You can!
But should you?!?
Neither makes sense.
At first glance, the second even less.
Buying a gun in order to ‘have an opinion’ is not only possible but also cheap.
At a second glance, the first is worse.
It sets the stage. In a certain manner….
Archives for category: Choices we make
“Mother Earth is a source of life,
not a resource.“
Chief Arvol Looking Horse
Mother Earth being the source of life – the, not “a” – is a truism. Regardless.
On the other hand, being a mere resource isn’t bad either… For the simple reason that all reasonable people treat resources is a responsible manner.
Right?
Specially when speaking about resources which are ireplaceable!
And since there is only one Earth… Huge, indeed, but finite nevertheless…
Which brings us back to ‘to each their own’.
Basically, there are two kinds of people currently living on Earth.
Some continue to treat it as a Mother – take from her only what they need and refrain from littering her bossom.
And the ‘cherry-pickers’. Who go by “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.” Who believe they had been given a free hand by their God. A free hand regarding the ‘dirt’ they have been made from…
The only problem with the ‘cherry pickers’ – exclusivelly with the ‘cherry pickers’ – being the fact that they don’t read enough. Enough of their (own) Book.
King James’ version is rather hard to ‘read’? OK…
‘Don’t eat any animal which has not been bled out first and don’t spill human blood?’
I’m afraid you’re still not getting it.
According to the book we’re talking about, God has made the entire world. Sparated the stars from the Earth, the water from the dry land, made all the plants and the animals… and Man.
Which man needs the Earth to live upon. An Earth as close to how it currently is as possible, in order for man to live comfortably!
But since “in the image of God has God made mankind”, then God himself needs the Earth.
For whatever reason.
Which means we’d better take good care of His Creation.
Of His entire Creation!
Keep it Virgin.
In Spirit!
Before wrapping up, I must remind you the Covenant between God and Noah’s children. Us.
“Never again will all life be destroyed by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth.”
Corelate this with “Whoever sheds human blood, by humans shall their blood be shed” and “for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me” and the whole thing suddenly has a new meaning.
‘OK, no more floods. But you’re still going to feel the consequences of your own follies. You, your children and all those wallowing in the wicked way’.
The Universe doesn’t care because:
It isn’t aware. Of anything.
It isn’t aware of us.
It’s a jerk.
Or the Universe does care but it’s us who are not aware…
And this has happened many more times across the world/along human history.
The fact that Stonehenge exists is ample proof that those people had been able to generate enough ‘wealth’ to build it.
We’ve been able to find out that the boulders had been sourced from two places. The 20 tons hard-sandstone sarsenes ‘traveled’ about 20 miles while the 2 tons blue-stones had been schlepped for about 220 miles. According to Mark Pitts, writing for the British Museum. And we think we have a fair idea about how the whole thing had been put together. Read the paper.
But we know close to nothing about the people who did it.
The stone ring is all that’s left of them.
Isn’t it strange? For such a technologically sophisticated people – and rich enough to afford such a herculean endeavor – to disappear in the mist of history?
And here’s a selection of other abrupt endings/’hibernations’:
Mohenjo-Daro and Harrapa in Pakistan.
Angkor Wat.
The Great Chinese Wall
The Egyptian pyramids
The Athenian Parthenon
The Roman Coliseum and the roads cris-crossing more than half of Europe
Kuldhara, the ghost-city
Machu Picchu
And, last but not least, the cathedrals mentioned by Reuter’s Mark John.
Europe did take a break after finishing building those cathedrals….
What am I trying to ‘suggest’?
That we, as a cultured species, have a tendency to evolve in fits and starts.
We tend to reach pinnacles only to descend – sometimes temporarily – in abject ‘marasmus’.
Could ‘self-sufficiency’ explain at least some of this?
While the spinning jenny was key to 18th century automation of the textiles industry,
they found it led to longer working hours in harsher conditions.
Mechanical cotton gins facilitated the 19th century expansion of slavery in the American South.
NOTA BENE!
Don’t tell me capitalism is at fault for any of this.
Capitalism is but a way of doing things. A road. Which we followed to where we are now.
How we behaved en-route and what we decide right now was/is our own contribution!
Learning from who’s experience?
A wise man is supposed to learn from other people’s experiences, right? No need to make your own mistakes, as long as they have already been committed… and the consequences made public!
‘Admitting that I may be wrong’ … easier said than done, for obvious reasons!
Very few people enjoy being proven wrong. Specially when ‘others’ get the upper hand. And even more so when those ‘others’ have nothing special. When those ‘others’ are nothing more but our “potential equals.”
We’re doing it for a noble cause.
In pursuit of the truth!
How about us being led into a wild goose chase?
Not by Karl Popper, mind you!
Modern propaganda, and particularly the kind currently permeating the social-media, is shaped and propagated by very skilled operators. Who are familiar with all the tricks in the psychology book and conversant in most ideological tenets currently whirling in the public space. And each of these propagandists has their agenda… Each of them tries to pull as many of us into their orbit… One of their favorite tools being Popper’s “I may be wrong and you may be right and, by an effort, we may get nearer the truth”.
In fact, these operators use Popper as a lever to break open our skepticism. To soften our disposition and to prepare the soil for the seed they want us to accept. And nurture…
How to resist? Given the fact that we are mere novices while they are masters of their chosen profession? Masters at ‘brain fogging’…
They try to mis-use Popper, we’ll use Popper as an antidote.
Do you feel treated as an equal?
Being invited as an equal member into a truth searching party?
Are you involved in a real debate? Do you get to say anything?
