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Tag Archives: intellectual evolution

FTAC: Political Islam and the Persistent Past

24 Sunday Sep 2017

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Political Psychology

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intellectual evolution, intellectual history, Islam, medieval vs modern, modern field-of-view, religion

The prompt: in relation to anti-Semitism, a statement suggesting Muslims, in general, know little about Islam, and anti-Semitic sentiment in Islam relates directly to the conflict in the middle east.


Religious identification serves as a powerful discriminator and tool for the purposes of leadership in the medieval world, and for some portion of the “Ummah”, small or large, the bond of Muslim identification against the Jew serves to sustain anti-Semitic thought wherever that may be promoted to serve the interests of leaders or spoilers for power.

While the notion that in some general way Muslims know nothing about Islam would seem to confront multiple cultural histories of written clerical thought largely expounding on Qur’an, Hadith, and Sunnah, much of which may indeed have been self-serving — or serving the subscriptions of noted institutions or scholars. In the medieval world, much of power would be suspended between the church (mosque, or temple), then seats of education, and political authority whose legitimacy rested on convincing clerical validation (predicated on beliefs installed).

The “Educated Modern” has a much widened field of view as regards phenomenology associated with psychology, religion, and spirituality. We’re aware of the world’s approximately 7,000 living languages and associated ethnolinguistic cultures; we’re aware of the histories of religions “across the campus”; perhaps most importantly, we’re aware of our own foibles. 🙂 The modern may face some puzzles as regards the perpetuation of the medieval suite of opposed and similar philosophies, but first on the agenda should be the question of how to bring forward those living in the medieval world.


One may practically skip church with that kind of Sunday morning sermonette.

🙂

However,the world’s educated and dedicated or leisured may support their “team”, the same have also access to a sophisticated awareness of their rivals plus awareness and knowledge sufficient to sink everyone’s ship: the good must ask wherever there is conflict what the fighting is about.

BackChannels simple answer to that question: power.

And there follows a question: medieval or modern?

“Medieval v Modern” has been chatted up quite on this blog, so I’ll spare ye another ramble.


Or not.

Appended

The prompt involved a legalistic reinterpretation about respect for Islam (should be equal to that given Christianity and Judaism) that I penned — the addition is italicized: “Jews, Christians, Muslims should accept the validity of each other’s legal interest in their chosen faith.”

I would accept the validity of the interest in religion, not the laws, policies, or practices promoted in the interest of its related fascism.

Even Pakistan has differentiated itself from Islam in its “realpolitik” law.

https://tribune.com.pk/story/1366268/man-interfaith-parents-wins-right-religion-choice/

As regards reform — i.e., an end to Islamic supremacism, supersession, bigotry regarding others, barbaric advisement — YES!

However, note the paths and leaders, including this conversation’s original poster:

Intellectualized Islam — e.g., Qanta Ahmed and others who bring a modern sensibility to Qur’anic ambiguity and move away from the supremacist mark, much preferring “no compulsion”.

Heretical Islam — e.g., M. Zuhdi Jasser and others in the Islamic Reform Movement who prefer contemplation and worship to “political Islam” and related militancy.

Renewal Through Reinterpreting Translation (goodbye Pickthall) and narrowed focus on the Qur’an — the claimed “word of God” — so as to diminish the merely mortal factor in the receiving of the Qur’an.

If any should think up other Islamic Reform options, let me know.

There is a greater and more challenging anachronism in the persistence of medieval worldviews about God and about power in a modern day that requires for greater wealth and security and the wider distribution of both plus justice a greater cooperation and integrity in global social relationships.

–33–

FTAC: Anti-Semitism: On the Left Sidebar’s Earliest Statement

16 Sunday Jul 2017

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Anti-Semitism, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Political Psychology, Politics

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21st Century Feudalism, anti-Semitism, feudal v modern, intellectual evolution, intellectual history, political evolution

“Caution: The possession of anti-Semitic / anti-Zionist thought may be the measure of the owner’s own enslavement to criminal and medieval absolute power.”

The statement appears with many others down the left sidebar:

https://conflict-backchannels.com

The greater contest associated with anti-Semitism may be that between feudal power supported by the medieval worldview — power descends directly from God to some benighted human — and the modern image of our glorious and variegated humanity. Those that recognize that God, nature, and the universe have produced and sustained for us at this time about 7,000 living language cultures, each of them addressing their environmental and social challenges differently, should not be able to remain with or return to an inflexible absolutism. 

The supremacist values — out of any people anywhere at any time — defy nature and human nature, and where they’re forced to work — because it takes force to get them to work — people suffer . . . and it could be said that everyone suffers.

