Greetings and Salutations from...... guess who?

May the fall television season be all that you hope for and more!!

But seriously folks...

Friends,

Willie Loman's father abandoned the family when Willie was "just a baby." Willie, as a child, blamed himself, and in fact, never stopped blaming himself. He thought that if he had been a somehow better, more personable, more likable child, his father would not have left. It is Willie's lifelong, relentless, tragic quest to be "well liked."

He is always trumpeting the virtue of being "well liked." It is this compulsion that explains his unfortunate choice of profession, his unworkable approach to the job of selling (with his emphasis on "selling yourself"), and most significantly, his long-term affair he carried on with a secretary at a department store in Boston; this is the woman, who, upon Willie's parting, coos at him: "... thanks for the stockings (significant because Willie's wife, Linda, is shown darning or sewing her own stockings). Next time your in Boston I'll put you right through to the buyers."

I would say that the reason behind Willie's affair was because he was searching - in vain - for the maternal validation that he never received from his mother. When his father left and Willie blamed himself, his own mother was either not willing and/or not able to disabuse him of this erroneous notion.

In his book, Family Secrets, family therapist, John Bradshaw explains that every infant has certain "narcissistic" needs. The primal experience, as he puts it, of a baby's life is looking into the face of his mother. It is important for a baby to look into that face and be able to see - himself!

It is important for a youngster to have the validation of someone in this world who thinks he is totally fabulous, the greatest thing since sliced bread, if I may put it that way, to oversimplify of course. But sometimes an infant will look into the face of the mother and not see himself. Indeed it is the mother who is seeking to use the baby to fulfill her emotional needs - which were not met at the appropriate time, that is, her own mother had not provided her with narcissistic validation.

A child in this situation may find himself in the role of "surrogate husband" to his mother as he grows older Recall that not only did Willie Loman's father walk out on the family when Willie was very young, but so too did big brother Ben. Willie sees Ben as a man much like their father was - as Willie imagines him to have been of course .

Ben is also like their father in that he also abandoned the family, went off to Africa apparently with barely a word. Willie is also angry at Ben, which is why he yells at Ben, as he rejects his offer to move out to Alaska and manage those properties, "We're gonna do it [make a success] here. You hear, Ben? We're gonna do it here!"

Even though Willie is drawn to Ben and his father because of the way he has romanticized them, he also must reject them because they abandoned him. Young Willie would have been the only one his mother had had left, and we can therefore imagine that she exercised a desperate, cloying hold on him. This means that she did not fulfill her emotional responsibilities, as his mother, to Willie.

Because of this lack Willie spent his whole life trying to get the motherly love (not that his mother did not love him) he did not get from his own emotionally unavailable mother. And this is why Willie has the affair with the woman in Boston, in my opinion.

I'll continue with this next time.

Until then

wingedcentaur

Good Morning Friends,

So old man Loman (Willie and Ben's father) moved the family around a lot because he was very likely dodging creditors. And according to Willie, the father "left when I was just a baby," and "I never had a chance to talk to him." Willie's use of the word "chance" is interesting.

This word, "chance" reduces parental responsibility to happenstance. Old man Loman couldn't pencil little Willie into his schedule. The father abandoned the family when Willie was very young. Willie, it seems, never allowed himself to consciously feel that anger.

But Willie is angry at his father. There is no doubt about that. We know he is angry at his father, as he should be, because he takes that anger out on his brother Ben. There is a scene in the play when Ben invites Willie to move himself and his family out to Alaska. Ben wants Willie to "manage" some properties he has there.

Willie is sorely tempted to take him up on his offer, remember? He fantasizes about it, "me and my boys out there..." Willie should have taken his brother up on his offer. He would have been being true to himself for perhaps the first time in his whole life, and had been engaged in this rare act of self honesty, he would have changed his whole life and that of his family for the better and avoided tragedy.

After Willie had killed himself and the family and Uncle Charley attended the funeral and returned to the Loman home, Willie's son, Biff, said something interesting. "He had the wrong dreams."

