QED, or the "State Spanking"

Such Things Do Not Exist, Come Now!

QED, or the “State Spanking”

by Claude-Gérard Sarrazin, writer, trainer and lecturer

In our society “freed from superstition”, “emerged from archaic thought”, the “belief in supraphysical universes and in the paranormal facts deriving from them is on the way to disappearing”. Such at least is the assertion often read or heard. The success of books and films dealing with the supernatural and the paranormal tends to demonstrate the contrary.

The popular press, the “serious” media, the specialised press, and the School on the quiet - everything leagues together to achieve the eviction of whatever touches the “paranormal”, the spiritual, the religious. The adjective “sectarian” stigmatises “the enemy of the people” (in whose name one speaks, of course; he is regularly consulted by telepathy, without any doubt).

I use quotation marks because these expressions are consecrated by usage and cover nothing I can take seriously.

I am going to attempt to lift a corner of the veil and show the underside of the cards, at least what I can know of it. It will be discovered that the argument from authority does not hesitate to twist logic and impose itself by abrupt assertion. This will be a mini-lesson in epistemology, such as I used to offer my senior pupils a very long time ago, such as all holders of the baccalaureate ought to have as habit and automatic practice. I ask the indulgence of professional philosophers accustomed to this kind of exercise.

In what way do these philosophical quibbles concern the good citizen?

One begins by creating a consensus: atheism is the State religion, the philosophy of modern man, freed from his old demons. Then one defends “the good citizen” against the perverts who, in the name of freedom of thought, threaten public order by swelling the army of the retrograde cults. Once the approach manoeuvres are well oiled, one will perhaps prohibit, as in the USSR of old, every form of religiosity, every form of spirituality, every “retrograde” publication; in passing, one will prohibit the alternative medicines and “organic” agriculture, which seem to disturb well-established industries and privileges.

The origin of these targeted and progressive attacks is, for the moment, vague and multiform. Even a minister cannot show himself in a church or on a pilgrimage without suffering the furious attacks of the “defenders of liberty”. An elected official must represent “the people” (which elected him, or the category of elite citizens which…).

If we do not watch out, the French motto Liberty-Equality-Fraternity will soon be part of mythology, on the same footing as the chansons de geste of the Middle Ages.

Let us see, then, the procedure used at the start, that of institutional demonstration.

Epistemology

The positivists, the materialists (in the philosophical sense of the term), the “serious minds”, the rationalists, the reductionists generally express themselves thus: “Reality is the physical world, the material universe. The true is what my senses perceive.”

In the name of this assertion that brooks no reply, a whole part of so-called civilised (conditioned?) humanity condemns supraphysical realities (the bases of religious beliefs, religious rites, so-called cultic groupings, etc.).

Nevertheless, all educated minds know that matter dissolves into an infinity of ever more tenuous particles, so that the term “matter” now covers only a vague but convenient concept. The material universe is…? And yet the senses of the normal man perceive matter as a monolith without flaws.

The senses (everyone’s, scientists included) perceive a Sun turning around the Earth, and the capricious planets running through the sky like anarchists (from the Greek planêtês, wandering star), while the stars are perceived as diamonds stuck on a dark vault that lights up by day.

Man’s senses perceive colours as real entities and not as particular frequencies. Sounds, noises, timbres are perceived as real entities and not as simple or combined frequencies. Smells are not perceived as an arrangement of a small number of basic molecules.

So the trained mind reconstructs the “reality perceived by the senses” and systematically contradicts all the “evident” perceptions. Why then should the reality reconstructed by the reductionist mind be more authentic than the reality perceived and defined by the spiritualists and other expanding minds? The “reality” constructed by the mind is not perceived but necessarily invented and modified as discoveries proceed.

One therefore cannot assert, without covering oneself in ridicule: “Reality is the physical world, the material universe. The true is what my senses perceive.” Reality is what my mind invents.

To this kind of (oh how disturbing) demonstration, the riposte has been:

“Esotericism and the religions are based on acts of faith; science is an act of knowledge and experience. Nobody can verify the sayings of the occultists, magi and theurgists without becoming a so-called occultist; whereas everyone can verify the sayings of the scientists.”

