(a.k.a.: God is Great!)
Now before you get scared that we at PeasantWatch are going off the deep end, please stop and think about why you think so. To be LL4, you’ll have to realize that you have no idea, and that you have no rational explanation except that I titled this post “Allah Akbar”. If that seems reason enough to dub us as psychos, then you might want to consider how you’d react if you saw a blog post titled “God is Great”. Some of you may have shouted “Amen, Brother!”…until you saw that I was quoting what countless terrorists have said right before ending hundreds, sometimes thousands, of innocent lives. The only exception would have been that it was in English, not Arabic.
So while I hope you can take this as a lesson in (at least) LL4, I also hope the title got your attention. …and maybe got your blood boiling, too. Our blood boils too when we think of terrorists, 9/11, innocent children crying in vain for their parents, and so much bloodshed over nothing but stupid selfishness. It’s not right, and the more we can do to stop such barbarism, the better.
But I heard recently that Congress is investigating Islamic Radicalization, or basically, they are trying to find out what is it about Islam that turns devout followers into mass-murderers? We can’t say it’s just their Eastern Culture, because there have been white Western converts who have done the same things, and Easterners who haven't! We also can’t say that the Koran is somehow evil, because (from what I’ve read and heard so far) it teaches good things about how to be a good person! In fact, I have found less doctrine about killing in the Koran than I have in the Bible, and yet we don’t see too many Christians committing terrorist acts...these days. So what is it? Well, as would be expected, such a complicated question has a complicated answer, and so we can’t answer it with large brush strokes. There are a lot of very good American Muslims who I have the highest respect for, and I doubt they appreciate the all-encompassing judgments that are so often thrown upon them. I want to be fair, not equal, to everyone, and so let’s focus on the deepest human layer: Human Nature, or the Life Levels.
Just like everyone else, some Muslims read and follow the Koran and the writings of Prophet Muhammad out of selfish, sometimes even malicious, LL1 reasons. They see that there’s something to gain over others from such devotion, and they take full advantage of it. Now not every Muslim is like this, just as not every Christian is like this with the Bible. But boy, is there ever an onslaught of preachers who bend, twist, and even brake the doctrine of the Bible for money, fame, or to satisfy sexual appetites. Some have even killed because, according to them, “the Bible said so”. That could be due to other Life Levels besides LL1, but I just want to make the point that there are Christians who are just as horrible as those particular Muslims are.
There are yet other Muslims (and Christians, and those of other faiths), who are made into nasty puppets of the LL1 Muslims because of their LL2 nature. While fewer in this Life Level may actually be responsible for terrorism, largely because it would depend on who the LL2 Muslim is looking up to, there have still been many brutal killings and the like by LL2 people of various religions. And there are even less LL3 Muslims who are terrorists because even though they keep strictly to their particular code of right and wrong, no one can sway them with peer pressure or false doctrine (LL2), and they’re not in it for themselves (LL1). So an LL3 terrorist would be someone who honestly has the perception and belief that killing infidels is right, regardless of what they gain or lose (in this life or the next), or how they look to their peers. To our knowledge, there are actually very few of these kinds of people who mercilessly kill others. They are still there, but they are notably fewer in number.
Now, I’d like to take a moment and cover something I discovered while read the Koran. Yes, after all the things I’ve been hearing about Muslims in the media, I decided that enough was enough, and so I checked out what appeared to be the most complete Koran from my local library. I also checked out The Koran for Dummies as an additional supplement to aide my understanding of Islam. So far, I have been very impressed with what I’ve found. It would seem to me that the purpose of the Koran is to help and train a person to operate according to a complete connection with God, or in other words, it helps them attain LL5. Understandably, no book can really train you any further through the Life Levels than that, simply because of how they work and what they entail. Yes, you can have books (and blog posts) explain those higher Life Levels, but the actual training becomes an intensely personal matter between you and your Creator after that point. So the Koran teaches and helps people reach LL5, which is great, right? Well, yes and no. It is great…as long as you’re ready for it. In other words, it's good as long as you’re LL4 enough to use the information in the Koran.
