do they make electric SUVs? — uncanni

Yes, but the extension cord has to be really long.

The cosmos does not give us a meaning for our lives. What the cosmos gave us (through the evolutionary process) is the capacity to ask questions about meaning, and to think that there is an inherent meaning in life, or to the contrary, there is not. I side more with the "there is not" side -- no given meaning. But we can give our lives meaning. In fact, we can give the entire cosmos meaning if we so wish -- not that our actions have any effect on the cosmos.

Well, we don't know how they decided where to put the holes, and we won't be finding out because they didn't leave any documentation inside the bone flute we found. They probably worked it out by trial and error until they got something that sounded good to them. Whether it would have sounded good to us is an open question. Some Chinese music sounds lovely, some of it sound terrible to me.

Estimations of what Roman music sounded like are not very pleasant--to my ears. I would guess the Romans liked their music, and would have found Ottorino Respighi's Pines of Rome cacophonous.

And I do appreciate your invention of the term polymorphic: it's just not Freud's term. — uncanni

No, no, I didn't 'invent' it. It's a real word, I misapplied it, and you are correct -- polymorphous is the word I was reaching for. Mrs. Crabapple ordered me to stay after school and write on the blackboard 100 times, "I will not mistake polymorphous perversity for polymorphic perversity ever again."

I wasn't referring to human behavior, which I still resist characterizing in "natural/unnatural" terms. Perhaps all activity performed by human beings is natural to them, so that nothing would be unnatural if it's done by someone. So natural human behavior includes a tremendous amount of destructive activity... Violence and all-consuming greed certainly appear to be natural to humans.
That still leaves me thinking that climate change is an unnatural process brought on by poisoning the environment, which would be included in natural, destructive human activity. — uncanni

Homo sapiens and our various poly-morph-ous per-ver-si-ties in all categories are natural, but we are a special case. Invention of complex technology which never existed before is natural for us, just as using tools is natural for New Caledonia crows. The crow's reach, however, does not exceed his grasp. Ours does. We consider it a virtue for a man's reach to exceed his grasp.

It is also natural for us to not think ahead 10, 20, 30 or 300 years to assess what the effects of our de novo technology might be. Let me emphasize that point: We aren't merely being stupid: we did not evolve the behavior of 10, 20, 30, or 300 year foresight. We evolved into modern human beings between 100,00 and 300,000 years ago, and during that long stretch of time, we hunted, we gathered, we chipped stone tools, and we had minimal impact on the planet. When we get something new and nifty like an automobile or a cigarette, we don't think about 50,000 - 100,000 deaths a year as the consequence. (It's taken us 60 years of concerted effort to reduce the rate of smoking significantly; cars have been made safer. But it's an uphill effort, requiring states to pass legislation making it illegal to hold and use a cellphone while driving. One would think that the paragon of animals could figure out that texting while driving was stupid, but... no.

James Watt might have foreseen that his steam engine would lead to a vast exploitation of coal, but he could not have foreseen what the long term effects of fossil fuel combustion on the climate. Because Watt lived within a capitalist economy, his invention was exploited immediately to maximize production and profit. [The first working steam engine had been patented in 1698 and by the time of Watt's birth, Newcomen engines were pumping water from mines all over the country. In around 1764, Watt was given a model Newcomen engine to repair.]

Did the developers of the cell phone and the smart phone (c. 1992 -- the Simon by IBM combined digital computing with a cell phone) think about the consequences? They did not. Did they intend for the smart phone to be used as a texting device while someone was driving a car? I would hope not; did they expect diners at one table to all be staring at or talking on their phones?

Need I mention what happened after the Manhattan Project produced an atomic bomb?

All that is part of our natural endowment: the capacity to invent and exploit without a balancing capacity to be guided by long-term estimations of consequences (if they are even produced).

We are thus doomed (fated, as it were) to be burnt by our ingenious abilities.

Climate change is natural; if 1000 volcanoes blow about the same time, the released gases will change the climate--naturally. What is tragic (fated, again) is that we have known about imminent climate change for at least 30 years and have so far been unable to achieve any of the targets for CO2 and methane emissions reduction. Yes, there is some progress being made, but business as usual is pretty much not changing and time is running out on our chance to avoid dangerous climate warming.

It isn't that we are just too stupid, too wicked, too... too whatever. We are just not able to change behavior even though we know the threat. Our brains do not work in such a way that 7 billion people can coordinate their behavior to radically change their economic and personal arrangements.

Uncanni: It's a lovely day here in the upper-midwest. The temperature is appropriate to the season, it's breezy, clear, and very pleasant. Global warming? What? Let's buy a big new SUV and take a long road trip.

That's all fine and dandy, but the instrument in question proceeded Pythagoras by maybe 40,000 years. What the 40,000 BCE people had discovered was a) pleasant sound could be made by blowing into a hollow bone and that b) holes in the bone, covered and uncovered, would change the sound. c) one could play the same sounds over and over. Not enough of the bone remains to know how the sound was initiated; an unknown amount of the bone tube has been lost--we can't know how long it was.

Ancient people has plenty of knowledge of material -- for instance, they knew what kind of rock worked best for certain kinds of tools or points. They knew how to knapp the rocks with a minimum of pressure. I would be surprised if they did their work using formal theory about pressure, crystal structure, strength of material, and so forth. I doubt if they applied Pythagoras to the problem of making a bone flute. (Remote as it is, I could be wrong.)

OK, so musicologists said the distance from one hole to the next wasn't random.

