Category Archives: Philosophy

FTAC – Syrian Wrap

15 Monday Aug 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Middle East, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Politics, Religion, Russia, Syria

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The “Syrian Knot” binds to itself two kinds of power in the world:

Political Absolutism (Moscow) v Democratic Distribution of Power (Washington)

Behind that contest:

–Syria’s drought and declining agriculture (leading to protests in 2011), which in a good world would be less important, but for a dictatorship, getting rid of people one doesn’t really care about or care for in the first place seems pretty convenient.

–Dissolving of the Soviet 25 years ago (December 26, 1991), for which the Soviet had prepared in the 1980s, and which Putin has effectively dropped the communist ideology but sustained the architecture of the earlier organization of the state, i.e., secret police (FSB), central leader (himself), and a privileged class (the “Oligarchs”). Possibly (probably), Russian barbarism predates the czars, and the combination of very dirty deeds (like bombing refugee camps) and high culture (like the concert in Palmyra) have centuries of historical precedent (that assertion is something I want to research and better anchor).

In 2011, and in a quick exchange about positions, Obama and Putin played what in chess would be an opening gambit. Obama had offered the potentially democratic Russian state a “reset” and Putin handily declined in favor of producing a neo-imperial update on the Soviet model. The KGB became the FSB. The invention of the PLO became the continuation of relationships with Hamas, Hezbollah, PFLP, and others.

***

The cultivating and promoting of anti-Semitism in the world is a feudal-medieval ruse to deflect fault on the part of leadership toward the Jews.

Why the Jews?

The Jews have been doing battle with “political absolutism” since the humbling of Pharaoh — thanks to God — and their turning their backs on the same with a “mixed multitude”, i.e., others who shared the Jewish abhorrence of the tyrant. What follows about 4,000 years later is “uptake” by others, i.e., the Romans who turn to Judaism and later differentiation and expansion of subscription (which brings wealth) as Christians. Several hundreds years after that, Muhammad borrows from the Jews, makes himself central in access to God or the Idea of God, and we arrive about here with a long sorry history of medieval warring over “political absolutism” and the basis for it (e.g., “divine right”; “dictatorship of the proletariat”; etc.)

With dictators, you know my rule: “Different Talks — Same Walk!”

Now the “digest” version of the Jews and Russia —

Once Rome had burned, raped, and sacked Jerusalem, the Jews became everybody’s “guests” . . . so come forward a thousand-plus years and find the Jews, a People laden with laws from the time of Moses, a “problem” (more of an opportunity) — an alien enterprise, strangers in a strange land — to Russian Christians who could and would leverage anti-Semitism into the customary theft and murder.

Look into the history of the Cossacks and the Pale of Settlement.

Then go forward again into the Soviet enterprise and its repression of religion (“the opiate of the people,” said Karl Marx). Russian Jews found themselves trapped for decades in Russia by the forces of Soviet exploitation and possession. When it became possible to leave that atmosphere en masse, they did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Jews_in_Israel

Along comes Putin, and Putin makes it his mission to “defend” the speakers of Russian — “Russophones” — wherever they may be found. The ploy excuses aggression (as in Ukraine). With hundreds of thousands of the Jews of Russia repaired to Israel, he knows also to become modern in this fashion and stand against anti-Semitism!

Post-Holocaust, post-Hitler, what Russian leader would not do the same?

Let’s add back ISIS — Assad’s incubated horror — and “Islamic Terrorism” in general and its effects: when a mosquito pricks the skin, the skin swells. The body responds to in the insult. Of course, the hand slaps or slaps away the mosquito (or the bee or wasp), and it starts repairs against infection and against any poisons delivered.

So it is that each terrorist act encourages resurgent nationalism where it takes place.
Migration has similar effects: people want to close their doors seal their boundaries, and fend off those most in need.

It could be said that nature is cruel — or here with political nature that Putin, Assad, and Khamenei are cruel, but like the cowardly fireman who sets the fire and later offers to put it out (!), these have created a condition and perception in many of the west that they can handle ISIS — and they may, having incubated that enterprise to glorify themselves in battle against the same.

Oh brother oh sister — Israel is a precious jewel of a small state representing the character of a people who turned their backs on the idea that any man, including Moses, could represent God on earth. For the Jews, God is indeed greater, and while Moses gets recognition, prayer is always to God, not to Moses. That separation changes the politics, and when Titus of Rome destroys Jerusalem, the priests take the hit (because they failed!) and the scholars and teachers rise in the esteem of the community and the great conversation about ethics and morality comes to represent the Jews. Old Jewish wisdom . . . that’s just my opinion and not very good scholarship but something that might hold up to scrutiny.