Charley, completely missing Biff's meaning, blathers on irrelevantly about how "a salesman's got to dream, boy.." and so on and so forth. Willie Loman should never have been a salesman. But not only that, Biff's statement is literally true. Willie Loman, in trying to make himself into something he was not, for the wrong reasons, had indeed possessed the wrong dreams.

This is a counterintuitive sentiment though. How can someone have the wrong dreams? How can dreams be right or wrong? One's dreams are simply intrinsic to himself, aren't they? One can have wrong dreams if they are the product of a false self, a fragile structure that Willie Loman painstakingly built up over his entire life.

Willie should have been a carpenter. That was his great talent. He was in his glory working with his hands. It was with his hands that he could hope to impress his brother Ben. Willie loved to send Biff and Hap, his other son (and there is a reason it has taken me this long to mention his name) to steal building supplies from the apartment building project across the street so that they could "rebuild the entire front stoop right now." Willie cannot impress his brother about his career, such as it is, in "selling."

During these episodes Willie can show Ben that he is a man's man, as it were, and that he was raising his two sons properly. In this way Willie likes to think he is gaining Ben's approval. And we, who came of age in the eighties, certainly, and blessed as we are with the perspective of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, know that Willie is seeking something he can never have - the approval of his own father.

There is something else that our modern perspective informs us of. Willie Loman, like all children who have been the victims of parental abandonment, blamed himself as a child and never stopped blaming himself. This is the key to his whole life. This is why he builds a false self. This is why he shoe-horns himself into a profession he is not suited for, is not good at, and doesn't even like. This is how he has become so economically desperate that, for some time, he has been borrowing two hundred dollars a week from Charley and pretending to his wife, Linda, that it is his pay. But I'll come to that later on.

When Willie and Ben's father abandoned the family, Willlie blamed himself, as all such children do. If only I had been a better, more cheerful kid, dad wouldn't have left me. Willie's mother was obviously not enough of a firmly supportive presence to counteract Willie's mistaken idea.

Let us return to the scene where Ben offers Willie the job in Alaska. But we'll have to do that next time.

Until then,

wingedcentaur

Good Evening Friends,

Willie Loman is the "salesman" in question, the one who dies tragically at the end of the story, by his own hand. Death of a Salesman is the story of how Mr. Loman came to such desperation that he believed the he was "worth more" dead than alive. He takes his own life so that his older son, Biff, can collect the better part of a twenty thousand dollar life insurance policy (that's twenty thousand dollars in 1950s terms). Wille's did this because he had the vague idea that Biff, his star, his favored, would "be ahead of Bernard again."

It is interesting to note that Willie is given positive counsel in this endeavor by his "brother," Ben. It is Willie's self conjured apparition of Ben. Willie is usually talking to himself when "Ben," is invoked. One could say that Willie has tried to split his Self in two parts. Understand that "Ben" helped talk Willie into committing suicide.

Ben is Willie's brother, a man whom Willie idealized. Ben was apparently something of an adventurer. He had left the family at an early age, "struck out on his own," to "make his fortune." We are given to understand that Ben journeyed to Africa and became wealthy in minerals and other commodities.

Ben was the kind of man that Willie wanted to be and the kind of man that the salesman was raising his boys - in a way - to be. Willie very much wants to believe that he is living his life and doing things the way Ben would have done them, if Ben had been in Willie's position. Willie values "Ben's" advice and counsel above all others, and Willie clearly harbors some anger at Ben, and it must also be said, obviously their father, though this father-anger is not expressed directly. It's hard to say that Willie even consciously recognizes this anger at his father, which he converts into self-blame and over-compensation. But let's not get too far ahead of ourselves.

We are given to understand that Ben, this American epitome of the "rugged individual,' is a man very much like their father (Ben and Willie's). At one point in the play, Willie, speaking as "Ben," talks about their father. According to "Ben," their father was something of a restless adventurer, a brilliant inventor.

"Ben" tells us that their father concieved and built various brilliant inventions and moved the Loman family from town to town selling them. It seems that their father rode into a town, sold his wares, made his money, and them packed up the wagon and the family, and headed off to the next town to dazzle the inhabitants with his inventions, and on and on, so on and so forth.

