Epidemanology 101: The Cause and Cure of Mankind
Manliness... seems to be about fifty-fifty good and bad. If it is good, maybe that's because it's the only remedy for the trouble it causes. --Harvey Mansfield, Manliness
One of the things that a classical liberal realizes that a leftist doesn’t is that human beings are the problem. And this is why the classical liberalism embodied in the conservative intellectual movement will always be a tougher sell than contemporary left-liberalism, because people naturally don’t want to believe that they are the problem. Rather, they prefer to imagine that there is some simplistic political solution that will cure the disease of man. But if you have even a modicum of personal insight, you know bloody well that no political program could ever cure you, you sick bastard, any more than socialized medicine could make Michael Moore just put down the freaking fork, okay?
I realize Petey's characterization sounds harsh, but you know he's right, and besides, he was addressing me. But there is a sense in which you can think of human beings as a weird disease of the biosphere. However, you can also think of life as a sort of runaway cancer on the body of matter, and existence itself as a blight on the body of nothingness.
After all, if there were no existence, there would be no problems either. To exist is to have an exzorbatant problem, if only because existence implies duality and separation from the Source of Being. And that’s a big problem -- a problem that it is the purpose of religion to address. (Although it must be emphasized -- being that it is universal -- that lefitsm attempts to address the same problem, only in an upside-down way, e.g., the religion of radical environmentalism that sees man as the pariah of the biosphere.)
The local manifestations of life and mind are relatively recent phenomena in the cosmos. The cosmos is at least 13.7 billion years old, meaning that it did just fine, thank you, for about 10 billion years without any creepy living things slithering about and mucking things up. And after that, the cosmos went another 3.84 billion years or so without any of these animals getting a big head and thinking that they knew better than the cosmos that had bearthed them. Although modern human beings have been more or less genetically complete for as long as 200,000 years, we really don’t see any evidence of what we -- or I, anyway -- call humanness until its sudden emergence about 40,000 years ago, for example, in the beautiful and fully realized cave paintings at Alta Mira and Lascaux.
As I pointed out in One Cosmos, once you have these new modes of locally concentrated Life and Mind, you also have the entirely new existential category of pathology. In other words, prior to the emergence of life 3.85 billion years ago, there were literally no problems in the universe. Nothing could go wrong because nothing had to go right. But every biological entity is composed of various functions that must achieve their end in order for the organism to survive.
In a human being, there are thousands -- millions, I suppose -- of large- and small-scale things that have to go right in order for us to be free of pathology. Our lungs must exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide with the environment; our heart must circulate blood; our pancreas must produce insulin (d’oh!), etc. All of these things have to go right for life to continue. Anything that interferes with the ability of an organ to accomplish its end is called “pathology.”
But this leads to an interesting question, for what on earth or in heaven is the mind for? What is the proper end of human consciousness? Because of we don’t know what consciousness is for, we can’t very well say that this or that individual is pathological, can we? Nor can we even begin to develop a functional political philosophy. It would be like trying to build a zoo with no proper knowledge of the appropriate habitat of each individual species.
Now, if you adopt a strictly Darwinian, materialistic view, then the answer to this question is obvious: a healthy person is simply one who survives, because that is the whole point of natural selection. Thus, Stalin was more healthy than the 20 to 40 million people he murdered, just as Hitler was clearly more healthy than the 6 million Jews he slaughtered. Survival of the fittest is the final arbiter in nature. You may think that I am being a bit polemical, but this was the philosophy of one of the forerunners of postmodernity, Nietzsche, who believed that the whole idea of “God” was a pathological meme that simply protected the weak and infirm from the harsh judgment of nature. Nature loves man ruthlessly, as someone once said.
No matter who you are, you will have something inside of you that makes a judgment between psychological health and pathology. A lay person generally doesn't make their criteria explicit or overcharge you for telling you about it, but clearly, you cannot say what is pathological unless you have some idea of what a human being is for, and what the pathology is preventing it from accomplishing.
For example, without ever deeply considering the reason why, most people outside the ACLU would say that a pedophile is a sick individual. But why, really? If you are a materialist, you would have to say that the sex drive has a purpose, and it is clearly a deviation from that purpose to direct it towards children.