Putin has melded many modern ideas into his own medieval atmosphere and the surface of related political theater — “Assad vs The Terrorists” — works for most who simply haven’t the time to examine (as I have) the complexity of the conflicts displayed or experienced.

Israelis don’t like being murdered by incited teenagers creeping into their children’s bedrooms — and there is Putin the Strong fending off Chechnya rebels and applying Russia’s most advanced weapons to the same once they have been channeled to ISIS in Syria.

The “west” has moved around Syria in its responding to post-Soviet neo-Imperial Russia in Syria and Crimea and elsewhere, but, give the devil his due, Putin has worked to weaken the European Union (the British vote on BREXIT seems to me an example of success with that) and NATO (Erdogan’s own embrace of despotism in Turkey accompanied by a go-ahead from Russia on the the “Turkish Stream” pipeline project seems also to affirm Putin’s influence and power) — and he has succeeded in partially renewing — or affirming — our world hosts immensely powerful financial and political elites — medievalism in the modern world.

Post-Soviet Russia saw two old clients — Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi — swept away into history, but with Assad in Syria and the way to Iran potentially laid bare, the dictators have taken their stands.

Would nature have forced mass (economic) migration from Syria?

Possibly.

But nature would not have incubated ISIS (by selecting other targets for bombing and combat earlier in the war) to later aggrandize and glorify the “abilities” of the “strong men”.

The conversation continued, always a few more words, a little more distillation of old observations and new ideas.

In the Garden of Eden story in the Torah, God introduces to Adam and Eve human awareness, self-awareness, and conscience.

It’s all right there at the beginning, i.e., a statement about our own nature — and it’s a good statement.

It’s not the Christian statement; it’s not Muhammad’s statement.

It’s a mysterious statement about the two that God will send off into human life and they will have to work to eat and wrestle with some thorny realities in the way of their own survival.

The dictators — caliphs, emperors, kings, sultans down through the ages — often bend the Divine to their own will, and then they use that power that comes from similar words and technologies in the worst imaginable ways.

The good seem either not powerful enough, proactive enough, or smart enough, frankly, to unmake the tyrant before he has got his hands on a serous treasury and a willing military.

Some could argue that the evil is as much our nature too.

I don’t know the answer to that.

I know that Syria represents perhaps the darkest tragedy of our time, as I believe it has been fashioned by Moscow, Damascus, and Tehran as a complete theater of politics and war.

______

BackChannels had a Muslim conversational partner for this post and one who advocated for Israel against anti-Semitic anti-Zionist smears launched in an advocacy site for the Syrian Revolution.  Questions were raised about Israel’s nationalist politics, links with Russia, and associated anti-Islamism.  Over the years, BackChannels has come to see Moscow promoting the amplification of political sentiment into internal conflicts beyond its borders.  Color codes “Red”, “Red-Green”, “Red-Black” apply to the reinvigorating of “old comrade networks” and the Islamic and Black Power politics that feed Black Lives Matter, Palestinian Solidarity, International Solidarity, Code Pink, and so many others nourished by the still moving inertia of old Soviet disinformation and related inspiration.

As Putin and Russo-Iranian politics have also promoted Far Right politics (Marie Le Pen in France, Jobbik in Hungary), the political color code “Brown” for nationalists and national socialists also applies.  It’s perfectly sensible that any space attacked by an alien force, conveniently “Islamist” these days, including “Islamist” against Muslims worldwide, will rally around its flag, and that whether it be in London or Islamabad.

A third force — i.e., a Moscow — helping to make that attack happen (by incubating ISIS; by using war to create conditions for mass migration irksome to one’s more true target regions and states) is something else: call it “diplomacy by other means” — and means generally beyond the public ken, for the public rarely has time and space for doing more than adjusting its perceptions according to major headlines.