Let us begin by remarking that very few people could verify the slightest theory used in nuclear physics, in cutting-edge biochemistry, in theoretical astronomy, in virology, in teratology, etc.

In fact, each of us is forced to perform act of faith upon act of faith.

Permit me to take up an example of elementary epistemology that I taught thirty years ago. The example has perhaps aged; so much the better, it will inconvenience nobody.

It is accepted (and rare are those who could doubt it) that man has trodden the lunar soil.

Let us set “proofs” against objections:

1. The astronauts planted a flag on the Moon.

Did you accompany them to verify that this is a material fact and not a photo or a film?

2. They were seen leaving in their rocket.

Were you present at the moment they climbed aboard? Are you certain they really left in that rocket without disembarking on the other side?

3. They were recovered in the ocean on their return.

Are you certain it was a round trip to the Moon and not an orbit around the earth? Or a simple parachute drop from a thoroughly terrestrial aeroplane? Were you present at the recovery, to affirm they were there?

4. Television retransmitted their movements from the Moon.

Are you certain it was not a science-fiction film? Were you at their side?

5. Lunar rocks were brought back and laboratories analysed them.

Were you present at the gathering? Did you visit those laboratories? Are you certain these are not simple, thoroughly terrestrial pebbles?

6. Photos were published.

Have you never seen doctored photos? (Today one would speak of photo-retouching software.)

7. One does have to trust someone.

The great word is out: one must trust - we are back to the act of faith.

Why then can one decently believe that men have trodden the lunar soil?

Thanks to a converging bundle of proofs. The more numerous the proofs, the shorter the leap, the smaller the act of faith.

Each of us must therefore accept the converging bundle of proofs, for he cannot redo, on his own, all the steps that led to this or that accepted law or theory. To “demonstrate” that supraphysical (therefore immaterial) data are inadmissible, that bundle of proofs is rejected, on principle, by invoking the argument from authority. We shall see it further on.

One must therefore conclude that so-called scientific knowledge differs in nothing from so-called occult or paranormal or spiritual knowledge:

1- the “specialists” reconstruct a world totally different from the one our senses perceive; a logical but theoretical universe;

2- a set of proofs is assembled and one finishes with an act of faith.

Nothing can be proven directly, even in the most trivial world. Unless one redoes all the experiments oneself; and knowing that the mind will be forced to reconstruct everything (matter is not a dense block but an immaterial cloud, for example), one cannot accept any law, any fact whatsoever, as proven. That is how it is.

BUT the atheist fundamentalists will continue to deny. “Reality” is delimited by a series of gratuitous postulates, and everything that exceeds it is inadmissible, “scientifically impossible”. That is proven, since I say so, is it not? So-and-so, Nobel laureate in this or that, said it ex cathedra, therefore… But So-and-so, also a Nobel laureate, had said… Oh, he was a naive man, who let himself be taken in. The two scientists reconstructed the world differently; one is accepted, supported by the media (and “the silent majority” accepts), the other is muzzled, erased or attacked.

Let us see another channel of the negation.

The measuring instruments

Use a precision thermometer to evaluate the sound level of a loudspeaker? Use a Geiger counter to measure the speed of the wind? Who would dare to proceed thus? Everyone knows one must use the appropriate apparatus, in direct relation to what is to be evaluated.

When it is a matter of so-called supranormal realities (for the moment, so long as the materialist postulate remains in force), there is never any hesitation. Instruments totally inadequate by construction are used. Measuring instruments designed to measure material energies cannot measure anything else.

Let us take, to make ourselves understood, a few harmless examples.

Perceptions

A colour-blind person does not perceive colours in the same way as an individual with normal vision. Even more evidently, a myope does not perceive the landscape like an emmetrope, and a hypermetrope cannot read small typographic characters like the emmetrope or the myope. Spectacles correct these defects of accommodation. The blind perceive none of this.

The atheist fundamentalists do not perceive (and do not want to perceive) so-called paranormal data. The difference between these limited perceivers and the colour-blind or the blind lies in awareness. The former are convinced they are right and will deploy everything to prove it; the latter know that a piece of reality escapes them. See the aura - well, really! See the energy of a charged crystal - well, really! Kirlian photos and other electrophotographs? Fakery, of course.

