adultery — Agustino

punishment — Agustino

immoral — Agustino

debauchery — Agustino

punishment — Agustino

punishment — Agustino

liberal-progressive — Agustino

adultery — Agustino

adultery — Agustino

adultery — Agustino

Ad infinitum. Honestly, why don't you demand punishment for all the Seven Wickednesses of pride, covetousness, lust, anger, gluttony, envy, and sloth? No more suffering is caused by subsidiary sin of adultery than by any of the Big Seven. Criminalizing, investigating, prosecuting and punishing people for pride, covetousness, lust, anger, gluttony, envy, and sloth would certainly be a tonic for a debauched immoral society (like ours, I suppose).

Why pick on adultery? Mortal flesh is prone to many errors. "All we like sheep have gone astray, every one in his own way." What's so special about adultery? Coveting, envying, raging, gluttons cause at least as much havoc in this world than adulterers, though it may be less personal.

Perhaps the heat of your rage over adultery owes its high temperature to pride. Perhaps adultery is so offensive because it is, among other things, a blow to the esteem in which we hold our selves, an attack on the sufficiency of our value to another person. "What more than ME could you possibly want or need, you ungrateful wretch?"

No, I'm not about to start making my philosophical decisions based on what "I feel is good". — Metaphysician Undercover

It is probably the case that you do, in fact, make philosophical decisions based on what you feel is good. This isn't a bug in you, it's a feature of human beings. Emotion WILL affect how we think whether we like it or not.

We are not exactly slaves to our feelings; feelings can be overridden, but overriding a feeling means that we have to deal with the feeling, and even in dealing with what we think is an emotional distortion, our thinking may be further affected by emotion.

Emotions are part of the way we think. We can't separate them out. We just have to deal with them.

A question from someone not from the USA: why do purported remarks by the founding fathers have a quasi-religious importance to so many Americans? This stuff can have an irrationalist edge, as seen from Abroad. — mcdoodle

When Lincoln (not a founding father) wrote the Gettysburg Address, briefly referencing founding documents, Jefferson (a founding father) had been dead only 37 years--not a long time. The Revolution of 1776 was only 87 years before. The past (which Faulkner says is never past anyway) just wasn't that far back. The rhetorical connections between founding documents, founding authors, and later rhetoric and authors has been continuous.

between the 11th century (like... 1066) and the present there have been 1000+ years and some very significant discontinuities to British history. (Plus there were hundreds of years of British history before Bill the Bastard arrived on the scene.) Specifically American and not British Colonial history dates back to 1783--233 years -- 240 if you count 1776 as the beginning. Our founding documents are much younger than yours are.

In our jurisprudence, yours too--no? precedent is important and our most important precedent is the constitution. In political rhetoric, claiming authority from the founding documents is still feasible -- that's what the gun lobby and the Amendment II is all about. The Brexit campaign wisely didn't reach back to 1066 for guidance. You don't have a constitution whose sacred meaning you can squabble over.

There is a certain amount of cultic attention being paid to the founding documents. Our sacred documents are over protected (like they were the tablets from Mount Sinai) while you have yours out on a table -- covered by glass, but still, sitting on a wooden table. At least they were in 1989. Britain has an abundant supply of cultic documents, objects, battlefields, castles, crypts, cathedrals, saints, palaces, princes (of varying caliber), actual crown jewels, great estates belonging to the once fabulously wealthy ruling elite, and so on. Our relatively puny list of sacred objects, documents, and places must bear a lot of heavy traffic. Plus none of our stuff is very old, unless we start counting aboriginal stuff, whom we all tried very hard to get rid of.

You have the royal family and we have the Daughters of the American Revolution--more than a few of whom are dingbats.

So, there you are. That's why.

Videos like this make me trigger happy.

The University of Chicago's 2016 welcome letter includes the following paragraph:

"Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called 'trigger warnings,' we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual 'safe spaces' where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own."

Muriel Spark wrote a wonderful short, dry comic novel back in the 1960s, "Momento Mori" [Remember you will die--part of the meaning of the Ash Wednesday service]. It was about some elderly people who started receiving anonymous, untraceable, phone calls informing them that they would die. No threat was made, no date, no means given. Just, you are definitely going to die.

The old folks responded variously, but the main character, Charmaine, a frail, quite elderly and once-famous actress, found the call quite stimulating and perked up considerably for a year or so. She was like a dying plant which when finally watered and lighted properly, does well for a while. Charmaine died, of course, as did all the folks who received the call, some in the way they particularly didn't want to die.