Indulgence in anti-Semitic cant may be a good signal of having chosen to march one’s people backward in time.


–33–

FTAC – New Boundaries – Normative Adaptation

31 Sunday May 2015

Posted by commart in FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Politics

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global intelligentsia, global normative values, intellectual evolution, intellectual history, Internet, political norms, politics

International trade and the Internet have altered the world’s boundaries in many ways, and with associated processes irreversible — some things cannot be turned backward — change in how we think about ourselves and others and our social and spiritual perception may be due.

“Google” has turned out a pretty good name for the past two decades of democratized intellectual exploration.

I’ve been calling “Time the New Space”.

We know what has been bothering (and bloodying) the world from the past: what lies ahead? What can be put ahead, i.e., developed now and placed in the future?

This whole conversation is a miracle.


The New Global Intelligentsia is going to be “new” for a while longer. It may be fragile too — too few where needed most — but perhaps growing peace is what time is for.


Time is the New Space.

When one can call in a pizza, Skype with a Facebook buddy 9,000 miles away, build a library, and fill a closet with one click (often enough), “space” — real space, earth space, physical space — becomes a little bit more recreational space and separate from common intellectual and social operations, including social and political projects.

No matter where one lives on this planet, very practically so, one may have a Great Conversation with countless others.

When the conversation turns to culture and conflict (for fun: add “language and psychology”) and the more callous mudslinging subsides or may be eluded by way of our aggregated and collective choices in conversational partners, watch out: change would seem to be in the offing.

Timeline for transiting from where we are (take a bearing) to where things are “a little bit better”?

Unknown.

Perhaps unknowable.

Nonetheless, whatever the differences may be in our sources of laughter and moans, those with whom we “chatype” online or, perhaps, who stumble across this blog, are traveling together on one blue pearl of a planet now thoroughly wrapped in talk.




Loose Additional Reference

Tetterner, Stuart James.  “Norms Perspective”.  Confluence, Cornell University.  Last updated September 5, 2007.

DiMaggio, Paul and Eszter Hargittai, W. Russell Neuman, and John P. Robinson.  “Social Implications of the Internet.”  27:307-36.  Annual Review of Sociology, 2001 (PDF).


. . . we believe that the internet activism of today is best perceived as informed by the spirit of the EZLN, the ‘Battle of Seattle’, and the diverse amalgams of social movements and subcultures that have matured along with the new media over the last five years. This is the internet as a living, historical force and one of the keys to understanding and shaping the political and cultural life of the present age.

Kahn, Richard and Douglas Kellner.  “New media and internet activism: from the “Battle of Seattle’ to blogging.”  New Media and Society, Sage Publications, 2004.  PDF may be found online.


Before the revolution, the Tsar in Russia had a system of internal passports. The people hated this system. These passports marked the estate from which you came, and this marking determined the places you could go, with whom you could associate, what you could be. The passports were badges that granted access, or barred access. They controlled what in the Russian state Russians could come to know.

The Bolsheviks promised to change all this. They promised to abolish the internal passports. And soon upon their rise to power, they did just that. Russians were again free to travel where they wished. Where they could go was not determined by some document that they were required to carry with them. The abolition of the internal passport symbolized freedom for the Russian people — a democratization of citizenship in Russia.

Lessig, Lawrence.  The Laws of Cyberspace.  Draft 3.  Essay presented at Taiwan Net ’98 Conference, Tapei, March 1998.


Because you may have heard this in the background of the video clip on the Family of Man exhibit (a related hardcover became my first book about photography).

# # #

Update to “Shimmer”

29 Friday May 2015

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Religion

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

bigotry, intellectual evolution, Islam, perception, psychology

Primary Page Address:

https://conflict-backchannels.com/coins-and-other-terms/shimmer/

Update – May 29, 2015

After first believing in this predator’s lies, Lessing eventually began suspecting something about him is not right and after some detective work found out his real name and the fact that he is a cleric who works at Shi’a Association of the Bay Area (SABA) in San Jose, California and that he is actually married.

Lessing wondered whether she should go to his mosque and expose him publicly. This tells me how little non-Muslims know Islam and the Muslim mind. What do you think would happen if you tell them? At first they deny it categorically accusing you of smearing the name of a good man and vilify you. If they see the undeniable proof, they change tactic and condemn him in your face assuring you that Islam does not allow that. Once you leave, they pat him on the back and laugh heartily.

Sina, Ali.  “Muslim Men Preying on Western Women.”  Faith Freedom Organization, May 17, 2015.  http://www.faithfreedom.org/muslim-men-preying-on-western-women/

Primary text: Lessing, K. M.  God Has Failed Me: A True Story, Part I.