Now, one must view this account with suspicion. One learns early on - if he doesn't suspect even earlier - in the play that Wille Loman is an "unreliable narrator." There is one case in which we are given a flashback on Willie's life.

Willie has come home from a sales trip in New England. He is joined in the backyard by his wife, Linda, and his two sons, Biff and Hap, as well as some friends from school whom the athletic, popular, and charismatic Biff has brought home. Linda asks Willie how the Chevy ran. "How did the Chevy run?"

In front of his two boys, Biff and Hap, Willie says that the car ran like a dream and such blather along those lines. When the two boys are out of earshot, we hear a different story from Willie. "Goddamn Chevrolet! They ought to prohibit the manufacture of that car."

In front of his boys Willie always must play the big man, the world-beater, the all-star salesman in a game where its all about "selling yourself," at least in Willie's opinion of what he believes to be the "facts of life" (not a quotation from the play but one of those old expressions with no clear meaning). Willie must pretend that everything is always coming up roses for him because he purports to live by the philosophy that the way to get ahead was to be "well liked."

This is what passes, from Willie's perspective, as good, fatherly instruction. He teaches his boys the value of being well-liked. He is always telling his boys the critical significance of being well-liked above anything else. Willie contrasts his son, Biff favorably against, say, Bernard, the son of "Uncle Charley." Willie says sadly, "... Bernard is... not well-liked."

Willie must model himself as one who lives by his own advice and thrives because he does so.

The truth is that Willie Loman is a tired old man, worn well beyond his sixty-odd years by care, worry, frustration,, and desperation. He is a man in a profession he is not suited for, one that he is not good at, and one that he does not even like. I will reinforce those points next time when I talk about how Willie Loman assembled his identity.

But to return to Wille and Ben's father, knowing what we do about Willie, knowing that he is a prevaricator, we can now look upon with a jaundiced eye, "Ben's" account of their father. Old man Loman was probably good with his hands. He might have been a handy man or something. However - and though I could be wrong - I feel certain that the reason old man Loman moved his family around so much was because he was dodging creditors.

We are given good reason for this conclusion because old man Loman did eventually abandon his family when Willie was very young, "just a baby."

There is a scene in flashback when Ben (I think a reasonable facsimile of the real Ben) visits with Willie and inevitably, looking at his watch, pressed for time as he always is (after all 'time is money,' and all that) and says that he must be shoving off, must make the train to be on time for another meeting that promises to make him a lot of money, blah, blah, blah.

Willie pleads with Ben to stay another minute. There's so much Willie wants to say and well, he "never got the chance to talk to him (their father), as old man Loman had "left when I was just a baby." Since Ben is so much like their father, presumably, Willie craves his company even more, for Ben's own sake but also because Ben represents a kind connection to their father.

I'll continue with this next time.

wingedcentaur

Good Evening Friends,

As I examine the Arthur Miller play, Death of a Salesman, I'm going to be drawing out all of those elements which are, to my way of thinking, not only indicative of but actually emblematic of what I have termed 'psychological reincarnation' and also 'partial psychological reincarnation.' As I have said before, I believe that these are the secular version, or truer version in my opinion, of the mostly eastern religious doctrine of the spiritual reincarnation of the "soul."

I do not subscribe to the religious version of reincarnation. I do not subscribe to the notion of a detachable, immortal soul. But I believe that the doctrine is and has always been based on something real. To believe otherwise would be to surrender ourselves to the notion that six, seven, or eight or more thousand years of the history of world religion [and I'm not just talking about the idea of reincarnation, but also the Christian Trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Ghost), and many other aspects of religion)] is nothing more than a global, inter-millennial, species-wide "delusion."

