#Reincarnation and #Karma | Order of #Bards, #Ovates & #Druids
by Dr Renata Bartoli

It’s not possible to give a date when the concept of reincarnation first appeared among human beliefs because it seems to be as old as humankind itself and it is present in cultures all over the #world.

Its first manifestation seems to be in Shamanism. From it the belief in rebirth has passed into all major religions that have developed on earth, accompanying and influencing them throughout their evolution.

Reincarnation though transcends the limits of specific, codified religious systems. Nowadays, in a more and more secularised Western society, it is science that enjoys respect and credibility, while traditional religions are constantly losing public interest: in fact, people are in search of a more direct and less structured spirituality. In this climate, interest in reincarnation is not fading but growing and this ancient, primordial belief is now receiving validation and support by just those very scientific milieux that – traditionally – have always been the antagonists of religions. I say ‘primordial belief’ because looking back to the entire history of human thought, reincarnation is actually the only worldwide concept that has shown continuity and permanence from our origins to the present day.

Eastern religions are well known to hold the concept of rebirth at the very core of their teachings. What is less known is that reincarnation has also always been present in monotheistic faiths and philosophical systems of Western and Middle Eastern societies.

In classical Greece Plato, Diogenes and Pythagoras spoke of reincarnation and past life regressions.

The #Ancient Jews believed that Abel had reincarnated into #Moses, and in the Middle Ages reincarnation appears in the esoteric teaching of #Kabbalah, developed further in later times by the Hassidic movement.
The concept of Karma was introduced to Latin Rome by Ennius, after being imported from the newly conquered Eastern territories, and #Virgil describes reincarnation in his #poems.Medieval Islam was also familiar with the concept of rebirth, and the Persian Sufis have preserved this belief up to the present day. The #Quran itself explains the law of Karma.
What about Christianity? Reincarnation was an integral part of the beliefs of early Christians and there are references to it even in the teachings of Jesus himself. However everything changed in #325 AD when, at the #Council of #Nicaea, reincarnation was condemned as #heretical. The fact is that this council was called in times of great turmoil and insecurity and its decisions were dictated by political needs and not by spiritual considerations; in fact the Council was requested by #Constantine, the emperor of the Eastern #Roman #Empire, and it marked a crucial political turning point in the fate of what would later become Europe as we know it today.

At that time the old empire was disintegrating under the pressure of nomadic peoples coming from the East, bringing with them a completely new and unknown civilisation. Constantine was the head of this vanishing empire and he was desperate to maintain an order which was faltering in the face of the advancement of the chaos brought by them. To do so he needed absolute power and absolute obedience and to obtain them both he needed very strict laws, able to keep order within the threatened boundaries. In such a situation #people were supposed to #obey #without #question, and no challenge to his #authority or the status quo was tolerated.

Reincarnation states that we incarnate over and over again, experiencing all sorts of human conditions, and that someone who had been a king in the past could be reborn as a tramp and vice versa. The precariousness and transitoriness of social status that it taught certainly sounded very subversive to a frightened monarch, and didn’t hold any appeal for him. Constantine used a heavy hand to #eradicate it. He banned it as he did all other ideas or beliefs he felt threatened by, and he didn’t hesitate to #execute their #supporters, mercilessly silencing any opposition.

In spite of all this the idea of #rebirth has never been extirpated and today – although the traditional religious systems are in crisis throughout the entire Western civilisation – the belief in reincarnation is growing steadily both in Europe and the USA, as the statistics of the last twenty years show.

https://druidry.org/resources/reincarnation-and-karma

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Extreme Weather Events and Capitalism

The #Ice Is #Melting
The #Land Is #Burning
The #Ocean Is #Dying
The #Living #Planet Is #Unravelling
It's happening on our watch.
No more delays ...

#Climate #scientists around the world are alarmed by a triple climate-change-related crisis that hit the western U.S. and Canada in June and July.
Normally climatologists are careful in their assessment of extreme weather events, under pressure from energy industry profiteers and anti-science climate change deniers. They go to great pains to avoid being accused of exaggeration, and rarely (really never) point to climate change as the cause of specific freakish #weather events.

The severity of what has happened in June and July has pushed past many of their carefully calculated projections. The fingerprints of capitalist-induced global warming are all over the crime scene.

A severe #drought in the western states of the U.S. that has been worsening for months has nearly drained Lake Mead in Nevada, Lake Oroville in California and other major reservoirs, threatening #power #generation for millions of people. A series of intense, widespread, sustained heat waves tortured a quarter of the U.S. as well as western Canada for weeks, taking the lives of hundreds of people.
The super-dry conditions in the region have caused 83 wildfires, including the Dixie Fire in northern California and the Bootleg Fire in southern Oregon. They are two of the largest #wildfires in #history and are both still raging.

