It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics. Robert A. Heinlein, Postscript to Revolt in 2100.
Religion is the metaphusical ‘thing’ inside which people who hold a set of tenets to be true are able to build a community.
Religion is sociological phenomenon. Something belonging to the realm studied by those who try to understand how large number of people work together.
Religions – on the other hand – are ‘sets of tenets’ put in practice by various groups of people. Sets of tenets which survive for as long as they continue to help the people who uphold them in their quest to survive as a group. As a community.
Religion cannot be ‘changed’. Religion can be studied. May be better understood. Like physics. You can’t ‘change’ physics! With what? With chemistry? Things don’t work like this. The only thing you may do about physics is to ‘deepen’ your knowledge about it.
Religions can, and sometimes have to, be changed. By the very people who ‘use’ them to survive.
Since nobody can survive on their own, each and everyone of us needs to belong. To a community. To a religion, actually!
And what do people do when they realize survival is impossible in certain conditions? Die or do something about it, right?
Now, which community can survive based on hate? It doesn’t matter whether you are asked to hate somebody inside or outside your community. Whether you hate individually or collectively. Hating – or despising – somebody blinds you and exhausts you. Puts a huge burden on your back. Focuses your attention so tight that you are no longer able to notice the real dangers. Those which actually make you less likely to survive.
And this is valid both for you as an individual and for you as a hating community.
Time, like everything else human, has two sides. Like a coin.
A ‘base’ and an interpretation.
There’s no interpretation without a base – even hallucinations are based on ‘something’ – and there’s nothing which has penetrated human conscience and ever managed to evade interpretation. In fact, human conscience needs to interpret, to assign meaning to, everything it ‘sees’. Everything it perceives. Anything which is uninterpretable, which has no meaning, cannot be controlled.It is, hence, dangerous. If you don’t know what’s going to happen next, you can assume anything. And since assuming the worst – and preparing for it – is far more useful towards survival than sleeping over it, we are biased towards erring on the side of caution. And towards relentlessly searching for meaning.
Time, like everything else human, is both a phenomenon – it happens – and a concept. The difference between the ‘time’ of a star and the human time being that ours has a name – given by us – and that the star cannot do anything about it. While we do!
We can do things to and about time!
We named it, we measure it, we attempt to interpret it…. and we try to do the best of it! We try to do, while alive, what we consider to be ‘the best’.
The best (?!?) for whom?
Tao.
The ‘road’. If everything flows, it has to flow ‘somewhere’. Not only from the start/spring to the ‘end’ (?!?)/never tranquil sea. Everything flowing needs a ‘riverbed’ to flow ‘through’. A plant needs soil to sprout, grow, bear fruit and ‘return to nature’. Even a star needs an Universe in order to shine… besides enough ‘fuel’, of course! I have started this post by saying that there’s no interpretation without a ‘base’ and that we, conscious human beings, need to attach meaning (a.k.a. interpretations) to everything of which we become aware. Same thing here. For anything to happen, a venue is needed. Some wise people in our past have used ‘Tao’ as a name for THE venue. For the venue where everything takes place.
Karma.
At first, when conscience had dawned on us, we were alone in the ‘dark’. And afraid about what was going to happen to us. To assuage that fear, we have identified God. As the ‘the meaning’ of the world. At first, when both the world and time seemed to be endless – to us, consequences came from God. We had to behave. Or else… God was there to punish each and every transgression. Sometimes using one of us as his proxy. After a while, some of our ancestors have learned to write. To reliably transfer information over generations. Very soon, those ancestors of ours have learned the link between cause and effect. Between behavior and consequence. Very soon God had become an outside observer. Or was out-rightly forgotten. But Karma survived.
Future.
I keep hearing that ‘evolution has no purpose’. Like many other human utterances, this one conveys far more information about the utterer than about the phenomenon described by the utterer.
‘This wooden table has 4 legs’. We learn about the table that it is in front of us, that it is made of wood and ‘has’ 4 legs. We learn about the utterer that: It was conscious when uttering those words. Only conscious agents are capable of ‘speaking like a human’. It has, at some point, learned to speak. English, and possibly other languages. It has, at some point, learned to count. At least up to four. And it had conserved that ability up the moment when it uttered those words. It was capable of identifying ‘wood’ as a material. When uttering that phrase, it was in a ‘casual’ state of mind. A ‘scientifically minded person’, a ‘grammar nazy’, for example – when in that mood, would not attribute human ‘abilities’ to a table. Which table is a mere object and objects cannot posses other objects. Tables cannot ‘have’, hence that person was speaking colloquially. Or, given the current ‘technological’ developments, those words might have very well been uttered by a statistically ‘minded’ AI application…. A man made ‘parrot’!
See what I mean?
Let’s go back to the presumably purposeless evolution.