There can't be a formula for "the authentic life" because everyone has to find, in their own circumstances, what "authenticity" is. Anything from a fixation on death to not responding at all to the certainty of death just can't be specified in advance.

That said, it seems like good advice to heed the warning of the telephone call: Just remember, you are going to die. Then get on with it. Live your life as you see fit, bearing in mind (without obsessing about it) that you won't live forever. Let that be a liberation rather than a burden. Some people are going to die too soon, much too soon, and that will be painful to their survivors. But sooner or later, all of us will die, regardless of how much yoga, long distance running, low-fat dining, no-sugar snacking, frequent check ups, perfect diet, the alleged power of positive thinking (don't believe in it myself, but that doesn't mean I want to hear you all whining all the time either) we can manage.

I am no longer young, but I am what I am doing, what I have done, what I hope I will have done yet, what I did not do, what I would have done, and what I would not have done. There were a thousand forks in the road, a thousand paths I chose, a thousand paths I therefore could not choose. I have taken high roads and low roads, reached higher than my grasp and stooped low enough to be contemptuous. I loved, I hated, I was exceedingly indifferent. I worked hard, I barely worked at all. I was creative and insightful, I was conventional and and obtuse. I was a libertine, I was a puritan. I am a believer, I am an apostate...

I, like you, am all manner of things, changing and constant, this today, that tomorrow, but still me.

The thread title "our life is but a dream" reminds me of a hymn by Isaac Watts (1674-1748), one stanza of which is

Death, like an overflowing stream,
Sweeps us away; our life is but a dream,
An empty tale, a morning flower,
Cut down and withered in an hour.

usually sung to the hymn tune Amanda

What I hear in the phase is not unreality, but the swift transience of our lives. We are likely to find emptiness of meaning, though, in the swift demise of our child or our young spouse/lover. The 'empty tale' and 'dream' does point towards meaningless existence, but that wouldn't be proper for Christian thought or hymnody. It's more like, "life would be meaningless without God" or Christ's reconciling salvation, or the mandate given to believers, or the action of the Holy Spirit. Or for the pagan, life would be meaningless if it were not for the glory of the world, as the Romans observed, sic transit gloria mundi.

Additionally as a consequentialist myself I can't see how adding intentions into the mix suddenly changes everything. The outcome, the consequence, is what matters here. Even if it was an accident, somebody got hurt. What difference does it make? — darthbarracuda

I too am a consequentialist, but sometimes it is hard to identify the connection between action or inaction and consequence.

The consequences of intervention may be--often are--invisible. On the one hand, a stranger's verbal threat might be sufficient to scare a mugger away, or it might cause an abrupt escalation, an eruption of life-threatening violence. They wouldn't--couldn't--know what would happen as a result of their intervention, especially if it wasn't decisive. On the other hand, a donor to an excellent NGO probably won't see the good work that was being done with the donation.

If the dangerous consequences of intervention are often invisible, so are the benefits.
It is often difficult to identify the connection between action/inaction and consequence.

I'm still a consequentialist, but sometimes we have to guess, estimate, assume--certainly not know-- what the consequences are.

Of course. What Paracelsus had to say is now a truism. Too much iron, oxygen, water, potassium, salt, and so on are all toxic. So are not enough. Most drugs have toxic blood levels. For some drugs, (Lithium is one) the margin between therapeutic and toxic blood levels is very narrow. Some drugs are entirely and necessarily toxic -- like platinum based drugs for cancer. One hopes to kill more cancer cells that healthy cells. Kill too many healthy cells, and the drug is a failure. The monoclonal antibody drugs (whose names end in '-mab' like Retuximab) can be exceedingly harsh too, in ways quite different from straight poisons.

The right dose of the right medicine at the right time for the right patient...

The pharmacopeia is bigger now than it was 50 or 100 years ago, and the medicines are potentially more lethal than before, because they attempt to intimately interfere with the finely tuned machinery inside the cell.

Thanks Bitter Crank. While I more or less agree with most what of what you say here; I don't think it is really relevant to the purpose of this thread... — John

I haven't followed the adultery/mysticism discussion. I did, however, participate in the very long discussion with Agustino in the old Philosophy Forum. Don't know whether you were there for that under a different name, or not at all.

Adultery isn't a good thing, (no one has risen to argue in favor of it, have they?) but all flesh is prone to error, and adultery is one of the top five failings of the flesh. I fervently pray that we do not return to a time when adultery is punishable under civil (or criminal) law. I view adultery as a certainty for a certain percentage of the population, and a consequence of social change more than a driver of social change.