I think this is a sadly diminutive estimation of human intellectual capacity and a darkly pessimistic view of human moral integrity. If those militant atheists really believe that organized religion is nothing more than a delusion or hoax, it is a delusion and/or hoax that has taken thousands of years to develop and solidify then we could both pose a question and tender a caveat: A) Question: If organized religion is either a hoax and/or a delusion, and given the fact of the millennia-long history of religion, where do they think the moral strength or integrity, on a broad basis will come from? B) If religion is a hoax and/or delusion, and given the thousands of years history of religion as a part of human life, religion will probably take thousands of years, at least, to eradicate it and replace this "irrational" belief with rational atheism; and even if this project were possible (and I don't think that it is), I think that society would run into, again, those primal forces in the human psyche that gave flame to the beginnings of religion and spirituality in the first place. I don't believe that all the data is in about the biological, genetic, sociological, historical, and evolutionary aspects of the development of religion.

I will be making several arguments:

1) Willie Loman, the main character in the play, is a man with two "Selves," a "true" Self and a "false" Self; both selves are real, as the "false" one had been built up meticulously over his seventy odd years of life.

2) Willie Loman is a man with a severe polarity in his personality. I am not a mental health professional but I would loosely ascribe the word "bipolar" to Willie Loman, both in terms of his moods and the very different characters of his two "Selves" that I have alluded to.

3) Willie Loman is a man whom I think we would describe, today, as a borderline paranoid schizophrenic. Indeed he suffered a severe psyhotic crisis, at the end, until the moment he took his own life. If someone had been able to intercept him before he took his life, Willie Loman might have done with six months to a year of hospitalization, at least.

4) The influence of Willie Loman over his two sons is far beyond anything like the normal, healthy and even unhealthy influence that parents have over their children. Indeed, one of Willie's sons can be said to be the offspring of his "true" Self; and the other son can be said to be the offspring of his "false" Self, the one Willie Loman had carefully built up during the period of his whole life, practically.

5) I will argue for the existence of both the dynamic of psychological reincarnation and partial psychological reincarnation, with respect to the interplay between Willie Loman and his two sons.

6) After all of this I will draw a connection between this and the choosing of the next Dala Lamai, with the aim of showing that the phenomena in both cases, from two very different countries and cultural backgrounds, is emblematic of the very same dynamic.

7) Even though Death of a Salesman is fiction, it is related to real phenomena (I will be discussing the book by John Bradshaw, called Family Secrets).

Until next time,

wingedcentaur

Friends,

I remember once watching something about Tibet on the National Geographic Channel (channel 43 in my area), specifically about how the next Dalai Lama is chosen. There is a kind of elder body of, you might say, religious examiners who are in charge of the process. The way the matter seems to be presented to the Tibetan public, from what I gathered from the program, is that the soul of the original Dalai Lama has been reborn once again in The One, a very young boy from a working class family, who is to be taken and raised by the monks so that he may fulfill his destiny.

We are dealing with reincarnation. However, it is not a simple matter as the Dalai Lama being reborn reborn in the body of a youngster, completely self-aware, who can say, at the appropriate time: 'Here I am guys. Take me to the temple and let's get to work!'

There is usually at least two or three boys in contention. The amount of credibility they can make for themselves seems to corresponds, in part, to the degree which they can summon up memories of their past lives (as the previous Dalai Lama), as well as other things.

After some time has passed the elder body of religious examiners make a decision and choose a single boy, and declare him to be the reincarnated Dalai Lama.

Now, one can imagine someone of the skeptical/atheist perspective seeing this and saying, What nonsense! If reincarnation is real, what is all this rubbish about not knowing which boy the Dalai Lama reincarnated in? Its this one or that one, clear and simple. All more proof that organized religion of all kind is a great, big, cynical hoax.

I will only say here: not so fast. I'll leave it there because this is our lead in to a discussion of Death of a Salesman.

Good Night,

wingedcentaur

Good Evening Friends,

It seems that we have lost our post from yesterday evening due to some vague, atmospheric technical glitch, blah, blah, blah. While the loss of this post is mildly tragic, it is no great bother. We can return to those thoughts another time. However there is still one more thing I would like to mention before we begin our examination of the play Death of a Salesman, on the road to describing what I have termed psychological reincarnation - that I claim was discovered thousands of years ago by the ancient masters, those various founders of the world's religions and spiritual systems - whose greater purpose is to support my thesis about the reconciliability of religion and humanism.

