In a recent post, What’s the point of it all? we made the statement “When you’re dead, you’re dead, and nothing of the individual survives. Individuality is a temporal and temporary phenomenon”, which provoked the following comment:

you are not able to prove it either

This comment deserves a post of its own for a full rebuttal.

It is a constant source of disappointment (figuratively speaking) to us that in 2008 people who claim to be “students of the occult”, people who claim to be sincere seekers into a “deeper reality” and into what is “hidden”, can be so completely ignorant of the basics of the investigative process. However, as disappointing as it is, it is not at all surprising. Modern occultism is, as we have often said, a concealing rather than a revealing practice. Occultists do, on the whole, tend to be rather credulous people who hold sweeping and unwarranted beliefs on all kinds of points upon which they cannot hope to have any kind of real knowledge. Then, on top of that, they are often given to repeating, like mantras, a series of trite philosophical platitudes such as “it’s impossible to prove anything”, “reality is subjective”, and “nothing is true; everything is permitted” by the “teachers” who spoonfeed them their ridiculous beliefs. These platitudes are conceptually no different from the old “god works in mysterious ways” type apologies for the blatent absurdity of Christian belief.

It is, therefore, without too much hope that we offer this explanation of the error in this way of thinking. Those who are invested in maintaining their pet beliefs are unlikely to be reached with reason, and those who are likely to be reached with reason are unlikely to require this explanation. Nevertheless, since the subject is an interesting one, we will proceed.

It is often held out that nothing can be known with certainty. This may or may not be true, but for practical purposes we can easily accept it. In any application of the scientific method, a conclusion is drawn based on relevant observed evidence. That evidence can never be complete; no one scientist or scientists can possibly have observed absolutely everything that has ever existed in the universe, on every conceivable scale. Moreover, it is quite possible – in fact, normal – for future evidence to turn up which contradicts the conclusion. It is further possible that even if the evidence is reliable, the reasoning used to come to the conclusion is not. Scientific conclusions are, therefore, little more than tentative assumptions in their ultimate interpretation.

It is not true, however, to conclude from this that “nothing can be known.” This is self-evident. We know, for instance, how to build bridges, construct aeroplanes, solve quadratic equations, send information at the speed of light through fibre-optic cables, and all manner of other things. We can do these things reliably and consistently, and both that reliability and consistency are evidence that we know how to do these things.

Now, that knowledge may not be perfect, and it may not be absolute. There are a number of factors that cause the peculiar shape of an aerofoil to allow for heavier-than-air flight, and there is continuing debate as to which of these factors are the most significant, but it is an undeniable fact that – whatever the cause – the result is that an aerofoil travelling through the air under certain specified circumstances results in a high air pressure beneath the aerofoil, and a low air pressure above the aerofoil, which enables a force to be generated which counteracts the effects of gravity.

Philosophically, it may be true that physical reality doesn’t even exist, and that although we believe ourselves to be witnessing the phenomenon of the aerofoil, we may simply be dreaming it, we may be “brains in a vat” imagining the whole deal. However, if it is true that we can never be sure of the nature of “reality” in this sense, then that definition of “reality” is perfectly useless to us, and should be discarded in favour of a better one. This being the case, there are many ways in which this “new” definition of reality can be determined to an extent, most of which are readily apparent to any normal educated person who has not been corrupted and confused by the delusionary nonsense of occultism. For instance, we may remark that observed evidence is more reliable than imagined evidence. Even if it remains true that observation may be hallucinatory, the more independently a greater number of observers can observe it, the less reasonable it becomes to explain a phenomenon away by a recourse to hallucination. Further, the more reliable the predictions of a hypothesis are, the more likely it is to be true. Thirdly, when two competing hypotheses both offer an explanation of the same phenomenon, the one that achieves it with the most economy, requiring the fewest number of arbitrary axiomatic assumptions, is generally more preferable than the other. Fourthly, the greater the number of observations that a hypothesis can predict, the more likely it is to be sound.

Such ways are, of course, hallmarks of the scientific method, and those who question the validity of it would do well to recognise that without it, they wouldn’t be able to send their fatuous juvenile ramblings from their computer over the internet, and that in any case without it they would likely be long dead from some childhood disease which remained unpreventable.

