Willpower:
My profession provided me with ample opportunity to be surrounded by young people seeking to use their potential to be successful. Of course what is success to one may be considered failure to another. I couldn't possibly count the number of young people who are bright, personable, likable, reasonable, trustworthy, etc. and yet going nowhere fast. With all they have going for them it would seem but a small and simple task to send them on their way to success at something. Yet nothing could be further from the truth for some of them. Nothing, absolutely nothing, can seem to generate any real willpower on their part to set realistic goals, draw up a game plan, and make the game plan work. The world is full of many people who say the right things, have legitimate goals, understand so much and yet, in the last analysis, never will find the willpower to achieve much of anything.
On the happiness scale, it is not clear where they stand in relation to those who have a game plan and the willpower to succeed. Thus, I suppose, the picture gets a bit muddled if contentedness is the final measure of success. The only fact here is that we are all dead in the long run---both achievers and non achievers. I won't even attempt to define an achiever. For a start you can't really achieve what you don't really have any intense desire to achieve.
The world, as I see it, has more daydreamers than achievers; more people living lives of quiet desperation than contented with accomplished goals; more losers than winners; more nothingburgers than fille Mignonburgers. What does it all mean? How can any sane intelligent person possibly make accurate judgments about others? Heredity, environment, luck, and health all are in the mix.
Nothing has frustrated me more in life, mostly because of my profession, than my inability to help certain good people become successful and economically independent. In these cases there is always the verbal desire to be somebody, to become financially comfortable, to have things others have, and yet it ends up being mostly parroted babble. When push comes to shove there is nothing there but tepid attempts for short periods of time to better themselves, and these tepid attempts usually are in response to others shoving or demanding them to do even that. In certain respects, maybe they are the lucky ones in life. Their lives are uncomplicated, their value systems weak, and everything in their life seems stuck in neutral. But to be fair, it is hard to reason why they have to have the same value system myself, or anyone else, wants them to have. I can understand the kids of overly protective parents being deficient in self driven energies----mom and pop, after all is said and done, prop them up from dangers and financial insecurity. The best thing my dad ever did for me was to tell me early on, and often, that after graduating from high school I was on my own. And he meant it. Yet, having said that, what worked for me might have been a disaster to a teenager of a different mold and nature. Very little, if anything, in life is ever perfectly clear. "You are your own master" sounds good but we all know, upon reflection, how dumb that really is. The reality is, for most people, a lot of genetics, a 'village' and luck.
"You are what your deep, driving desire is.
As your deep, driving desire is, so is your will.
As your will is, so is your deed.
As your deed is, so is your destiny."
- Upanishads
Even the above, so poetic and inspirational is mostly bullshit. The best it can mean is that sometimes, for some people, it will work out that way. Of course if that person didn't have the driving desire with the resulting good deeds, the chosen destiny would not have been reached.
Were there real justice in the world all young people would have a level playing field to the maximum extent possible. This is stymied at all levels by family values---which really means your own kids come first, always come first, and fairness comes second, always comes second. There is not a major religion in the world which has any scriptural family values such as the family values defined by the religious right in this country. Every religion in the world, on paper, insists that any wealth past the basics, must be shared with those in greater need. To the extent this is true, religions fail badly. It isn't even close. 100 million people will starve to death in the next few years, and all of us affluent will continue to wallow in materialism like pigs at a feeding trough. We do everything but oink. If I am different at all it is only in admittance and degree---even then, this might simply be an illusion. Never mind God save the Queen---God save us all.
"It's not that some people have willpower and some don't.
It's that some people are ready to change and others are not."
- James Gordon
It seems Mr. Gordon is just defining willpower above, not really shedding any illumination on the term.
"Construct your determination with Sustained Effort, Controlled Attention, and
Concentrated Energy. Opportunities never come to those who wait... they are
captured by those who dare to attack."
- Paul J. Meyer
This seems to come closer to defining willpower---sustained effort, controlled attention, and concentrated energy. Daring to attack---ah, this is certainly an aspect of willpower. Maybe this is where willpower begins.
"What you have to do and the way you have to do it is incredibly simple.
Whether you are willing to do it, that's another matter."
- Peter F. Drucker
The above also attempts to define willpower but there is nothing incredibly simple about it. Good game plans don't come incredibly easy.
"Men who are resolved to find a way for themselves will always find opportunities
enough; and if they do not find them, they will make them."
- Samuel Smiles
This sheds a bit more light on willpower---an ability to create opportunities. If one just watches the world go by---it will. Creating your own opportunity is a core part of will power. A person can want all they want, but no one is likely to pay it much attention----and those whose wants are met by the efforts of parents or others of any ilk, are likely to fail because gains unearned often escape for the lack of the inherent inability to sustain the gain. What anyone earns themselves is always more satisfying than anything unearned. Despite any good front, the recipients of unearned anything have a shallow level of personal contentment. Welfare---government or inherited---- cannot be transformed into pride of achievement. It simply can't and for the most part, no one is fooled.
"The intelligent want self-control; children want candy."
- Mevlana Rumi
The above smart ass remark is probably more insightful than at first glance. Willpower requires a high degree of self control. Maybe a lot of willpower is just how each person is wired. Perhaps some people are wired to feel, but not to do; or wired to understand but not to do; or so wired to feel the pain of failure that they avoid trying.
"The longer I live, the more I am certain that the great difference between the great
and the insignificant, is energy -- invincible determination -- a purpose once fixed,
and then death or victory."
- Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton
"Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal: my strength
lies solely in my tenacity."
- Louis Pasteur
"Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan, in which we
must fervently believe, and upon which we must vigorously act. There
is no other route to success."
- Stephan A. Brennan
Combining all three of the above probably comes closest to defining willpower. In the end, willpower can be defined but not easily programmed. Why some people have a lot of willpower and others little willpower is buried deep in our genetic psyche. What is, is. And many a parent has been driven nuts by what is, is. Still, it seems evident that the success of any level of willpower is at least partly driven by circumstances, luck, and our 'village'. Growing up in a Palestinian refugee camp, the hills of Afghanistan, or the bowels of our urban or rural ghettoes does not exactly provide the kind of fertile soil for willpower to succeed. Support and encouragement from others are almost always in the mix here somewhere. Terrell Owens may have earned the right to be in the Football Hall of Fame, but his real mark of distinction, the basis for any other achievement, is his exceptional willpower---a willpower derived almost entirely from an internal wiring that is amazingly self generated and sustained---an island of pure willpower little influenced by any' village', luck, circumstance or natural physical endowment. An inability to let others participate and be a part of your achievement is to be DIFFERENT and generates hostility, which in Terrell's case sometimes translates into irrational anger toward him. We may all say we respect those who pull themselves up by their own boot straps, but when it comes in a such a pure form it is seen as pure selfishness, and is then seen as a success which needs to be put in it's place and disrespected for it's independent isolationism. To me, this kind of willpower, to such a degree, is so rare as to be amazing. And so do some others, which is why the whole phenomenon called Terrell Owens is a raging storm of diverse feelings. "Who the hell does he think he is?", scream his detractors. Of course he knows what he is because he, outside of his grandmother, created exactly who he is and what he can do. Others, less numerous, see Terrell as the ultimate 'little engine that could'---the 'Yes I can, yes I can" skinny kid who got picked on, little blessed with any abundance of naturally born talent, and yet got to the top by pure focused willpower.
So much for pure willpower. Willpower, in isolation---played out according to the rules of ethics---generates success with a cost. It really shouldn't, but it does.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Monday, March 22, 2010
What Does Freedom Mean?
What does Freedom Mean?
"Freedom and justice for all". What exactly is freedom? I suppose there is freedom from external domination from another country. I reckon, if one is in a minority, there is the freedom from any tyranny of the majority. Freedom from fear is a more personal aspect of freedom. There is even the freedom of having nothing left to lose. If you are without food, shelter, health care, a job, etc. any freedom is of little use. I mean the law may state that the rich, as well as the poor, can sleep under bridges and scrounge though garbage cans, but this is a silly kind of freedom for the rich and an indication of lack of freedom for the poor.
Freedom of opinion is another kind of freedom, albeit tough to swallow when others get in your face about a matter with which you forcefully disagree. If the will of God alone is determining the course of history then free will doesn't exist. The religious right seem the most confused. They justify a lot of what they do, or what happens in life, by claiming it is God's will. They then turn around and pray a lot so that their way can be implemented by God for their or someone else's benefit. The assumption seems here to be that God may not do the good thing without someone praying for Him to do the good thing. Some women believe they have the freedom to abort for reasons they deem to be sufficient, but the right to lifers believe no such freedom for women exists. I never respected the title "Right to Life" adopted by the anti-choice crowd. When a mother who can't adequately support raising another child aborts, the anti-choicers scream bloody murder but then oppose all government programs that might let that child have proper health care, a good school, etc. It is like life to them is just a bunch of functioning cells. They aren't always so cheap, like if someone is on life support in a vegetative state, they are all for society footing the bill for years. I can understand using taxpayer money to give a child a good school or good health care, but I fail to see what society gains by using modern medicine to keep someone a live by machines for a few more months at the expense of thousands upon thousands of dollars. It seems freedom dictates pro choice for mothers and the freedom of every person to control their own dying process. After all, freedom doesn't really mean much if only certain people are free to follow their own religious beliefs.
The religious right are very adamant about their right to follow their religious beliefs and just as adamant that their religious beliefs should be the law of the land. There is no fair is fair in their vision of life. What the religious right has is faith and stubborn allegiance to past or present dogmas. They seldom change, and when others in society gain more freedom such as slaves, women, children, gays, etc. it is less because the religious right ever change and more because the next generation is able to see the injustices with less ingrained bias. Progress in freedom for minorities is more generational in nature than intra-generational.
It may make more sense to say that the grand plan of our universe is dependent on the evolutionary process created by God than to say the future is already determined by God's grand plan. After all, God doesn't determine which team wins a ball game or how well any player plays, regardless of what some athletes claim. Chance, determination, and talent will prevail. This hardly in any way diminishes the role of God, it just clears up the manner in which God rules the world----by a system, not by God micromanaging all that happens, metering out individual punishments and favors.
It is probably a real effort for any of us to respect the freedom of others to be eccentric. Freedom is only possible where people respect diversity. Sometimes the U.S. acts a bit daffy when we insist that imposing a type of government on another country is a righteous act carried out by our 'freedom fighters'. I think people in countries like Vietnam had about enough of our 'freedom fighters'. They were never really free until they suffered the loss of 2 million of their own at the hands of our 'freedom' fighters. Certainly the 2 million dead aren't free. Well, maybe they are.
Until there is equality before the law for all, there is no real freedom for all. I think personal happiness is tied to freedom. Numerous polls on which nations have the happiest people seem to center on Scandinavian countries and Costa Rica. Costa Rica? The U.S. is quite far back in the pack, like 23rd. The explanation given (if the polls are legitimate) is that in places like Denmark the people are free from worry about education, health care, job benefits, and retirement benefits; they work a 37 hr week, get 6 weeks vacation every year, have excellent public transportation etc. Of course their tax rate is over 50%. Americans would almost all say they would rather die than pay a 50% tax rate. But then again, I guess the Danes are more interested in being free from worry about their basic needs while Americans are more interested in the freedom to pursue survival of the fittest.
Perhaps Americans are too competitive---too concentrated on being sure someone else gets the short end of the stick. In one sense America is a great place to amass great wealth for those with the talent to do so, and Denmark a great place to relax, smell the flowers, and be happy when enough is enough. They also live the longest in these Scandinavian countries. It just amazes me that people can be happy in such a cold climate.
It does not escape my attention that those countries in which people are the happiest are never those countries where sectarian religion has strong control over the nation's government. I suspect it would be difficult to be happy living in a place where your own religious beliefs are thwarted by someone else's religious beliefs being the law of the land. Beliefs are important to everyone, some more than others, and the freedom to act on your own religious beliefs is often essential to personal contentment.
Today another kind of freedom is in the forefront of concern: the freedom from violence. When the economic gap between the rich and the poor or middle class widens, as it is doing today across the globe at an insane exploding rate, the pressure for those less fortunate to resort to violence multiplies as the their economic woes worsen. As human overpopulation of the globe proceeds at a similar insane rate the competition for dwindling resources like land, food, homes, and jobs increases, and again, the propensity for violence multiplies. The question is not why terrorism exists, but whether it's acceleration can be halted without responsible human reproduction reducing overpopulation and stopping the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few. No ethical society would ever let wealth become accumulated to the extent 3% of the people own 90% of the wealth in the country. And that is exactly where America is today.
Jesus and most all major prophets and ethical leaders in history have rejected violence as a means to an end, other than to save oneself or a nation from attack by insurgents from outside or within a nation. Now that we have a global economy it is not clear how national patriotism is beneficial at all. When our own government orchestrates the killing of 2 million Vietnamese, the same number of Jews killed by HItler, or drops 28,000 bombs on Iraq, and builds hundreds of military bases on the soil of other nations----when any government behaves in this fashion, their own citizens or group of citizens angry about this or that will respond with violence to solve their problems too. When our own country spends more on military hardware than all the other major military powers combined, is it any surprise individual Americans insist on having their own super efficient assault weapons? Freedom from violence is becoming one of the most difficult freedoms to achieve. Violence begets violence. We all know this. We really do, but we are descendants of the 'Wild West', 'manifest destiny', 'You can run but you can't hide', 'dead or alive', lynching for justice, and more recently torture of prisoners. With all this penchant for violence at the very top of our society, any freedom from violence for the rest of us is doomed. When I was young, not exactly eons ago, I never, at any time, worried about being shot in school, friendliness with strangers was expected, hitch hiking of non existent concern, child rape a rarity, and Americans were beloved across the globe. If people saw an American plane in the skies they waved---in scores of countries they now tremble with fear. In terms of deaths, military bases, destruction of property, and displacement of families, modern America is the World Champion. No other nation comes close. How the hell could this have happened?
Freedom and justice for all. America has proudly extended justice for all, steadily reducing the number of Americans who left outside justice for all. Freedom, on the other hand, is another story. Many aspects of freedom elucidated above are slipping away, especially freedom from fear about health, violence, job security, financial security, and all the problems associated with human overpopulation. For increasingly more people freedom is beginning to mean nothing left to lose. Terrorism thrives on this kind of freedom.
"Freedom and justice for all". What exactly is freedom? I suppose there is freedom from external domination from another country. I reckon, if one is in a minority, there is the freedom from any tyranny of the majority. Freedom from fear is a more personal aspect of freedom. There is even the freedom of having nothing left to lose. If you are without food, shelter, health care, a job, etc. any freedom is of little use. I mean the law may state that the rich, as well as the poor, can sleep under bridges and scrounge though garbage cans, but this is a silly kind of freedom for the rich and an indication of lack of freedom for the poor.
Freedom of opinion is another kind of freedom, albeit tough to swallow when others get in your face about a matter with which you forcefully disagree. If the will of God alone is determining the course of history then free will doesn't exist. The religious right seem the most confused. They justify a lot of what they do, or what happens in life, by claiming it is God's will. They then turn around and pray a lot so that their way can be implemented by God for their or someone else's benefit. The assumption seems here to be that God may not do the good thing without someone praying for Him to do the good thing. Some women believe they have the freedom to abort for reasons they deem to be sufficient, but the right to lifers believe no such freedom for women exists. I never respected the title "Right to Life" adopted by the anti-choice crowd. When a mother who can't adequately support raising another child aborts, the anti-choicers scream bloody murder but then oppose all government programs that might let that child have proper health care, a good school, etc. It is like life to them is just a bunch of functioning cells. They aren't always so cheap, like if someone is on life support in a vegetative state, they are all for society footing the bill for years. I can understand using taxpayer money to give a child a good school or good health care, but I fail to see what society gains by using modern medicine to keep someone a live by machines for a few more months at the expense of thousands upon thousands of dollars. It seems freedom dictates pro choice for mothers and the freedom of every person to control their own dying process. After all, freedom doesn't really mean much if only certain people are free to follow their own religious beliefs.
The religious right are very adamant about their right to follow their religious beliefs and just as adamant that their religious beliefs should be the law of the land. There is no fair is fair in their vision of life. What the religious right has is faith and stubborn allegiance to past or present dogmas. They seldom change, and when others in society gain more freedom such as slaves, women, children, gays, etc. it is less because the religious right ever change and more because the next generation is able to see the injustices with less ingrained bias. Progress in freedom for minorities is more generational in nature than intra-generational.
It may make more sense to say that the grand plan of our universe is dependent on the evolutionary process created by God than to say the future is already determined by God's grand plan. After all, God doesn't determine which team wins a ball game or how well any player plays, regardless of what some athletes claim. Chance, determination, and talent will prevail. This hardly in any way diminishes the role of God, it just clears up the manner in which God rules the world----by a system, not by God micromanaging all that happens, metering out individual punishments and favors.
It is probably a real effort for any of us to respect the freedom of others to be eccentric. Freedom is only possible where people respect diversity. Sometimes the U.S. acts a bit daffy when we insist that imposing a type of government on another country is a righteous act carried out by our 'freedom fighters'. I think people in countries like Vietnam had about enough of our 'freedom fighters'. They were never really free until they suffered the loss of 2 million of their own at the hands of our 'freedom' fighters. Certainly the 2 million dead aren't free. Well, maybe they are.
Until there is equality before the law for all, there is no real freedom for all. I think personal happiness is tied to freedom. Numerous polls on which nations have the happiest people seem to center on Scandinavian countries and Costa Rica. Costa Rica? The U.S. is quite far back in the pack, like 23rd. The explanation given (if the polls are legitimate) is that in places like Denmark the people are free from worry about education, health care, job benefits, and retirement benefits; they work a 37 hr week, get 6 weeks vacation every year, have excellent public transportation etc. Of course their tax rate is over 50%. Americans would almost all say they would rather die than pay a 50% tax rate. But then again, I guess the Danes are more interested in being free from worry about their basic needs while Americans are more interested in the freedom to pursue survival of the fittest.
Perhaps Americans are too competitive---too concentrated on being sure someone else gets the short end of the stick. In one sense America is a great place to amass great wealth for those with the talent to do so, and Denmark a great place to relax, smell the flowers, and be happy when enough is enough. They also live the longest in these Scandinavian countries. It just amazes me that people can be happy in such a cold climate.
It does not escape my attention that those countries in which people are the happiest are never those countries where sectarian religion has strong control over the nation's government. I suspect it would be difficult to be happy living in a place where your own religious beliefs are thwarted by someone else's religious beliefs being the law of the land. Beliefs are important to everyone, some more than others, and the freedom to act on your own religious beliefs is often essential to personal contentment.
Today another kind of freedom is in the forefront of concern: the freedom from violence. When the economic gap between the rich and the poor or middle class widens, as it is doing today across the globe at an insane exploding rate, the pressure for those less fortunate to resort to violence multiplies as the their economic woes worsen. As human overpopulation of the globe proceeds at a similar insane rate the competition for dwindling resources like land, food, homes, and jobs increases, and again, the propensity for violence multiplies. The question is not why terrorism exists, but whether it's acceleration can be halted without responsible human reproduction reducing overpopulation and stopping the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few. No ethical society would ever let wealth become accumulated to the extent 3% of the people own 90% of the wealth in the country. And that is exactly where America is today.
Jesus and most all major prophets and ethical leaders in history have rejected violence as a means to an end, other than to save oneself or a nation from attack by insurgents from outside or within a nation. Now that we have a global economy it is not clear how national patriotism is beneficial at all. When our own government orchestrates the killing of 2 million Vietnamese, the same number of Jews killed by HItler, or drops 28,000 bombs on Iraq, and builds hundreds of military bases on the soil of other nations----when any government behaves in this fashion, their own citizens or group of citizens angry about this or that will respond with violence to solve their problems too. When our own country spends more on military hardware than all the other major military powers combined, is it any surprise individual Americans insist on having their own super efficient assault weapons? Freedom from violence is becoming one of the most difficult freedoms to achieve. Violence begets violence. We all know this. We really do, but we are descendants of the 'Wild West', 'manifest destiny', 'You can run but you can't hide', 'dead or alive', lynching for justice, and more recently torture of prisoners. With all this penchant for violence at the very top of our society, any freedom from violence for the rest of us is doomed. When I was young, not exactly eons ago, I never, at any time, worried about being shot in school, friendliness with strangers was expected, hitch hiking of non existent concern, child rape a rarity, and Americans were beloved across the globe. If people saw an American plane in the skies they waved---in scores of countries they now tremble with fear. In terms of deaths, military bases, destruction of property, and displacement of families, modern America is the World Champion. No other nation comes close. How the hell could this have happened?
