We, humans, pride ourselves on many things.
On being smart/intelligent. And on being the only animals able to brag about their achievements with their peers…
But what is it that qualifies us as humans?
That would, of course, depend on what a human really is…
OK, let me use another tack.
What are we really good at? What sets us apart from the rest of the animals?
Practical intelligence? Our ability to solve really complicated problems?
Then watch this wild New Caledonian Crow treating itself to a piece of meat.
Our ability to figure new meaning and to overcome our natural impulses?
Then read about Sheba the Chimp using language to suppress her greed:
SALLY BOYSEN: And Sheba gets two, so Sarah gets four. See?
SALLY BOYSEN: You want to give two to Sarah? Okay. Two goes to Sarah, and you get six.
There is a video which depicts all this. Click on this link and see if it’s available “in your area.” http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/nature/ape-genius.html.
How about our consciousness? Our ability to ‘observe ourselves in the act of observing‘.
Well, that alone wouldn’t have made us any more special than an octopus…
But what if our individuality resides in us having taken all three to ‘a different level’? One which hasn’t yet been attained by anybody else? Not necessarily higher, mind you!
I’ll deal with ‘trade’ now and I’m afraid you’ll have to come back for the rest.
‘Trade’ wasn’t even mentioned in those three examples?
What was the crow trying to do?
Feed itself? As in exchange matter with the ‘outside’?
What was Sheba trying to do?
Figure our what was going on? As in trading information with the surrounding world?
In this sense all living things are engaged in all forms of trading? And continue to do so for as long as they remain alive?
What did I tell you about us doing nothing really new? Only different?
OK, we had already figured out – long before Adam Smith described it as ‘division of labor’, that by dividing tasks amongst us we’ll be able to accomplish far more things than if we had attempted ‘individual autarky’. And then we had invented ‘trade’, as a manner of exchanging the different wares each of us was proficient in doing…
Wait! Even this is not really ‘new’!
Mother Nature had already invented sexual reproduction – a very extreme ‘division of labour’, a very long time ago…. but not before bacteria were already adept at ‘trading’ genetic information.
Apparently, heretics are hated while nonbelievers are simply despised.
Does any of this make any sense?
Actually, yes.
First of all, faith is like riding a bike.
If you stop moving, you either fall or you have to put a foot on the ground.
And, after you learn how to do it, you don’t have to think about it anymore.
All is fine as long as you keep on moving…
Secondly, some people need to learn how to curb their initial enthusiasm… which is not such an easy thing to do… and the more dedicated among them have the greater difficulties…
Let me give you an example from the world of the martial arts.
The corpus of knowledge pertaining to this domain includes a series of resuscitation and first aid methods. Very efficient ones.
Our current, safety above all attitude, would mandate for these methods to be taught first to every new student. Which doesn’t happen. Age old experience has demonstrated that ‘enthusiastic’ newcomers would hit/choke each-other far harder and take far less precautions when knowing that resuscitation is so readily available. This is why these powerful methods are taught only to the more experienced, and self controlled, practitioners of the art.
Going back to the difference between heretics and nonbelievers, let me point out another less obvious thing.
Most of us are imprinted with a faith or another in our early childhood. Way before any of us was capable of thinking for their-selves. As a consequence, most of us are very relaxed towards something which is both very familiar and shared by most of those around us.
Until something happens, that is.
Something which contradicts our faith. Something which might force us to ‘stop the bike’. Which might cause us to fall. Or stop and reconsider.
And this is the real difference between heretics and nonbelievers.
As believers, we’ve always known about nonbelievers. That they’ll go straight to hell. There’s nothing unsettling for us about that. They are so different from us that, practically, they don’t count. We might bump into them on the street, we might even do business with them… but, in the end, they don’t count.
They cannot influence our ‘deep thinking’. The way we see the world.
Heretics are something totally different. They are people like us, who share most of our beliefs and who behave almost like us on most occasions.
If we don’t pay special attention, we might confuse them with ‘our own people’.
