Russell Brand's "How to Become a Christian in 7 Days" is a raw, witty testimony of his conversion — a 12-step-inflected guide back to Christ after addiction and fame.
I’m happy for him. When anyone can come to terms with things in their past they feel need looking at and look to a better path, that is always good (IMHO).
"... Brand’s message is clear: you’re not joining a religion so much as coming home to the One who loves you beyond merit, beyond failure, beyond the world’s hollow offers."
If one cannot accept the idea of Christ, we can accept the way unconditional love and forgiveness make us feel.
Yes, except "do not" rather than "cannot." It's a disagreement via a polite declination, rather than something we-who-disagree lack. I LOVE the acceptance I feel within Nature, as one among Her many creations. I'm good, no forgiveness necessary.
OK. Just so you-all remember that not all MAHAns are Christian, or even religious, or are interested in what Brand has to say given his history. The one great thing he's done is to interview Vandana Shiva. Mass respect for her.
This movement is not a Christian one; it is a health for all movement, and one where some-to-many are Christian ... and some-to-many are not. Focus is fine; now when will we read the insights of, say, Robin Wall Kimmerer, or Winona LaDuke? Perhaps Starhawk?
Exactly Diana. Not all Mahans are Christian, as I am not. Although I certainly do admire some real Christians like King. And despise CINOs (Christians in Name Only ) like Charlie Kirk, a FAKE Christian; a hater of gays.
Getting back to King, here is an excerpt from his first great inspired public address to a large crowd of Black people in Montgomery, Alabama in 1956, starting the Bus Boycott there. He was only 26 years old. He is justifying their ethical stance in the traditional call and response pattern of some Black churches. I have inserted some responses in parentheses which are mine not the crowd's.:
"And we are not wrong, we are not wrong in what we are doing. (no, sir! ) If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong. (He's not wrong! ) If we are wrong, Jesus of Nazareth was merely a utopian dreamer that never came down to earth. If we are wrong, justice is a lie. Love has no meaning. (tell it! ) And we are determined here in Montgomery to work and fight until justice runs down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream. " (Yes, suh! ...like a mighty stream...)
The real Martin Luther King was not what/who you think he was. You will find out the truth in due course, as we all will, who are the "manufactured" heroes and the real ones. How interesting that you can believe wholeheartedly in MLK but not in Jesus. Perhaps, that in itself, is proof of the hero programming. Jesus did not incarnate on Earth to establish religion, all religion is man made, a system of brainwashing for the purpose of controlling and disuniting humans. It works brilliantly.
Well, tell me, smart-ass, who the "real" King was. And I do not "beleive" "wholeheartedly" in King, I just think he was a decent guy. But it is true that I have not adequately explained my position about Jesus, which might understandably seem to contradict what I said about King, and it may sound that I reject Jesus from many posts I have made here. In case anyone is interested (which I doubt ) , there is a post further down here that will explain that position as well as apologise to Russell Brand for my uncalled for rejection of him on the thread of comments after the first time this article about his book was published last week.
And oh yeah, Jesus did not incarnate on Earth, which is a physical impossibilty. So start taking your meds again, Brendaria.
I adored King. I was five when I saw him speaking publicly on a neighbor's black and white TV and was mesmerized. He CARED about people, about right and wrong, about justice and resistance to injustice. Truly a good human being! Thanks for the memories.
Everything he wrote is worth reading, even if one does not beleive in God. He came from a deep wise place. I did not agree with his pacifism, but that is a minor disagreement. Here for you and others, the close of his famous speech from "The March on Washington ", Aug 1963 .:
...."when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, Black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at last. Free at last. Thank God almighty, we are free at last..... "
Apparently I need a Make The Goddess First hat, perhaps not red. I can wear it with my Kennedy for President 2024 shirt, navy to match. Already have a "make vaccine manufacturers liable again" hat.