Freedom and justice for all. America has proudly extended justice for all, steadily reducing the number of Americans who left outside justice for all. Freedom, on the other hand, is another story. Many aspects of freedom elucidated above are slipping away, especially freedom from fear about health, violence, job security, financial security, and all the problems associated with human overpopulation. For increasingly more people freedom is beginning to mean nothing left to lose. Terrorism thrives on this kind of freedom.
Friday, March 19, 2010
The Price and Rewards of Morality
The Price and Rewards of Morality:
I guess it starts with freedom---free will if you prefer. If God 'wills it' then human morality is non existent---whatever we do, or someone else does is scripted by God or the Devil. Some view a person as torn between the Devil and God. Behind any of this are beliefs, not proven facts, so the issues are forever muddled. I suppose the question first has to be answered as to whether we can really know anything that is not first in the senses--- senses which are dependent on the material world. Kant viewed morality as a series of questions: "What can I know?" "What ought I to do" and "What can I hope?"
Reason would appear to dictate that life on our planet is controlled by some sort of 'natural law' embedded in a God created evolutionary process. As time progresses we learn more and more about the particulars of the evolutionary process, especially now that we know so much more about molecular genetics. Thus, what is left is to understand is how human 'free will' fits into the evolutionary process. If humans have 'free will', then this free will affects the evolutionary process. In this respect the human species is the first species able to affect it's future destiny via 'free will'. Other species seem pretty much destined to be entirely controlled by natural law. Of course one could argue that 'free will' is just another aspect of natural law. Perhaps so, but then 'free will' as part of natural law did not exist until more recently in the evolutionary process.
If one believes God created each species, that God is actively involved with the personal lives of each person on the planet, that whatever happens in the world is God's will or that God has designated human emissaries to write written words of gospel to a particular tribe of people---well these are beliefs----and because they are beliefs, cannot be proven or disproved. Humans, by definition I guess, are free to believe anything they want. But beliefs often have consequences. One can 'believe' that smoking does not have future health consequences, but then if that belief is wrong people die a slow painful death desperately trying to get oxygen into their body. Beliefs can matter a lot in the long run.
Given that beliefs often have consequences, it behooves us to have reasonable beliefs based on reasonable thoughts. Mistaken beliefs can yield disastrous results. Somehow, stating that 'my religious beliefs are true because I inherited them' seems almost absurd. Religion, at least in theory, is about living some kind of moral life as a path to an 'after life'. Because of free will, so it is reasoned, some will choose to live moral lives and others will choose not to, and only those who choose to live a moral life get to go to 'heaven'. The question of an afterlife is beyond human reason. This does not make it, a priori, an absurdity. There is so much yet we don't know about earthly life that it seems unreasonable to be upset because we cannot reason out details, or even any existence, of a possible 'afterlife'. Not everything that IS, is subject to current human understanding. With the passage of time, humans have much more understanding about a lot of natural law, and the environment in which we prosper. This is evolutionary progress. Almost by definition, the evolutionary process is the work of God.
Given the goal of religion (an after life) and the role morality plays in all religions, then moral principles are important. For the most part humans don't appear to discover or learn basic moral principles. Rather, humans have the intuitive capacity to understand basic moral principles. In what human society is there debate over whether it is wrong to steal? to have sex with another's spouse? to kill another person? to lie? to cheat? etc. Not all moral principles are equally clear. Nevertheless just about everyone understands moral cliches such as 'fair is fair', 'what goes around comes around', etc. We know. We all know. Everyone knows---here, there, and everywhere. Abstract logical reasoning resides within human nature as a current genetic reality. If everyone except psychopaths understand right and wrong, then the problem is one of doing the right thing. But what then is the right thing? Something which gives us pleasure? something which increases our financial worth? something which gives an advantage to our own family, our own community, our own state, our own country, our own economic bracket, our own ethnic group, our own religious group?, etc.
One problem is that morality excites passion. Passion cannot be trusted to be reasonable or moral. In the presence of passion, reason can be driven by circumstances, not moral principles. Thus there are non moral imperatives--behavior which is driven by circumstance. These are reactions to situations. You may need to get access to food for survival, protect yourselves from those trying to harm you, win a political battle, or romance battle, or save your job, or win a job, etc. Moral behavior which is governed by non moral imperatives is not, in any pure sense, moral behavior.
What then is pure moral behavior? A pure moral principle is an action that is morally necessary in itself, without reference to any purpose. These are the mountains which everyone must climb to gain any real moral status for their life. I suppose this kind of behavior distinguishes the 'saints' from the 'sinners'. Let us take "thou shalt not steal'---a widely accepted moral principle. The principle is simple, the application is not. If someone has no real need to steal, and they don't---for the most part---then the result is meritorious at the lowest level. If someone has a great need to steal to survive, but only steals in the worst of situations, then I guess they may well have achieved a result more meritorious than one who never has any need to steal---and certainly a lot more meritorious than one with a need to steal who does so all the time. The point here is that it is wrong to steal---period---maybe. This being granted, any grading of moral behavior gets quite complicated. Once you add genetic and environmental variations, the interpretive fog here gets extremely dense. Hence the logical moral caution of 'Judge not that ye be not judged'. If morality is an operative state necessary to achieve a goal (some sort of life after death) then it is probably unreasonable to think we will be our own judge and jury on the matter or the one to judge and jury anyone else. Like so much else in life one has to just do the best one can. We know the rules but we don't know how many points we have to get to pass. How could anyone possibly know that? Many cop out with such vaporous absurdities such as "God has saved me---I have sinned but God has saved me" It is like the kid who does bad things but explains to the school principal,"I did a bad thing but my mom loves me and will forgive me and not really hurt me, just slap my hand." The trouble is adults are not kids and no one has the vaguest idea about judgment, the nature of it, or the points needed to pass---except I, whom God really likes, Who guides me daily through the mine fields of life. Yeah, me and Pat Robertson, Jerry Faulwell, Muslim Ayatollahs, Popes, Priests, Ministers, Kings, etc---the chosen ones. In each category listed above history has yielded endless examples of this being not true. There have never been any human designated representatives of God who have stood the test of moral trust. Like the rest of the population it turns out to be a crap shoot. It strains the concept of logic to assert God would attempt to communicate rules and laws and interpretations of law via such a bizarre assortment of religions whose criteria of being correct is essentially via inheritance.
One of the characteristics of a moral principle is universality. Lincoln put it this way: "As I would not want to be a slave I can be no master" While all sorts of defensive beliefs can be generated by those who mistreat others or deny others the same freedom and privileges as themselves, there really is no escape from the grand daddy of morality: 'do unto others as you would have them do unto you'. This perfect example of moral logic kind of dictates the morality of most situations. While every age has it's 'witches', every age should, from a moral standpoint, have no 'witches'. It was never right to enslave others, to hang certain ethnics, to deny women the vote, to deny equal opportunity for jobs or housing, to deny certain groups admission to good schools, etc. And by the same moral principle it is not right to deny children (or others) the kind of medical care available to some, it is not right to spend less money to educate some children than others, to deny the benefits of marriage to some couples of adult age because of whom they choose as their marriage partner, to use military might to solve global conflict, etc. Yes, this is a modern age but 'witches' still abound in the minds of otherwise good people.
There is no moral logic to 'might makes right'. Those who claim otherwise cannot rest their case on moral logic. Unfortunately, this 'might makes right' about guts any moral principles from the mentality of our own foreign policy for some time now. "You can run but you can't hide" is bully bellowing. "Dead or Alive" is nothing if it is not an ok to take law into your own hands and justify violence as a means of deciding right and wrong. Preemptive military attack means nothing logically if it does not mean that someone has the right to attack anyone who they think might be some kind of threat to their life, their financial status, their religious beliefs, their political beliefs, their own position of power in life, etc. Gangs use this mentality, the mafia, some religious zealots, and currently our own government. And as logic dictates, "what goes around comes around". It certainly is no product of any "do unto others what you would have them do unto you". And because we are now hell bent on using violence to address world conflicts---what goes around comes around, and we get in return terrorism. When violence becomes your operative mode, then whatever you have at hand you use. Is there anything sillier than leaders, who use violence to resolve their own conflicts, rising to some podium and urging others not to use violence to solve their conflicts? It's hard to top that for pure arrogant moral absurdity. If our government can justify dropping 28,000 bombs on Iraq or killing 2 million Vietnamese, then by what moral logic can we criticize the violence of urban gangs? There is so much violence in America because we actually accept violence as a means to end. Our violence is ok, it is the violence of others that is not ok. Yeah, sure.
Let's just take one more example. Almost all religions preach the moral principle that once you have enough to take care of your own basic needs, that left over should be given to those in need. I have never heard anyone argue the opposite. It fits in perfectly with 'do unto others as you would have them do unto you'. Hardly any of us really do follow what we all agree is a universal moral principle. Let us not quibble here as to what constitutes basic needs---clearly most of us are considerably past that. Part of the problem is two-fold. I might put forth this: "I would consider this if others did it, but for me to do it by myself doesn't really accomplish very much". Hard to argue that this has no truth. Or I might say, puffing up into the appropriate posture, "I earned what I have, if someone else wants to have this stuff, let them earn it"----the "I did it the old fashioned way, I earned it" pitch. Sometimes someone comments that I seem to have accumulated more wealth than that of someone who was a teacher all his life. And I of course like to point out that I lived simply most of my life, never had more than just a room to live out of until I was late twenties, never owned a house until I was in my forties, never (except for my first car) bought anything on credit. So there, other fools spent most of their earnings on interest for all the things they bought on credit. Still, the point remains---a pure moral principle is an action that is morally necessary in itself, without reference to any purpose. To live by the moral principle in question it is necessary, because the principle is moral---to give any excess I have past the point of basic needs, to those who have less than the basic needs. But, one might say, "there is no real reason why some of these people cannot earn their own basic needs". This is certainly true too. If I am capable, and willing to work to earn my basic needs, then all those who are capable of earning their basic needs have an obligation to do likewise.
I wonder, given their particular genetics and environmental situation, just how many millions of people across the globe have no chance, for any variety of genetic or environmental circumstances, to earn for themselves their basic needs? If the answer is in the millions, then the number of people who do have the genetics and environmental circumstances to earn past their basic needs must be many fold million more than those who don't. Clearly, if enough people would follow the moral principle in question here, there would be no one left without the basic needs of life except those who have the ability and environmental circumstances to earn their basic needs, but decline to do so. In this respect we are all trapped. We really are. Almost all of us are weasels, of one sort or another. We circle the wagons around our wealth, we spend considerable time plotting how to acquire even more wealth. I mean, if a certain amount of wealth is good, more must be better, and endless more wealth the ultimate orgasm. Morally, enough is as good as a feast.
My own rationalization goes like this: If I gave all my excess wealth right now to those in need there would be less available to those in need over the long run than if I let my wealth continue to grow so that at my death there will be the maximum amount available. Hard to deny this rationale either. To contribute to this maximum amount available I try to live modestly, not getting too wrapped up in some sort of material world or spending excessive amounts of money on extravagant restaurants, trips, hobbies, etc. I suppose, so far so good---BUT, I am single and can do this kind of thing with little emotional conflict. Most people have kids and want to leave most of their accumulated wealth to them. It is hard to envision how this in any way meets the universal moral principle of giving your excess wealth to those unable to meet their basic needs. In fact, inherited wealth simply ensures a greater inequality in the distribution of wealth in every society. Even if all the above is logical, the question remains whether my plan here is more meritorious than those who leave their excess wealth to their kids. After all, if I did have kids would I really still do this? As far as I can figure out, almost all religions place the responsibility of parents to raise and support kids to adulthood. I don't know of any religion in which the religious founder extended that responsibility any further. In general, it has always seemed to me that those kids who make the most of their life, accomplish the most, and have the most contentment in life, are those kids essentially left on their own after like 18 yrs of age. Like any generalization there are sufficient exceptions. My dad made that clear to his kids, and while at the time I thought him cruel and non supportive, with time I think it was the best contribution he could have made to my life. What you do on your own always means the most and is a major foreboding of how far you will go in life---give me a fish and I eat for a day, teach me to fish and I eat for a lifetime.
At any rate, the universal moral principles are not hard to identify--- just hard to follow. These universal moral principles have little to do with any particular religious creed. To the extent any particular religion enables a person to adhere to these universal moral principles, that religion matters to that person. Unfortunately, far more often a person's inherited religion serves as some sort of safe haven for ignoring universal moral principles---when adhering to them is inconvenient or clashes with assorted human selfish motivations. Through your religion, God will forgive. I guess.
To the extent most of the above is true we then live in a world where all except the mentally ill or retarded understand universal moral principles. Individual religions add nothing to these universal moral principles. All the ceremonies, the hymns, the prayers, the glittering cathedrals, the brightly robed highly titled priestly patriarchs, the solemn services, the paper shuffling, religious college degrees, or the sermons have zero impact on these universal moral principles. These principles are not changed by any of the aforementioned. On the other hand, to the extent any of the aforementioned, except the glittering cathedrals, assist a person to adhere to the universal moral principles, then it is all good. But I suppose one could question to what extent, and to what percentage of the members, does organized religion instead provide some sort of shield from having to adhere to these universal moral principles? The unspoken argument for many is, that while they do not always adhere to universal moral principles, they are good and active members of a church. Historically, churches have often supported, or been passively silent, on many of the worst abuses of human rights and moral principles, including burning witches, slavery, etc. I doubt any reasonable person could ever envision Christ or Buddha, etc. ever supporting the invasion of Iraq. Like who could ever read the teachings of Christ and conclude he would handle conflict the George Bush way? Who would ever conclude that Christ would endorse some kids having no health care, spending less money to educate some kids than others etc.? Strangely, and this is a debatable generalization, it just seems the religious right wing factions of our society are the most vocal supporters of military violence to solve conflict, to actively support the accumulation of more and more wealth in the hands of the already wealthy, to oppose any universal plans to equalize health care and education for kids, to oppose vigorous protections of the environment, to spew intolerance to the different, and to share excess wealth with their kids who seldom lack for the basics of life instead of with those deficient with the basic needs of life.
Somehow there is a glaring disconnect between universal moral principles and the actions of religious fundamentalists---just a picture of life's illogical contradictions. What we see is not always what we think we see, but twisted so that we see what we want to see. "I see", said the blind man as he picked up his hammer and saw.
I guess it starts with freedom---free will if you prefer. If God 'wills it' then human morality is non existent---whatever we do, or someone else does is scripted by God or the Devil. Some view a person as torn between the Devil and God. Behind any of this are beliefs, not proven facts, so the issues are forever muddled. I suppose the question first has to be answered as to whether we can really know anything that is not first in the senses--- senses which are dependent on the material world. Kant viewed morality as a series of questions: "What can I know?" "What ought I to do" and "What can I hope?"
Reason would appear to dictate that life on our planet is controlled by some sort of 'natural law' embedded in a God created evolutionary process. As time progresses we learn more and more about the particulars of the evolutionary process, especially now that we know so much more about molecular genetics. Thus, what is left is to understand is how human 'free will' fits into the evolutionary process. If humans have 'free will', then this free will affects the evolutionary process. In this respect the human species is the first species able to affect it's future destiny via 'free will'. Other species seem pretty much destined to be entirely controlled by natural law. Of course one could argue that 'free will' is just another aspect of natural law. Perhaps so, but then 'free will' as part of natural law did not exist until more recently in the evolutionary process.
If one believes God created each species, that God is actively involved with the personal lives of each person on the planet, that whatever happens in the world is God's will or that God has designated human emissaries to write written words of gospel to a particular tribe of people---well these are beliefs----and because they are beliefs, cannot be proven or disproved. Humans, by definition I guess, are free to believe anything they want. But beliefs often have consequences. One can 'believe' that smoking does not have future health consequences, but then if that belief is wrong people die a slow painful death desperately trying to get oxygen into their body. Beliefs can matter a lot in the long run.
Given that beliefs often have consequences, it behooves us to have reasonable beliefs based on reasonable thoughts. Mistaken beliefs can yield disastrous results. Somehow, stating that 'my religious beliefs are true because I inherited them' seems almost absurd. Religion, at least in theory, is about living some kind of moral life as a path to an 'after life'. Because of free will, so it is reasoned, some will choose to live moral lives and others will choose not to, and only those who choose to live a moral life get to go to 'heaven'. The question of an afterlife is beyond human reason. This does not make it, a priori, an absurdity. There is so much yet we don't know about earthly life that it seems unreasonable to be upset because we cannot reason out details, or even any existence, of a possible 'afterlife'. Not everything that IS, is subject to current human understanding. With the passage of time, humans have much more understanding about a lot of natural law, and the environment in which we prosper. This is evolutionary progress. Almost by definition, the evolutionary process is the work of God.
Given the goal of religion (an after life) and the role morality plays in all religions, then moral principles are important. For the most part humans don't appear to discover or learn basic moral principles. Rather, humans have the intuitive capacity to understand basic moral principles. In what human society is there debate over whether it is wrong to steal? to have sex with another's spouse? to kill another person? to lie? to cheat? etc. Not all moral principles are equally clear. Nevertheless just about everyone understands moral cliches such as 'fair is fair', 'what goes around comes around', etc. We know. We all know. Everyone knows---here, there, and everywhere. Abstract logical reasoning resides within human nature as a current genetic reality. If everyone except psychopaths understand right and wrong, then the problem is one of doing the right thing. But what then is the right thing? Something which gives us pleasure? something which increases our financial worth? something which gives an advantage to our own family, our own community, our own state, our own country, our own economic bracket, our own ethnic group, our own religious group?, etc.
One problem is that morality excites passion. Passion cannot be trusted to be reasonable or moral. In the presence of passion, reason can be driven by circumstances, not moral principles. Thus there are non moral imperatives--behavior which is driven by circumstance. These are reactions to situations. You may need to get access to food for survival, protect yourselves from those trying to harm you, win a political battle, or romance battle, or save your job, or win a job, etc. Moral behavior which is governed by non moral imperatives is not, in any pure sense, moral behavior.
What then is pure moral behavior? A pure moral principle is an action that is morally necessary in itself, without reference to any purpose. These are the mountains which everyone must climb to gain any real moral status for their life. I suppose this kind of behavior distinguishes the 'saints' from the 'sinners'. Let us take "thou shalt not steal'---a widely accepted moral principle. The principle is simple, the application is not. If someone has no real need to steal, and they don't---for the most part---then the result is meritorious at the lowest level. If someone has a great need to steal to survive, but only steals in the worst of situations, then I guess they may well have achieved a result more meritorious than one who never has any need to steal---and certainly a lot more meritorious than one with a need to steal who does so all the time. The point here is that it is wrong to steal---period---maybe. This being granted, any grading of moral behavior gets quite complicated. Once you add genetic and environmental variations, the interpretive fog here gets extremely dense. Hence the logical moral caution of 'Judge not that ye be not judged'. If morality is an operative state necessary to achieve a goal (some sort of life after death) then it is probably unreasonable to think we will be our own judge and jury on the matter or the one to judge and jury anyone else. Like so much else in life one has to just do the best one can. We know the rules but we don't know how many points we have to get to pass. How could anyone possibly know that? Many cop out with such vaporous absurdities such as "God has saved me---I have sinned but God has saved me" It is like the kid who does bad things but explains to the school principal,"I did a bad thing but my mom loves me and will forgive me and not really hurt me, just slap my hand." The trouble is adults are not kids and no one has the vaguest idea about judgment, the nature of it, or the points needed to pass---except I, whom God really likes, Who guides me daily through the mine fields of life. Yeah, me and Pat Robertson, Jerry Faulwell, Muslim Ayatollahs, Popes, Priests, Ministers, Kings, etc---the chosen ones. In each category listed above history has yielded endless examples of this being not true. There have never been any human designated representatives of God who have stood the test of moral trust. Like the rest of the population it turns out to be a crap shoot. It strains the concept of logic to assert God would attempt to communicate rules and laws and interpretations of law via such a bizarre assortment of religions whose criteria of being correct is essentially via inheritance.