Fast Link Reference

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/05/15/cold-war-cold-struggle/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/02/09/ftac-on-why-the-jews/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2015/10/02/syria-assad-vs-the-terrorists-how-isis-defends-assad/

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2016/05/06/ftac-russias-not-so-appealing-turn-in-syria/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Jewish_pogroms_in_the_Russian_Empire

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990s_Post-Soviet_aliyah

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/war-in-syria-russia-s-rustbucket-military-delivers-a-hi-tech-shock-to-west-and-israel-a6842711.html – 1/29/2016

https://www.oilandgaseurasia.com/en/news/erdogan-turkey-russia-agree-jointly-implement-turkish-stream – 8/15/2016

http://vladimirets.org/pale_of_settlement.htm

http://www.newsweek.com/us-accuses-assad-aiding-islamic-state-through-airstrikes-338582

https://yannayspitzer.net/2012/07/22/a-new-map-of-jewish-communities-in-the-russian-empire/

 

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FTAC – Adjusting Normative Global Values – Religious v Secular Societies

12 Friday Aug 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Politics, Religion, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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The promotion of conflict seem to me inseparable from the invention and promotion of cultural, political, religious, and social discriminators, and those who stand to gain in prestige or wealth by leveraging such differences will certainly do so in the cause of their own aggrandizement, messianic delusion, and glorification. Note, please, the Putin promotes both Far Left and Far Right political organizations and personalities aligned roughly “Red-Black-Green (old “comrade networks”, Black Power movements, and Islamists) AND Brown, i.e., “New Nationalists” like Donald Trump and Viktor Orban, although Trump may not wish to nor be able to pervert constitutional basics as Orban has done (for himself) in Hungary.

Writing here as “an American of Jewish descent” and somewhere along the spectrum of “secular humanists”, the recognition of the world’s 7,000 living languages, each representing beliefs and spirituality — or none — in the process of using sound and signal to address in some place the challenges of living with the earth and with one another — I should think the retreat from too zealous a passion for one belief a part of “live and let live”.

I wouldn’t incline as the Soviets toward doing away with religion but rather promote tolerance for beliefs embraced privately and confined to behaviors and practices within each faith community. In essence, it’s that outlook that produces the modern multi-cultural, multi-religious open and secular democratic societies.

The sustained presence of anti-Semitism in the world and the possible emergence of either latent or new anti-Semitic movements involves the presence of the medieval world in the 21st Century.

Putin’s post-Soviet neo-imperial revanche in Russia has reemphasized medieval values certain to produce “wars of all against all” that then may contribute to his appearance as a strong force for stability — he’s the fireman who sets the fire and then shows the world how to put it out.

It’s very difficult for the general public to perceive that story, but I believe, with cause, that the projection of a Total Political Theater is and has been what Moscow has been about for generations to, perhaps, centuries. Today, it remains hampered by its own medieval urges — and to put a cap on that, one may note the revival of the Russian Orthodox Church, which is not a bad thing but part of a larger package in the Kremlin’s worldview.

The modern soul would rather religion persisted and thrived with both a sense of prudent social constraint and volunteered boundaries. Most modern people recognize there are many things between the person, family, and community and God — or the possession of a compassionate and ethical happiness — but the same want for a socially healthy sense of community and personal boundaries.

Must couples, for example, hetero or homo, display affection in public? How intensely? How much “signal” is needed or wanted? To what end?

There are a lot of questions like that, and because we really can’t solve them species-wide, it’s better to go about our business privately but with awareness also of the impact our behavior may have on the earth and on others.

______

Hitchens only found out he was Jewish by birth when his mother died. It didn’t change how he felt about the improbable existence of God, but I believe it made his writer friend Martin Amis a little jealous.

Posted to YouTube 4/17/2013.

The above post was prompted by a Muslim’s complaint about having atheism and secularism foisted on the same by such luminaries as Dawkins, Geller, Hitchens, and others.

BackChannels simply hews to its observation of Putin’s re-medievalization project in Russia and attached to former Soviet client states, political enterprises (like the PLO), contested spaced and, as with Turkey, old enemies.  In essence, Russia’s president wants to keep playing old movies in realpolitik in realspace.  It behooves the open democracies of the west — or their constituencies, from the least informed on the streets to the ivory tower set — to reconsider what it took to produce (and shame on Brexit) peace and prosperity x political integrity, rule of law, and functioning and reliable courts across Europe and North America.

Moscow and its partners have raced backwards — of course, in their heads forward — into the worst of medieval absolutism.

Syria should today serve as an example of how that world works and what it looks like.

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FTAC – A Note on Global Consciousness and Conscience

04 Thursday Aug 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, International Development, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Politics

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There is no justice.

There is money.