A lot of people who marry are in no wise ready or mature enough to make a lifelong commitment and keep it, without the support of an intact and involved community. Those who are more or less free of the old community ties that bind have very few places to turn to for help when marriage hits the rocks.

If philosophers can not find positive ways to address the problem of adultery, (something beside discussing punishment) then they just aren't trying very hard.

I was raised in a broken home, and look how I turned out! — Wosret

But you were raised in Canada.

I am from a single-parent family, and Bitter Crank, I find your comments and others like yours very offensive. — Sapientia

Of course I didn't intend to offend you, and I am glad that your single parent did a good job raising you, and he/she deserves a great deal of credit, as all good parents do. Most children in single parent families grow up normally. But...a quarter to a third (in the US) have bad outcomes, which is much higher than bad outcomes for two parent family children. It's a significant difference.

I'm sticking with the judgement that single parenthood in general is not an advantage, is a great burden to the single parent, often results in untoward outcomes, and should not be encouraged through policies. In the United States (with it's diminished and grudging social service system) single parent-headed families are at a significant economic, psychosocial, and educational disadvantage and experience more difficulties than two-parent families.

Just for example...

Adolescent Well-Being in Cohabiting, Married, and Single-Parent Families
Authors
Wendy D. Manning,
Kathleen A. Lamb
First published: November 2003
Abstract

Cohabitation is a family form that increasingly includes children. We use the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health to assess the well-being of adolescents in cohabiting parent stepfamilies (N= 13,231). Teens living with cohabiting stepparents often fare worse than teens living with two biological married parents. Adolescents living in cohabiting stepfamilies experience greater disadvantage than teens living in married stepfamilies. Most of these differences, however, are explained by socioeconomic circumstances. Teenagers living with single unmarried mothers are similar to teens living with cohabiting stepparents; exceptions include greater delinquency and lower grade point averages experienced by teens living with cohabiting stepparents. Yet mother's marital history explains these differences. Our results contribute to our understanding of cohabitation and debates about the importance of marriage for children.

Growing Up with a Single Parent. What Hurts, What Helps.
McLanahan, Sara; Sandefur, Gary

Using information from four national surveys and a decade of research, this book demonstrates the connection between family structure and a child's prospects for success. It shows how divorce, particularly with often-attendant drops in income, parental involvement, and access to community resources, diminishes children's chances for wellbeing. It is revealed that children whose parents live apart are twice as likely to drop out of high school as those in two-parent families, one and a half times as likely to be idle in young adulthood, and twice as likely to become single parents themselves. Additionally, data show that some of the advantages often associated with being white are really a function of family structure and that some of the advantages associated with having educated parents evaporate when those parents separate. The concluding chapter offers recommendations for rethinking our current policies. The authors explain why it is imperative that more of the costs of raising children be shifted from mothers to fathers and from parents to society at large, as well as why universal assistance programs that benefit low-income two-parent families and single mothers must be developed. Appendixes contain data and variables from the studies, bivariate probit models, and sex-difference factors statistical tables.

from a Slate article:

Take two contemporary social problems: teenage pregnancy and the incarceration of young males. Research by Sara McLanahan at Princeton University suggests that boys are significantly more likely to end up in jail or prison by the time they turn 30 if they are raised by a single mother. Specifically, McLanahan and a colleague found that boys raised in a single-parent household were more than twice as likely to be incarcerated, compared with boys raised in an intact, married home, even after controlling for differences in parental income, education, race, and ethnicity. Research on young men suggests they are less likely to engage in delinquent or illegal behavior when they have the affection, attention, and monitoring of their own mother and father.

But daughters depend on dads as well. One study by Bruce Ellis of the University of Arizona found that about one-third of girls whose fathers left the home before they turned 6 ended up pregnant as teenagers, compared with just 5 percent of girls whose fathers were there throughout their childhood. This dramatic divide was narrowed a bit when Ellis controlled for parents’ socioeconomic background—but only by a few percentage points. The research on this topic suggests that girls raised by single mothers are less likely to be supervised, more likely to engage in early sex, and to end up pregnant compared with girls raised by their own married parents.

A likely story...

If you want to make God laugh, just tell him your plans.

http://magazine.foxnews.com/love/cheating-statistics-do-men-cheat-more-women for example this. — Agustino

Really, Agustino, you have to reference better sources than Fox News Magazine.