Further, in recognition of the tenuous nature of scientific conclusions, it will be apparent that all the factors described above describe the likelihood or probability of a hypothesis being true. And here we come to the first observation. Many people mistakenly believe the impossibility of absolutely proving anything to be a fatal obstacle to the acquisition of knowledge (at least with regards to disproving their own pet beliefs, of course; they are quite happy to accept the reality of knowledge when it applies to the creation of the technological gadgets which keep them amused). It is not. “Proof” is not the only valid arbiter of knowledge. Even if we can never absolutely “prove” anything, we can nevertheless – in some cases – reliably demonstrate the falsity of something to be so vastly unlikely that for all practical purposes it may as well be proven. Similarly, there are cases where we can demonstrate something to be so vastly unlikely that for all practical purposes it may as well be disproven.

And, let’s try to do that now. In terms of claims of the supernatural (of which reincarnation is such a claim) the big one is, clearly, the existence of a “god”. It is a well known fact that a negative cannot be proven; it cannot be proven that “god does not exist”, for instance, since – to use another mantra occultists occasionally like to spew – “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” However, this is not the only approach we have open to us. If there exists something else which at least is strongly incompatible with the existence at least of the kind of “god” postulated by these people, and that something can be demonstrated, then we can acquire a potentially vast body of evidence which indirectly suggests the non-existence of a god.

Let’s look at an example. Darwin’s theory of evolution provides us with a satisfying answer to the mystery of improbability. In other words, the old “argument from design” essentially stated that the odds of such a complex being as even a fish – let alone a human – spontaneously coming together by chance is so impossibly small that it must have been designed. This question of improbability is one that must indeed be addressed, for chance is not a good enough answer. Unfortunately for creationists, design is not an appropriate answer, for it in fact increases the amount of improbability that must be addressed, arguing not that a complex being came together by chance, but that an even more complex being capable of creating not only another complex being, but all complex beings in the universe along with everything else in it, came together by chance.

Evolution, on the other hand, shows that complex things must arise from simple things if the question of probability is to be satisfactorily addressed. A initially simply organism mutates in a very slightly different way. Most of these mutations and deleterious, and result in the death of the organism. But some are advantageous, and these advantageous mutations not only survive, but become more likely to survive than its unmutated cousins. Each individual mutation is itself very unlikely, but in the presence of billions of mutations simultaneously occuring across billions of organisms, the law of large numbers positively requires that advantageous mutations occasionally occur. When this law of large numbers is extended over a very long period of time, advantageous mutation compounds with advantageous mutation, resulting in the development of very complex creatures fitted to their environments, because those unfitted to their environments have been eliminated for that very reason.

Evolution is the only explanation we have the addressed the question of improbability, by removing the need to “leap” from simplicity to complexity in one go. It demonstrates complexity to arise from a vast pool of cumulative developments whose inherent unlikelihood is overcome by simple virtue of the sheer number of mutations. If the odds of, for instance, a particular single cell organism mutating in a particular way at ten billion to one against in any given year, then if we have one hundred billion such organisms existing then we would positively expect that mutation to occur ten times a year. If such a mutation is advantageous, we may reasonably expect that mutated organism to greatly increase in numbers at the expense of its unmutated cousins, paving the way for the improbability of further advantageous mutations to occur in the following year.

So, we do have direct and very convincing evidence that complex things must arise from simple things; once again, this is the only explanation we have that gets us over the problem of improbability, and not only does evolution get us over that improbability, but it does so spectacularly well.

This evidence therefore suggests that there was not a complex being at the beginning to create life. Some people suggest that evolution has no implications for the existence of a god, since it may be the case that god simply set evolution in motion, and then watched it unfold. Are they right? No. If the evidence suggests that complex things must come from simple things – which it does – then there can’t have been a complex thing in the beginning to set it going.

The only possibility is that the conclusion that complex things must arise from simple things does not follow from the evidence, and that the conclusions of evolution merely apply to a subset of “organisms”, if we can call “god” such a thing. But we see no such things. There is no evidence, anywhere, of anything making a huge leap from simplicity to complexity. To be truly agnostic, we would have to admit that it’s possible there could be a being who leapt from nothing to complexity, that all such beings are necessarily invisible and undetectable – at least to our current capabilities – but to do so is simply to strain the boundaries of credulity. It is quite simply an unnecessary belief; if what we observe can be explained without such a creature, why invent one? The law of parsimony is in rebuttal, here.