There SHOULD be conscience, principles, virtues, and values tempering HOW we earn / produce money and apportion its spending, but nature has no rules and languages within which we culturally define and suspend ourselves may offer or encourage awful options for channeling behavior.

Juxtapose the Glory of the Sochi Winter Olympics with the then Early Destruction of Syria.

For the tyrant and the civilization represented: what’s wrong? Where’s the problem?

The mass murdering of challengers and rivals confirms power.

That’s natural, isn’t it?

Of course, it’s not the only way to go, and the developed open societies and diversified economies of the west have proven that.

Perhaps our experience of the world only picks up the reflection of the character of its global business and political elites.

The talk-about inspiration for the post was a piece by Kevin Sieff on Luanda, Angola appearing in The Washington Post, August 2, 2016: “An oil boom made it the most expensive city in the world.  Now it’s in crisis.”  The poster had complained about petro-state corruption and celebrity perfidy in accepting gigs at private parties paying $2 million in fee.

(Perhaps BackChannels and its editor should take a break right about here — and both may but will forge on another moment).

Who is to say that states from Angola to Burma to Moscow to Tehran should not be feudal or medieval in character?

Should there not be dictators — or other singular powerful personalities — who build worlds around themselves and produce spectacles — in Syria, an entire theater of politics and war — for others?

The “responsive and responsible” governments of democratic open societies (of the west — but, really, anywhere similar ideals and related practices prevail), don’t just obtain money and spend it capriciously or selfishly, and while they certainly produce in their constituencies people who would do that, they may also demand greater virtue on the part of their own business and political elites.

In the modern atmosphere, economic development and urban and rural planning PLUS the integration of public and private interests in development becomes so common and transparent as to become invisible to most people most of the time.

The modern Everyman need not worry about roads and sewers, water pipes, electrical supply, and communications infrastructure  and all other such basic building blocks because all contribute some (and many do work in related industries) all of the time.

Boom-and-bust has always been the rule for mining towns and “petro states” but more responsible spending around them may also ease conditions when prices fall or the lode done run out.

The modern communities of Democratic open societies get a very different effect from that kind of broadened cooperation and inclusion.

Posted to YouTube October 20, 2014.

Result: no “ghost towns” — real ones or sets — that aren’t productive.

And fun!

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FTAC – Ejection of the Archaic Past

22 Sunday May 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, A Little Wisdom, Epistemology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Philology, Philosophy, Politics, Religion, Syndicate Red Brown Green

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The clip dates from 2013. I take note of the time because we’re in changing times where we may not be able to observe change — by what we’re able to see, we’re too limited — but if it’s taking place, there should be fewer of these clips available this year than there may have been in 2013.

______|____________|___

Archaic-Past | Restive Middle | Modern Muslim Reform Movements

That “archaic past” can no longer do any real thing for anyone except enrich its handful of malignant and piratical leaders. It’s going to go away, visible if by way of combat with the al-Qaeda Typicals, invisible if by way of unspoken individual and popular rejection. Out with the old. The new has many channels forward, including a conservative aspect, which I find convoluted but . . . what works might work.

Regarding Corbyn and the Far Out Left — http://www.the-american-interest.com/…/the-derangement…/

This is the 25th Anniversary Year of the Dissolving of the Soviet, and The Phantom of the Soviet wanders around in such persons as Corbyn, who should be also part of the “archaic past”.

Relevant on my blog: https://conflict-backchannels.com/syndicate-red-brown-green/

Those “al-Qaeda Typicals”, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the organizations and persons that support them are today readily visible to the public.  Perhaps still tender and less visible are organizations like the Muslim Reform Movement and publications like New Age Islam.

BackChannels’ question: has the modern world with its “math, science, and technology” mania passed the age of miracles?

The religion of the future will be cosmic religion. It will transcend personal God and avoid dogma and theology. - Albert Einstein

Is new scripture possible?

Are new exegeses based on old scripture possible and useful?

Over the years on this blog, and with such off-hand gems as “anthropolitical psychology”, one may look into the future with clinical observation and certainty, which may or may not be spiritually satisfying.

What does it mean to observe and say our global inventory of languages stands at fewer than 7,000 living languages, we are losing several every year, and each represents through sound and other signal a distinct way of living with others in proximity and with the land on which The People have been cultured?

Is that all there is?

Could be.

It could be magnificent as well if we continue to find God, Nature, and The Universe awesome beyond our comprehension.