Acute perceptions

A wine taster does not read the labels on the bottles before dipping his lips in the tasting cup: he is capable of giving an opinion from what he perceives. There are no corrective spectacles for those who cannot accomplish such a feat.

Another example concerns absolute pitch; this is a measurable particularity, perfectly “evaluable”, though still denied by a few stragglers, egalitarians or people lost in their theories.

May the use of the first person singular be forgiven: I am certain of what I advance; rather than compile statistics or reflections, I have preferred to draw on my continuous experience in the matter.

Absolute pitch.

When I began studying the piano (I was a child), a cousin of my father’s, a former musician of the opera orchestra, amused himself by making me guess the names of the notes he pressed. I was at the other end of the room. He would press with one finger (he was not a pianist), after counting from middle C, the key which I named immediately (octave and name). He found this extraordinary and I found it so childish that I wondered how he did not lose patience.

At the Conservatoire, the musical dictations seemed to me child’s play, amusing riddles, while my neighbours erased ceaselessly and sweated abundantly.

I only discovered the expression “absolute pitch” at the age of twenty-three, in a work lent by a friend. Since that distant period, I have met a few musicians endowed with absolute pitch and have been able to learn that all had it immediately, and not through training.

Deaf theoreticians thought they had found a brilliant “proof”: musical notes are only arbitrary frequencies that nothing distinguishes from one another, therefore the theory of tonalities and specific notes is absurd. These deaf men are comparable only to blind men who would permit themselves to write (in braille, no doubt) that colours are all alike because they are only arbitrary frequencies… The wavelengths of colours do not proceed by leaps but are progressive. It is sometimes difficult to distinguish a yellow-green from a green-yellow but, apart from the colour-blind, every normal individual, and above all any painter - is that not what counts? - can distinguish a green from a yellow, and even a bluish green from a frank green or a yellowish green.

It is exactly the same in music: notes are wavelengths, quite simply, just like colours. However, it is strange that the majority of musicians cannot, like painters, put a name to these wavelengths.

A first conclusion must already be drawn: even if a majority vote tipped the balance to the side of the upholders of the uniformity of musical frequencies (notes do not exist), reality would remain unchanged: the tones exist in the absolute. A piece of reality that the senses of the majority do not perceive and that, in certain cases, these majoritarians noisily deny.

There are no corrective spectacles for those who cannot accomplish such a feat.

There exist, then, phenomena (the names of the notes) that the majority does not perceive, which does not invalidate their existence. So, the supraphysical energies?

Such things do not exist, come now, since I, noble consecrated scholar, do not perceive them… Heard that somewhere before? See the aura? Well, really! Perceive an energy in or around the body? Well, really! You would do things that I, at the summit of evolution, could not manage? Well, really! All humans are equal and alike - really! But I, who am after all superior…

Energy

For millennia, acupuncturists discovered the acupuncture points and the path of the ch’i WITHOUT the slightest electronic apparatus. The West, rationalist out of respect for the State religion installed at School, scoffed: ridiculous superstitions. The meridians followed no anatomically recognised path. Came the day when technology (a purely electronic detector, very material, easy to find in a specialised shop) made it possible to locate the points and measure the ch’i. No Mr Know-it-all has yet come to present his apologies.

One can feel, one can see this energy.

The Tradition has taught it for millennia. But it is good form to raise the placard: scientifically inadmissible. It is admitted (with a sigh) that machines measure, detect, inject, BUT not that humans do the same DIRECTLY.

In the same way, the upholders of the “organic” in agriculture and food are deviants. They doubtless disturb the people… Their claims are explained, like miracles, by the placebo effect.

Placebo

The word “placebo” (from the Latin: I shall please) has become synonymous with the rational explanation for everything concerning the therapeutic effects of a non-aligned medicine (energetic, homeopathic, miraculous or empirical healing, etc.). Lourdes is “explained” by the placebo.