The BackChannels response to the correspondent who sent the piece: “I wanted to share the link with (name withheld) because it so mixes themes toward a demonizing that leaves no channel out for the Muslims who would themselves revile the cleric on display.

Earlier today from The Awesome Conversation: ” . . . a part of the American / North American / NATO / western public responds to Islam as represented by al-Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, et al., plus any number of western writers who emphasize the medieval qualities embedded in texts and taken up by the organizations mentioned. That’s what they see. It’s too little — not the whole thing — but that’s what they see.”

Shimmer.

With every act of disrespect — betrayal, deception, desecration, intimidation, libel, murder, seduction, slander, and theft — toward another person or group, Islam, through one person or many, displays itself exactly as its most vociferous critics describe, which makes the work of the Ummah’s more conscionable, introspective, and reforming adherents that much more difficult to impossible.

# # #

Iraq – Imagining Time – As a River – As an Infinite Table

20 Friday Jun 2014

Posted by commart in A Little Wisdom, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Islamic Small Wars, Philology, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Politics

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conflict, intellectual evolution, political change, political psychology, politics, time

As similes go, I think “time is a river” is done.

Iraq suggests to me that time, as here humans may conceive of it, may resemble something more like a table riven with canyons.

Some come to the edge of the end of something: if they turn back, they go backward while time continues advancing others around them; if they look toward the edge out ahead of themselves, they have to devise a crossing – and then take it.


Sometimes, I refer to Hillel the Elder (circa 35 BCE to 10 CE) who said in the course of arguing the meaning of Judaism with his rival Shammai, “whosoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whosoever that saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.”

🙂

Hillel has been reputed to have said a few other good things as well (I believe three epigram have been listed to the left of this post), but that just quoted is the one that suggests a story about how we got to this edge.


If the Next Poetry looks difficult for writing (someone, please, channel Rumi), the separation of a kind of personality from the encouragement of a more human and natural ethics may want for sophistication greater than immediately available.

Simply pointing the finger at the despotic and spitting out the words “malignant narcissist!” might not do the trick.

Suggesting that the world is full of “bad daddies” might be more helpful: at least it would focus on the nature of some men and that of most men and women in light of the appearance of relationships between dictators, control of others (starting with what others hear and what they say), the exertion of power over others (whether they like it or not), and, always, the exploitation of the same for “narcissistic supply” accompanied by spectacles of murder and plunder undertaken with the greatest cruelty imaginable and achievable.

Now I / you / we can see them: The Despotic.

The Democratic stand opposed, but, alas, not quite put together themselves.  In Iraq, in fact, it appears they may be getting mauled, and the story in Syria tells exactly what happens to undefended good deed doers.

Time spreads out always to the end of things with a moment of division before the beginnings of new things.  That “now” may be short — somebody made a decision! — or it may be very long and tortuous as with forty years in a wilderness.


For some, perhaps myself included, time is also an island.

Every day is yesterday but a little different, but then — at my age — not too much so.

I have read that there are no longer “uncontacted people” — isolated tribes entirely untouched by the world beyond themselves — on our small planet, but some who may flee from further contact, probably with good practical reasons in mind, may live similarly.

The rest of us have to deal with one another in some way, and the “some way” we do that brings with it change — and better change we want than that assumed by a handful of tyrannical others.

Interesting Reference

Everett, Daniel.  Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle.  Vintage, 2009.

Golub, Alex.  “Are there ‘uncontacted tribes’?  The short answer: No.”  Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology, July 1, 2008.

# # #

FTAC – A Note on Not Conflating Men with God

09 Monday Dec 2013

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Politics, Religion

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Tags

anti-authoritarianism, ethical obligation, intellectual evolution, Judaism, moral inquiry

The “Jim Crow” laws are as gone as slavery in the United States. Secularism, as a principle, helps guide the development of laws having to do with human relationships in business, governance, and life, and does not confuse what is human with what is divine nor will it define, nor should it, the relationship between person and God, the experience of the divine, or engagement in ritual or spirituality.

In the Jewish ethos, even Moses is human – merely a man – as is Abraham, whom many wish had questioned God himself over the binding of Isaac.

That invented thing call “The West” is more idea than reality, more built from Greco-Roman esprit, the Judeo-Christian precepts, and the brightening of The Enlightenment that brings to the medieval society a natural humanism and reason. Such things are not exclusive nor exclusively western nor modern nor technological. General Saladin would have known these things in their embryonic stage as well as his personal physician Maimonides. To go back a little further in philosophy attending law and relationships, one might spend some time with the elder contemporary, probably, of Jesus: Hillel, neither and never beatified nor deified.

Some Jews read “The Akeda” and note that God never again speaks directly to Abraham, nor, for that matter, does Isaac.

