Indeed, where do people think this radical idea came from? Karl Marx? Oprah Winfrey? Marx believed the opposite, and rightly so, given his fundamentally anti-theistic principles: "The critique of religion is the presupposition of all critique."
Why might this uber anti-idea be so foundational to the whole project of the left? A number of reasons, but certainly because it undercuts any claims to truth, and thereby clears the field for the exertion of raw power and unapologetic violence, the old libido dominandi (which isn't just the pleasure of physical domination, but the perverse joy of intellectual and spiritual domination, in case you haven't noticed). As Lenin so eloquently expressed it,
Why should we be squeamish about the sacrifices to our righteous cause?... It does not matter if three-fourths of mankind is destroyed; all that counts is that ultimately the last quarter should become communist.... Later centuries will justify the cruelties to which circumstances have forced us. Then everything will be understood, everything.
So don't ask why BLM doesn't care about murdered black police officers and looted black-owned businesses, not to mention the chronic pandemic of black-on-black crime: the media will justify the cruelties to which circumstances have forced them, nor do we have to wait centuries, rather, seconds. Progress!
We should also point out that in the absence of our God, persons don't matter, being that the discovery and elaboration of personhood itself was one of those differentiations of consciousness discussed a couple of posts ago. It represents a tremendous advance -- a leap in being -- over its atheistic, materialistic, and primitive religious alternatives.
Incidentally, "secularization" for Voegelin is "a polite word for 'deculturation'" (Webb). Deculturation? That's another word for "deformation," an impolite word for the intrinsically pathological "destruction of the order of the soul," which can only be properly formed in and by "the love of transcendental perfection inherent in the fundamental tension of existence," i.e., in vertical openness to the Beyond (what we call O).
To repeat a formula I must have mentioned almost 15 years ago (October will mark 15 years of blogviating -- the "g" is silent), "there is a soul within and a grace above, and this is all we know or need to know."
Yes, it's a slight exaggeration, but not by much, for the soul is that by which God is known, and grace is that through which God reveals himself. For example, "revelation" is one thing, but in the absence of a graced intellect, it is a closed book. As is the world, but forgive the tenured, for they haven't a clue.
To make it even more abstract, just say there is a supra-vertical transmitter and an intra-vertical receiver, and that if there isn't, then nothing can be known about anything, period. There is no truth because there is no intellect to know it. And if you want to take it one step further, both poles -- grace and soul, truth and intellect, intelligence and intelligibility -- are of a single differentiating substance. We'll return to this idea in due course.
Some of the quotes above are from a book I read yesterday called Political Apocalypse (not really recommended because the other books on Voegelin we've been discussing are better). In it Voegelin points out that
the substance of society is psyche. Society can destroy a man's soul because the disorder of society is a disease in the psyche of its members.
This is in no way an exaggeration, polemic, or distortion. In order to appreciate its literal truth, one must only try to imagine what it would be like to live in the deformed and derailed world of the MSM, with no friction or cognitive dissonance. You can't.
To cite just one out of millions of examples, you can't possibly see Fredo Cuomo equate the barbaric thuggery of Antifa with the liberation of Europe and say to yourself, "yes, exactly!" Give Fredo credit though. He obviously paid attention in history class. It even sounds like he may have majored in history, for in the words of the Aphorist, There is an illiteracy of the soul that no diploma cures.
And yesterday I learned that Dostoevski was "among the first to understand that the modern political movements are secular religions ('irreligions'), aping science, dedicated to the destruction of God and the humanity of man, and at bottom are spiritually and intellectually bankrupt."
In other words, the left is bankrupt in every way except financially, but they're working on it.
You and I understand all this, as does any normal person, albeit intuitively and not necessarily philosophically or metaphysically. Which led me to ask myself: "Bob, this didn't used to be difficult, nor was it reserved for scholars and specialists, let alone fringe bloggers. What happened? Why the eclipse of the obvious? Why is half of America so bereft of common sense?"
I'll go further: Voegelin correctly observed that "the essence of modernity is Gnosticism." But I'll bet if some spiritually obtuse and ideologically deformed egghead were to happen upon this blog, he'd say something to the effect of "what a bunch of occult and grandiose nonsense!"
