Author: Lost PLanet

Posted on

The Ugly Business Of Big Bad Pharma

Being Bad comes naturally to Big Pharma, as evidenced by their history in the marketplace. Over the previous decade or more the pharmaceutical industry has raked up a least 20 billion USD in fines for all kinds of absolutely unconscionable unethical and outright criminal behavior, ranging from publishing fake journals to plug their own products, hiding information about the deadly consequences of their drug during the testing phase, to bribing physicians to promote off-label prescription  of  anti-depressants leading to increased suicides in children. And no one went to jail for this!

The US government has been signaling for the last couple years that pharmaceutical executives should expect to become targeted for prosecution or debarment.  This in light of the fact that companies regard the risk of multi million-dollar penalties as just another cost of doing business.  This according to a 2006 study by the  University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine in Los Angeles for the National Institute of Mental Health of off-label use of drugs, including Zyprexa, for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease.

However, in their most recent effort in 2011 to oust Forest Laboratories’ Howard Solomon from his 30-year tenure as its CEO following accusations of fraud in 2009 related to Lexapro have been unsuccessful.  The expression ‘Thick as Thieves comes to mind when considering a statement made by the company’s board in defense of Mr. Solomon: “Mr. Solomon has always set a tone of the highest integrity from the top.”

Yes, and the moon is made of green cheese.

The following is a litany of offenses committed by Big Pharma since around 2003, and an ugly rap sheet by any other name. By no means a complete account, it shows  the complete lack of ethics  in an industry that exists ostensibly to improve the lives of those who have suffered the misfortune of some illness or disease. As such, it reveals a disgusting lack of concern for the very people who are at the receiving end of their unscrupulous efforts to bring their products to market, regardless I seems – of whether it would kill them or not. Presumably they would prefer the latter, but that isn’t necessarily a deterrent in the relentless and clearly morally blind quest for obscene profits, the sole raison d’être that whole sorry industry is about.

Most recently, drug-maker Pfizer was fined in December of 2016 a record £84.2m ($107m USD) by the UK’s competition regulator after the price charged to the NHS for an anti-epilepsy drug was increased by up to 2,600%. The CMA also fined the drugs distributor Flynn Pharma £5.2m for charging excessive and unfair prices in the UK for phenytoin sodium capsule.

Before September 2012, Pfizer manufactured and sold phenytoin sodium capsules to UK wholesalers and pharmacies under the brand name Epanutin, and the price was regulated. In September 2012, Pfizer sold the UK distribution rights to Flynn Pharma, debranding the drug and making it generic.The drug was no longer subject to price regulation, leaving Pfizer free to sharply increase the price it charged Flynn, which in turn further raised the price it charged the NHS.

In February of 2014 Endo Health Solutions Inc. and its subsidiary Endo Pharmaceuticals Inc. agreed to pay $192.7 million to resolve criminal and civil liability arising from Endo’s marketing of the prescription drug Lidoderm. As part of the agreement, Endo admitted that it intended that Lidoderm be used for unapproved indications and that it promoted Lidoderm to healthcare providers this way.

In November of 2013 Johnson & Johnson agreed to pay a $2.2 billion fine to resolve criminal and civil allegations relating to the prescription drugs Risperdal, Invega and Natrecor. The government alleged that J&J promoted these drugs for uses not approved as safe and effective by the FDA, targeted elderly dementia patients in nursing homes, and paid kickbacks to physicians and to the nation’s largest long-term care pharmacy provider, Omnicare Inc. As part of the agreement, Johnson & Johnson admitted that it promoted Risperdal for treatment of psychotic symptoms in non-schizophrenic patients, although the drug was approved only to treat schizophrenia.

In December of 2012 the European Commission has fined drug makers Johnson & Johnson and Novartis a combined 16 million euros or about $21.95 million on December 11 for delaying market entry of a cheaper generic painkiller in the Netherlands. European Commission Vice-President Joaquin Almunia, in charge of competition policy, said the two companies ‘shockingly deprived patients in the Netherlands, including people suffering from cancer, from access to a cheaper version of this medicine, Xinhua reported.

The commission said in a statement that Johnson & Johnson’s patent on a patch containing the drug Fentanyl expired in 2005, however in July 2005, it signed a so-called ‘co-promotion agreement and paid Novartis to delay launching a generic version. The delay lasted 17 months, and was more profitable for both companies than competing honestly would have been. US pharmaceutical firm Johnson & Johnson was fined 10.8 million euros while Novartis of Switzerland was 5.5 million euros.

In December  of 2012 Amgen agreed to pay a $762 million fine to resolve criminal and civil charges that the company illegally introduced and promoted several drugs including Aranesp, a drug to treat anemia. Amgen pleaded guilty to illegally selling Aranesp to be used at doses that the FDA had explicitly rejected, and for an off-label treatment that had never been FDA-approved.

Also in December of 2012 Sarnoff-Aventis agreed to pay $109 million to resolve allegations that the company gave doctors free units of Hyalgan (an injection to relieve knee pain) to encourage those doctors to buy their product. Sanofi lowered the effective price by promising these free samples to doctors, but at the same time got inflated prices from government programs by submitting false price reports, alleged the United States. Medicare and other government health care programs “paid millions of dollars in kickback-tainted claims for Hyalgan,” according to the DOJ announcement.

In October 0f 2012 Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals Inc agreed to pay $95 million to resolve allegations that the company promoted several drugs for non- medically accepted uses. These drugs included the stroke-prevention drug Aggrenox, the lung disease drugs Atrovent and Combivent, and Micardis, a drug to treat high blood pressure. The FDA alleged that Boehringer improperly marketed the drugs and “caused false claims to be submitted to government health care programs.”

On July 3, 2012, the Associated Press reported that British drug maker GlaxoSmithKline LLC will pay $3 billion in fines ” the largest healthcare fraud settlement in U.S. history ” and plead guilty to promoting two popular drugs for unapproved uses and to failing to disclose important safety information on a third in the largest health care fraud settlement in U.S. history, the Justice Department said Monday.

In addition to the fine, Glaxo agreed to resolve civil liability for promoting Paxil, Wellbutrin, asthma drug Advair and two lesser-known drugs for unapproved uses. The company also resolved accusations that it overcharged the government-funded Medicaid program for some drugs, and that it paid kickbacks to doctors to prescribe several drugs including asthma drug Flovent and herpes medicine Valtrex.