But what is the actual purpose of the sex drive? Is it only to reproduce? If that is the case, then any non-reproductive sex would have to be deemed equally pathological, because reproduction is the only concern of natural selection. If we draw our lessons from nature, then the strongest man with the most wives and children would be the healthiest one, even if he had a few child brides thrown in the mix.
But back to our original question: what is a human being actually for? Is there a reason for our existence? If you are any kind of materialist or secularist, you must be intellectually honest and affirm that there is no such reason aside from those that we simply make up. And this is precisely what the secular left does. The doctrines of “diversity,” multiculturalism and moral relativism are all nihilistic to the core, being that they insist that there is no proper way for a human being to “be,” and that any judgment we make about other people and cultures is not only wrong, but probably racist as well. But on what Darwinian grounds is racism wrong?
Completely lost on these leftist quacks is the irony that their daffy doctrine of diversity is itself a very strong statement about the ultimate purpose of human beings, which is to not make judgments unless it is to harshly judge those who judge. This is what we call a sophisticated “postmodern” belief, which is to say that it is a diseased limb on the tree of western civilization that its inhabitants have cut from the trunk, so that they mysteriously hang suspended in thin, irony-poor acadanemic air with no visible means of philosophical support.
It makes no sense at all -- certainly less sense than the religious traditions they deride and dismiss -- but that’s an intellectual for you. They always believe that their abstractions are more real than reality, and that reality itself is a deviation from their beautiful ideas. They don't trust something that works in practice unless it also works in their theory. It’s one of the reasons they detest liberty, because they cannot accept the idea that the robust “bottom up” order produced by chaotic liberty surpasses their own beautiful ideas of how the good society should be imposed by leftist elites from on high. (Excellent piece that touches on this at American Thinker, Courage, Cowardice and the Wordsmiths.)
I do not derive my ideas of human health and pathology from nature. Nor do I derive them from culture. Rather, I do so from religious tradition, which I believe speaks to the Universal Man -- not to such and such a man, but to man as such -- to all men at all times and in all cultures, without exception. The man who fails to achieve these ends is more or less sick in the soul, psyche or brain, while the culture that fails to produce these kinds of men is a sick society.
Man is the image and likeness of the Creator, so he therefore has an uncreated intellect that may know Truth, and know it absolutely. He may distinguish between the Real and the unreal (or less real), between appearance and reality, between the transient and the eternal, between causes and effects, between the objective and subjective, and between principles and their manifestation. No mere animal can do any of these things, nor can any materialist philosophy account for them in a manner that is not logically self-refuting.
Man has an uncreated conscience that may distinguish between objective good and evil, and do so reliably. This is not to say that I do not believe in situational ethics. Rather, it is to say that in each situation there is an objectively good choice, even if we must struggle to discern it.
And man has an aesthetic eye that may distinguish between beauty and ugliness, and therefore pursue degrees of translucent material perfection that are measured in light of the Absolute. Aesthetic perfection does exist, and cannot surpass itself. Postmodern art makes a virtue of its failure to even acknowledge these transcendent degrees of perfection, and therefore equates ugliness and beauty.
In short, man is man because he may know the True, the Good and the Beautiful, and act upon that knowledge with a will that is free. Any man who does not achieve these ends is a sick man, and any culture that does not produce such men is a sick society.
Judged by these criteria, academia is by and large a very sick place, at least as it pertains to the humanities (we are naturally excluding those noble and truly liberal universities such as Hillsdale College whose very mission is to preserve the ideals of which we speak). On what elite campus do the professors speak of timeless truth, or objective morality, or of transcendentally real beauty? To the extent that they do, we have no quarrel with them.
Our enemies in the Muslim world are our enemies precisely because they are sick men from sick societies who wish to spread their disease to the rest of the world. But in our own part of the world, approximately half of the population suffers from a soul pathology that prevents them from making judgments on, or even perceiving, the soul pathology of our external enemies. Thus, there are no feminist groups who have rallied behind George Bush, who has liberated more Muslim women than perhaps any other human being in history. Likewise, I know of no leftists who celebrate the achievements of the great liberator Ronald Reagan, who gave millions of victims of a satanic ideology the opportunity to become human again. For if leftists were to acknowledge these achievements, they would no longer be leftists. They would be cured.
