Fear and racism
The brilliant Richard Fernandez on the new blasphemy against PC thought:
But there are indications that blasphemy, far from being dead letter, is alive and well. Wikipedia, in discussing the subject, warns the reader to also consult the entries for “hate speech”. That is now the alias the blasphemy lives under and it certainly has that effect among modern true believers…
Reuters reports that “the U.N. Human Rights Council adopted the non-binding text, proposed by Pakistan on behalf of Islamic states, with a vote of 23 states in favor and 11 against, with 13 abstentions” making insults to Islam a human rights violation. What those insults may be is the rub. If there are just some things the blasphemers don’t instinctively “get” or which they wrongfully assume is protected under such quaint notions as freedom of speech, then too bad.
I distinctly remember when I first encountered the new blasphemy, although the subject matter was not Islam. It was twenty years ago, and I had returned to the university to get my Master’s degree. Every now and then I was required to take a course that featured mainly undergraduates, and one of those was called Human Sexuality.
At the time, the campus had been shaken by a disciplinary action against a professor, sparked by a student who objected to something he said in class. I no longer remember exactly what it was, but I do remember this: it was a supposedly sexual reference he made to no one in particular, illustrating some point in his lecture, and it was so mild as to be remarkable only for its inoffensiveness. And yet it had offended one person, a female student in his class, who reported him to the proper Thought Police authorities.
I’d been away from college for some time, and it came as quite a shock to me that it had been taken over by PC thinking. To a woman (there were very few men in my Human Sexuality class, which was made up of future social workers and therapists), the youngsters in the class backed the protesting woman student against the old geezer goat of a professor.
I rose and spoke of my puzzlement at their stance. Did they really think he should be disciplined merely because he offended someone’s tender sensibilities? Shouldn’t there be like, you know, something objectively offensive about what he had actually said?
No, they answered. It was enough that she felt what she felt. She had a right to never be offended, and he needed to be re-educated. As I recall, he had been forced to take classes in gender sensitivity in order to keep his job.
I looked around at these lovely young women, all fresh and bright and intelligent and eager, and felt the cold chill of something dreadful creep up my spine. And then I shook my head sadly and sat down, because I had no way of reaching them.
I haven’t thought this through, but somehow I think there’s a link here to the “bullying” problem. Children have always bullied other children. All animals I’m familiar with have a system of “bullying” that establishes dominance. At some point, an order of ascendancy within the resident population is determined and each knows his/her place. In fact…it’s commonly called “the pecking order”…which should give us oblivious humans some clue.
If there is no order of dominance, then there is constant jostling – and maybe out and out fighting – within the society to determine just who’s boss. You may not be “the boss of me”, but chances are you’re the boss of _somebody_! And _somebody_ has to be at the bottom…unless they’re willing to fight their way up to the top.
So…I think it’s a form of power play. A children’s game…”You can’t say that to me…and I’m going to tell on you” kind of thing. The problem is that sometime, somehow, people have to grow up and stop crying to mommy to “make the other guy be nice to me”. And how far up are we going to permit the “mommy” thing go? I’ve mentioned the “one world government” thing on other blogs, and been smacked for being a conspiratorialist. I don’t think I am – I think the phenomenon is simply one of looking for a bigger “mommy” who can make the “other guys” play nice. The US has been “mommy” for a fairly long time – now people are looking for a way to duck out of the responsibility of being “mommy”, and so they want a _world_ “mommy” to take over.
The problem is that “mommy” just wants to go out and play too!
(Sorry this is so disorganized…just some random thoughts)
There can be no justice when “right” and “wrong” are subjective.
suek: it is the elevation of personal, subjective feelings above impersonal, objective standards and principles.
And I think my first encounter with it (in a university, at the hands of feminists) was not atypical of who and what was responsible (at least in part) for its rise. Other factors were the 60s (boomer generation) and the ubiquity of therapy as a mode of approach to life in our culture. Therapy has its place, of course, but it was never meant to apply to everything.
Social workers are now ritually indoctrinated with leftist politics as part of the curriculum. One literally can’t get the degree unless one positively subscribes. There was an effort to impose a similar regime on the students in the school of education at the U of Minnesota, but public outrage forced the faculty Marxists to take their agitprop back out of the public eye.
If by that you mean the ubiquity of therapy has resulted in a rise of “if it makes me unhappy it’s wrong” , despite whether or not anyone did anything that was actually harmful or hurtful… yeah.
>>it is the elevation of personal, subjective feelings above impersonal, objective standards and principles.
…
Therapy has its place, of course, but it was never meant to apply to everything.>>
Statement 1) To what purpose?
Statement 2) Assumes that there is a norm, doesn’t it? So…what _is_ that norm? The answer to both is related: you eliminate an objective standard such as the Judeo-Christian standards by elevating the personal feeling standard. Then you establish the State approved standard as the norm, and prescribe psychological treatment to any who vary from that norm. You know…sort of like…re-education camps.
I see a pattern emerging…!
SUEK, I’d like to use your statement as a starting point: Suppose you substitute the word “theology” for “therapy” and then the sentence reads: “Theology has its place, of course, but it was never meant to apply to everything.” That comes close to describing the relationship between our constitution, which provides a liberal society (conservatives are the real liberals) and the variety of theological beliefs of the founders.
It was their shared belief that if theology was everything then freedom was nothing and so they set out to prevent government from ever being hijacked by a theology. Our constitution is currently threatened by two theologies: Marxism and Islam. Both of these theologies will not admit to any limits on their right to govern. In distinction fundamental Judeo-Christian theology has admitted the right of people to freedom as a political constraint.
Neo,
So if your encounter with those undergrads was 20 years ago, that would mean that those sensitive young ladies are now in their late thirties or early forties.
And now they are doing things like being executives at NPR; or professors at Harvard who want to faint and puke if the president of the school speculates that males might be better at math. I bet most of them are in HR at places like my company, though.
Wow, this is a relevant topic.
I work at a university and our department directors are in the process of scheduling outside mediators, why? Something occurred during a recent tour of our facilities to new graduate students. The tour was being lead by a male and female colleague of mine and as the graduates departed, the male called back to the departing students, “Don’t forget to come use us!” An awkward statement perhaps but of course he was referring to the services and facilities which was the topic of the tour. The female colleague reported him. Now he’s very afraid for his job, a newly wed, with a meager pay, in a difficult market. The vast majority of our group stand by him — but is a woman makes the suggestion of being uneased by an imagined, invented, or real sexual reference then heads are going to roll. We happen to have a very incompetent and unethical administration over our department so, well, we’ll see how this goes
**but if
Timely, interesting post. I have just started my second bachelor’s degree, and I am attending classes with young 20-somethings. Here is one small story about the acquisition of tattoos:
ME: I have one tattoo – thought of getting another but they are expensive. I recently found a great tattoo artist that goes by the name of Boris the Russian. He does some fabulous work.
20-SOMETHING: Boris the Russian…isn’t that kind of racist?
Now I am fond of the young woman I was talking to – I’ve taken two prerequisite classes with her and I wish I was as smart about some things at that age as she is. But that statement (which was so inane I let it go – I don’t have the energy for that shit) really speaks to how hard people seem to LOOK for offense. Seems like a lot of annoyance to be offended so easily – it must happen dozens of times a day if you lower the standards THAT much. Apparently, an individual of Russian descent can’t even draw attention to that fact themselves!
As a long time Christian I have watched the same thing happen within the churches of America. Feelings vs. commitment, therapy vs. exposition of the Bible – this virus of self-loathing has infected every aspect of our society it appears. Again, as a Christian, I believe that reality will awaken people from their somnambulate
walk through life – the world really is not about ‘them’.
http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/
The above link shows the disgusting Keith Ellison, (Congressman for Minnesota’s 5th district and a shoe in for re-election) shill for the Muslim Brotherhood doing just that: shilling.
Ellison’s Hajj was paid for with $13,350 from the Muslim American Society.The Muslim American Society is the Muslim Brotherhood’s chief operating arm in the U.S.
ALP…
I think I would have asked her: Do you consider race and nation of origin to be the same thing?
I can’t help but wonder what her answer would be. After all, since all US people of negroid origins are commonly considered “African-American” even if they have no actual links to Africa (at least within their generational memory), and since some who are actually African-American but who happen to be caucasians are told that they _can’t_ be AA, I can understand the link between race and nation of origin. I guess I’d also ask her what race Russian is…
You must be a better person than I am…I don’t think I could have passed up the chance to ask the questions. Like you, I think the response was pretty stupid, but if you also think she’s _not_ stupid, then it might be a window into a thought process that hasn’t occurred to you. Or me. As yet.
The bulk of this PC crap and hate speech thinking is the work of coastal elites. It is completely foreign to most people in flyover country where people still cling to their guns and religion. Throw in some serious election fraud and I fear for my country. Violence is not out of the question.
new blasphemy???? There’s nothing new about it. Its potential is I believe hardwired into the brain. Why it manifests in some and not in others or why some people seem to outgrow it over time while others succumb with age, I don’t know.
As for young women taking easy offense, I recently had that experience on another forum. My new avatar offended some young lady because she said it looked like an album cover of a band that performed a song that she thought demeaned women. I told her it didn’t bother me in the least, so I was comfortable with it (I couldn’t find the song in any case). Thereupon she started a vicious campaign on line using her own and other identities accusing me of all kinds of outrageous crimes. BTW she’s in another country and we’ve never met and never will. Eventually I dropped out – having better things to do with my time than read such attacks. A couple weeks later the moderator contacted me inviting me back and mentioning that the young lady had been banned permanently from the forum.
Someone above mentioned that the real liberals these days are the conservatives. That is so true. In my experience of the last few decades people called conservatives are far more open minded – i.e. able to listen to differing opinions – than people on the left who love to talk about how tolerate they are except for……..anyone against abortion, affirmative action, gay marriage, etc….
This kind of behavior is always around and until someone can rejigger dna it always will be. It’ll shift from left to right and back again depending on the times and circumstances, but it’s not going anywhere.
“There can be no justice when “right” and “wrong” are subjective.”
Which is exactly most relativists’ point: There is no justice because right and wrong are subjective. Anything an absolutist calls “justice” is merely the punishment of the less powerful by the more powerful when the less powerful act in ways that “usurp privilege”; the “justice” tag is simply self-justification for retaining and using power, part of the brainwashing used to convince the disenfranchised to accept their lack of power.