Thus, although we cannot directly “disprove” the existence of a creator god, the evidence of another field – evolution – directly contradicts the possibility of such a being existing. The proof is not absolute, and it remains theoretically possible that a being could exist that can make an impossibly improbable leap from nothing to vast complexity, but there is convincing evidence against the existence of god nevertheless, over and above his simply lack of necessity.

We could seek evidence from another direction, also. Some religions assert their “god” to not merely be the creator, but to intervene in worldly affairs. So, we could look for evidence of the intervention of this “god”.

Now, in years gone by, evidence of “divine intervention” was claimed to be visible in cases of chance. Order, it was observed, was necessity, but providence was the domain of the gods. The study of probability, surprisingly, did not really begin until the sixteenth century. Prior to that, “random” outcomes were held to be outside of the scope of investigation due to their very randomness. The caprices of nature were held to be acts of the divine; no pattern could be detected in when it rained, or when it did not rain, or which side of the die landed upwards, so those events were held to be controlled by the divine. This is, indeed, likely to be the origins of the practice of divination; chance events, uncontaminated by the influence of man, were determined by the gods, and hence in chance events something of the knowledge of the gods could be divined. Indeed, this is likely to be behind the prohibition of divination and other forms of magic in the Bible; “knowing the will of God” was the domain of the church, and it simply would not do to let any old common man have access to this kind of information.

However, advances in the study of the uncertain has revealed the order in randomness, has revealed that whilst the roll of the die may be random each time, nevertheless over an extended period of time we positively expect each face of an unbiased die to land upwards one-sixth of the time, and the more throws we make, the more accurate we expect this prediction to become.

And, indeed, in seeking evidence of god’s “intervention”, we can make an interesting observation. Many spiritual but non-religious people do not argue for a conscious intervention by God, but nevertheless unwittingly argue for something substantially identical; they argue that the preponderance of order in the universe is evidence of some intelligence underlying it.

Now this turns out to be as completely backwards as it is possible to get. Far from being evidence of intelligence, order is evidence of lack of intelligence. Order is dumb; it fulfills itself. Evidence of intervention – evidence of a guiding “intelligent principle” which intervenes in the world – would come from observations of deviation from order.

Some people, for instance, argue that the Solar System is evidence of intelligent design, since the planets orbit the Sun so inexorably predictably, and apparently eternally. Yet this is not true. Current theories suggest that the planets formed from a spinning disk of matter being thrown out from the Sun in its early stages, and condensing into blobs of matter that eventually formed the planets. The gravity of certain forming clumps of matter within that disk would attract nearby smaller clumps to it, increasing the size of the clump and increasing the strength of gravity even further, compounding the process.

With these clumps starting to form, we can notice that they would have a mass, a distance from the Sun and other clumps, and an orbital velocity. For a given mass and distance from the Sun, there exists a velocity at which the orbit will be stable; any slower than that, and the object will spiral inwards towards the Sun; any faster than that and the object will fly off into space.

It is likely that the objects going to fast would have been thrown from the disk into space in the early stages, leaving only objects going slow enough to be held in orbit. This clumping process would form larger objects. Those objects would do one of three things; they would stay where they are, or they would clump together with larger objects, or they would fall into the Sun. Either way, after a period of time we would be left only with objects orbiting the Sun that are just the right size and going at just the right velocity to maintain a stable orbit.

Thus, the “order” exhibited by the objects orbiting the Sun are not evidence of intelligent design at all; the author is not an astrophysicist, and the above details are not critical to the point at hand, but the point is that it can be envisaged how apparent order not only can but must arise from natural processes, and not from intelligence. Neither is the second law of thermodynamics any contrary argument, here; the clumpy nature of orbiting planets is actually a less ordered state than the relatively homogeneous original disk, so we can see that entropy has indeed been increasing.

Now, what would be evidence of intelligent intervention would be observations of this order being broken. Newtonian physics, for instance, predicts that gravity would, in an initially stable “steady-state” universe, cause all objects to attract each other, ultimately resulting in the universe compressing into a singularity. Newton himself recognised this, and in fact used it as an argument for the existence of a god, since a regular transcendtal “divine push” would be periodically required to stop the stars and planets rushing together. And, indeed, observing this would be evidence for intelligent intervention. Similarly, if we could observe a planet orbiting the Sun at a velocity that suggests its orbit should not be stable, then that would also be such evidence.