To know, to will, to love: this is man's whole nature and consequently it is his whole vocation and duty. To know totally, to will freely, to love nobly; or in other words, to know the Absolute, and ipso facto its relationships with the relative; to will what is demanded of us by virtue of this knowledge; and to love both the true and the good, and that which manifests them here below; thus to love the beautiful that leads to them. --Frithjof Schuon, Roots of the Human Condition
One of the things that a classical liberal realizes that a leftist doesn’t is that human beings are the problem. And this is why the classical liberalism embodied in the conservative intellectual movement will always be a tougher sell than contemporary left-liberalism, because people naturally don’t want to believe that they are the problem. Rather, they prefer to imagine that there is some simplistic political solution that will cure the disease of man. But if you have even a modicum of personal insight, you know bloody well that no political program could ever cure you, you sick bastard, any more than socialized medicine could make Michael Moore just put down the freaking fork, okay?
I realize Petey's characterization sounds harsh, but you know he's right, and besides, he was addressing me. But there is a sense in which you can think of human beings as a weird disease of the biosphere. However, you can also think of life as a sort of runaway cancer on the body of matter, and existence itself as a blight on the body of nothingness.
After all, if there were no existence, there would be no problems either. To exist is to have an exzorbatant problem, if only because existence implies duality and separation from the Source of Being. And that’s a big problem -- a problem that it is the purpose of religion to address. (Although it must be emphasized -- being that it is universal -- that lefitsm attempts to address the same problem, only in an upside-down way, e.g., the religion of radical environmentalism that sees man as the pariah of the biosphere.)
The local manifestations of life and mind are relatively recent phenomena in the cosmos. The cosmos is at least 13.7 billion years old, meaning that it did just fine, thank you, for about 10 billion years without any creepy living things slithering about and mucking things up. And after that, the cosmos went another 3.84 billion years or so without any of these animals getting a big head and thinking that they knew better than the cosmos that had bearthed them. Although modern human beings have been more or less genetically complete for as long as 200,000 years, we really don’t see any evidence of what we -- or I, anyway -- call humanness until its sudden emergence about 40,000 years ago, for example, in the beautiful and fully realized cave paintings at Alta Mira and Lascaux.
As I pointed out in One Cosmos, once you have these new modes of locally concentrated Life and Mind, you also have the entirely new existential category of pathology. In other words, prior to the emergence of life 3.85 billion years ago, there were literally no problems in the universe. Nothing could go wrong because nothing had to go right. But every biological entity is composed of various functions that must achieve their end in order for the organism to survive.
In a human being, there are thousands -- millions, I suppose -- of large- and small-scale things that have to go right in order for us to be free of pathology. Our lungs must exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide with the environment; our heart must circulate blood; our pancreas must produce insulin (d’oh!), etc. All of these things have to go right for life to continue. Anything that interferes with the ability of an organ to accomplish its end is called “pathology.”
But this leads to an interesting question, for what on earth or in heaven is the mind for? What is the proper end of human consciousness? Because of we don’t know what consciousness is for, we can’t very well say that this or that individual is pathological, can we? Nor can we even begin to develop a functional political philosophy. It would be like trying to build a zoo with no proper knowledge of the appropriate habitat of each individual species.
Now, if you adopt a strictly Darwinian, materialistic view, then the answer to this question is obvious: a healthy person is simply one who survives, because that is the whole point of natural selection. Thus, Stalin was more healthy than the 20 to 40 million people he murdered, just as Hitler was clearly more healthy than the 6 million Jews he slaughtered. Survival of the fittest is the final arbiter in nature. You may think that I am being a bit polemical, but this was the philosophy of one of the forerunners of postmodernity, Nietzsche, who believed that the whole idea of “God” was a pathological meme that simply protected the weak and infirm from the harsh judgment of nature. Nature loves man ruthlessly, as someone once said.