The upholders of “it is only…” refute the “stories”: the sick man imagined his illness, and his “cure” is only a just return to reality; in the other cases, it is only the placebo effect. Autosuggestion thus operates in every case.

One may wonder, in the first place, why these right-thinking people do not systematically use this non-destructive placebo effect, instead of imposing difficult and costly treatments (the Social Security deficit?), or condemning the patient to infirmity.

In the second place, one will wonder how a wounded individual (a grave haemorrhage, for example) or an accident victim (a joint almost completely destroyed, for example) could “imagine” his disorder and rise completely cured after a healer has laid on hands for a few brief instants.

The upholders of “it is only…” line up the lists of frauds and take good care not to report the authentic facts.

It is hardly possible, within the framework of an article, to report precise facts. The author of these lines has not witnessed miracles at Lourdes (he does not live there), but he has been witness to, or has been able to verify the authenticity of, several “miracles”; these were not “psychosomatic illnesses” or imaginary illnesses, hysteria or “compensations”. It is easier to “explain” by the placebo than to go and verify on the spot. The argument from authority makes law.

A celebrated author went to verify on the spot. He is now considered a hallucinator. The book? Le voyage de Lourdes. The work was published posthumously, found among its author’s papers. The author is known by the name of Alexis Carrel (his real name Marie Joseph Auguste Carrel-Billiard; French surgeon, biologist and neurophysiologist born at Sainte-Foy-lès-Lyon on 28 June 1873 and died in Paris on 5 November 1944. Nobel Prize in physiology-medicine 1912, “for his work on vascular suture and the transplantation of blood vessels and organs”.) As a young atheist doctor (doctorate in 1900), he accompanied (in 1903) a journey of condemned patients. He witnessed the miracle, before his eyes. He converted. He had the audacity to recount the details in his book. He puts himself on stage under the name of Dr Louis Lerrac (his name backwards). This scientist “let himself be taken in”.

Let us return to the placebo.

Thus, when one says “placebo effect”, one implies “illusion”, whereas the results are perfectly measurable.

The placebo in itself

All medical research nowadays uses the double-blind protocol; the results obtained with a so-called active substance and an inactive substance (the placebo) are compared. In theory, lactose is used orally; in injectable form, distilled water or physiological serum; the whole is presented in the form of capsules, tablets, powder, ampoules or drops; everything nicely coloured, nicely packaged, like real medicines.

The layman is left dumbfounded on reading the results well known to all those who take part in or organise research, or simply read the reports regularly:

“The placebo effect acts, of course, on the signs experienced, but it is also possible to measure it on objective parameters, such as gastric acidity, pupil diameter, the level of lipoproteins, of white blood cells (eosinophils, lymphocytes), of electrolytes, of corticoids, of glucose, of cholesterol in the blood, or again blood pressure.”

(Lemoine, Dr P., Le mystère du placebo, Odile Jacob, 1996, p. 25).

As can be seen, it is not a question of a subjective impression vaguely expressed by a patient, but indeed of objective measurements. This is a psychosomatic action of the first order, whose reality is measurable by all the specialists.

“Placebos […] have physiological effects. They can provoke immediate reactions, nausea, skin eruptions, diarrhoea, fainting, pain and drowsiness. But it has also been demonstrated that placebos could accelerate the healing of wounds and recovery after a surgical operation, suppress pain and reduce fever. […] The placebo has no direct physiological impact on the nerves acting on the blood vessels, but its curative effects are no less real, and those that do not take place in the test tube (in vitro) can assuredly occur in vivo - within that complex system that is the human body.”

(Friedman, Dr H., Les secrets de l’autoguérison, Rocher, 1994, p. 156).

The author (doctor and psychiatrist) already cited above sums up the effects of the placebo:

“Overall, the product would be effective in about 30% of cases. […]

“Like any effective product, Placebo can induce a certain number of undesirable effects: asthenia, headaches, nausea, dizziness, insomnia, diarrhoea, constipation, anxiety are the signs most frequently found (about 20 to 30% of cases).”

(Lemoine, Dr P., Le mystère du placebo, pp. 222-223).

Thus the nocebo effect (the contrary of placebo) exists as well.