The question is, how did the obvious become controversial, and how did such anti-human buffoonery become the conventional wisdom of the media-academic complex?
The answer may surprise you! But only if you've forgotten everything man has learned about man over the past 50,000 years or so.
About the title of this post. I'll leave off with some aphorisms that shall never pass away, even if they are forever banned on grounds of constituting racist hate speech:
For God there are only individuals.Only the theocentric vision does not end up reducing man to absolute insignificance.
Modern history is the dialogue between two men: one who believes in God and another who believes he is a god.
If the soul is a myth, genocide is a simple problem of effective anesthetics.
Hell is any place from which God is absent. --Dávila
UPDATE -- same attractor, slightly different angle: America in the Aftermath of George Floyd: Between Paganism and Christianity.
45 comments:
I thought Happy Acres nailed it with this: "Why don’t progressives write a novel or make a movie showing us life where everybody is made identically equal in wants & likes & abilities, so we could see the bliss they see."
With all the sci-fi out there, I have yet to read or see something close to this. Or if it did exist, would I notice it?
Well Ted, you could try "The Giver." It covers that topic skillfully.
Robert believes the left is Godless. This fundamental error colors all of his work and makes it all only partially true.
Much of Robert's critique of the left is actually a critique of 20th century communism and is valid particularly for Eastern Europe and the former CCCP. This mad a powerful impression on Robert. He was young right around the time of Glasnost and that explains it somewhat.
The world has moved on. The Democrat is a God-lover. Democrats worship God, go to church, pray. So how does your analysis take that into account?
So try again to figure out why the Democrat is evil. Because it is not for lack of belief in a merciful God.
Have you created a straw man and now frantically gesture towards it as the Devil himself?
Climate change is Love.
-Thanks, Operators are Standing By
No one doubts that Democrats worship, the question being whom.
I like it here because we get to party like it’s 1989.
Here, your future is so bright you gotta wear shades, just so long as you stay away from that nasty leftism. Here, there is only good and evil with no Third Ways about it. There are no videos of Obama telling everybody that his policies are moderate Republican, or conservative commentators telling us that Trump’s social policies are moderately liberal. No politician is ever what they actually do, but only what our people say they’re saying.
Just keep your eyes on your goals, forget about everybody else, and you'll be just fine.
Obama is no moderate Republican. He's far to the right of Mitt Romney, John McCain, and Colin Powell.
The question is, how did the obvious become controversial, and how did such anti-human buffoonery become the conventional wisdom of the media-academic complex?
Just as the tree of liberty needs to be watered from time to time, so does the truth of existence need to be discovered from one generation to the next.
***
Ted, if memory serves some of LeGuin's stuff approaches that ideal, she imagined worlds where the people were hermaphrodites, or a planet that was run as an idealized anarchist communist utopia where everybody happily worked for the common good while somehow retaining their individuality. She tried to make that life seem good, or at least harmless, but anybody with half a brain can see that it's a complete, well, fantasy.
She was also the one who wrote the story about the perfect city that was only allowed to be that way because a child was essentially sacrificed in a basement on a regular basis. This was, of course, meant to represent capitalism.
Same point as today's post:
"In my view, Candace is simply a voice of common sense. But in today’s world, common sense is subversive.
"This is the world we are living in. Good is evil, evil is good, and insanity makes perfect sense."
****
Like Clarence Thomas, Candace Owens is a genuine hero courageously standing up to real evil.
Rumor has it the Candace Owens was a poor liberal blogger who came to be mentored by Milo Yiannopoulos (yeah, that weird gay guy) and learned that there's real money to be made as "an outsider" doing conservative commentary.
Anonymous, the Left is generally irreligious and still dances to the tune of “scientific materialism”, even though their “science” seems malleable when it suits them politically, eg., their reversal on mass congregating in the time of coronavirus. Also, Biden’s exclaiming that we must adhere to science while he was deploring Trump’s shutdown of Chinese traffic to the USA - umm, the shutdown wasn’t based on the medical science re germ-spreading?