Evolution is a phenomenon. Like a thunder. It takes a lot more time to unfold than a thunder, it’s about as hard as a thunder to predict the exact point where it will ‘strike’ but we know enough about both to be able to point out, quite reliably, a few ‘rules’ about how both phenomena take place. About where, when and how they will unfold. What’s the purpose of thunder? To ‘close the circuit’? To discharge the energy pent up in the cloud? I’m afraid that attributing purpose to thunder is akin to allowing tables to ‘have’ legs. What we have here is a ‘figure of speech’. An ‘implicit’ figure of speech… so implicit that it’s not even considered as such… Same thing when it comes to evolution.
Which evolution is paramount to survival. Just as no cloud can accumulate ad infinitum electric energy – hence thunder – no living thing ever – no species, more exactly – has yet been able to survive ‘everything’. Everything mother nature has thrown at it. Hence ‘evolution’! Which is a mere process which makes life possible. In certain conditions – in a certain Tao – after it had sprung up. And, again, attributing purpose to evolution is akin to allowing a table to own legs.
Then what about ‘future’? If God no longer decides for us – the God we have identified – and if evolution is ‘pointless’… then ‘future is blind’?!?
Not so fast!
Question: Where was God at Auschwitz? Answer: Where was man at Auschwitz?
Could any of those present at Auschwitz have done anything to fundamentally change the outcome? Probably not. Could we, as a species, have done – have behaved, actually – in such a manner as to avoid Auschwitz altogether? Specially after the Armenian Genocide had already taken place? Should we, as a species, have done differently when so many Tutsi had been killed in Rwanda? When 8000 Muslim Bosniak men and boys had been murdered in Srebrenica?
See what I mean? About the future? About our future?
What do we have here? “Eternity and endless return?” Or past mistakes haunting us through time? Until we figure out the way forward? Or else…
“An old Jewish Rabbi dies and goes to heaven. He stands in line for a while for his chance to meet God in person. His turn comes and he steps forward. God says “Welcome. Do you have any questions for me?” Rabbi: “No, I just want to tell you a joke about my time in that concentration camp.” God: “How can you joke about such a thing?” Rabbi: “I guess you had to be there.” “
‘A proposition needs more than ‘mere’ Logic in order to be True. It also needs to be epistemologically correct.’ Oscar Hoffman, 1930-2017
This morning (February 22, 2013, thanks FB) I had a very interesting discussion with my son.
Trying to ‘soften’ him up to my arguments I said: “I don’t understand how a person with such a command of logic as yourself is unwilling to accept that…”
I should have seen this coming: “If you have such an admiration for MY logic why don’t YOU accept that…” That very moment I recalled a lecture by Professor Oscar Hoffman: ‘A proposition needs more than ‘mere’ Logic…’
How do you translate that to a 13 years old?
“Look here. Being Logical is only the beginning. You cannot do anything without it but it isn’t enough just by itself. It’s only the formal side of Things”. And that was the very moment when inspiration hit me: “Let me give you an example. You have a lot of wooden pieces: spheres, cubes, pyramids, cylinders, cones..etc. and two boards with holes in them: circles, squares, triangles. Your task is to put each wooden piece through the corresponding hole but you must also follow a second rule: half the wooden pieces are made of red oak and they belong to the red board while the other half are made of birch and they belong to the blue board”.
“Let’s presume you have no idea about either geometry or kinds of wood. Using logic you might separate red oak from fir using the grain and then learn to thread various shapes each through the corresponding hole. But no amount of logic will ever enable you to associate the correct pile of wooden pieces to which colored board unless somebody tells you which pile is made of red oak and which pile is made of fir. Savvy?”
I’m proud to report that he got the point!
Present day edit. He remembers the discussion but neither of us can recall where it started!
Language is the tool we use to convey information. To speak our minds…
The consequences of tool use – messages, in this case – depend on the yielder. The consequences of shooting a gun depend mainly on the person aiming the gun. The consequences of using language … depend on those who are at the both ends of the ‘barrel’.
Messages – consequences of language being used to put together batches of information with the intent of transmitting them to an audience – are interpreted as soon as they reach their ‘target’. Meaning – what the receptor makes of a message, using the same languaging tools as those put to work by the emitter – depends mainly on the receptor. In fact, most of the times, there’s more information to be gleaned from a message than that intended to be conveyed by the person initiating the exchange.
If interested in who said what and what Orwell thought about the subject… just click on the link above. I’ll only add the reasons for which I know it to be a misleading affirmation.
The factual truth is that only dictators need to be guarded by rough men during their sleep. And during the rest of their lives… We, the rest of ‘the people’, go to sleep at night knowing there’s only a very slim chance to be targeted by thieves. Yes, we know that the police will likely come to investigate after the fact. After the fact… But we also know that we are less likely to fall prey to violence than those living in other countries because our societies work better than those which are more violent than ours.