Just as the relativist can be accused of acting only out of self-interest, by wanting not to endure someone else’s definition of “wrong”, the absolutist can always be accused of acting only in self-interest by wanting to impose his own (because it’s favourable to him) definition of “right”. But the relativist sees himself as in a “better” position because he will admit to his self-interest, while assuming the absolutist is hypocritically denying his.
Thus it becomes a form of begging the question, of invisible-cat logic — if self-interest is assumed the only “real” reason for anyone sane to do anything, anyone who appears to act against their own self-interest *must* be presumed either mad, deluded, or hypocritical.
I find myself puzzled over how people immersed in PC don’t just throw up on themselves once in a while. No kidding. What a shallow and petty little life. I’d go insane. Hell i nearly go insane just being around it.
Did they really think he should be disciplined merely because he offended someone’s tender sensibilities? Shouldn’t there be like, you know, something objectively offensive about what he had actually said? (p)No, they answered. It was enough that she felt what she felt. She had a right to never be offended, and he needed to be re-educated.
Some people, while claiming to oppose injustice, actually want the power to dish it out. As multiculturalism and PC collectivism have advanced, such hypocrisy has gotten worse: many don’t even disavow it anymore.
It can be difficult to focus on principles when you suspect that many self-identifying “victims of injustice” are indifferent to the merits of their case and view you as a chump for taking principles scrupulously.
Yeats was not optimistic:
Hurrah for revolution and more cannon-shot!
A beggar upon horseback lashes a beggar on foot.
Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again!
The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on.
***********************
NB: I know that historically many Americans did not have full civil rights, and I do not claim that the country is perfect in that regard today. What I do claim is that there are some who use those facts as a pretext for an agenda that has nothing to do with liberty and justice for all.
Suek…”If there is no order of dominance, then there is constant jostling”
There is much truth to this. In companies where the organizational hierarchy is ill-defined, there tends to be much more politics of the malign type than in companies where a reasonably coherent structure has been put into place.
neo, said, “I looked around at these lovely young women, all fresh and bright and intelligent and eager, and felt the cold chill of something dreadful creep up my spine.”
neo-neocon meets Orwell. He was right. Only the timetable was wrong.
And now we see the boot stomping on faces. Ask Juan Williams about it. Or nyo’s colleague.
Pope Benedict XVI calls it a “dictatorship of relativism”:
“We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as definitive and has as its highest value one’s own ego and one’s own desires…
http://www.ewtn.com/pope/words/conclave_homily.asp
gs Says:
October 23rd, 2010 at 7:02 pm
Excellent comment, gs.
Nyomynthis said,
The female colleague reported him.
This sort of thing is 99.99% female driven.
It’s no mystery. It’s a way for them to get ahead, the get good grades, to get rivals fired, to make excuses for poor performance, etc., etc., etc.
Women are trained to do this from like age 2 now. They get advanced classes in how to take offense for profit starting in High School and continuing through the career years.
Oh, man: Another thriller going on in Philly tonight! Good thing I don’t have a bad heart (at least so far).
Neo, its worse than you think. This sort of PC thinking is at the heart of the harassment statutes that are in effect as federal law. Recently I half-jokingly asked a receptionist to lunch in an email and it was reported as harassment. She made a big deal out of being married, despite the fact that she doesn’t wear a wedding ring. I got a talking to, and she got her behavior reinforced. If the company doesn’t do this, they run the risk of being sued. But ask yourself: what kind of society have we created when asking someone to lunch can incur a lawsuit.
Ugh. The Phillies’ season is over, with yet another nail-biter of a game tonight. They beat themselves, due to sloppy fielding and an inability to get hits with runners in scoring position. They squandered countless opportunities.
So now it’s Texas against San Francisco in the World Series. The Steers vs. the Queers. What? That’s offensive? Well, too fucking bad. I don’t do PC.
(Hey, my comments weren’t so off-topic after all, were they?)
It is a sad state we come to when we have to be careful how we phrase things, lest we be fired or sued.
I do a great deal of volunteer work at a local shooting range (both firearms and archery, though I’m mainly in the Archery section I do some crossover into shotgun) that is managed by our state wild life agency. I’m President of the archery club there (independent from TWRA) and director of our junior programs.
Twice a year we do a youth outdoor clinic where we take a number of kids – usually between 15 and 25 – and let them get a basic introduction to outdoor activities. Each event varies with what we do based on who volunteers, this year it was three venues (shotgun, rifle, and archery) so we did a more indepth session that normal. Included in the whole deal is lunch – if which I am the cook. Another note that is important is this is all totally free to the kids.
For lunch I made hotdogs, chili, and slaw. We used good ones too – the all beef ballbparks and the chili and slaw are homemade. No crappy canned or cheap ingredients – if I do something I do it right (I believe in the saying “if it is worth doing it is worth doing right”). With workers I usually end up cooking for around 30-45 people which normally takes a few hours worth of work.
Today we had a father call and ask what we were eating, when told he said his son was a vegetarian and we had to offer him a meal. We told him special need diets needed to bring their own food and we would accommodate them (our volunteer cook would happily grill anything he needed). But no, apparently by some law we *had* to accommodate him. He required a chefs salad with the meat picked out, two apples (he even specified two different varieties, he had to have one of each but I do not recall the types now), a minimum of two cups of skim milk, and a specific type *and* brand of salad dressing (again don’t recall).
Needless to say his kid wasn’t getting that. He called up as far the supervisor chain as he could get today to rant at them and said he is going on up on Monday – I guess we will have to wait and see if he does.
So far TWRA has been quite good about handling that sort of thing, I’m not too worried that this will result in a cessation of funds. I’m lucky in that, over all, Tennessee is fairly conservative and they do not get much blowback from telling those people “no”. I suspect that in many states the program would just be killed.
I’ve also had not so dis-similar things happen both in my junior archery program and in coaching a Scholastic Clays Target Program skeet team (though in shotgun I’m a worker bee, not a leader bee). I’ve also heard one parent inform another coach that their life doesn’t revolve around this range so it was the coaches responsibility to individually call them with changes as they couldn’t take the time to check schedules – said parent should be happy that they informed someone besides me as that one would not have had a nice response. Personally I’m not very good with people who figure the world revolves around them.
1. Thanks for the good words, rickl.
2. I rummaged through dusty old bookmarks and found a couple of relevant pieces by the eminent writer Doris Lessing: here and here, published almost ten and twenty years ago. Like Orwell, Lessing is associated with the Left–and her intellectual honesty brings his to mind.
(A similar quote from 1982 is at Wikipedia’s Lessing article, but following the link triggered an unsafe-site warning from my Norton 360.)
gs,
I was struck by the Lessing comment in your first link about the schoolgirl saying men were basically violent and caused wars. Raising girls this way is as bad as binding their feet. Are we producing generations of Nellie Olsens instead of Laura Ingalls? All this indoctrination does is build walls between boys and girls, men and women. Let the girls discover on their own. Let them play and tease and learn that the boys who pulled their pigtails were clumsily trying to flirt. Let them learn to give as good as they get, but with a twinkle in their eye.
One thing I have learned in my rather long life and many, many friendships with guys is that the ones who tease you are the ones who will stand by you when you need them. They are the ones who will keep you from turning into a sanctimonious old biddy, and even when things are tough, they will find something for you to smile about. I love ornery little boys and I love grown men who retain a bit of that playfulness. To paraphrase Christine O’Donnell: I am not a wimp.
“Four Legs Good, Two Legs Better”.
I looked around at these lovely young women, all fresh and bright and intelligent and eager, and felt the cold chill of something dreadful creep up my spine. And then I shook my head sadly and sat down, because I had no way of reaching them.
“Feminism, Socialism, and Communism are one in the same, and Socialist/Communist government is the goal of feminism.” – Catharine A. MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (First Harvard University Press, 1989), p.10
for a similar experience, all you have to do is look to the part that Mikhail Baryshnikov (Latvian: Born Riga 1948 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Baryshnikov) played in “White Nights” (With Gregory Hines)…
there is a scene where he breaks out of the room for practicing, goes across the roofs, and into a class of young ballerinas.
we mostly focus on his letting us know that when he defected he was erased from their history. but in example of your story, the young girls led by one, all teamed up as the strong collective against a man (who wasnt even opposing them)
its an interesting scene… but the fact that the burden of proof is to prove yourself innocent was what feminism also did to legal court… hearsay was admissable on one side.
and in this case the women were standing up for what was then the new idea replacing the “reasonable woman” with the “victims perception” as the new standards!!!
by reasonable woman standards what the professor said was ok, by victim class standards one girl was oppressed by this males forcibly adding sex to a conversation, and (as described by several french philosophers quoted by feminists i can quote too), so creating a hostile environment and he should be punished and reeducated.
since the latter describes what happened, guess who has been driving since before that while all the while claiming the other side is driving (so when something is not liked its whose fault)…
argue that a rose by another name is something else.
Hate speech is a required civic duty and virtue. The problem is that most public leaders have a completely reversed perspective on this topic. Defending Danish cartoonist, insulting Islam for it’s teachings, or any other religion, is not hate speech, it’s a condemnation of what affronts democracy and freedom. The warrants for ethnic hatred, genocide, slavery, cruelty to women, children, minorities, the most vulnerable in society, etc. requires our hatred, if we value what we value about Western Society, then the book that sits on every pulpit of every church, mosque, synagogue, temple in the world requires our most biting satire and hatred.
Women now outnumber men in College, and they are generally better prepared to be there and more serious about studies. In general I repeat.
This is surely because little girls have been trained to work hard, shoot for the stars, dream, succeed, etc.
Little boys have seen men demeaned or laughed at almost exclusively from their earliest age. They are treated like ‘girls’ in schools and if they act like ‘boys’ they get drugged (Ritalin).
Can you imagine the outcry and outrage if a) women were demeaned at laughed at in every venue there is; b) girls were treated like boys; c) and were routinely drugged if they did not act like boys.
We would simply call such a thing Hideous.
It is now effectively our cultural policy for boys.
And if they get out of line in any way whatsoever, the entire weight of the legal system is primed and ready to pounce on them. There are whole legions of people, in actual fact, being paid just to watch men and to charge them and every now and then to make examples of them. Just so we all know who is in charge and running the show.
Plato was so right. To rule a society you really must rule the children. You can effectively control the men bny spiritually castrating the boys.
This is what we have done.