Your proposals seem dangerously close to conservatism though BC :P How does a Marxist explain this? — Agustino

What contributes to healthy, nurturing families does not vary greatly from left to right. (Marx himself, as you no doubt know, was not exactly a paragon of familial propriety.) That so many couples in the United States ((which is what I am familiar with) are having serious difficulties maintaining relationships and healthy and strong families doesn't seem entirely mysterious. three points:

1. It takes community to create healthy nurturing families, and community has been collapsing for decades.

2. Shrinking and maldistributed economic resources degrade individual, community, and family capacity to succeed. It isn't just that large numbers of people have less income than they need, it's the psycho-social effect of large income disparities communities. Inadequate income from work means more time spent at work for both spouses, which short changes everyone in the family.

3. The expectations of very large numbers of individuals are altogether out of sync with what they can reasonably achieve.

Is everything falling apart? No. If you look at healthy, economically stable communities you can find healthy families. You can find some healthy families in communities that are falling apart too. But on the whole, the proportion of communities and families in economic and psychosocial distress are perhaps the majority.

Very-large-scale changes in western culture are probably beyond any sort of remediation. The controlling role of religion in society probably is not going to return, which I view as more a blessing than a curse, but there is definitely a downside.) Communication technologies, world economic shifts, and a host of other factors have a role to play in the difficulties individuals experience.

I may sound conservative here, but some of the old-fashioned virtues have survival value in a rotting capitalist state.

His point is that given these 'outs' people should be held accountable before the law if they breach what he claims is the legally binding contract of marriage. — John

Agustino did battle on this topic in the old Philosophy Forum. It was lively. This time around, let's spend less time figuring out how to punish people who commit adultery and spend more time figuring out how to help families be successful.

Adultery in the context of the usual marriage vows is unhelpful, contradictory, and often destructive. What I consider important is that IF a heterosexual marriage leads to children, then the parents should endeavor to keep their relationship healthy and centered on raising healthy, productive and reasonably happy children. That means avoiding adultery, addictions, irresponsible debt, desertion, and the like.

We (American society) do not do a very good job of helping parents succeed, and truth be told, a good many people who think they should become parents ought to be strenuously discouraged from committing much effort to that goal unless they get their act together.

Successful families need:

• to live within modest material budgets so that their resources can be directed toward good parenting.
• to receive enough income that between them, parents can provide 1 FTE parent. Maybe families need to be subsidized to make that possible. Both mother and father should have time to interact with children.
• education in good, traditional child-rearing practices. Many adults have not benefitted from being raised in a healthy large family and they simply do not know what healthy family life looks like. They need training to achieve it. And on-going support.
• Families need good pre-natal health care, good delivery service, and post-natal followup health monitoring.
• Families need functioning communities in which to live.

Single parenthood (as a starting plan) should be strongly discouraged.

But I think the underlying rationale of individualism has shifted enormously in the last few generations. — Wayfarer

The pendulum has definitely swung, but I'm not sure it is just "too much individualism" that we are suffering from. Some of what passes for individualism is alienation, anomie, atomization, disrupted community, dysfunctional families, and so on. Many individuals have nothing to fall back on but individuality, and that alone is not enough. Individuality that develops in the context of solid family life, fully functioning communities, and with learning is worth pursuing. Unfortunately, a lot of people's individuality is that of an aquarium of fish tossed out in the street. Their "individuality" is the privilege of dying alone.

Is the ascetic justified in their actions? Can they really say that what they are doing is "better" than what everyone else is doing? For the ascetic himself, asceticism might be seen as a kind of personal salvation, but to everyone else, could it come across as obnoxious? Can we criticize the ascetic for this, or are they free of blame here? — darthbarracuda

We could, I suppose, judge them by the sort of fruit they bear. What good is it doing them, or anybody else, that they are ascetics? It Jack finds salvation by living in a monks cell, silently meditating, praying ceaselessly, and eating little, more power to him. That doesn't mean everyone should get themselves a similar bare concrete block cell and follow suit.

On the other hand, we could also judge the hedonists by the fruit they bear. What good are they doing themselves or anyone else? Maybe some hedonists have found a way of doing good in the world. We can raise the bar a bit for their evidence, but it's possible they bear good fruit--which they probably then eat.

It is insulting in the same way that somebody listening to classical music is insulting — andrewk

I have listened to classical music for many, many hours, trying to insult my fellow citizens. And you know what? It just didn't work. None of them were insulted. In fact, they didn't give a rat's ass that I was wasting my time listening to that crap. They were all listening to the latest thing coming out of the pipe and were totally indifferent to my condescending, insulting slanderous taste in music.