Dr Howard S. Friedman, professor of psychology and social medicine, even specifies:

“It is noted with interest that the condition of the people treated with the placebo practically always improves (compared with the control group, which receives no treatment). It happens that the improvements due to the placebo are greater than those due to the medicine. But this effect is often neglected; it is considered a random variation or a systematic error, not a phenomenon in itself.”

(Friedman, Dr H., Les secrets de l’autoguérison, p. 155).

And yet…

“The results are sometimes curious: placebos prove in certain cases more active than the real drugs. Amphetamines, stimulants of the central nervous system, increase physical endurance by 88%, while placebos increase it by 132%. That gives an idea of the role suggestion plays in sporting performances.”

(Godefroy, C., La dynamique mentale, Jour, 1990, p. 120).

One may moreover ask THE question: in what percentage does a so-called active substance draw its effectiveness from the placebo effect? Which would modify the picture still further. Instead of 30% of cases, should one not read 50% or even more?

Indeed, one generally forgets to insist on a constant fact: the active substance, in these comparative experiments, acts, it is said, in 50 to 65% of cases, which means in plain terms that it does not act in 35 to 50% of cases. It is therefore not necessarily specific, and perhaps it is only one more placebo.

Let us retain the essential: the introduction of an inactive substance (placebo) into an organism produces measurable effects. The psychosomatic effect is therefore proven. In lay terms, the action of the “mind” on matter is quite real.

Why is the effect not verified every time? A blockage can occur on any plane, and the body may not be capable of responding (too worn out, too intoxicated, for example).

The discovery of the placebo effect thus adds itself to the classical knowledge concerning autosuggestion. The atheists have not failed to seize on these key concepts to explain miraculous cures. For these reductionists, the cure is easily explained: autosuggestion or placebo, therefore an intense mental and affective coagulation, hence a psychosomatic action. Let us suppose the cure is ONLY that; SO WHAT? Why have these masters of “it is only…” not succeeded in curing or relieving a patient condemned to infirmity or death by implanting such a coagulation? Why, in case these holy places were only suggestion factories, destroy that “naive” faith which permits the implantation of a saving coagulation? To offer what in exchange?

Why not a secular basilica of Lourdes, where all the principles of suggestion would be applied? Where all the treatments would be reimbursed by the Social Security? Where the doctors would all be convinced reductionists, pure and hard? One would thus prove, definitively, that the “miracles” are only placebo.

That way, one could not hide behind the habitual screen: the first diagnosis was wrong. Why must the doctors who made the first diagnosis always be incompetents, capable of confusing hysteria with an incurable disorder, of mixing up files, while the atheists who make the post-miracle diagnosis are infallible?

BUT there remains the key point, never addressed: if the mind is only a secretion of the brain or the electrical functioning of the neurons, what is the mechanism of the placebo? Since the physical substance is inactive, WHO or WHAT acts on the body? The doctor’s magnetism? But magnetism does not exist, since it is only placebo. QED.

The spiritualist explanation is evacuated by drowning everything under the placebo umbrella, but one takes good care not to explain the process itself.

Fakirism

We could not write such an article without recalling the well-known experiment in group hypnosis; Rémy Chauvin reports it in a very interesting work (La fonction psy, Laffont, pp. 252-253): a fakir plays the flute before a coil of ropes; the end of the rope rises and dances like a snake, defying all the laws of gravity. It is filmed… and it is discovered that the ropes stayed quite quietly on the ground. The sneerers exult: it was only an illusion. Serious people understand: a fakir was capable of hypnotising a group of onlookers, without any particular staging, instantaneously. This form of hypnosis is unknown in the West and, if it is practised, it is not avowed.

By a brilliant sleight of hand, the phenomenon (what is visible) is evacuated and the fact is omitted: the success upon the crowd of witnesses.

Who, among the most learned upholders of “it is only…”, can hypnotise a crowd (or even a group) without speaking, without technical means, or even while speaking in abundance? Who can provoke a collective hallucination? Bad faith is a pledge of authority when it comes to defending materialist thought.

Let us take another example.