One of the characteristics of a moral principle is universality. Lincoln put it this way: "As I would not want to be a slave I can be no master" While all sorts of defensive beliefs can be generated by those who mistreat others or deny others the same freedom and privileges as themselves, there really is no escape from the grand daddy of morality: 'do unto others as you would have them do unto you'. This perfect example of moral logic kind of dictates the morality of most situations. While every age has it's 'witches', every age should, from a moral standpoint, have no 'witches'. It was never right to enslave others, to hang certain ethnics, to deny women the vote, to deny equal opportunity for jobs or housing, to deny certain groups admission to good schools, etc. And by the same moral principle it is not right to deny children (or others) the kind of medical care available to some, it is not right to spend less money to educate some children than others, to deny the benefits of marriage to some couples of adult age because of whom they choose as their marriage partner, to use military might to solve global conflict, etc. Yes, this is a modern age but 'witches' still abound in the minds of otherwise good people.
There is no moral logic to 'might makes right'. Those who claim otherwise cannot rest their case on moral logic. Unfortunately, this 'might makes right' about guts any moral principles from the mentality of our own foreign policy for some time now. "You can run but you can't hide" is bully bellowing. "Dead or Alive" is nothing if it is not an ok to take law into your own hands and justify violence as a means of deciding right and wrong. Preemptive military attack means nothing logically if it does not mean that someone has the right to attack anyone who they think might be some kind of threat to their life, their financial status, their religious beliefs, their political beliefs, their own position of power in life, etc. Gangs use this mentality, the mafia, some religious zealots, and currently our own government. And as logic dictates, "what goes around comes around". It certainly is no product of any "do unto others what you would have them do unto you". And because we are now hell bent on using violence to address world conflicts---what goes around comes around, and we get in return terrorism. When violence becomes your operative mode, then whatever you have at hand you use. Is there anything sillier than leaders, who use violence to resolve their own conflicts, rising to some podium and urging others not to use violence to solve their conflicts? It's hard to top that for pure arrogant moral absurdity. If our government can justify dropping 28,000 bombs on Iraq or killing 2 million Vietnamese, then by what moral logic can we criticize the violence of urban gangs? There is so much violence in America because we actually accept violence as a means to end. Our violence is ok, it is the violence of others that is not ok. Yeah, sure.
Let's just take one more example. Almost all religions preach the moral principle that once you have enough to take care of your own basic needs, that left over should be given to those in need. I have never heard anyone argue the opposite. It fits in perfectly with 'do unto others as you would have them do unto you'. Hardly any of us really do follow what we all agree is a universal moral principle. Let us not quibble here as to what constitutes basic needs---clearly most of us are considerably past that. Part of the problem is two-fold. I might put forth this: "I would consider this if others did it, but for me to do it by myself doesn't really accomplish very much". Hard to argue that this has no truth. Or I might say, puffing up into the appropriate posture, "I earned what I have, if someone else wants to have this stuff, let them earn it"----the "I did it the old fashioned way, I earned it" pitch. Sometimes someone comments that I seem to have accumulated more wealth than that of someone who was a teacher all his life. And I of course like to point out that I lived simply most of my life, never had more than just a room to live out of until I was late twenties, never owned a house until I was in my forties, never (except for my first car) bought anything on credit. So there, other fools spent most of their earnings on interest for all the things they bought on credit. Still, the point remains---a pure moral principle is an action that is morally necessary in itself, without reference to any purpose. To live by the moral principle in question it is necessary, because the principle is moral---to give any excess I have past the point of basic needs, to those who have less than the basic needs. But, one might say, "there is no real reason why some of these people cannot earn their own basic needs". This is certainly true too. If I am capable, and willing to work to earn my basic needs, then all those who are capable of earning their basic needs have an obligation to do likewise.
I wonder, given their particular genetics and environmental situation, just how many millions of people across the globe have no chance, for any variety of genetic or environmental circumstances, to earn for themselves their basic needs? If the answer is in the millions, then the number of people who do have the genetics and environmental circumstances to earn past their basic needs must be many fold million more than those who don't. Clearly, if enough people would follow the moral principle in question here, there would be no one left without the basic needs of life except those who have the ability and environmental circumstances to earn their basic needs, but decline to do so. In this respect we are all trapped. We really are. Almost all of us are weasels, of one sort or another. We circle the wagons around our wealth, we spend considerable time plotting how to acquire even more wealth. I mean, if a certain amount of wealth is good, more must be better, and endless more wealth the ultimate orgasm. Morally, enough is as good as a feast.
My own rationalization goes like this: If I gave all my excess wealth right now to those in need there would be less available to those in need over the long run than if I let my wealth continue to grow so that at my death there will be the maximum amount available. Hard to deny this rationale either. To contribute to this maximum amount available I try to live modestly, not getting too wrapped up in some sort of material world or spending excessive amounts of money on extravagant restaurants, trips, hobbies, etc. I suppose, so far so good---BUT, I am single and can do this kind of thing with little emotional conflict. Most people have kids and want to leave most of their accumulated wealth to them. It is hard to envision how this in any way meets the universal moral principle of giving your excess wealth to those unable to meet their basic needs. In fact, inherited wealth simply ensures a greater inequality in the distribution of wealth in every society. Even if all the above is logical, the question remains whether my plan here is more meritorious than those who leave their excess wealth to their kids. After all, if I did have kids would I really still do this? As far as I can figure out, almost all religions place the responsibility of parents to raise and support kids to adulthood. I don't know of any religion in which the religious founder extended that responsibility any further. In general, it has always seemed to me that those kids who make the most of their life, accomplish the most, and have the most contentment in life, are those kids essentially left on their own after like 18 yrs of age. Like any generalization there are sufficient exceptions. My dad made that clear to his kids, and while at the time I thought him cruel and non supportive, with time I think it was the best contribution he could have made to my life. What you do on your own always means the most and is a major foreboding of how far you will go in life---give me a fish and I eat for a day, teach me to fish and I eat for a lifetime.
At any rate, the universal moral principles are not hard to identify--- just hard to follow. These universal moral principles have little to do with any particular religious creed. To the extent any particular religion enables a person to adhere to these universal moral principles, that religion matters to that person. Unfortunately, far more often a person's inherited religion serves as some sort of safe haven for ignoring universal moral principles---when adhering to them is inconvenient or clashes with assorted human selfish motivations. Through your religion, God will forgive. I guess.
To the extent most of the above is true we then live in a world where all except the mentally ill or retarded understand universal moral principles. Individual religions add nothing to these universal moral principles. All the ceremonies, the hymns, the prayers, the glittering cathedrals, the brightly robed highly titled priestly patriarchs, the solemn services, the paper shuffling, religious college degrees, or the sermons have zero impact on these universal moral principles. These principles are not changed by any of the aforementioned. On the other hand, to the extent any of the aforementioned, except the glittering cathedrals, assist a person to adhere to the universal moral principles, then it is all good. But I suppose one could question to what extent, and to what percentage of the members, does organized religion instead provide some sort of shield from having to adhere to these universal moral principles? The unspoken argument for many is, that while they do not always adhere to universal moral principles, they are good and active members of a church. Historically, churches have often supported, or been passively silent, on many of the worst abuses of human rights and moral principles, including burning witches, slavery, etc. I doubt any reasonable person could ever envision Christ or Buddha, etc. ever supporting the invasion of Iraq. Like who could ever read the teachings of Christ and conclude he would handle conflict the George Bush way? Who would ever conclude that Christ would endorse some kids having no health care, spending less money to educate some kids than others etc.? Strangely, and this is a debatable generalization, it just seems the religious right wing factions of our society are the most vocal supporters of military violence to solve conflict, to actively support the accumulation of more and more wealth in the hands of the already wealthy, to oppose any universal plans to equalize health care and education for kids, to oppose vigorous protections of the environment, to spew intolerance to the different, and to share excess wealth with their kids who seldom lack for the basics of life instead of with those deficient with the basic needs of life.
Somehow there is a glaring disconnect between universal moral principles and the actions of religious fundamentalists---just a picture of life's illogical contradictions. What we see is not always what we think we see, but twisted so that we see what we want to see. "I see", said the blind man as he picked up his hammer and saw.
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Dissolved Illusions
Dissolved Illusions
We start off believing. We believe in Santa Claus, we believe all the dogma in our inherited religion is absolutely true, we believe that God will guide us through life if we pray and act properly, we believe our country is always right, we believe everyone has a chance to succeed if they only try, we believe in certain sport heroes, certain political heroes, in friendship that will last forever, in a perfect love, in right makes might, and it goes on and on. With time, all of us, to varying degrees, begin to lose some of these illusions and are forced to deal with stark reality about much of life. The innocence of so much around us becomes lost. I guess this is called maturity.
Some people, for some reasons, become more critical about their faith based beliefs than others. Those who tend to question things as they were led to believe are called rebels, insurgents, liberals, heathens, etc. Those who hold fast to their inherited beliefs or culture are called conservatives, archaics, purists, dolts, gullibles, intransigents, etc. Both groups have little use for the other.
Because God's evolutionary process depends on CHANGE for life to evolve to more and more complex life forms, conservatives have a harder life. Things do change, especially in the areas of justice and ethics, but these changes come about not because the conservative opposition changes and supports these changes, but because a new generation has the more unprejudiced mind set to view the reasons for the change. And so with time, evolution is always an upward process, with stalls and reverses, but given time the process moves forward and upward. It really is an amazing process. It all seems to be some kind of brilliant chemistry and chance, with each of us in this process being no more than complex molecules governed by the same laws of evolution as any other molecules. We can insist God created man in His image but this is without any reasonable basis. We may feel a need to believe God is our special friend or our country his special guardian, but this is not based on any scientific evidence. We really create such a
God because we fear death, need to believe in life after death, and so we create a God in our mind who is in tune with our own thoughts and lifestyle. And just in case, we always make God a forgiving God so that even if we 'sin' it can be overlooked IF we have our inherited theology straight. Well, at least he is forgiving for us and those like us, while those other heathens become our sacred duty to punish, the sooner the better. I mean why wait for God to punish them. Maybe we don't really trust God to punish them appropriately. Sometimes these people even have the audacity to worship in front of us, or in our neighborhood or dress different etc. Of course, enough is enough.
I can't say I regret losing many of life's illusions. The more you line reality up with your own understanding, the more contented you will be. Contentment has a lot to do with going gently down the evolutionary stream of life. Humans have the greatest ability to manipulate our environment to improve our lives and prevent disaster to our own person. But we FOOL ourselves if we think our own free will changes the course of evolution. There may be several ways to get from point A to point B. This will be determined by the laws of evolution. That's the big picture. The more narrow picture is our own welfare during this minute period of time in evolution that we exist. We can tamper with this, and we call this our freedom. Freedom really does exist and we are free to make choices. The choices have consequence to our own well being or the well being of our contemporaries on earth. My cat has the chance to behave or suffer the consequences personally. Whether she behaves or not has nothing to do with the bigger picture of evolution.
I don't know why we need to feel special in order to be grateful and contented with our lives. It is the old "Mother likes me better than you" act only mother in this case is God. I have had several pets that I really liked including cats, dogs, horses. If they could talk it would seem silly to me if any of them felt they were created in the image of me, or that I gave any of them dominion over the other or I liked one species better than the other. You can't compare apples to oranges, they are all different species. God just has more species created by his evolutionary laws to like. Illusions play a role in our sanity. We all have to believe in something, I believe I will go to bed now.
We start off believing. We believe in Santa Claus, we believe all the dogma in our inherited religion is absolutely true, we believe that God will guide us through life if we pray and act properly, we believe our country is always right, we believe everyone has a chance to succeed if they only try, we believe in certain sport heroes, certain political heroes, in friendship that will last forever, in a perfect love, in right makes might, and it goes on and on. With time, all of us, to varying degrees, begin to lose some of these illusions and are forced to deal with stark reality about much of life. The innocence of so much around us becomes lost. I guess this is called maturity.
Some people, for some reasons, become more critical about their faith based beliefs than others. Those who tend to question things as they were led to believe are called rebels, insurgents, liberals, heathens, etc. Those who hold fast to their inherited beliefs or culture are called conservatives, archaics, purists, dolts, gullibles, intransigents, etc. Both groups have little use for the other.
Because God's evolutionary process depends on CHANGE for life to evolve to more and more complex life forms, conservatives have a harder life. Things do change, especially in the areas of justice and ethics, but these changes come about not because the conservative opposition changes and supports these changes, but because a new generation has the more unprejudiced mind set to view the reasons for the change. And so with time, evolution is always an upward process, with stalls and reverses, but given time the process moves forward and upward. It really is an amazing process. It all seems to be some kind of brilliant chemistry and chance, with each of us in this process being no more than complex molecules governed by the same laws of evolution as any other molecules. We can insist God created man in His image but this is without any reasonable basis. We may feel a need to believe God is our special friend or our country his special guardian, but this is not based on any scientific evidence. We really create such a
God because we fear death, need to believe in life after death, and so we create a God in our mind who is in tune with our own thoughts and lifestyle. And just in case, we always make God a forgiving God so that even if we 'sin' it can be overlooked IF we have our inherited theology straight. Well, at least he is forgiving for us and those like us, while those other heathens become our sacred duty to punish, the sooner the better. I mean why wait for God to punish them. Maybe we don't really trust God to punish them appropriately. Sometimes these people even have the audacity to worship in front of us, or in our neighborhood or dress different etc. Of course, enough is enough.
I can't say I regret losing many of life's illusions. The more you line reality up with your own understanding, the more contented you will be. Contentment has a lot to do with going gently down the evolutionary stream of life. Humans have the greatest ability to manipulate our environment to improve our lives and prevent disaster to our own person. But we FOOL ourselves if we think our own free will changes the course of evolution. There may be several ways to get from point A to point B. This will be determined by the laws of evolution. That's the big picture. The more narrow picture is our own welfare during this minute period of time in evolution that we exist. We can tamper with this, and we call this our freedom. Freedom really does exist and we are free to make choices. The choices have consequence to our own well being or the well being of our contemporaries on earth. My cat has the chance to behave or suffer the consequences personally. Whether she behaves or not has nothing to do with the bigger picture of evolution.
I don't know why we need to feel special in order to be grateful and contented with our lives. It is the old "Mother likes me better than you" act only mother in this case is God. I have had several pets that I really liked including cats, dogs, horses. If they could talk it would seem silly to me if any of them felt they were created in the image of me, or that I gave any of them dominion over the other or I liked one species better than the other. You can't compare apples to oranges, they are all different species. God just has more species created by his evolutionary laws to like. Illusions play a role in our sanity. We all have to believe in something, I believe I will go to bed now.
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
The Word Is LONELY
FROM THE FILES: Between 2005-May 2007
The Word Is Lonely:
The word is lonely. What the word means is another matter. Kind of a complicated multifaceted, double-entendre. There is always the philosophical question if you can ever be happy if you have never been sad, if you can ever be displeased if you have never been pleased, and I guess if you can ever be lonely if you have never been crowded. I assume here that everyone gets lonely in some form or another. A person could be lonely for a lot of reasons---a lost loved one, a lost friend, a lost pet, a lost job, a lost home, a lost spouse, or just a lack of friends. And then there are people who seem to have no reason to be lonely, but they are---and those who should seem to be lonely but are not. Probably those who are most capable of creating their own amusement and activities are least likely to be lonely. After all they are least dependent on others for mental stimulation. Could it be that those who feel the need to go through the entire day with a cell phone, IPOD, video games, or internet/TV screens plastered on their face might be the loneliest of all?
The word lonely is one of those words with which you can do about anything---twist it this way or that, view it from one angle or another, but ultimately fail if you substitute one person for another. I never know whether to envy those who depend upon, and surround themselves with, others around the clock. Is it better to be gregarious or aloof? Maybe this relates to some sort of innate social ability. There is no question but that I tend to fall on the shallow end of the sociability pool. Nothing too unique there, but I do come with a twist---I like to study people, and can tolerate a wide range of personalities. But, for the most part, it has to be from a distance. Perhaps most people are more likable from a distance. Ask the divorced.
People who chase after companionship and those who defend against it, by definition must do so by preference. I suppose there are plenty who chase after companionship but can't find much of it, and those who seek solitude who rarely succeed in getting much of it. I don't think one can really state to be sociable is good and to be aloof is bad. It must relate to some sort of comfort level. My mother couldn't go enough places and my father couldn't not go to enough places. I seem to be some kind of cross. I tend to go to the same places too much but to some other places not enough.
It would not be my place to explain the needs of those who cherish constant company. This seems the kind of area where everything is relative amid the absence of any best way or good way or bad way etc. But the eternal 'wonderer' here ponders how the word lonely applies to these two groups---even though the two groups are quite diverse within their own groups. I know for my own part, I am never less alone than when in nature by myself, and never more alone than in the midst of an obligatory group gathering which I reluctantly agreed to attend. It is not that I sit in a corner by myself (although I have done that too)---I can be quite gregarious with an effort. But for the most part, despite the claims otherwise, I find most group gatherings superficial ego tripping image projecting circuses. Everyone is projecting whatever image they are choosing to project, rarely is anything discussed in depth (that is impossible, someone will always change the subject), and witticisms flow like water over the Hoover Dam. With me it is even more complex. I would guess like at least 80% of things I agree to attend I never do. When the time comes, I rarely want to go. But if I go, in most cases, I have a good time. Yet that pattern has stayed with me all my life.
But back to the word lonely. I think there are two kinds of lonely: the kind of lonely where you want company and the kind of lonely where you miss someone or something. In the latter case it doesn't do any good to have someone else around since it is someone else or something else you miss. If you lose a lover it doesn't much help to be at a party surrounded by large clumps of other people. The list of people whose memory makes us lonely gets longer and longer with age. If you live long enough you have a lot to miss. This kind of lonely is not always unpleasant. If the memories are good, then the loneliness is good---or at least meaningful. There are those who, for one reason or another, have few good memories. These people most likely are the loneliest in the sadist sense of the word lonely. If you don't have a lot of good memories as you age, then what really do you have?
Much of life is a choice between doing and thinking. Of course it is always some kind of mixture but I think most can be put in one category or the other---for the most part. The doers are happiest when doing. I know, Duh!. If they are stopped from doing, they immediately become lonely. Thinkers need space to think. They need time to think. If you take away their space and time to think they are lonely, or more precisely frustrated. Yes, one can certainly be lonely in a crowd. And for different reasons. I don't think one can really be objective about loneliness. In the last analysis what counts is to what extent a person is content. I know people who are gregarious who are content and people who are aloof who are content. Which is better seems a rather witless waste of time.
I wonder which group handle aging the best? The gregarious or the aloof? I selfishly hope it is the aloof---after all, the older you get the more time you have to think, even if it is increasingly muddled thinking. I suppose at some point, if you live long enough, you just sit minus the thinking. When your thinking deteriorates to the point your former being is hardly existent, what is the proper word for it? You body is not dead, but your former 'being' is gone. If there is an afterlife, maybe your being goes there long before your body dies. Wouldn't that be a funny Deistical trick----to leave a cell functioning body around for right wing religious fanatics to fawn over. Well, funny to me anyway. Science knows a lot about the body, but how much do any of us know about our 'being'. People think science has all the answers but that is a simplistic illusion. Science tells us cause and effect according to natural laws. But only our own 'being', with our own minds, can understand reasons for anything. Try using science to explain beauty or music, or honesty, or just about anything else that gives real meaning to our lives. We can push molecules and atoms around every which way, but this will never explain any of the aforementioned. In the end materialism isn't the end all of anything. Which is not to say I intend to sell my large screen TV. Still, big screen TVs have always been around. It is called LIFE---if some couch potatoes can remember when they had one.
The Word Is Lonely:
The word is lonely. What the word means is another matter. Kind of a complicated multifaceted, double-entendre. There is always the philosophical question if you can ever be happy if you have never been sad, if you can ever be displeased if you have never been pleased, and I guess if you can ever be lonely if you have never been crowded. I assume here that everyone gets lonely in some form or another. A person could be lonely for a lot of reasons---a lost loved one, a lost friend, a lost pet, a lost job, a lost home, a lost spouse, or just a lack of friends. And then there are people who seem to have no reason to be lonely, but they are---and those who should seem to be lonely but are not. Probably those who are most capable of creating their own amusement and activities are least likely to be lonely. After all they are least dependent on others for mental stimulation. Could it be that those who feel the need to go through the entire day with a cell phone, IPOD, video games, or internet/TV screens plastered on their face might be the loneliest of all?