No matter who you are, you will have something inside of you that makes a judgment between psychological health and pathology. A lay person generally doesn't make their criteria explicit or overcharge you for telling you about it, but clearly, you cannot say what is pathological unless you have some idea of what a human being is for, and what the pathology is preventing it from accomplishing.
For example, without ever deeply considering the reason why, most people outside the ACLU would say that a pedophile is a sick individual. But why, really? If you are a materialist, you would have to say that the sex drive has a purpose, and it is clearly a deviation from that purpose to direct it towards children.
But what is the actual purpose of the sex drive? Is it only to reproduce? If that is the case, then any non-reproductive sex would have to be deemed equally pathological, because reproduction is the only concern of natural selection. If we draw our lessons from nature, then the strongest man with the most wives and children would be the healthiest one, even if he had a few child brides thrown in the mix.
But back to our original question: what is a human being actually for? Is there a reason for our existence? If you are any kind of materialist or secularist, you must be intellectually honest and affirm that there is no such reason aside from those that we simply make up. And this is precisely what the secular left does. The doctrines of “diversity,” multiculturalism and moral relativism are all nihilistic to the core, being that they insist that there is no proper way for a human being to “be,” and that any judgment we make about other people and cultures is not only wrong, but probably racist as well. But on what Darwinian grounds is racism wrong?
Completely lost on these leftist quacks is the irony that their daffy doctrine of diversity is itself a very strong statement about the ultimate purpose of human beings, which is to not make judgments unless it is to harshly judge those who judge. This is what we call a sophisticated “postmodern” belief, which is to say that it is a diseased limb on the tree of western civilization that its inhabitants have cut from the trunk, so that they mysteriously hang suspended in thin, irony-poor acadanemic air with no visible means of philosophical support.
It makes no sense at all -- certainly less sense than the religious traditions they deride and dismiss -- but that’s an intellectual for you. They always believe that their abstractions are more real than reality, and that reality itself is a deviation from their beautiful ideas. They don't trust something that works in practice unless it also works in their theory. It’s one of the reasons they detest liberty, because they cannot accept the idea that the robust “bottom up” order produced by chaotic liberty surpasses their own beautiful ideas of how the good society should be imposed by leftist elites from on high. (Excellent piece that touches on this at American Thinker, Courage, Cowardice and the Wordsmiths.)
I do not derive my ideas of human health and pathology from nature. Nor do I derive them from culture. Rather, I do so from religious tradition, which I believe speaks to the Universal Man -- not to such and such a man, but to man as such -- to all men at all times and in all cultures, without exception. The man who fails to achieve these ends is more or less sick in the soul, psyche or brain, while the culture that fails to produce these kinds of men is a sick society.
Man is the image and likeness of the Creator, so he therefore has an uncreated intellect that may know Truth, and know it absolutely. He may distinguish between the Real and the unreal (or less real), between appearance and reality, between the transient and the eternal, between causes and effects, between the objective and subjective, and between principles and their manifestation. No mere animal can do any of these things, nor can any materialist philosophy account for them in a manner that is not logically self-refuting.
Man has an uncreated conscience that may distinguish between objective good and evil, and do so reliably. This is not to say that I do not believe in situational ethics. Rather, it is to say that in each situation there is an objectively good choice, even if we must struggle to discern it.
And man has an aesthetic eye that may distinguish between beauty and ugliness, and therefore pursue degrees of translucent material perfection that are measured in light of the Absolute. Aesthetic perfection does exist, and cannot surpass itself. Postmodern art makes a virtue of its failure to even acknowledge these transcendent degrees of perfection, and therefore equates ugliness and beauty.
In short, man is man because he may know the True, the Good and the Beautiful, and act upon that knowledge with a will that is free. Any man who does not achieve these ends is a sick man, and any culture that does not produce such men is a sick society.
Judged by these criteria, academia is by and large a very sick place, at least as it pertains to the humanities (we are naturally excluding those noble and truly liberal universities such as Hillsdale College whose very mission is to preserve the ideals of which we speak). On what elite campus do the professors speak of timeless truth, or objective morality, or of transcendentally real beauty? To the extent that they do, we have no quarrel with them.