It’s not feminism per se. it’s that comminism/statism/fascism/controlism that does it. In other words, Democrats and the Dem party. This is their program more than anything else almost. Everything else is secondary to demasculating the boys.
e
Those who cut off the noses of Afghan women require of hatred. Member of the Westboro church require our hatred. West bank settlers who teal Palestinian lands require our hatred. Buddhist and Hindus … they are plenty of equal examples for them too, news/google it.
Yes. Holding up a sign or burning a book are roughly equivalent to cutting off someone’s nose.
You just have to stare in wonder and awe at the way leftism has educated us intellectually, morally, emotionally.
Everyone is wrong! About everything! And so we are all the same and nothing is wrong!
You can google it.
Perhaps Nyomythus could follow the lead of his French revolutionary counterparts, and lead a charge to to get rid of the present calender being used by the west? Too much influence from religious sources. I mean, the month is roughly based on the lunar cycle, though its been tampered with so much it does not quite fit, and the year is based roughly on an orbit of the earth around the sun. But that 7 day week-we must do like the French did and go to a 10 day week. But then it sure is a long time between weekends- bummer!
And lets not even get started on the start date of the thing, roughly corresponding to the birth of Christ (within 3 to 5 years). At least the French, in their glorious Secular revolution, overcame those religious Americans -who inexcusably left refrence to the old calender and its ‘Lord” in their Constitution-which according to Nyo both does not exist and does exist as a “concession” at the same time.
Why oh why could we have not had a glorious secular revolution like France! how much more fun it would have been!
Whatever California is doing doesn’t seem to work. Whatever Texas is dong does seem to work. Whatever the Arabs are doing doesn’t seem to work. Whatever the Israel is doing seems to work.
I’ll stick with the culture and doings of Texas and Israel.
I’ve always been of the mind that this kind of stuff was one of the things we just did better in Britain. You know, the kind of snobby middle-class dinner parties where the hostess has to make sure she doesn’t sit the Reverend Jones opposite the noted society atheist in case World War III breaks out down that end of the table somewhere between the hors d’oeuvres and the petit fours.
But now, even in the rather specialized field of “the paranoid fear of causing offence”, we’ve been surpassed by the new world, dammit! Yet one more industry where Britain once led the world where we’re now relegated to err, “junior league” status. I’m off to cry into my beer. Goodnight!
Mike Mc. Says:
October 24th, 2010 at 12:20 pm
Yes. Holding up a sign or burning a book are roughly equivalent to cutting off someone’s nose.
Why would they be equivalent, that never crossed my mind.
Jon, why would do like the French did?? — that never occurs to me.
jon baker,
There are days I wish we’d have a revolution like the French had, only let’s have this coming week.
If we did, some heads would be rolling.
Who is the equivalent of Louis XVI and his cronies these days? Oh.
Viva la revolucion?
As expected, the mind trained by leftism really has very little idea of what it means even by the words it uses. It spouts approved platitudes as if it was a trained monkey. It is not an accident that there are not any leftists anywhere who can argue. They bully and coerce or they lose. There is no third option.
What never crossed your mind is a lot Nyo.
Oh that you would let some fresh ideas stray into that vacant landscape!
Since we should hate all the things you mentioned equally, they are all equally hate-able offenses.
There are rules of logic and thought. They’ve been around since Aristotle and used to be taught in grammar school. It’;s not your fault that you never got that education. The people you now call lord saw to it. But I think it is a damn shame.
I’m not attacking you. I’m lamenting the prison of non-thought the left has cemented people in through the school system.
What never crossed your mind is a lot Nyo.
You have the advantage of driving “ohh what I think” over which ever cliff you wish.
If you think you know what I think (hello, though police) and it makes you feel better, that’s fine, masturbate in this way all you wish.
Who said equally? Jerk it a little harder you’re about to cum.
Nyo,
You are playing to type. You just trotted out the 15 year old’s attack when things are going against them.
It’s not about you. My point is about the system that produced you. Words can hardly capture the regret and remorse of it. They did that to us!
No one knows what you are thinking. You never actually say. That is because you never actually do it.
You’ve just been trained and programmed to say certain things.
When someone criticizes the oppressive system of PC speech codes and abuse of power, you are trained to parrot something how there are many many bad things that we need to be against and hate.
It doesn’t even rise to the quality of pablum, but it is what our ‘best’ minds are trained to do these days.
If they don’t, they get the equivalent of an electric shock – like the pigeons and lab rats would get if they don’t press the bar the right number of times for a given stimulus.
Your leftist minders treated you as a bee in a bee hive and not as a human being. You are rewarding their belief in you by buzzing about a lot.
I’ve often been amused (and struck) by an essay by V. I. Lenin, noted organizer and anti-feminist (you can look that one up).
“Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder”…it’s actually interesting to follow along (sing along with Ilych?) about the immaturity of the leftists. They certainly proved to be pussycats and cannon fodder for the likes of J. V. Stalin and friends.
Just ask Trotsky and Bukharin.
“West bank settlers who teal [sic] Palestinian lands require our hatred.”
And anti-Zionist scum who trash 3,000 years of Jewish history and the Jewish connection to Palestine by accepting the Phakestinian narrishtive concocted by the Arab imperialists require mine.
“if we value what we value about Western Society, then the book that sits on every pulpit of every church, mosque, synagogue, temple in the world requires our most biting satire and hatred.”
I didn’t know Rousseau’s, Darwin’s, Marx’s and Nietzsche’s books sat on every pulpit of every church, mosque, synagogue and temple in the world. You learn something new every day.
Maybe one day you’ll learn about the 100,000,000 (yes, that’s hundred followed by six zeros) victims of the non-religious, indeed anti-religious, ideology of Marxism. Then you’ll quit scapegoating religion and lay the blame where it belongs: with human nature.
Mike
You are playing to type. You just trotted out the 15 year old’s attack when things are going against them.
No, again you don’t know what I think or why I’m doing anything, I’m just getting bored with the tautologies, perhaps a preschool tactic, do you want some equivalence of those who cut off the noses of afghan women? Fine, I’ll recite the alphabet for you, I mean, I’ll point out the obvious.
Here’s equivalence: Priest who rape and torture children, and their apologist who convince the media to call it “child abuse” oh it’s only abuse, it’s child rape and torture, and it’s worthy of our hatred.
Want another? Of course you don’t, your ever presumptuous tautologies amuse you, these are real people whose lives are destroyed, here’s another one:
Mother Theresa and her type who say AIDS is bad, but using condoms is far worse, thus hundreds of thousands of people, who don’t want to be damned from an imagined afterlife take their chances and have sex without condoms and die miserably of AIDS, this also is worthy of our hatred.
ziontruth, human nature doesn’t tell good people to kill their neighbors, only religion can make good people do evil things. Die fascist scum.
Nyo,
Wow.
What does that twisted and inaccurate sputum have to do with the ideas in this issue?
Nothing.
The idea from Fernandez and Neo is that there is still blasphemy in the world. But it is enforced by the Left as a tool and a tactic to squelch debate or discussion and to force others to do what the left wants. It is a tool of oppression used by an oppressor. The Left.
Of course that makes leftists uncomfortable because now you are being exposed as an oppressor. Which is true.
Therefore, blame Mother Theresa for AIDS or some priest for rape. That way, in the face of their oppression, yours not not look so bad.
That’s a fallacy dude. You can look it up. It’s several fallacies actually.
it’s proof of your shame at what your side does to decency every day of the week and not in an odd isolated incident.
By analogy, the Left rapes the language and tortures prosperity and freedom every day as a matter of policy and political power. The Left in the USA today is no different from the Soviet Union in Lenin’s day or Stalins for that matter – except for the open and extreme violence employed. But give them time. Give them time. They will surely get to that if they consolidate just a little more power. It’s what they do; what they have to do since the human person does not willingly harm itself the way a leftist would do to them.
You seem to be a nice gentle person. Does it not bother you that you ride with the Black Hats?
You seem to be a nice gentle person, I wasn’t born yesterday. Jerk harder you’re almost there. I was adding definition to your first tautology that required an equivalence to the afghan example.
The idea from Fernandez and Neo is that there is still blasphemy in the world. But it is enforced by the Left as a tool and a tactic to squelch debate or discussion and to force others to do what the left wants.
From another angle of the issue I’m saying blasphemy is used by right wing forces in the world to censor criticism of religious extremism. By the way I’m am in no way a Leftist, I make a sharp distinction between Leftism and Liberalism.
This is a fairly decent and pretty intelligent blog, with some astute commenters (not including myself), so I have to wonder why nyomythus is even here? Talk about sinking to the lowest common denominator, of scraping the bottom of the barrel, of being a few fries short of a Happy Meal, of being so soft-headed jello has more solidity.
Seriously, what idiotic, crapping on the carpet pleasure do you get by posting here, nyomythus? Are you so starved for attention? Mommy not breast feed you? Daddy didn’t love you enough? The school nurse misdiagnosed your sexuality in first grade? What? Because it’s got to be something really deep and profound. I’ll put on my hip waders while waiting for you to answer.
nyomythus,
“ziontruth, human nature doesn’t tell good people to kill their neighbors”
Neither does gravity. But, just as people need to fight gravity day after day in order to keep healthy, they have to fight human nature in order to stay good people. Being evil comes naturally to human beings, while goodness needs to be taught and maintained.
How do I know this? I’ve looked at the Manufacturer’s Manual. It says (Genesis 8:21) that “The imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth.” Of course, you’ll dismiss this as you dismiss anything to do with religion. But I find the evidence to be in agreement with it–much more than the Humanist School’s idea that we’re all basically good but we do evil because something obstructs us. Humanity has done far too much evil for that explanation to be satisfactory.
We have an evil inclination (or passion or whatever–“Yetzer Ha-Ra” is the Hebrew term). We must and can fight it, but it can’t be ignored. To assume a natural inclination toward good is to court disaster. We do have an inclination toward good, but in order to realize it we must master the evil inclination, which in man’s natural state is the dominant one.
“only religion can make good people do evil things.”
Tell that to the aforementioned 100,000,000 murdered in the name of Marxism.
“Die fascist scum.”
To hold you to your own standard, you must be a very religious person.
ziontruth
(Genesis 8:21) that “The imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth.”
I don’t look at children and think they are inclined to be evil.
***
RickZ, yes, censorship can bring out the worst scorn in the best of us. Your point is … ? I’m saying that blasphemy of Leftist politically correct speech is as required as our blasphemy of religious extremism, to separate and denounce the latter while embracing the first is inconsistent.