The word lonely is one of those words with which you can do about anything---twist it this way or that, view it from one angle or another, but ultimately fail if you substitute one person for another. I never know whether to envy those who depend upon, and surround themselves with, others around the clock. Is it better to be gregarious or aloof? Maybe this relates to some sort of innate social ability. There is no question but that I tend to fall on the shallow end of the sociability pool. Nothing too unique there, but I do come with a twist---I like to study people, and can tolerate a wide range of personalities. But, for the most part, it has to be from a distance. Perhaps most people are more likable from a distance. Ask the divorced.
People who chase after companionship and those who defend against it, by definition must do so by preference. I suppose there are plenty who chase after companionship but can't find much of it, and those who seek solitude who rarely succeed in getting much of it. I don't think one can really state to be sociable is good and to be aloof is bad. It must relate to some sort of comfort level. My mother couldn't go enough places and my father couldn't not go to enough places. I seem to be some kind of cross. I tend to go to the same places too much but to some other places not enough.
It would not be my place to explain the needs of those who cherish constant company. This seems the kind of area where everything is relative amid the absence of any best way or good way or bad way etc. But the eternal 'wonderer' here ponders how the word lonely applies to these two groups---even though the two groups are quite diverse within their own groups. I know for my own part, I am never less alone than when in nature by myself, and never more alone than in the midst of an obligatory group gathering which I reluctantly agreed to attend. It is not that I sit in a corner by myself (although I have done that too)---I can be quite gregarious with an effort. But for the most part, despite the claims otherwise, I find most group gatherings superficial ego tripping image projecting circuses. Everyone is projecting whatever image they are choosing to project, rarely is anything discussed in depth (that is impossible, someone will always change the subject), and witticisms flow like water over the Hoover Dam. With me it is even more complex. I would guess like at least 80% of things I agree to attend I never do. When the time comes, I rarely want to go. But if I go, in most cases, I have a good time. Yet that pattern has stayed with me all my life.
But back to the word lonely. I think there are two kinds of lonely: the kind of lonely where you want company and the kind of lonely where you miss someone or something. In the latter case it doesn't do any good to have someone else around since it is someone else or something else you miss. If you lose a lover it doesn't much help to be at a party surrounded by large clumps of other people. The list of people whose memory makes us lonely gets longer and longer with age. If you live long enough you have a lot to miss. This kind of lonely is not always unpleasant. If the memories are good, then the loneliness is good---or at least meaningful. There are those who, for one reason or another, have few good memories. These people most likely are the loneliest in the sadist sense of the word lonely. If you don't have a lot of good memories as you age, then what really do you have?
Much of life is a choice between doing and thinking. Of course it is always some kind of mixture but I think most can be put in one category or the other---for the most part. The doers are happiest when doing. I know, Duh!. If they are stopped from doing, they immediately become lonely. Thinkers need space to think. They need time to think. If you take away their space and time to think they are lonely, or more precisely frustrated. Yes, one can certainly be lonely in a crowd. And for different reasons. I don't think one can really be objective about loneliness. In the last analysis what counts is to what extent a person is content. I know people who are gregarious who are content and people who are aloof who are content. Which is better seems a rather witless waste of time.
I wonder which group handle aging the best? The gregarious or the aloof? I selfishly hope it is the aloof---after all, the older you get the more time you have to think, even if it is increasingly muddled thinking. I suppose at some point, if you live long enough, you just sit minus the thinking. When your thinking deteriorates to the point your former being is hardly existent, what is the proper word for it? You body is not dead, but your former 'being' is gone. If there is an afterlife, maybe your being goes there long before your body dies. Wouldn't that be a funny Deistical trick----to leave a cell functioning body around for right wing religious fanatics to fawn over. Well, funny to me anyway. Science knows a lot about the body, but how much do any of us know about our 'being'. People think science has all the answers but that is a simplistic illusion. Science tells us cause and effect according to natural laws. But only our own 'being', with our own minds, can understand reasons for anything. Try using science to explain beauty or music, or honesty, or just about anything else that gives real meaning to our lives. We can push molecules and atoms around every which way, but this will never explain any of the aforementioned. In the end materialism isn't the end all of anything. Which is not to say I intend to sell my large screen TV. Still, big screen TVs have always been around. It is called LIFE---if some couch potatoes can remember when they had one.
Monday, March 15, 2010
How Christian Are You?
FROM THE FILES: 3/28/05 How Christian are You?:
Whatever else those of us who criticize the religious right can say, it cannot be said, that they never read the bible. Admittedly, it tends to be the same select non threatening passages which bring comfort and a feeling of self righteousness to their souls. But, they along with most others, are familiar enough with Christ to know his position on many things. So here is my test for how Christian you are, regardless of which Christian sect with which you identify.
All questions are true or false:
If Jesus were the President he would have chosen to drop the 28,000 bombs on Iraq to accomplish any one of the many changing reasons for why it was done.
If Jesus were President he would elect to spend more per capita on military matters than all the other major military powers combined.
If Jesus were President he would react to the growing economic distance between the rich and the poor in this country, higher than any other Western advanced society, by giving more tax breaks to the affluent.
If Jesus were President he would not pose religious duty in terms of personal responsibility, but instead work to have government pass religious laws, a sort of religion by government decree.
If Jesus were President he would lead the way in taking ghetto youths who sell pot and put them in jail for mandatory decade sentences.
If Jesus were President he would find no problem with tax money to educate some children double or triple that to educate other children.
If Jesus were President he would encourage his followers to isolate themselves from the poor, to circle the wagons, send their kids to private schools, and in general keep all contact with non believers, the poor, and the different to an absolute minimum.
If Jesus were President we would have bigger, more elaborate and expensive cathedrals across the land, with gilded altars, stylish garments, glittering head gear, and elaborate ceremonies.
If Jesus were President he would advise those fortunate enough to amass excess wealth to give it to the poor and needy when they die instead of to their offspring.
If Jesus were President he would eliminate all taxes on wealth passed on to family members at time of their death, for excess wealth, accumulated legally, is theirs to keep within the family, not return to the society from which it was extracted.
If Jesus were President he would not favor international courts to decide international disputes, but declare that this country, God's chosen people, has the right and obligation to use military might, if necessary, to decide international disputes in our favor. This country has a special and unique place in God's heart. We cannot fail because God will bless America and God has given America a 'manifest destiny'.
If Jesus were President he would oppose having the minimum wage, like social security and most pensions, from being automatically adjusted based on cost of living changes.
If Jesus were President he would oppose having the richest country in the world providing health insurance to all it's citizens, respecting the rights of those who do not wish to have their hard earned money being used to pay medical benefits for those less fortunate than themselves. Health care is not a right and certainly not a duty of society.
If Jesus were President he would oppose the expenditure of large amounts of tax dollars to provide inexpensive mass transit for the poor. They should, like everyone else, pay for their own mass transit costs. $2 or $3 per ride on a bus or subway is just fine. As a bonus it ensures they can't go too far too often. Based on the minimum wage back in the 50's and the cost of a subway ride in the 50's, today's subway ride should cost about $1.00. Tough. Of course back in those days we didn't spend 10 times more on military matters than any other country. Something has to give.
If Jesus were President he would declare past laws, on the torture of prisoners, obsolete or I guess the term the Bush Attorney General used, was 'quaint', out of date.
If Jesus were President he would dismiss the idea of responsible reproduction and declare the choice to have as many children as you please, at least a right, if not a duty. "Go", Jesus would say, "and multiply and have dominion over all the creations of this earth, obliterate them if they take up space needed by ever increasing number of humans"
Jesus would say that sex and reproduction are one and the same process and one without the other is an aberration of God's intent. Birth control is a sin. Sex for pleasure is even worse.
Jesus would say that Church leaders should have college degrees, or be of a certain sex, or abstain from sex, have no job except be a church leader, live in parishes, and spend 90 or more percent of their time with ceremonies, rituals, organizing and attending church functions, organizing and attending meetings, maintaining church buildings, public appearances to bless this and that, etc. After all this how can there be so many sexual deviates among the stricter of religious sects, Protestant or Catholic? Am I the only one who begins to wonder, about those who project themselves loudly about their purity, how long before we find they are finding some sort of kinky outlet for their pureness? Am i imagining things or does it just seem there are more kids being sexually molested by clergy than any other profession?
Would Jesus agree that God did indeed help Reggie White, Isaac Bruce, and Terrell Owens win football games?
Would Jesus tear up international treaties because they required economic hardship, despite the legitimacy of their goals?
Would Jesus, as President, appear hundreds and hundreds of times before wealthy, business, and religious groups and virtually never appear at gatherings of groups representing the poor, the different, and ethnic minorities? Jesus may have spent most of his time among the poor, the different, etc., but Bush and most of us have risen above that sort of thing.
Would Jesus as President choose as his Vice-President some one who amassed all their millions of great wealth by steering government contracts to select corporations? In Illinois we have been putting such talented gents in jail.
Would Jesus really say some living human cells constitutes a person? Would Jesus really say it is God's will that a person be kept alive or suffer so long as there is human technology to keep at least some of their cells functional? Or would Jesus say that God has blessed humans with the capacity to control their own dying process according to their own unique situation and emotional differences?
Would Jesus be a flag waver or flag burner or just ignore flags?
Would Jesus really condemn love between two people depending on social status, economic status, racial status, gender status, religious affiliation, or the kind of sex involved? Who goes to heaven----those who really are highly sexually charged, or those who have little interest in sex?
Would Jesus preach violence begets violence or use violence as a means to make the world a better place to live?
Would Jesus reject violence as a means of defense if a person or nation is actually attacked? If persons of a particular group (racial or political or religious) attack you, is it legitimate to then attack others in the same group or only those who attacked you?
Would Jesus say those blessed with wealth and health are obligated to be the brother's keeper for the less fortunate? Would that include blacks in DeFar, ghetto kids who sell recreational drugs for profit, affluent kids who use recreational drugs for pleasure (or relief)? the educational opportunities of ghetto kids? the health care of all?
Am tiring of this now. Don't bother to add your points up. Unless there is a huge curve on this exam I guess most of us are heading to hell. I have an advantage. God may declare me too off the wall, too outside the box, and maybe too difficult to fit in anywhere. I am hoping for a sentence delay.
Whatever else those of us who criticize the religious right can say, it cannot be said, that they never read the bible. Admittedly, it tends to be the same select non threatening passages which bring comfort and a feeling of self righteousness to their souls. But, they along with most others, are familiar enough with Christ to know his position on many things. So here is my test for how Christian you are, regardless of which Christian sect with which you identify.
All questions are true or false:
If Jesus were the President he would have chosen to drop the 28,000 bombs on Iraq to accomplish any one of the many changing reasons for why it was done.
If Jesus were President he would elect to spend more per capita on military matters than all the other major military powers combined.
If Jesus were President he would react to the growing economic distance between the rich and the poor in this country, higher than any other Western advanced society, by giving more tax breaks to the affluent.
If Jesus were President he would not pose religious duty in terms of personal responsibility, but instead work to have government pass religious laws, a sort of religion by government decree.
If Jesus were President he would lead the way in taking ghetto youths who sell pot and put them in jail for mandatory decade sentences.
If Jesus were President he would find no problem with tax money to educate some children double or triple that to educate other children.
If Jesus were President he would encourage his followers to isolate themselves from the poor, to circle the wagons, send their kids to private schools, and in general keep all contact with non believers, the poor, and the different to an absolute minimum.
If Jesus were President we would have bigger, more elaborate and expensive cathedrals across the land, with gilded altars, stylish garments, glittering head gear, and elaborate ceremonies.
If Jesus were President he would advise those fortunate enough to amass excess wealth to give it to the poor and needy when they die instead of to their offspring.
If Jesus were President he would eliminate all taxes on wealth passed on to family members at time of their death, for excess wealth, accumulated legally, is theirs to keep within the family, not return to the society from which it was extracted.
If Jesus were President he would not favor international courts to decide international disputes, but declare that this country, God's chosen people, has the right and obligation to use military might, if necessary, to decide international disputes in our favor. This country has a special and unique place in God's heart. We cannot fail because God will bless America and God has given America a 'manifest destiny'.
If Jesus were President he would oppose having the minimum wage, like social security and most pensions, from being automatically adjusted based on cost of living changes.
If Jesus were President he would oppose having the richest country in the world providing health insurance to all it's citizens, respecting the rights of those who do not wish to have their hard earned money being used to pay medical benefits for those less fortunate than themselves. Health care is not a right and certainly not a duty of society.
If Jesus were President he would oppose the expenditure of large amounts of tax dollars to provide inexpensive mass transit for the poor. They should, like everyone else, pay for their own mass transit costs. $2 or $3 per ride on a bus or subway is just fine. As a bonus it ensures they can't go too far too often. Based on the minimum wage back in the 50's and the cost of a subway ride in the 50's, today's subway ride should cost about $1.00. Tough. Of course back in those days we didn't spend 10 times more on military matters than any other country. Something has to give.
If Jesus were President he would declare past laws, on the torture of prisoners, obsolete or I guess the term the Bush Attorney General used, was 'quaint', out of date.
If Jesus were President he would dismiss the idea of responsible reproduction and declare the choice to have as many children as you please, at least a right, if not a duty. "Go", Jesus would say, "and multiply and have dominion over all the creations of this earth, obliterate them if they take up space needed by ever increasing number of humans"
Jesus would say that sex and reproduction are one and the same process and one without the other is an aberration of God's intent. Birth control is a sin. Sex for pleasure is even worse.
Jesus would say that Church leaders should have college degrees, or be of a certain sex, or abstain from sex, have no job except be a church leader, live in parishes, and spend 90 or more percent of their time with ceremonies, rituals, organizing and attending church functions, organizing and attending meetings, maintaining church buildings, public appearances to bless this and that, etc. After all this how can there be so many sexual deviates among the stricter of religious sects, Protestant or Catholic? Am I the only one who begins to wonder, about those who project themselves loudly about their purity, how long before we find they are finding some sort of kinky outlet for their pureness? Am i imagining things or does it just seem there are more kids being sexually molested by clergy than any other profession?
Would Jesus agree that God did indeed help Reggie White, Isaac Bruce, and Terrell Owens win football games?
Would Jesus tear up international treaties because they required economic hardship, despite the legitimacy of their goals?
Would Jesus, as President, appear hundreds and hundreds of times before wealthy, business, and religious groups and virtually never appear at gatherings of groups representing the poor, the different, and ethnic minorities? Jesus may have spent most of his time among the poor, the different, etc., but Bush and most of us have risen above that sort of thing.
Would Jesus as President choose as his Vice-President some one who amassed all their millions of great wealth by steering government contracts to select corporations? In Illinois we have been putting such talented gents in jail.
Would Jesus really say some living human cells constitutes a person? Would Jesus really say it is God's will that a person be kept alive or suffer so long as there is human technology to keep at least some of their cells functional? Or would Jesus say that God has blessed humans with the capacity to control their own dying process according to their own unique situation and emotional differences?
Would Jesus be a flag waver or flag burner or just ignore flags?
Would Jesus really condemn love between two people depending on social status, economic status, racial status, gender status, religious affiliation, or the kind of sex involved? Who goes to heaven----those who really are highly sexually charged, or those who have little interest in sex?
Would Jesus preach violence begets violence or use violence as a means to make the world a better place to live?
Would Jesus reject violence as a means of defense if a person or nation is actually attacked? If persons of a particular group (racial or political or religious) attack you, is it legitimate to then attack others in the same group or only those who attacked you?
Would Jesus say those blessed with wealth and health are obligated to be the brother's keeper for the less fortunate? Would that include blacks in DeFar, ghetto kids who sell recreational drugs for profit, affluent kids who use recreational drugs for pleasure (or relief)? the educational opportunities of ghetto kids? the health care of all?
Am tiring of this now. Don't bother to add your points up. Unless there is a huge curve on this exam I guess most of us are heading to hell. I have an advantage. God may declare me too off the wall, too outside the box, and maybe too difficult to fit in anywhere. I am hoping for a sentence delay.
Pt. 4 The Proverbial Cliff for Empires
11. RELIGIOUS INTOLERANCE
Religion is obtuse a subject to analyze as any. Both philosophy and religion are attempts to understand the meaning of human life and human living. Philosophy is based on logic and reasoning while religion is basically a matter of faith. One cannot use science, reason, or logic to prove the tenets of one religion over another. Every religion kind of assumes those with the greatest faith in the tenets of their religion will get to some kind of heaven after death. What happens to others of a different religion is kind of left murky. The core of most religions is the Golden rule: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you". In theory, the presence of so many religions with such a core would make this world a wonderful place for everyone to live. Yet Buddhists and Quakers are about the only worshipers who take the Golden Rule seriously. After that, the reality is a religious world of intolerance, intransigency, pageantry, elaborate rituals, greed, indifference, and violence. In America, Christianity is anything but Christ-like. One would have to be illiterate or menticidal to read the Bible and picture Christ endorsing the Vietnam or Iraq wars, the amassment of wealth in the hands of a few, kids without health insurance, the War on Drugs as a criminal rather than a medical battle, the tax laws which favor the rich, a legal system which favors the affluent or majority tribes, the exploitation of slave labor anywhere on the globe, indifference to overpopulation, or the depletion of the world's natural resources. How anyone can prevent the distortion of pure religious concepts by human priests, of this or that sort, is beyond my grasp. Without exception those humans who have projected themselves as some sort of God's emissary to their flock of worshippers have been historically proven to be illusionary. Yet faith always prevails. Those with the most faith end up being the most blind. Change becomes a virtual impossibility---to change would call into question everything else believed---for if some beliefs are wrong who is to feel safe against other beliefs being wrong? To me, religion without reason behind it, however fragile and temporal the reasoning, is a disaster waiting to happen. Every Christmas Eve, for as long as I can remember, the headline in the paper is always------always----"Pope Prays For Peace". Has there ever, in the history of mankind, been a more useless plan for Peace? The Pope may get the headlines, but the message is the same across the globe----titular religious leaders of varied ilk, all praying for peace. Be all that as it may, the greatest leaders for peace, justice, and freedom in the world's history have essentially been mostly deeply religious persons with little or no ties to organized religious sects, possessing the greatest determination to keep church and state totally separated. Organized religion and intolerance have gone hand in hand as the norm, not the exception. And from the intolerance comes arrogance, distrust, dislike, and then the persecution and killing starts---like night follows day. We are close enough now to the edge that any more religious crusading is really scary.
Throughout my own life, my perception of religion has undergone endless change. The Universe, including our own planet, with some sort of God created evolutionary process--- exists---that much can be reasoned out just as can the existence of an anonymous donor who gives us a gift---reason dictates that the donor must exist. It appears humans have an innate sense of moral values in that so much of basic moral principles, like stealing and cheating, concern for others, etc. are common to all cultures across our globe. Most everyone, minus psychopaths, understand basic right and wrong. The core goal of civilized moral government seems to be a collective effort to promulgate moral values to the maximum. We know right or wrong, for the most part anyway, but whether we do the right rather than the wrong is the problem. The good that religious beliefs can do for an individual is obvious and undeniable. Yet the core religious values inherent in human nature, once formed into religious sects---these dogmas and rituals of sects adopted via inheritance and acts of faith, become social dynamite. There simply is no objective reasoning which leads one to sign on as a Baptist, or a Jew, or a Catholic, or a Hindu, or a Buddhist, or a Muslim, etc. The presence of inherited faith based religious gangs across the world creates endless intolerance, distrust, conflict, and often subsequent wars. Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Churchill, and endless other leaders were very religious in terms of their moral values, but were identifiable with no particular religious sect. In part, perhaps because of that independence, they were able to bring people together. Religious gang leaders never bring people together, they instead pretend their own peculiar rituals, traditions, and opinions on endless social and political matters are derived from some sort of God assisted human written scripture, or from human designated inter-mediators to God Himself. History has long proven that to be bunk, and those delusional enough to believe they are emissaries of God have been guilty at times, of every crime known to man. Yet the farce goes on, and as it does the world is becoming an increasingly dangerous place for more and more people. The idea that God is pal-ing around with the most faithful of certain religious sects, protecting them from danger, ill luck, etc. is just untenable from any rational observation of history.
The period of history in which religious leaders and Kings had the most control is now referred to as the Dark Ages. The French Enlightenment, which followed this period of time, was essentially a period in which printing presses were able to provide ordinary citizens with the principles and discoveries of science. Once ordinary people were exposed to rational reasoning about the world in which they lived, then superstition and the tyranny of the lettered classes over the untutored, lost ground and, in fact, became overthrown. This really ushered in the concept titled separation of church and state. The pomposity of self-appointed authority came under substantial ridicule and the hold of priests and kings over citizens was considerably weakened. From this point on human populations began to be separated into two basic groups: those who saw faith based religious tenets as the salvation of mankind, and those who viewed some sort of naturalism as the last word---a world in which nature is scientifically examined to provide the truth of matters, not faith based human derived religious dogma. As the body of scientific knowledge increases, to remain stationary is to become stagnant, and the future under no obligation to mimic the past. To faith based worshippers this is heresy--a sign of decadence and disrespect to the laws of God.