Prayers for your son . . . supposedly more than 6Mil Muslims & many Jews have converted to Christianity in recent years. Jesus is visiting them in dreams/visions . . . implore that for your son.
Does he go into his take on human sacrifice? Does anyone? It's a death cult. No doubt it's attractive to people who want to negate themselves, as he so clearly does (that's at the root of addiction).
I am very pleased- as a generally generally closely alligned member of the MAHA movement- to see the outpouring of identitification with and demonstration of religious practices in a large segment of citizens in our country. However, as an identified and proacticing Jew, it does ocassionally concern me that more achnowlegement of the founding understanding of respect and support to ALL religious practice in our nation is cherished and supported by this new political movement.
It is wonderful to hear about Christians excited about the one indivisable and unseen presence which guides and arbitrates the complex material and immaterial elements of this universe. This I applaud as I fully identify with such enthusiasm even if the details of my specific Judaic belief and practices diverge significantly from Christian theology and practice.
I am a proud Jew, yet I want to belong within this new thoughtful and intellectually purposeful movement which has developed subsequent to the past Presidential Campaign of Robert F Kennedy. Please reassure me that all religious adherents are welcomed as equals in the MAHA movement.
The first time this article was published, I ripped into Brand pretty viciously. But what I was really ripping into were the MAGA fake Christians who infest this Substack. I unfortunately equated the two which I should not have done, because there is no evidence, at least that I know of, that Brand has ended up as a zealot evangelical fake like one often reads here. If I find that out, I will then attack him.
Brand deservers a lot of respect for his contributions to the health freedom movement. And I think he is basically a decent guy who has had a lot of problems and has tried to heal using various therapies and movements. ( I do not know what to make of these rape allegations ). And I should not have ridiculed him about going from 12 Steps to TM to Revolution etc... Although some may think I should also not ridicule the idiotic praise-Jesus "Christians" here either, there is a big difference between Brand and his Christianity (as described in the short article) and the vicious satanic Charlie Kirk types , who may indeed have been motivated by suffering to seek "the Lord", but have ended up as arrogant hypocritical little shits.
Regarding Jesus: the Gospels reveal a decent caring compassionate individual, whose example, in my opinion, has not been followed by about 99.9% of Christians since he walked the Earth and died, and was NOT resurrected, because that is a physical impossibilty.
And Brand was really funny in "Get Him to the Greek" . And Jonah Hill even funnier. The "Jeffrey" sequence was particularly hilarious , but I say that with some reluctance, because it is NOT funny to bad trip on drugs, as I well know.
The ignorance displayed in the many comments is quite soul destroying, I don't usually read them and, having done so, I am reminded of why I do not. It is hard to explain to humans that Jesus did not incarnate on Earth to establish the ROMAN Catholic Church. He did not come to establish a religion. He came to tell us the TRUTH about who we are and our relationship to our Father, the Divine Creator. Religion is a man made control mechanism, designed by the Godless and hugely successful on many levels. It will, at some point, disappear and the world will be the better for its absence. It must be pointed out, however, that the only major religion that is not a supremacist religion is Christianity. Christianity should be seen as a recipe for living in love, under the Law of One.
Christianity for most of its history was VERY supremecist. Even if it is not anymore. It was atheists like me that put the fascist motherfucking Churches of earlier ages back in their places. Violently if necessary , as the French revolutionists rightly did, as the Left in the Spanish Civil War rightly did ,and as the Bolsheviks rightly did.
I agree, but Jesus does not represent the church as man created it. If his mission had not been hijacked by corrupt, powerful psychopaths, we would not be living with the insanity that we have now.
There is no such thing as conversion to God and Jesus: the first does not exist, and the latter was a person just like us, who died 2000 or so years ago, thus whose spirit and body no longer exist.