“I don’t look at children and think they are inclined to be evil.”
Look more closely. Look how selfish they are over their toys. Take a look at at their kindergarten scraps, the manic intensity in the kids’ eyes when fighting each other. Look how quickly they learn verbal abuse, blame avoidance and similar traits.
And all the parents blame the other kids for spoiling their child, and they blame the other kids on all the other parents’ rotten education. Not realizing no external reason in needed, just leaving the child to its own devices, failing to prune the bad traits early enough, because “he’s such an innocent boy” and “she wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
I’d never have liked to believe it myself. But the truth and our wishes have this tendency to part ways.
Nyomythus, your comments here are vile and puerile. You owe all the readers here an apology, now.
For the benefit of everyone else, Nyomythus is not a Leftist; he is a Liberal with a particular animus toward revealed and organized religion. We are not sure what lies behind it. He seems to fall into that group of people for whom the Religious Right–broadly speaking–as extremists are comparable to the Taliban, and religious people are suspect, particularly in matters of human sexuality. Hence his obsession with Mother Theresa and her opinions about distributing condoms. Nyomythus’ knee jerks predictably whenever issues touch on religion.
We are not sure why it is so important to him. We know that he grew up in the South, where the social impact of fundamentalists can be heavy in the smaller cities and towns, and detectable in the larger cities. He now inhabits a university community; I’m not exactly sure where, but I get the feeling it is not in the South. Not that location matters so much: there is a class of Southerner who defines their status as deriving from their negative opinions about fundamentalists, and Souther universities are full of them, too.
The difference is this: in the South he must consider himself part of a brave minority fighting for liberty from religious domination; in the North, he is part of a majority–though suspect because of his background–who takes stands to demonstrate is is not one of them. Alternatively, he could feel he has been damaged by these fundamentalists in some way; there might be some kind of personal or family trauma behind the scenes.
That would at least explain why his contributions on this topic fall so far short of what his intellectual potential would suggest.
With their fairly equal irrational hatred of religion can you imagine what kind of couple Nyomythus and Tatyana would make? Kinda makes one shudder.
“”Not realizing no external reason in needed, just leaving the child to its own devices””
Ziontruth
Isn’t that exactly what we see in urban poor? A normally single parent situation to guide the child and they likely have issues of their own similar upbringing.
The miracle of the judeo.christian culture is in how it teaches love. Not a shallow love shown mostly with parents offering things and kind words to their kids. But a love that dares instill discipline and lets the child grow secure knowing someone is in charge and looking out for his best interest.
Oblio
Nyomythus, your comments here are vile and puerile. You owe all the readers here an apology, now.
I’ve been to concise and should have elaborated more, for that I do apologize. I began with a simple post and I don’t like it when people invent and attribute false meaning to me; quote my words, or ask me plain questions if you wish.
For the benefit of everyone else, Nyomythus is not a Leftist; he is a Liberal with a particular animus toward revealed and organized religion.
I don’t wish I didn’t have a conscious, push back is required. Look at some of the reasons why in just recent years, the genocide of Christians in East Timor by Muslims in Indonesia; the three-way Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Muslim civil war in former Yugoslavia; to Africa, the Middle east, this list can go on and on and on. Ziontruth made a reference to Marxist having killed millions, but did Marx write instructions or give examples of how to murder entire peoples? When we say Marx we mean the USSR, in general, right? Stalin was a seminary student, studying to become a priest. He knew something about what I’ve said before, about Holy Books being the warrant for slavery, genocide, oppression of minorities, miracle harvest, heresy trials, etc… this was Stalin’s template, the Russian population was ready-made for a master/slave relationship. What prepared them? What was the template used to control them? Russian Orthodoxy was superimposed on Communism. I don’t want to see the same sort of thing superimposed on American Democracy, all steps in that direction will be met with my criticism.
We are not sure what lies behind it. He seems to fall into that group of people for whom the Religious Right—broadly speaking—as extremists are comparable to the Taliban, and religious people are suspect, particularly in matters of human sexuality. Hence his obsession with Mother Theresa and her opinions about distributing condoms.
In this thread, I mentioned The Westboro Church and Mother Theresa — as I’ve stated these are good examples of another type [should have been more cocise here] of religious extremism, worthy of my personal hatred but certainly not comparable to the likes of the Taliban, that would be absurd. On other threads, I’ve said that I’m skeptical of the Religious Right; of the process by how they come to conclusions, of where they draw divine authority.
Taliban, Jihadist types — kill them.
Westboro Church types and Mother Theresa types — they are worthy of my criticism and debate, and no donations or support from me.
Big distinction.
Nyomythus’ knee jerks predictably whenever issues touch on religion.
It’s not a knee jerk, it’s crystal clear. Democracy, freedom, individuality are worth defending. I disagree with Leftist who forfeit this responsibility because they would rather disagree on everything with the Right than to agree with them about of the major issue of the world today; world economy, keeping a thumb down on illegal production/trade of weapons of mass destruction, and human liberation. I appreciate much of the Right, but when I have a criticism I give criticism.
nyo: because you’re a longtime commenter here I will give you the benefit of the doubt and not ban you outright. But you have made many many comments in this thread that would have gotten you banned if you’d been a newcomer. As it is, I’m issuing a warning: one more over-the-line comment and you’re out.
@ expat 4:18 pm. Are we producing generations of Nellie Olsens instead of Laura Ingalls?
The answer to your question would seem, alas, to be Yes.
And, to those who understand your allusion, the comparison is brilliantly succinct.
Okay but SteveH can keep graduating Ziontruth for disciplining children into submission because that’s how children know that they’re loved. That’s not offensive … where are our priorities?
I had learned to ignore Nyomythus, because he has never added any discernable value to any discussion on this blog. Because of tonight’s salvos, I breezed through his utterances, and Lo! found he has stooped to an entirely vulgar level as his form of rebuttal, tinged with gibberish.
Perhaps he’s been drinking (again?).
I do hope, against all hope, that he is not an educator, despite Oblio’s deductions. He has really become quite loathesome, in addition to his earlier manifest confusion.
If you have been drinking, Nyo, you need help from a Higher Power; in AA, that can be a rock or a group of people; it need not be a God.
There is often a quite good person behind the veil of alcohol, one that can gradually emerge with recovery.
Tom are you an alcoholic? I’m sorry if you are. I wouldn’t wish or invent that upon anyone.
Nyo-
Nope. I am a doc, triple Board certified, with decades of patient care experience. I am searching for explanations of your written conduct, and possible remedies, beyond ignoring you altogether.
You seem to dodge the question: Had a drink or two tonight? Got a problem?
Nope, you?
Not worth it.
Too bad then. Probably no redeeming you, Nyo, as Gringo says.
Over and out.
“”@ expat 4:18 pm. Are we producing generations of Nellie Olsens instead of Laura Ingalls?””
Similar to a question i’ve asked here before. Do liberals watch Leave it to Beaver and think Eddie Haskel is the shining example of morality on the show?
“I don’t look at children and think they are inclined to be evil.”
One or two very important books obviously were absent from your education. Read “The Lord of Flyes” by William Golding. Or “Natural history of Aggression, or So-called Evil” by Konrad Lorentz.
Humans are sinful and evil-inclined from their birth, and this is not only religious principle, but a demonstrable scientific fact. There are exceptions, of course, bur they are very rare. Almost everybody indulge in sadistic fantasies, and if only few act accordingly, this is because they know about consequencies of criminal behavior and are restrained by law, moral and religion, which are need to be taught to them. And every time when social order collapses in wars or revolutions, all these internal demons are loosed free, and a mass barbarisation with orgies of heinous crimes engulf whole nations.
Psyhoanalysis and social psyhology abundantly corraborated the concept of original sin (in Catholic theology, or evil impulse, as it is called in Hebrew theology). The very skills that were crucial for individual survival in pre-historic societies – paranoid fear and hatred for strangers, egotism, aggression, social rejection of any non-conforming individuals, lust for power – are with us as powerful instincts that need to be disciplined and restrained during childhood and adolescence. This is known as socialization, and when this process is incomplete or imperfect, we get criminals. Some cultures are better than others in this respect, as criminal and moral statistics reveal.
Sergey, I disagree. Goodness is innate in any healthy person and it does not need to be taught. There are times of unrest, hopelessness, collapse of civilization and how we maintain and restore order is necessary, and how people pass on knowledge may or may not transcend extraordinary situations. In “Lord of the Flies” we see children who have gone insane from the hopelessness of being rescued; some few of them cling to the fire, most do not, but the rare situation should not dictate everyday life. Normal life should teach us about rare situations. This is what great literature gives us.
SteveH,
The Jewish example of mercy is of the father who disciplines his child. The culture unable to say “No” to kids cannot comprehend this, but the explanation is easy given: If the father disciplines the child, then though the child might well hate it at the moment, he or she will later be thankful for not being allowed to walk into the abyss; whereas, if he neglects to discipline the child, he or she will later suffer from the painful encounter with the real world outside the parental bubble. And then the grown child will curse the parents for the lack of preparation.
Nyomythus here thinks this is about beating the child into submission. It isn’t, not even under Jewish law. The use of corporal punishment is only for extremities, when all other means have been exhausted. In the usual case, all that’s needed is to make clear to the child that “No” means “No.” Something that fell out of fashion when the educators of the Humanist School took over.
Nyomythus,
“Ziontruth made a reference to Marxist having killed millions, but did Marx write instructions or give examples of how to murder entire peoples? When we say Marx we mean the USSR, in general, right?”
No, I mean just about every country Marxism has ever been tried in. The U.S.S.R., China, Cuba, you name it. As for Marx’s instructions, he wrote plenty on the necessity of bringing down the bourgeoisie (sp?) by force and installing the dictatorship of the proletariat. It isn’t much of a stretch from those ideas to the unprecedented death toll that took place in, as I said, just about everywhere Marxism was implemented.
“Stalin was a seminary student, studying to become a priest.”
The hole is still square, and your attempt to stick a round peg in it won’t work no matter how hard you try. To reiterate: There was nothing but the logic of Marx’s “dialectic” itself that Stalin, Mao and Castro required in order to unleash dystopia.
“That’s not offensive … where are our priorities?”
Where indeed? Where are our priorities when someone would devote all his odium to religion in general, on account of some half-baked ideas and lame comparisons, instead of the danger of the Marxist/Islamist alliance that’s in our plain sight?