Is that significant?

If you’re a Jew, the close reading of the Torah elicits passionate engagement in ethical and moral argument, and indeed, though the nodding majority of readers may believe God set out to test Abraham’s obedience, a distinct minority would seem bound to ask whether the ancient lunkhead could not have instead raised his voice to God in argument intended to spare Isaac, which God has to do by sending an angel, a subaltern, or prevent the act and then providing a substitute, a ram, for Abraham to slaughter instead.

At the end of each day, we feel; we question; we reason; we protest – and tyrants, whether with power over body, mind, or spirit, we leave behind us.

# # #

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Caution: The possession of anti-Semitic / anti-Zionist thought may be the measure of the owner's own enslavement to criminal and medieval absolute power.
___________

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Epigram

Hillel the Elder

"That which is distasteful to thee do not do to another. That is the whole of Torah. The rest is commentary. Now go and study."

"If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? If not now, when?"

"Whosoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whosoever that saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world."

Oriana Fallaci
"Whether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president, from a murderous general or a beloved leader, I see power as an inhuman and hateful phenomenon...I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of having been born."

Talmud 7:16 as Quoted by Rishon Rishon in 2004
Qohelet Raba, 7:16

אכזרי סוף שנעשה אכזרי במקום רחמן

Kol mi shena`asa rahaman bimqom akhzari Sof shena`asa akhzari bimqom rahaman

All who are made to be compassionate in the place of the cruel In the end are made to be cruel in the place of the compassionate.

More colloquially translated: "Those who are kind to the cruel, in the end will be cruel to the kind."

Online Source: http://www.rishon-rishon.com/archives/044412.php

Abraham Isaac Kook

"The purely righteous do not complain about evil, rather they add justice.They do not complain about heresy, rather they add faith.They do not complain about ignorance, rather they add wisdom." From the pages of Arpilei Tohar.

Heinrich Heine
"Where books are burned, in the end people will be burned." -- From Almansor: A Tragedy (1823).

Simon Wiesenthal
Remark Made in the Ballroom of the Imperial Hotel, Vienna, Austria on the occasion of His 90th Birthday: "The Nazis are no more, but we are still here, singing and dancing."

Maimonides
"Truth does not become more true if the whole world were to accept it; nor does it become less true if the whole world were to reject it."

"The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision."

Douglas Adams
"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" Epigram appearing in the dedication of Richard Dawkins' The GOD Delusion.

Thucydides
"The Nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools."

Milan Kundera
"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

Malala Yousafzai
“The terrorists thought that they would change our aims and stop our ambitions but nothing changed in my life except this: weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage was born.”

Tanit Nima Tinat
"Who could die of love?"

What I Have Said About the Jews

My people, not that I speak for them, I nonetheless describe as a "global ethnic commune with its heart in Jerusalem and soul in the Land of Israel."

We have never given up on God, nor have we ever given up on one another.

Many things we have given up, but no one misses, say, animal sacrifice, and as many things we have kept, so we have still to welcome our Sabbath on Friday at sunset and to rest all of Saturday until three stars appear in the sky.

Most of all, through 5,773 years, wherever life has taken us, through the greatest triumphs and the most awful tragedies, we have preserved our tribal identity and soul, and so shall we continue eternally.

Anti-Semitism / Anti-Zionism = Signal of Fascism

I may suggest that anti-Zionism / anti-Semitism are signal (a little bit) of fascist urges, and the Left -- I'm an old liberal: I know my heart -- has been vulnerable to manipulation by what appears to me as a "Red Brown Green Alliance" driven by a handful of powerful autocrats intent on sustaining a medieval worldview in service to their own glorification. (And there I will stop).
One hopes for knowledge to allay fear; one hopes for love to overmatch hate.

Too often, the security found in the parroting of a loyal lie outweighs the integrity to be earned in confronting and voicing an uncomfortable truth.

Those who make their followers believe absurdities may also make them commit atrocities.

Positively Orwellian: Comment Responding to Claim that the Arab Assault on Israel in 1948 Had Not Intended Annihilation

“Revisionism” is the most contemptible path that power takes to abet theft and hide shame by attempting to alter public perception of past events.

On Press Freedom, Commentary, and Journalism

In the free world, talent -- editors, graphic artists, researchers, writers -- gravitate toward the organizations that suit their interests and values. The result: high integrity and highly reliable reportage and both responsible and thoughtful reasoning.

This is not to suggest that partisan presses don't exist or that propaganda doesn't exist in the west, but any reader possessed of critical thinking ability and genuine independence -- not bought, not programmed -- is certainly free to evaluate the works of earnest reporters and scholars.

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