Is there a difference between baptism and waterboarding?
This was a fun little question I asked the Thomas group who study the Gospel of Thomas together. I wondered if I was the only person who had thought of this yet, so I typed it into Google to see if someone else had made the connection. Not many, but there was this one guy's opinion of forming a new religion with waterboarding as it's initiation rite.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/grayson-daughters/ralph-reed-and-john-mccai_b_107585.html
This has been a powerful intuition for me. I remember being baptisted in the Baptist church of a small town on the coastal plains of North Carolina. The baptismal was just a hole in the floor underneath where the preach stood to deliver his sermons. When the time came to baptize initiates, they removed a heavy plank cover off the tank underneath the altar, and dunked people there.
I'm trying to recall whether or not the preacher did what was necessary to induce the drowning reaction. I was nine years old. When I watched this video of a journalist voluntarily undergoing waterboarding to find out for himself whether it was torture or not, I realized the truth of my experience and how these so-called "charismatics" had their way with me.
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/08/hitchens200808
I don't know if you remember or not, but years ago I discovered that my real goal in my spiritual quest was to discover how these sorts of people had made me so vulnerable to their religion. Now I know.
I've written about how doctors still use the same practices of the shamans and medicine men by scaring people into healing themselves. They use all sorts of chemotherapy and radiation treatments to accomplish a healing. Why fuck around? Waterboarding is about the scariest thing some claim can happen to people. Any doctor who really wanted to use the art of medicine to get rich and famous would take up waterboarding right away. Watch the video. The equipment they use is dirt cheap. No damage from either chemicals or radiation burns for the "patient" to deal with after the process/ritual is completed, and the fear appears to be so real that either it cures you or kills you. Quite naturally, the customer would have to sign a paper... oh, that's right... they already do.
Healing, I suppose, is the physician himself at work at his own ills. I don't know how a physician could heal himself by waterboarding. The mechanics of it are for all practical purposes impossible to manage. Besides, if waterboarding is the best technique available for inducing the healing state, it should be simple enough to gather a self help group together where each member is waterboarded by the others to get things done easily and correctly.
The most fascinating thing for me, of course, is that each of us appear to have the facility to heal ourselves. How crazy it must be for a person being tortured to death to realize at some point in his dying moments, that he had to ability to make things different all along, and just never took the chance to save himself by throwing his life away in order to induce the fear necessary to get things done. Now, I know why I jumped off that 800 cliff in Yosemite National Park, and why I survived it without a scratch on my body.
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