Our enemies in the Muslim world are our enemies precisely because they are sick men from sick societies who wish to spread their disease to the rest of the world. But in our own part of the world, approximately half of the population suffers from a soul pathology that prevents them from making judgments on, or even perceiving, the soul pathology of our external enemies. Thus, there are no feminist groups who have rallied behind George Bush, who has liberated more Muslim women than perhaps any other human being in history. Likewise, I know of no leftists who celebrate the achievements of the great liberator Ronald Reagan, who gave millions of victims of a satanic ideology the opportunity to become human again. For if leftists were to acknowledge these achievements, they would no longer be leftists. They would be cured.
To know, to will, to love: this is man's whole nature and consequently it is his whole vocation and duty. To know totally, to will freely, to love nobly; or in other words, to know the Absolute, and ipso facto its relationships with the relative; to will what is demanded of us by virtue of this knowledge; and to love both the true and the good, and that which manifests them here below; thus to love the beautiful that leads to them. --Frithjof Schuon, Roots of the Human Condition
posted by Gagdad Bob at 8/27/2007 06:21:00 AM
39 Comments:
Aside to GB -
Another pinch of Hillman.
Target locked, "Fox One!", Vapor Trail, Brilliant Explosion!
Did you touch the Enlightning Rod today, Bob? You know, the one Divine-ing rod that finds living water, always points to the heart, and illuminates from within?
This is great though, made me laugh out loud!
But if you have even a modicum of personal insight, you know bloody well that no political program could ever cure you, you sick bastard.
Also, regarding L links, as you've referred to them as, check this out. This quote is taken from Alpha Centauri, in which one of the leaders of the factions (the Scientist) describes the Graviton (the 'particle' used to describe the effect of gravity):
"This unusual specimen is not so much a classic particle as a connector--a kind of string attaching two particles. As distance increases the connective power becomes attenuated, but if it is cut the power vanishes: forever."
Hah, if Truth is Light, then Love is certainly Gravity. And if ground is earth is mass, then what has more gravity than the Absolute Ground?
Hmmmm.
Consciously, leftists believe that Man is inherently good and that with the correct type and amount of political tweaking and manipulation, "Utopia on Earth" can be acheived. And yet unconsciously, guilty leftists like algore intuit that Man is a blight that is killing the Earth and that if the virus called Man were eradicated, things would be perfect once again.
Sooooo... which is it?
Sick bastards is right.
Today there was an article/column in "Dagens Nyheter" (transl: Todays News), one of the two big daily newspapers in Sweden. It was written by some kind of "anti human life promoter". In an almost sixteenhundred words long "vision", he decribes how great Earth would manage without humans, how beautiful it would be, a place full of animal life, flowers and trees.
To bad no one would be around to enjoy it.
And, oh yes, this was in the science pages of the paper.
...
And yeah, this has not much to do with Bobs post today, but I thought I let you know that this last friday, I visited heaven and fell back to earth again.
(And it's in English)
"...leftists believe that Man is inherently good..."
Hence all those people who think that if we all just saw the world through the eyes of children, or if we just let kids be "natural," the world be a more perfect place. I wonder if that's an undercurrent of the drive behind the youth-obsessed culture (referring to Walt's post, linked in the first comment)? If youth equals Goodness, then striving desperately to retain youthfulness means you're always trying to be good? So aging Gracefully isn't just unpleasant, it actually becomes a sin, so to speak.
"...Man is a blight that is killing the Earth..."
Most of the people who believe that seem also to believe that children are naturally pure and good, at least in my experience. Of course, many of them also think that reproducing is a bad thing (hence the epithet "breeders," heard commonly in places like San Francisco when a family with more than one child dare show themselves in public). So again, logically speaking, there comes the idea that people are born good and become evil as they grow up. This goes hand in hand with the idea of Manliness being a bad thing, given that by definition a Man is an adult, and not a child or an adultolescent. The same is true of Womanliness.
Suddenly, the leftist agendas all make sense: the only time in life when boys and girls can be said to be essentially the same (though in truth, of course, not even then) is in childhood. Children are good and pure, they all kind of look the same, they're taken care of by parents, and childhood is an idyllic time of play and no worries.