Glaxo illegally promoted Paxil for treating depression in children from 1998 to 2003, even though it wasn’t approved for anyone under age 18. The company also promoted Wellbutrin from 1999 through 2003 for weight loss, sexual dysfunction, substance addictions and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, although it was only approved for treatment of major depression.

In May of 2012 Abbott was fined $1.5 billion in connection to the illegal promotion of the anti-psychotic drug Depakote. Abbott admitted to having trained a special sales force to target nursing homes, marketing the drug for the control of aggression and agitation in elderly dementia patients. Depakote had never been approved for that purpose, and Abbott lacked evidence that the drug was safe or effective for those uses. The company also admitted to marketing Depakote to treat schizophrenia, even though no study had found it effective for that purpose.

In January 2009, Indianapolis-based Lilly, the largest U.S. psychiatric drug maker, pleaded guilty and paid $1.42 billion in fines and penalties to settle charges that it had for at least four years illegally marketed Zyprexa, a drug approved for the treatment of schizophrenia, as a remedy for dementia in elderly patients. In five company-sponsored clinical trials, 31 people out of 1,184 participants died after taking the drug for dementia ” twice the death rate for those taking a placebo. Those findings were reported in an October 2005 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Lilly already had a criminal conviction for mis-branding a drug when it broke the law again in promoting schizophrenia drug Zyprexa for off-label uses starting in 1999. The medication provided Lilly with $36 billion in revenue from 2000 to 2008. That’s more than 25 times as much as the total penalties Lilly paid in January of 2009.

In April of 2010 AstraZeneca was fined $520 million to resolve allegations that it illegally promoted the anti-psychotic drug Seroquel. The drug was approved for treating schizophrenia and later for bipolar mania, but the government alleged that AstraZeneca promoted Seroquel for a variety of unapproved uses, such as aggression, sleeplessness, anxiety, and depression. AstraZeneca denied the charges but agreed to pay the fine to end the investigation.

On Sept. 2, 2009, Pfizer unit, Pharmacia & Upjohn, pleaded guilty to  instructing more than 100 salespeople to promote Bextra, a drug approved only for the relief of arthritis and menstrual discomfort, for treatment of acute pains of all kinds.

For this  felony, Pfizer paid (then) the largest criminal fine in U.S. history: $1.19 billion. On the same day, it paid $1 billion to settle civil cases involving the off-label promotion of Bextra and three other drugs with the U.S. and 49 states. This follows earlier allegations of criminal conduct by one of Pfizer’s units  Warner-Lambert -in January 2004, for pushing doctors to prescribe an epilepsy drug called Neurontin for uses the Food and Drug Administration had never approved. Pfizer agreed to pay $430 million in criminal fines and civil penalties, and pleaded guilty to two felony counts of marketing a drug for unapproved uses. while assuring the .S. Attorney’s office that Pfizer and its units would stop promoting drugs for unauthorized purposes.

According to the U.S. Attorney’s office: ‘At the very same time Pfizer was in our office negotiating and resolving the allegations of criminal conduct in 2004, Pfizer was itself in its other operations violating those very same laws. They’ve repeatedly marketed drugs for things they knew they couldn’t demonstrate efficacy for. That’s clearly criminal.

The penalties Pfizer paid this year for promoting Bextra off-label were the latest chapter in the drug’s benighted history. The FDA found Bextra to be so dangerous that Pfizer took it off the market for all uses in 2005.

Also in 2009,  Forest Laboratories was accused of fraud in 2009 related to Lexapro, an antidepressant. In a civil complaint, federal prosecutors alleged that Forest hid from parents and doctors the results of a study indicating that Lexapro might increase the risk of suicide in kids. Meanwhile, the complaint alleges, the company was promoting another clinical trial ” financed by Forest, naturally ” showing Lexapro’s effectiveness. Prosecutors also charged the company with providing kickbacks to doctors in the form of sports tickets, expensive meals, and paid vacations.

In September 2007, New York-based Bristol-Myers paid $515 million ” without admitting or denying wrongdoing ” to federal and state governments in a civil lawsuit brought by the Justice Department.

Across the U.S., pharmaceutical companies have been pleading guilty to criminal charges or paying penalties in civil cases when the U.S. Department of Justice finds that they deceptively marketed drugs for unapproved uses, putting millions of people at risk of chest infections, heart attacks, suicidal impulses or death.

Since May 2004, Pfizer, Eli Lilly & Co., Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. and four other drug companies have paid a total of $7 billion in fines and penalties. Six of the companies admitted in court that they marketed medicines for unapproved uses.

In a setback in May 17, 2006 for bio-pharmaceutical company Chiron now Novartis a federal judge ruled that the company’s medical-method patent covering a drug-device combination used by cystic fibrosis victims cannot be used to bar use of the treatment in lower concentrations. Chiron had been successful in keeping a significantly more efficient nebulizer technology of the market since 1997 because it would require less of the drug TOBI that they had exclusive rights to.  The new ‘vibrating mesh nebulizer would cut the treatment duration at least in half (more like from 20 minutes down to 5) encouraging children to comply with their treatment regimens, and are small and portable, unlike the heavy traditional compressor type nebulizers patented by Chiron for the delivery of TOBI.

According to Richard P. Doyle, Jr. of Janssen Doyle LLP, the firm representing the defendants in the case, the ruling marked a huge victory for patients and potentially huge losses for Chiron by allowing doctors to prescribe the eFlow nebulizer manufactured by PARI of Germany: ‘This is a rape and pillaging case on the part of Chiron”, said Doyle. “I’ve never run into somebody so evil.” Chiron spent millions of dollars to keep this new technology off the market simply because it would hurt sales.

And let us not forget Merck & Co. Vioxx maker Merck concealed heart attacks suffered by three patients during a clinical study of the now-withdrawn painkiller in a report on the study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2000, the journal wrote in an editorial released in August of 2005. The editorial, written by the journal’s editor in chief, Dr. Jeffrey M. Drazen, executive editor Dr. Gregory D. Curfman and a third doctor, also alleges the study’s authors deleted other relevant data before submitting their article for publication. Adverse cardiovascular events include heart attacks, strokes and deaths. ‘Taken together, these inaccuracies and deletions call into question the integrity of the data on adverse cardiovascular events in this article, the doctors wrote.

And staying with Merck for a moment, how unethical is this:  Merck paid an undisclosed sum to Elsevier to produce several volumes of fake medical journals that had the look of a peer-reviewed medical journal, but contained only reprinted or summarized articles“most of which presented data favorable to Merck products“that appeared to act solely as marketing tools with no disclosure of company sponsorship. The journals -The Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine, which was published by Exerpta Medica, a division of scientific publishing juggernaut Elsevier, is not indexed in the MEDLINE database.