>> Hell is any place from which God is absent. --Dávila<<
I think hell might be described as a permanent state of restlessness. Generally the conservative agenda remains the same bc it resides in certain truths that are unchanging. The ProgLeft agenda is constantly mutating, constantly morphing history, constantly assigning “good guy” status to former “bad guy” status, always seeking out new ways to cast blame, constantly tearing up old manifestos in favor of new ones .... all in search of a peace they can’t find within themselves for the obvious reasons.
Will
I like Joe Rogan. Like Steve Bannon, he tends to think for himself and prefers to be swayed by reason. But unlike Steve he'll freely admit that he doesn't know everything and just does the best he can.
(Disclaimer: of course if turns out he’s not religious then he could just be another scientism satanic we hear so much about, with everything he says being tricksy and false)
He had Candace Owen on his show (#1125).
Urusula LeGuin, The Dispossessed. Great novel of left-wing anarchism.
Of course it doesn't "show us life where everybody is made identically equal in wants & likes & abilities, so we could see the bliss they see." because that is not what the left aims at, it's a stupid caricature pushed by stupid people.
What it depicts (you can decide for yourself how believable it is) is a society without unequal power relations. Not the same thing at all.
Will,
Most scientists and academics are irreligious and do tend to be Left, a concern to me. But a century ago they were mostly religious. Why?
Biden is a corporate credit card company carrying senile grifter fool, worse than Trump who at least followed through on his border and China promises. Most Democrat elites are in the back pocket of multinational neoliberal corporations.
The proper "leadership" response to coronavirus would've been masks, testing and enforcement with all business as usual, until the vaccine became available.
You're very wrong about the conservative agenda never mutating. Where are the Tea Partiers, the fiscal conservatives with balanced budgeters, the anti-military/industrial complex types, and the militant anti-Islamic fighters, the Free Traders? Is our respected/beloved Trump any of those things?
Anonymous, you’re correct in that conservatives shift emphasis now and then re aspects of conservatism. But unlike the Left they aren’t always seeking out the new. Conservatives have certain bedrock principles that don’t change, which is why they rely on tradition and what actually has been seen to work or not work. The Left seems to detest tradition, and it certainly ignores the lessons history has to teach.
Will
Anonymous, go back 300, 400 years or so, all scientists were alchemists, and were no less scientific for that. Alchemy of course rests on the notion that we live in a living universe, that everything is in effect alive, and that the sum total of everything is a living Unity, God. Modern scientism doesn’t acknowledge a living universe, doesn’t acknowledge the senses by which we perceive a living universe. Most people, scientists included, are going to go with the prevailing paradigm, no matter how much evidence to the contrary there is.
Will
Alchemy is so obviously a waste of time it is hard to imagine why a sensible person would pursue it.
If you want to connect with the living universe (or anything arcane), the wide open route is via prayer and contemplation; it is tried and tested, results are immediate.
You don't play with chemicals to enter a mystic state. How can that possibly work? There must be more to Alchemy, I suppose I'll have to study up on it.
Anyway, I'm a God-fearing leftist and I know plenty more like me, and zero of the irreligious type. Zip. What gives? Do I run in the wrong circles? Am I mistaken, are you mistaken?
And when I say leftist, I mean waaaaay left. And my entire posse the same. And all God-fearing as Hell.
Someone needs to undertake a serious analysis of the degree of irreligiosity among Democrats to answer this question conclusively.
What are you basing your conclusion on? Please don't tell me on media talking heads. That would not be an accurate read.
-Butt wait, there's more.....
anon @ 6/07/2020 10:17:00 PM,
I just go to Pew or Gallup polls which tell me where all the temporal little mammonous political beliefs fall out amongst the citizenry. Religious folk are all over the place. The pollsters even sort out Left or Right by degree, as if on a sliding scale. They also categorize all the denominations for our convenience.
I sensed the primary problem with mammonous religion when I was like 8, reading about the Egyptian pyramid builders. The pharaohs preached/rationalized that they were gods and deserved these outrageous tombs, which to my little brain, begged many questions.