Correct: polymorphous. One of those spell-checker insertions. But... I thought you found it "dialogically liberating to listen to and understand the same word one uses being used by others in different contexts which generate different meanings."

I don't find it "dialogically" (do you mean "rhetorical"? liberating to listen to people slinging around the latest cant. it's just annoying.

As I recollect, "queer" didn't develop into the meaning you cite, Queer was ripped off. It was 'appropriated'. "'Queer' now refers to all sorts of different performances or stances inhabited by both hetero- and homosexuals.".

I'm an old fag; I got done discussing all this stuff ages ago. It reminds me of my long-since-past youth.

As Kinsey wisely observed (based on a lot of research)

The only unnatural act is one you cannot perform.

It's natural for a guy to give himself a blow job, (natural if one is sufficiently well hung and flexible). it is very unnatural for anyone to actually do what is often speculated upon, to have one's head up his or her ass. The adult head is too big, for starters, and the neck is neither long enough nor sufficiently flexible.

The woman who thought she was now a man and had announced this to the world, discovered she was inconveniently pregnant. It is impossible for men to become pregnant, so it is unnatural. It is possible for women to think they are men, and visa versa, so that's natural. It's unnatural for women to become men, and visa versa, because what was decreed at conception can't be undone 30 years later. Every cell in the body is marked with its male or female heritage. Men stay men and women stay women, regardless of what pills or plastic surgery are employed. So, actual "trans sexuals" are unnatural - and impossible.

Can we talk about perverse? Polymorphic perversity? Is being "perverse" the same as, better than, or worse than being unnatural? I suppose it depends on whether it's done well, or not. Wouldn't most of us take consummate perversity over mediocre normality?

Variety is an essential feature of nature and quite aptly the LGBT community's symbol is the rainbow. — TheMadFool

The rainbow, that overworked spectrum, is only the latest symbol for gay people, and anybody that wants to associate themselves with the gay community for whatever reason. It has been debased.

There have been several other symbols for the gay community:

Walt Whitman's suggestion for the gay symbol was the phallic calamus plant, which has nothing to do with calamine lotion.

In 19th century England, a green carnation signaled the faggot, probably because green is not a color in which carnations appear -- it's "unnatural". Lately several flowers like roses, zinnias, and mums have been bred into green.

. In the 1960s-early 70s, the Lambda sufficed.



The Nazis coded prisoners using colored triangles; homosexual prisoners were identified with pink triangles. This was picked up from a play in the early 1970s, Bent. "Bent" was/is a European term for homosexuals.

I make up most of the stuff I write on this forum. — T Clark

Are not we all?

May we hear from daughter Phil what she thought? And what did you name the fourth one? Were Bob and Phil resentful about not getting ice cream named after them? (I don't like Cherry Garcia --too much amaretto flavor. Not that any one, including me, cares much one way or the other.).

Having children was never something I particularly wanted to do, being an exclusively gay guy of the not-marrying and not-having children kind. Whether deciding to have children is ethical or not depends on circumstances.

For those who have a choice in the matter: if one is not married; if one is a chronic drug/alcohol user; if one is poor; if one is mentally unstable; if one thinks that they can, singly, be a completely adequate parent; and so on, I would judge it as at least inadvisable to have children, and it might be unethical.

Lots of people are poor and manage to be good parents, but deciding to be a poor single parent is stupid. Alcoholics and chronic drug users should not be in charge of children. Period. Raising healthy children requires a fair number of challenges; deciding to have children (alone or with a partner) and knowing that one is mentally ill seems inadvisable. Children benefit greatly from having two parents who both participate in the rearing of the child. It is a question of both role models, sufficient time, attention, and income.

Over population is a major concern to me, and I don't think we can succeed in avoiding catastrophic global warming without restricting, reducing population.

People who decide to have children, especially many children, for doctrinal reasons are being unethical. They are demanding a greater share of the world's diminishing resources in the service of some god or religious obsession. [I am the youngest of a large family; I have 2 brothers and 4 sisters, two died in infancy. Effective and convenient birth control was not available until the 1960s, by which time I was in college. My parents didn't want to have 7 children, they just did.]

There are no ethical grounds for considering methods for quickly reducing the population. Fortunately for us, we don't have to think of methods: Nature can and will reduce our population if we run out of resources.

The excessively large human population is not growing as fast as it was growing, but it is still growing --it is not shrinking. IF we want to avoid being subject to nature's harsh culling methods, we would do well to have fewer children. Nor trying to reduce the population by having fewer children is also unethical.

I reject anti-natalism. People are not quite as good a thing as flowers that bloom in the spring; we are frequently less appealing that birds on the wing; but we aren't a curse on the world, either (most of the time, anyway).

It's 84.25%, actually. — S

"T"'s was a zinger; this is just sour grapes.

I am extremely skeptical of evolutionary biology or sociobiology. Looking for correlates between specific genes and specific behaviors seems wrongheaded — T Clark

It is wrong headed, because specific genes evolved long before the specific behaviors arose that we most like to dwell on.

Some people like to gamble (roulette, poker, farming, real estate, see what is going on in dark alleys, etc.). The set of genes that enable some people to comfortably gamble (take real risks) arose long before poker, farming, and dark alleys came into existence. 100,000 or 200,000 years ago, risk takers must have had some advantages, or they would have died young without progeny. Perhaps they were more successful hunters than the nervous nellies who hung back. Perhaps they were willing to see what lay over the next mountain as they explored the world, and found fertile valleys.