Sergey,
Lord of the Flies is one of my favorite books. It was a great change after having read so much of the “noble savage” genre.
“”Goodness is innate in any healthy person and it does not need to be taught.””
nyo
Theres a way to prove this kind of pablum from liberals is total bunk meant to merely feel superior in his uber tolerance of all cultures.
Let the liberal be hitch hiking alone at night and have the choice of a devout Christian or an “innately good” typical ghetto resident being the one to stop and pick him up.
“Ziontruth made a reference to Marxist having killed millions, but did Marx write instructions or give examples of how to murder entire peoples?”
Well, yes. Marx did advocate mass murder. Did you not know that?
“Normal life should teach us about rare situations. This is what great literature gives us.”
Great literature (Dostoevsky, for example) does exactly the opposite. It does not teach us about situations, normal or abnormal, but about who we are. And to do so, it places its heroes in the most extreme situation to reveal their inner selves. And such cruel experiments do reveal an abyss of evil and demonism in seemingly ordinary people. The problem with these teenagers was not that they turn to religion in dire sraits, that is what most people do, but the kind of religion they choose, even invent: a bloody pagan cult. They so revealed a pagan, a hidden barbarian in them – evil, wich is always with you under a thin crust of civilizatin.
Sergey, I see.
Theres a way to prove this kind of pablum from liberals is total bunk meant to merely feel superior in his uber tolerance of all cultures.
Humbly, I certainly don’t think of myself as superior. I’m good to family, and people I meet, there are things I do pretty well, and lots of things I don’t do well with, but I do believe in the superiority of the great thinkers and skeptics that forged western civilization, particularly American civilization which I think is the jewel of all human cultures.
what kind of society have we created when asking someone to lunch can incur a lawsuit.
the one that the feminist leaders always wanted… separate breeding pens for cows and bulls, where the state approves when we get to assocaite, and so gets to choose what associations are better (and get rewarded) or not (and get punished)
Social Darwinism is the core point…
this is what they have ALWAYS said they were making, one only had to read what they were saying, promising, offereing, and doing… to easily see the end.
what could control population better than to make a war between the sexes, then turn the women into rutting sex toys, so tha when you let them get together they will have children (like nashi in russia).
what good is breeding if your breeders wont have sex on command by allowing association?
how could you ahve that if men defended their families?
how could you get to the end result of elites over cattle otherwise?
no one noticed that the chinese women working for nike didnt have men, familied, property… they had barracks, and a job in exchange for food.
and that is better than what they had.
but make no bones about it… the women can keep crowing that its a mans world, but men never ever created any society that was this unsound…
I don’t quite accept the Christian doctrine that man is evil. That emphasis comes from St. Augustine and is probably the reason why people have noticed that religion is used to control the masses by an elite who don’t seem to think they are the same thing: evil.
Further, Torah and Talmud rather assert that man is not born evil; man is born with an inclination towards evil (yetzer hara) maybe better understood as selfishness (although one must immediately understand that such a statement is the majority opinion and opposite opinions exist, as always, in the Talmud.)
Fundamental Christians seem to emphasize the demonic as the source of evil. Jews don’t–as there is plenty of mischief from the yetzer hara. I think the amount of actual text in the Bible dealing with demons and the supernatural suggests the Jews are right. And yet, don’t think Torah doesn’t believe in a supernatural evil. Such evil become engaged especially when man seeks the power it offers.
The foundational emphasis one takes regarding evil leads to the important belief one has regarding free will. Christians don’t believe in free will, at least until after one has received a transformation achieved by an acceptance of the atonement of Jesus Christ and the infilling of one’s heart and soul with the Holy Spirit. For Jews, a life lived under Torah (righteous instruction) is the instrument whereby one’s will becomes more free.
So the doctrine of intrinsic evil is something foundational to Christianity but repugnant to many. You either have to have been taught it as a child or come to your own conclusion to much enjoy it.
And some people just plain don’t like being told they are evil.
Curtis,
Augustine’s position was that everything created is created good, and that evil is a privation or deprivation or parasite of good. Evil is a lack. It is something missing.
What is missing in people after the Fall is a perfectly good will, in the sense of knowing and wanting and working for the proper good.
Among other things, he was merely stating the obvious. His evidence was the actuality of every person ever born anywhere at any time, and all of recorded history up to the present, 100% inclusive with one or two notable exceptions (Jesus and Mary).
Of course, if you’ve got evidence to the contrary we’d like to hear it.
This is what we have done.
It’s not feminism per se. it’s that comminism/statism/fascism/controlism that does it. In other words, Democrats and the Dem party.
no… its the progressives and it IS feminism..
its just that you dont remember waht they said because a few years ago, taking them seriously was nutty…
just as taking hitler seriously because you read his book detailing waht he would do, would make you a nut early on…
you obviously ignored the feminist legal scholar mckinnon admitting that feminism is communism.
it ALWAYS was… it was NEVER anything different
betty friedans old name was naomi goldstein…
feminism is Stalinist Marxist.. you can read that every point they wanted is what Lenin and later Stalin implemented and that which destroyed the Russian people as a force outside their leaders whims.
she allowed interviews until she figured out that they were going to reveal her past.. not promote and celebrate her as some god like icon of women
“Some historian recently wrote some attack on me in which he claimed that I was only pretending to be a suburban housewife, that I was supposed to be an agent.” Naiomi Goldstein…
the interviewee was a fellow traveler… so he wanted not to lie, not to actually smear her with the truth. he bent over backwards, as they did with sanger for so long, despite the quotes are from her autobiography.
Salon
Betty Friedan’s secret Communist past
http://www.salon.com/col/horo/1999/01/nc_18horo2.html
if you take the time to look at each hero, you will find lies, half truths and connections to the soviet union.
Kinsey? lied, and gave babies to pedophiles to experiment on for him as he took notes. was part of the social (marxist) movement to sexualize children and the population as was done in hungary (which no on has yet to go out and read)
Meade lied and was part fo the same group… as was friedan… the idea was to have lots of stuff come out and publish all sharing similar themes and ends and justificiations.
kind of like George soros hiring a few thousand journalists to write articles… or the email forum where they colluded in coordinating articles!
your prepubescent girl who wears fetish heels, copies glee and wants to pull a train in a mens locker room.. IS THE STATED END
got that? STATED END…
but we dont read their first hand books, papers, etc… when they get elected and someone points out such a book, like with erlich and holdren, we are aghast.
well, i can quote till i am blue in the face, and until now, everyone will try to paint them as extreme parts of a reasonable thing, not the core of an unreasonable thing that is old, and had its start in state terrorism, and anarchy! (rote zora)
the following is from the iFeminists website:
the idea of the popular front was to make various fronts that all represented the same thing int he back. like the chinese restaurants or hindi restaurants who have one kitchen and three stores in front…
each person going to one of the restaurants thinks that the food is from different places, but they are all eating the same food..
feminism was such a “popular front” a false way to get groups of people to do the work for you under some false point that neer really talks about the final part in detail among the unwashed.
in this way, each front is promised a major place at the new table of power… (which is a lie), and so each front works and feels it will be rewarded with their ideas once the end despotism is reached.
which is why you ahve blacks thinking they will be kings, and the women thinking they will, and the spanish thinking they will, and the gays now full bore that they will get rid of marraige, and so on.
NONE of them will get what they want since ALL of them are being used.
its like not being able to make a net that will catch big fish, small fish, medium fish, and so on…
so you make lots of special nets, and do the same game with each group as you isolate them and keep them from listening to any other.
which is why women will read about what men tare thinking from other women, but nto from the men themselves. 🙂
[edited for length by n-n]
nyo: “Goodness is innate in any healthy person and it does not need to be taught.”
My goodness! Do you really believe that?
People do not appear to become fully human in terms of good and evil except through experience of societies and language (either physical, such as with deaf people or other sorts of sign languages, or regular speech). Fortunately, almost all people on earth are embedded in societies and language. Otherwise it seems they would be as feral children, who are neither good nor bad in the conventional sense but something quite different (what’s more, for most feral children, we do not know the background of their early lives, so it’s not really a good experiment). Societies and language shape people in ways that are different from whatever “innate” means.
My point is, unless you marooned a bunch of newborns on a desert island and somehow they managed to raise themselves (which is prepostorous), we have no idea what’s “innate” in terms of good and evil. The best we can tell is that there are potentials for both in most people (some psychopaths seem—accent on the seem, because we don’t even really know about them—to be born with the propensity for good missing. So perhaps evil is the absence of the good impulse; in its absence, the evil impulse naturally takes over).
But good is only a propensity. Jewish thought, for example, as discussed in this thread, believes humans have impulses for good and evil, both of which are necessary for human life to survive and prosper—in fact, both are seen as necessary for the functioning of the world itself.
Philosophers and religious philosophers the world over have long struggled with the question of human nature, good, and evil—as, of course, have politicians (and, by the way, your rejection of all religions may have closed you off from some of the wisdom that religions do offer).
One of the biggest disagreements between left and right is about what people will do if generally left to their own devices (which of course is different from what’s “innate,” since society always comes into the picture). How much restriction is required? How much guidance, and who should be doing the guiding? How much intervention, and who should be doing the intervening? And what type of guidance and intervention?
You have made a strikingly, almost shockingly, simplistic and unproven statement.
Just because you believe it and have faith in it doesn’t make it so, however. In that way it is something like those movements you criticize so much and so often—a religion.
“For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections; for even the women did change the natural use into that which is against nature.”
The Historical Roots of “Political Correctness”
By Raymond V. Raehn
THIS is why i keep bringing up George….
bela kuhn and so on…
we are living a refined version of what they did, and no one is interested in any history, but fully invested in the imaginations they create as to why things are the way they are, in absence of any reality to spoil the ideas.
so they invented Political Correctness, and used POPULAR FRONTS like feminism to promote them.
feminism being the biggest and most powerful and connected in power to racists (which we cant call that) and others.