Just like with reading a fiction novel, a non-fiction treatise, watching a movie, conversing with someone, or doing anything else, what people do with information they receive is based entirely on their Life Level. One’s Life Level is not a measurement of their devotion, but rather it is a measurement and description of why they are devoted in that way. So you can understand that out of five equally devoted Muslims, by far the scariest one to meet would be the one who is devoted out of sheer self-service and self-gratification (LL1), followed by the one who is devoted in order to please family, friends, or neighbors (LL2). Potentially less scary than that would be one who is devoted out of honor, and also because it fits his current understanding of right and wrong (LL3). A Muslim who is fully devoted because of careful empirical thought, and always remains open to unfamiliar knowledge (LL4), would be an even better person to meet (and would be extremely unlikely to participate in any terrorist activities). And finally, a Muslim who was devoted to Islam because they were so directed by God (LL5), would actually be the very best of the five to meet. But that’s just where things get sticky: Here we have Life Level 1, 2, or 3 Muslims claiming to receive revelation from God in an LL5 way, and claim then that God told them to blow up that building or shoot those people. So how do we tell who’s really LL5 and who isn’t?
I said earlier that it would be extremely unlikely for an LL4 Muslim to be a terrorist. That’s because anyone who’s LL4 would try everything possible first before resorting to violence. They’d realize that these other people are people with families, lives, and dreams just like them, and so they’d first do everything else they could think of to solve whatever problem they see. An LL4 person, of any religion, would see that talking, voting, spreading the word, and communicating in any constructive ways would have much better long-term effects than just blowing something up. And if some lower Life Level person tried to claim “But Allah commands it!”, the LL4 person would look objectively into it and see if God actually did command it, or if only the LL1 leader did.
Remember, each Life Level carries with it every good aspect of the previous Life Level. So if anyone of any religion tries to claim that God told them such-n-such, observe them for a bit…do they have a shred of LL4 in them? Are they fully open to opposing views and things they don’t yet know? Or are they rigid in their beliefs, trying to please others, or just trying to please themselves? What is their underlying motivation behind “God told me…”? We cannot skip any Life Levels, whether we’re Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, agnostics, or even atheists. And the liars will be found out when we observe whether or not they have skipped any of the Life Levels below where they’re claiming to be.
In summary, here’s what I hope you’ll take from this post:
First, that Islam and the Koran are both very good and I would suggest you read the Koran so as to more fully understand your Muslim neighbor (though at this time I’m still in the middle of it).
Second, that we at PeasantWatch are not Muslim, nor are we considering converting. We're very strong in our own faith.
Third, that depending on the Life Level of each individual Muslim, they can be either good, bad, or somewhere in between…just like everyone else.
Fourth, that Bad/Mediocre Muslim + Devotion to Islam = Death, Destruction, and Darkness.
Fifth, that Bad/Mediocre Christian (or anyone else) + Devotion to Christianity (or anything else) = Death, Destruction, and Darkness.
Sixth, that bad, devoted people of any religion will try to justify their actions by saying that “God told me to do it.”
Seventh, that since no Life Level can be skipped, you can identify someone who lies about revelation from God by checking to see if they hold any of the good parts of the previous Life Levels or not.
And eighth, that God truly is great. Whether you call him Allah, or Jesus, or Lord, or anything else, He really is wonderful. Those who are stuck in LLs 1-3 try to destroy and discredit that, but it still doesn’t change the facts. Consider this yet another call for everyone of every religion, political party, cultural background, and ethnicity to change their Human Nature, their Life Level, to LL4. Only then will we finally be able to permanently keep things like this and this* from ever happening again.