But the answer is NOT that 'all opinions are equal', nor that everything is simply a matter of opinion. — Wayfarer

Not only are not all opinions equal, many of them are not even wrong. Many opinions are just plain stupid. What is important is that you be certain of the rightness of what you know and believe.

It's possible that large numbers of one's fellow citizens make flawed judgements about a number of things. — Wayfarer

It is not only possible that large numbers of one's fellow citizens make flawed judgements, it is a dead certainty that they make flawed judgements. Worse than that, sometimes even we (!) make flawed judgements (every little once in a while).

I think one of the difficult things about modern life is that not everyone can be right. — Wayfarer

Just out of curiosity, what age was it when everyone could be right?

The ascetic is one who rejects worldly things in pursuit of a higher transcendental plane of existence, or something to that effect.

But isn't this kind of insulting to those who aren't ascetics? The ascetic, in virtue of his actions, is essentially telling the rest of the rabble that what they like to do is inadequate, insufficient, or not worthy of praise. — darthbarracuda

We rabble, bless us, give limited admiration and a wide berth to the ascetic holy man, but we ourselves have no intentions of starving, freezing, or abstaining from all pleasures and necessities. There is little enough for us as it is. We rabble understand that some people think cold water, stale bread, and a bed rags on the ground comprise the royal road to holiness, but 99.938% of us lack any intention of following that path.

Amused slightly, perhaps, or appalled. A little grateful if the holy man's privations shed some grace on us. Insulted, no.

The term "sacred" means nothing to you. It's a hollow concept that fools insert into sentences to create meaning where there is none. — Hanover

I agree that "sacred" and other words are thought to add weight to airy sentences. However...

Luther thought ordinary work was sacred and holy.

[In Luther's time] The division between the laity and the professional priesthood was stark during this time period. The idea of the priesthood of all believers, prominent in the New Testament, became marginalized.

This was the historical context for Luther’s rediscovery of the biblical doctrine of work. Luther was one of the first theologians to spark renewed interest in reconnecting faith and everyday life. In his book How Then Should We Work? Hugh Whelchel writes that, "It was initially through Martin Luther’s efforts that the sixteenth century Reformers began to recover the biblical doctrine of work."

Lee Hardy summarizes Luther’s contribution to a more robust theology of vocation in his book, The Fabric of This World. According to Hardy, Luther expanded the idea of vocation to include: Domestic duties, civic duties, and employment. Luther then argued that everyday work is imbued with spiritual significance.

He wrote in The Babylonian Captivity of the Church that "…the works of monks and priests, however holy and arduous they may be, do not differ one whit in the sight of God from the works of the rustic laborer in the field or the woman going about her household tasks…all works are measured before God by faith alone."

The first part of the quotation ("If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered") has not been found anywhere in Thomas Jefferson's writings, to Albert Gallatin or otherwise. It is identified in Respectfully Quoted as spurious, and the editor further points out that the words "inflation" and "deflation" are not documented until after Jefferson's lifetime.

...

This first known occurrence in print of the spurious first part with the two other quotations is in 1948, although the spurious portion actually appears after the two other quotations.

From here...

I don't think the banking situation of 1813 is quite analogous to the banking situation 200 years later.

There has been a dispossessing the property of The People, but the desperadoes who were doing the stealing were people in the wealthy slave- and land-owning class to which Jefferson and other founding fathers belonged, as well as banks and corporations.

I agree with a lot of what you say, but I think the idolatry is the key problem that I take serious issue with. — saw038

I think idolatry is a key problem too. I just don't think contemporary Christian idolatry is directed toward 'graven images', statuary, and the like. The OT prohibition on graven images was a reaction to their contemporaries, Baal worshippers and others, who thought their gods and the graven images were one and the same -- the way some Hindus think that the god and the statue of the god in a temple are one and the same. The statues of the Virgin Mary or the four Evangelists or whoever are visual references, not representations. (And if somebody didn't explain who the statue was of, a lot of people wouldn't know whether it was St. John, Aristotle, or their congressman.

The idolatry of modern Christians is the emotional and capital investment in bricks and mortar. "This church is us and God's house at the same time. God lives here. We are on good terms with God here. Without this edifice which we maintain, God would be homeless, and so would our faith. Maintaining and beautifying this structure is the heart of our faith, the most important thing we do here."

No Christian would articulate such an idea, of course, but if you look at church budgets, church fundraising efforts, church giving -- the building, the organ, the stained glass windows, etc. -- are the heart of concern. That is an idolatry.