Gramsci has been mentioned here as well as his long walk…
however, ignored is the OTHER half. implementaion, which is what lukacs and later the frankfurt school was all about.
and so feminists and their 60s sexual revolution (since men cant have a sexual revolution since men don’t control the means of sex! women do), always casted eveyrthing into the NEW culture, the progressive culture, the new age, the unisex, the metroxexual, etc.
they knew that by working on women, and by changing how they regarded their world, they would voluntarily hate their own existence and so destroy culture and so the society, and so, make it possible for a communist type overthrow from a collapse created from such.
now here we are, at the brink of such a collapse, and brought by the women, lack of fecundity, and the new socialist kids created by schools in wich the new socialist woman had to turn her kids to since no one was home any more, everyone was making tax money for the socialists.
the more unhappy women were, and the more happy they saw their grandmother,s the more they sought to wreck it all… not return and conserve it.
as marx said, women were the key. as hitler said, women were the key. as stalin said, women were the key…
but as feminists said, you women have nothing without us, we will give you power by being your power for you…
what we call feminism, sex education, and all that.
lukaks called Cultural terrorism
we are afraid to have relationships like we had, opinions as we had. through CULTURAL TERRORISM, the opinions of people would be shaped.
why did i say to read about him?
because if i said that what you tholught was normal was a form of terrorism, yolu wouldnt listen to me.
but of course, by not reading about him, the ideas, the techniques, you dont realize that what NEO described those girls doing to that teacher.
what another said as to the fact you can go to jail if you ask someone out on a date.
thats CULTURAL TERRORISM.
and since its from the left
its RED TERROR or a part of it..
legal punishments of being cleaned out by an equal who didnt put in equally.
automatic loss of children in 95% of the cases
automatic guilt
and on and on…
thats the culture. women, law, schools, work, all bearing down in a form of red terror to mold new socialist man..
who will NOT oppose whats coming… he will be too afraid to stand up for whats right, now that he has been traied that he will be punished for standing up for what he thinks is right. (lifetime pavlovian training).
and the others, they will gladly give in as a form of schadenfreude revenge for women marginalizing them from their own society…
and sitting there smiling is hitler, stalin, mao, gramsci, lukaks, freidan, meade, kinsey, and lots and lots of others…
In 1923, Lukacs and other Marxist intellectuals associated with the Communist Party of Germany founded the Institute of Social Research at Frankfurt University in Frankfurt, Germany. The Institute, which became known as the Frankfurt School, was modeled after the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow. In 1933, when Nazis came to power in Germany, the members of the Frankfurt School fled. Most came to the United States.
we mention the franfurt school
we mention gramsci
but we wont respond to the man who put it all together in germany and who “set the stage for the coming hitlerian attempt at marxisms prophecies with stalin as a co conspiratore”
they saw how dangerous these men were, and they kicked them out!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
and our american left accepted them, loved them, gave them a home and a platform. put their SAME ideas in place.
and we are now right at the same point taht they brought germany.
not only are we following the socialism. the economics, the laws, the ideas of jews beign bad, and all that. but we are doing so with the same ideological preparation organization that did it there too!!!!!!!!!!!!!
[they came and settled at Columbia, and started the teachers college! so that all new teachers would end up being fellow travelers eventually! ]
you see. these MEN made all this up as a means to an end. and women, took it up and made it normal to us, just as normal as mom made apple pie, and thanksgiving… familiarity… FAMILY…
they could not get through the men to hurt their families
‘
so they got throuhg the women to do it, using their vanity… as was done in the bible they forgot and got angry at describing them that way, that was so sexist of the bible to describe how we let the others in and cause our families to suffer!
now we got rid of that, and then waht? we are being chases again out of eden.. (compared to the third world, US is as edenic as nothing else in history)
and yet, youc an read that history, and feminism, and the quotes of feminists.
and you cant connect the destruction of the patriarchy as a way to communist totalitarian as in hungary
and the destruiction of the patriarchy as a main goal of feminism, as a STATED way to a communist totalitarian future, which they claim is the answer for women
WOMEN sold us into state slavery…
WOMEN used cultural terrorism to shut up the men and any valid argument they may have.
and the end result, was the fulfillment of the plans of hitler, stalin gramsci, lukaks, mao, etc
take a bow ladies…
you won by beating up and betraying the people who loved you for a state who claimed to give you a BBD (bigger better deal).
and we ar so far along, that the men cant oppose at all, thats hate speech.
so unless the women get up, abandon communism, gramsci, social terrorism, etc..
there is only one outcome that will happen.
the question is not whether, but when
Critical Theorists of the Frankfurt School opened the door to the racial and sexual antagonisms of the Trotskyites. Leon Trotsky believed that oppressed blacks could be the vanguard of a communist revolution in North America. He denounced white workers who were prejudiced against blacks and instructed them to unite with the blacks in revolution. Trotsky’s ideas were adopted by many of the student leaders of the 1960s counterculture movement, who attempted to elevate the black revolutionaries to positions of leadership in their movement.
The student revolutionaries were also strongly influenced by the ideas of Herbert Marcuse, another member of the Frankfurt School.
Marcuse preached the “Great Refusal,” a rejection of all basic Western concepts, sexual liberation and the merits of feminist and black revolutions.
“How much restriction is required? How much guidance, and who should be doing the guiding?”
Neo, I think these questions can not be answered in abstractio, without consideration of the quality of society at hand. Different societies can require very different levels of restriction and guidance, since their ability to properly socialize their members are also very different. In some societies robbery and murder of innocent, slavery and kidnapping of people for ransom historically were a social norm. This is even true now for some of the most barbaric societies – Somali pyrates, Chechen bandits or Nigerian insurgents. Many Arab countries objectively require harsh tyrannies to keep their populations at bay. These people can not restrain themselves so they need external forces to do the job – provide some measure of civil peace and security. I just do not believe that the same level of policing would be adequate for Arab and Anglo-Saxon society, and it is up to each country do decide what form of government and necessary repression is optimal for them. Some societies can not do even this and need to be occupied to make them to be not too dandgerous to their neighbours and the world community as a whole.
and what does all that have to do with friedan, the college event where the women ruined that teacher. the lack of men in schools, etc?
When addressing the general public, advocates of Political Correctness — or cultural Marxism, to give it its true name — present their beliefs attractively.
It’s all just a matter of being “sensitive” to other people, they say.
They use words such as “tolerance” and “diversity,” asking, “Why can’t we all just get along?”
The reality is different. Political Correctness is Not at all about ”being nice,” unless one thinks gulags are nice places.
Political Correctness is Marxism, with all that implies: loss of freedom of expression, thought control, inversion of the traditional social order and, ultimately, a totalitarian state.
If anything, the cultural Marxism created by the Frankfurt School is more horrifying than the old, economic Marxism that ruined Russia.
At least the economic Marxists did not exalt sexual perversion and attempt to create a matriarchy, as the Frankfurt School and its descendants have done.
This short essay has sought to show one critical linkage, that between classical Marxism and the ingredients of the “cultural revolution” that broke out in America in the 1960s.
Of course, the action does not stop in the ‘60s; the workings of Frankfurt School are yet very much with us, especially in the field of education. That topic, and other present-day effects of Frankfurt School thinking, will be the subjects of future chapters in this book.
history actually makes what is happening make complete and easy to understand sense.
just as those who thought they knew Thomas Joseph Petters, or Bernard Madoff, have to get over.
that there is NOTHING to salvage in the lie… that all that you may have ethought about their goodness in the past, was only to faciliatate the badness in the present. (as they said they were going to do)
unlike Thomas Joseph Petters, or maddoff, there is over 100 years of written open plain english truth describing things!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Thanks, neo, for pointing out what should be obvious about human development. I think one big difference between utopians and realists in this regard is that utopians see infants as a mound of clay that is infinitely malleable, while anyone who has been around kids knows that they come into the world with a personality. The skill in parenting is to know how to effectively teach and socialize each one. The risk takers need to fall a few times to learn limits, and the overly cautious need a bit more encouragement and support. The parents should be the the main deciders because they have the best opportunity to read the child’s facial expression and body language before choosing a course of action. You can have basic rules, but the methods of applying them have to be adapted to each child.
i waited for a long time before commenting.
and i havent been commenting as much as of late
hopefully neo wont edit them down too much.
as each time this happens on thsi subject, we lose the history that defines how we got here!!!
its not her intent, but the end is stil stalinization since most are ignorant of such history (the leaders are not)
There is one incontrovertible lesson that EVERY successful single mother teaches their children with completeness, finality, and a total inability to refute
That her daughter need not a mate
and that her son, has no point to living if he cant find some selfish reason to do so apart from giving his all for a family. The son learns that he has no place or purpose outside of selfishness.
That no matter how hard he works, tries, puts in, does good, etc… he will never be needed enough that dumping him and taking what he offers as recompense for being with such a useless thing, isnt the norm.
Failure to launch is just no reason to launch…
why? for what?
would you flip a coin in which when you lose, you lose big, and for the future, and your future ability and future suffering of some other mate…
and when you win, you dont actually win, you only exist in a state of non loss until she changes her mind
if the women thought the world was hostile filled with men who loved them and wanted them and to make them happy and have partnerships. and thought it was a huge win to beat up and win a sex war against people who didnt want to fight.
wait till they meet the ones that dont care about them, actually treat them like objects and do not have such a huge sympathy and love for them that they would destroy their own society trying to make them happy.
anyone want to microwave the popcorn?
i am willing to crush the ice for the margarita’s…
Artfldgr…
Thank you for your efforts. I’d like to compile your comments – they ring so true. My first introduction to the underlying Communism was “Who Stole Feminism” by Suzanne Hoff Somers, and what you say just confirms and elaborates on her book. So much has been shuffled beneath the cover of time and politics.
I can’t help but wonder _why_. What is the goal? These people will be long dead or _are_ long dead – what is the goal? A perfect society? That has been Christianity’s goal as well…the difference being, I guess, that with the force of government much can be achieved that free will cannot achieve. The funny thing is that in the days when religious mores dictated behavior much more than it does today, the law generally enforced those religious standards. Now we have the religious standards torn down by laws, and no new standards to replace them. Yet. Except of course – political correctness.
Heck of a standard.
William Zebulon Foster was General Secretary of the Communist Party, USA
any of that sound familiar?
did you know any of thsi source of thinking for the ideas you turned over to decide what would make a part of you and what wouldnt?
it continues from foster
all this was in fosters book
Toward Soviet America
(New York, International Publishers, 1932)
that was about the time that he and Roger N. Baldwin, created the ACLU…
To which baldwin said “Communism is the goal.”
A useful idiot is someone who, while zealously promoting one cause, ends up advancing a very different one through stupidity, naivete or inattention. The useful idiot never sees the big picture.