Now before you get scared that we at PeasantWatch are going off the deep end, please stop and think about why you think so. To be LL4, you’ll have to realize that you have no idea, and that you have no rational explanation except that I titled this post “Allah Akbar”. If that seems reason enough to dub us as psychos, then you might want to consider how you’d react if you saw a blog post titled “God is Great”. Some of you may have shouted “Amen, Brother!”…until you saw that I was quoting what countless terrorists have said right before ending hundreds, sometimes thousands, of innocent lives. The only exception would have been that it was in English, not Arabic.
So while I hope you can take this as a lesson in (at least) LL4, I also hope the title got your attention. …and maybe got your blood boiling, too. Our blood boils too when we think of terrorists, 9/11, innocent children crying in vain for their parents, and so much bloodshed over nothing but stupid selfishness. It’s not right, and the more we can do to stop such barbarism, the better.
But I heard recently that Congress is investigating Islamic Radicalization, or basically, they are trying to find out what is it about Islam that turns devout followers into mass-murderers? We can’t say it’s just their Eastern Culture, because there have been white Western converts who have done the same things, and Easterners who haven't! We also can’t say that the Koran is somehow evil, because (from what I’ve read and heard so far) it teaches good things about how to be a good person! In fact, I have found less doctrine about killing in the Koran than I have in the Bible, and yet we don’t see too many Christians committing terrorist acts...these days. So what is it? Well, as would be expected, such a complicated question has a complicated answer, and so we can’t answer it with large brush strokes. There are a lot of very good American Muslims who I have the highest respect for, and I doubt they appreciate the all-encompassing judgments that are so often thrown upon them. I want to be fair, not equal, to everyone, and so let’s focus on the deepest human layer: Human Nature, or the Life Levels.
Just like everyone else, some Muslims read and follow the Koran and the writings of Prophet Muhammad out of selfish, sometimes even malicious, LL1 reasons. They see that there’s something to gain over others from such devotion, and they take full advantage of it. Now not every Muslim is like this, just as not every Christian is like this with the Bible. But boy, is there ever an onslaught of preachers who bend, twist, and even brake the doctrine of the Bible for money, fame, or to satisfy sexual appetites. Some have even killed because, according to them, “the Bible said so”. That could be due to other Life Levels besides LL1, but I just want to make the point that there are Christians who are just as horrible as those particular Muslims are.
There are yet other Muslims (and Christians, and those of other faiths), who are made into nasty puppets of the LL1 Muslims because of their LL2 nature. While fewer in this Life Level may actually be responsible for terrorism, largely because it would depend on who the LL2 Muslim is looking up to, there have still been many brutal killings and the like by LL2 people of various religions. And there are even less LL3 Muslims who are terrorists because even though they keep strictly to their particular code of right and wrong, no one can sway them with peer pressure or false doctrine (LL2), and they’re not in it for themselves (LL1). So an LL3 terrorist would be someone who honestly has the perception and belief that killing infidels is right, regardless of what they gain or lose (in this life or the next), or how they look to their peers. To our knowledge, there are actually very few of these kinds of people who mercilessly kill others. They are still there, but they are notably fewer in number.
Now, I’d like to take a moment and cover something I discovered while read the Koran. Yes, after all the things I’ve been hearing about Muslims in the media, I decided that enough was enough, and so I checked out what appeared to be the most complete Koran from my local library. I also checked out The Koran for Dummies as an additional supplement to aide my understanding of Islam. So far, I have been very impressed with what I’ve found. It would seem to me that the purpose of the Koran is to help and train a person to operate according to a complete connection with God, or in other words, it helps them attain LL5. Understandably, no book can really train you any further through the Life Levels than that, simply because of how they work and what they entail. Yes, you can have books (and blog posts) explain those higher Life Levels, but the actual training becomes an intensely personal matter between you and your Creator after that point. So the Koran teaches and helps people reach LL5, which is great, right? Well, yes and no. It is great…as long as you’re ready for it. In other words, it's good as long as you’re LL4 enough to use the information in the Koran.
