Does anyone believe in a third dimension? There is a third dimension to this discussion that rarely gets talked about. This will be a long and wide ranging post so I hope you can bear with me for a bit! (it will discuss aliens, ghosts and moon landings!)
If you study religion, supernatural beliefs and shamansim right back to the stone age (mesolithic) and probably beyond, you find a very definite pattern. Ancient pyramids, the massive megalithic temples in Ireland that I have been studying in depth, the mesolithic communities with ritual chambers in the Near East and the ritual longhouses of South America where the beliefs about the cosmos are inbuilt into the architecture all share at least one common purpose. They reaffirm and solidify beliefs and religions that not only hold society together but also empower those who claim to be in touch with it, perhaps even control or converse with the netherworld. The shaman is just a lonely nutcase unless there is a community to believe in their 'powers' and their ability to see order in the chaotic world. That is how they obtain power in a religious and political sense and these massive and powerful symbolic structures are the physical mainfestations of this 'unseen power'. They are the necessary constant reminders of the power these religious and political leaders have to bring order or at least explain the chaos that humanity fears so much.
This doesn't have to be a cynical controlling of the masses by a manipulative egotist (though it often is), the communities demand these leaders with special powers to bring some kind of order to their world so it becomes a joint conspiracy between the powerful and the common people to bridge the deepest human fears. In simple terms, the common people have an unwritten contract with the shaman priest that they will put their faith and power into the hands of the shaman or priest and in return the shaman or priest offers a myhological world where there is order and meaning. See where this is heading?
This conspiracy between the normal people and the powerful leaders had not gone away, it has modified itself constantly, new religions with their own symbolism, heroes and special leaders (priests, shamen etc) that bridge the gap between our fear of a chaotic world and an invented orderly world that is contacted through the living (again priests and shaman) and the dead (prophets, saints etc). Its still a very powerful force in our societies in the form or religions and churches but in the west at least, there has been a split where political power has at last been divorced from the supernatural. One of the true turning points of humanity was the so called 'age of reason'. Some centuries ago people began to question this established order, the beliefs that gave the leaders power and the mythology that supported it. They began to question everything for the first time in thousands of years, real power over their world was returning to the common person.
This was very bad news for the powerful, people who view the world through a belief system that the powerful control are in turn easy to control themselves. At a time when religion and politics were two sides of the same coin, it meant the power that religious/poitical leaders had by right was evaporating. There were massive changes, democracy came to the enlightened coutries (or at least in theory) and politics and religion were seperated.
This does not mean the old pattern went away, the basic reality remained that people with beliefs in 'other forces' which the powerful could protect them from or at least bring them in contact with, were much easier to control.
What we have seen since is an attempt to roll back the advances made during the age of reason. Without exception the powerful go to great lengths to foster unreasonable beliefs or beliefs in their superhuman capabilities. Notice the increase in beliefs about aliens (fostered by some governments policy of leaking supposed 'classified' photographs and documents then denying their existence), the multitude of ghost spotting programs on TV, the political leaders calling on God to bless their next adventure or protect the poor and disadvantaged who can then be discarded, crop circles placed across the countryside, moon landings to show how the powerful can even cross the gulf of space are comparable with the shaman crossing the line between life and death and returning. It doesn't matter if the moon landing happaned or not, it was meant to be a symbolic venture to affirm the amazing capabilities of the state, in effect actually doing the impossible (almost superhuman?).
In a nutshell what is happening is that logic and reason is being discouraged or at least confused by contradictory messages and symbolic actions, the proposed re-uniting of church and state, endless repitition of the ghost-exorcist-alien-crop circle theme on TV and the creation of boogie men-like enemies that we need to be protected from (the enemies can be real people, economic disasters, plagues and natural disasters). The goal is to destroy public confidence in their own logic and reason and re-introduce the old fears about the chaotic and supernatural world which in turn makes control over democracies so much easier for the elite. In effect there is an ongoing attempt to return to the days before the age of reason where people were just too afraid to question their leaders.
The next question of course is, are we the common people allowing this to happen willingly? Are the new fears that come with reason and logic harder to bear than the old fears which religion and supernatural beliefs gave us comfort??