Steven Yates
was he the professor of the class you were in neo?
there are LOTS of quotes like this from before 60s feminism and the boomer idiots…
they were part of the argumetns… but then after bella dodd, head of the communist party usa, took control of the teachers union, such was left out.
we were never told that an idea had its origin in stalinism… and if we questioned why history was now social studies, we were made to feel foolish.
now the mask is off.
you can read it all. its all there.
but will you believe their own words… unchanged, and unrequited, and unchanging for over 150 years…
and they still dont, and they oppse the history as if your lying…
but they and others never check it.
not until its too late…
Steven Yates earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy in 1987 at the University of Georgia and has taught the subject at a number of colleges and universities around the Southeast. He currently teaches philosophy at the University of South Carolina Upstate and Greenville Technical College, and also does a little e-commerce involving real free trade. He is on the South Carolina Board of The Citizens Committee to Stop the FTAA.
He is the author of Civil Wrongs: What Went Wrong With Affirmative Action (1994), Worldviews: Christian Theism Versus Modern Materialism (2005), around two dozen philosophical articles and reviews in refereed journals and anthologies, and over a hundred articles on the World Wide Web. He lives in Greenville, South Carolina, where he writes a weekly column for the Times Examiner
Artfldgr: no, not him.
There have been a great many such cases. And even at the time I knew feminism was a huge mover in what happened in the case I was privy to. It was very obvious.
Neo,
I missed this whole topic and thread because I was busy.
But BET you I know which word it was.
10 years ago I said the phrase “fellow coworkers” to a group of people.
A woman was outraged. She was offended. She said fellow was masculine. I referred to how it was used in the sentence and told her that it was an adjective that included everybody. I told her that it was offense on her part due to not knowing the definition of the word.
I gave up.
What saved me?
She liked me and I was young. If I had a position of power and was somebody she didn’t like… I would’ve been disciplined I’m sure.
And… I never got through to her.
Baklava: I am so sick of the awkward constructions “him/her” and “he/she” that I sometimes just throw PC caution to the winds and use the masculine pronouns! That’s how far gone I am.
sad it wasn’t obvious enough for the only people who could do something, to actually do something!
after so many years, the men have left the field since they always leave the field when the competition is not fair… and the act of competing itself means you lose.
they were made to exist and most never procreate
they were made to live with very little so that others could have more
and they have no place any more…
which is fine…
they are bailing out en masse…
and its WAY too late for any minimal action to woo them back to any kind of participation.
i know that most dont think so.
but most dont make the leap from the 60 year old baby boomber of today, and how bad they are compared to the grandparents.
and the grandchildren that will be in their stead in 20 years… illiterate, dysfunctional, cant have relationships, often vectors of disease, amoral, etc.
when th last of the great generation and the failures they made leave, whats left.
unless the ladies wake up
the end is a fixed thing…
unless you have a way to reverse 50 years of their games sovietizing law, schools, academies, broadway, etc…
the deal is done, which is why you are seeing the end game.
if it was not done… it would be like 20 years ago, and you or others rather, would be so quick to jump no me for telling them the valid history!
now, not so hard to jump..
but not angry enough to reverse, fix, and clean up.
with whites being 8% of the worlds population
and the other 92% wanting to exterminate us as the only way to save the world from oppression (male rapists, white male oppressors, Jewish, christian, etc), it doesn’t look good. does it?
NMP any more..
i tried for 30 years…
i was destroyed and left pretty broken
now i just want to have a bit of peace before i go
all my dreams are dead…
thanks to the aesthetes, the femnazis, their new law, the education system, the business administration, and all those law changes…
nothing left, not even hope…
and a lot of change coming…
maybe in another century we may recover…
but i doubt it since the process that they used is irreversible,.
cant change a pickle back to a cucumber ladies.
we passed he point of no return ages ago
and the only ones that can bring us out, are not interested.
so its NMP we are SOOL….
Mike Mc,
Some people don’t believe in the Fall; if Adam and Eve had a perfectly good will, why did they choose to disobey God? Perhaps even Adam and Eve were created with an evil inclination? Perhaps we are as they were in essence; and in existence, we have been given the required help, and God as a righteous judge, will acknowledge our individual circumstances.
Judaism doesn’t believe in “The Fall,” and Jews are the ones who have interpreted Genesis for much longer than Christians. In fact, it appears to me that the doctrine may exist to satisfy the necessities of a theological construct. Christianity seems to be more concerned with the theological ediface than the actual existent one. Therefore, a Christian is a Christian by right thinking; his behavior seems to come second.
Also, you have put your evidence in a form where no one would disagree with it, but it may support two contentions. The evidence that “all have sinned” (my understanding of your phrase “the actuality of every person ever born . . . ) stands for both the idea of original sin as well as yetzer hara. And so I don’t have contrary evidence, just another conclusion from the same evidence–one that I don’t hold too tightly.
There is a proverb I especially like: It is the glory of God to conceal a matter and the glory of kings to seek it out. A king is one who has a kingdom and who reigns there. Our behavior is our kingdom and right behavior leads to right thinking. Salvation, then, might just be open to all and not to just those limited to hearing the gospel.
I’m no expert on Augustine, but he does point to Satan as a necessary component of The Fall and he seems more to disagree than agree with Martin Luther on free will. His orginal sin seems quite the same as yetzer hara and later developments (especially the Reformation) in Christianity have parted the two.
Jewish parable about the evil inclination (yetzer hara):
Thank you, Neo. You are quite right. And within boundaries, the lower selves offer enrichment and enjoyment.
Reminds me of an original Star Trek episode where Captain Kirk gets separated into two halves. The “good half” lacked the industry and will of the “bad” half.
As Torah states in the Cain and Abel event, “Sin lies crouching at your door. . . but you can master it.”
neo
“innate” means…
You’re all over the place. If children are parent-less and feral then they’ll start again as we started as a species by and large, generation after generation, 100,000+ years of early death and misery until some order is hammered out of chaos.
We are innately good because it was a trait that was required to develop for our continued existence.
Human beings would have never have made it to Sinai to receive the supposed 10 Commandment — if we did’t already know that murder was wrong, lying, cheating, etc.. Note, the 10 Commandments doesn’t mention that genocide is wrong, or that being cruel to children is wrong, or that subjugating others and minorities is wrong maybe because those thing will soon be required of the story line. There will be time to apologize for those things later.
There is more dignity in knowing that love and caring for one another was a hard-won trait that required the brutality and miserable lives of untold generation, I think this is the truer story.
To believe it was given to us magically, without effort, cheapens it, it cheapen self-sacrifice in all it’s forms from loving your neighbor to the mystery of how some people give their lives for others, it’s a mystery but some of a road into our distant past can be seen by archeological evidence. We’re not as grand a species as we think we are, but our noble qualities comes from a necessity of working and living with others instead of killing each other.
I messed up me italics … fiddle sticks!
Nyomythus, you still have to explain what is known as “the problem of evil.” To wit, if people are innately good, how does evil come into the world? It is as accurate to say, by your reasoning, that people are innately evil and innately good, and that leaves us without much guidance.
On balance, Neo has the more nuanced understanding of human nature. Not surprising, and you would do well to listen to her.
nyomythus: methinks it’s you who’s “all over the place.”
My argument wasn’t about religion vs. atheism, or magic vs. science. It was about whether the trait “goodness” is innate. I spent a lot of time explaining that the propensity for good and for evil is part of humanity from birth, and that both are required for human existence. That’s exactly what that fable concerning the yetzer hara is about.
…how does evil come into the world?
Religion. Magical-thinking. Anti-Realism.
Religion infects us by saying that we are sick and commanded to be well. To both fear and love a divine master; the seeds of serfdom and totalitarianism. Gives us immoral doctrines to scape goat our responsibilities from a human sacrifice. Tells us to forgive those who would destroy us. And invents a everlasting torment even after death for those who don’t obey or think the wrong thoughts [and in the case here, the template/superimposition for PC speech — thought crime.]
In “To Life” Harold Kushner explains that G-d could create perfection, but he could not create goodness, which is a free will agent freely choosing to do what is right. According to Kushner, the ‘our’ in “let us make man in our image” means a statement by G-d to the animals to create man, a creation part animal and part G-d. Hence the lower and higher natures, of which not mastering the lower is evil. And some add that it was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and that mastering the desire to do good requires a more dedicated and knowledgeable effort than mastering the animal self. That might explain why the efforts of the Utopians seem peculiarly resistant to reason.
I despise Leftist so much because they pervert Liberalism. Their ethical standards are based on Anarchy, Socialism, Communism — all of these are miserable failures. Their ethics are based on grabbing power, in the name of Liberalism. With all I dislike about the general Religious Right [I’ve already made the distinction between this and the Extreme Ring Wing] I would rather see a Conservative victory in the House and Senate than to support what presently dominates the Left.
Curtis — magical thinking is not reason.
A genius agrees, in part, with you:
I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own — a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms.
(Albert Einstein, Obituary in New York Times, 19 April 1955)
Einstein also spoke out in favor of socialism and one world government, joined radical civil rights organizations, and defended the character of friends who were Communists.
So where was he right and where was he wrong?
I know I’m nowhere even remotely close on par with Einstein. I know that.
nyomythus: You confuse all religions with some subsets of religion that get your goat.
You write:
Are you aware, for example, that not a single one of your statements is true of Judaism? In fact, they are pretty dramatically incorrect. Judaism posits that human beings are not inherently evil; they have impulses towards good and evil and are given free will to choose their course of action. Nor does it suggest we forgive those who would destroy us; on the contrary! Nor is G-d considered a divine master whom we slavishly obey–he is ineffable and unknowable and represents (among other things) the good we strive for. Judaism is not concerned with the afterlife and hardly mentions it, and the idea of hell is not generally accepted (and even the small number who believe in it believe that it is most definitely not eternal).
I don’t think that a great many of the statements you made are true of Hinduism or Buddhism, either, nor of Unitarianism and certain other Christian denominations that are not literal and fundamentalist (and perhaps even some believers in the latter would tell you that you have somewhat misstated their beliefs—although the details of fundamentalist Christian beliefs are not something I know much about, so perhaps not).
I could go on, but you get the idea—or rather, you don’t get the idea. I wonder how much you actually know about the religions of the world, except that you hate them.
nyomythus, your religious education is woefully inadequate. Perhaps you are an escapee from some backwoods cult based on a perversion of Calvinism. It would explain a great deal.