As gods, why didn't they just blink the tombs into existence? Why did they need such magnificence to be left behind? What about the regular Joe (or Joenabib)? What was this God <-> Regular Joenabib relationship all about? Why did ancient Egyptian god pharaohs suffer from inbreeding maladies? Does Ra also have bad teeth and really large inbred ears?
It turned out that the pyramid builders were farmers getting paid during the Nile flood season, lest idle hands rampage drunkly or revolt mobly through the streets. I don't know if all the workers bought into the God thing, but at least they were getting paid with trinkets and beer. And then the citizenry could look back in pride at the pretty cool mountain they built.
The Roman Flavian Emperors went one smarter when they had the Colosseum built to be something the people could actually enjoy from more than just at a distance. Back then Rome had a slaves and loot economy. They'd dream up these fantastical creations and then wait to conquer somebody's ass to make them pay for it. The people didn't mind. I hear that even slaves could attend some of the Colosseum shows on their days off.
We Americans used to make our own rich pay for stuff which the wee folks enjoyed, like freeways and nukular submarines, as long as the rich still got worshipped as Gods. But now we're trying to worship the rich as these non-benevolent Gods with these brave new politial-religious technologies they invented. I don't think it's gonna work. Sooner or later wee folks may figure out the scam and revolt.
My suggestion is that the rich get busy now building a surveillance police state, filled with powerfully intelligent satellite military robots, with a few crappy mammonous diversions like Youtube videos to keep the wee folks busy in the meantime, while preaching to the wee folks that their guns will keep them safe from any state sponsored Godlike power and control technologies.
Seeing as NONE of us are in the club, why are we playing this game?
Seems like the left and right are both doing their best to keep power strucures in place that are increasing survalience, decreasing libery and rights.
But oh it's the left {Apply Generalisation here} scream the right
But oh it's the right{Apply Generalisation here} scream the left
Noise get's into every system of communication, Say's Claude Shannon. Don't think Shannon or any thinkers of the 20th century could predict quite how utterly absurd the preceding century has become.
The issue is that due to hyper-consumerist post modernism, there's NOTHING to unite peoples common sense anymore.
It's all opt in/opt out [this suits my lifestyle option] thinking regardless of political orintation.
Why can't we all just unite over global access to Maslows bottom tier as a priority ?????????? FREE EQUAL ACCESS TO - FOOD-WATER-SHELTER
if you want anything more you have to work for it--- Fucking simple! remove bio-survival anxiety as well as in group out group FEAR OF THE OTHER and we can all evolve a little quicker!
Surely science lovers, spirtualists and lovers of any kind of god can unite on the common sense of this ethic?
Let's just figure out this food/water deal ffs!
"FREE EQUAL ACCESS TO - FOOD-WATER-SHELTER"
Uh huh.
That sounds simple. How, pray tell, would you propose to implement this brilliant, world-healing plan?
Actually, scratch that - it was a rhetorical question, but I fear you might try to answer it anyway.
Anonymous, yes, do yourself a favor, take your own advice, and study up on what alchemy really was and is before commenting on it. It’d be a better look for you. I suspect alchemy isn’t what you think it is at all. Btw, Isaac Newton was a devout praying, contemplating Christian and an alchemist. I should add I’m not an alchemist, but I have a pretty good sense of what it’s about.
Same thing applies to what you said about the pharaohs and pyramids - you’re imposing your own modern, leftist, secular view on an ancient time and peoples of whose religious, spiritual way of understanding life and the cosmos you clearly have no clue.
Julie - 32 homicides in Chicago the first week in June, all victims minority, no one shot by police. Where’s BLM? Where’s ANTIFA?
Will
"That sounds simple. How, pray tell, would you propose to implement this brilliant, world-healing plan?"
Fuck knows??? but right now I'd be preying to god that black american citizens are after equality and not revenge!
FUCK YOUR WHITE TRASH SUPREMIST GOD! Y'all broke the social contract! and never fixed america for all people... Suck it up!
What a convincing argument. So coherent, so convincing. Such wit and wisdom! I am persuaded by your reasoned proclamation that... um...