As adults, they all try to look childish (or at least youthful), they want the nanny state to take care of them, and they're convinced that if we all just act like children the world would be a utopia.
Al right, so I haven't discovered anything new here, but I at least hadn't thought of leftists and the youth culture in quite that way before.
"To exist is to have an exzorbatant problem...."
Did you mean this?
Zorba's answer: "Am I not a man, and is not a man stupid? I am married. Wife, Children, the whole catastrophe!"
They always believe that their abstractions are more real than reality, and that reality itself is a deviation from their beautiful ideas.
Love it!
Thanks for the Schoun quote- it's just what i've been looking for to use in a mixed media piece.
"To bad no one would be around to enjoy it."
Johan, I think they've found away around that teensy problem - removing you from your body. Seems we'll soon be able to warehouse our bodies on the moon, and virually project our selves here. No fuss, no muss.
"This is some aspect of an out-of-body experience we have reproduced in a mechanistic way.""As well as providing scientists with a way to examine out-of-body experiences further in a lab setting, the experiments could have industrial applications. "This is essentially a means of projecting yourself, a form of teleportation," said Dr Ehrsson. "If we can project people into a virtual character, so they feel and respond as if they were really in avirtual version of themselves, just imagine the implications.
"The experience of playing video games could reach a whole new level, but it could go much beyond that. A surgeon could perform remote surgery, by controlling their virtual self from a different location."
[pausing for reloading health and life reserves]
I agree River, Gagdad definitly had the deivineing rod out and swinging today. A couple of today's greatest hits:
"They always believe that their abstractions are more real than reality, and that reality itself is a deviation from their beautiful ideas."
"In short, man is man because he may know the True, the Good and the Beautiful, and act upon that knowledge with a will that is free. Any man who does not achieve these ends is a sick man, and any culture that does not produce such men is a sick society."
"Man has an uncreated conscience that may distinguish between objective good and evil, and do so reliably. This is not to say that I do not believe in situational ethics. Rather, it is to say that in each situation there is an objectively good choice, even if we must struggle to discern it."
How people managage to find reasons to support their reasoning, is something I've begun diving into on my site, starting today.
Bob writes:
"If we draw our lessons from nature, then the strongest man with the most wives and children would be the healthiest one, even if he had a few child brides thrown in the mix."
Bingo!
How did our society ever get to this place where brides are only one to a man, and have to be over fourteen?
These injunctions really step on a strong man's ability to have the best life, at least mate-wise.
We need to take back our freedom. That is what anarchism is all about. Real Christian men should have as many mates as they can support. The weaklings have somehow imposed a false morality on our culture which levels the playing field so that they can get as many women as the strong. That's messed up.
The correct discernment of right or wrong, healthy or pathologic, etc, is the job of the psychic being.
Get in contact with the PB and questions of right and wrong don't need to be analyzed but come easily and automatically. It is a moral computer of great speed and precision.
If contact with the PB is tenous our hazy, then some mental parsing of morality will have to be carried out, as a second-best option.
In the abscence of intellect, following a written code that can be trusted, such as the Bible, is the third best option.
Relying on instinct/intuition is the last option and the least precise/effective.
Relying on emotions is not reccomended as they can be of questionable source and motive.
>>a leftist doesn’t (realize) is that human beings are the problem<<
Being as how I have been "on the road" as of late, I took time to read a bio of Woody Guthrie. A genius of sorts, definitely, and absolutely a guy who had a genuine, heartfelt sympathy for the downtrodden, but also a guy who personally left a roiling wake of bad karma in his path.
One must wonder (well, I do) - with a soul as fiercely creative and expansive as his, would WG actually have done the world more good had he not been as prolific as he was and instead had assumed a lil bit more personal responsility? A truly spiritual soul, I believe, goes a long way in influencing the world for the better, whether or not it achieves any kind of renown.
Living Symbolism Alert - the fires in Greece. Are the roots of democracy near to going up in smoke?