We wouldn't have evolved genes for academic success because academies appeared just 5 minutes ago. But organized thinking must have been an advantage a million years ago, granting H. erectus, H. habilis, or H. heidelbergensis a big of better life.

A principle of evolution that seems to me true is that "new features do not appear from nowhere." If batters can hit a little ball moving at high speed, it is because genes were developed a very long time ago for vision and body movement coordination. What mammal doesn't require that kind of capacity?

But I agree with you -- there is no poetry gene, no leather scene gene, no civil engineering gene, no Formula 1 gene.

Can you try to tie this in, briefly is fine, to the feeling of knowing/body of knowledge theme a bit. — T Clark

Reading better history than what we were given in high school (and college too, for that matter), I gained a more granular understanding of "what happened" in Russia under the dismal Romanovs as well as the dismal Bolsheviks; in Germany the brief Weimar years and the Nazi years; in the United States the promise of abolition, emancipation, and reconstruction followed by decades of retrogression through legal and extralegal suppression of black people; the history of the labor movement reveals how good theory and practice led to solid progress for workers, but was followed by weaker strategy and a very determined effort on the part of Capital to suppress labor rights, and so on.

Several years of focused reading on these topics (in the last decade, mostly) is responsible. There is a lot of hand-wringing over the rise of populism in Europe and the U.S., as if populism was equivalent to fascism. It isn't; but there is some common ground they both occupy. For the "leftish politicians" populism is a retrograde movement. Remainers in UK must feel a sharp sense of disastrous retrograde movement as the conservatives (and whoever the hell voted for Brexit) decided to negotiate their way out of union with the continent and now, under Boris & Co., crash out.

40 years ago I wasn't very familiar with the long term objections to Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, Disability Insurance, Medicare, and Medicaid of the conservative wing of the Republican Party (and the 1% masters). I became aware of court and legislative challenges to each of these programs, and enduring objection to what most people would call progressive programs. Unless there is a significant change in Congress, the conservatives will produce a retrogressive decay in these programs, not by frontal attacks in the courts, but by simply starving the programs at choke points. The IRS has been subject to this kind of choke-point retrogression.

I read maybe 20-25 books about Detroit, Chicago, and Baltimore. Detroit and Baltimore, in particular, were places that were once considered among the best cities in the country -- prosperous, forward looking, great architecture, colleges and universities, beauty, and tons of industry. Lots of pollution too, of course, but working factory smoke stacks = money and jobs. The greatness of those two cities was turned to humiliation with remarkable swiftness. I won't go into it now, but their humbling was caused by quite understandable economic change and very deliberate policy. Chicago has been surpassed by Los Angeles in population, but it still is a competitive "Second City". Chicago had the advantage of not depending on a single industry (autos) like Detroit did.

The motives and strategies of regression have become part of my body of knowledge about history that once upon a time I didn't have. I figured Social Security and Medicare were here to stay forever more, world without end, amen. It now seems possible, even a bit probable, that they won't, not because the country is going broke, but because of specific policies held by particular groups.

When I graduated from college in 1968 I would not have been able to teach anything better than the shoddy product I received. Now I could teach a much, much better course.

When I graduated from college I would not have been able to teach an English Literature or composition class as good as what I had been taught. At 22, I was woefully lacking in the BoK called life experience to appreciate the pile of literary stock English majors are supposed to be knowledgeable about and love. Now, 51 years later, I've had enough love affairs, funerals, severe disappointments & glorious achievements (exaggerating a bit), mourning and celebration, religious enthusiasms and disappointments, financial progress and regress, conflict and cooperation, etc. to actually GET much more of what literary characters are experiencing. Boswell was once boring; now he's a contemporary.

So now that there is about zero chance of it happening, I have at my command a fairly cohesive body of personal experience, literary and historical reading, and much broader interests, that I would make a very good teacher.

Sorry. The ancient instrument makers didn't scratch a telephone number, street or email address onto the flute, so I wasn't able to ask them.

However, their brains were pretty much like ours by the time the flute was made, so maybe... but we just don't know what kind of quantitative thinking they did.

All you have to do is not die and you can't help but get wise — T Clark

Not dying is insufficient. Wisdom does not necessarily grow with age. There are stupid, arrogant senior citizens who were stupid, arrogant junior citizens. Look no further than our esteemed maximum leader!

No, I don't think I am cynical. But one definition of a cynic is "a disappointed idealist". I have an idealistic streak, and I am even now shocked--shocked!!!---to find that events were made to happen by various operatives. Nope -- not a conspiracy theorists -- I don't think 9/11 was a government plot or that the CIA killed Kennedy. But 9/11 is a good example of a splendidly engineered event.

The person who might well think of conspiracies is Al Gore, the way he lost the presidency in what certainly seemed like a rush to judgement in Florida, then to the SCOTUS. I really don't know how Gore managed to endure. I'd have dissolved into a puddle of bile.

The Gulf of Tonkin business was engineered. Watergate! Nixon was very actively trying to engineer a crooked outcome.

But the biggest example of being shocked was to discover that American consumer culture was not the result of Americans merely having extra cash to spend, and lots of stuff to buy. I was shocked to discover that the culture of consumption was engineered in the latter part of the 19th--beginning of the 20th century by retailers, public relations firms, housing companies, and so on. Consumption as a way of life was a radical change from the previous centuries of thrift, production, and minimal consumption. It's been the new normal for 120 years, and it required a lot of industrious labor to get people to change their behavior that much.