What is your point, exactly?
FREE EQUAL ACCESS TO - FOOD-WATER-SHELTER
I'd propose soylent green, but it's dead people. I'd also propose building some really grand public projects, like aqueducts and baths, but we'd always have to be conquering other people's asses first, to make them pay for it. I'd propose making Trump or Biden our God-pharaoh, but wouldn't this lead to a palace filled with unusually senile orange inbred royals? I couldn't worship a god like that. Seems it's always something.
Maybe anybody who wants FREE EQUAL ACCESS TO - FOOD-WATER-SHELTER would have the equal opportunity to actually work for it. To eat, drink or keep dry they'd have to join the military or civil service of some kind, bare minimum. Maybe they'd be taking the place of our tax-evading illegal workers. First job, round them all up and send them packing.
If one wanted more, one could always move up from there to get a private job.
Of course the coming scourge of robotic-automation would have to be dealt with. I'm sure glad I dont have children. Fun times ahead.
Will @6/08/2020 01:56:00 PM,
There are at least three anonymii commenting in this thread. My advice for those confused by such confusion is to quote them by time stamp, just like I did with you.
I can't speak for the others, but I see alchemy as the search for wealth, health, power and longevity via homemade chemistry sets. As a child I was an alchemist. This was before I set the house on fire and was advised to became a philosopher, lest I get my backside tanned again.
As a philosopher I believe that scientism is the belief that all of reality must be proven via the five senses. But what if there are actually eleventy senses? How do we not know this?
Anonymous
As a philospher, where are you getting the idea Science is based on merely emperical data?
Seeing as the OP of this blog likes reality tunnels as do I, what about the origins of the reality tunnel and what that implies? My Green, red and blue isn't your Red, Green or blue.
Who is the master that paints the grass green? etc...
We're not getting away from
*Deduction
*Induction
*Abduction
*Socratic Method
*Interloucter/Counter-Counter argument
As well as your 5 senses, being aware that they're catagorically unreliable, as is all peoples memory, these are facts, that have been argued and refuted to death.
What can we verify about 'emperical data' I.E the five senses?
Namely that human perception is falible, and open to illusion, worse
is our memory of our perceptions.
Which is why we've had 120 years of
*Instrementalism
*Phenomonology
*The Copenhagen interpretaion
*Quantum Relativity
*Pragmaticsm
Leading to Neuroscience, 720 degree spin physics, advanced AI herusitics, Reality Persistance based VR, Cybernetics so on and so forth etc...Non of these advances happend based on emperical data alone, the scientific method was employed.
Honestly, the fact they are using Googles deep-mind algorithms to model complex emergent events like Covid-19, climate change, resource and economic availabilty shouldn't come as a suprise.
In 2016, One of the best 5 Go players in the world, only managed to beat Googles Deep mind 2 out of 5 games. In 2020 the updated system beat the old system 100 times in a row. Lee Sedol quit GO in Feb 2020.
The correct and only arguments left to make are:
how we use this 'data' to make ethical and fair choices for sentient beings who do feel emotion and pain?
How can we give all people - More time to enjoy their lives?
We just don't need people to do most of the work OR thinking anymore, we need all people to have some sense of purpose however.
I'm pretty sure all this is what people like Buckminster Fuller and Arthur C Clarke foresaw of our future.
Yet we're still stuck with (leaders intrested in selfish power games)
Because people want an alpha leader
What's sad is that someone like Trump represents reflecting primates ideas and feelings of what an alpha should be which are still based on animal drives. (I'd argue we've repressed to many drives, with out finding a way to intergrate) I'm very much a Jungian in that sense!
The only thing relience on the [5 sense has brought us recently] is the flat earth society, and Roden maths *FACE PALM
We don't get 'free energy' from just wanting something to be true.
gotta figure out the math, the logic, the enginering problem, based on rational and natural science.
There are Philosphical/ethical problems and there are technological/mathamatical problems... USE THE RIGHT TOOL FOR THE JOB ;)
Kantian lens Glass Cleaners going cheap
A steal at $3.50...
That's some Cheep Acid Oswald, can I get 500 lids!
right on, uptight n' outasight!