In every generation our civilization endures invasion of barbarians. We call them children. Are they innately evil or good is irrelevant and obscure. What is certain that they are barbarians: selfish, agressive, ignorant about culture and moral and need a great deal of taming, moral and religious instruction to make socially acceptable and well-behaving persons from this natural substrat. That is what for families exist. In no other setting socialization can be adequate. I always can tell day-care attended persons from home grown ones, even when they at their forties. The first are often more vital, easy to communicate, but somewhat paganish, with underdeveloped personality. The second are more prone to intraspection, self-awareness, philosophical, and self-restrained.
Well, take the word “God” out of the ten commandments for those who are offended by the concept of a supreme being other than self. Replace it with whatever floats your boat, as far as a higher level to attain. It is my understanding that thousands of new laws are written every year at local, state, and national levels. The ten commandments still cover them all.
Proverbs, too. Knowledge and wisdom, and the difference between the two.
Perhaps, nyomythus, Einsten had much more knowledge than wisdom.
Knowledge is knowing where our nation is going at this time, and understanding the end result. Wisdom? Lock and load.
Who are the real literalist and fundamentalist? I don’t personally know any Christian who takes scripture strictly for its denotation and never its connotation. Atheist and haters of organised religion are the only ones i see who can’t get past a literal and fundamentalist application of scripture.
I have to be creative with my name because I’m blocked… :\
some subsets… you mean the supreme principles, the supreme principles, big difference. I was a bit frivolous to only cite the one religion I am most familiar with, but you have been a bit frivolous too.
The corollary of my singular example is that all the relevant religions are based on early human prescriptions for living, when advancements in science [as a discoverer of the natural world] and literature [as the moral teacher] and Liberal Capitalism/Democracy [as how we govern ourselves] etc. demonstrate that we can do much much better. Judaism, the religion that says our God is the one true God who gave us this land. It belongs to us. Jewish people have always lived in what is today Israel, some people refer to it as Palestine, I call it Israel because that is what it is today. Also claiming a right by God are those who say Allah is the one true God who gave us this land. The religious solution is Apocolypse, an end to the miserable hard work of living and advancing knowledge. This is what makes a peaceful solution impossible in the region, because there will always be zealots on one side or the other who will make peace impossible and living unbearable. Hindus, the one’s who great leader, Gandhi, partitioned India in the name of making peace with the Muslims, thus binding the two for millennia’s to come in conflict [Islam is especially troublesome as we know] — Gandhi who said of the Jews in Germany in the 1930’s, “Turn the other cheek.” Buddhist, who today in Tibet are killing other Buddhist because they are the wrong types of Buddhist, or the Buddhist who inspired the Kamikaze suicidal attacks of the pacific war, or made Hirohito a living God … perhaps the same inspiration that gives The Kim-sung family the right to claim the same divine status. Unitarianism, Quakers, Mormonism, and other liberalized denominations are transformative and moving in the right direction, but as an establishment, they make no sense to me. Liberal Christianity makes no sense because I do not see how one can choose what they wish from the word of God, or change it to fit their needs; live by faith and the Book and you are a sincere believer or you are not. It is an entrepreneurial venture from the main business. All of them prescribe some dietary, sexual, speaking/thinking prohibitions/specifications. It is this latter one, the one on what we can and cannot think, what we can and cannot say, which I think is the authoritative inspiration for Leftist politically correct speech.
SteveH,
Yet the irony is that it is muslims who take their ‘scripture’ literally, and are given a free pass by “atheists and haters of organized religion.” Such atheists are the first to exclaim that the Bible and the koran both have violent tracts (the moral relativism argument). But, again, one group takes those violent passages of their ‘holy’ book and applies them to the modern world, and the other group does not take their holy book’s violent passages to heart and act on them. Funny that.
SteveH,
Yet the irony is that it is muslims who take their ’scripture’ literally, and are given a free pass by “atheists and haters of organized religion.”
Not from me. I rail against other atheist who make these sort of moral relativist arguments. Christianity has clearly made light years of progress, not thanks to original doctrine but thanks to skeptics and other liberalizing forces who have pushed back over centuries.
…I mean RickZ
nyomythus: I checked on my blocked names, and yours is not there. Nor do I recall ever blocking you, although that could always happen in the future, based on my warning to you the other day. If you are blocked in some way, it is most likely the spam filter, which does weird things that are out of my control.
Your suggestion that I have been frivolous here is a sort of tit for tat after you suggest that you have been frivolous. I have not been frivolous in addressing you on these issues; on the contrary, I am extremely serious. Nor were you frivolous; you were merely very incorrect and ignorant in your assertions.
As far as the re-establishment of the Jewish nation goes, there are many people (and, in fact, the majority of the founders of Israel) who were proponents of it based on historical origins (including a historical presence there and in many nearby Arab lands that has been continual), and recent history (the Holocaust in Europe and the fact that Jews were trapped there with no place to go). These particular claims, which were determinative, were based on historical nationhood (the Jewish people rather than the Jewish religion, since Judaism is one of the rare religions that has always been both a nation and a religion), rather than religion itself. In fact, many of the leading founders of Israel were atheists.
This is not to say that the religious didn’t also agreed for the most part (although reform Jews less so in the religious sense, and there were also groups of religions Jews who were against Israel’s founding iin 1948).
The Muslim focus on the same lands came late in the game, as a reaction and a strategy. Although they did have a religious presence there, Israel is most definitely not a central area or central part of their religion, such as Mecca and Medina are. Their religious focus on Israel is very much an afterthought, accentuated in order to highlight their secular claims to the land.
The land of Israel and the resultant controversy over it is a religious one, to be sure, but it is also a national one, like any other national controversy over lands that were partitioned.
But the points you attempted to make about religion in general, the ones that I was addressing in earlier comments addressed to you on this thread, had nothing to do with any of that. I was specifically addressing assertions you were making about religions in general, in which you had displayed your ignorance on matters that seemed central to your hatred of religion.
There is no question that there are religious issues that have led to strife and bloodshed, narrowness and persecution, around the world. But to condemn religion wholesale for them is shortsighted and narrow, IMHO, because religion does much good as well—and, after all, atheists and agnostics perpetrate strife and bloodshed and narrow thinking, too; it is something that seems inherent in humanity, not religious belief.
My more basic point is that, if you hate religion in general, at least study it enough to know what you’re talking about. You do not seem to have done so.
nyomythus: Oh, and by the way, science has shown it can do better? Give me a break! Science is as susceptible to prejudice and misuse and hubris as anything. Think of all the “scientists” who supported Nazi racial theories, and all the doctors who assisted with experiments in the death camps, and those who cooperated with the Soviet perversions of science, or who blamed parents for making their kids autistic and schizophrenic, or on and on and on.
What you criticize in religion is not was makes it unique, it is what makes it part and parcel of humanity. Impulses toward war do not go away if religion goes away. Look at the venom on the far left among atheists, see how they want to “improve” us all (at the point of a gun, if necessary), and it will disabuse you of any notion there is something especially bad about religion in that sense. Communism was an atheistic religion that killed many millions. Nazism used Christianity at times but was not of it, and was antithetical to it, and look how nice the Nazis were. Quakers, as you seem to realize, could not be a basis for the entire world; the strong would kill the weak, and Quakers depend on the protection of others from this (I’ve written several pieces here on Quakers, and have studied Quaker beliefs in some depth).
Your thinking is very shallow, nyo.
Think of all the “scientists” who supported Nazi racial theories, and all the doctors who assisted with experiments in the death camps, and those who cooperated with the Soviet perversions of science, or who blamed parents for making their kids autistic and schizophrenic, or on and on and on.
Evil people will be evil people with our without a God, do think that’s news to me? Some people [scientist or priest or whoever] don’t have a conscious … some understood that they can be absolved from bad behavior. … i wonder why they would think this?
Your thinking is very shallow, nyo.
…cheap and transparent.
nyo: saying your thinking is shallow is not cheap. Your thinking is shallow. And if it’s not your thinking that’s shallow, please learn to express the depth of your actual thinking better.
And what do you mean by writing that my charge was not only cheap but “transparent?” Usually a person uses that word to either mean “clear,” (which I doubt you mean), or to mean that the other person has some obvious and ulterior motive or agenda rather than merely making the point. Actually, I’m merely making the point that your thinking is shallow—because your thinking in this thread is shallow.
And it was in response to this statement of yours that I pointed out the pitfalls of science as a guide to human action:
You responded to my pointing out that science is no great guide to human moral decisions by writing:
I really don’t know whether it’s news to you. But at any rate it was not the point I was making when I brought up the examples of scientists gone sadly wrong. The point I was making is that there is no evidence that advancements in science offer a better prescription for living than religion does.
By the way, religion today may be based on “early thinking” about these things. But most religions have not stood still. For example, to take Judaism again, many people are only familiar with what Christians call the Old Testament. Judaism has continued to change and develop through the long tradition of argument, explanation, and extension of thought known as the Talmud. And Jewish religious thought and interpretation continues to be refined and changed up to the present day.
And that’s just one tiny example.
I’m not as bright as most in here. But I know this much. I knew artfldgr would be vindicated in time, as he has been. I said it over a year ago. As more and more of the leftist agenda unfolds, I feel he did not climb high enough, nor yell loud enough.
And I repeat myself from a comment above. Lock and load. And as the saying goes, hold your friends close, but hold your enemies closer. What is going on in our great nation is not new, but it is definitely ramped up and accelerating at an ever accelerating rate. Those of that ilk have crossed a line now, and have no choice but to keep pushing. They have been uncovered, or uncovered themselves. They aren’t my friends, they aren’t my neighbors, and I don’t want them in my America.
The water is beginning to boil, yet the frog stays put.
Curtis
THEY did not go against God…
Eve decided to trick Adam so she could have him join her in her going against god… and another tricked eve using the same mental verbal forms as they use today.
adams first wife, lilith was a pip too..
and just like eve, today’s women have turned against their mates in war (and find those that love them easy to beat), and are ushering us out of the closest thing to Eden in empirical history (for people other than aristocracy)
kind of funny, but some voice gave them knowlege of a new right and a new wrong. this knowlege was predicated on bringing us back to eden by sending us out of eden to be animals again…
nyomythus, let go of your prejudices and bigotry. You don’t need them. Open your mind. You still get to use reason and apply judgment. Religion is an emergent human phenomenon, if you like. That it survives in various forms is testimony to its usefulness. You needn’t fall into a literalistic fundamentalism that accepts any of them in their own words, or any assertion that any of them have only one interpretation and meaning.
Love hearing what people have to say.. and no one gets slandered for their opinion! GLAD to find a blog I enjoy. Backlinks