Most churches send money to food shelves, world missions, Lutheran Social Services, Catholic Charities, etc. but it's a pittance compared to the expenditures on building and it's contents.

The idolatry is revealed in the action, not in a superstition about graven images.

Do you think that this is a form of worshipping false idols? — saw038

You didn't ask me, but more to the point, the luxuries of the church building for the Christian is better addressed by Mathew 6:19-21, “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal... because where your treasure is, there your heart will be also."

The edifice complex.

Many churches become real estate operations because as young churches they needed space to grow and run their programs. Then they matured, and over time tended to shrink. Now the congregation is small, and the needs of the building (which has become both an old "treasure" and a damned nuisance) soaks up most of their resources.

This is the American situation: many denominations, many congregations covering the same territory, and secularization has left many a church building empty. The state is not responsible in any way for the maintenance of churches.

There are solutions, but very, very few congregations are willing to merge. They don't want to share space, either, most of the time. Even churches in the same denomination have difficulty cooperating in minor ways, never mind nearby churches in different denominations.

Yes, it is a sort of idolatry.

On a day-to-day basis I'm not much worried about a nuclear apocalypse, though post-apocalypse fiction is a favorite genre, if it's well done. It's the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that set the doomsday clock at 3 minutes before midnight, not I. An even more likely cause of a nuclear war (they note) is misinterpretation of signals, telemetry as well as human words and actions.

masturbation (pardon my French) — jorndoe

But "masturbation" isn't French. Masturbate is from Latin masturbatus, past participle of masturbari. If the French had had a French word for jerking off, mentally or other wise, we would probably be using it. I read somewhere that the French never engaged in masturbation of any kind, so they didn't have such a word. It was probably in the same book that said "People are stupid."

The golden rule works because most people are alike. The same is true for subjective morality. We all tend to think the way other people in our society do, and societies across time have a fair amount of similarity and continuity.

Our similarity doesn't prevent us from acting in various different ways. Most people would say it is wrong to physically attack your boss just because you have a disagreement with him or her. People understand that one can wish harm on a superior, maybe even feel ready to deliver the harm. But, because we are similar, we will generally find that attacking bosses is a very bad policy because it leads to worse consequences for the attacker.

As a labor negotiator put it, "Write the savage letter to your boss, say everything you want to say, then delete it."

We recognize this as good policy--not because we think bosses are so special that they must be protected from very negative feedback--but because we understand that employees are far more vulnerable than bosses are.

Nuclear war will almost certainly not begin with a considered, thoughtful analysis of the international situation by the central leadership, supplemented by experts in think tanks. Rather, a nuclear war will more likely begin by some country, like Pakistan, losing command and control structure under the assault of insurgents. The insurgents, being fanatics, aren't going to hesitate to resort to nukes if their perceived enemy (India, for example) is seen as a heathen threat.

Pakistan attacks India. India retaliates. Maybe the Israel decides to get rid of threats. It attacks 2 countries, india attacks Pakistan. China or Russia decides to attack the USA, and then the curtain falls.

Oppressors and oppression has been supplied in abundance. But liberation requires two steps, not necessarily in this order:

# liberate one's self from internalized oppression taught by the oppressor
# liberate one's people from external oppression enforced by the oppressor

Different forms of oppression require different approaches. People with significant physical / emotional disorders are sometimes "taught" that they are unable, insufficient, not good enough for... and so on. The oppressive society may be quite solicitous of handicapped people, while inadvertently teaching them that they are really damaged goods.

Once upon a time, most gay men thought they were deviant, sick, diseased pariahs not worthy of manhood. The Gay Liberation Movement changed that for most gay men who experienced this self-liberation, though some guys miss the comfortable closets they preferred to live in.

Whether you are objectively oppressed or subjectively self-oppressed, it is your job to do something about it. The oppressor has no interest in unbinding your chains. The oppressed have chains to lose and a world to gain, so get on with it.

Many women are oppressed. So are many blacks. It is not the job of men or white people to liberate either group. Liberation means concerted action, on the one hand, and taking responsibility for one's existence on the other hand. A woman, for instance, can not join her boyfriend in getting drunk during Oktoberfest, and then claim that he disrespected her by having (or trying to have) sex with her while she was passed out. He was drunk too. Why should his decision-making ability be in working order when hers wasn't? Accept the consequences of getting drunk with your boyfriend (or husband), or don't get drunk.

Blacks can't do a horse shit job of raising their children, and then blame the schools for being racist because their kids arrive at pre-school already developmentally stunted. You can't belittle a black peer for acting white because he's a good student, and then claim you are a victim of racism because you can't express yourself in passable standard English.