Mild Pacific Northwest goes wild

The southwest U.S. is no stranger to deadly heat, but what is most unexpected is that this extreme heat has hit the Pacific Northwest, a region known for mild temperatures and damp weather.
Roads buckled in Seattle from the sweltering heat. For several days Portland, Ore., was the fourth-hottest place on earth. British Columbia suffered the highest death toll with more than 800 deaths between the end of June and middle of July — quadruple the average number of deaths.
The village of Lytton in British Columbia burned to the ground just as Paradise, Calif., did in 2018 — essentially nothing left but ashes and smoke.
In Canada’s British Columbia province, and the U.S. states of Washington, Oregon and northern California, the heat broke all-time temperature records, and then broke those records again, and then again.

Electric power for millions threatened

Nevada and California’s livability depends on a system of 1,500 human-made reservoirs, not only for drinking water and agriculture but for electricity from hydroelectric generators.
Engineers say that the water level in Lake Mead will be below the minimum water level needed to generate power to 1.3 million people in a matter of days. Lake Oroville will likely last until September, when it won’t be able to supply electricity for another 800,000.
Normally, power companies buy power from nearby regions when needed. But constantly running air conditioning in a wide swath of the western U.S. during 2021 has diminished power surpluses that normally allow that to happen.
All told, the fires have burned 1.3 million acres — an area larger than Los Angeles, New York City and Chicago combined. The smoke has journeyed cross-country to the East Coast, prompting air quality warnings along the northern part of the Eastern Seaboard and as far inland as central Virginia.
In addition to California, Oregon, Washington and British Columbia, the heatwaves hit Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana and Idaho.

Heat deadly for agricultural workers

Thirty-eight-year-old Sebastián Francisco Pérez from Guatemala was working at an Oregon tree farm on June 26 when he collapsed and died from the heat. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 53 #agricultural #workers died from heat nationwide in 2019, but this was the first in Oregon directly attributable to heat.
Only four states have laws in place to protect farmworkers. Oregon became the third after the death of Sebastián. Washington State quickly followed with some emergency measures. Some other states merely have “guidelines.”
Irene Ruiz, an #environmental #justice organizer from Boise, Idaho, messaged about the heightened danger to agricultural workers during heatwaves. “Guidelines are not enough. These are the people who put food on our tables and are the most affected and in danger of extreme heat.”

#Imperialism and #globalwarming

Recent decades have seen extreme weather events become more frequent and much more severe than previous periods. Experts point to that quickening pace and increasing severity as caused directly by global warming, even though they usually avoid blaming global warming for specific weather events.
The opposing narrative, motivated by energy profiteers, is that the warming of the atmosphere during this period is a natural cycle, that it has happened before over the millennia, and that it will pass.
But a #scientific #paper published in the journal Nature on July 28 referenced two large, decades-long studies of the #Earth’s “ #energy balance” — the amount of the sun’s energy entering Earth’s atmosphere compared to the amount of energy reflected back out into space. Both studies confirm that greenhouse gases are keeping the sun’s energy trapped in our atmosphere.
The paper asserts that there is less than a 1% chance that the rise in global temperatures and all of its frightening consequences are a natural occurrence.

#Greenhouse #gases began to heat the #atmosphere with the dawn of #industrial #capitalism in the latter part of the 19th century. That much is readily admitted in the capitalist press these days. What isn’t written about enough is the role of imperialist domination in this crisis for #humanity.
The machinery of war is the greatest consumer of oil, and like a dog chasing its tail, pollutes the world while fighting to control oil markets. If the #US military machine were to be ranked in the list of countries that indicates how much they contribute to pollutants that heat the atmosphere, the list would show it ahead of 46 countries.
Estimates of the cost of stopping global warming vary from $300 billion to Forbes Magazine’s price tag of $50 trillion. Underdevelopment and poverty have been imposed on much of the world by #imperialist #military #force and #economic #leverage for more than a century. The stolen wealth is now concentrated in the hands of the tiny group of billionaires that have profited immensely — as a class — from the control of oil markets. That stolen wealth is key to mitigating climate change.

The world is being told to put its faith in international agreements to solve the crisis. The #ParisClimateAgreement is supposed to oblige each participating country to limit greenhouse gases and commit rich nations — and in some cases private corporations — to help fund efforts by poor nations with $100 billion per year in grants, loans and other forms of financing, to help them switch to clean energy.
That agreement still shifts the blame to the poorest countries, when in fact 20 industrialized countries are responsible for 78% of greenhouse gases.
Historically, no country has put more carbon dioxide into the air than the imperialist U.S. #empire. The ultimate goal of the Paris Agreement is to limit greenhouse gases to a 2% increase per year, and “if possible” to 1.5% per year. As of today, the rich countries haven’t come up with the first $100 billion that was due in 2018.

https://climate.copernicus.eu/surface-air-temperature-july-2021

#Capitalism is a #roadblock on the path to mitigating this huge crisis for #humankind. It will take a #global #environmental #movement that is #revolutionary — #conscious of the need to #eradicate imperialism — to stop the crisis of global warming and climate change ~
#scottscheffer #climate-emergency #climate-action #climate-crisis #climate-change #climate-strike