The claim that Merck had created a journal out of whole cloth to serve as a marketing tool was first reported by The Australian and came to light in the context of a civil suit filed by Graeme Peterson, who suffered a heart attack in 2003 while on Vioxx, against Merck and its Australian subsidiary, Merck, Sharp & Dohme Australia (MSDA).

Now,  if anyone should have the naive belief that pharmaceutical companies are in business to produce drugs to make or keep people healthy, that is only true to the extent that some of the drugs they bring to market (and more and more at outrageous prices) will actually do that. But, clearly, that is only incidental to the real objective of why they are in business: to make as much money as is possible while remaining to stay out of jail in light of the countless accusations of sleazy deception, massive fraud, wholesale corruption, and the despicable and outright criminal failure to disclose critical health information which can be assumed to have led to many a patient’s death.

Welcome the world of Big Pharma, where unconscionable corporate scoundrels  appear to rule the roost!  What, you have a better word for them?  Be my guest … You wonder how these folks sleep at night.

Posted on

The World as Form and Function

Reality is created by observers in the universe  – John Archibald Wheeler, Theoretical Physicist (1911-2008)

Today I am revisiting the views held by Schopenhauer in The World as Will and Idea (1818), and his rejection of naïve realism, or what has been called scientific materialism, that the things we observe in the world are what they appear to be, absolutely, and forever, and not in anyway all or part a function of human perception and experience in the sense that they can be modified based by the very act of perceiving or experiencing them

Thus,  scientific materialism would reject the distinction between how things are independently from human observation versus how they are perceived by our perceptual and conceptual processes.  At the same time,  a scientific materialist would have to accept the the distinction between subject and object, i.e., the distinction between the observer and the thing being observed.

But if we  have no other means of accessing the world other than perceiving or experiencing,  is it in fact a meaningful exercise to even refer to it as a matter of some significance? To all intents and purposes, if we never refer to it again, what would be lost in our discussions about the nature of the world?

To deal with this alleged problem the German philosopher Immanuel Kant  (1724-1804)  introduced the “thing-in-itself”, or “ding ansich” in German – to suggest that the true nature of  the world is fundamentally unknowable as we can only grasp the nature of things indirectly through perceiving them as objects in relation to ourselves – how we have experienced them.  I believe Prof. Kant may have gone too far, in the sense that is is contradictory to say that something is fundamentally unknowable as to make such an assertion implies some knowledge about  it. Existence is not an attribute that can be asserted independently of the qualities through which it is instantiated.   In other words, the distinction serves no useful purpose, when at most the existence of the “ding ansich” might be implied as an essential element in a theory of perception. And maybe that is all what Kant had in mind.

Moving on,  it is one thing to experience the world through one’s senses – it is another thing to experience it logically, e.g., to experience such things as cause and effect, time, space and the various ways in which objects relate to us and each other. If these relationships are permanent features of the physical universe, it wouldn’t matter in what form you encountered them in your experiences, your conclusions about them would be same. But in the end, it would be less important what the world looks like versus what can be abstracted from it simply from interacting with it. And this would lead me to say that the nature of the world is about function (a method that relates an objective to its instantiation) –  and not form (the manifestation of matter and energy), the latter being  incidental to the process, and a means to an end in terms of being the medium that allows the function to be enabled or expressed.

This is an important view for me and consistent with my argument that we should perhaps be less preoccupied with the makeup of the material  universe, by poking into the furthest and oldest region of the universe, looking for clues of sorts and so on. Instead, we should look look more closely at what the logical or functional nature of the various cosmic events appear to be about,  such as the manifestation of a directional and seemingly intrinsic teleological process leading to ever higher degrees of material complexity and organization and where this particular process would seem to want to take us to.

And so the question should be: What has been accomplished to date by the process of material evolution?  As such, the cosmos appears to be a  work in progress, and that is at least some concrete information we have about the nature of the world as we have encountered it.

Posted on

The Power behind the Throne

Having already demonstrated on countless occasions his inability to put two sentences together coherently (unless, perhaps, in praise of his own grandeur, e.g. “I am very intelligent …” etc.) I assume we shouldn’t be all that surprised to learn that US President Trump’s inauguration speech* was written by two of the president’s closest aides, chief strategist Steve Bannon and senior advisor Stephen Miller, and not by Trump himself – as he had claimed earlier – as reported by the Wall Street Journal on January 21st.

On the other hand, I wonder if Americans have figured out yet that, while Trump is now in the  US President’s seat doing his thing,  this might not be  quite his own thing as there is a puppet master in the White House, pulling the strings he needs to pull to have Donald do his bidding for him and his paranoid anti-Islam ideology.

I’m referring of course to alt-right-wing  and rabid-Islamophobe Stephen K. Bannon who in 2015 was described by a Bloomberg Newsweek article about him, “The Most Dangerous Political Operative in America”, and more recently referred to by the Guardian as “The man who once imagined a ‘global war’ between ‘the Judeo-Christian west’ and ‘jihadist Islamic fascism’. This man is now Trump’s top adviser.

Bannon & Trump

And so I’m wondering what if Trump might not be quite his own man because it’s not the Russians that have the goods on dear Donald, but Steve Bannon does, having dug up some highly compromising information on Dear Donald through his Breitbart News dirt-mining research team known as the Government Accountability Institute, or  GAI.

Earlier, Bannon, in his capacity as executive chair of Breitbart News LLC, had hired discredited author Peter Schweizer, the president of  GAI,  after being very much impressed by his best-selling publication of Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich.

Schweizer, who began his career as a researcher at the conservative Hoover Institution, digging through Soviet archives, led the conservative GAI group that is said to have close ties to the Mercer family – called in 2015 by the Washington Post one of the ten most influential billionaires in politics – as well receiving substantial support from other right-wing sources such as  Charles and David Koch.  In conducting its “fact-based” research the GAI team  has access to resources that include an “after-hours” deal to use European internet infrastructure equipment worth 1.3 billion to comb the internet including the secretive Deep Web for information (read “dirt”). And if it is true that Bannon through the GAI has found some real dirt on Trump,  it would not be inconceivable that he and his alt-right cronies are able to put this to some good use by advancing their own ideological ends.