I was shocked to discover that many of the manners and habits which get described as "middle class" (and references the petite bourgeoisie) and may or may not have anything to do with the middle class, were introduced and encouraged by manufacturers, magazine editors, retailers, in a very deliberate effort to shape future consumption. A lot of people's material and experiential aspirations are the result. Mine too, to some extent.

Every time I read a new book about gay history, like a recent title on Chicago's "fairyland" I am shocked and annoyed to discover that 'they' were doing stuff that 'we' 1970s people thought was scandalously revolutionary 40 years (or more) before Stonewall. What all they were doing was suppressed after prohibition. Crackdowns all over the place. Which underlines one of my theories about progress: it can always go into reverse, so we should not think that todays gains are forever.

I never worked in a book warehouse, but a guy I know did, and he also loved the job.

This is a very good topic.

I had some knowledge of American history. The oldest layer (and framework) came from elementary and secondary school lessons. In 1400 and 92, Columbus sailed the ocean blue; the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock; One if by land, two if by sea; Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence; Lincoln freed the slaves and was assassinated; Teddy Roosevelt; Teapot Dome; FDR; WWII.

Much of what I learned in school was more myth than knowledge. I didn't know that at the time. I thought I was getting the straight dope. In a different sense of the word, dope, I was getting straight dope.

I got by for a long time on myth-history. Myth works, really, as long as one isn't trying to critically examine one's life or one's country or one's world. It wasn't until later adulthood (way way after college) that I began to read material that was more knowledge, less myth, and sometimes not myth at all.

The pieces of mythic history fit together with delusions based on myth, so how can one tell that what we had been given and what we had gathered was not all that true? Was, in fact, bullshit?

It's a process, not an event.

It takes time. First, one hears contrary information -- maybe at a demonstration. Maybe one reads contrary information in a free Newspaper, or a cheap one, anyway, like The Militant, or The Body Politic (gay paper from Toronto) -- NOT the New York Times. Or one goes to a study group. One hears stories on NPR (at least one did in the good old days), or PBS. One sees an eye-opening film like The Fog of War, about Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara who escalated the Vietnam War.

Then one starts seeking out contrary information, and one finds that it too fits together, and decidedly doesn't fit the myths on which one's delusions were based. Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent was a wedge (like a log splitting wedge) that broke open a large hunk of history.

Many books, talks, magazine articles, films, discussions, etc. later, I have a new history that much better accounts for reality. A book on the history of advertising, marketing, and the creation of desires goes a long ways in explaining how I got some of the myths and delusions that are still deep in my memory.

Not only are we deluded, we have been deliberately and elaborately deceived. Somebody will say, "well that just your new myth". No, it fits too many other pieces in too deep a way. So, knowledge about history doesn't necessarily feel good -- I don't like knowing "I drank the Kool Aid willingly".***

***Historical Factoid: drinking the Kool Aid™ references the mass suicide of the cult led by Jim Jones in Guyana in 1978. It means swallowing all sorts of stuff.

Kool Aid, Kool Aid, tastes great
Wish I had some, Can't wait.

Jingle for Kool Aid.

Kool-Aid is a brand of flavored drink mix owned by Kraft Heinz based in Chicago, Illinois. The powder form was created by Edwin Perkins in 1927 based upon a liquid concentrate called Fruit Smack. Smack is now, at least, another name for heroin; the word is Yiddish, meaning 'sniff' (but not snort). It's a word the Yiddish lists do not eagerly embrace (unlike "schlong").

Tom Wolfe wrote a book, "The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test.

Kool Aid is the official soft drink of Nebraska.

DO NOT DRINK THE KOOL AID!

One of the 'facts' of mental activity that makes us who we are is that so much of it is invisible to that part of the brain that operates as the conscious self. Most of those sensory signals that pour into the brain don't pass over the desk of the conscious self. They pour in, are processed and stored. Sometimes we take note of them as they happen: A bee stings your foot; you smell roasting meat; you see an inordinately sexy body; you hear an unusual bird call and you stop to listen.

Worse, we don't know what the brain is busy doing. The endless chatter in our heads or the scratching of EEGs, or fMRI scans tell us that a lot is going on in there, but we don't have control over most of it. When I write, "I" -- my conscious self -- is mostly not composing the sentences. What I write is news to my conscious self, quite often -- like when I start a reply to someone, and realize that what I am writing is decidedly not what I want to say.

Even so, we needn't think that anyone else other than "us" is doing the composing. What I see coming out on the screen is almost always completely agreeable, and I recognize the source, the phrasing, the examples, etc. "Great -- that's my stuff, alright."

Sometimes, when we are dealing with a very unfamiliar problem, and we set out to think about it very deliberately, we can (that is the conscious self) do the thinking first hand. But most of the time, all that is carried on out of image, sound, odor, tactile, flavor, etc. We just don't have cameras inside our heads monitoring what is going on in "the big factory" surrounding our little command post of conscious self.

All to the good. We really don't want an update on every operation going on in the brain, let alone going on in the rest of the body.

As our brain forms prenatally, postnatally, in infancy, and on though to adulthood, these capacities are built. A baby doesn't have a big factory surrounding the not-yet-finished command post. As William James put it, to a new baby the world is one big buzzing confusion. It takes time to learn how to process all the input. And it takes time to put together a working self.

I certainly didn't mean to offend those who advocate for the interests of various snakes. It was not I who put the snake in the story.

I will have to take your objection to the identification of snake/evil tempter under advisement for now. You may be right, that the snake was not yet identified with Satan when the Eden story was composed, and I may have dipped into doctrine.