And by being so close to us, they constantly remind us that, maybe, it is us who are wrong. About that small thing which makes the difference between us and them.
I must add here that ‘fresh’ converts have the ‘worst of it’. They had already reconsidered their faith, reached a conclusion and are now under a more intense pressure to defend their ‘deliberate choice’. The ‘born again’ are in the very same situation, choosing to comeback to an erstwhile lost faith is no different from adopting a new one.
This pressure is unbearable. Having to nurse such a huge doubt is like a devil constantly whispering in our ear… A culprit must be found, blamed for the torment we had to endure and punished for their arrogance. For their audacity to exist. To constantly remind us that there are alternatives to what we’ve been led to believe.
And this is valid for all kind of faiths. The phenomenon is not restricted to the religious world.
People who had vaccinated their children actually hate those who had chosen not to.
Well, some of them… I’ll come back to this…
Atheists hate the faithful.
The progressives hate the conservatives and the conservatives respond in kind.
Those who believe the Earth is round hate and/or make fun of those who are convinced the Earth is Flat… and so on…
In this situation, people might ask themselves ‘how come we hadn’t yet slit each other’s throats in sleep?’
‘well, some of them…’
The point being that, most of the times, the haters are a small minority. Most of the believers have either understood that the main tenet of all ‘faiths’ is ‘don’t harm anybody unnecessarily and respect all other human beings/opinions’ or actually have better things to do than to split hairs.
Which brings us to the present situation.
When various ‘con-artists’ have learned to inflame hate and to prod the haters to fight each-other.
Only both the haters and the rest of us – the silent majority who, until know, have been too lazy to intervene, have forgotten that ‘divide et impera’ had always ended up disastrously. Usually for those who allowed themselves to be divided and, quite often, for the ‘imperators’ themselves.
Both Alexander the Great and Cesar, two of the most acclaimed generals and political figures, had ended up both prematurely and in an undignified manner. After causing enormous suffering to both the conquerors and the conquered.
Let’s not forget that Greece had practically disappeared from the world stage after Alexander the Great and that Cesar had been the first – well, the second, of the long list of Roman dictators who had led the empire to its eventual demise.
This might have been a ‘natural’ occurrence. ‘Natural’ as in ‘then inevitable’.
But why repeat it, now that we’ve already learned how it invariably ends?
Isn’t this funny? In a somewhat tragic way?
An Ugandan native makes a few bucks ‘educating’ white tourists about the Coriolis effect.
The videographer, an England born Australian, jokingly asks him “What’s the magic, boss?”
Meanwhile, another guy tries to convince us that the Coriolis effect is fake and that the Earth is flat.
What next?
When are we going to watch a Youtube video claiming the fact that all the Northern Hemisphere tornadoes spin in the same direction while those in the Southern Hemisphere ‘do it’ in the opposite one is due to … no, I give up …
I’m going to ask you something else.
At the end of the previous post, I promised that I’ll come back on why God was so afraid that Adam and Eve might grab some fruit “from the tree of life and eat, and live forever“.
Now imagine what would have happened if humans were immortal and a guy from the ‘flat Earth community’ was in charge.
Or if Stalin lived forever.
Click the pictures above to watch the videos.
Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”
The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”
“You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.
Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?”
He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”
And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”
The man said, “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”
Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?”
The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”
So the Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this,
“Cursed are you above all livestock and all wild animals!
You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life.
And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.”
The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.
And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.
So, a pair of innocent brats are allowed by their parent to play in an orchard. And told that they’re welcome to eat any fruit but those hanging from two trees.
The “craftiest” of the other kids tell them that the fruit of one of the forbidden trees are not only good tasting but also ‘good for you’ – ‘you’ll have your eyes opened and you’ll be like your father’.
The pair follow the advice they had just received, develop a certain self awareness – of their nakedness, for starters, and try to fashion some clothes for themselves.
Hearing their father coming, the children hide behind some trees – like all of them do, after they had done something which they were not supposed to.
The father calls for them and, before showing themselves, they speak to him from their hiding. Again, like all other children. Before and after them.