I’m not sure how else to explain the fact that there is a NON-ELECTED individual talking into the ear of the president all day, as well as why Trump is allowing Bannon as a regular attendee to the National Security Council ′s Principals Committee, a Cabinet-level senior inter-agency forum for considering national security issues. This move has been  severely criticized by several members of previous administrations and was called “stone cold crazy” by Susan E. Rice, Barack Obama’s last national security adviser.

But regardless of what Bannon and the GAI may or may not have on Trump, it remains to be seen how the latter – as a person with NPD** – is able to tolerate the presence of Bannon without being able to control him, especially now, when more and more attention appears to be focused on Bannon’s role in running the country. Having to share the limelight with another human being is not something Trump is capable of, so stand back and wait for this situation to come to a head.

(*) Described at the time by George Bush as “some weird shit …”

(**) Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) is a form of pathological narcissism, first diagnosed by the psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut, in 1968. A rigid pattern of behaviour that drives a lifelong quest for self-gratification, NPD is characterized by a grandiose sense of self-importance, an insatiable need for attention and a chronic lack of empathy.

Posted on

Death on the Amber Shore

memorial at palmnicken
Memorial at Palmnicken, Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia

Warning: This, sadly, is a true story of incredible cruelty that you will not be able to get easily out of your mind once you have read it. It is one of many similar  acts of unimaginable savagery making up the holocaust and perpetrated by the criminal leadership of the German Nazi Reich during its dying days. Once they realized that their game was up and that the end of the Reich was in sight, they embarked on a desperate attempt to erase the evidence of their state run genocide directed against the Jews of Europe. This would include closing existing concentration camps, by evacuating prisoners to other areas, to be killed  and their bodies disposed of.

It was this approach to the Final Solution – Endlösung – that saw approximately 7,000 people, mostly Jewish women – begin their death march on 26 January 1945 from their Königsberg prison in East Prussia towards the town of Palmnicken in the Samland region on the Baltic coast. They had been gathered from various areas in Eastern Europe, and their death march to Palmnicken would be one of many similar marches by Jewish prisoners in East Prussia from January 1945 onwards.

Palmnicken was approximately 50 kilometers away. Once they arrived there, the plan was to drive the prisoners into a disused mine shaft in the large amber mine complex at the shore front, and then to seal up the entrance.

The march started the late morning of January 26 under the most atrocious conditions. It was the midst of a very cold winter, and the prisoners went without food or warm clothes. One survivor, Maria Blitz (née Salz) (1), recalled:

We were wrapped in dirty, threadbare blankets and on our feet we wore crude wooden clogs, which made moving forward on the snow and ice—in addition to our constant mortal terror—pure torture. Our clothing consisted of rags and paper, which we had tied together with wires to protect ourselves from the cold. Anyone who could not go on or fell over was shot immediately or beaten with a rifle butt. My sister Gita could not go any further—she had violent diarrhea and collapsed. We tried to get her back on her feet, but she asked us to leave her lying there, she wanted to go to her mother—whom we had already lost in Auschwitz. She was shot.

A Königsberg resident who witnessed the start of the march, Rose-Marie Blask, remembered the following:

I was 14-years-old back then. … I saw a procession of people on the other side of General-Litzmann-Strasse [the former Fuchsberger Allee]. I stood near a tree, it was already getting dark, the air full of snow, and no one could see me. Then I saw in horror that the SS were driving a long procession of prisoners in front of them. Again and again, an SS man raised his arm and a person fell in the snow, though I could not hear a gunshot. I don’t know how long I stood there, as if frozen. At any rate, I saw a lorry following on behind. The dead were lifted out of the snow and thrown into the back of the lorry.

Only 3,000 of the approximately 6,500 to 7,000 Jewish prisoners arrived in Palmnicken later that night on January 26. Around 2,000 to 2,500 marchers where either shot by the accompanying SS guards when they tried to flee or simply fell down, or died from sheer exhaustion during the 50 kilometer march under abhorrent conditions. The following morning up to 300 corpses were found along the final two kilometer stretch between Palmnicken and the village of Sorgenau.

The Anna Grube

Once at the mine site in Palmnicken things did not go to plan for the SS as the site manager refused to allow the disused shaft – the Anna Grube – to be used for mass murder. It was argued that the shaft was needed for the town’s water supply. Instead, the remaining exhausted and freezing victims were allowed to recover from their ordeal by being housed in the mine’s large workshop, and the factory canteen was order to cook for them. On January 30th, however, the site’s estate manager – Hans Feyerabend – was found dead, his own gun in his mouth, but unclear if he had committed suicide or was murdered. He had opposed the SS plans to murder all the prisoners from the moment he found out about it.

That same evening a number of Hitler Youths were ordered by the town’s mayor and the regional Nazi Party group leader to assist the SS at the disused Anna mine site with re-captured Jewish prisoners who had managed to get away during the final stage of the march. One of the Hitler Youths, Martin Bergau – on which much of this account is based – stated the following:

When we left the municipal office with the SS-men, it was already quite dark. … When we reached the northern part of the town, we turned left and went down the path to the closed Anna mine. We reached the squalid buildings, situated at sea level. I noticed a group of around forty to fifty women and girls. They were captured Jews. A diffuse source of light sparsely illuminated what seemed a ghostly scene. The women had to line up in twos, and we were instructed by the SS-men to escort them. Around six to eight SS-men might have belonged to the command. I could not tell whether they were Germans or foreigners, as their commands were extremely terse. Once the line-up was complete, two women at a time were led around the side of the building by two SS-men. Shortly afterwards two pistol shots rang out. That was the sign for two more SS executioners to take the next two victims to the building, which was shrouded in twilight, and shots soon resounded there again. I had had to position myself pretty much at the end of the long line. A classmate stood right across from me with a cocked rifle, watching over the women on the other side. One woman turned to me and asked in good German if she could move two places forward; she wished to walk this last path with her daughter. In a voice nearly choked with tears, I granted this brave woman her request. … Then I accompanied a mother whom I will never forget to her daughter.