What was going on in the story is more portentous than Snake merely inviting Eve to doubt what she doesn't understand. What interest did Snake have in Eve partaking of the forbidden fruit? What was his agenda (or her agenda -- the snake could have been female; in fact, I have the distinct feeling just now that the Snake in Eden was definitely female).

Revelations is certainly later than Genesis, but where did the Revelation author get the basic idea of snakes not being reliable advisors (I don't know, I'm asking).

Note that the Jews see our elevation which Christianity sees a fall. — Gnostic Christian Bishop

good point

How do you understand the fall of man in a different way? — TheMadFool

The story is an attempt to explain why life is a bitch, and then we die. It would not have escaped the notice of the biblical authors that some, many, most, or all of our problems (depending on the situation) are a result of our own unwillingness to a) follow the rules, whoever announces and enforces them, b) take responsible courses of action, c) reject the seductions of various snakes in the grass who have agendas which are not in our interest, d) avoid really stupid policy and practice, and more.

For the biblical writers who believed in a just God, there had to be a monumental cause to justify/explain the enduring disagreeableness of life. Their artistic solution to the problem of the difficulty of life was to place in the story of Eden, where Adam and Eve sacrificed their innocence to the seductions of the snake/evil tempter. the cause of our daily suffering.

The faithlessness of the descendants of Abraham, is a recurrent theme in the Bible. Again and again they display ingratitude, disobedience, wanton disregard toward God. Gross negligence followed by unpleasant consequences. It's a pattern that needed a symbolic explanation which the biblical writers placed in the story of Eden.

The ancient biblical authors weren't the only writers/compilers of myths to explain the problems of the world through various kinds of divine action. Some parts of the Bible are straightforward (if biased) history. Some parts are liturgy (the Psalms). Some parts are law. And some parts are literary. The stories in Genesis are literary, mythic. They aren't intended to be literal explanations. Take the story of the flood that ends with the promise of the rainbow. It's a second creation story with a happier ending. We don't have to go hunting for evidence that there was once a flood that covered up the whole earth. Noah and the flood is another nice story that explains our being here.

If you read Job, you would not go looking for evidence that somebody named Job actually existed. Job is another story about the evil one and suffering. It is literary material, not historical. Don't take it literally.

In the New Testament, the lovely story of Jesus born in the town of Bethlehem--stars, angels, shepherds, kings, etc. is clearly LITERARY not historical. The authors who wrote that story were separated in time and place from Israel. The Temple in Jerusalem had long since been turned into a temple for the worship of Roman (pagan) gods [referenced in Jewish literature as "the abomination of desolation"]. A good share of the Jews had been deported. It wasn't a few years of separation -- it was centuries. The authors had probably never been to the former nation of Israel, now a province of the Roman Empire.

The Christmas story places the messiah in the right place and time (per literary requirements). We don't have to take that part of the story of Jesus literally.

1. We lack a complete knowledge of "good and evil"

2. God punished us for knowing "good and evil" — TheMadFool

Well, I suppose we won't have "complete" knowledge of good and evil until our time comes to an end.

Feel free to interpret the Bible however you want -- everybody else does. But in my arrogant opinion, I don't think god was punishing us for knowing "good and evil".

It doesn't make sense. Sentient beings MUST distinguish between good and evil, and nothing in the Bible suggests that we can get along without knowing what is good, and what is not good -- or evil. the Bible teaches us to do good and avoid evil. One has to know the difference.

The creation story wasn't written as biography, you know. Or history. Even if you thought the world is 6023 years old, it is OBVIOUSLY the case that nobody was walking around behind God, Adam, and Eve and taking notes. Furthermore, you know, the creation story in Genesis has common features with creation stories in adjacent cultures (in the ancient world).

The Creation story is in part the story of why there is anything at all. (God made it.). It's the story of why life is such a predictably severe pain in the ass. (A & E fucked up.).

One might think that in a world made by the hand of God that things would be a lot nicer. Instead of living in the grandeur of a spiritual 'house beautiful', we live in dismal shit holes, and carry on the way we do.

The creation story is a great piece; just don't take it literally.

If neither confer any survival value — 3017amen

I'm not a biologist, so this may not be precisely right.

That said, it seems like one of the principles of evolution is that new traits, capacities, abilities, don't just appear out of thin air in organisms. Rather, traits, capacities, features, etc. that are already present in some form are gradually modified until they are something different. For instance, early in life history, some multi-celled organisms possessed light-sensitive cells on the surface of their body which aided the organism in avoiding harm, finding food, or moving purposively. Eventually. these light-sensitive cells became more numerous, more structured, more complicated. Eventually they became eyes. Nervous systems likewise started out as very simple arrangements, and over time became more structured, more complicated, and eventually developed little brains, to which the little eyes supplied sensory input.

Music, or counting or calculation, didn't suddenly appear either. Organisms need to signal information to each other (warnings, mating availability, calling to young, etc.) and this is often done by sound. Making sound, and hearing sound, starts out simply and over time gets more complicated. Some animals make sounds with different pitch, tone, rhythm, and so forth. Similarly, counting and calculating come into play in very simple ways, like figuring exactly how an insect is located in 3 dimensions from moment to moment, and snatching the meal with a long, sticky tongue. Or an animal may need to know how much of something is available. There is a big difference between 1 wolf and 10 wolves, if one becomes the focus of wolfish attention.