To view the above as two groups---the God fearing and the Godless---is way over simplification. Polls consistently show most people believe in God. If believing or not believing in God is not what separates these two groups, what is it that separates them?
To the extent any of the above is true, the problem really is to find a way to dissemble all the human tacked on debris to basic moral concepts and build religious values on the core moral values inherent in human nature. All the rest is diverse societal nonsense. People can dance to the tune any way they want as long as they stay on pitch to these basic inherent moral values.
My observation is that there is little logic in pitting the question as one of God's laws or the Laws of Nature. Rather, the more logical approach would seem to consider the Laws of Nature to be God's Laws. The more irrational approach would seem to lay claim to faith based religious dogmas as God's laws. At one point in history religious dogma stated the world was flat. As scientific knowledge increased it became obvious the world was not flat. To me, it is ok to have faith based beliefs----religious or otherwise----under two conditions: one does not insist such faith based beliefs be made the law of the land, and one is willing to drop these beliefs as increased scientific knowledge proves a faith based belief wrong. It is one thing to say God is never wrong and quite another thing to claim YOU are never wrong.
It is not uncommon for a lot of people to believe God created man in His own image. If one believes that, evolution is bunk. While there is no scientific or logical evidence that God created man in His own image, there is ever increasing scientific evidence for an evolutionary process that has been in operation for billions of years. Given the evidence for such an evolutionary process, and given that almost everyone believes God exists, then logic would seem to dictate that God is the author of this evolutionary process---a rather amazing process at that. Of course this God created process does not lend itself to the notion of humans as some kind of 'special' creation with favored status---like God's faithful human servants get to go through life with God's arm around their shoulders answering their prayers and providing them special protections from HIS Law's of nature. Man is distinguished from other animals most clearly by an advanced ability to reason, as sure as birds are distinguished by the ability to fly, and fish to swim. Reason is the only tool for human understanding of anything---any field, any reality. Even ethics and morality, or if you prefer the term religion, are subject to reason as the basis for validity. With time ethics or religious beliefs change, as they should, with increased understanding of ourselves and others. Faith based religious beliefs that supported slavery, limited rights for women, opposition to birth control, and a whole host of ignorant faith based beliefs eventually lose their hold on believers. Even today faith based notions about gays, about abortion, about control over the dying process, etc. are slowly being changed. And as always, there are those who sincerely feel these changes to be some sort of assault on the Laws of God---as preached by the church religious leaders of their inherited religion.
The most insidiously dangerous faith based belief, one that could conceivably doom the future for the human species, is the belief that a few functioning human cells constitutes a human being and cannot be terminated or it will be an affront against God himself. Even birth control, family planning, and rigid control over population growth are all considered by most to be an affront to the 'will' of God. For any human claims about understanding the 'will' of God, these claims seem the ultimate in arrogance. The best humans can ever do is use our evolutionary gift of reason to protect our future. To claim a few functioning human cells to be a human being is a conceptual absurdity. With this absurdity under our belt we then claim abortion is murder, that assisted suicide during a difficult dying process is murder, that putting to sleep a human 'vegetable' is murder, that birth control is murder, etc. It then follows that bringing to term a child who cannot, for whatever, reasons, be properly cared for---is the 'will of God'. From this I guess it would follow that the 'will of God' is for as many LIVING HUMAN sperms and eggs be fertilized as possible, that all these 'potential' human beings be assisted to materialize into conceived and birthed children----some sort of 'whole lot of fucking going on'. Of course with modern scientific advancement there is no need for a 'whole lot of fucking going on', we could kind organize donated sperm and eggs into some kind of assembly line production. All of this might be good for a ludicrous chuckle except the total absence of a any systematic planned parenthood across the globe is generating a whole lot of human misery across our globe because the ability of our earth to support such large populations has become exceeded. Oh well, God wills it. Look down---now you see it----the edge of the cliff right at our feet.
Associated Quotations:
"In the same way let us judge the religious organizations which we see all around us. Do not let us deny the good and the happiness which they have accomplished, but do not let us fail to see clearly that their idea of human perfection is narrow and inadequate; and that the Dissidence of Dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion will never bring humanity to its goal."
(Matthew Arnold)
"I came to the conclusion long ago...that all religions were true, and also all had some error in them." (Gandhi)
"Prayer: to ask that the laws of evolution in the Universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy." (Ambrose Pierce)
"And we all have known
Good critics, who have stamped out poet's hopes
Good Statesmen, who pulled ruin on the state
Good patriots, who for a theory, risked a cause
Good kings, who disembowelled for a tax
Good popes, who brought all good to jeopardy
Good Christians, who sat is easy chairs
And damned the general world for standing up
Now may the good God pardon all good men!." (Elizibeth Browning)
"The question before the human race is whether the God of nature shall govern the world by his own laws, or whether priests and kings shall rule it by fictitious miracles." (John Adams)
"The moralist preaches reason, because he believes it necessary to man; the philosopher writes, because he believes truth must sooner or later prevail over falsehood; theologians and tyrants necessarily hate truth and despise reason because they believe them prejudicial to their interests." (Paul Henri Thiry)
"All religions united with government are more or less inimical to liberty. All separated from government are compatible with liberty." Henry Clay
"Man is a religious animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion---several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight." (Mark Twain)
" If we submit everything to reason, our religion will have nothing in it mysterious or supernatural. If we violate the principles of reason, our religion will be absurd and ridiculous. (Blaise Pascal)
"He who begins by loving Christianity better than the truth, will proceed by loving his own sect or Church better than Christianity, and end by loving himself better than all (others).." Samuel Coleridge
"The mob that would die for a belief seldom hesitates to inflict death upon any opposing heretical group." (Ellen Glasgow)
"It comes to pass that nothing is so firmly believed as that which we know least; nor are there any persons so sure of themselves as those who tell us fables, such as alchemists, prognosticators, seers, chiromanticists, quacks, id genus omne. To which I would join, if I dared, a host of persons, interpreters and verifiers-in-ordinary of the designs of God." Michel Montaigne)
"What kind of truth is this which is true on one side of a mountain and false on the other? (Michel Montaigne)
"There is nothing men more readily give themselves to than pushing their own beliefs. When ordinary means fail, they add commandment, violence, fire and sword." (Michel Montaigne)
"Give the Church a place in the Constitution, let her touch once more the sword of power, and the priceless fruit of all the ages will turn to ashes." (Robert Ingersoll)
"The hope of science is the perfection of the human race. The hope of theology is the salvation of a few, and the damnation of almost everybody." (Robert Ingersoll)
"Christendom has done away with Christianity, without it being aware of it. Therefore, if anything is to be done about it, the attempt must be made to reintroduce Christianity." Soren Kierkegaard)
"The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation." (Jeremy Bentham)
"Let us worship God again in simplicity, instead of making a fool of him in splendid edifices." (Soren Kierkegaard)
"Minorities need the majority to free them from their fears. The majority needs minorities to free them from their guilt." (Paraphrased from Martin Luther King)
"The majority of people believe in incredible things which are absolutely false. The majority of people daily act in a manner prejudicial to their general well-being." (Ashley Montagu)
" People fashion their God after their own understanding. They make their God first and worship him afterwards." (Oscar Wilde)
"How many things which served us yesterday as articles of faith, are fables for us today." (Michael Montaigne)
"You have got our country, but are not satisfied; you want to force your religion upon us....Brother, you say there is but one way to worship and serve the Great Spirit. If there is but one religion, why do you white people differ so much about it?" (Redjacket)
"There is no creed so false but faith can make it true". (Henry David Thoreau)
"The death sentence is a necessary and efficacious means for the Church to attain its ends when rebels against it disturb the ecclesiastical unity, especially obstinate heretics who cannot be restrained by any other penalty from continuing to disturb ecclesiastical order......to despise legitimate authority, no matter in whom it is invested, is unlawful, it is rebellion against God's will......women, again, are not suited for certain occupations; a woman is by nature fitted for home-work, and it is that which is best adopted at once to preserve her modesty and promote the good bringing up of children and well being of the family. (Pope Leo XIII)
"Men have broad and large chests, and small narrow hips, and more understanding than women, who have but small and narrow breasts, and broad hips, to the end they should remain at home, sit still, keep house, and bear and bring up children.....Either God must be unjust, or you, Jews, wicked and ungodly. You have been, about fifteen hundred years, a race rejected of God..... what shall Christians do now with this depraved and damned people of the Jews? I will give my faithful advice. First, that one should set fire to their synagogues...then that one should also break down and destroy their houses.....since we punish thieves with the halter, murders with the sword, and heretics with fire, why do we not turn on all those evil teachers of perdition, those popes, cardinals, and bishops, and the entire swarm of the Roman Sodom with arms in hand, and wash our hands in their blood........because the sword is a very great benefit and necessary to the whole world, to preserve peace, to punish sin, and to prevent evil.........whoever wants to be a Christian should tear the eyes out of his Reason.......Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has; it never comes to the ad of spiritual things, but---more frequently than not---struggles against the divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God." (Martin Luther)
"All great religions in order to escape absurdity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely." (Henry Mencken)
"Conscience is God's presence in man" (Emanuel Swedenborg)
" No miracle has ever taken place under conditions which science can accept. Experience shows, without exception, that miracles occur only in times and in countries in which miracles are believed in, and in the presence of persons who are disposed to believe in them." (Ernest Renan)
"When the State intervenes to insure the indoctrination of some doctrine, it does so because there is no conclusive evidence in favor of that doctrine." (Bertrand Russell)
"That they (the dogmas of religion) do little harm is not true. Opposition to birth control makes it impossible to solve the population problem and therefore postpones indefinitely all chance of world peace." (Bertand Russell)
"Always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice and corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty." (Joseph Pulitzer)
"If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of him." (Thomas Carlyle)
"Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character." (Sankara Acharya)
"To cling to the principles of the Judeo-Christian ethic----honesty, integrity, compassion, love, ideas of hope, charity, humility---is an integral part of any person's life no matter what his position in life may be....My prayer is that my life be meaningful in the enhancement of His Kindgom on earth, enhancement of the lives of my fellow human beings; that I may help translate the natural love that exists in this world and do simple justice through government." ( Jimmy Carter).
"The great law of culture is, Let each become all that he was created capable of being: expand, if possible, to his full growth, resisting all impediments, casting off all foreign, especially all noxious adhesions, and show himself at length in his own shape and stature, be these what they may" (Thomas Carlyle)
"Living is not the good, but living well. The wise man therefore lives as long as he should, not as long as he can. He will think of life in terms of quality, not quantity." (Lucius Annaeus Seneca)
"It is a cruel crime thoughtlessly to bring more children into existence than can be properly taken care of." (Rabindranath Tabore)
"Creeds must become intellectually honest. At present there is not a single credible established religion in the world. That is perhaps the most stupendous fact in the whole world-situation." (Bernard Shaw)
"The Popes, like Jesus, are conceived by their mothers through the overshadowing of the Holy Ghost. All Popes are a certain species of man-gods, for the purpose of being able to conduct the functions of mediator between God and mankind. All powers in Heaven, as well as on earth, are given to them." (Pope Stephen V)
"Of all religions, Christianity is without doubt the one that should inspire tolerance most, although, up to now, the Christians have been the most intolerant of all men." (Voltaire)
"Still, instead of trusting what their own minds tell them, men have as a rule a weakness for trusting others who pretend to supernatural sources of knowledge." (Arthur Schopenhauer)
"Say nothing of my religion. It is known to God and myself alone. Its evidence before the world is to be sought in my life; if it has been honest and dutiful to society the religion which has regulated it cannot be a bad one." (Thomas Jefferson)
"This is what you should do: love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men....re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss what insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem." (Walt Whitman)
"I sit and look out upon all the sorrows of the world,
And upon all oppression and shame.....
I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny, I see martyrs and prisoners....
I observe the sights and depredations cast by arrogant persons upon laborers, the poor, and upon others who are different,
All these---all the meanness and agony with out end
I sit looking out upon,
See, hear, and am silent" (Walt Whitman)
"They (the Clergy) believe that any portion of power confided to me, will be exerted in opposition to their schemes. And they believe rightly; for I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." (Thomas Jefferson)
"...it cannot be lawful for the press, under the pretext that it is free, to make daily and systematic attempts on the religious and moral health of mankind." (Pope John XXII)
"Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.......He that never compares his notions with those of others, readily acquiesces in his first thoughts, and very seldom discovers the objections which may be raised against his opinions; he, therefore, often thinks himself in possession of truth, when he is only fondling an error long since exploded." (Samuel Johnson)
"In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot (the Bushs' of the world)........they have perverted the purest religion ever preached to man into mystery and jargon, unintelligible to all mankind, and therefore the safer engine for their purpose. (Thomas Jefferson)
"I never came across anyone in whom the moral sense was dominant who was not heartless, cruel, vindictive, log-stupid, and entirely lacking the the smallest sense of humanity. Moral people, as they are termed, are simply beasts. I would sooner have fifty unnatural vices than one unnatural virtue." (Oscar Wilde)
"Christian, n. One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor. One who follows the teaching of Christ so far as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin." (Ambrose Bierce)
"Write on my gravestone, 'Infidel. Traitor"---infidel to every church that compromises with the strong; traitor to every government that oppresses the people." (Wendell Philips)
"I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The Still, sad music of humanity." (William Wordsworth)
" There is not any thing, which has contributed so much to delude mankind in religious; matters, as mistaken apprehensions concerning supernatural inspiration or revelation; not considering, that all true religion originates from reason, and can not otherwise be understood, but by the exercise and improvement of it." (Ethan Allen)
"In order to see Christianity, one must forget almost all the Christians......the efficacy of religion lies precisely in what is not rational, philosophic, nor eternal; its efficacy lies in the unforeseen, the miraculous, the extraordinary. Thus religion attracts more devotion according as it demands more faith---that is to say, as it becomes more incredible to the profane mind." (Henri Frederic Amiel)
"It is forbidden to decry other sects; the true believer gives honor to whatever in them is worthy of honor." (Asoka) Buddhist Emperor of India
"Men will wrangle for religion, write for it, fight for it, die for it; anything but---live for it." (Charles Colton)
"Religion has lost itself in cults, dogmas, and myths. Consequently the office of religion as a sense of community and one's place in it has been lost." (John Dewey)
"There is only one step from (religious) fanaticism to barbarism." (Denis Diderot)
"Religion is the idol of the mob; it adores everything it does not understand." (Frederick the Great)
"As a general rule the classes that are low in economic efficiency, or in intelligence, or both, are peculiarly devout---as for instance, the negro population of the South, much of the lower-class foreign population, much of the rural population, especially in those sections which are backward in education, in the stage of development of their industry, or in respect to their industrial contact with the rest of the community." (Thorstein Veblen)
"Just as no one can be forced into belief, so no one can be forced into unbelief." Sigmund Freud)
"A man is truly ethical only when he obeys the compulsion to help all life which he is able to assist, and shrinks from injuring anything that lives." (Albert Schweitzer)
"Faith means intense, usually confident, belief that is not based on evidence sufficient to command assent from every reasonable person." (Walter Kaufmann)
"Even those who do not regret the disappearance of religious illusions from the civilized world of today will admit that so long s they were in force they offered those who were bound by them the most powerful protection against the danger of neurosis." (Sigmund Freud)
"Nothing in the whole world, or even outside of the world, can possibly be regarded as good without limitation, except a good will. No doubt it is a good and desirable thing to have intelligence, sagacity, judgment, and other intellectual gifts, by whatever name they may be called; it is also good and desirable in many respects to possess by nature such qualities as courage, resolution, and perseverance; but all these gifts of nature may be in the highest degree pernicious and hurtful if the will which directs them, or what is called the 'character' is not itself good." (Immanuel Kant)
"Fear of death was the first thing on earth to make the gods." (Lucretius)
12. INABILITY TO CHANGE
Associated quotations:
" But touch a solemn truth in collision with a dogma of a sect, though capable of the clearest proof, and you will soon find you have disturbed a nest, and the hornets will swarm about your eyes and hand, and fly into your face and eyes." John Adams
"No one can walk backward into the future" (Joseph Hergesheimer)
"The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities....it is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority." Lord Acton
"Let them innovate in nothing, but keep the tradition" (Pope Stephen I)
" To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often." (John Henry Newman)
"Possibly, if a true estimate were made of the morality and religions of the world, we would find that the far greater part of mankind received even those opinions and ceremonies they would die for, rather from the fashions of their countries and the constant practice of those about them, than from any conviction of their reason." (John Locke)
"There is danger in reckless change, but greater danger in blind conservatism" (Henry George)
"Western thinking has become conservative; the world situation should stay as it is at any cost; there should be no changes. This debilitating dream of a status quo is the symptom of a society that has come to the end of its development." (Alexander Solzhenitsyn)
"Every great scientific truth goes through three states: First, people say it conflicts with the Bible; next, they say it has been discovered before; lastly, they say they always believed it." (Louis Agassiz)
"People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage." (John Kenneth Galbraith)
"A great many people think they are thinking wihen they are rearranging their prejudices" (William James)
"There is nothing permanent except change" (Heraclitus)
"A religion that requires persecution to sustain it is of the devil's propagation." Hosea Ballou.
"Their life is so practical, so confused, so excited, so active, that little time remains for them for thought" ( Alexis Charles Hennri Maurice Clerel De Tocqueville)
"There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning---devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political, intellectual or creative work.....One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love friendship, indignation, compassion." (Simone De Beauvoir)
"In the best sense of the word, Jesus was a radical....His religion has so long been identified with conservatism.....that it is almost startling sometimes to remember that all the conservatives of his own times were against him; that it was the young, free, restless, sanguine, progressive part of the people who flocked to him." (Phillips Brooks)
"Our country, right or wrong! When right, to be kept right; when wrong to be put right." (Carl Schurz)
"...the seed of imperial ruin and national decay---the unnatural gap between the rich and poor----the exploitation of the boy labor, the physical degeneration which seems to follow so swiftly on civilized poverty----the horrid havoc of the liquor traffic, the constant insecurity in the means of subsistence and employment---the swift increase of vulgar, jobless luxury---are the enemies of Britain." (Winston Churchhill)
"All that is necessary to make this world a better place to live in is to love---to love as Christ loved, as Buddha loved." (Isadora Duncan)
"To criticize one's country is to do it a service....Criticism, in short, is more than a right; it is an act of patriotism---a higher form of patriotism, I believe, than the familiar rituals and national adulation." (William Fulbright)
"In practice all men are atheists; they deny their faith by their actions." (Ludwig Feuerbach)
"Wherever morality is based on theology, wherever right is made dependent on divine authority, the most immoral, unjust, infamous things can be justified and established." (Ludwig Feuerbach)
"Famine seems to be the last, the most dreadful resource of nature. The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to provide subsistence....that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race." (Thomas Malthus)
"Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking: where it is absent, discussion is apt to become worse than useless." (Count Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy)
"We come inevitably to the fundamental question: What are people for? What is living for? If the answer is a life of dignity, decency, and opportunity, then every increase in population (at this point in time) is a threat to every single being" (Marya Mannes)
"There are three ideas which seem to me to stand out above all others in the influence they have exerted and are destined to exert upon the development of the human race.....The first of these and the most important of the three, was the gift of religion to the race; the other two sprang from the womb of science. They are as follows: (l) The idea of the Golden Rule; (2) The idea of Natural Law; (3) The idea of age-long growth, or evolution. (Robert Millikan)
"Truth is compared in scripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in perpetual progression, they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition. A man may be a eretic in the truth; and if he believes things only because his pastor says so, or the Assembly so determines, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes his heresy." (John Milton)
Religion is obtuse a subject to analyze as any. Both philosophy and religion are attempts to understand the meaning of human life and human living. Philosophy is based on logic and reasoning while religion is basically a matter of faith. One cannot use science, reason, or logic to prove the tenets of one religion over another. Every religion kind of assumes those with the greatest faith in the tenets of their religion will get to some kind of heaven after death. What happens to others of a different religion is kind of left murky. The core of most religions is the Golden rule: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you". In theory, the presence of so many religions with such a core would make this world a wonderful place for everyone to live. Yet Buddhists and Quakers are about the only worshipers who take the Golden Rule seriously. After that, the reality is a religious world of intolerance, intransigency, pageantry, elaborate rituals, greed, indifference, and violence. In America, Christianity is anything but Christ-like. One would have to be illiterate or menticidal to read the Bible and picture Christ endorsing the Vietnam or Iraq wars, the amassment of wealth in the hands of a few, kids without health insurance, the War on Drugs as a criminal rather than a medical battle, the tax laws which favor the rich, a legal system which favors the affluent or majority tribes, the exploitation of slave labor anywhere on the globe, indifference to overpopulation, or the depletion of the world's natural resources. How anyone can prevent the distortion of pure religious concepts by human priests, of this or that sort, is beyond my grasp. Without exception those humans who have projected themselves as some sort of God's emissary to their flock of worshippers have been historically proven to be illusionary. Yet faith always prevails. Those with the most faith end up being the most blind. Change becomes a virtual impossibility---to change would call into question everything else believed---for if some beliefs are wrong who is to feel safe against other beliefs being wrong? To me, religion without reason behind it, however fragile and temporal the reasoning, is a disaster waiting to happen. Every Christmas Eve, for as long as I can remember, the headline in the paper is always------always----"Pope Prays For Peace". Has there ever, in the history of mankind, been a more useless plan for Peace? The Pope may get the headlines, but the message is the same across the globe----titular religious leaders of varied ilk, all praying for peace. Be all that as it may, the greatest leaders for peace, justice, and freedom in the world's history have essentially been mostly deeply religious persons with little or no ties to organized religious sects, possessing the greatest determination to keep church and state totally separated. Organized religion and intolerance have gone hand in hand as the norm, not the exception. And from the intolerance comes arrogance, distrust, dislike, and then the persecution and killing starts---like night follows day. We are close enough now to the edge that any more religious crusading is really scary.