Just like with reading a fiction novel, a non-fiction treatise, watching a movie, conversing with someone, or doing anything else, what people do with information they receive is based entirely on their Life Level. One’s Life Level is not a measurement of their devotion, but rather it is a measurement and description of why they are devoted in that way. So you can understand that out of five equally devoted Muslims, by far the scariest one to meet would be the one who is devoted out of sheer self-service and self-gratification (LL1), followed by the one who is devoted in order to please family, friends, or neighbors (LL2). Potentially less scary than that would be one who is devoted out of honor, and also because it fits his current understanding of right and wrong (LL3). A Muslim who is fully devoted because of careful empirical thought, and always remains open to unfamiliar knowledge (LL4), would be an even better person to meet (and would be extremely unlikely to participate in any terrorist activities). And finally, a Muslim who was devoted to Islam because they were so directed by God (LL5), would actually be the very best of the five to meet. But that’s just where things get sticky: Here we have Life Level 1, 2, or 3 Muslims claiming to receive revelation from God in an LL5 way, and claim then that God told them to blow up that building or shoot those people. So how do we tell who’s really LL5 and who isn’t?
I said earlier that it would be extremely unlikely for an LL4 Muslim to be a terrorist. That’s because anyone who’s LL4 would try everything possible first before resorting to violence. They’d realize that these other people are people with families, lives, and dreams just like them, and so they’d first do everything else they could think of to solve whatever problem they see. An LL4 person, of any religion, would see that talking, voting, spreading the word, and communicating in any constructive ways would have much better long-term effects than just blowing something up. And if some lower Life Level person tried to claim “But Allah commands it!”, the LL4 person would look objectively into it and see if God actually did command it, or if only the LL1 leader did.
Remember, each Life Level carries with it every good aspect of the previous Life Level. So if anyone of any religion tries to claim that God told them such-n-such, observe them for a bit…do they have a shred of LL4 in them? Are they fully open to opposing views and things they don’t yet know? Or are they rigid in their beliefs, trying to please others, or just trying to please themselves? What is their underlying motivation behind “God told me…”? We cannot skip any Life Levels, whether we’re Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, agnostics, or even atheists. And the liars will be found out when we observe whether or not they have skipped any of the Life Levels below where they’re claiming to be.
In summary, here’s what I hope you’ll take from this post:
First, that Islam and the Koran are both very good and I would suggest you read the Koran so as to more fully understand your Muslim neighbor (though at this time I’m still in the middle of it).
Second, that we at PeasantWatch are not Muslim, nor are we considering converting. We're very strong in our own faith.
Third, that depending on the Life Level of each individual Muslim, they can be either good, bad, or somewhere in between…just like everyone else.
Fourth, that Bad/Mediocre Muslim + Devotion to Islam = Death, Destruction, and Darkness.
Fifth, that Bad/Mediocre Christian (or anyone else) + Devotion to Christianity (or anything else) = Death, Destruction, and Darkness.
Sixth, that bad, devoted people of any religion will try to justify their actions by saying that “God told me to do it.”
Seventh, that since no Life Level can be skipped, you can identify someone who lies about revelation from God by checking to see if they hold any of the good parts of the previous Life Levels or not.
And eighth, that God truly is great. Whether you call him Allah, or Jesus, or Lord, or anything else, He really is wonderful. Those who are stuck in LLs 1-3 try to destroy and discredit that, but it still doesn’t change the facts. Consider this yet another call for everyone of every religion, political party, cultural background, and ethnicity to change their Human Nature, their Life Level, to LL4. Only then will we finally be able to permanently keep things like this and this* from ever happening again.
*As a side note, I realize that the second video, the one showing the people harrassing the Muslim man while he's praying, is a much smaller deal than the 9/11 attacks. But just like all brutality and murders to people of different races and nationalities, they always start small, and they always involve the kind of bigotry, hatred, and prejudice that is so common among those who are no higher than LL3.
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