The fact that we never observe these kinds of deviation from order, however, provides us with yet more evidence against an intelligent intervention, and yet more evidence against at least the kind of “god” that the Christians promote, and once again this is true even though we cannot directly disprove his existence.

The foregoing should, hopefully, convincingly demonstrate the point that although there are things whose existence we cannot directly prove or disprove, it does not follow that we therefore cannot generate any evidence either for or against such hypotheses, and it does not follow that we cannot generate some pretty darned convincing evidence for or against them. And, as the last example especially shows, even if we cannot get too close to disproving the existence of a “god”, we certainly can get close to disproving some of the qualities he is often imputed to have and some of the behaviours he is often imputed to exhibit.

Now, we have indulged in this lengthy diversion to demonstrate how – particularly with regards to the supernatural, and the truth of reincarnation is a supernatural claim – evidence can be obtained, and in some cases evidence strong enough to form relatively firm conclusions, with respect to supernatural claims regardless of the fact that they cannot be absolutely proven or disproven. With that point in mind, we can now return to the question of reincarnation and the comment which sparked this discussion.

Right off the bat, it is necessary to point out that the comment received – which has been published in full at the top of this entry – is very brief, and there is a limit to how much can be read into it. The comment as stands – “you are not able to prove it either” – is, on the face of it, perfectly true. However, as demonstrated above, it is also perfectly irrelevant. We accept the possibility that the poster may have had no other ulterior motive than to point that out, that he/she seriously thought that such an obvious and basic observation was so profound and insightful as to make it worth pointing out in its own right, despite the fact that exactly that was conceded in an existing comment of ours to that entry. We do consider this to be unlikely, however. In most discussions of this type, comments such as “you are not able to prove it either” are raised for a reason, and that reason is normally to give the believer an “out”, to hold on to some shred of hope for the validity of his/her beliefs. We are happy to concede that we just don’t know what the intention of the poster was, but we are justified in assuming an intention because there exists a sufficient number of other people who would have such an intention as to render the point worth making regardless. We will make no further apology on this point.

This kind of objection – “you are not able to prove it either” – tends to be raised for a simple reason. My original statement denied the existence of any kind of afterlife – in the context of reincarnation, but the statement did not restrict itself to that – and the rebuttal of “you are not able to prove it either” may be read as meaning “therefore reincarnation may be true.”

What happens in this kind of situation is that the believer responds to skepticism about that belief by – consciously or otherwise – rendering it into an “either-or” question. The comment “you are not able to prove it either” can be translated as meaning “reincarnation may be true, or it may not be true”. In particularly egregious cases of confusion, the believer concludes from this that the chances of either situation being the case are equal. This is so far from the truth as to be risible.

Let’s deal with the first of the two issues. Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist and vocal atheist, had, during a public Q& A session, the question “what it you’re wrong?” put to him by a smug and self-satisfied student of Liberty “University”. He famously responded as follows:

Well, what if I’m wrong? I mean, anybody could be wrong. We could all be wrong about the Flying Spaghetti Monster and the pink unicorn and the flying teapot. You happen to have been brought up, I presume, in a Christian faith. You know what it’s like not to believe in a particular faith because you’re not a Muslim.

You’re not a Hindu. Why aren’t you a Hindu? Because you happen to have been brought up in America, not India. If you were brought up in India, you’d be a Hindu.

If you were brought up in Denmark during the time of the Vikings, you would’ve believed in Woton and Thor.

If you were brought up in classical Greece, you’d have believed in Zeus.

If you’d been brought up in Central Africa, you’d be believing in the great JuJu up the mountain.

There is no particular reason to pick on the Judeo-Christian god which in the sheerest accident you happened to have been brought up under and ask me the question ‘what if I’m wrong’.

What if you’re wrong about the great JuJu at the bottom of the sea?