Throughout my own life, my perception of religion has undergone endless change. The Universe, including our own planet, with some sort of God created evolutionary process--- exists---that much can be reasoned out just as can the existence of an anonymous donor who gives us a gift---reason dictates that the donor must exist. It appears humans have an innate sense of moral values in that so much of basic moral principles, like stealing and cheating, concern for others, etc. are common to all cultures across our globe. Most everyone, minus psychopaths, understand basic right and wrong. The core goal of civilized moral government seems to be a collective effort to promulgate moral values to the maximum. We know right or wrong, for the most part anyway, but whether we do the right rather than the wrong is the problem. The good that religious beliefs can do for an individual is obvious and undeniable. Yet the core religious values inherent in human nature, once formed into religious sects---these dogmas and rituals of sects adopted via inheritance and acts of faith, become social dynamite. There simply is no objective reasoning which leads one to sign on as a Baptist, or a Jew, or a Catholic, or a Hindu, or a Buddhist, or a Muslim, etc. The presence of inherited faith based religious gangs across the world creates endless intolerance, distrust, conflict, and often subsequent wars. Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Churchill, and endless other leaders were very religious in terms of their moral values, but were identifiable with no particular religious sect. In part, perhaps because of that independence, they were able to bring people together. Religious gang leaders never bring people together, they instead pretend their own peculiar rituals, traditions, and opinions on endless social and political matters are derived from some sort of God assisted human written scripture, or from human designated inter-mediators to God Himself. History has long proven that to be bunk, and those delusional enough to believe they are emissaries of God have been guilty at times, of every crime known to man. Yet the farce goes on, and as it does the world is becoming an increasingly dangerous place for more and more people. The idea that God is pal-ing around with the most faithful of certain religious sects, protecting them from danger, ill luck, etc. is just untenable from any rational observation of history.
The period of history in which religious leaders and Kings had the most control is now referred to as the Dark Ages. The French Enlightenment, which followed this period of time, was essentially a period in which printing presses were able to provide ordinary citizens with the principles and discoveries of science. Once ordinary people were exposed to rational reasoning about the world in which they lived, then superstition and the tyranny of the lettered classes over the untutored, lost ground and, in fact, became overthrown. This really ushered in the concept titled separation of church and state. The pomposity of self-appointed authority came under substantial ridicule and the hold of priests and kings over citizens was considerably weakened. From this point on human populations began to be separated into two basic groups: those who saw faith based religious tenets as the salvation of mankind, and those who viewed some sort of naturalism as the last word---a world in which nature is scientifically examined to provide the truth of matters, not faith based human derived religious dogma. As the body of scientific knowledge increases, to remain stationary is to become stagnant, and the future under no obligation to mimic the past. To faith based worshippers this is heresy--a sign of decadence and disrespect to the laws of God.
To view the above as two groups---the God fearing and the Godless---is way over simplification. Polls consistently show most people believe in God. If believing or not believing in God is not what separates these two groups, what is it that separates them?
To the extent any of the above is true, the problem really is to find a way to dissemble all the human tacked on debris to basic moral concepts and build religious values on the core moral values inherent in human nature. All the rest is diverse societal nonsense. People can dance to the tune any way they want as long as they stay on pitch to these basic inherent moral values.
My observation is that there is little logic in pitting the question as one of God's laws or the Laws of Nature. Rather, the more logical approach would seem to consider the Laws of Nature to be God's Laws. The more irrational approach would seem to lay claim to faith based religious dogmas as God's laws. At one point in history religious dogma stated the world was flat. As scientific knowledge increased it became obvious the world was not flat. To me, it is ok to have faith based beliefs----religious or otherwise----under two conditions: one does not insist such faith based beliefs be made the law of the land, and one is willing to drop these beliefs as increased scientific knowledge proves a faith based belief wrong. It is one thing to say God is never wrong and quite another thing to claim YOU are never wrong.
It is not uncommon for a lot of people to believe God created man in His own image. If one believes that, evolution is bunk. While there is no scientific or logical evidence that God created man in His own image, there is ever increasing scientific evidence for an evolutionary process that has been in operation for billions of years. Given the evidence for such an evolutionary process, and given that almost everyone believes God exists, then logic would seem to dictate that God is the author of this evolutionary process---a rather amazing process at that. Of course this God created process does not lend itself to the notion of humans as some kind of 'special' creation with favored status---like God's faithful human servants get to go through life with God's arm around their shoulders answering their prayers and providing them special protections from HIS Law's of nature. Man is distinguished from other animals most clearly by an advanced ability to reason, as sure as birds are distinguished by the ability to fly, and fish to swim. Reason is the only tool for human understanding of anything---any field, any reality. Even ethics and morality, or if you prefer the term religion, are subject to reason as the basis for validity. With time ethics or religious beliefs change, as they should, with increased understanding of ourselves and others. Faith based religious beliefs that supported slavery, limited rights for women, opposition to birth control, and a whole host of ignorant faith based beliefs eventually lose their hold on believers. Even today faith based notions about gays, about abortion, about control over the dying process, etc. are slowly being changed. And as always, there are those who sincerely feel these changes to be some sort of assault on the Laws of God---as preached by the church religious leaders of their inherited religion.
The most insidiously dangerous faith based belief, one that could conceivably doom the future for the human species, is the belief that a few functioning human cells constitutes a human being and cannot be terminated or it will be an affront against God himself. Even birth control, family planning, and rigid control over population growth are all considered by most to be an affront to the 'will' of God. For any human claims about understanding the 'will' of God, these claims seem the ultimate in arrogance. The best humans can ever do is use our evolutionary gift of reason to protect our future. To claim a few functioning human cells to be a human being is a conceptual absurdity. With this absurdity under our belt we then claim abortion is murder, that assisted suicide during a difficult dying process is murder, that putting to sleep a human 'vegetable' is murder, that birth control is murder, etc. It then follows that bringing to term a child who cannot, for whatever, reasons, be properly cared for---is the 'will of God'. From this I guess it would follow that the 'will of God' is for as many LIVING HUMAN sperms and eggs be fertilized as possible, that all these 'potential' human beings be assisted to materialize into conceived and birthed children----some sort of 'whole lot of fucking going on'. Of course with modern scientific advancement there is no need for a 'whole lot of fucking going on', we could kind organize donated sperm and eggs into some kind of assembly line production. All of this might be good for a ludicrous chuckle except the total absence of a any systematic planned parenthood across the globe is generating a whole lot of human misery across our globe because the ability of our earth to support such large populations has become exceeded. Oh well, God wills it. Look down---now you see it----the edge of the cliff right at our feet.
Associated Quotations:
"In the same way let us judge the religious organizations which we see all around us. Do not let us deny the good and the happiness which they have accomplished, but do not let us fail to see clearly that their idea of human perfection is narrow and inadequate; and that the Dissidence of Dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion will never bring humanity to its goal."
(Matthew Arnold)
"I came to the conclusion long ago...that all religions were true, and also all had some error in them." (Gandhi)
"Prayer: to ask that the laws of evolution in the Universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy." (Ambrose Pierce)
"And we all have known
Good critics, who have stamped out poet's hopes
Good Statesmen, who pulled ruin on the state
Good patriots, who for a theory, risked a cause
Good kings, who disembowelled for a tax
Good popes, who brought all good to jeopardy
Good Christians, who sat is easy chairs
And damned the general world for standing up
Now may the good God pardon all good men!." (Elizibeth Browning)
"The question before the human race is whether the God of nature shall govern the world by his own laws, or whether priests and kings shall rule it by fictitious miracles." (John Adams)
"The moralist preaches reason, because he believes it necessary to man; the philosopher writes, because he believes truth must sooner or later prevail over falsehood; theologians and tyrants necessarily hate truth and despise reason because they believe them prejudicial to their interests." (Paul Henri Thiry)
"All religions united with government are more or less inimical to liberty. All separated from government are compatible with liberty." Henry Clay
"Man is a religious animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion---several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight." (Mark Twain)
" If we submit everything to reason, our religion will have nothing in it mysterious or supernatural. If we violate the principles of reason, our religion will be absurd and ridiculous. (Blaise Pascal)
"He who begins by loving Christianity better than the truth, will proceed by loving his own sect or Church better than Christianity, and end by loving himself better than all (others).." Samuel Coleridge
"The mob that would die for a belief seldom hesitates to inflict death upon any opposing heretical group." (Ellen Glasgow)
"It comes to pass that nothing is so firmly believed as that which we know least; nor are there any persons so sure of themselves as those who tell us fables, such as alchemists, prognosticators, seers, chiromanticists, quacks, id genus omne. To which I would join, if I dared, a host of persons, interpreters and verifiers-in-ordinary of the designs of God." Michel Montaigne)
"What kind of truth is this which is true on one side of a mountain and false on the other? (Michel Montaigne)
"There is nothing men more readily give themselves to than pushing their own beliefs. When ordinary means fail, they add commandment, violence, fire and sword." (Michel Montaigne)
"Give the Church a place in the Constitution, let her touch once more the sword of power, and the priceless fruit of all the ages will turn to ashes." (Robert Ingersoll)
"The hope of science is the perfection of the human race. The hope of theology is the salvation of a few, and the damnation of almost everybody." (Robert Ingersoll)
"Christendom has done away with Christianity, without it being aware of it. Therefore, if anything is to be done about it, the attempt must be made to reintroduce Christianity." Soren Kierkegaard)
"The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation." (Jeremy Bentham)
"Let us worship God again in simplicity, instead of making a fool of him in splendid edifices." (Soren Kierkegaard)
"Minorities need the majority to free them from their fears. The majority needs minorities to free them from their guilt." (Paraphrased from Martin Luther King)
"The majority of people believe in incredible things which are absolutely false. The majority of people daily act in a manner prejudicial to their general well-being." (Ashley Montagu)
" People fashion their God after their own understanding. They make their God first and worship him afterwards." (Oscar Wilde)
"How many things which served us yesterday as articles of faith, are fables for us today." (Michael Montaigne)
"You have got our country, but are not satisfied; you want to force your religion upon us....Brother, you say there is but one way to worship and serve the Great Spirit. If there is but one religion, why do you white people differ so much about it?" (Redjacket)
"There is no creed so false but faith can make it true". (Henry David Thoreau)
"The death sentence is a necessary and efficacious means for the Church to attain its ends when rebels against it disturb the ecclesiastical unity, especially obstinate heretics who cannot be restrained by any other penalty from continuing to disturb ecclesiastical order......to despise legitimate authority, no matter in whom it is invested, is unlawful, it is rebellion against God's will......women, again, are not suited for certain occupations; a woman is by nature fitted for home-work, and it is that which is best adopted at once to preserve her modesty and promote the good bringing up of children and well being of the family. (Pope Leo XIII)
"Men have broad and large chests, and small narrow hips, and more understanding than women, who have but small and narrow breasts, and broad hips, to the end they should remain at home, sit still, keep house, and bear and bring up children.....Either God must be unjust, or you, Jews, wicked and ungodly. You have been, about fifteen hundred years, a race rejected of God..... what shall Christians do now with this depraved and damned people of the Jews? I will give my faithful advice. First, that one should set fire to their synagogues...then that one should also break down and destroy their houses.....since we punish thieves with the halter, murders with the sword, and heretics with fire, why do we not turn on all those evil teachers of perdition, those popes, cardinals, and bishops, and the entire swarm of the Roman Sodom with arms in hand, and wash our hands in their blood........because the sword is a very great benefit and necessary to the whole world, to preserve peace, to punish sin, and to prevent evil.........whoever wants to be a Christian should tear the eyes out of his Reason.......Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has; it never comes to the ad of spiritual things, but---more frequently than not---struggles against the divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God." (Martin Luther)
"All great religions in order to escape absurdity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely." (Henry Mencken)
"Conscience is God's presence in man" (Emanuel Swedenborg)
" No miracle has ever taken place under conditions which science can accept. Experience shows, without exception, that miracles occur only in times and in countries in which miracles are believed in, and in the presence of persons who are disposed to believe in them." (Ernest Renan)
"When the State intervenes to insure the indoctrination of some doctrine, it does so because there is no conclusive evidence in favor of that doctrine." (Bertrand Russell)
"That they (the dogmas of religion) do little harm is not true. Opposition to birth control makes it impossible to solve the population problem and therefore postpones indefinitely all chance of world peace." (Bertand Russell)
"Always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice and corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty." (Joseph Pulitzer)
"If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of him." (Thomas Carlyle)
"Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character." (Sankara Acharya)
"To cling to the principles of the Judeo-Christian ethic----honesty, integrity, compassion, love, ideas of hope, charity, humility---is an integral part of any person's life no matter what his position in life may be....My prayer is that my life be meaningful in the enhancement of His Kindgom on earth, enhancement of the lives of my fellow human beings; that I may help translate the natural love that exists in this world and do simple justice through government." ( Jimmy Carter).
"The great law of culture is, Let each become all that he was created capable of being: expand, if possible, to his full growth, resisting all impediments, casting off all foreign, especially all noxious adhesions, and show himself at length in his own shape and stature, be these what they may" (Thomas Carlyle)
"Living is not the good, but living well. The wise man therefore lives as long as he should, not as long as he can. He will think of life in terms of quality, not quantity." (Lucius Annaeus Seneca)
"It is a cruel crime thoughtlessly to bring more children into existence than can be properly taken care of." (Rabindranath Tabore)
"Creeds must become intellectually honest. At present there is not a single credible established religion in the world. That is perhaps the most stupendous fact in the whole world-situation." (Bernard Shaw)
"The Popes, like Jesus, are conceived by their mothers through the overshadowing of the Holy Ghost. All Popes are a certain species of man-gods, for the purpose of being able to conduct the functions of mediator between God and mankind. All powers in Heaven, as well as on earth, are given to them." (Pope Stephen V)
"Of all religions, Christianity is without doubt the one that should inspire tolerance most, although, up to now, the Christians have been the most intolerant of all men." (Voltaire)
"Still, instead of trusting what their own minds tell them, men have as a rule a weakness for trusting others who pretend to supernatural sources of knowledge." (Arthur Schopenhauer)
"Say nothing of my religion. It is known to God and myself alone. Its evidence before the world is to be sought in my life; if it has been honest and dutiful to society the religion which has regulated it cannot be a bad one." (Thomas Jefferson)
"This is what you should do: love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men....re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss what insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem." (Walt Whitman)
"I sit and look out upon all the sorrows of the world,
And upon all oppression and shame.....
I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny, I see martyrs and prisoners....
I observe the sights and depredations cast by arrogant persons upon laborers, the poor, and upon others who are different,
All these---all the meanness and agony with out end
I sit looking out upon,
See, hear, and am silent" (Walt Whitman)
"They (the Clergy) believe that any portion of power confided to me, will be exerted in opposition to their schemes. And they believe rightly; for I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man." (Thomas Jefferson)
"...it cannot be lawful for the press, under the pretext that it is free, to make daily and systematic attempts on the religious and moral health of mankind." (Pope John XXII)
"Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.......He that never compares his notions with those of others, readily acquiesces in his first thoughts, and very seldom discovers the objections which may be raised against his opinions; he, therefore, often thinks himself in possession of truth, when he is only fondling an error long since exploded." (Samuel Johnson)
"In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot (the Bushs' of the world)........they have perverted the purest religion ever preached to man into mystery and jargon, unintelligible to all mankind, and therefore the safer engine for their purpose. (Thomas Jefferson)
"I never came across anyone in whom the moral sense was dominant who was not heartless, cruel, vindictive, log-stupid, and entirely lacking the the smallest sense of humanity. Moral people, as they are termed, are simply beasts. I would sooner have fifty unnatural vices than one unnatural virtue." (Oscar Wilde)
"Christian, n. One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor. One who follows the teaching of Christ so far as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin." (Ambrose Bierce)
"Write on my gravestone, 'Infidel. Traitor"---infidel to every church that compromises with the strong; traitor to every government that oppresses the people." (Wendell Philips)
"I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The Still, sad music of humanity." (William Wordsworth)
" There is not any thing, which has contributed so much to delude mankind in religious; matters, as mistaken apprehensions concerning supernatural inspiration or revelation; not considering, that all true religion originates from reason, and can not otherwise be understood, but by the exercise and improvement of it." (Ethan Allen)
"In order to see Christianity, one must forget almost all the Christians......the efficacy of religion lies precisely in what is not rational, philosophic, nor eternal; its efficacy lies in the unforeseen, the miraculous, the extraordinary. Thus religion attracts more devotion according as it demands more faith---that is to say, as it becomes more incredible to the profane mind." (Henri Frederic Amiel)
"It is forbidden to decry other sects; the true believer gives honor to whatever in them is worthy of honor." (Asoka) Buddhist Emperor of India
"Men will wrangle for religion, write for it, fight for it, die for it; anything but---live for it." (Charles Colton)
"Religion has lost itself in cults, dogmas, and myths. Consequently the office of religion as a sense of community and one's place in it has been lost." (John Dewey)
"There is only one step from (religious) fanaticism to barbarism." (Denis Diderot)
"Religion is the idol of the mob; it adores everything it does not understand." (Frederick the Great)
"As a general rule the classes that are low in economic efficiency, or in intelligence, or both, are peculiarly devout---as for instance, the negro population of the South, much of the lower-class foreign population, much of the rural population, especially in those sections which are backward in education, in the stage of development of their industry, or in respect to their industrial contact with the rest of the community." (Thorstein Veblen)
"Just as no one can be forced into belief, so no one can be forced into unbelief." Sigmund Freud)
"A man is truly ethical only when he obeys the compulsion to help all life which he is able to assist, and shrinks from injuring anything that lives." (Albert Schweitzer)
"Faith means intense, usually confident, belief that is not based on evidence sufficient to command assent from every reasonable person." (Walter Kaufmann)
"Even those who do not regret the disappearance of religious illusions from the civilized world of today will admit that so long s they were in force they offered those who were bound by them the most powerful protection against the danger of neurosis." (Sigmund Freud)
"Nothing in the whole world, or even outside of the world, can possibly be regarded as good without limitation, except a good will. No doubt it is a good and desirable thing to have intelligence, sagacity, judgment, and other intellectual gifts, by whatever name they may be called; it is also good and desirable in many respects to possess by nature such qualities as courage, resolution, and perseverance; but all these gifts of nature may be in the highest degree pernicious and hurtful if the will which directs them, or what is called the 'character' is not itself good." (Immanuel Kant)
"Fear of death was the first thing on earth to make the gods." (Lucretius)
12. INABILITY TO CHANGE
Associated quotations:
" But touch a solemn truth in collision with a dogma of a sect, though capable of the clearest proof, and you will soon find you have disturbed a nest, and the hornets will swarm about your eyes and hand, and fly into your face and eyes." John Adams
"No one can walk backward into the future" (Joseph Hergesheimer)
"The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities....it is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority." Lord Acton
"Let them innovate in nothing, but keep the tradition" (Pope Stephen I)
" To live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often." (John Henry Newman)
"Possibly, if a true estimate were made of the morality and religions of the world, we would find that the far greater part of mankind received even those opinions and ceremonies they would die for, rather from the fashions of their countries and the constant practice of those about them, than from any conviction of their reason." (John Locke)
"There is danger in reckless change, but greater danger in blind conservatism" (Henry George)
"Western thinking has become conservative; the world situation should stay as it is at any cost; there should be no changes. This debilitating dream of a status quo is the symptom of a society that has come to the end of its development." (Alexander Solzhenitsyn)
"Every great scientific truth goes through three states: First, people say it conflicts with the Bible; next, they say it has been discovered before; lastly, they say they always believed it." (Louis Agassiz)
"People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage." (John Kenneth Galbraith)
"A great many people think they are thinking wihen they are rearranging their prejudices" (William James)
"There is nothing permanent except change" (Heraclitus)
"A religion that requires persecution to sustain it is of the devil's propagation." Hosea Ballou.
