were and what we did on the Earth plane, and there continue our growth, then violence, loneliness, cruelty, and the fear of death will quite naturally disappear. We won't need to have committees to address the problem.

Until we grow beyond materialism, we will continue to see greater violence, destruction, and separation of peoples. Only understanding our eternal nature as one family can result in that growth, and the transformation of humankind.

Craig