Here is what really happenned to Brand psychologically , according to the theories of neo-Freudian psychoanalist Arthur Janov. It's called the Conversion Experience which is just another neurotic way of coping with existence. This below may be hard to understand for those unacquainted with Janov's theories but I include it anyways, in case something makes sense to someone. (See especially his book "Prisoners of Pain" )
Saturday, November 6, 2010
The Conversion Experience by ARTHUR JANOV
The conversion experience is an important aspect of belief systems. Due to one cataclysmic event, a person "sees the light" and is inalterably changed. As a rule, this epiphanic moment happens suddenly, converting the individual from a suffering, despairing human being into someone who has found supposed peace and salvation. It is a seemingly magical experience that appears to happen without rhyme or reason.
Many of my patients have talked about their earlier conversions. Things must be going badly — this is the sine qua non for the conversion experience. Further, the difficulties must have endured for some time before the defense system (against unconscious traumas) begins to crumble. The individual's current situation, compounded with past trauma, becomes more than the person can handle. Suddenly there is breakdown and conversion.
I recall how one patient put it: "I was broke, divorced and alone for some time. One day, sitting in the park alone at dusk, I felt something grab me and I screamed out all to myself, 'I’ve been saved!' What I discovered later in therapy was that I had been "saved" from an hithertho unconscious feeling that I was never saved, that my parents let me drown in my misery without so much as batting an eye. They did nothing to help me, turned me out at the age of 15 because I didn't behave, and let me flounder in life through drugs and alcohol without once reaching out to help.”
Naked before this neglect, unloved, alone, she fled into the arms of the mystical, where she no longer felt alone or unloved. Now that she had been "saved" , she no longer had to reexperience the real underlying feeling that there was no one to save her from her childhood hell. She now had renewed false hope, the a pale imitation of the real hope she had lost very early in her life. This was the essence of her conversion; she had converted hopelessness into false hope.
Therein lies the paradigm for the conversion experience. I call it a primal crisis. It usually occurs to people when they are in enormous pain or on the brink of it. It is really the snapping point and it occurs when the person can no longer defend. There's nothing else left for her to do but to be "saved" by God.
Very often, when my patients are on the verge of tremendous feelings, particularly the feelings that predate verbal abilities, they begin to shake and tremble enormously; they thrash and writhe as the force of the pain almost lifts them off the ground. One patient, while convulsing violently, screamed out that she felt a "force" shaking her. Finally she cried, "I’ve been saved, I’ve been saved!"
This occurred during a personal crisis, a period of utmost despair and hopelessness. For weeks she had been seriously contemplating suicide. Finally, her conversion experience told why she was suffering so much. By being "born again," she had been "saved" — saved from the discovery that she really had absolutely no one in her life, not now, not ever. Her "rebirth" spared her the experience of profound hopelessness that comes with the realization that she was utterly alone in an indifferent universe, that no one loved her. Once one re-experiences the underlying despair, real hope can be experienced.
Why do people tremble and shake while undergoing "religious conversion?” It's really a very short leap from the feeling fueling these convulsions to sensing a new, magical, benevolent force that controls one's destiny. It is childhood pain converted to a belief in childhood magic, the belief that anything is now possible. The form doesn't matter: Jesus, Buddha, Allah, pyramid power, communication with an omniscient seer from centuries past. One is now in another realm, another universe.
What we see in the conversion experience is how pliable feelings are; how easily they are turned into ideas and how those ideas have the strength of feeling. This process is not as freakish as one might imagine, since it aids in survival.
I’m happy for him. When anyone can come to terms with things in their past they feel need looking at and look to a better path, that is always good (IMHO).
We all need self-reflection.
God bless him.
Can't wait to read it
"... Brand’s message is clear: you’re not joining a religion so much as coming home to the One who loves you beyond merit, beyond failure, beyond the world’s hollow offers."
If one cannot accept the idea of Christ, we can accept the way unconditional love and forgiveness make us feel.
Yes, except "do not" rather than "cannot." It's a disagreement via a polite declination, rather than something we-who-disagree lack. I LOVE the acceptance I feel within Nature, as one among Her many creations. I'm good, no forgiveness necessary.