While most of us visiting this blog may not subscribe to the idea of God, in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic sense (many of us believe that the concept of "God" is simply beyond our level of comprehension at our present state of development), others in the humanist camp seem to view the trinity idea about the nature of God, to be another level of nonsense on top of the idea of God, a product of delusion to begin with.

I would suggest that the trinity idea of identity is not, in and of itself, ridiculous. If one wanted to one could think of each and every one of us as having a trinitarian identity. In Christianity God is represented as God The Father, The Son (the word or wisdom of God), and the Holy Spirit or Holy Ghost.

You read these words and get an idea of what I am about. These words, to the extent that my choice of words, sentence structure, idiomatic expressions, my predominant subject matter, and the thoughts I express, are reflective of what and how I think, they are me, my (Word).

If you spoke to me on the phone and heard my voice (Holy Spirit), you would encounter the second dimension of me. To the extent that my use of language and tone of my voice is reflective of my identity, my feelings and emotions and thought processes, my voice is me, my (Holy Spirit).

If you met me in person and came into the totality of my presence, my (Father), you would be in the physical presence of my full self, from which my (Word) and (Spirit) issue; and while my (Word) and (Spirit) are reflective of ME, they are ME, qualitatively me, but could never, by themselves, certainly, nor in combination, be ME quantitatively.

We can never fully express the "Father" of our Selves through our verbal (Spirit) or written (Word) words. And so the sum is greater than the sum of the parts. Now, I do not know if the concept of a trinitarian God was thoughtfully laid out by the compilers of the Bible or jerry-rigged as a part of the synthesization of various theologies, that we know to have been a part of assembling what we call the Bible. Or was this conception a survival of a kernel of the wisdom of the ancient masters?

Whatever the case may have been, I think the Trinity served a useful purpose as a portal, in the west, into the exploration of more complex notions of individual identity, which includes some of the psychological phenomena I have alluded to in past reflections in this blog, such as so-called Multiple Personality, the composite nature of the Self, and the like.

wingedcentaur

Good Evening Friends,

There is one more thing I must mention before coming to our examination of the play Death of a Salesman on route to laying out my argument about psychological reincarnation, which is the centerpiece of my presentation which will attempt to reconcile religion and humanism. Another reason that this is important is oil. There can be no doubt that the Christian Right is an important element fueling the broader political Right's staunch resistance to any environmental protection measures, particularly those involving CO2 emissions, oil, and global warming. Some of the Right seem to think that talk of global warming is so much propaganda. They will mention the fact that decades ago the big concern was global cooling.

I cannot speak to that. But a more important consideration for our purposes is this: do you believe that oil comes from dead dinosaur bones, as I do, or do you believe that oil is just a substance placed in the ground by "God," for the benefit of Man; and presumably God would not deliberately give us something that would degrade the ozone layer when burned.

If you subscribe to the latter then certain conclusions follow:

1) You do not accept the notion about the Earth being several billions years old.

2) Therefore you believe that the Earth is only several thousand years old, not nearly old enough to have hosted the life spans of such a species of dinosaurs, for the many millions of years that scientists believed they had roamed the world.

3) With the connection between oil and an extinct animal species severed, one is only left with divine origin to explain the existence of this substance called oil - the term fossil fuel would be meaningless to you.

4) And so, if the oil was placed there by divine providence, for the benefit of Man, who has been given dominion of the Earth, then using it cannot possibly cause harm to us or the environment. God wouldn't do that to us, the Christian Right might argue.

I'm afraid it really does matter what you think about evolution, the age of the Earth, dinosaurs, the nature of oil, on a practical level. Its like a game of Russian Roulette. Either the Religious Right and their more secular political allies and sympathizers are right, and the world is getting warmer due to some natural, perhaps cyclical process. Or the Religious Left and their more secular political allies and sympathizers are right, and the world is getting warmer due to human action.