Because of the concerns about contaminating the town’s water supply, the SS opted for a different approach. With the promise that the prisoners would now be taken by ship to Hamburg, they were led out of the main complex and through a gate that led directly onto the beach where they were directed to start marching South towards along the icy Baltic seashore towards Pilau. Once on the way, the SS executed their plan kill each and every one of the roughly 3,000 remaining prisoners, by machine-gunning the marchers from the back and herding them into the icy waters. Because of the melee that followed – and the sheer number of prisoners involved – the SS could not murder everyone as systematically as they had planned. Many victims were initially only wounded, or not even hit. Some fainted and froze to death, or became trapped between ice floes and drowned. Others died on the beach after days in agony. But some survived;  Zila Manielewicz, born in 1921 in Ozorkow, recalled the following:

When we arrived on the shore, it was already darkest night. … Suddenly I was hit on my head with a rifle butt and I and I fell into a precipice. I gained consciousness in the water. At this time, dusk had already fallen. The shore was full of corpses and the SS men were still hovering over them. …. Towards morning the SS men disappeared. Around this time we became aware that about 200 of us were still alive. We got up and climbed onto the beach. The path we had taken that night was itself full of corpses and the seawater was red from the victims’ blood. Together with two other Jewish women, I dragged myself to the closest German village; …

Another account, by Pnina Kronisch,born in 1927 in Belzec:

Then they threw the murdered Jews into the water by kicking them. As the seacoast was covered with ice, the murderers pushed their victims into the icy water with their rifle butts. Since I was at the front of the column with my sister Sara, we were the last in line to be shot. I was also laid down on the seacoast together with my sister, though I was not killed by the shot that was aimed at me but only wounded in my left foot, and my face was soaked in the blood of the murdered Jews lying next to me. During this time my sister was killed. I did not wait until the Germans threw me into the sea—I threw myself in and remained lying next to the ice floe, which already was caught up in the water and hit by the waves. The Germans believed I was dead, and since I was alone, to my good luck, and last in line to be murdered, the Germans got into their sleds and drove off. Before dawn I scrambled out of the sea and hid in the coal store of a German farmer who did not live far from where these events occurred.

Because the seashore where the massacre occurred was separated by a broad strip of park and woodland and the town 30 meters above, only a few of the inhabitants of Palmnicken saw what happened that night. But next day it was immediately apparent that a massacre had taken place. Helene Zimmer, a former resident of Palmnicken, stated the following to the Ludwigsburg court:

… Then we went back to Palmnicken on foot, along the shore instead of along the completely congested road. It was a very painful march taking several hours. … Just before Palmnicken, actually between Nodems and Palmnicken, we suddenly saw countless corpses lying on the shore, and also heard desperate screams still coming from the water. As far as I could see, those lying on the shore were all dead, and every now and then we could hear desperate cries coming from the water. … The water along the shore was partly frozen and ice floes floated around, between them were the seriously wounded or dead people. Many of them were dressed in the same striped clothes. There were also many women among them. … I was so shaken at the sight that I covered my eyes with my hands. … We then quickly went on walking because we could not stand the sight.

It is estimated that approximately fifteen of the original group of 7,000 individuals survived death march and final massacre on the beach at Palmnicken. While the crime was reported to the Soviets when they captured Palmnicken ten weeks later, few details regarding this monstrous crime made its way into the West prior to 1994. It was then that Martin Bergau – a former Hitler Youth member from Palmnicken- had his memoir covering the war years published. He had witnessed the crime at the age of sixteen. Shortly after the massacre he had been taken prisoner by the Soviets; after his release he had not been allowed to return to his home in East Prussia.

In 1945 Palmnicken became part of the Soviet Union and Königsberg was renamed Kaliningrad as a result of the Potsdam agreement. After the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1992 it became part of the Russian Federation. While the mass grave in the Anna mine had disappeared into a sand dune, the murder victims’ remains were eventually unearthed by amber excavators in the 60’s. Initially thought to be the remains of Soviet soldiers murdered by the Germans, a memorial stone was erected and wreaths were laid every year at the site until the demise of the Soviet Union in 1992. Finally, in 1994, Martin Bergau was able to convince the regional authorities that the bodies lying at the site were in fact Jewish.

And so ends another incredibly sad tale of man’s inhumanity to man – what an infinitely tragic species we are! Clearly, there can be no almighty god, or at least not one that is capable of compassion, empathy, love or self-respect – and in which case he might as well kill himself. Or perhaps he did that already, realizing what kind of creature he hath wrought here on earth, as we must have started slaughtering each other from the moment we found ourselves capable of it.

Today is January 27 2017, Yom HaShoah, or International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Lest we forget …

This post is based on:
Endlösung on the ‘Amber Shore’:
The Massacre in January 1945 on the Baltic Seashore—
A Repressed Chapter of East Prussian History
BY ANDREAS KOSSERT (2004)
http://leobaeck.oxfordjournals.org/

maria-blitz
Maria Blitz

(1) Maria Blitz – one of the last survivors of the the Palmnicken Massacre in January of 1945 died on June 11, 2016, at the age of 98.

Posted on

Welcome to 2017, “The Year of the Idiot”

On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron. (H. L. Mencken, 1880-1956)

Given the subject matter I am addressing today the flavour of this post can’t help but be more appropriately in tune with the cantankerous creature that I am naturally, and more comfortably, from myself.

Hitherto I have always attempted to present a range of rational arguments that were meant to be -if anything – food for thought in a world that appeared to be sliding into a soul crushing display of idiocy, to the point of self-destruction.

And what a fool I am – a Don Quixote of  mediocre intelligence, astonishing naivety and brazen assumptions about the nature of the world and all that can be found in it – in being so wrong about the depth of despair the world appears to have sunk to!

Just so we know where I stand on this, I find the world and all that can be found in it a place of incredible beauty and wonder, but then only if we were able to subtract that horrible insipid creature homo sapiens from its inventory, including all its dastardly deeds since the beginning of time. Other than that, I consider it an absolute privilege to be a part of it. Speaking of the true meaning of “a chance of a lifetime”, but, oh, how we are squandering this opportunity!

I look forward to soon being able to get back to writing about my foolish yet  guardedly  optimistic assumptions about the meaning and nature of the larger world. But before I get there I want to metaphorically throw up  some of the indigestible misery that I am forced to ingest much too frequently,  by being exposed to the actions of my fellow creatures, thanks – but no thanks, really – to the tragic but inescapable fact of being a member of the same sorrowful species.

So let me throw this one up large, as it has been sticking in my craw for some time: how could there have been enough  US citizens of eligible voting age to elect a moron of the magnitude of a Donald Trump to be their next president?

This is either a case of severe voter fraud, or there is in fact some truth to the rumour that many  Americans have been changed into zombies. The latter would be true given that even with half-a-brain it should have been clear that this self-aggrandizing individual is no presidential material anywhere,  unless we’re talking about marginal countries such as North Korea or Zimbabwe – hellholes of human misery by any other name – where  leadership  appears to be mainly a function of intimidation and bullying, requiring no intellectual capacity at all.

