Lecture: Rightness and Wrongness (2) (1963)

You’ll see sometimes a person who is only nominally degraded–they’re a politician or something like that, see? And you’ll see this person go downhill and become a covert criminal and slip a little bit further and a little bit further. And you’ll see him out lecturing for the Salvation Army, protesting against the very thing which they recently held to be right. This individual has sort of died a death now. He is talking about going to heaven. He’s talking about being dead. That is mainly what he’s talking about.

You very often go into–you go into a church of one of these older faiths, and you’ll find the minister up there haranguing and screaming, you know, about “the evils of the demon rum,” or something like that, to the congregation. “Stay ye away from that pub, bud,” you know? Yelling, you know? And he goes back to his study, you see, and he takes this little nip of medicine to fortify himself, you see, after the exertions of his lecture.

Now, these birds who are working this hard were working inevitably and invariably in the field and area of death, because they are right down to the point where you get an aberrated rightness and wrongness; cessation of survival is so threatened that it becomes imminent. It actually gets dramatized before it happens.

And you’ll see somebody turning against religion because of the amount of hypocrisy in it. You know, the guy is saying, “Well….” Well, the Roman Catholic church probably lost its grip on the world which it’s trying to reassert now by killing off the Buddhist. I beg your pardon, the better interpretation is that it’s only those in charge in Vietnam who are members of the Catholic church. That actually isn’t everybody. There are some Presbyterians there, too, in the American troops, and so forth.

I have opened up a chapter here which is leaving you blinking just a little bit.

I’m sure somebody is going to make the assumption sooner or later, though, that if the only government in the world being maintained in force actively by U.S. arms is a Catholic government, that that government’s turning against another religion has something to do with something here that we haven’t quite put the finger on. And we add to the fact that that same government is attacking the only other organization on the face of earth who doesn’t believe in death forever, we begin to ask interesting questions. You probably hadn’t linked the attacks on the Buddhist up with U.S. arms supporting the government of Vietnam, nor the attacks of the FDA against the FCDC in Washington, D.C.

Yeah, everybody else is all right. Criminals, they’re fine, and so forth. Everybody’s all right. But it’s just these two organizations on the face of earth plus one other, the Theosophist, who talk about reincarnation and who talk about coming back to life again and who talk about these other things. And it’s an oddity that just in the last two or three years all three of these organizations have been furiously attacked by the U.S. government. Sort of an interesting puzzle, isn’t it? Well don’t worry about it. We’ll get there before they do. This is just an interjected thing.

Now, they’re evidently asserting a rightness about death. I know it’s mean of me, it’s cabalist, it’s rabble-rousing for me to infer that the majesty of government is actually being used to further some foul, religious end in some way and to cause everybody to be dead. But I’m very interested in the fact that the Church of England, of all organizations, right down here in the form of a vicar (who, I think, has had to move since). This bird–I’m looking at a face or two here who were present in this–was being very censorious about our giving death lessons to young children. Story went around the world. What do you think this guy does every time he stands up there in the pulpit? It gives one to wonder, you know? He’s talking about going to heaven and  this sort of thing. He’s giving death lessons to little kids.

Diana came home from school one day crying. She was going to a local school up here. She wanted to know if all this stuff about poor Christ was true. And I gave her the hot dope, and . . . Well, as a matter of fact, I did. I was very reasonable about the whole thing. I said, “Native populaces have their religious beliefs, and wherever you are, you must remain tolerant of the current beliefs,” and so forth, and she took this in.

But it’s interesting that this bird down here is asserting how wrong it is, don’t you see, to give children death lessons while he himself is giving them death lessons. Only our death lessons are straight dope–this is what happens with regard to death–but his are a darn lie.¹

Notes