"Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." - Exodus 22:18 This Biblical passage was used to justify some of the greatest injustices ever seen on this planet. The Christians of the Medieval and Renaissance periods used it to justify demonizing or torturing or burning at the stake anyone who was "off the radar" of mainstream society. Women living alone. "Uppity" women. Scientists. Astrologers and alchemists. Priests and nuns who would not bow to dogma and the God-given Authority of the Church. And above all heretics, those who challenged the Divine Right of the Church to claim Divinity, and sole access to Divinity.
The passage was brought to the New World by Prot- estants, who had been chased out of every country in Europe for (as Alex put it so well today) repre- senting the stypic buttplug approach to morality and spirituality. It landed in full force in Salem, Massachusetts, where Cotton Mather and his Puritan ilk used it as an excuse to persecute and press to death (no burnings there...they were "civilized" and threw the supposed witches and warlocks into a hole and piled rocks on them until they suffocated from the pressure) the same sorts of people. So what is the TM movement counterpart of "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live?" I propose, given the evidence of the TMO's long history and this discussion group, that Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's and the TM movement's variant of this tried and still untrue piece of shit...uh, sorry... dogma is "Thou shalt not suffer a TM critic to be thought well of." Is this not the recurring theme we see over and over in the TMO? Is it not the recurring theme we see on this group? Those who have taken the mantle of Defending That Which Only An Idiot Would Try To Defend onto their own shoulders run this number day in and day out here, and the TMO lawyers run it on a larger scale in public. Whenever someone criticizes them or their belief system or their organization or above all their access to money, their *first impulse* is to try to destroy the credibility of the person who is doing the criticisizing. Their second impulse, when that doesn't work, is to become insanely jealous and out of control every time the critic is treated as if he or she were a thinking human being, or worse, a cool human being. Nothing pushes the TM TB's buttons more than to see one of their enemies being liked. It's as if the mere *possibility* that someone accepts or -- <crossing myself to ward off evil> -- actually *likes* a TM critic sends the compul- sive TM Defender into paroxisyms of jealousy and spite. THEY GO CRAZY. And their next impulse is to lash out, to do some- thing -- anything -- that will restore the social order, "bring things back into accord with the Laws Of Nature," reveal this evildoer (who *must* be one because he believes something different than the TM TBs believe) to "justice." He or she *must* be discredited, or if the TM Defenders cannot do that, they must *claim* that the critic has been discredited. And who are these claims *made* to? Not the objective and fairly dispassionate lurkers. They are capable of -- and have always been capable of -- coming to their own conclusions about posters on this forum, be they TM supporters or TM critics. What the compulsive TM Defenders have to say in their attempts to demonize the critics probably isn't going to affect them much one way or another. No, the appeal of the TM Defender is to *Other TM Defenders*, or to those they want to recruit to that cause. And if you watch the traffic here on FFL, those are the *only* people who play "pile on" and "reward" the demonizers for their efforts. It's called "preaching to the converted." Which, interestingly, is pretty much the only people that the TMO or its compulsive Defenders *can* preach to any more. Those who can think for themselves do so. The only people who fall for "Demonize the critic" are those who are already programmed to do so. Just my opinion... "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use." -- Galileo Galilei, from God and Reason, hounded and demonized during his life by the same sorts of people