Or you, along with the rest, are simply told what to believe?
“that which is divinely natural,
but must be learned humanly; a phenomenon of Science.“
Mary Baker Eddy
Well, we are indeed in the presence of a miracle.
In the presence of a wonderful miracle!
In spite of the entrenched obstinacy of some ‘infallible’ and very powerful agents – who had Giordano Bruno burned in a public square for maintaining exactly the same thing – we have finally accepted this as a fact.
Some of us, at least…
Biden led Trump 37% to 35% in a hypothetical matchup, with the remaining 28% saying they weren’t sure who to pick or would vote for someone else or no one at all.
Neither Biden nor Trump were widely liked by people outside their parties. Just 31% of independents had a favorable opinion of Trump and 32% thought as much about Biden.
At 80 years old, Biden is the oldest U.S. president ever to sit in the White House, and 63% of Democrats in the poll agreed with a statement that he was too old to work in government. Thirty-seven percent disagreed.
Still, Biden leads the Democratic contest by even more than Trump leads the Republican field, with 63% of Democrats’ support compared with 15% for anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.”
What’s going on here?
What happened with/in the greatest/most powerful democracy on Earth?
Why has the American People allowed itself to be split in half? Each of those halves bowing to its own idol…
Only because ‘they had avocados’?!?
And what about Reagan? He was right, after all… Trump was the government, wasn’t he?
Reagan was incomplete.
Government is nothing but a tool. A tool for the society to govern itself with. “of the people, by the people, for the people“. But also a tool for a dictator to exploit a country.
Blaming the tool never takes the blamer out of the ‘unpleasant’ situation.
A more complete statement would have been:
‘Any unchecked government tends, sooner rather than later, to become a problem.’
The key word here being ‘unchecked’, not government. For the same reason which had prompted ‘god’ to warn us:
Any graven image you will ever make will inevitably be incomplete. Not because of your incompetence but because of my infinite complexity. I, your god, am infinite. Hence incomprehensible. You might glimpse some, or even a lot, about my ‘true’ nature but you’ll never find out enough. Enough for you to make a ‘usable’ graven image.
A reliable idol…
‘Exploring the consequences of our limited consciences‘
A truth is, first and foremost, an expression.
A message, formulated by an observer, describing a portion of what the person expressing themselves considers to be a ‘portion’ of ‘reality’. Being a message, any truth is formulated by means of a language.
Does anybody know everything about any subject? About anything, actually?
No, nobody knows everything about anything. Hence there is no such thing as a complete truth.
Furthermore, being expressed by means of a language, a truth – any expression, actually – will never be able to convey to the person receiving the message everything the transmitter intended to say. The transmitter is never able to cram ‘everything’ inside an inherently limited message, no language is absolutely ‘precise’ and no receiver will ever interpret any message the way the transmitter intended it to mean. Hence even if anybody will ever learn everything about anything, that person will never be able to convey that knowledge to anybody else. Let alone to everybody else…
What next?
‘Never ever believe anything? Anymore?!?’
Is it possible for us, humans living in concert, to cooperate in this manner?
Knowing that nothing which is being said, one way or another, is ‘true’? Completely true?
Well, we did get this far, didn’t we?
We’ve been expressing ourselves, in the imperfect manner I described above, since we’ve learned to use language. Since we’ve learned to speak…
70 000 years ago, give or take a few millennia, is when some scientists believe we’ve started to communicate more or less like we do now. The people living then had the same genes we have now and the bones they have left us to dig up and stare at are similar to ours. Hence the only thing which differentiates us from our ancestors is our culture. A treasure of knowledge which has been noticed – bit by bit, formulated using language – message by message, and remembered, one way or another. Hence the only difference between us and our ancestors is a collection of incomplete – and imperfectly interpreted – pieces of truth.
Then again, is it possible for us – humans living in concert – to cooperate by means of incomplete and ‘misinterpreted’ pieces of truth?
Well, we came this far going (up?) this way, didn’t we?
It seems that as long as we do it ‘in good faith’ things will, eventually, ‘mesh up’ just fine!
Which leads us to ‘the truth’. ‘The’ as different from ‘A’ truth.
While a truth is a message, the truth is a state of mind.
The understanding of the fact that what we call ‘reality’ can be learned only ‘in concert’.
Only as long as we help each-other along the process. Only as long as each time we formulate ‘a message’ we do our best to ‘speak the truth’.
The sign itself is simply true.
The only intriguing aspect in all this is the courage of the person who had affixed it!
You see, the first religious beliefs/cosmological explanations maintained that the whole ‘creation’ had been given birth by the ‘First Mother’. People in those times – like all of us – were just extrapolating their everyday knowledge into the metaphysical realm. Which hadn’t yet been given that name…
After the advent of agriculture – which had introduced the notion of property/inheritance, hence the need to defend those things – men took over. As owners – better suited for war – and then as dispensers of meaning. A.k.a. priests.
God followed suit. It had become a Father and a Shepard. It still is in the minds of the ordinary believers.
Reading some theology – it’s enough to scrap the surface – I found out that most theologians maintained that God was unfathomable. That its main characteristic is the fact that it is ‘hidden’.
Then how come some of us are so sure about its gender? About its will? About what it means for us to do?!?
As usual, Chomsky is only half-right.
Opportunities shouldn’t be provided. Period!
In fact, nobody should be able to control/provide sizable amounts of opportunity!
On the other hand, making it so that only a small number of people enjoy all the opportunities in the world is, indeed, criminal.
Unsustainable for the longer time frame, actually!
nicichiarasa 