Humans probably did not evolve from a line of animals that were capable of seeing ultra-violet or ultra-red radiation. As handy as it might be now, that feature was never in the cards--or the genes. We're not going to develop that kind of vision.

I was pretty sure it was Augustine, but I was too lazy to double check. Thank you for confirming.

Harvey Cox, a Protestant theologian, says this: Adam and Eve were meant to eat the fruit of The Tree. Cox emphasizes that in His relationship to mankind, God constantly calls us to fulfill our potential as God's creation. God, Cox posits, wished that Adam and Eve would decide on their own volition to gain the knowledge the tree offered. That happy event isn't what happened. Eve, and by extension, Adam, allowed themselves to be seduced by the Serpent into eating the fruit of The Tree.

So, God sees that the artificial perfection of Eden is no longer suitable to Adam and Eve. It was nice while it lasted, but now it is time for them to leave the cradle and start dealing with the kind of problem that mankind has always been dealing with. You know what kind of problems humans have to deal with, because you, being human, have to deal with all this crap too.

God keeps urging his human creation to live up to its potential.

Some time well after the death of Christ, the Church cooked up a plan of salvation which begins with Adam's and Eve's "original sin" and ends with Christ's crucifixion. Christ died to take away the sins of the world, the first of which was Eve's disobedience.

Listen, YouCrazyFool: For the time being, just forget the whole business of sin and salvation. Think about God trying to get people to be good, be ethical, be honest, loving, faithful, and so on and many so forths. That's what a lot of the Bible's prophetic speech is about: Live up to your God-given potential, people. Stop dilly dallying around in the fleshpots of the world, where you just end up getting gonorrhea, syphilis, chlamydia, herpes, warts, and worse. "I know sex feels good," God says. "After all, I created sex as part of existence. It is meant to feel good. But pullllease, raise your standards a little, will you!" You get a stiff dick and all judgement and reason goes out the window. At least go for quality!"

You can read Harvey Cox's exegesis in his short book, "On Not Leaving It To the Snake".

Your misinterpretation of the Bible is one reason why some people say that only adults should be allowed to read it. It is a richly complex book, and the uninitiated, unguided often make a hash out of it.

It is probably not the case that "music" and "math" evolved as we now experience them. "Music" and "mathematics" are cultural inventions, resting on innate capacities. Language involves a number of 'musical' qualities: tone, pitch, rhythm, and so forth. Our need and capacity to think about the world involves quantitative elements -- how big, how far, how many, how fast, and so on.

Animals which have evolved along side us also employ some of these innate capacities because they did have survival value.

Our evolutionary line has been developing these innate qualities for a few million years, and it is likely that the innate qualities mentioned DID play a role in evolutionary success. The first evidence of a musical instrument that was made to purpose is an ivory instrument with holes drilled at regular intervals. This instrument belong to 'modern man' and was made 45,000 years ago. There may be other, and earlier musical devices, which have either rotted away or we have not found.

Did musical instruments play a role in survival? Yes, because 'culture' is how we live, and everything that helps bind a group together and stimulate interaction has survival value.

At an early stage, I suppose, what mathematics did was make explicit skills that are implicit. You can throw a rock and hit the target because you are capable of calculating (not consciously) the required force, the necessary trajectory, and timing of the the throw. Other species have to do similar background calculations to be able to catch prey, or avoid becoming dead prey. But the first applications of math were (as far as I know) applied to trade, which is very recent, 5,000 years ago, after the invention of writing.

We have been evolving for a long time, and we won't be finding any evidence in the fossil record of how innate abilities that would one day produce music and math developed.

Monte Python is up there with the greats, in my humble opinion, and I have laughed a lot in some Seinfeld episodes.

My John Donne never saw a film and never wrote a screenplay. He died in 1631, London; he was 59. He is considered one of the greatest love poets in English. He was a poet and a clergyman, Church of England. What my Donne and your Dunne have in common is that they are both dead.

Here is one of his characteristic poems - about how likely it is that a beautiful woman will remain both both beautiful and faithful. It's read by Richard Burton who had problems remaining faithful, as I recollect. So did his wife, Elizabeth Taylor.

Donne doesn't condemn the lady in the poem, however.

In The Flea, he contemplates the parasite that has just sucked blood from him and is now doing the same thing to the woman sitting near by. In his day, people had fleas. Fact of life.

Mark but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deniest me is;
It sucked me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be;
Thou know’st that this cannot be said
A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead,
Yet this enjoys before it woo,
And pampered swells with one blood made of two,
And this, alas, is more than we would do. (two more stanzas)

The flea has mingled blood that is not going to get mixed in any other way -- certainly not by he and she having sex. The flea is luckier than he.

Writers like Shakespeare's and Donne's writing was loaded with memorable phrases that have taken an independent existence -- like "for whom the bell tolls" or "First thing we do is kill all the lawyers".

What I said was in the context of, and stimulated (caused?) by TheMadFool's Latin quote. It directed me down a particular thought-path.

Generally, I am very tolerant of unproven, evidence-free statements--Not because I believe everything I hear, but as you said, "because it can lead to fruitful lines of thinking".

I do not have a dog in this fight, but it seems like Quod grātīs asseritur, grātīs negātur is valid. I can claim there is intelligent life on 23 planets, but I make this claim without evidence. There are quite a few planets that MIGHT POSSIBLY host life of some sort, and there is evidence for that claim. But there is no evidence at all for the claim that 23 planets host intelligent life. So you can say, "No there are not." with as much confidence as I said it with. "Donald Trump is a moron." can be asserted and dismissed with equal confidence. There does not seem to be any evidence for his being a moron. There is no evidence that he is a distinguished statesman, either. He provides daily evidence that he lurches from topic to topic in his Twitter pronouncements.