Evolution

(I do not call into doubt the theory of the evolution of species; I do not have the competence to discuss its tangible proofs; I confine myself to the philosophy, to the explanation, to the noumenon as opposed to the phenomenon. The materialist explanation is impossible. I recall in passing that theory means working hypothesis and not theological certainty.)

The key phrase, for materialism, is: “little by little”. Everything evolves “little by little”. One must sometimes count in millions of years.

Thus, “the function creates the organ”.

For a good million years, man has dreamed of having wings; he has had to content himself with taming the horse and then horsepower. The need is nevertheless there.

“Man has toes because he no longer needs foot-fingers.” The remains of the man of a million years ago show toes and not foot-fingers. Evolution therefore stopped at… the first steps. Let us forget this useless detail.

Let us imagine a science-fiction scene in conformity with the theory (pardon, the dogma).

Hitler, duly advised by scientists eager to please him, has discovered a means of verifying the theory of evolution. With his approval, they build a tower a hundred metres high. A lift saves time. Night and day, at the rate of five persons a minute, inmates of the death camps are sent up. One after the other, helped by conscientious guards, they jump into the void. A well-designed mechanism receives them below to clear the ground. One waits for wings to grow on them and allow them not to fall according to the laws of gravity.

The upholders of the evolutionary theory will protest: this experiment would not have lasted long enough. Only 7,200 people would have been seen to plunge each day, therefore barely 2,629,800 in the average year. Two million samples is insufficient. And two or three years…

Let us leave man and his dreams.

Terrestrial life was born of the ocean. So be it. Fish therefore “decide” to leave the aquatic milieu to stroll on the sand and rocks. Even if “courageous” fish sacrifice themselves for a million years, no fish will have the time to see lungs grow, just as the man jumping from his tower will not have the time to feel his wings grow. The lungs must grow BEFORE leaving the water.

WHO or WHAT makes these lungs grow, perfectly useless under water? The millions of years will do nothing about it. Chance?

The birth of the eye and of the “vision” function…

It is demonstrated that the eye formed itself “little by little” and that… Why do certain beings, very numerous ones at that, still not have eyes, which would simplify their lives? WHO or WHAT generated eyes? The elementary animal doubtless “imagined” that the surrounding landscape was worth the effort of manufacturing a rudimentary eye? That animal does not think, so it cannot imagine… And thought is only the secretion of the brain…

A cosmic catastrophe? An unexpected radiation? In the right direction, obviously, and on certain species only, well targeted… (by WHOM?)

In this manner, one can imagine the process at work in the evolution of species, so dear to the materialists.

1. The atoms vote and unite into molecules; then the molecules unite into cells, which unite into multicellular organisms, which share out the functions to become organs.

2. Much later, the marine animals gather and vote that some of them will grow lungs to colonise terrestrial space.

3. Further on still, the monkeys vote to designate certain of their number who will become men.

4. And men vote to elect chiefs, kings, priests…

Men repeat the original (principial) gesture: the cells share themselves out into organs so that a complex organism may live.

A marvellous logical process, where everything starts from the base…

Who would dare believe in such a circus? How could the cells have shared out the functions of an organism? How could marine animals have “decided” to grow lungs?

“Over the millennia, or rather the millions of years,” repeat the materialists, convinced in their voluntary blindness.

In what way can millions of years modify an already established order? In what way can the “decision” of an assembly of monkeys transform a portion of the primates into men? But the genetic code… Who dictates the transformation to it?

Any logical “mind” admits that these transformations must be dictated by a higher Power, by a higher Order, by a Logos, represented at the level in question by an active, internal principle. Certainly, certainly, spontaneous mutations… across millions of individuals, obviously. Such is the spiritualist explanation conveyed for millennia.

A tree begins with its roots… That is the visible phenomenon (a necessary pleonasm). But it began with a buried germ, and the force contained in that germ DICTATED the form of the tree. The Order starts from the invisible. One can always imagine growing a tree by planting roots.

Evolution is a fact almost impossible to deny; the evolutionary process cannot be a simple material movement, even one of the atomic order: something must dictate, something conscious.