Rep:Julie
That the LA Riots on a national level is probably best avoided, by not esculating the mother fucker!
Is that point exacting enough for you?
Esculating?
Sad. I really think you ought to be reassigned to a site that's more in line with your reading comprehension level. Don't the handlers give you a test or something, to make sure you're actually a good fit for the site you're trolling? This isn't even insultainment, it's just pathetic; I can't honestly mock someone who's that impaired.
Maybe you should file a grievance.
Don't worry, scientists will save us: You will be made to care.
“Esculate” - trying to ramp up in force and frequency while simultaneously being emasculated.
Isn’t that “ exacting” enough for you, Julie? I find it quite exacting,
Bob, you ever think about deleting commenters who use profanity and don’t come close to address the topic of your post? The internet is vast, there’s a lotta sites where they can vent to their hearts content and go about their proselytizing for various extremist views.
Will
Will, that's a brilliant definition.
Also, in case I forget to say it, it's been delightful seeing you comment here again.
I do not permit Bob to delete stupid or crazy comments, first, because he doesn't even read most of them, and second, because what is a crazy or stupid commenter but a sane or intelligent commenter's teacher? Indeed, the Aphorist reminds us with chains of golden irony that
--Nothing is more dangerous for faith than to frequent the company of believers. The unbeliever restores our faith.
--It is enough to know nothing more than that certain beings have adopted an idea to know that it is false.
--We conservatives provide idiots the pleasure of feeling like they are daring avant-garde thinkers.
--After conversing with some “thoroughly modern” people, we see that humanity escaped the “centuries of faith” only to get stuck in those of credulity.
As for our policy on profanity, it is strictly to prohibited when it isn't strictly necessary for the purposes of sacred humor. It too serves its purposes, however, as the signature of poor breeding, bad taste, ill manners, coarseness, lowliness, and a limited vocabulary.
Julie, thank you! I’ve never really been totally absent from OC, you know. I just preferred to “lurk” for a time. Or how about “hover”, that has a less pejorative connotation. So I’ve been hovering .... as has the Spirit of Fergus the Cat.
W.
(Also, there is the purely practical consideration that deleting commenters only encourages them.)
Okay Petey ..... to be sure, I’ve got no prob with unbelievers per se as long as they act civil and present their counter-views in a reasonably intelligent manner. But, the insane, profanity-laced screeds .... just saying that than can leave a certain toxic muck on the walls after a time. You can deal with it, I can deal with it, and it’s your show, your rules.
But I sure as bleep wouldn’t let someone get away with that in my home.
W.
aninnymouse said "As a philosopher I believe that scientism is the belief that all of reality must be proven via the five senses. "
'As a misosopher I believe that scientism is the belief that all of reality must be proven via the five senses'
There, fixed it for you.
Van, I don't believe in scientism and never said that I did. But I do believe in the scientific method's ability to explain material reality. Any reality beyond that, not so much if not at all.
Could you describe in detail some personal experience which led you to know that spiritual reality can be known beyond the five senses?
What supercilious snobbery, I see above.
Everybody understands that you cannot drink the word "water," and yet virtually nobody seems entirely free of semantic delusions entirely comparable to trying to drink the pixels that form the word "water" on this page or the sound waves produced when I say "water" aloud. If you say, "The word is not the thing," everybody agrees placidly; if you watch people, you see that they continue to behave as if something called Sacred "really is" Sacred and something called Junk "really is" Junk.
This type of neurolinguistic "hallucination" appears so common among humans that it usually remains invisible to us, as some claim water appears invisible to fish, and we will continue to illustrate it copiously as we proceed. On analysis, this "word hypnosis" seems the most peculiar fact about the human race. Count Alfred Korzybski said we "confuse the map with the territory." Alan Watts said we can't tell the menu from the meal. However one phrases it, humans seem strangely prone to confusing their mental file cabinets - neurolinguistic grids - with the non-verbal world of sensory-sensual space-time.
As Lao-Tse said in the Tao Te Ching, 2500 years ago:
The road you can talk about is not the road you can walk on.