OK. Just so you-all remember that not all MAHAns are Christian, or even religious, or are interested in what Brand has to say given his history. The one great thing he's done is to interview Vandana Shiva. Mass respect for her.
This movement is not a Christian one; it is a health for all movement, and one where some-to-many are Christian ... and some-to-many are not. Focus is fine; now when will we read the insights of, say, Robin Wall Kimmerer, or Winona LaDuke? Perhaps Starhawk?
Exactly Diana. Not all Mahans are Christian, as I am not. Although I certainly do admire some real Christians like King. And despise CINOs (Christians in Name Only ) like Charlie Kirk, a FAKE Christian; a hater of gays.
Getting back to King, here is an excerpt from his first great inspired public address to a large crowd of Black people in Montgomery, Alabama in 1956, starting the Bus Boycott there. He was only 26 years old. He is justifying their ethical stance in the traditional call and response pattern of some Black churches. I have inserted some responses in parentheses which are mine not the crowd's.:
"And we are not wrong, we are not wrong in what we are doing. (no, sir! ) If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong. (He's not wrong! ) If we are wrong, Jesus of Nazareth was merely a utopian dreamer that never came down to earth. If we are wrong, justice is a lie. Love has no meaning. (tell it! ) And we are determined here in Montgomery to work and fight until justice runs down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream. " (Yes, suh! ...like a mighty stream...)
Right on , my brother ! A true Christian.
Martin Luther King Jr. 1929-1968
The real Martin Luther King was not what/who you think he was. You will find out the truth in due course, as we all will, who are the "manufactured" heroes and the real ones. How interesting that you can believe wholeheartedly in MLK but not in Jesus. Perhaps, that in itself, is proof of the hero programming. Jesus did not incarnate on Earth to establish religion, all religion is man made, a system of brainwashing for the purpose of controlling and disuniting humans. It works brilliantly.
Well, tell me, smart-ass, who the "real" King was. And I do not "beleive" "wholeheartedly" in King, I just think he was a decent guy. But it is true that I have not adequately explained my position about Jesus, which might understandably seem to contradict what I said about King, and it may sound that I reject Jesus from many posts I have made here. In case anyone is interested (which I doubt ) , there is a post further down here that will explain that position as well as apologise to Russell Brand for my uncalled for rejection of him on the thread of comments after the first time this article about his book was published last week.
And oh yeah, Jesus did not incarnate on Earth, which is a physical impossibilty. So start taking your meds again, Brendaria.
I adored King. I was five when I saw him speaking publicly on a neighbor's black and white TV and was mesmerized. He CARED about people, about right and wrong, about justice and resistance to injustice. Truly a good human being! Thanks for the memories.
Everything he wrote is worth reading, even if one does not beleive in God. He came from a deep wise place. I did not agree with his pacifism, but that is a minor disagreement. Here for you and others, the close of his famous speech from "The March on Washington ", Aug 1963 .:
...."when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, Black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at last. Free at last. Thank God almighty, we are free at last..... "
It's an extremely aggressive cult. They will take over any org they enter and will try to shout down anyone who objects to their preaching.
Apparently I need a Make The Goddess First hat, perhaps not red. I can wear it with my Kennedy for President 2024 shirt, navy to match. Already have a "make vaccine manufacturers liable again" hat.
good for you!
Love you, and Jesus, Russel Brand!
Love the concept Russell can't wait to read. going to get one for my F***** son he has to turn his life around to Jesus.
Also would love to be considered for Rusty's Rockets for the americanflagmonument.com
project. many blessings to you Russell
With Great admiration,
John W. Jeffries
Prayers for your son . . . supposedly more than 6Mil Muslims & many Jews have converted to Christianity in recent years. Jesus is visiting them in dreams/visions . . . implore that for your son.
Leave your son alone. He needs your concept of conversion to Jesus like a hole in the head. And it does not help that you obviously hate him.