“Scientific” demonstrations

A psi subject gives a filmed demonstration. Beforehand, he has been searched, studied, checked, tested to verify that he carries no concealed apparatus, no means of trickery. The premises have been gone over with a fine-tooth comb, the cameras as well as the seats and supports. The slightest blink, the slightest movement of arm or leg is watched. If they dared, they would force the experimental subject to remain totally naked. He is expected to bend a metal bar, twist a spoon, make a compass deviate, move an ashtray, make a cup fly.

He succeeds. Conjurors hasten to demonstrate that it is an elementary trick and reproduce the same phenomena. Power over matter does not exist.

QED, or almost.

“The silent majority” is thus protected from charlatanism and the exploiters of credulity. Amen.

An extraterrestrial acquainted with our intellectual habits would demand a scientific experiment, as one would do to test a new medicine: parallel groups, in the same conditions, according to the same protocol. Which, in this instance, would mean that the conjurors would be searched, stripped, in an equally bare laboratory. Would they succeed in the slightest “trick”? Certainly not, since they demonstrate that everything is faked. And the psi subject, then?

“Such things do not exist, come now!” Let us protect the good people (they are still in their infancy, are they not?) from the charlatans and the exploiters of credulity.

Let us demonstrate to them that God is only a chimera, the expression of a fundamental neurosis, and the loop will be closed.

God does not exist, it is obvious

The basic argument, the “unavoidable” postulate of the atheists: where does this God, origin of all things, come from?

Let us quickly turn the argument around and not let ourselves be taken in by the habitual closed set of chained arguments. The materialists create sets (in the mathematical sense of the term) and triumph: whatever does not enter the defined set is inadmissible.

The material universe comes from an original coagulation according to the accepted theories; the modalities of the expansion do not command unanimity (and that is secondary in our reflection).

Let us ask THE question that people take good care not to ask: WHERE does this original matter come from? What was there before? The physicists refuse to answer: inadmissible…

It is no more logical to accept the (observed) existence of a universe born of nothing than the (undemonstrable) existence of an eternal god.

The word “God” is difficult to accept: it has been so debased, so often associated with the old bearded man on his cloud… No matter: “something” exists; it is impossible to “prove” that God exists or that he does not exist. The converging bundle of proofs is lacking.

Who or what could awaken that silent majority which people are so keen to protect?

The School

The School has the mission… does it still have a mission? Let us start again. The School ought to have the mission of forming individuals capable of analysing, of understanding, of manipulating concepts, and above all of knowing how to construct a reasoning (and reciprocally, of perceiving the flaws of a pseudo-demonstration).

Created in 1808 by Napoleon I, the baccalaureate ought to crown twelve years of study and demonstrate the aptitude for reflection. In 1900, 1% of pupils finished with the bac; in 1970 it was still 20%; we are now, while awaiting better, at 63%.

Since almost everyone obtains the bac, almost everyone should be able to cry halt to false demonstrations. But if Napoleon Bonaparte wanted to form “the elite of the nation”, that elite is perhaps anaesthetised, or abandoned without the slightest inner formation.

Unless our society is voluntarily living the prelude to the decadence that destroyed Roman civilisation. Juvenal (Decimus Junius Juvenalis), Latin satirical poet (≈50-≈130), wrote already, nearly two thousand years ago:

”… [populus Romanus] qui dabat olim imperium, fasces, legiones, omnia, nunc se continet atque duas tantum res anxius optat, PANEM ET CIRCENSES.”

”… [the Roman people] which once bestowed full powers, fasces, legions, everything, now holds itself back and anxiously wishes for only two things: BREAD AND CIRCUSES.”

(Satires, 10, 78-81)

It is for each of us to gauge the timeliness of citing Juvenal.

Provisional conclusion

We have no gulags in France; we are in a democracy. Nevertheless, a strange force, supragovernmental perhaps, seems to organise events so that “the good people” is conditioned, as in the re-education camps.

Democracy cannot and must not be synonymous with anarchy; the term must express a state of law and of rights; each person must be free, so long as he knows that his liberty stops where that of others begins.

The upholders of materialism and atheism must share the order with the upholders of spiritualism and of faith in other intimate truths. Wars rage in far too many countries for fundamentalists to attempt to give birth to one among us.