"Their life is so practical, so confused, so excited, so active, that little time remains for them for thought" ( Alexis Charles Hennri Maurice Clerel De Tocqueville)
"There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning---devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political, intellectual or creative work.....One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love friendship, indignation, compassion." (Simone De Beauvoir)
"In the best sense of the word, Jesus was a radical....His religion has so long been identified with conservatism.....that it is almost startling sometimes to remember that all the conservatives of his own times were against him; that it was the young, free, restless, sanguine, progressive part of the people who flocked to him." (Phillips Brooks)
"Our country, right or wrong! When right, to be kept right; when wrong to be put right." (Carl Schurz)
"...the seed of imperial ruin and national decay---the unnatural gap between the rich and poor----the exploitation of the boy labor, the physical degeneration which seems to follow so swiftly on civilized poverty----the horrid havoc of the liquor traffic, the constant insecurity in the means of subsistence and employment---the swift increase of vulgar, jobless luxury---are the enemies of Britain." (Winston Churchhill)
"All that is necessary to make this world a better place to live in is to love---to love as Christ loved, as Buddha loved." (Isadora Duncan)
"To criticize one's country is to do it a service....Criticism, in short, is more than a right; it is an act of patriotism---a higher form of patriotism, I believe, than the familiar rituals and national adulation." (William Fulbright)
"In practice all men are atheists; they deny their faith by their actions." (Ludwig Feuerbach)
"Wherever morality is based on theology, wherever right is made dependent on divine authority, the most immoral, unjust, infamous things can be justified and established." (Ludwig Feuerbach)
"Famine seems to be the last, the most dreadful resource of nature. The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to provide subsistence....that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race." (Thomas Malthus)
"Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking: where it is absent, discussion is apt to become worse than useless." (Count Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy)
"We come inevitably to the fundamental question: What are people for? What is living for? If the answer is a life of dignity, decency, and opportunity, then every increase in population (at this point in time) is a threat to every single being" (Marya Mannes)
"There are three ideas which seem to me to stand out above all others in the influence they have exerted and are destined to exert upon the development of the human race.....The first of these and the most important of the three, was the gift of religion to the race; the other two sprang from the womb of science. They are as follows: (l) The idea of the Golden Rule; (2) The idea of Natural Law; (3) The idea of age-long growth, or evolution. (Robert Millikan)
"Truth is compared in scripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in perpetual progression, they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition. A man may be a eretic in the truth; and if he believes things only because his pastor says so, or the Assembly so determines, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes his heresy." (John Milton)
Pt. 3 The Proverbial Cliff for Empires
6. THE RICHEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD CLAIMS IT CANNOT AFFORD UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE FOR ALL CITIZENS even though we are the only industrialized country not to do so. We are like 27th in infant mortality rate, many countries are ahead of us in average life span, and there are like 40 million people in the U.S. without health insurance at all. Strangely, those who scream the loudest about abortion, who claim to be the most legitimate Christians, who have the most affluence in our society, are the largest blocs of people who adamantly oppose universal health care. "Who is going to pay for all this?" they scream. Well, maybe it should be those with the most money, the most concerned about right to life, and those with the highest degree of Christian morality. You know, "Onward Christian soldiers"......Ooops, wrong hymn---that is for marching to war.
7. THE RICHEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD CLAIMS IT CANNOT AFFORD TO SPEND THE SAME AMOUNT OF DOLLARS PER STUDENT TO EDUCATE OUR CHILDREN. I guess some kids just deserve bad schools, bad teachers, less books, etc. If they had chosen their parents with more care they wouldn't be in such dumps for schools. Meanwhile the reading and math scores for American students keep falling further behind the scores of dozens of other countries. Oh, what the hell difference does it make as long as the right kids inherit all the money. When is the last time any of us affluent ever even drove through the seedier portions of our community? Now let us all rise, open our hymnals and sing stoutly, "Onward Christian Soldiers........", wave a bible, family valuize ourselves, thank God for all our blessings, and vote for some sort of George Bushite.
Associated quotations:
"The preservation of the means of knowledge among the lowest ranks is of more importance to the public than all the property of all the rich men in the country." (John Adams)
"That there should one Man die ignorant who had capacity ofr Knowledge, this I call tragedy." (Thomas Carlyle)
"On one occasion Aristotle was asked how much educated men were superior to those uneducated. 'As much,' said he, 'as the living are to the dead.' " (Diogenes Laertius)
"Probably no nation is rich enough to pay for both war and education." (Abraham Flexner) At least Bush is proving something.
"There is nothing which can better deserve our patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness." (George Washington)
"The tax which will be paid for the purpose of education is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests, and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people to ignorance." (Thomas Jefferson)
"Upon the subject of education, not presuming to dictate any plan or system respecting it, I can only say that I view it as the most important subject which we as a people may be engaged in. That everyone may receive at least a moderate education...appears to be an object of vital importance." (Abraham Lincoln)
"Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is a great equalizer of conditions of men,----the balance wheel of the social machinery......It does better than to disarm the poor of their hostility toward the rich, it prevents being poor." (Horace Mann)
"I want nothing to do with any religion concerned with keeping the masses satisfied to live in hunger, filth, and ignorance. I want nothing to do with any order, religious or otherwise, which does not reach people that they are capable of becoming happier and more civilized on this earth, capable of becoming true man, master of this fate and captain of his soul. To attain this I would put priests to work, also, and turn the temples into schools." (Jawaharlal Nehru)
"But if you ask what is the good of education in general, the answer is easyk; that education makes good men, and that good men act nobly" (Plato)
"Why should we subsidize intellectual curiosity?" (Ronald Reagan)
8. THE USURPTION OF CONTROL OVER ALL 3 BRANCHES OF OUR GOVERNMENT BY CORPORATE LOBBYISTS AND SPECIAL INTEREST GROUPS. If anyone wants to know who now controls all the branches of our government they just need examine what our government spends our money on (our priorities), the tax codes, the kinds of laws passed, the nature of court decisions, who our wealth is going to, the slipping status and protections of employees, world trade policies, etc. Democracy is such a vague word these days (or any other days) as to be almost meaningless. Democracy was the same word used when slavery existed, when women couldn't vote, when segregation existed etc. It is just the kind of word made for some dim witted President like George Bush to throw around as an excuse for his puppetiered behavior on behalf of his support base. The truth is that money now completely controls our elections with precious few exceptions, while the open primary system leaves the public completely under the control of money and sophisticated psychological ploys which prey upon prejudice and fear to manipulate a sufficient number of special interests groups to coalesce behind a single candidate who can win slightly more than 50% of the vote of the 50% of people who still bother to vote. George Bush rules America today with less than 25% of the votes of those of age to vote. As mentioned, democracy is a tricky word. When corporate monopolistic cabals like the oil, gas, and coal industries are given essentially free reign to exploit our environment and our pocketbooks en route to accumulating vast profits, just as monopolistic professional sport owners/player unions are given the same unmonitored freedom to exploit sport fans and taxpayers of the cities in which they play---when this kind of reality can be sold to the public as a healthy function of democracy, well----democracy is in need of emergency life support. Democracy, as I understand it, should not be a tool for the rich, the powerful, any religious group, any racial group, etc. in control of all three branches of government. As the Judicial branch falls, all protection against abuse by those who have seized the power is gone. Strangely, the current situation is not mob rule---not yet---since those in power get there with less than 25% of the votes of those eligible to vote. This is specifically special interest rule---a rule, which if allowed to continue, will lead to mob overthrow through domestic terrorism. Most empires in history have fallen due to foreign overreach of power and domestic accumulation of wealth in the hands of too few. Nervous? We should be.
Associated quotations:
"A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within. The essential cause of Rome's decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars." (Will and Ariel Durant). Remind you of of any modern empire?
"Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny." (Thomas Jefferson)
"I believe in an America where the separation of Church and State is absolute" (John Kennedy)
"The strongest bond of human sympathy outside the family relation should be one uniting all working people of all nations and tongues, and kindreds." (Abraham Lincoln)
"We have no more a real democracy in the world today. Democracy in politics has in no country led to democracy in its economic life. We still have autocracy in industry as firmly seated on its throne as theocratic kings ruling in the name of god or aristocracy ruling by military power; and the forces represented by these twain, superseded by the autocrats of industry, have become the allies of the power which took their place of pride. Religion and rank....are most often courtiers of Mammon and support him on his throne. ( George W. Russell)
" A liar lies to the nations.
A liar lies to the people.
A liar takes the blood of the people.
And drinks this blood with a laugh and a lie." (Carl Sandburg)
"It is not man's fault but the malice and imposture of priests and kings which have everywhere destroyed truth." ( Charles De Talleyrand-Perigord)
"It may, however, be foreseen even now, that when the Americans lose their republican institutions, they will speedily arrive at a despotic Government, without a long interval of limited monarchy." (Alexis Charles Henri Maurice Clerel De Tocqueville)
"We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it." (George Bernard Shaw)
9. THE INSIDIOUS MONOPOLIZATION OF MEDIA CONTROL BY A FEW CORPORATE MONGOLS WITH ACCESS TO MODERN PROFESSIONAL METHODS OF PUBLIC PROPAGANDIZING SO EFFECTIVE AS TO MAKE THE METHODS, NOT THE MESSAGES, THE MEANS TO LEAD THE PUBLIC. The monopolization is being offset, to a large degree, by the increase in popularity of the internet as the source of news by the public. Major newspapers, TV networks, etc. are all in decline. The problem is that the internet becomes the major means of social interaction for more and more people. People don't hang on the front porch or the neighborhood anymore, they hang on the internet. What this all really means is beyond my grasp. What the constant imbecilic babble on cell phones to a few family or close friends every place all the time over trifling mundane matters of existence does to the ability of people to ponder the bigger questions of life, community, and public policies is more clear to me. Modern communication and means of travel have certainly shrunk the world. Whether shrinking an overpopulated globe is a good thing seems dubious, at best. If there is such a thing as information overload we may have achieved it. While it all provides someone like me a zillion things to muse about, it also dulls my sense of exactly what to think or do about a maze of
seemingly unlimited tunnels of oncoming and outgoing trains of thoughts, actions, and events.
If ever the world was too much with us, it is now. If there is light at the end of any tunnel, it seems less hopeful considering how many tunnels in our view. We all begin to feel like the little Dutch boy trying to plug the leaks in the dam with his fingers. Perhaps, in defense, people select a handful of others and babble incessantly with them on cell phones about matters of such minor importance simply to fend off the realities of what is really out there, bearing down on all of us with vengeance of an angry Mother Nature. For many of us we live in the best of all possible worlds in the worst of all possible worlds for most others. A massive implosion seems inevitable and yet, from a mental health point, unthinkable. If ever there were a time when to see things unclearly is a blessing, this may be the time. Perhaps the most popular prayer these days, in one subtle form or another is: "Please God, stall all this till I am dead." To hell with the next generation.
Associated quotations:
"The effectiveness of political and religious propaganda depends upon the methods employed, not on the doctrine taught. These doctrines may be true or false, wholesome or pernicious---it makes little or no difference....under favorable conditions, practically everybody can be converted to practically anything." (Aldous Huxley)
"The mischief springs from the power which the moneyed interest derives from a paper currency which they are able to control, from the multitude of corporations with exclusive privileges which they have succeeded in obtaining...and unless you become more watchful in your States and check this spirit of monopoly and thirst for exclusive privileges you will in the end find that the most important powers of Government have been given or bartered away, and the control of your dearest interests have been passed into the hands of these corporations." (Andrew Jackson)
"The men of the higher circles are not representative men; their high position is not a result of moral virtue; their fabulous success is not firmly connected with meritorious ability. Those who sit in the seats of the high and mighty are selected and formed by means of power, their sources of wealth, the mechanics of celebrity which prevail in our society." (C. Wright Mills)
"The press of this country is now and always has been so thoroughly dominated by the wealthy few of the country that it cannot be depended upon to give the great mass of the people that correct information concerning political, economical, and social subjects which it is necessary that the mass of people shall have, in order that they shall vote and in all ways act in the best way to protect themselves from the brutal force and the chicanery of the ruling and employing class." (Edward Scripps)
10. VIOLENCE BEGETS VIOLENCE----From the frontier days onward America has always been a violent culture. Guns, lynchings, murder, assassination, war, riots----whatever the nature of conflict, Americans more often than not sought solutions via the barrel of a gun. Might makes right has been the prevailing American foreign policy for decades now. Bush has given violence a new wrinkle----preventive warfare. According to this policy, if we think someone might cause us trouble down the road it is ok to attack them now, sort of cut them off at the pass.
It is not at all clear how much the tax cuts to the rich trickle down in our society, but the penchant to solve conflict through violence certainly does. We may give the appropriate ceremonial lip service to historical moral leaders like Christ, Buddha, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Lincoln, etc. but, for all practical purposes as it relates to our government policies---they are fools, idealistic wimps lacking the necessary patriotic fortitude or strength of character to really teach domestic and global dissidents a few lessons, or preferably bomb them off the face of the earth. I guess we call it tough love, albeit places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam must by now, after centuries of tough love by militarily powerful countries hell bent on realigning their politics, religion, or economic priorities----certainly by now they might be weary of so much 'tough love'. If there are any better examples of countries who have been repeatedly bombed back into the stone age, I can't think of any off hand. What is new, lets say in the last 50 years, is the entrance of the U.S. as a participant in this sort of venture. Once violence, as a national policy to solve conflict, becomes acceptable, it tends to become acceptable at all levels of our society. Whether it is our government using violence to solve conflict, some kid blasting other school kids, gang members killing each other, spouses assaulting or killing each other, torture of prisoners, police brutality, dog fighting for entertainment, sexual violence, violent music, violent movies, or whatever the scene of the violence-----it all proceeds from the top down. If we cannot denounce violence as the national policy means to stop conflict, there is no way to curb the violence at any other level in our society. Bush is on TV practically every day defending violence to achieve his objectives. And he has the support of the weapons manufacturers, professional soldiers, gun owners, the religious right, and I guess most of those eager to teach this or that group of people a lesson or two. When people are in the mood to teach others a lesson or two, Christ, King Jr, etc. are not attractive role models. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is not compatible with any mood to kick the shit out of this or that group of people. That alternative approach is ok with the next door neighbor, at least as long as the neighbor has his religious and political priorities in order. Like Bush preaches----we can all get along if everyone learns to do things his way, or at least 'their way' if you want to include his clones.
I have seen some awful sights in my life, but Bush or Condalesa Rice on the TV insisting that others stop using violence to resolve their conflicts has to be the all time winner of awful sights. Others should stop the violence but Bush, by his own repeated insistence, is going to win conflicts by military slaughter no matter how many hundreds of thousands need to be killed, or how many millions need to be left homeless, or how many communities need be leveled into the Stone Age, or how many guilty or innocent need to be tortured, or how many billions of dollars need to be diverted or borrowed to fund massive wars on several fronts. I suspect this might be true: over the past 50 years no country in the world can match the United States in number of countries invaded---out right or via guerrilla armies financed by the United States-----or number of people rendered homeless by our military actions, or number of communities bombed into the stone age with our planes, or number of our own military dead via military ventures, or in money spent on guns, bombs, delivery systems or have as many military bases in foreign countries as the United States. Let's face it: 750 military bases in 130 countries is the all time world record. But as Bush amazingly insists, with the proper contorted look of moral turpitude, if "other countries would cease sending men and arms into sovereign countries, these military and terrorist activities would cease". Yet most Americans cannot understand why Bin Laden is more popular globally than George Bush. How far down the ladder of morality and ethics have we slipped as a country to earn such widespread disdain by others across the globe? Of course it doesn't mean other countries are so righteous, but we like to think we are. Maybe we once were, up until the end of World War II, but like other advanced civilizations, time takes it's toll, and the same factors which have toppled every past civilization are now present in our own advanced empire Time goes, it is often said. Wrong, time stays, we go.
Associated Quotations:
"Force---that grimmest and ugliest of gods that men have ever erected for themselves out of the lusts of their hearts. You will find yourself hating and dreading all other men who differ from you; you will find yourself obliged by the law of conflict into which you have plunged, to use every means in your power to crush them before they are able to crush you; you will find yourself day by day growing more unscrupulous and intolerant, more and more compelled by the fear of those opposed to you to commit harsh and violent action." (Auberon Herbert)
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the houses of its children. This is not a way of life....Under the cloud of war, it is humanity hanging itself on a cross of iron." (Dwight Eisenhower)
"We would rather be ruined than changed
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die." (Wystan Auden)
"To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love." (George Santayana)
"It would repel me less to be a hangman than a soldier, because the one is obliged to put to death only criminals sentenced by the law, but the other kills honest men who like himself bathe in innocent blood at the bidding of some superior." (George Santayana)
"When the rich wage war it is the poor who die." (John-Paul Sarte)
"I have known war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a method of settling international disputes." (Douglas MacArthur)
"There are in fact four very significant stumbling blocks in the war of grasping the truth, which hinder every man however learned, and scarcely allow anyone to win a clear title to wisdom, namely, the example of weak and unworthy authority (political or religious), long standing custom, the feeling of the ignorant crowd, and the hiding of our own ignorance while making a display of our apparent knowledge." (Roger Bacon)
"Think of the dull functioning of dogma, age after age. How many millions have been led shunted along dogmatic runways from the dark into the dark again.....endless billions, and at the gates, dogma, ignorance, vice, cruelty, seize them and clamp this or that band upon their brains." (Theodore Dreiser)
"Those who are convinced they have a monopoly on the Truth always feel that they are only saving the world when they slaughter the heretics." (Arthur Schlesinger Jr.)
"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction." (Blaise Pascal)
To do evil that good may come of it is for bunglers in politics as well as morals." (William Penn)
"It would now be technically possible to unify the world, abolish war and poverty altogether, if men desired their own happiness more than the misery of their enemies." ( Bertrand Russell)
"Birth control, family planning and population limitation are most important in any effort to bring real peace into the world." (Margaret Sanger)
"Christianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a hound it tracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled wars, and nursed furious hatreds and ambitions. It sanctified, quite like Mohammedism, extermination and tyranny. All this would have been impossible if, like Buddhism, it had looked only for peace and the liberation of souls. It looked beyond; it dreamt of infinite blisses and crowns it should be crowned with before an electrified universe and an applauding God..... Buddhism had tried to quiet a sick world with anesthetics; Christianity sought to purge it with fire." (George Santayana)
Violence proceeds from fear and "Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth---more than death. Thought is subversive, and revolutionary, destructive, and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless to the well-tried wisdom of the ages. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid....thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man. But if thought is to become the possession of the many, and the privilege of the few, we must have done with fear. It is fear that holds men back---fear that their cherished beliefs should prove delusions, fear lest the institutions by which they live should prove harmful, fear lest they themselves prove less worthy to the respect then they have supposed themselves to be." (Bertrand Russell)
"The greatest power in the world today is the power to change........The most reckless irresponsible thing we could do in the future would be to go on exactly as we have in the past ten or twenty years. I can imagine no more dangerous policy than the conservatism that exists today." (Karl Dutsch)
"(Violence) has no head and cannot think, no heart and cannot feel. When she moves it is in wrath; when she pauses it is amid ruin. Her prayers are curses, her god is a demon, her communion is death, her vengeance is eternity,, her decalogue written in the blood of her victims, and if she stops for moment in her infernal flight it is upon a kindred rock to whet her vulture fang for a more sanguinary desolation." (Daniel O'Connell)
"Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.....A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition as if every thing were titular and ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions......A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.---"Ah, so you are sure to be misunderstood."-----is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton and (Terrell Owens), and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood."