A lot of discussion that goes on here is based on assertions without evidence. This is an entirely normal state of affairs, because we understand that we all have opinions about all manner of things that are not supported with evidence. If we had to present evidence for all our opinions, we would become terminally constipated and would eventually explode.

There was a scene in a movie made from a Kurt Vonnegut novel, where a couple finds themselves in a bubble/cage in the middle of space. They are in a large bed. The aliens ask them, "Have you mated yet?" We don't know why the aliens care whether they have mated or not, but apparently they are scientifically oriented aliens.

The humans protest that they have free will and may or may not mate, depending on their wishes.

The aliens respond that they have studied millions of sentient cultures in the universe, and only on earth is anyone concerned about "free will".

POINT OF STORY IN THIS THREAD:

MAYBE what the aliens will tell us is that some of our philosophical concerns are nothing more than oddball hangups. Being concerned about free will and the meaning of the universe strikes me as hang ups. For one thing, we probably can not determine whether we have complete free will or are completely determined. And we can not determine what the meaning of the universe is, either. If we want the universe to have a meaning, then just fucking get on with it and give the universe whatever meaning we think it should have -- or no meaning at all.

From what I can tell, we are a mix of determinism and freely chosen acts. And if we are totally determined, then it still feels like free will -- so what difference does it make?

I do not think it is controversial to state that your childhood really sets a lifelong trajectory. Can we abandon this narrative that if you just work hard and make good choices you will succeed? — rlclauer

One's parents, and the head start they give their children (or not), does indeed plot much of one's trajectory. There are enough exceptions, though, to warrant working hard and making good choices. Up to the spring of 1964, I did not, could not plan on going to college. Several fortuitous events happened that made it possible for me to begin college in the fall. I did work reasonably hard (could have, would have, should have worked harder) and I could have made better choices about careers. I thought I would become a high school teacher, but I did not know myself well enough to realize how stupid that choice was for me. Things eventually worked out OK after graduation, without me teaching so much as 15 minutes of 12th grade English.

Children can often exceed their parents economic achievements under some circumstances, especially during a vigorous growth economy, and if one's parents weren't very high achievers. It's possible to exceed one's own predicted trajectory through life if one has at least normal intellectual assets and a lot of drive, and not too many unfortunate accidents.

Greatly exceeding one's own expectations and parental achievements shouldn't be counted on. In the long run of history, continual speedy upward progress is NOT normal. (In the long run of history, people more or less match their parents' achievements when things are going well.). Centuries have passed with no net economic growth. That doesn't mean life was terrible during those hundreds of years. Life was just very stable. One's life was like one's great grand parent's lives. Another angle to remember is that when economic growth does occur, it is never evenly distributed. The rich get richer, of course, and the poor get poorer. When England colonized North America, it was not the riff raff that benefitted economically; it was the leading families of England who owned the colonies, and made investments. "It's not the Earth the meek inherit, it's the dirt."

I believe we should temper the western narrative of everyone deserves where they end up, and place more emphasis on social responsibility and economic determinism. I would be interested in reading your thoughts. — rlclauer

Anglo-America, at least, has been fairly strongly flavored by Calvinist theology which holds that material success is a sign of God's grace. The successful man is successful because he was predestined to receive God's grace of salvation, and material success is a sign of grace. The poor couple with 5 sickly children are also evidence of God's plan of salvation. Their wretched state is a sign of their damnation by God, and their poverty is a mark of God's displeasure.

God's pleasure or displeasure is a flying fickle finger of fate, as it happens. It is quite often IMPOSSIBLE for us to perceive the virtues of the elect and the flaws of the damned. I mean, a lot of assholes seem to be among the elect, and a lot of very decent people seem to be among the damned. I say fuck John Calvin and his theology of fucking predestination.

So I have heard that "no man is an island" phrase hundreds of times. I just assumed it was some idiom. Thanks for the cultural learnin'. — ZhouBoTong

And now you also know where Ernest Hemingway got the title for his novel, "For Whom The Bell Tolls".

The movie wife of W. C. Fields, who played comic drunks, said in her usual harsh, stentorian voice, "You're going to drown in a barrel of whiskey." Fields' movie reply was "Drowned in a barrel of whiskey! O death where is thy sting?" Another line from a John Donne poem.

The source of power is the desire of those it subjugates. — Tzeentch

How does that work for slaves?

No, individuals determine their own fate, collectivism is a hindrance — rlclauer

I disagree with this option.

No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man's death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. JOHN DONNE, 1572 -1631

You understand, of course, that "man" is the generic for humankind, which includes men and women.

Certainly, individuals play a part in their becoming; we are not automatons. "Fate" is a really old-school concept; Fate deprived the individual of ultimate autonomy. (Or in the words of the Roman poem, La Fortuna, "Fate crushes the brave".) Our 'fate' for better or worse was determined by The Fates – or Moirai – who were a group of three weaving goddesses who assign individual destinies to mortals at birth. Their names are Clotho (the Spinner), Lachesis (the Alloter) and Atropos (the Inflexible).

The 'self-made individual' is a fiction of the narcissistic personality, the rugged individualist, the deluded loner.

We are social creatures, and without society and everything involved in society, we are no more than wolf-children, clods.