Our latest advocate of Mr. PibB (the Psychic Being) falls for the same pitfall most do; there is only one 'pyschic being' that you want to be in contact with; and there are many that you don't.
And believe me, those others are more than willing to make the connection.
That's why you've got the Bible, dude.
Long way to go...
"Are the roots of democracy near to going up in smoke?"
Or is Greece just having a unusualy bad fire season without the infrastructure to handle it.
Van:
Have you read William Gibson? Innovator of "cyber punk", "cyberspace", and virtual reality.
I would certainly get that "X-box 36000" to get to play those projecting games in the future. Then I don't have to do stupid things like jumping out of a plane for real, I keep my body safe on the ground, and let the projection of me do all the crazy stuff.
It's an interssting idea. How would that "feel"? Will it be possible to totally simulate an experince to the brain? Or will it be as for someone who has a missing limb, but still can feel it itch? A true experience, but still something that is missing...
No distribution of good will should go unpunished.
'Blasphemous' Balls
Goodness gracious, great balls of ire!
Johan, my motto always is, there is nothing like the real thing. That's why I like books; don't have to experience the real thing for a lot of that stuff...
Johan,
if nothing else the simple knowledge that it's not real might eventually lead players to get rather more jaded. No matter how risky the behavior, you wouldn't really be risking anything, and once the novelty of being out-of-body wore off it still wouldn't be enough.
I had the most wonderful out of this world experience a few days ago. I was taking an afternoon nap, as I'm inclined to do daily. During this particular one I found myself in the family kitchen hangin' with Mom and Dad while we were throwing together salad fixins. It was such a deliciously real experience.
[10 years have passed since I lost them - our recent reunion was a special gift I treasure.]
Rating: * * * * *
...you know bloody well that no political program could ever cure you...
NO! The "itch" I have will not respond to programs!
...the ultimate purpose of human beings, which is to not make judgments unless it is to harshly judge those who judge.
This is the Liberal Message!
For if leftists were to acknowledge these achievements, they would no longer be leftists...
Inherently-conflicted, like the alcoholic who wants to sober-up, but whose greatest fear is that to do so he would have to stop drinking.
I do not derive my ideas of human health and pathology from nature. Nor do I derive them from culture. Rather, I do so from religious tradition ... The man who fails to achieve these ends is more or less sick in the soul, psyche or brain, while the culture that fails to produce these kinds of men is a sick society.
I think River was right about touching the Enlightning Rod! Or, could it be that Sunday's "heavy dose" of Dupree's favorites was powerful medicine?
I mean this seriously: any post that can concisely answer the question, What is Man for? has got to rate 5 Stars!
In short, man is man because he may know the True, the Good and the Beautiful, and act upon that knowledge with a will that is free.
Clever! And enlightening.
I've been skipping Cosmos class of late, not really having enough time to devote to properly reading your posts.
And yet, I was motivated to read this one. And I'm glad. I now have a much better understanding of G*d, just from that one sentance. Here's what I mean:
In short, G*d is G*d because He knows the True, the Good and the Beautiful, and acts upon that knowledge with a will that is free and just.
To say "I'm not worthy" is an understand. And yet we've been blessed with a touch of the Divine. And that thought makes me positively giddy.
River and Julie: you are both right of course!
You know, I wish Princeton's Peter Singer, among others, would read this. I make note of Singer because he, more than most, is best representative of the 'ape in a tuxedo.'
You ask, "What is the proper end of human consciousness...what is a human being actually for?"
How they fear those questions!
Thanks Bob, for helping shake off the Monday lethargy.biu
That's offensive to tuxedos. Around here we call them tenured apes.
"A truly spiritual soul, I believe, goes a long way in influencing the world for the better, whether or not it achieves any kind of renown.
Living Symbolism Alert - the fires in Greece. Are the roots of democracy near to going up in smoke?"
Hi Will! How are you?
Glad to "see" you again!
I concur. The truly spiritual soul does far more than we can currently see, while a sick soul, which can cause much damage, depends more on smoke and mirrors to exaggerate it's power.
Which is why leftists for the most part must blow everything out of proportion and out of context (when they aren't fabricating outright lies) to be "heard" and herded.