Because our society works better, not because we employ more ‘rough men’ to guard us… On the contrary! The more violent a country, the more ‘popular’ the ‘rough men’ are. On both ‘sides of the isle’!
And the more violent a country, the less peacefully people sleep in that country…
There’s no other meaning but that attached by men to the stories they had spun themselves. For their own use.
Children are afraid of the dark. Not of ‘darkness’ but of ‘the dark’. Children, not babies! All babies let us know when they wake up. For the simple reason that they wake up to eat. Or to have their diapers changed. With small children – babies who had developed a certain level of self awareness – things are a little more complicated. They need more than simple sustenance. They need to learn. Their budding consciences needs to fit themselves into the world. Play being the first step. But play is impossible ‘in the dark’. Specially when previous experiences, hastened by ‘well meant warnings from well wishing adults’, suggest that ‘the dark’ is full of ‘hidden’ dangers.
In fact, it’s actually fascinating to observe how self awareness transforms darkness into the dark. Sheep – who are hunted during the night by various predators – don’t go into depression at sunset. OK, sheep are never alone and their senses – other than vision – are far sharper than ours. But I’m sure you understand what I’m driving at. While the rest of the animals do not have problems related to darkness, we – humans – are not comfortable in ‘the dark’. To the tune of developing various forms of phobia. From claustrophobia to agoraphobia. Simply because conscience – our ability to observe ourselves experiencing life – realizes it can observe/control less when in ‘the dark’. When its ability to see/influence what’s going on is reduced.
The point being that it’s our consciousness which makes the difference between darkness – lack of light – and ‘the dark’. That place/situation in which the conscious agents who cannot see/intervene experience their impotence. And call it for what it is. ‘The dark’.
Yes, you who have enough spare time to read things like these and are open minded enough to continue. Who don’t worry too much about what you’re going to eat tomorrow and who would like to figure out what life’s about. What’s the meaning of all this which is going on around you.
You who have just figured out you’re different from the rest of the animals. That you’re able to think. And that you’ll never make it alone.
That no matter how smart you are, you’ll never be able to pull it on your own. That no matter how strong you are, now, you’ll always need to be helped by your brethren.
Your previous actions that were done in error now have consequences. Karma.
My father has cancer. And an eye problem. The cancer is being treated in a public hospital while the eye problem is taken care of at a private facility. In the last couple of days we have visited them both.
Besides the obvious differences there’s a huge, and overpowering, ‘common ground’. The money problem.
No, not the money you have to fork out if you want to be treated in a private facility. The fact that money has been elevated to goal status.
Functionally speaking, health-care is a ‘social function’. By helping each member to remain healthy, the society – as a whole – preserves it’s overall health. It preserves it’s functionality. It’s ability to survive and to thrive. By helping my father with his medical conditions, the society makes it possible for me and my family to remain productive. Instead of taking care of him – which we can’t do properly – we can continue to do what we’re good at.
And no, the subject of this post is not ‘who should pay for health care’. There is no ‘free’ anything so everything has to be paid, one way or another. The problem is the fact that money becoming the main goal has consequences.
Instead of trying to maintain the well being of the population – in an economically sensible manner – the health industry is focused on making profit. Instead of trying to maintain the well being of the population – in an economically sensible manner – the public health system is focused on being ‘thrifty’. The consequences are similar. Overworked doctors, crowded waiting rooms, impatient personnel, long waiting hours, irritation… And no spare capacity to cover ‘mass emergencies’!
Unfortunately, things go way deeper than this.
Do you remember what else ‘surfaced’ in the winter of 2020?
Put two and two together and it becomes a lot easier to understand how and why a huge number of people ended up believing that COVID-19 was a scam. A scam concocted by Big Pharma to convince us to buy their products…
In retrospect, what happened doesn’t make much sense, does it? So many people who had died because so many of us didn’t have enough trust in masks and vaccines… So many of us were convinced that we were being played! For money…
Because it had already happened!
“These consumers were getting a raw deal. They were being exposed to Mylan’s price increases and excluded from the market forces that might cushion them. They were getting ripped off. And it’s no wonder they got angry.”
And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, toknow good and evil. Gen 3:22
Why are we doing all this?
?!?
You heard me. ‘Why are we doing all this?’ Everything that we do.
Is anything wrong with you?
No. Not anything that I know of. Only this question which has arisen on it own. Why don’t we just stop? Stop doing everything that we do…
But doing what we do is the reason for our existence… Otherwise we would not exist. At all! The world itself would have been different. Completely different!
So what?!? Do you really care about the world? What’s in it for you? For us… What benefit do we have from the world being as it is? Or at all…
nicichiarasa 