(Or:
The way that can be spoken is not the way that can be trodden.)
We all "know" this (or think that we do) and yet we all perpetually forget it.
For instance, in the United States = an allegedly secular Democracy with an "iron wall" of separation between Church and State written into its Constitution - the Federal Communications Commission has a list of Seven Forbidden Words which nobody may speak on the radio or television. Any attempt to find out why these words remain Tabu leads into an epistemological fog, a morass of medieval metaphysics, in which concepts melt like Salvador Dali's clocks and ideas become as slippery as a boat deck in bad weather.
One cannot dismiss this mystery as trivial. When comedian George Carlin made a record ("Occupation: Foole") discussing, among other things, "The seven words you can never say on television," WBAI radio (New York) played the record, and received a fine so heavy that, although the incident occurred in 1973, WBAI, a small listener-sponsored station, recently announced (1990) that they have not yet paid all their legal costs in fighting the case, which went all the way to the Supreme Court. The Eight Wise Men (and One Wise Woman) thereon upheld the Federal Communications Commission.
The highest court in the land has actually ruled on what comedians may and may not joke about. George Carlin has become something more than a comedian. He now has the status of a Legal Precedent. You will pay a heavy fine, in the U.S. today, if you speak any of the Seven Forbidden Words on radio or television - shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits.
The words have been forbidden, "our" Government says, because they "are" "indecent." Why "are" they "indecent"? Because a certain percentage of people who might turn on the radio or TV experience them as "indecent."
Why do sombunall people experience these words as "indecent"? Because the words "are" "dirty" or "vulgar."
Why "are" these words "dirty" and "vulgar" when other words, denoting the same objects or events, "are" not "dirty" or "vulgar"? Why, specifically, can a radio station be fined if a psychologist on a talk show says "He was so angry he wouldn't fuck her anymore" but not fined at all if the psychologist says "He was so angry he stopped having sexual intercourse with her"?
As Mr. Carlin pointed out in the comedy routine which led the Supreme Court to perform their even more remarkable comedy routine, fucking seems one of the most common topics on television, even though nobody uses the word. To paraphrase Mr. Carlin, many guests on the Merv Griffin and Donahue shows have written books on how to fuck or who to fuck or how to fuck better, and nobody objects as long as they say "sexual intercourse" instead of "fucking." And, of course, as Carlin goes on, the main topics on soap operas, day after day, consist of who has fucked whom, will she fuck him, will he fuck somebody else, have they fucked yet, who's getting fucked now, etc.
Some say "fuck" "is" "dirty" and "sexual intercourse" isn't because "fuck" comes from the Anglo-Saxon and "sexual intercourse" comes from the Latin. But then we must ask: how did Anglo-Saxon get to be "dirty" and why does Latin remain "clean"?
Well, others tell us, "fuck" represents lower-class speech and "sexual intercourse" represents middle-and-upper class speech. This does not happen to accord with brute fact, statistically: I have heard the word "fuck" in the daily (non-radio) conversation of professors, politicians, business persons, poets, movie stars, doctors, lawyers, police persons and most of the population of sombunall classes and castes, except a few religious conservatives.
And, even if "fuck" did occur exclusively in lower-class speech, we do not know, and can hardly explain, why it has been subject to a huge and bodacious fine when such other lower-class locutions as "ain't," "fridge" (for refrigerator), "gonna" and "whyncha" (why don't you) have not fallen under similar sanction. Nor have we yet seen a ban on the distinctly lower class "Jeet?" "Naw - Jew?" (Did you eat? No, did you?)
The fact that some enclaves of religious conservatives do not use the word "fuck" (or are embarrassed if they get caught using it) seems to provide the only clue to this mystery. The Federal Communications Commission, it seems, bases its policy upon persons who believe, or for political reasons wish to seem to believe, that the rather paranoid "God" of the conservative religions has His own list of Seven Forbidden Words and will become quite irate if the official Tabu list of our government does not match His list. Since that particular Deity has a reputation for blowing a few cities to hell whenever he feels annoyed, the F.C.C. may, in the back of their heads, think they will prevent further earthquakes by maintaining the Tabu on the Seven Unspeakable Words.
