Web surfers visiting here have probably had their own fill of experience or news — or both — vomited up from the evil and ugly world. For those so offended but in themselves good and noble and perhaps in need of a refreshed idealism and inspiration, I offer an old memory.
Here’s a trailer.
And here — from another company — the greater quotation.
Abraham Lincoln Statue, Gettysburg National Military Park Visitor’s Center, November 8, 2010, (c)2010 James S. Oppenheim
I’m an American of Jewish descent and the last name tells of a small wine-making town on the Rhine. Perhaps growing up the proper noun-based cultural infusions in the development of self-concept shaped whatever it is I’ve become, but had those details been missing, would I have gravitated toward writing, music, photography, and, later, blogging?
In the democratic modern mode, there’s a lot more going on in the “mixing” of the person — multiple influences and variables — and in many ways we choose our character and if not for better — I’ve been handed some things . . . haven’t made a good life or at least picket-fence-and 2.5 children template of the “American Dream” — then at least for the possession of integrity, an authentic existence, which I think ultimately a good thing.
In other modes — authoritarian, medieval, Orwellian — legacy may indeed fix in place the future.
We should be able to enjoy our respective ethnolinguistic and other legacies in heritage by finding for ourselves what is noble in survival and scrapping and shrugging away and tucking in the miseries of the past. For everyone: something happened back there — so what needs to happen to produce a better experience in living, personal and community-wide, tomorrow?
” . . . remember that I have bestowed favours upon you . . .”
Is that God?
Is that God and the Prophet?
” . . . remember that WE have bestowed favours upon you . . . .”
Mohammed will proclaim that the Jews perverted the Torah, but the Jews — and let’s acknowledge that the Torah has been “set” in history (okay, it was a committee) and then transcribed by hand on parchment in Hebrew for every living Torah letter by letter by scribes devoted to that extraordinary and regimented art — may claim that not one letter of the Torah has been altered through the ages . . . through the ocean of time between finality and what is read today.
What is “supersession” but a political attempt to “one-up” the Torah and claim final authority in the interest of personal aggrandizement and enrichment?
No Moses?
No Muhammad.
No Constantine?
No Church of Rome.
Frankly, I blame Hillel the Elder for striving to make Judaism accessible to the “restive of Rome”.
He succeeded.
But the Romans, whatever they were, were not necessarily Jewish in soul. They could and did abandon the Pantheon of the Gods (good thing), but they needed the symbols of the divine as Divine.
And oh ye Muslims . . .ye cannot brag the slaughter of the Banu Qurayza on one hand and convincingly tell of “no compulsion” on the other.
It doesn’t wash.
I’m an American of Jewish descent — an American Secular Humanist.
I appreciate the full range of thought about God, nature, and the universe, and much the appreciate today the fewer than 7,000 living languages into which our thoughts have been packed, each language representing an isolated People’s way of inventing responses to their own environmental and social challenges.
If I were drawing salary as an academic or writer, I would embark on a lengthy period of research and discussion about “modernity”, humanism, comparative religion, and multiculturalism. However, unpaid, occasionally validated, I may leave the above to stand as it stands.
Here is the renowned but under-publicized Daniel Everett on his experience with Christianity, primitives, language, and faith:
Everett’s terrific, a capable scholar of unquestionable integrity.
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.
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.
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.
The Jews could not have done very well against the Romans!
🙂
Revisit Titus and the horrific burning of Jerusalem.
Revisit Masada, for that matter.
The distillation and order I suggest for the uptake of a Judaic monotheism, which we all share (whether we like it or not) starts with the jurist Hillel the Elder (35-BCE to 10-CE), who produced decisions and an outlook that made Judaism less ethnic, more evolving around principle, and more accessible to conversions (uh oh). smile emoticon So: Hillel the Elder –> Jesus and Paul –> General Constantine –> General Muhammad.
We may agree on the unity (and sanctity) of life and of a natural life well lived, but our disagreements on scripture, the composition of extended works and exegesis, devolve to our ethnolinguistic cultures once more separated by geospatial relationships and by time. In retrospect, here at the advent of a new world interlaced with Internet-based communicating, our enmities seem cultivated in fear and dreadfully superficial and malignant narcissism.
At this point, no one need have the last word — not Moses, not Jesus, not Muhammad, nor our overlooked link in the end-of-the-Roman Era family guy Hillel the Elder. What we may need are new words resonant with the more noble aspects of our common humanity.
