Tags
agnosticism, atheism, Judaism, philosophy, religion, theism, theology
I guess I love to talk by “chatyping”.
Even back in my Booz (Allen and Hamilton) days, lunch and bbc-type intranet went together, not necessarily a good thing because in some corporate environments, people may track what others say with interest in evaluating or stinging the same down the road.
Then too, there are some “thought police” scattered around the world: the existence of state-controlled media tells as much, and the various wars on various nasty cabal and larger organizations involve every kind of intelligence “listening post” and cyber-scanning.
The machines want to know some things, one may suppose, and certainly all those offices also want to know the nature of the various species crawling across their once pristine and easily defined battlespace: forget about cartel kingpins and venal state lobbyists — what do with so many friendlies zipping and zapping everywhere in shark tank cyberspace?
God bless ’em.
And God bless us, one and all.
In any case, come forward about 17 years from the olden days and upwards of, I don’t know, maybe 30,000 or more messages typed online in various communities, and here am I (and you perhaps) with Facebook and both of us — all of us — somewhere in the middle of an awesome conversation, and it turns out I like what I type in short form.
Of course, I’ve had a lot of practice.
The subject was an aphorism that I “Liked” in the Facebook way: “Morality is doing the right thing regardless of what you were told; Religion is doing what you were told regardless of what is right.”
I laughed too.
And then I thought about it.
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Although I got a chuckle out of this, I feel I should mention that I am not an atheist, do not advocate “no religion”, and do believe that the cultivation of “good conscience” may be derived from and integrated with culture, cultural values, language in general, language metonymy more specifically, language behavior (sensibility and timbre in expression), and the vagaries of individual psychology and various social processes. If we follow the black-and-white inversion that may formulate as Too Much Religion –> No Religion, the barren quality in that may force even the most rigorous intellectuals to advocate as healthy the presence and persistence of magical, romantic, and universal thought.
The matter of resisting malicious ideas and impulses comprise a large part of moral and religious instruction, but a few can and do get their grip on the levers of institutions and in the pursuit of their own “dreams of glory” lose the better part of their humanity. They are those who exceed limits, cannot contain themselves, become the worst hypocrites, and, when so empowered, lead their people to ruin.
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