The Wall of Separation between Church and State, like many other pious pronouncements in our Constitution, does not correspond with the way our government actually functions. In short, the Seven Forbidden Words remain forbidden because pronouncing them aloud might agitate some Stone Age deity or other, and we still live in the same web of Tabu that controls other primitive peoples on this boondocks planet.
Some light seems about to dawn in the semantic murk... but let us press further and ask why the conservative's Stone Age "God" objects to "fuck" and not to "sexual intercourse" or such synonyms as "coitus," "copulation," "sexual congress," "sexual union," "love-making," etc.? Should we believe this "God" has a violent prejudice against words which, in reputation if not in reality, seem to reflect lower-class culture? Does this "God" dislike poor people as much as Ronald Reagan did?
Perhaps the reader will appreciate the immensity of this mystery more fully if I ask a related question:
If the word "fuck" "is" obscene or "dirty," why isn't the word "duck" 75% "dirty"?
Or, similarly:
If the word "cunt" "is" unacceptable to the conservative's "God," why does the word "punt" not receive a 75% unacceptability rating? Why do we not see it spelled "p---" in the daily press?
To quote the admirable George Carlin one more time, "Such logic! Such law!"
Exercizes
1. Try to explain the difference between a Playboy centerfold and a nude by Renoir. Discuss among the whole group and see if you can arrive at a conclusion that makes sense when stated in operational-existential language.
2. Perform the same delicate semantic analysis upon a soft-core porn movie and a hard-core porn movie. Remember: try to keep your sentences operational, and avoid Aristotelian essences or spooks.
3. When U.S. troops entered Cambodia, the Nixon administration claimed this "was not" an invasion, because it "was only" an incursion. See if anybody can restate this difference in operational language.
4. The C.I.A. refers to certain acts as "termination with extreme prejudice." The press describes these acts as "assassinations." Try to explain to each other the difference. Also, imagine yourselves as the victims. Do you care deeply whether your death gets called "termination with extreme prejudice" or "assassination"?
5. In the 1950s, the film "The Moon Is Blue," became a center of controversy and actually got banned in some cities because it contained the word "virgin." How does this seem in retrospect? Discuss. (If anybody finds Mr. Carlin's paraphrased jokes offensive let them explain why the above film no longer seems offensive.)
Robert Anton Wilson © 1990
Some more vocabulary: Julie
arrogant
haughty
conceited
disdainful
overbearing
pompous
condescending
superior
patronizing
imperious
proud
lofty
lordly
snobbish
snobby
overweening
smug
pretentious
affected
scornful
mocking
sneering
scoffing
hoity-toity
high and mighty
uppity
snooty
stuck-up
fancy-pants
toffee-nosed
snotty
jumped up
too big for one's boots
"We conservatives provide idiots the pleasure of feeling like they are daring avant-garde thinkers."
"I disapprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it."
- Voltaire
Kind Regards to he who is known as Petey!
at least one of you here GET IT!
In terms of that 'GOD'singular noun vertebrate - Do we really need to wait until death before we realise the pluralality of 'GOD' 'NATURE' "ALL THAT EXISTS OUTSIDE OF THE EGO'?
NO - I think I understand Aquinas and Spinozas God better than concervative america does, by, oh just a bit... It's not justification of some archaic moral codes.
That's why we have ethics and philosphy, Morals belong in the dark ages. Apart from the golden rule, which extends beyond thy neighbour, to all people of diversties and ethnic backgrounds! Hence Maslow, you contradictory bastards.
Concervatices calling out the left for thier 'identity politics and communist fascism - Mean while they vote for a cabal of facists! genius, and new terms like 'watermelon' because some say maybe it would be a good idea not to FUCK EVERY INCH OF THE PLANET WITH HEAVY INDUSTRY. Godless morons!
Yep Biden and his democrats are just as bad, and non of you wanted something new like Saunders or Warren. fucking hopeless! Hail Trump! Hail the Emperors new clothes!
Love from Europe, a culture of many cultures, you historical inbreds you!
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