The absolute tragedy now is that it appears that the folks who can least afford to have a  windbag and pathological narcissist like Trump at the helm of their country have in fact given him the keys to to the White House: this is tantamount to the chickens electing Colonel Sanders to look after their interest. They have jumped from the frying pan directly into the fire, when – by “draining the swamp” of Wall Street lobbyist – he is now putting Wall Street kingpins directly into government. As reported by Forbes the other day:

… Trump announced Gary Cohn (who was seen as the successor to Goldman’s current chief executive Lloyd Blankfein) will be joining his cabinet as director of the National Economic Council and an assistant to the President for economic policy. Cohn’s appointment means there will be a trifecta of former Goldmanites in the Trump administration. Former Goldman partner and mortgage trader Steven Mnuchin has been named Secretary of Treasury by Trump. Steve Bannon, a former Goldman banker, is his chief strategist.

How confused can you get, America?  Your government will be run directly by the sharks raised and educated at Goldman Sachs, predatory capitalism’s finest specimens. Guided by the motto “To Take from the Many to Give to the Few”, these  are the folks that get up in the morning for the sole reason to stuff their own pockets  – and those of their cronies – with other peoples money, and by hook or by crook it seems.

They are the very miscreants that precipitated the September 2008 financial crisis that almost brought down the world’s financial system.  They did this by selling sub-prime mortgage derivatives out of the front door, touting them as the fines investment instruments ever, while shorting these stinkers through the back door, knowing full-well they were absolute garbage to begin with. How low can you go?  And: NOBODY WENT TO JAIL FOR THIS!

It took a huge taxpayer-financed bailout to shore up the financial industry. Even so, the ensuing credit crunch turned what was already a nasty downturn into the worst recession in 80 years. To think that these types of characters would now switch their allegiance from their own pocketbooks to Joe Six-pack – and in particular the under- or unemployed and destitute – is a stretch only attempted by anyone even more naive than I am.

Excuse me now while I look for some mouthwash to get the sour taste out of my mouth.

Posted on

The Scourge of Mankind

One continues to wonder why anyone would be willing to kill a fellow human being just because they don’t share your religious beliefs.  But for any student of European history it is not too difficult to be reminded of such acts of barbarism being committed in the name of deity of sorts, when murder was on the repertoire in order to advance the interests of the Roman Catholic Church in Europe during the Dark or Early Middle Ages

Lest we forget, by slaughtering the infidel unwilling to convert to their version of Islam, the Muslim Jihadis of today appear to have taken a page from the late great King Charlemagne – or Charles the Great – the king of the Franks, who became the first emperor in Western Europe since the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and is sometimes referred to as the founder of modern Europe.

During his campaign to establish an empire in full support of the Church, he felt compelled to Christianize newly conquered people upon penalty of death, which lead to such events as the massacre of 4,500 captive rebel Saxons in October of 782 in what is now known as Verden in Lower Saxony, Germany. The unfortunate Saxons had rebelled against King Charles’ invasion and his subsequent attempts to Christianize them from their native Germanic paganism.

And that massacre pales in comparison with the events almost 500 years later, in 1209, in the town of Béziers in the Languedoc region.  When the Roman Catholic Church established the Inquisition, it was set up initially to wipe out the Cathar movement in southern France where it had taken hold in opposition to the hitherto dominant Roman Catholic religion. Apparently, there were a lot of Cathars living in the town of Béziers, to the point that it was seen to be a Cathar stronghold, and on July 22nd, 1209, under leadership of the Abbot of Citeaux the town was attacked, ransacked, and completely burned to the ground, the majority of its population of 20,000 people killed, including many women and children. That this would have included many thousands of Roman Catholic adherents who were also living in Béziers didn’t seem to matter. When questioned about this, the Cistercian abbot-commander of the Catholic crusaders, is on record of having said that: “Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eis. (Kill them all, the Lord will recognize His own).

Now all this happened a long time ago, and while today the Christian faith is far more benign,  the justification for this kind of slaughter remains an intrinsic part of the foundation of the Christian faith: the bible, for in Deuteronomy XIII.12-16, the faithful are instructed as follows:

If thou shalt hear say in one of these cities …, Let us go and serve other Gods …; then shalt thou surely smite the inhabitants of that city with the edge of the sword, destroying it utterly and all that is therein. … And thou shalt burn with fire the city and all the spoil thereof every whit for the Lord thy God. … And it shall be a heap forever; and it shall not be built again.

And so we are here today, 800 years after the slaughter in Béziers – and yes, it was rebuilt again! –  and in the 21st century, and as can be evidenced from recent events in the Middle East, innocent people continue to be slaughtered in the name of some god or prophet or another. One might claim that this kind of action has nothing to do with the religious beliefs themselves – and that they are misused when wielded as weapons of murder and destruction. No – it is precisely the unsubstantiated and irrational nature of these beliefs that allows them to be used in this manner. When you think you have the creator and eternity on your side – all your actions are justified; you cannot be wrong!  Until we shake off the influence of these dangerous nonsensical beliefs, our species will continue to be murdered for them.

This leads me to say that to believe in the existence of a god or other kinds of super-natural beings has historically shown itself to be a seemingly endless source of human tragedy. Because – while in principle these are nonsensical and hence harmless beliefs– it is at the same time the sickly smell of centuries of savagery and senseless slaughter of thousands  of people in the name of such beliefs – and primarily in the competition between such beliefs.

Posted on

Mars

On October 12 of 2016 U.S. President Barack Obama vowed to help send people to Mars within the next 15 years, pledging to work with private companies “to build new habitats that can sustain and transport astronauts on long-duration missions in deep space.”

Earlier this year,  SpaceX founder and all-around wunderkind Elon Musk of Tesla fame outlined his highly ambitious vision for manned missions to Mars, which he said could begin as soon as 2022 – three years sooner than his previous estimates. And, never short on vision, he envisages 1 million people living there by 2060 (presumably all going to the local shopping malls in electric vehicles)

And back in March of 2012, Dutchman Bas Lansdorp announced The Mars One project to establish a human settlement on Mars in 2023, and as such the effort is portrayed as “the next giant leap for humankind”. Other than that, the one catch is that this project does currently not include a way to leap back to earth from there …

The most amazing thing of the Mars One project is that – when the word went out that they were looking for volunteers for a one way trip to Mars – people have been lining up to be part of this mission.  “The trip of a lifetime” said one volunteer that made the shortlist. Well, yes, and “likely the very last trip of a lifetime” might also be an accurate description of it.