Wow, who's the judgmental one?
“Intellectually, the book is much richer than might be expected.” Not so - I would expect nothing less.
Does he go into his take on human sacrifice? Does anyone? It's a death cult. No doubt it's attractive to people who want to negate themselves, as he so clearly does (that's at the root of addiction).
Sounds like a great read.
Hello MAHA
I am very pleased- as a generally generally closely alligned member of the MAHA movement- to see the outpouring of identitification with and demonstration of religious practices in a large segment of citizens in our country. However, as an identified and proacticing Jew, it does ocassionally concern me that more achnowlegement of the founding understanding of respect and support to ALL religious practice in our nation is cherished and supported by this new political movement.
It is wonderful to hear about Christians excited about the one indivisable and unseen presence which guides and arbitrates the complex material and immaterial elements of this universe. This I applaud as I fully identify with such enthusiasm even if the details of my specific Judaic belief and practices diverge significantly from Christian theology and practice.
I am a proud Jew, yet I want to belong within this new thoughtful and intellectually purposeful movement which has developed subsequent to the past Presidential Campaign of Robert F Kennedy. Please reassure me that all religious adherents are welcomed as equals in the MAHA movement.
John Kaplan, MD
Wildomar, CA
APOLOGIES to Russell Brand:
The first time this article was published, I ripped into Brand pretty viciously. But what I was really ripping into were the MAGA fake Christians who infest this Substack. I unfortunately equated the two which I should not have done, because there is no evidence, at least that I know of, that Brand has ended up as a zealot evangelical fake like one often reads here. If I find that out, I will then attack him.
Brand deservers a lot of respect for his contributions to the health freedom movement. And I think he is basically a decent guy who has had a lot of problems and has tried to heal using various therapies and movements. ( I do not know what to make of these rape allegations ). And I should not have ridiculed him about going from 12 Steps to TM to Revolution etc... Although some may think I should also not ridicule the idiotic praise-Jesus "Christians" here either, there is a big difference between Brand and his Christianity (as described in the short article) and the vicious satanic Charlie Kirk types , who may indeed have been motivated by suffering to seek "the Lord", but have ended up as arrogant hypocritical little shits.
Regarding Jesus: the Gospels reveal a decent caring compassionate individual, whose example, in my opinion, has not been followed by about 99.9% of Christians since he walked the Earth and died, and was NOT resurrected, because that is a physical impossibilty.
And Brand was really funny in "Get Him to the Greek" . And Jonah Hill even funnier. The "Jeffrey" sequence was particularly hilarious , but I say that with some reluctance, because it is NOT funny to bad trip on drugs, as I well know.
The ignorance displayed in the many comments is quite soul destroying, I don't usually read them and, having done so, I am reminded of why I do not. It is hard to explain to humans that Jesus did not incarnate on Earth to establish the ROMAN Catholic Church. He did not come to establish a religion. He came to tell us the TRUTH about who we are and our relationship to our Father, the Divine Creator. Religion is a man made control mechanism, designed by the Godless and hugely successful on many levels. It will, at some point, disappear and the world will be the better for its absence. It must be pointed out, however, that the only major religion that is not a supremacist religion is Christianity. Christianity should be seen as a recipe for living in love, under the Law of One.
Christianity for most of its history was VERY supremecist. Even if it is not anymore. It was atheists like me that put the fascist motherfucking Churches of earlier ages back in their places. Violently if necessary , as the French revolutionists rightly did, as the Left in the Spanish Civil War rightly did ,and as the Bolsheviks rightly did.
I agree, but Jesus does not represent the church as man created it. If his mission had not been hijacked by corrupt, powerful psychopaths, we would not be living with the insanity that we have now.
There is no such thing as conversion to God and Jesus: the first does not exist, and the latter was a person just like us, who died 2000 or so years ago, thus whose spirit and body no longer exist.