Related: http://thomasberry.org/

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Books – Reading Recommended – Maslow

28 Sunday Feb 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, A Little Wisdom, Books, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Psychology

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An indisputable fact about the work of A. H. Maslow is that it gives off sparks — very nearly all of his writing gives off sparks.  An attempt to understand this by thinking of him as simply a psychologist would probably prove futile; he must first be thought of as a man, and then as one who worked very hard at psychology, or rather, who rendered his growth and maturity as a man into a new way of thinking about psychology.  This was one of his major accomplishments — he gave psychology a new conceptual language.

Geiger, Henry.  “Introduction: A. H. Maslow”.  P. xv.  The Farther Reaches of Human Nature.  New York: The Viking Press, 1971 (Second Printing, 1972). 

While for some, life may be about the balance of forces involved in charting individual courses; for the Moslowans, life may be more about becoming, and that by way of the development of an authentic person (on the inside) and struggle with the world to enjoy that person and the related engagement with, indeed, the external forces of the world.

Of all the books encountered in the life of the BackChannels editor, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature produced the greatest hope and longing and it reset the editor’s personal course — and a great course it has been — entirely.

Readers from every walk in politics and religion may find the journey taken with Maslow perfectly universal in appeal and practicality.

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Rediscovery, Renewal of Devotion – Bederman’s _Back to the Ethic: Reclaiming Western Values_

11 Thursday Feb 2016

Posted by in 21st Century Feudal, Books, Philology, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Religion

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BTE_Front_Cover_BSP2_120915_jpg_not_reducedBederman, Diane Weber.  Back to the Ethic: Reclaiming Western Values.  Canada, Mantua Books, 2015.

The belief in an ethical God makes it possible over time, to move from a society of tribes to a society of many tribes, held together with commonly shared beliefs, stories, and traditions, because this God demands that we care for the other, the stranger, because we know how a stranger feels; we were once strangers in a strange land (see Exodus 23:9) (p. 60).

Canadian author Diane Weber Bederman, a friend of BackChannels’ editor, has put together a brief compelling volume about the origins of compassion, empathy — a pervasive thoughtfulness most of all — in contemporary western thought by way of Biblical language and lore and the interaction of the Judeo-Christian vision of God and man as woven through the western experience.

Although composed as defense and reminder of western values, it may turn out the right book at the right time as regards broadening the channels for the appreciation of a number of aspects of cultural and intercultural survival:

Ethical monotheism is not the enemy.

Belief in the ethical God of the Christians and Jews counterbalances egoism and the idolization of another human being.  I cannot place belief in any man perfecting himself.  The evidence is overwhelmingly to the contrary.  I wrote about that earlier, in my chapter “The Snake Tempted Me,” about the Enlightenment and the rise of secularism.  More people have died from wars that embraced secular fundamentalist propaganda than have been killed in wars based on religious differences.  Encyclopedia of Wars authors Charles Phillips and Alan Axelrod document the history of recorded warfare.  From their list of 1,763 wars, only 123 are classified as involving a religious cause; these wars account for less than 7 percent of all wars and less than 2 percent of all people killed in warfare.  It is estimated that more than 160 millions civilians were killed in genocides in the twentieth century alone, with nearly 100 million killed by the Communist states of USSR and China.  Think of Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Kim Jong-il, and Adolph Hitler. 

Why do we allow ourselves to give up our free will and instead by swayed by others?  Why do we so easily forget God’s admonition, “Beware of letting your heart be seduced; if you go astray, serve other gods and bow down to them . . . you will quickly perish”? (Deuteronomy 11:16-17) . . . . (p. 101)

Bederman is right and rightly quotable, page after well researched and thoughtfully written page, for her book reminds of basic principles and tenets that form the bulwark of a healthy and productive western society.

The tour begins close to the thought, “Before ethical monotheism and the revelation at Mount Sinai, there was little concept of the intrinsic value of a human being.  There was little concept of the sacredness of human life” (p. 11).

Given the spectacle created by dictator and “eye doctor” Bashar al-Assad in Syria with the help of Putin, Khamenei, and Baghdadi, one cannot discount Bederman’s observation of history and its present corollaries, for conscience, empathy, kindness, human rights, freedom, and love itself may not be givens in human affairs but transmitted through the oral and written traditions in language of a civilization born of suffering beneath the words, whips, and yokes of tyrants.  For that, the Judeo-Christian experience has been (from Pharaoh to Hitler) immense.

