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- How you coping, kid?

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- It's weird.

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Just when I think I've got a handle on things something holy unbelievable presents itself.

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Sometimes I wish I'd just stayed at home.

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- You sound like the Man.

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- What was He like?

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- He likes to listen to when people talk.

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Christ loves to sit around the fire

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and listen to me and the other guys.

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Ya'know whenever we´re going on about an unimportant shit

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he always had a smile on his face.

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If there's only real beef with mankind,

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it's the shit that gets carried out into his name,

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wars, bigotry, televangelist.

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The big one though, is the fractioning of all the religions.

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He said mankind got it all wrong by taking a good idea

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and building a believe structure on it.

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- You´re saying having believes is a bad thing?

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- I just think it's better to have ideas. I mean you can change an idea. Changing a belief is trickier.

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People died for it. People kill for it.

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Don’t believe what’s in the papers. Don’t believe what’s on TV.

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Don’t believe what’s on the internet. Don’t believe activists.

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Don’t believe special interest groups. Don’t believe corporations. Don’t believe scientists.

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Don’t believe priests. Don’t believe your friends. Don’t believe banks.

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Don’t believe me. Don’t even believe your own senses.

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"You're saying having believes is a bad thing?"

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There is no way to know the truth about anything for sure, ever.

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So instead of wasting time choosing and believing this or that,

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believe nothing, but understand as much as you can.

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Understandings are only approximations. They are ever-changing and evolving.

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New facts and new informations can sometimes turn your understandings over on their head.

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If you are wrong about something and you get corrected

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you don’t have to feel stupid or ignorant for ‘believing’ something that was wrong,

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instead you can rejoice at your new knowledge and updated understandings.

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Understandings have no emotional attachment and therefore allow us to align ourselves

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with new realities as soon as they become evident,

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freeing us from the lag time and emotional upheaval

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involved in deconstructing a deeply held belief.

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To say that we understand something is likely true,

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rather than saying we ‘believe’ it,

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places us into a new paradigm where the

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false dichotomy of ‘true’ and ‘not true’ is not recognized.

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Because the real essence of what I’m promoting here is the removal of absolutist thinking.

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The end of black and white, of good and evil, of true and false.

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These ideas are useful sometimes for a discussion

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but ultimately lead to confusion because they don’t have any real-life substance.

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Not a single person or a single thing is all good or completely bad,

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it’s all shades of grey.

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So when presented with an idea the question is not "Is this idea true?’",

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it’s "How much information do we have to support this idea right now?"

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The more information we have the more confident we can be that this idea is true.

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Thinking like this, truth then becomes a never-quite-attainable,

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quite imaginary, abstraction. It’s like infinity:

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You can keep counting and you’ll keep getting further ahead but you’ll never reach infinity.

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The best that we can do

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is continuously approximate the truth with ever growing certainty,

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but realizing that certainty in and of itself is also an unattainable abstraction.

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That doesn’t mean that we can’t get close, there are many things we can be nearly certain of,

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but we can’t be afraid of questioning everything,

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from our most superficial, to our most basic assumptions, if we want to keep making progress.

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We must also keep in mind that valid questioning can never come from belief,

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but only from reasoned evidence, resulting in an updated understanding.

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"I just think it's better to have ideas. I mean, you can change an idea."

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Hm, I'm gonna make that my motto ... or mantra ... or something.

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So understand what’s in the news, understand who writes the news

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and why they write the news and who they write it for.

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Understand what your friends say, and try to understand where they might have gotten that information from.

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And what biases they might be projecting on to that information.

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Understand that activists usually have very good intentions

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and are often saying something important, but understand their passion,

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and the fact that passions can sometimes lead people astray,

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including lying for their causes.

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Same thing for priests and politicians.

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Understand that you can find supporting evidence for almost any position you want,

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if you look for it and our greatest tool for weighting the value and accuracy of any evidence,

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of approximating certainty with understandings, is science.

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But understand that scientists are human

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and they are not infallible and they are often wrong.

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Especially when financial interests pressure researchers to find

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the results they want, and research is severely limited in any field

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from which a profit cannot be made, or a field that may infringe on someone elses profit.

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Understand that our senses and memories can play tricks on us, and others

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and our minds tend to mold our perceptions of experiences

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to previously held notions, without us even realising it!

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Maybe you disagree, maybe you have different understandings.

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That´s good, that´s fine. Just don´t believe any of them.

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But some wonder that without believe,

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can these changing understandings be ‘good’ enough to direct us in our behavior?

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If I don’t believe that killing someone is wrong,

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they wonder, why don’t I just go out

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and have a blast slaughtering as many people as I can?

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Well it´s because I value human life.

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And this is a value I’ve cultivated

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based on the understanding that I am a human life,

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and I understand and see and feel the beauty of other human lifes.

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I see myself in them, and to do them harm is to harm myself, is to harm everyone.

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No need to believe anything to see that. At least that’s how I understand it.

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And I also understand that the less harm there is going around,

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the better off we’ll all be.

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So yeah, I think understandings can actually offer a

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much more concrete direction for our species,

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because as with any new frontier,

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you must draw the map as you discover the landscape.

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Only a fool believes that he knows what its path

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to the next mountain before he’s crossed it.

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Another thing that I have come to understand is:

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"If it’s true that we’re all from the center of a star,

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every atom in each of us from the center of a star,

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then we’re all the same thing, that even a coke machine

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or a cigarette butt in the street of Buffalo

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are made out of atoms that came from a star.

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They’ve all been recycled thousands of times as have you and I.

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And therefore, it’s only me out there, so what is there to be afraid of?

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What is there that needs solace-seeking? Nothing.

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There’s nothing to be afraid of, because it’s all us.

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The trouble is, we’ve been separated by being born

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and given a name and an identity and being individuated.

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We've been separated from the oneness, and that’s what religion exploit,

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that people have this yearning to be part of the overhaul one again.

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So they exploit that. They call it god.

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They say he has rules, and I think it’s cruel.

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I think you can do it absent religion.

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Shouldn't we consider in every nation major changes

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in the traditional ways of doing things,

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a fundamental restructuring of economic,

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political, social and religious institutions?

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We've reached the point where there can be no more special interests or special cases;

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Fundamental changes in society are sometimes labeled impractical

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or contrary to human nature.

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As if nuclear war were practical or as if there's only one human nature.

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But fundamental changes can clearly be made,

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we're surrounded by them.

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The old appeals to racial sexual religious chauvinism

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and to rabid nationalist fervour are beginning not to work.

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A new consciousness is developing

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which sees the Earth as a single organism

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and recognizes that an organism at war with itself is doomed.

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We are one planet.

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One of the great revelations of the age of space exploration

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is the image of the Earth finite and lonely,

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somehow vulnerable,

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bearing the entire human species through the oceans of space and time.

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Understanding that we depend on our enviroment, our planet

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and each other for survival, and also understanding

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that our approximations of reality are likely

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to keep on their path of continual evolution

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have currently lead me to the conclusion to support

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the Zeitgeist Movement and the Venus Project.

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These two aspects that have just been described are

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central to the movement's tenants.

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And I suggest, anyone who got anything out of this video

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or enjoyed it in any way - go and check out

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these ideas with an open mind and:

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come to your own understandings!

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"Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency. Man is a social being" -Mahatma Gandhi-