Here is what really happenned to Brand psychologically , according to the theories of neo-Freudian psychoanalist Arthur Janov. It's called the Conversion Experience which is just another neurotic way of coping with existence. This below may be hard to understand for those unacquainted with Janov's theories but I include it anyways, in case something makes sense to someone. (See especially his book "Prisoners of Pain" )
Saturday, November 6, 2010
The Conversion Experience by ARTHUR JANOV
The conversion experience is an important aspect of belief systems. Due to one cataclysmic event, a person "sees the light" and is inalterably changed. As a rule, this epiphanic moment happens suddenly, converting the individual from a suffering, despairing human being into someone who has found supposed peace and salvation. It is a seemingly magical experience that appears to happen without rhyme or reason.
Many of my patients have talked about their earlier conversions. Things must be going badly — this is the sine qua non for the conversion experience. Further, the difficulties must have endured for some time before the defense system (against unconscious traumas) begins to crumble. The individual's current situation, compounded with past trauma, becomes more than the person can handle. Suddenly there is breakdown and conversion.
I recall how one patient put it: "I was broke, divorced and alone for some time. One day, sitting in the park alone at dusk, I felt something grab me and I screamed out all to myself, 'I’ve been saved!' What I discovered later in therapy was that I had been "saved" from an hithertho unconscious feeling that I was never saved, that my parents let me drown in my misery without so much as batting an eye. They did nothing to help me, turned me out at the age of 15 because I didn't behave, and let me flounder in life through drugs and alcohol without once reaching out to help.”
Naked before this neglect, unloved, alone, she fled into the arms of the mystical, where she no longer felt alone or unloved. Now that she had been "saved" , she no longer had to reexperience the real underlying feeling that there was no one to save her from her childhood hell. She now had renewed false hope, the a pale imitation of the real hope she had lost very early in her life. This was the essence of her conversion; she had converted hopelessness into false hope.
Therein lies the paradigm for the conversion experience. I call it a primal crisis. It usually occurs to people when they are in enormous pain or on the brink of it. It is really the snapping point and it occurs when the person can no longer defend. There's nothing else left for her to do but to be "saved" by God.
Very often, when my patients are on the verge of tremendous feelings, particularly the feelings that predate verbal abilities, they begin to shake and tremble enormously; they thrash and writhe as the force of the pain almost lifts them off the ground. One patient, while convulsing violently, screamed out that she felt a "force" shaking her. Finally she cried, "I’ve been saved, I’ve been saved!"
This occurred during a personal crisis, a period of utmost despair and hopelessness. For weeks she had been seriously contemplating suicide. Finally, her conversion experience told why she was suffering so much. By being "born again," she had been "saved" — saved from the discovery that she really had absolutely no one in her life, not now, not ever. Her "rebirth" spared her the experience of profound hopelessness that comes with the realization that she was utterly alone in an indifferent universe, that no one loved her. Once one re-experiences the underlying despair, real hope can be experienced.
Why do people tremble and shake while undergoing "religious conversion?” It's really a very short leap from the feeling fueling these convulsions to sensing a new, magical, benevolent force that controls one's destiny. It is childhood pain converted to a belief in childhood magic, the belief that anything is now possible. The form doesn't matter: Jesus, Buddha, Allah, pyramid power, communication with an omniscient seer from centuries past. One is now in another realm, another universe.
What we see in the conversion experience is how pliable feelings are; how easily they are turned into ideas and how those ideas have the strength of feeling. This process is not as freakish as one might imagine, since it aids in survival.
You protesteth too much! Someone must be praying for you and God is trying to speak, if you'll listen.
Listen to what !? a non-existent being? You are delusional.
I question why he is not relying on Jesus alone. He mentions secondary sources to confirm his Christianity. Jesus is all you need, Bro. Russell.
I'm curious. Has Russell ever explained the number 33 tattoo on his arm? 🙄
https://vanishingtattoo.com/people/russell-brand/
I believe that about as much as I believe this Artemis nonsense.
Mahamovie.com