This demonstrates the falsity of reducing such issues to an “either-or” question. The fact that I “cannot prove” that individuality does not survive death is absolutely no reason at all to believe in reincarnation. Many people believe that we become ghosts after we die, and hang around haunting our relatives. Others believe that, depending on how “good” we’ve been, we either burn in hell for all eternity or go to a worse place of eternal torture, being forced to play harps and sit around worshipping “God” for the rest of time. Others believe that we all go on eternal nature walks in the “Summerlands”. Unless one wants to take the self-evidently absurd view that what happens after death is exactly what each living individual believes will happen, then the believer in reincarnation gets precisely nowhere by stating “you are not able to prove it either”, since in order to support his belief he must first establish why one of these alternative possibilities could not be true. God-believers often bizarrely laugh at atheists, totally obvious to the fact that every believer is an atheist with respect to every other possible god than the one he personally believes in; philosophical atheists just take this one step further to include all gods to ensure consistency.

It is not sensible, therefore, to doubt the non-existence of some form of life after death, but then to leap to the assumption that the alternative must be reincarnation. The simple issue of doubt is not sufficient to prop up such a belief, since the number of possible alternatives is potentially vast, and it is sheer folly to arbitrarily pick one of them and believe that one to be true. Even if the question did come down to “afterlife or not afterlife” in equal proportions, then the positive belief claim would be “there is a form of life after death”. There is simply no sensible way whatsoever to arbitrarily pick reincarnation or any other form of that life in the absence of evidence. If the believer in reincarnation wants to invoke philosophical uncertainty in support for his beliefs, then in order to avoid being branded a complete and blathering tomfool he needs to explain why that invocation does not equally support the Christian afterlife belief, for instance.

Even aside from this, we can address specific evidence against this particular theory. Naturally, the theory of reincarnation requires the acceptance of philosophical dualism, the idea that there is some “soul” or “spirit” separate from the material world, which somehow influences it, and can transfer from one body to another. This is contradicted by a wealth of evidence. Studies in brain damage in particular show that consciousness, memory and other mental phenomenon depend a great deal upon the physical condition of the brain. Particular types of brain damage can reliably predict particular types of mental difficulty, whether with short term memory, pattern recognition, and so on. This strongly suggests that consciousness is to a great part a function of the brain, and not something that exists independently from it. The theory of reincarnation presupposes that actual memories can survive in the absence of the brain, existing transcendentally somewhere. Even if we argue that memories are a function of the brain, we’d have to argue that this transcendental “individual essence” is capable of modifying the brain in some way so that it does present those memories to the individual, but is somehow incapable of doing that after development and therefore incapable of retaining those memories follow certain types of brain damage. The idea that such a transcendental essence is responsible for such memories, but is only responsible for them in such a way that is completely consistent with a purely materialistic theory of memory is quite simply ludicrous, yet another wholly unnecessary and unparsimonious theory.

Furthermore, if reincarnation is frequent (and, of course, regardless of actual frequency, every occultist believer naturally believes that it’s frequent enough to happen to them) then we would expect many, many people to have experiences of past lives. When we do look at people who report past life memories, we find overwhelmingly that they consist of occultists, religious types, and “psychics”, and isn’t it just a total surprise that these are the kind of people who would express such a belief? We never, ever find a materialist scientist, for instance, who genuinely professes to have past-life experiences. The overwhelming majority of people report no past life memories at all. Are we really to suppose that pimply occultists and other certain religious types are the select elite who are permitted multiple incarnations?

If reincarnation is true, and individuality does transfer in any meaningful way, then we would expect to at least occasionally observe people exhibiting knowledge that they could not otherwise reasonably be expected to have, and to demonstrate it conclusively, such as consciously locating hidden objects or articulating lost ideas. Yet nobody has ever convincingly done this to the satisfaction of the scientific community. Neither is the old “absence of evidence” trick going to help the believers here, either. The truth of the theory of reincarnation would result in a positive expectation that such demonstrations would occur, relatively frequently, and the fact that they do not is strong evidence against the truth of that theory.

Moreover, for any “karmic” theory of reincarnation to be true – which the occultist often expresses – then we would further have to presume the existence of some divine justice system, some overriding intelligence that not only creates objective moral qualities, but who enforces them through some bizarre system of not punishing people directly, but incarnating them as worms and other creepy crawlies once they have lost all possibility of remembering their previous sins. It’s an insane notion. Not only would one have to overcome the problems of assuming an intelligent and interventionary divine force in the universe – which we have discussed above – but one would have to explain why such a force would act in such a stupid, pointless, and cackhanded manner.

