I have not watched MSNBC since Keith Olbermann was excommunicated. When I heard the news of his banishment, the first name that came to my mind was Baruch Spinoza. If you do not know anything about Spinoza, spend some time absorbing the contents of the following video – you will learn why you have never heard about him in your years of college education in the Western world:
http://www.youtube.com/...
Baruch Spinoza was silenced, not because he had nothing important to say. Rather, he had too many truths to say against making profits and fame out of delusions, lies, propaganda, superstitions, and injustices.
To the masses of his period, Spinoza said: Fear is like a potent drug applied to generate, feed, and sustain superstitions, lies, injustice, and inequality.
To the political leaders, Spinoza said: Without fear as your weapon of remaining in power, you are nothing. You instill fear in your masses so that you could continue to enjoy your ill-gotten fortunes and fame.
To the religious leaders of his period, Spinoza said: There is no God but nature, and nature is neither good not bad. Nature is not fearful nor fearless nor to be feared because nothing disturbs the laws of nature, and human wishes and desires got nothing to do with the operations of nature. Nature cannot be said to be free nor determined by human desires, emotions, sins, perfections, and goodness. Whatever human beings do or fail to do got nothing to do with the superstitions delineated in the Bible because every human decision or action is predetermined to be what it is according to the laws of nature.
To the sycophants who wielded power and to their foot soldiers, these words, utterances, and behavior of Spinoza were too much to tolerate. They were too much to tolerate because they were contrary to the accepted theological brambles of the period. As a result, Spinoza was offered lucrative pensions, bribes, contracts, and professorship, so long as he kept his ideas and opinions to himself.
To them all, Spinoza said: You can keep your money, phantoms, and superstitions, but you cannot control my thoughts or the eternal truths of nature; nature thinks by necessity, and a man exists in nature as a thinking being. Whatever exists in nature exists either in itself as a thinking being or in something else as a controlled automaton.
As a result, Spinoza was booted out of schools, out of jobs, and out of economic existence. He was excommunicated and banned and banished from existence. At least, so the sycophants of Spinoza’s period thought. They thought (erroneously) that Spinoza’s body and mind were completely silenced. They thought that Spinoza and his ideas were effectively banished from humanity.
Here is the crux or correlation: If Spinoza’s ideas and claims were false, why bribe him with positions and contracts to silence his ideas and claims? If your masses/audience were able to govern their decisions and actions with steady and clear intelligence, why were you fearful of fictions and superstitions coming from one of many sources of the same in MSNBC? If others must have their delusions and superstitions, why deny me and millions of other viewers their only source of that which you love to perpetuate on the American airwaves? If your theology and theologians are as intelligent as you claim, why then do you fear the Spinoza of our period?
If you were free, you would have governed your actions and decisions according to the dictates of nature, and millions of your audience would still be loyal to your network. But because you are the slaves of money and superstitions, our Spinoza had to be excommunicated. You made a big mistake because we are not living in 1645s when ignorance and superstitions were forced down the throats of the masses in the name of religion and heaven.