To be sure, Mr. Lansdorp does not plan to make the trip himself. He will be occupied by the production of a reality TV show that is meant to finance the project as it will feature his Mars-bound flock as they get on with the business of colonizing the dusty red planet.

The Sun sets on Mars

Now, why in the world would anyone want to go to a place like Mars – also known as a dead planet? It was author and visionary Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) who – in The Martian Chronicles – made the colonization of Mars becomes a necessity for human survival – with humans fleeing a troubled, broken and atomically devastated home planet Earth.  But unless someone knows something that I don’t know, the last time I looked, this incredibly beautiful planet of our is still very much alive,  and most of it very habitable, and although there are many among us who are doing their best to put a stop to that, with a little bit of foresight and determination we will be able to put a stop to them sooner rather than later to ensure it remains habitable for the foreseeable future.

It is said that exploring the solar system as a united humanity will bring us all closer together. Mars is the stepping stone of the human race on its voyage into the universe. Human settlement on Mars will aid our understanding of the origins of the solar system, the origins of life and “our place in the universe”.

Now I would not want to make light of any of these lofty objectives, but there is a kind of charming naivety about these projects that makes me question the depth of the brain trust behind them. While “Getting there is half the fun!” or so it is said, there are some significant issues to be concerned about before strapping yourself into a tin can for a lengthy journey into the unknown, and this regardless of the fact that – as in the Mars One project – you will only have a one-way ticket for this trip (!)

Recent research into the effects of long-term space-travel suggests that cosmic radiation from the remnants of supernovae could pose cognitive risks for astronauts on long journeys. Researchers from Arizona State University exposed rodents to space-like levels of radiation for six weeks and observed significant cognitive damage. The rodents performed badly on memory and learning tests, and showed elevated levels of anxiety. Six months later, the rodents were still suffering from neural damage. The conclusion is that cosmic radiation breaks down the structural complexity of neurons in the brain’s pre-frontal cortex, which is associated complex cognitive behaviour like decision making. Researcher Dr. Charles Limoli, a professor of radiation oncology at the University of California Irvine’s School of Medicine compared it to stripping the branches off a tree.

“It may impact the ability of astronauts to undertake multitasking, executive function, decision-making, or respond to unanticipated events,” he said.

And  while one is cocooned in a space capsule for a seven month trip through a vacuum,  as well as having one’s brain vacuumed out by cosmic radiation, I wonder about the intrepid Mars-bound traveler ability to realize that that our place in the universe is the very planet they just left, the one that that spawned us, nurtured and continues to sustain us provided we continue to care for it.

The fact is that, today, it has become possible to reach out and touch the stars remotely with the help of some very clever technology, and allowing us to do so from within the comfort and safety of our own planet’s environment. There is no aspect of Mars – or the universe at large, for that matter – that, in principle, cannot be discovered or examined remotely and without having to go there physically. This as opposed to having to drag our critical life-sustaining environment along with us when we do this  in person.  Now why do I suddenly have this image of a goldfish in a zip-lock bag filled with water …

It seems to me that putting all our resources towards the advancement of remote technologies for space-exploration will be a significant less costly way to realize our goals for spacial exploration, let alone not having to put people’s lives in jeopardy, which should be the very first consideration for not wanting to fire folks into in infinite vacuum on the head of a rocket.  Really, how desperate can you get?

Alright, so where is my sense of adventure – and don’t I have any imagination at all? From my very early days as a teenager I have been collecting science fiction literature by just about any who could inspire me on that matter, and that includes Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clark, Robert Heinlein, Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and even cranky Vonnegut – and many, many others – and not forgetting Jules Verne, who’s writings introduced me to the genre a long time ago.

As well, you name the science fiction movie or TV production made recently or in the past, and I will likely have seen it, including Le Voyage dans la Lune from 1902. And yes, of course the Matt Damon movie “The Martian”.  Add to that all the TV series such as Star Trek, Space:1999, FarScape, Firefly, etc, and without question most of it very entertaining, if not always very believable!

So what does this have to do with  the utility of manned space exploration?  What I  have picked up from this is that the tales of science fiction are metaphors for exploring the human mind, in terms of considering alternate realities within the limits of our understanding of what we are and what we are all about.  Such considerations also project our existing technologies into the future to get a glimpse of what they ultimately might lead to. And what better way to put them into the hands of some aliens, who, as different they may be from an appearance point of view, are often decidedly more human than most in emphasizing certain human character traits  – in particular in the department of predation, conquest, domination, violence and destruction.

On that subject, I have always wondered why is it that aliens are typically out to destroy us or take our planet. I think this is because we have a deep-seated fear that we might in fact loose the earth to some evil alternate version of ourselves – now or in the future.  By invoking the latter as aliens we can fight and kill them in a virtual reality game without feeling guilty about ourselves, having essentially disowned such threats through a process of self-denial, i.e., no human being could ever be that self-destructive.

None of this will have anything to do with setting up human colonies on lifeless planets such as Mars or other dead rocks such as the Moon. There, I only smell money, the usual target of predatory capitalism, ready to ransack another heavenly body,  and as far removed from the romantic notion of “exploring the solar system” as you can get.

Though I’m past one hundred thousand miles,
I’m feeling very still
And I think my spaceship knows which way to go
Tell my wife I love her very much, she knows
Ground control to major Tom, your circuits dead,
There’s something wrong
Can you hear me, major Tom?
Can you hear me, major Tom?
Can you hear me, major Tom?
Can you…
Here am I floatin’ ’round my tin can far above the world
Planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do.
(from “Space Oddity”, on the 1969 David Bowie album)

Posted on

The Limits of Our World

Given that there are limitations to what we can achieve with our bodies in a physical sense – e.g., how high we can jump, or how fast we can run – it seems reasonable to think there are also limits to what we can achieve with our minds in an intellectual sense, in that these limits are determined by the unique physiology of the human brain and its ability to offer up the required level of conceptualization.

We might be comparing apples with oranges here, but the intent is to merely illustrate the fact there will likely be an upper limit to the extent that one is able to grasp a concept and run with it, so that no matter how clever one is, there are going to be limitations to our ability to think about the world and our place in it.

The ability to organize and conceptualize the data of our sensory experiences into the reality of the everyday world we must live in is critical to our ability to survive and thrive in it. And that isn’t necessarily a uniquely human ability – and likely exists to some extent within other creatures in the world depending on their level of sentiency.

