Stilly - Whaddy mean..."I tried" Are you feeling ignored? ;-)

Look, you said a lot of good stuff there. Yeah, the separation of church and state seems like a darned good idea to me. The present alliance you have in the USA between neocon politicians and a certain form of simplistic literalist Christianity is simply extraordinary. You won't find anything really comparable in any other western democracy at this time, I don't think. It's bizarre.

Therefore, it seems to be an exclusively American problem, and a BIG one.

But the REAL opiate of the masses nowadays is the other thing you mentioned, "the mass consumption of material goods". That is the opiate that is driving society, running the economy, and wrecking the material world.

As for the "Feed the Pig" thing...yeah. Right on. People in this society are constantly encouraged and seduced into spending themselves into debt. They are given credit cards to encourage them to spend money that they don't yet have, and that's done to keep the wheels of production turning and to hit them with interest charges when they are late paying. It's utter irresponsibility, encouraged from the top down with a ceaseless flow of advertising, and it's done so those at the top can get richer.

My Dad fed into that system perfectly. He spent money like it was water. He was always in debt. Heavily in debt. He finally left this world leaving nothing much but a whole bunch of unpaid debts in his wake. My Mother, fortunately, was not inclined that way in the least. She saves money. So do I. Neither one of us has ever been in debt so far in our whole lives...and let's hope it stays that way.

I do not buy today what I cannot afford today, it's that simple. I pay all bills in full by their due date. The credit card companies hate people like me. ;-)

Do I have too many material possessions? Yeah. A few too many. I'm a North American. I've seen how Third Worlders live, and I'm spoiled with unnecessary possessions to some extent (although far less than many of my peers have, that's for sure). I've kept things fairly simple for a North American.

*****

Past lives. I have had memories of being...an Indian warrior out west somewhere...a young, shy middle class woman in Victorian England...a military pilot in one of the World Wars...a minor officer in the infantry in another war...a traveling minstrel in the medieval times... All of those lives were fairly ordinary on the surface, but they all had their joys and challenges, I'm sure. The value of a life is not determined by your fame or your social standing, it is determined by the growth of character, awareness, and consciousness, moulded through experience.