Exploitation is a recurrent feature of human behavior -- whether it is exploiting the land, the sea, the air, animals, plants, or other humans. It's what we do; it is a feature of our species, not a bug. So, as much as we depend on collective society for our existence, we also can count on probably getting screwed by our society. No one is exempt: one is either a member of the small group of beneficiaries of past and current exploitation (rich people) or one is the object of exploitation (that's most of us).

Now, despite all this verbiage about collectivity, it is also the case that individuals, singly and in combination, are critical drivers of society. Being a driving force doesn't mean one wasn't affected by membership in the collective community. Indeed, their particular community is where individuals learn how to be drivers/leaders.

here has been for quite some time an obsession with power and looking at everything through the lens of power, domination and exploitation. This narrative sells so well. Especially to young students. — ssu

what you say is true enough. The current crop of students (and maybe the theorists from whom they get ideas) seem to think that power comes by way of race and gender. Power iS connected to race and gender, but the source of power remains exploitation of resources--mineral, plant, and animal--including our esteemed animal selves.

Your Philoscience prof was probably correct. My impression is that the the old whore of philosophy has been more than adequately plowed. However, I doubt that either AI or aliens will change the situation.

Our putative replacements (computers and aliens) will have to deal with the same problems every other conscious, knowing species have had to deal with.

College does not seem to consist of strictly 18-22 year olds, anymore -- it has not for quite a while, actually. Good luck to you on your education project. It is a good idea to focus on study while you are in school.

As for unionizing a work place, one needs the support of an established union--there are a couple that represent restaurant employees.

I have shoplifted in protest before. — thewonder

I used to do that -- back in the 1970s -- until I got caught and had to pay a hefty fine. My partner was nearly arrested at a local grocery store for sampling chocolate covered something or other that were sold out of a bin. He was very humiliated, and was not doing it for politics, but because it was a convenient snack item while he was grocery shopping.

I spent a lot of time in gay bars once upon a time. (I'm 72.). Cruising for sex, of course, and to chat, listen to the music. I sometime drank too much, which sometimes is the point. So, at this point I've settled on being as suave or gauche as I am. I am what I am.

The IWW was/is an interesting group. The do exist, but nothing in the way they did 100 years ago. But I think their theory, their songs, their attitude was all good. You familiar with Billy Bragg -- a British folk singer?

Here's his version of the Internationale.

The Internationale
Billy Bragg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v85NWc0RIKc and Pete Seeger doing the original version in French

Stand up all victims of oppression
For the tyrants fear your might
Don't cling so hard to your possessions
For you have nothing if you have no rights
Let racist ignorance be ended
For respect makes the empires fall
Freedom is merely privilege extended
Unless enjoyed by one and all

So come brothers and sisters
For the struggle carries on
The internationale
Unites the world in song
So comrades come rally
For this is the time and place
The international ideal
Unites the human race

Let no one build walls to divide us
Walls of hatred nor walls of stone
Come greet the dawn and stand beside us
We'll live together or we'll die alone
In our world poisoned by exploitation
Those who have taken now they must give
And end the vanity of nations
We've but one earth on which to live

And so begins the final drama
In the streets and in the fields
We stand unbowed before their armor
We defy their guns and shields
When we fight provoked by their aggression
Let us be inspired by like and love
For though they offer us concessions
Change will not come from above
Billy Bragg

So, again, good luck to you, and much success.

I'm a bit of lifestylist and a utopian idealist who isn't too terribly involved with the labor movement. — thewonder

I've was involved in a leftist political group for 15 years, but was a union member all of about 15 months. I've always worked in the NGO sector of the economy -- the non-profits -- and they are very rarely unionized. The one time I was able to join a union was when I worked for the U of MN, for a short period of time. I wasn't impressed by the AFSCME local.

Many of us are life stylists and utopian idealists. My favorite political day dreams are utopian. The problem with me was that I didn't really practice the kind of lifestyle I would have liked to lived on a sustained basis. Had I done so, I'd probably be dead 20 or 30 years ago. I wanted to be a man-about-the-gay-town; suave; a coherent radical (some were, some were not); a notable person. Trouble was, I didn't know how to be all that--at least not until I was too old to be that kind of person.

Plus I was pulled in other directions. That was really the problem -- I was pulled by short-term enthusiasms rather than sticking with the main chance. And all of this is about life style, ideals, and all that.

I actually think that too much of the Left is ostensibly opposed to radical reform motivated by some sort of revolutionary notions. — thewonder

Much of the left has its collective head up its collective ass. The insistence on revolution over reform gets one off the hook of having to figure out what to do to make things 10% better right now. It's easier to just say, "oh, woe, reform just undermines the revolution. We mustn't settle for reform because then the revolution won't happen." Bull shit. Get out there and work for whatever gains you can get. Everybody will be better off, and you just keep working for the revolution.

Do you think that the political system could be meaningfully, substantially, and radically altered without waging something like a general strike? — thewonder

No. Though, when you think about it, "a general strike" in this country would already be pretty radical. Workers in France have done it a number of times; students have joined in (and visa versa). But France's history and political experience is much different than hours.

But it would take more than a general strike. It would require a genuine political alternative that was organized, powerful, extremely broad based, and popular. It would take a disciplined movement of workers, unemployed, youth, and seniors. The protest movement in Hong Kong demonstrates discipline. Without it, they would have fizzled many demonstrations earlier. The labor movement in the US has demonstrated disciplined solidarity, like when they forced the Big Auto companies to negotiate with them back in the 1930s. A lack of discipline is revealed when union members cross their own picket line. That has happened on more than one occasion.