But only in humans is this capacity developed to the point that it can be articulated in terms of shared ideas, and be the subject of continuing discussion and analysis. Now that we can do this and chimps – our nearest cousins in the animal kingdom – cannot, is not just a function of the ability to use one’s brain more effectively, but also the fact that the human cerebral cortex, the brain’s most highly evolved region, is three times larger in humans than in chimps. The latter simply don’t have the hardware for this – to put this in very simple terms.

And so it might be necessary for our species to receive substantial increase in the grey matter department before we (or the species that supersedes us)  will be able to reach the next level of understanding that will allow us to grasp our place in the world more completely, as currently we don’t seem to have much of  a clue!

I’m presenting this in the context of our ability to understand those aspects of the world that would have to be larger than us, in the sense that they have gone into the making of us – and underpin the evolutionary push that brought us about. All of this on the assumption that the evolution of matter is an intrinsic, goal oriented process, and in the end not some random activity without necessarily excluding randomness as a means to an end if that would bring about the desired effect, with the understanding there is such an objective.

But insofar as we are able to look back to see how we did come about in an evolutionary sense – and attempt to deduce some underlying principles from this – we can’t look back quite far enough to see what started it all because we can’t conceptualize an earlier world that doesn’t have any humans in it yet without begging the question.

That is to say – we cannot undo what we have added to the world due to our own presence in it, and see it independently from ourselves. In Schopenhauer’s words, in the end it is always a human eye that looks at the world, and a human brain that must interpret the information. As such, we will always see the world from our own perspective and not on its own terms, should there in fact be such a world.  It would follow that there is no objective knowledge of the world, because all knowledge we have of it is a function of how we encountered the world from the very moment we were able to interact with it and hence always judged from the subject’s point of view.

This also means  we are no innocent bystanders with respect to being able to account for the spectacle of the world as we are experiencing it; we are necessarily implicated in its very creation when these experiences give rise to our descriptions of it. At the same time, our capacity to account for it in an intellectual or logical sense is necessarily limited by the creature we are today, and subject to the conceptual processing machinery in the grey matter department.

To summarize, it would appear that – not only can we not reach beyond our grasp physically  – neither can we do so intellectually when it comes to understanding the world we see around us in terms that are able to account for our own presence in it – as that would reach beyond the fact of our own creation as human beings, a fact that is given to us without recourse to justification.

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world. (Arthur Schopenhauer)

Posted on

The Larger Context

Life’s larger context is defined, in the first place, by our ideas about our place in the world provided we see it in in terms of being intrinsically linked to everything else that is going on in it.  Consequently, our true human potential will never be realized unless we start taking our cue from the larger context of existence as it is being manifested by our daily experience of it.

The challenge here will be to translate these experiences into a language that allows the larger context to emerge so that it can be articulated and inspire us to create a destiny for ourselves that does justice to the effort that has gone into the making of us.

This effort is not easily understood – and if we even understood just the tiniest fraction of it I’m not so sure we would be much further ahead in gaining an insight into the larger picture.   No doubt I will be writing more  about that in a future piece …

For now we describe our arrival here on earth in terms of an evolutionary process over billions of years.  Nothing is explained in terms of why or how or where this process is heading for, and so we are left with a mystery. Being at the receiving end of this process, we can look back to some extent and infer that apparently this has been about the gradual enablement of what we call “consciousness”, and achieved by the development of ever more complex organizational structures within matter, reaching its current summit in the grey matter of our brains. Now what?

The one thing that this did bring about was the transition of life’s apparently intrinsic evolutionary pressures from a strictly internal process over billions of years to an external one, as evidenced by the ingenuity of our species to manipulate and restructure matter into ever increasing organizational complexity as reflected by the various aspects of technology that we are familiar with today. Through us, nature has achieved a quantum leap in the creativity department, now being able to push its evolutionary objectives over significantly shorter time frames. In this sense, human beings function as nature’s evolutionary agents, pushing these objectives along at a breakneck speed for no other reason than that it seems to be the natural thing to do …

Smart enough to move it along, yet not smart enough to know why, and that is probably a wise thing as far as nature is concerned, given our tendency to self-destruct, a function of being an intermediate, transitional and demonstratively unstable life-form, schizoid, capable of being both intellectually brilliant and emotionally brittle, or logical and illogical, and the latter most likely caused by that aspect of ourselves that is still very much the predatory, primitive beast in the field that we descent from.

So yes, where do we go from here?

Posted on

Spiritual Beliefs

Existential writers such as Søren Kierkegaard claimed that proof of God cannot be the outcome of a logical argument, such that God’s existence can never be a public or objective truth. Belief in God, consequently, must always be a private matter, entirely subjective and a function of the individual accepting such truths for themselves as a matter of faith. Hence attempting to prove the existence of a God via such means as the Argument from Design would not fly in Mr. Kierkegaard’s neighborhood.

However, the way I see it is that the way most people accept the existence of a God is along the lines of believing  something far less profound, e.g., believing that the earth is round. One accepts this to be a true fact about the world since it fits in with what you have been told about the world,  from the time you heard it first mentioned, from what you heard at school or from what you have read about it.  As such, accepting the truth of such a belief and  most other beliefs one holds as true is a function of coherence with other beliefs that seem to support it, giving you no reason to examine it critically or ever doubt it for that matter.

I’m willing to concede however that  – when people say they believe in God – they might be expressing more than just something that they have always accepted as true, such as the belief that the earth is round. What may be referred to as “spiritual beliefs” are the results of having a sense or an awareness that one is part of something larger and more profound than oneself while being unable to cite the specific reason for believing this to be a true belief about themselves and the world.  An example of that might be what Einstein wrote about in a  November 9, 1930 New York Times Magazine article  titled Religion and Science  in the context of what he referred to as “a third stage of religious experience”:

I shall call it cosmic religious feeling. It is very difficult to elucidate this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it, especially as there is no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it.

Beliefs based on such feelings  may have some intrinsic credibility based on the phenomenological nature of our everyday experiences, when one is led to expect a greater context for them beyond the immediacy of the present moment and whatever else one might bring to bear on them. It is within this expectation or awareness that one might ascribe to the possibility of a deity existing, especially when one is told from day one that there is such a thing as an all-powerful being named God, and being at the receiving end of a process I call “religious brainwashing” at the hands of some authoritarian religious institution that does not allow its core dogmas to be challenged.

Given this line of reasoning, you could say that the belief in God merely fills the void in one’s belief system that resulted from sensing the larger whole of one’s existence without being able to articulate exactly what that is.