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Tag Archives: spirituality

FTAC: Turn Around – Globally ReStanced Time

25 Monday Feb 2019

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, A Little Wisdom, Epistemology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Philosophy, Political Psychology, Religion

≈ 1 Comment

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hope, idealism, international affairs, Past and Future, religion, spirituality

Inspiration for this little bit of wisdom: another set-to about the God of Judaism and the God of Islam — or depictions, expressions, instructions, etc. seemingly attached to the construction or perception (in mind, of course) of each.

Basically: “Your God is not my God — and my rightness must be therefore more right than your rightness.”

And God must have put us here to prove how right we are about God.

Something like all of that plus the bloody historical baggage that has been dragged through time with that kind of thinking.


https://www.jcf.org/about-joseph-campbell/

http://thomasberry.org/

Ethnolinguistic cultures on earth: about 7,000 (fewer, actually).
There are many ways of looking up at the stars and experiencing or interpreting the divine.

In the Torah, God hears Ishmael’s cries too.

The more true challenge of the present lies in handling the habits attending medieval politics and worldviews that better account for turning something we cannot know — God, as we think of God, is greater than our observational capabilities — into something we think we know.
Judaism represents the Tribal Way of the Hebrews, an old People with a calendar to prove it and a distinct trail through time planted on or in the earth in built space or artifacts. Rather than mosey on to other civilizational uptake, adaptation, and competition, it might prove healthier to visit the present, take a deep breath, and have both a broad and long view backward, the better perhaps for considering and taking the next step forward.

Having given up the burning of witches and largely ejected “contra-lateral amputation” as inhumane (although there are some barbaric, malignant, primitive, and sadistic holdouts), we might do better than eternally trying to erase one another.


Call it a plea for peacefulness momentarily enshrined in a blog post . . . also a plea to perhaps stand together for a broad and great gaze backward from this extraordinary plateau in human communicating and social interaction — and then: think fresh; think forward; think next.

Commence.


The “New Nationalists” — there’s a term that’s getting around — are old feudal reactionaries. Each — start with Erdogan in his White Palace — means to live as if in a castle socially surrounded by nobility and attended by peons and slaves.

BackChannels hopes they will one day find themselves left floating in their own blood-dimmed and greed-soaked clouds and the better world, broadly inclusive, culturally self-sustaining (we should be concerned with keeping and growing our 7,000 or so living language cultures), earth conscious, still in awe of the universe, and beautifully interwoven will look back on them with a shudder.

–33-

Books – Reading Recommended – Maslow

28 Sunday Feb 2016

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

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authentic self, freedom, human development, human performance, humanism, individuation, Maslow, psychology, spirituality, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature

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.

# # #

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

11 Thursday Feb 2016

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

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Back to the Ethic, book review, books, Diane Weber Bederman, ethical monotheism, ethics, global ethical constructions, Judeo-Christian, political thought, politics, spirituality, values

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.

# # #

FTAC – Admonition to “Reclaim the Heritage of the Land”

22 Monday Oct 2012

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

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cultural ecology, culture, earth, ecology, land, national, political, regional, religious, self-concept, spiritual, spirituality

The question posed by citizens of a developing state had to do with defending it from “Islamist” spoilers and their thoughts about ultimate cultural programming, a path abhorred by all but themselves.  My response:

” . . . a culture, any, I believe, IS its language, and its language contains ITS stories, ITS art, ITS theater, ITS dance, ITS customs, and most important and never to be displaced or replaced: ITS Literature. Books. Legends. Folk tales. Poems. Songs. IF the overlay of a colonizing or imperial or even religious culture — any — has dimmed the vibrancy of the expression of the earth through its evolving human complement, THEN one might consider taking a good, long, and shared elegiac journey through the past and reinstalling all that charms, delights, educates, informs, and refreshes the culture, rightly grounded, literally, to come in time and to become itself.

How is that for a different kind of “civilizational mission”?

My suggestion to you: reclaim in modern form the authentic heritage of the land.”

Also referenced in the conversation: American Transcendentalism and Vine Deloria, Jr.’s God is Red.

I’ve not wish to see English echoed in another language but, with peace, to enjoy the emergence of a reinvigorated foreign language, one more capable of serving the needs of cultural vibrancy born of the soil and coursing through the blood alive with it and in love with it too.

Let Colorado be Colorado, says I, and then may the people of every village and state revel in the mountains, plains, and rivers of their birth and ancestry.

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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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