We could go on at length, but we trust the point is made. Whilst it is undeniably true that we “are not able to prove it either”, this in no way prevents us from demonstrating that – whilst maybe not completely impossible – the belief is utterly bizarre, stupendously unlikely, and entirely without support, to such an extent that it is perfectly justifiable to state that it is “untrue” for all practical purposes.

Any person interested in seriously exploring this field of study and gaining expertise in it would do well to look extremely critically at the philosophical platitudes they use to justify their beliefs, because it should be plain to anybody paying attention to this entry that in the majority of cases, expressing such platitudes serves only to conceal the underlying process of rationation, not to clarify it. Far from gaining any kind of deeper insight from the possession of such tiny pieces of misunderstood epistemological philosophy, in the vast majority of cases they serve only to confuse the student, and to give him all the justification he needs to avoid questioning the fatuous and empty beliefs that he has been spoonfed by the deluded idiots that have preceded him. It is yet another example of how those who use skepticism to deny the validity of skepticism do so incorrectly, and end up as prey to the very imperfections of reason that they falsely claim to be free from.

In no other fields than occultism and religion would any old outlandishand arbitrary belief, no matter how outrageous and bizarre, be accepted as a candidate for serious consideration solely because “it cannot be disproven”. The fact that this spurious philosophical red herring is raised so often in these fields demonstrates the old adage that “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” It is extremely easy for the casual student of the occult (and by far the vast majority of students of the occult are casual) to learn of a few misleading and misunderstood philosophical platitudes, and then to consider himself to be “on to something”, leaving him free to follow the example of his peers and his forebears in the holding of any manner of ridiculous and obnoxious beliefs. Strongly reminiscent of the Christian apologists, these people are just grasping at straws, looking for any way they can to feel themselves justified in believing in nonsensical superstitions and risible “theories”. A failure to understand the rational process which is so often decried by occultists, and a general lack of knowledge, leads people to make statements such as “it’s possible that evidence could arise in support of reincarnation, but since it hasn’t, the question is still wide open” and to consider the uncertainty of the question settled, without stopping for a minute to consider all the indirect evidence which may have a bearing on the question.

The study of the occult is a minefield for the unwary. Ironically this is something that is stated again and again, but still people manage to step on the mines, because they fail to recognise that their belief that they’ve found a good answer, or a good argument, is indeed one of those mines. In a field where the practitioner is so obviously highly susceptible to delusion, it is important to apply – and to continue to apply – extreme skepticism, and the lack of firmness in the data makes this attitude even more important, not less as many mistakenly presume. The mistaken agnosticism of “reincarnation may or may not be true” is a prime example of the kind of error that is rife amongst student of the occult, arising from such a simple and obvious matter of failing to take into account the alternatives that the “may be true” side of the question would equally support.

Like theology, it is arguable that “occultism”, per se, cannot really be described as a field of study in which expertise may be claimed. Certainly, the training and practices that the vast majority of occultists either receive or put themselves through in no way whatsoever equips them to deal with issues such as those we have been describing. It is as if people learn a few rituals, meditate for a while and consider themselves to have had some form of subjective and unreliable “experience”, then listen to a few trite and pat philosophical arguments and consider themselves to be in a position to address questions such as this without bothering going to the trouble of acquiring the expertise to do so. It is as if someone should proclaim themselves to be experts on the construction of steam engines merely because they’ve seen a few roll past the tracks behind their house.

Everybody wants to believe that they are right, that they are an expert in their chosen field, but occultism and related areas are somewhat unique in that mastery generally cannot be assessed – certainly not by peers who are equally light years away from mastery – with the result that it becomes trivially easy to set oneself up as someone knowledgable and capable safe in the knowledge that this claim will never become subject to verification. Unfortunately, by examining the claims these people make, and understanding the processes and circumstances by which such claims either can or cannot be made, it is possible to make such a verification, relatively reliably, by those who actually have bothered to acquire the expertise.

Unfortunately, the self-proclaimed instant 3-minute “masters” are equally as unequipped to come to this realisation, making pointing it out to them somewhat of a fruitless exercise. However, from time to time there does appear the occasional student who is not convinced by all this occultist claptrap, and who can recognise at least a glimmer of the faulty thought processes which await the unwary, and who require merely that the opening of the way be revealed to set them on the right direction. It is to those people that these words are addressed, and let those who have ears, listen.