Discovering that they had tried to ‘cover themselves’, the father asks them: ‘How did you find out that you were naked? Have you eaten from the forbidden tree?’
I’m going to take a break here. Just to wonder. Why had the omniscient father to see his children’s makeshift clothing in order to know what had happened?
Back to our story.
Confronted by the father, the boy apportions the blame on everybody-else’s shoulders but his: ‘the girl you had put at my side made me eat those fruit’. And the girl graciously passes her portion to their ‘teacher’: ‘it was the serpent who told me it was OK’.
Sounds familiar? From the kindergarten?
The father, omnipotent like all other fathers, starts to punish the characters of the drama.
Really?!?
In fact, what is described here as ‘the punishment’ is nothing but each of the three ‘finding out’ the true roles in which each of them ‘had been cast’ for the play which was about to begin. Life on Earth.
And we have to notice that the father/director, misericordious as he’s always been, leaves us some thinly veiled instructions and explanations.
“And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.”
What clearer warning about the perils of inconsiderate ‘enmity’? And also about the need to consider all possible consequences of an act… Why crush somebody’s head without a proper reason and why bite someones heel just for the fun of it? Only to start/maintain a horribly vicious circle?
And why banish those who ‘know good and evil’ from ‘living forever’?
You’ll have to come back for my next post to find out about that.
The American Revolution was fought under the banner of ‘Taxation without representation is tyranny”.
Meaning that the first Americans saw taxes as money well spent, as long as paying said taxes allowed them to vote. As in ‘being able to determine their own future’. Albeit in a collective manner.
In fewer words, the early Americans viewed liberty as being valuable enough to die for, let alone to spend some money in order to maintain it.
time.com
And what made so many modern Americans willing to sell their hard won ability to vote? To determine their future?
Are they so poor that, for them, liberty has become an empty word?
Have they lost all confidence in the democratic process?
Are they so infatuated with money?
Any mix of all of the above?
Tanti UE ne-a spus sa dam jos sarmele de pe stalpi.
Si noi ne-am conformat.
Uite-asa a aparut reteaua de fibra optica care transporta tot internetul si turma de canale de televiziune la care ne holbam cu totii de parca am fi hipnotizati.
Deocamdata, aceasta retea acopera doar marile bulevarde.
Si se extinde, treptat, spre ‘interior’.
Undeva pe la mijlocul lui Decembrie, a venit randul strazii Matei Voivod.
Asa ca niste Dorei vajnici au profitat de vremea frumoasa si s-au apucat sa taie un santulet prin asfalt.
Intre timp s-a stricat timpul si, incet incet, a venit Vinerea Pastelui.
Alti Dorei vajnici au descarcat, dis-de-dimineata, niste colaci de cablu optic, au adancit santuletul si s-au apucat sa pozeze cablul.
Dupa care s-au apucat sa faca niste beton. La lopata pe trotuar.
Ca sa umple santul. Mi-au explicat ca nu pot lasa cablul ‘in aer’ si ca aia cu asfaltul sunt altii…
Discutia a inceput de la hohotele mele.
Tocmai treceam pe langa ei si contrastul dintre colacul de cablu optic si Dorelul lopatand pe trotuar a fost atat de grotesc incat m-a umflat rasul.
Dorel s-a uitat lung la mine, eu mi-am plimbat privirea de la cablu la lopata lui, el s-a prins si a inceput sa rada cot la cot cu mine.
Dupa care mi-a explicat cum e treaba cu asfaltul.
Si sa nu uitam ca Dorel stie sa monteze cablu optic. Poate ca nu toti, dar macar unul din echipa stie sa lege cablurile alea intre ele. Iar treaba asta se face cu un laptop si niste scule destul de complicate.
Nu stiu ce ma face sa cred ca Doreii astia ar fi in stare sa se coordoneze mai bine singuri, fara sefii aia care ii trimit sa sape santuri inainte de Craciun si sa le umple in Vinerea Mare.
nicichiarasa 