Blacks have to end their self-oppression and must conduct political, social, and economic actions to make oppressing them a losing proposition. At one time (into the 1970s) blacks were making good progress. The community lost its way. It's not too late to get back on the right track.

So what about the place divinity holds in your views? — Mongrel

Divinity, divinity, divinity... drums fingers on table. What place?

I've tried several methods of incorporating divinity into the physical system.

The divine (God) infuses everything. The divine and the material interact.
The divine (God) is utterly apart from the physical world. No interaction.
The divine (God) and the physical world are side by side, but do not interact.

Mostly now I think God doesn't exist. No divinity, the material is all. This is not an entirely happy conclusion. I had liked the presence of God in my universe.

Yes, change is the only constant. The climate will change. What is significant about THIS climate warming (or changing) is the speed at which it is happening. Normally losing or gaining a few degrees of average surface temperature takes thousands of years. We're getting noticeably warmer by the decade.

It has taken us about 200 years of burning stored up carbon (from coal and oil) that was removed from the atmosphere about 150,000,000 years ago or so (I'd have to look up the dates for the Carboniferous layer of geology). What was unique in the Carboniferous period was that the wood produced at that time did not rot -- the organisms which are good at breaking down lignin hadn't evolved yet. So the wood pilled up and eventually was buried -- permanently (until recently) reducing carbon in circulation. Trees that die now rot, and give up their carbon back to the air, or they are turned into something before rotting.

Did you get up on the wrong side of the bed?

How did we get where we are as a country? It was built on that alone, meaning power hungry cocky assholes. IE the Rockafellas/Vanderbuilts/Morgans/Carnegies and many others of the same. — kenhinds

That's a very good question, but the answer is complicated.

First, the country was built on the backs of two despised groups: white trash and black slaves. From the very beginning, (1620 and earlier, even) the English ruling class loathed their poor white English people, and thought that the shipping as many of them to the colonies would be a way of improving them. It wasn't that they thought that North America was paradise: they didn't. The colonial masters thought of the continent as an unimproved waste land, and that it was a good place to use waste people.

Over time, the descendants of the colonial masters became the founding fathers. They didn't like poor people either, like poor white Americans. Their preferred type was obsessively hard working, thrifty, an economically ambitious climber, an accumulator of land, farm animals, etc. The type they preferred was fairly abundant, and became the real "middle class" -- not the top notch elite, but the professionals, businessmen, large farmers, etc.

Then there were the slaves. Black slaves became the largest single type of asset in the country, outweighing the value of land, buildings, and machinery. They were chattel: meaning they were property, without rights, without dignity. They were in the same class as farm animals. You could beat a horse without penalty, and you could whip a slave to death without penalty. The Civil War was not the sort of liberation of black people that some think it was. Poor--now free--blacks were even more loathed than poor whites. Well, maybe not -- hard to determine who was at the bottom of the inverted aristocracy of loathsome people.

But one thing was crystal clear: blacks were not going to rise. They were going to be kept on the bottom of the social pyramid by whoever much violence it took to keep them there. And they were, from 1865 to 1965, more or less.

As for white trash, there was never any intent on the part of the American ruling class to allow American white trash to rise too much either. Rise some, yes. Rise a lot, no. Of course: Some poor white trash became rich white trash, and if that happened far enough back, one could eventually pass one's self off as high quality. Maybe even become ruling class.

So, we have the country run in the interests of the small ruling class--whose interests tend to be supported by the much larger middle -- professional, entrepreneurial, academic -- class.

Most white trash never developed a sense of being an exploited, oppressed group. They were sold the bill of goods that everybody was going to get rich, but was just currently out of cash. Going to be rich but broke lasts generations.

So white trash are racist, quite often. White trash need the theory of racial superiority to explain how they are actually better than black trash, cuz in the dark at the bottom of the heap everybody looks pretty much the same. [My background is solidly white trash. I'm a WASP -- White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, but my parents were poor and I never made much money. Too stupid and trashy to know how.]

Who believes that we are on the verge of a massive paradigm shift? — saw038

I don't know whether we are on the verge of a major paradigm shift or not, and we might not know it until it has actually shifted. I don't think the conflicts in the Middle East are unusual. Unfortunate, but not unusual.