Artists and assorted creative types needs must submerge themselves with object-projects: book, essay, play, poem, screenplay. That’s what it takes to pioneer thought and fashion ideas and insights into transmissible forms, and that auto-constructed isolation may go hard on the soul — it certainly has on mine, and the desktop has added its own layer of interference with the experience of what is proximate in the way of events and people. Nonetheless, “chatyping” in response to what others spell out online proves always stimulating while the cyber-environment — global, politically across cultures, across political boundaries, across languages and religions — provides a glimpse at what today is possible and perhaps needs to become a new reality in conversation.
The Awesome Conversation itself has been nothing less than miraculous.
What comes next?
This blog has stated its six most irreducible virtues at the top of the sidebar to the left.
Those ennobling characteristics, however, may be brought to bear against a world rife with cruel and despotic leaders and their deeply manipulated and misguided (start with “state-controlled press” and end with “absolute political suppression”) followers and the messes made by related widespread conflict, diminishment, ignorance, and impoverishment.
Rome was neither built nor taken apart in a day, and while Latin has become a “dead language” — useful to the Catholic Church and to science for its stability, Hebrew has been returned to life and with it, so one may hope, interest in the preservation, survival, and evolution of some approximately 7,000 still living languages and the cultures and subcultures each represents in the global tapestry.
The Iranian regime’s interests begin and end here: http://www.reuters.com/investigates/iran/#article/part1 The sowing of chaos and confusion through disinformation and manipulation conforms with the post-Soviet arrangement signaled by the promotion of feudalism endorsed by Putin, Assad, and Khamenei. The story’s about individual wealth and absolute power, and there’s not much more to it than that.
The modern Jewish credo and ethos may have been set by Hillel the Elder between 70-BCE and 10-CE, a period to be noted in the history of religion and in the formation of the “Abrahamic Faiths” especially. Hillel’s most famous statement and the three questions:
“That which is distasteful to thee, do not do to another. That is the whole of Torah. All of the rest is commentary” (“Now go and study” — the whole was addressed to a convert).
“If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? If not now, when?”
Jewish humanism and universalism — for which I blame Hillel 🙂 — far exceed, and have always far exceeded personal and parochial interests. They are a part of what binds personalities as diverse as Karl Marx, Woody Allen, Albert Einstein, and Felix Adler (who?). Of course, Jews do not have the lock on the observation of the universe or the universal in living, but what drives the study, the humor, the insight, and the humanism comes very much of the rejection and abandonment of Pharaonic power, i.e., the power of the despot. The Jews and “the mixed multitude” continue pioneering through time in search of a more kind and principled humanity.
” . . . the power of the despot and the shared humanity of humanity” is what should have been said.
Anti-Semitic and bullying — sometimes mild and polite — “Jew baiting” has its upside in the inspiration of some cool thought now and then; however, who is not full-up on words, Words, WORDS!?
Agha ma wati jinday wastha naya Goda degay khe b mani wastha.
Agha ma degrani wastha naya goda ma cheyan?
Agha ani na, goda kadi?
In the first century BCE, Babylonian born Hillel (later known as Hillel the Elder) migrated to the Land of Israel to study and worked as a woodcutter, eventually becoming the most influential force in Jewish life. Hillel is said to have lived in such great poverty that he was sometimes unable to pay the admission fee to study Torah, and because of him that fee was abolished. He was known for his kindness, gentleness, concern for humanity. One of his most famous sayings, recorded in Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers, a tractate of the Mishnah), is “If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, then what am I? And if not now, when?” The Hillel organization, a network of Jewish college student organizations, is named for him. Hillel and his descendants established academies of learning and were the leaders of the Jewish community in the Land of Israel for several centuries. The Hillel dynasty ended with the death of Hillel II in 365 CE.
Without prompting, a Facebook friend, a teacher, translated Hillel into Baloch.
At the end of a note to the same, I’ve stated a perhaps uniquely modern stance:
Our world offers an abundance of timeless knowledge and wisdom from myriad sources, a vast reach across cultures through the great libraries and their scholars, and one may be gifted with opportunity and time to do some soul searching about the meaning of life and living in the place that one inhabits. Toward that end, while I do my part 🙂 , I generally promote ethnolinguistic cultural survival and self-determination, not only for the Hebrews but for Baloch, Kurds, Pashtun, and every other unique living language community on the planet.
In fewer words, plainly promoted: geospatial coexistence with ethnic centers, margins, and mixers; global cultural co-evolution with updating toward what is authentic in belief, kind in social manner, and respectful in its humanity; and continuously improving “qualities in living” with economic, psychological, physical, and spiritual dimensions.
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