"Sit down before a fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion. Follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall lean nothing".
(Thomas Huxley)
"Persecution is the first law of society because it is always easier to suppress criticism than to meet it." (Howard Mumford Jones)
"The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie---deliberate, contrived and dishonest---but the myth---persistent, persuasive and realistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears." (John Kennedy)
"Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate". (John Kennedy)
"Those who make peaceful revolutions impossible will make violent revolutions inevitable." (John Kennedy)
"New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common." (John Locke)
"A day spent without the sight or sound of beauty, the contemplation of mystery, or the search for truth and perfection, is a poverty stricken day, and a succession of such days is fatal to human life." (Lewis Mumford)
"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." (Issac Newton)
"A dying people tolerates the present, rejects the future, and finds its satisfactions in past greatness and half remembered glory." (John Steinbeck)
"Deeds of violence in our society are performed largely by those trying to establish their self-esteem, to defend their self-image, and to demonstrate that they, too, are significant.....violence arises not out of superfluity of power but out of powerlessness. (Rollo May)
"A devotion to humanity...is too easily equated with a devotion to a Cause, and Causes, as we know, are notoriously blood-thirsty." (James Baldwin)
"If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him." (James Baldwin)
"I discovered in the earliest stages that pursuit of Truth did not admit of violence being inflicted on one's opponent, but that he must be weaned from error by patience and sympathy. For what appears to be truth to one, may appear to be error to the other." (Gandhi)
"Aggressiveness is taught, as are all forms of violence which human beings exhibit.....Aggression is the expression of frustrated expectation of love." (Ashley Montagu)
" Women's rights, men's rights, ---human rights---all are threatened by the ever-present spectre of war so destructive now of human material and moral values as to render victory indistinguishable from defeat." Rosika Schwimmer
7. THE RICHEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD CLAIMS IT CANNOT AFFORD TO SPEND THE SAME AMOUNT OF DOLLARS PER STUDENT TO EDUCATE OUR CHILDREN. I guess some kids just deserve bad schools, bad teachers, less books, etc. If they had chosen their parents with more care they wouldn't be in such dumps for schools. Meanwhile the reading and math scores for American students keep falling further behind the scores of dozens of other countries. Oh, what the hell difference does it make as long as the right kids inherit all the money. When is the last time any of us affluent ever even drove through the seedier portions of our community? Now let us all rise, open our hymnals and sing stoutly, "Onward Christian Soldiers........", wave a bible, family valuize ourselves, thank God for all our blessings, and vote for some sort of George Bushite.
Associated quotations:
"The preservation of the means of knowledge among the lowest ranks is of more importance to the public than all the property of all the rich men in the country." (John Adams)
"That there should one Man die ignorant who had capacity ofr Knowledge, this I call tragedy." (Thomas Carlyle)
"On one occasion Aristotle was asked how much educated men were superior to those uneducated. 'As much,' said he, 'as the living are to the dead.' " (Diogenes Laertius)
"Probably no nation is rich enough to pay for both war and education." (Abraham Flexner) At least Bush is proving something.
"There is nothing which can better deserve our patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness." (George Washington)
"The tax which will be paid for the purpose of education is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests, and nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people to ignorance." (Thomas Jefferson)
"Upon the subject of education, not presuming to dictate any plan or system respecting it, I can only say that I view it as the most important subject which we as a people may be engaged in. That everyone may receive at least a moderate education...appears to be an object of vital importance." (Abraham Lincoln)
"Education, then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is a great equalizer of conditions of men,----the balance wheel of the social machinery......It does better than to disarm the poor of their hostility toward the rich, it prevents being poor." (Horace Mann)
"I want nothing to do with any religion concerned with keeping the masses satisfied to live in hunger, filth, and ignorance. I want nothing to do with any order, religious or otherwise, which does not reach people that they are capable of becoming happier and more civilized on this earth, capable of becoming true man, master of this fate and captain of his soul. To attain this I would put priests to work, also, and turn the temples into schools." (Jawaharlal Nehru)
"But if you ask what is the good of education in general, the answer is easyk; that education makes good men, and that good men act nobly" (Plato)
"Why should we subsidize intellectual curiosity?" (Ronald Reagan)
8. THE USURPTION OF CONTROL OVER ALL 3 BRANCHES OF OUR GOVERNMENT BY CORPORATE LOBBYISTS AND SPECIAL INTEREST GROUPS. If anyone wants to know who now controls all the branches of our government they just need examine what our government spends our money on (our priorities), the tax codes, the kinds of laws passed, the nature of court decisions, who our wealth is going to, the slipping status and protections of employees, world trade policies, etc. Democracy is such a vague word these days (or any other days) as to be almost meaningless. Democracy was the same word used when slavery existed, when women couldn't vote, when segregation existed etc. It is just the kind of word made for some dim witted President like George Bush to throw around as an excuse for his puppetiered behavior on behalf of his support base. The truth is that money now completely controls our elections with precious few exceptions, while the open primary system leaves the public completely under the control of money and sophisticated psychological ploys which prey upon prejudice and fear to manipulate a sufficient number of special interests groups to coalesce behind a single candidate who can win slightly more than 50% of the vote of the 50% of people who still bother to vote. George Bush rules America today with less than 25% of the votes of those of age to vote. As mentioned, democracy is a tricky word. When corporate monopolistic cabals like the oil, gas, and coal industries are given essentially free reign to exploit our environment and our pocketbooks en route to accumulating vast profits, just as monopolistic professional sport owners/player unions are given the same unmonitored freedom to exploit sport fans and taxpayers of the cities in which they play---when this kind of reality can be sold to the public as a healthy function of democracy, well----democracy is in need of emergency life support. Democracy, as I understand it, should not be a tool for the rich, the powerful, any religious group, any racial group, etc. in control of all three branches of government. As the Judicial branch falls, all protection against abuse by those who have seized the power is gone. Strangely, the current situation is not mob rule---not yet---since those in power get there with less than 25% of the votes of those eligible to vote. This is specifically special interest rule---a rule, which if allowed to continue, will lead to mob overthrow through domestic terrorism. Most empires in history have fallen due to foreign overreach of power and domestic accumulation of wealth in the hands of too few. Nervous? We should be.
Associated quotations:
"A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within. The essential cause of Rome's decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars." (Will and Ariel Durant). Remind you of of any modern empire?
"Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny." (Thomas Jefferson)
"I believe in an America where the separation of Church and State is absolute" (John Kennedy)
"The strongest bond of human sympathy outside the family relation should be one uniting all working people of all nations and tongues, and kindreds." (Abraham Lincoln)
"We have no more a real democracy in the world today. Democracy in politics has in no country led to democracy in its economic life. We still have autocracy in industry as firmly seated on its throne as theocratic kings ruling in the name of god or aristocracy ruling by military power; and the forces represented by these twain, superseded by the autocrats of industry, have become the allies of the power which took their place of pride. Religion and rank....are most often courtiers of Mammon and support him on his throne. ( George W. Russell)
" A liar lies to the nations.
A liar lies to the people.
A liar takes the blood of the people.
And drinks this blood with a laugh and a lie." (Carl Sandburg)
"It is not man's fault but the malice and imposture of priests and kings which have everywhere destroyed truth." ( Charles De Talleyrand-Perigord)
"It may, however, be foreseen even now, that when the Americans lose their republican institutions, they will speedily arrive at a despotic Government, without a long interval of limited monarchy." (Alexis Charles Henri Maurice Clerel De Tocqueville)
"We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it." (George Bernard Shaw)
9. THE INSIDIOUS MONOPOLIZATION OF MEDIA CONTROL BY A FEW CORPORATE MONGOLS WITH ACCESS TO MODERN PROFESSIONAL METHODS OF PUBLIC PROPAGANDIZING SO EFFECTIVE AS TO MAKE THE METHODS, NOT THE MESSAGES, THE MEANS TO LEAD THE PUBLIC. The monopolization is being offset, to a large degree, by the increase in popularity of the internet as the source of news by the public. Major newspapers, TV networks, etc. are all in decline. The problem is that the internet becomes the major means of social interaction for more and more people. People don't hang on the front porch or the neighborhood anymore, they hang on the internet. What this all really means is beyond my grasp. What the constant imbecilic babble on cell phones to a few family or close friends every place all the time over trifling mundane matters of existence does to the ability of people to ponder the bigger questions of life, community, and public policies is more clear to me. Modern communication and means of travel have certainly shrunk the world. Whether shrinking an overpopulated globe is a good thing seems dubious, at best. If there is such a thing as information overload we may have achieved it. While it all provides someone like me a zillion things to muse about, it also dulls my sense of exactly what to think or do about a maze of
seemingly unlimited tunnels of oncoming and outgoing trains of thoughts, actions, and events.
If ever the world was too much with us, it is now. If there is light at the end of any tunnel, it seems less hopeful considering how many tunnels in our view. We all begin to feel like the little Dutch boy trying to plug the leaks in the dam with his fingers. Perhaps, in defense, people select a handful of others and babble incessantly with them on cell phones about matters of such minor importance simply to fend off the realities of what is really out there, bearing down on all of us with vengeance of an angry Mother Nature. For many of us we live in the best of all possible worlds in the worst of all possible worlds for most others. A massive implosion seems inevitable and yet, from a mental health point, unthinkable. If ever there were a time when to see things unclearly is a blessing, this may be the time. Perhaps the most popular prayer these days, in one subtle form or another is: "Please God, stall all this till I am dead." To hell with the next generation.
Associated quotations:
"The effectiveness of political and religious propaganda depends upon the methods employed, not on the doctrine taught. These doctrines may be true or false, wholesome or pernicious---it makes little or no difference....under favorable conditions, practically everybody can be converted to practically anything." (Aldous Huxley)
"The mischief springs from the power which the moneyed interest derives from a paper currency which they are able to control, from the multitude of corporations with exclusive privileges which they have succeeded in obtaining...and unless you become more watchful in your States and check this spirit of monopoly and thirst for exclusive privileges you will in the end find that the most important powers of Government have been given or bartered away, and the control of your dearest interests have been passed into the hands of these corporations." (Andrew Jackson)
"The men of the higher circles are not representative men; their high position is not a result of moral virtue; their fabulous success is not firmly connected with meritorious ability. Those who sit in the seats of the high and mighty are selected and formed by means of power, their sources of wealth, the mechanics of celebrity which prevail in our society." (C. Wright Mills)
"The press of this country is now and always has been so thoroughly dominated by the wealthy few of the country that it cannot be depended upon to give the great mass of the people that correct information concerning political, economical, and social subjects which it is necessary that the mass of people shall have, in order that they shall vote and in all ways act in the best way to protect themselves from the brutal force and the chicanery of the ruling and employing class." (Edward Scripps)
10. VIOLENCE BEGETS VIOLENCE----From the frontier days onward America has always been a violent culture. Guns, lynchings, murder, assassination, war, riots----whatever the nature of conflict, Americans more often than not sought solutions via the barrel of a gun. Might makes right has been the prevailing American foreign policy for decades now. Bush has given violence a new wrinkle----preventive warfare. According to this policy, if we think someone might cause us trouble down the road it is ok to attack them now, sort of cut them off at the pass.
It is not at all clear how much the tax cuts to the rich trickle down in our society, but the penchant to solve conflict through violence certainly does. We may give the appropriate ceremonial lip service to historical moral leaders like Christ, Buddha, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Lincoln, etc. but, for all practical purposes as it relates to our government policies---they are fools, idealistic wimps lacking the necessary patriotic fortitude or strength of character to really teach domestic and global dissidents a few lessons, or preferably bomb them off the face of the earth. I guess we call it tough love, albeit places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam must by now, after centuries of tough love by militarily powerful countries hell bent on realigning their politics, religion, or economic priorities----certainly by now they might be weary of so much 'tough love'. If there are any better examples of countries who have been repeatedly bombed back into the stone age, I can't think of any off hand. What is new, lets say in the last 50 years, is the entrance of the U.S. as a participant in this sort of venture. Once violence, as a national policy to solve conflict, becomes acceptable, it tends to become acceptable at all levels of our society. Whether it is our government using violence to solve conflict, some kid blasting other school kids, gang members killing each other, spouses assaulting or killing each other, torture of prisoners, police brutality, dog fighting for entertainment, sexual violence, violent music, violent movies, or whatever the scene of the violence-----it all proceeds from the top down. If we cannot denounce violence as the national policy means to stop conflict, there is no way to curb the violence at any other level in our society. Bush is on TV practically every day defending violence to achieve his objectives. And he has the support of the weapons manufacturers, professional soldiers, gun owners, the religious right, and I guess most of those eager to teach this or that group of people a lesson or two. When people are in the mood to teach others a lesson or two, Christ, King Jr, etc. are not attractive role models. "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" is not compatible with any mood to kick the shit out of this or that group of people. That alternative approach is ok with the next door neighbor, at least as long as the neighbor has his religious and political priorities in order. Like Bush preaches----we can all get along if everyone learns to do things his way, or at least 'their way' if you want to include his clones.
I have seen some awful sights in my life, but Bush or Condalesa Rice on the TV insisting that others stop using violence to resolve their conflicts has to be the all time winner of awful sights. Others should stop the violence but Bush, by his own repeated insistence, is going to win conflicts by military slaughter no matter how many hundreds of thousands need to be killed, or how many millions need to be left homeless, or how many communities need be leveled into the Stone Age, or how many guilty or innocent need to be tortured, or how many billions of dollars need to be diverted or borrowed to fund massive wars on several fronts. I suspect this might be true: over the past 50 years no country in the world can match the United States in number of countries invaded---out right or via guerrilla armies financed by the United States-----or number of people rendered homeless by our military actions, or number of communities bombed into the stone age with our planes, or number of our own military dead via military ventures, or in money spent on guns, bombs, delivery systems or have as many military bases in foreign countries as the United States. Let's face it: 750 military bases in 130 countries is the all time world record. But as Bush amazingly insists, with the proper contorted look of moral turpitude, if "other countries would cease sending men and arms into sovereign countries, these military and terrorist activities would cease". Yet most Americans cannot understand why Bin Laden is more popular globally than George Bush. How far down the ladder of morality and ethics have we slipped as a country to earn such widespread disdain by others across the globe? Of course it doesn't mean other countries are so righteous, but we like to think we are. Maybe we once were, up until the end of World War II, but like other advanced civilizations, time takes it's toll, and the same factors which have toppled every past civilization are now present in our own advanced empire Time goes, it is often said. Wrong, time stays, we go.
Associated Quotations:
"Force---that grimmest and ugliest of gods that men have ever erected for themselves out of the lusts of their hearts. You will find yourself hating and dreading all other men who differ from you; you will find yourself obliged by the law of conflict into which you have plunged, to use every means in your power to crush them before they are able to crush you; you will find yourself day by day growing more unscrupulous and intolerant, more and more compelled by the fear of those opposed to you to commit harsh and violent action." (Auberon Herbert)
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the houses of its children. This is not a way of life....Under the cloud of war, it is humanity hanging itself on a cross of iron." (Dwight Eisenhower)
"We would rather be ruined than changed
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die." (Wystan Auden)
"To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love." (George Santayana)
"It would repel me less to be a hangman than a soldier, because the one is obliged to put to death only criminals sentenced by the law, but the other kills honest men who like himself bathe in innocent blood at the bidding of some superior." (George Santayana)
"When the rich wage war it is the poor who die." (John-Paul Sarte)
"I have known war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a method of settling international disputes." (Douglas MacArthur)
"There are in fact four very significant stumbling blocks in the war of grasping the truth, which hinder every man however learned, and scarcely allow anyone to win a clear title to wisdom, namely, the example of weak and unworthy authority (political or religious), long standing custom, the feeling of the ignorant crowd, and the hiding of our own ignorance while making a display of our apparent knowledge." (Roger Bacon)
"Think of the dull functioning of dogma, age after age. How many millions have been led shunted along dogmatic runways from the dark into the dark again.....endless billions, and at the gates, dogma, ignorance, vice, cruelty, seize them and clamp this or that band upon their brains." (Theodore Dreiser)
"Those who are convinced they have a monopoly on the Truth always feel that they are only saving the world when they slaughter the heretics." (Arthur Schlesinger Jr.)
"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction." (Blaise Pascal)
To do evil that good may come of it is for bunglers in politics as well as morals." (William Penn)
"It would now be technically possible to unify the world, abolish war and poverty altogether, if men desired their own happiness more than the misery of their enemies." ( Bertrand Russell)
"Birth control, family planning and population limitation are most important in any effort to bring real peace into the world." (Margaret Sanger)
"Christianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a hound it tracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled wars, and nursed furious hatreds and ambitions. It sanctified, quite like Mohammedism, extermination and tyranny. All this would have been impossible if, like Buddhism, it had looked only for peace and the liberation of souls. It looked beyond; it dreamt of infinite blisses and crowns it should be crowned with before an electrified universe and an applauding God..... Buddhism had tried to quiet a sick world with anesthetics; Christianity sought to purge it with fire." (George Santayana)
Violence proceeds from fear and "Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth---more than death. Thought is subversive, and revolutionary, destructive, and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless to the well-tried wisdom of the ages. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid....thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man. But if thought is to become the possession of the many, and the privilege of the few, we must have done with fear. It is fear that holds men back---fear that their cherished beliefs should prove delusions, fear lest the institutions by which they live should prove harmful, fear lest they themselves prove less worthy to the respect then they have supposed themselves to be." (Bertrand Russell)
"The greatest power in the world today is the power to change........The most reckless irresponsible thing we could do in the future would be to go on exactly as we have in the past ten or twenty years. I can imagine no more dangerous policy than the conservatism that exists today." (Karl Dutsch)
"(Violence) has no head and cannot think, no heart and cannot feel. When she moves it is in wrath; when she pauses it is amid ruin. Her prayers are curses, her god is a demon, her communion is death, her vengeance is eternity,, her decalogue written in the blood of her victims, and if she stops for moment in her infernal flight it is upon a kindred rock to whet her vulture fang for a more sanguinary desolation." (Daniel O'Connell)
"Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.....A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition as if every thing were titular and ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions......A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.---"Ah, so you are sure to be misunderstood."-----is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton and (Terrell Owens), and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood."
"Sit down before a fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion. Follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall lean nothing".
(Thomas Huxley)
"Persecution is the first law of society because it is always easier to suppress criticism than to meet it." (Howard Mumford Jones)
"The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie---deliberate, contrived and dishonest---but the myth---persistent, persuasive and realistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears." (John Kennedy)
"Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate". (John Kennedy)
"Those who make peaceful revolutions impossible will make violent revolutions inevitable." (John Kennedy)
"New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common." (John Locke)
"A day spent without the sight or sound of beauty, the contemplation of mystery, or the search for truth and perfection, is a poverty stricken day, and a succession of such days is fatal to human life." (Lewis Mumford)
"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." (Issac Newton)
"A dying people tolerates the present, rejects the future, and finds its satisfactions in past greatness and half remembered glory." (John Steinbeck)
"Deeds of violence in our society are performed largely by those trying to establish their self-esteem, to defend their self-image, and to demonstrate that they, too, are significant.....violence arises not out of superfluity of power but out of powerlessness. (Rollo May)
"A devotion to humanity...is too easily equated with a devotion to a Cause, and Causes, as we know, are notoriously blood-thirsty." (James Baldwin)
"If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him." (James Baldwin)
"I discovered in the earliest stages that pursuit of Truth did not admit of violence being inflicted on one's opponent, but that he must be weaned from error by patience and sympathy. For what appears to be truth to one, may appear to be error to the other." (Gandhi)
"Aggressiveness is taught, as are all forms of violence which human beings exhibit.....Aggression is the expression of frustrated expectation of love." (Ashley Montagu)
" Women's rights, men's rights, ---human rights---all are threatened by the ever-present spectre of war so destructive now of human material and moral values as to render victory indistinguishable from defeat." Rosika Schwimmer
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