Are we on the verge of World War 3? — saw038

What makes it likely that we are on the verge of WWIII is the fact that Russia, US, China, Pakistan, India, France, UK, Israel (presumably) and NK all have nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them to at least some targets (like South Korea or Japan for NK). A lot of the risk is in the arsenals of Russia and the US. True, we reduced the number of bombs available (largely because we both had more than we needed) but the nuclear-missile subs are patrolling the oceans, the missile silos are ready to launch.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has their doomsday clock currently set at 3 minutes to Midnight -- the moment of doom. A few years ago it was at 6 minutes before Midnight, The End.

Naturally nobody knows at this moment how a nuclear war would begin. My guess is that Pakistan or Israel might launch an attack. Either a massive counter-attack would happen, a rapidly escalating counterattack would take place, or (least likely) the exchange would stop.

On a planet that is already experiencing global climate change, even a fairly limited nuclear war could escalate the process. Massive fires, social disorganization, abruptly shifting priorities, and so on would likely lead to a sudden increase in carbon loading of the atmosphere.

We would be totally screwed in yet more ways.

Without you, there is no me. It takes other people to be a self. We have to assemble the components of our selfhood, and while some of that comes from interacting with the objects, spaces, environmental conditions and so on, a great deal of our self-construction occurs while interacting with other selves, in varying degrees of completion.

Our playmates might be as unassembled as we are, while our parents, uncles, grandmothers, and so on are likely to be finished and polished selves. We benefit from interacting with all kinds of people.

Other people never cease to be critical. Our selves are not sufficient to easily survive solitary confinement in prison over a long period of time. We tend to shatter, eventually. People who are isolated (but at liberty), like immobile old people or psychologically fragile adults who avoid social contact, don't do well over time, physically or psychologically. They die at a much higher rate than people who are connected with others, everything else being equal.

I always think philosophy gets lost in heady speculation and neglects the nuts and bolts of human existence -- eating, playing, mating, emotions, working on cars, (or bikes, or quilting, whatever) the long hours at work, family, pets, etc.

you spend a lot of time in what is essentially a socialist household — swstephe

Reminds me of a scene from Mel Brooks' Twelve Chairs. The character is searching desperately for a chair that has jewels sewn into the upholstery. He arrives at this one house and gets on his knees and begs for information. The lady comrade says "This is a soviet household. There will be no groveling`

Do you easily and naturally believe that the outcome of a thought experiment can tell you something important about the world? If so, you, along with Leibniz, Newton, Spinoza, and Einstein (among others) lean toward rationalism.

Do you tend to squint an eye at grand theories and prefer instead to be guided by good quality studies and experimentation? Then you, along with most doctors, engineers, and John Locke, lean toward empiricism. — Mongrel

Either may be the best approach, depending on the problem and the resources at hand. I suppose I lean towards empiricism. I'm a simple peasant and I like evidence that can be cut and dried. Rationalism is probably way over my head.

1. Was Jesus' resurrection only a work of literature with no physical grounds that such a thing occurred? — saw038

Whether Jesus was raised from the dead is a secondary question. The primary question is, "Does God exist?" If God exists, Jesus could have been raised from the dead, because God could put life back into a dead body if he chose to do so. Of course, it is possible that God exists and Jesus wasn't raised from the dead. Maybe the Jews were right: God exists, but the Messiah has not come yet. Jesus was a great guy, but not The One, maybe.

If the Christians were right that God exists, but wrong about Jesus being the Son of God, then they were in deep trouble when the guy they thought was incarnated God (if they actually thought that -- they might not have at the time) was crucified, died, and on the third day was still totally dead. The disaster was Jesus' death, not the lack of a resurrection. He doesn't seem to have had time, as far as we can tell, to build up a deep following to take over for him upon his demise. The 12 apostles and followers had only had Jesus for 3 years--not very long. Even if he was God incarnate, the material Jesus was working with was not the finest grain of wood. Even as the endgame crisis approached, they kept drifting off into la la land.

The Gospels, and Paul's letters, were not written to be literature. Sure, one can read/teach the Gospels and the Old Testament as literature, and some of it is just fine as literature goes, but the Bible is best understood and appreciated as the faithfuls' account of God's actions in the world.

2. Was Jesus' resurrection a true story that transcended the realm of physical laws as we currently perceive them? — saw038

If Jesus was resurrected... yes, it was a very scandalous violation of the universe's rules and regulations. How DARE God pull a stunt like that on us -- who does he think he is?
Oh, well, I see ...

I don't think God exists, and therefore I can't think God raised Jesus from the grave. If I were changed back into thinking that God does exist, then it would be quite possible to believe that For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried. On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures; he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.