The LSA is a warning on so many levels regarding the Quickening.
>>"Are the roots of democracy near to going up in smoke?"
Or is Greece just having a unusualy bad fire season without the infrastructure to handle it<<
Well, of course there's a material explanation for the fires. The symbolic implications would fall into another perceptual category.
And hello, Ben! I am tired, Ben. Bloody but unbowed. Or bawdy but unbent. Bloated but un-beered.
"Bloody but unbowed. Or bawdy but unbent. Bloated but un-beered."
Lisa will be glad to hear that!
Rest as much as you can and eat plenty of Skully's salad.
I'll send some extra energy via Johan the Cosmic Swede, who has plenty to spare. :^)
Great post, Bob!
I give it *******!
That's right, seven stars! You can add 'em to Walt's five stars if you want.
"...no political program could ever cure you, you sick bastard, any more than socialized medicine could make Michael Moore just put down the freaking fork, okay?"
I love that good ol' Petey symbolism. There's forks and then there's forks (as in pitch).
Fork a dork: Michael Moore fisking.
Who here has an opinion on Amy Winehouse?
Reincarnation of Billie Holiday?
Julie, you always seem to be up on current culture... any thoughts?
Well, Smoov - to be honest, this is the first I've ever heard of her. However, seeing this and thisI do wonder. Billie's secret granddaughter, perhaps? I really like her sound. I wonder how she is live?
wv approves? zzdsda
I like Amy Winehouse. She has a real special way of updating the 60s Motown sound. Guess the Rehab song was autobiographical and she lost! The ticketmaster god smiled upon me yesterday and delivered 4th row pit seats at the Greek for Joss Stone tonight. She also has an amazing set of pipes! Very excited...
Postwise, I also cracked up at the no program curing myself cuz I'm such a sick bastard! It's so true. People want world peace and all this fantasy stuff and they can't even control their own body that is constantly at war with itself. How unrealistic...
From the article Mizz E referenced:
"This ball ... carries a message with it which, like an atom bomb, can cause carnage and insecurity in all parts of Afghanistan,'' a leading Afghan newspaper, Cheragh, said today.
Hmmm...soccer balls or atom bombs?
Personally, there are some places over there where I would like to put that statement to the test.
What really causes more carnage?
Let's find out. If the A-bombs cause more carnage, it is, afterall, allah's will.
I agree. Today’s has to go on Dr Bob’s Greatest Hits. I mean it just has to.
Will, good to see ya!
LSA to be sure. That the very root of Western Civilization has receded so far from its fruits that it doesn't have the wisdom, wealth and infrastructure to fight brush fires... that's not a pleasant image at all.
Johan (cosmic swede) said... "Van: Have you read William Gibson? Innovator of "cyber punk", "cyberspace", and virtual reality."
You know, thats one I've heard so much about, but havn't read yet... someday.
"How would that "feel"? Will it be possible to totally simulate an experince to the brain? Or will it be as for someone who has a missing limb, but still can feel it itch? A true experience, but still something that is missing... "
Julie said "... the simple knowledge that it's not real might eventually lead players to get rather more jaded. No matter how risky the behavior, you wouldn't really be risking anything, and once the novelty of being out-of-body wore off it still wouldn't be enough. "
Hmmm... so then the next step, in order to keep the experience at a constant rev'd up level... would be to... block the players short term memory from accessing his real body and awareness, so they wouldn't be distracted by the real world, and think that the virtual world was the real world... now that would make each turn seem a life and death thrill! That would be Cosmic!...er... or Karmic...
Hmmm... maybe call it the game of Life?
[Hello, literary agents are us? I've got this idea for a story....]
Once in a while I come across something that nails the non-believing lefts unified thinking process. This post among others by Bob does it. Thanks Bob.
I'll post this at the college faculty lounge where my wife works for the tenured monkey's to peruse.
I'm confused... Does Michael Moore even bother to use a fork?
I cannot begin to respond to uncreated intellect of man, so immune to imperfection and epistemological error, that he may -- with impunity and such remarkable clarity -- judge others about what they are (in this case "the left") without proposing anything but the classical materialism of the spiritually dead.
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