Where Bederman quotes Thomas Paine — “Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man” — she precedes the presentation of it with an observation drawn from commentary on the God of the Torah:

There is a commentary in one of the many books about the Bible that imagines God’s response to the happiness of the Israelites after the drowning of the Egyptians.  God hears the angels singing and celebrating His great victory.  But instead of rejoicing weeps and rebukes them.  “Why are you singing?”  He asks.  “Why are you rejoicing?  The Egyptians are My children, too, and they are dead, drowned in the sea.  There is no cause for you to sing.  Their deaths are not to be celebrated” (p. 38).

True, and to BackChannels’ mind memory of a passage in an old Haggadah serves up the same lesson.

We — of the Jews and the “mixed multitudes” that joined the flight from Pharaoh, of “the west”, of the world’s democratic open societies, of the realms of the considerate and lawful (as opposed to those more familiar with capricious justice) — don’t rejoice at death, not even the death of mortal enemies.

As a philosophy of ethics, Bederman takes on abortion, utilitarianism, geneticism, too accepting a multiculturalism, and, of course, moral relativism: “If ethics have no extrinsic or intrinsic substantive base, then ethical decisions will be made by those in power who can impose their beliefs on others” (p. 75).

Again, page after page, Back to the Ethic proves a rich and thoughtful reading, one also at times personal as when Bederman encounters her own passage through hell in the form of a costly medical misdiagnosis and the path she takes in response to it. However, the author does not dwell in the region of her own mortality but rather in the realm of the universal and its reflection in scripture and the defense through time of Judeo-Christian belief in the structuring of the western tradition and today’s compassionate, democratic, open, and most vibrant societies.

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FTAC – Ethnolinguistic Cultural and Religious Survival – The Greatest Conversation

06 Sunday Dec 2015

Posted by in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Philology, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Religion

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Reminder: our species’ inventory of living languages stands at about 7,000; our inventory of most subscribed religions stands at about 16 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_religious_groups — and then one may get into counting sects and cults in any number. Each package –language and religion + language or religion — represents some human way of adjusting to a limited (!) ecological or social environment — they ways of a people in its place (a good reference for that thought might be Vine Deloria Jr.’s book _God is Red_).

Add some borrowing, from Moses to Hille, perhaps, from Hillel to Jesus, Paul, and Constantine, from Constantine’s example on to Muhammad. The thought about our intellectual history may not be magical or romantic but it makes sense of time, thought, and adjustment to changing wants and changed boundaries.

The popular and scholarly discussion of religion is not something that can be or should be forbidden as each human mind wrestles not only with immediate environmental and social survival — this, using language as a cultural tool — but with a sense known to most of humanity (atheists comprise but seven percent of the lot) of a greater metaphysical existence from the genius loci to the Master of the Universe.

That’s life.

Life with time changes some things.

Life with space preserves some things.

central –> marginal –> mixed <– marginal <– central may give us one way of thinking about ethnolinguistic cultural (and religious) survival (and co-evolution). I don’t want to live in an all English, all secular world. Who would? No matter: nature, by demonstration, prefers experiment and variety.

Let the years of violent cultural annihilation and conquest subside. We are capable of observing ourselves, speaking across immense cultural and physical space . . . the conversation cannot be avoided but can be had with much, much less grief.

Verbose, definitely.

Underappreciated, maybe.

🙂

Every day’s conversation and news transmitted around the world changes the world a little bit because it reaches into so many minds.  In some social circles, one may talk of a New Global Intelligentsia, and while so many state leaders and generals may be “too busy and too important” to be in it themselves, have no doubt that they are looking it over in some compressed fashion and with varied ambitions and concerns.

The prompt had to do with questioning and discussing religion, which in the west is what the west does without inhibition.  We annul and validate with our choice in subscription, some of which may be powerfully driven by the accident of birth and legacy, and in some other part the experience of discomfort leading to the development of choices — options — and the conscious and adult election to lend or withhold our energies from one set of beliefs or practices or another.

There should be no compulsion.

Where violence is needed to enforce obeyance, bold and earnest conversation may condemn, degrade, and diminish the medieval and uglier methods of political and religious control.

We talk.

The freedom to listen with compassion, empathy, and empirical and intuitive knowledge; the freedom to reason about, reflect on, and weigh ideas; and the freedom to speak responsibly about anything — about all things — is freedom.

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