Okay, I'll finish this supplemental introduction tomorrow, when, hopefully, we can then get into dissecting Death of a Salesman.

wingedcentaur

Good Morning Friends,

Concerning our project of reconciling religion and humanism, I am still not satisfied that I have made myself clear about my intentions and meaning. When I suggest, for example, that Jesus expressed an essentially secular observation when he talked about the man stricken with the plague - having cited his observation as emblematic of something I have termed psychological reincarnation, I do not mean to extract Jesus, the possibly historical figure, from the realm of the religious or spiritual. I am not presenting Jesus to religionists as a secular figure. I am also not presenting him to humanists as a kind of 'fellow traveler,' if I may be forgiven for using that term in a slightly distorted context.

Indeed, it was through the application of his "spiritual" vision that he came to various realizations that he did in both the "secular" and "sacred" realms. Knowledge is transdimensional or transrealistic. I just mean that knowledge cannot be place in a box marked either "sacred" or "secular." Real knowledge is applicable everywhere. Basically, I consider myself an adherent to the Humanist Manifesto of 1933, yes, 1933 as opposed to at least two that I know of that came in 1973 and 2000. Point number seven says ".... the distinction between the secular and the sacred can no longer be maintained."

Let me see if I can give you a link, if you're interested.

American Humanist.org

I think that's it. Frankly, I just typed in Humanist Manifesto of 1933 in the search bar. I was taken to the manifesto of 1933. I looked up and saw American Humanist.org and other stuff, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, I hope that's right. My point is that for us, of the relgious humanist or relgious naturalist school, there is no dividing line between the perceived secular and the perceived sacred.

Next time I'm going to go right into a discussion of Death of a Salesman.

wingedcentaur

Good Evening Friends,

In connection with my proposed series of reflections concerning the reconciliation of religion and humanism, we begin. I begin by trying to persuade you of the underlying secular validity of a process, reincarnation, that is commonly understood to be "spiritual" in nature, and therefore subject to belief in or disbelief in, depending on your outlook. Why have I, a westerner in culture, chosen the odd and eastern topic of reincarnation to focus on?

Because reincarnation is an ontological matter, ontology being the study of being, the very nature and properties of the Self, or "Soul," if you like. This is central to all we have been discussing in all of the reflections of this blog.

Let me say this. A word that scholars use in writing about the history of ideas is anticipation, or to say thus and such "anticipated" thus and such. This word, "anticipated" is used to describe the relationship between an idea that came first and its later, more developed and sophisticated, analagous, descendant idea, if you will, either in the same field or in an entirely different field. "Anticipation" seems to convey, in this context, a coincidental prescience, a kind of serendipity.

For example, we might say that the east Asian idea about reincarnation (or more properly, transmigration) with the soul being concieved as not only passing from life to life, but form to form depending on the righteousness or lack thereof, of one's existence in the previous state - anticipates the theory of evolution.

What we are looking at here is a delineated relationship between religion and science. We are given to understand that a rough, vague, notion, primitive to be sure, rather quaint and cute in its superstitious way grew up in a delusional spiritual system or religion - and its interesting to notice a very, very, very vague resemblance to rational, real science - but enough of that tosh, as they say in Britain. No connection between the two ideas is ever mentioned, or perhaps, either thought of. These ideas are said to be independent of one another.

I say that these ideas are on the same continuum, not apart from each other, and not on different intellectual tracks. Religion was the first mode of conveyance, to us in our day, of ideas of practical, quantitative, and secular value; but during the time that the ancient masters, the founders of the world's religions, uttered these ideas there was no clinical, secular, scientific framework within which they could be interrogated, accepted, or rejected them.

Therefore they were placed in the only system of intellectual comprehension available at the time, religion. And as these ideas were making their way down to us, secular society, they yet served to distort and exaggerate the the claims, practices of those religions.

Let me give an example. There is a passage in the New Testament in which Jesus and some of his follwers come upon a man with the plague. He's got open sores and boils and the like. One of them asks Jesus what was the man's sin that he should have been striken with plague. I don't remember the precise location of the passage just now.

Jesus answers something to the effect that the man, himself, did not sin but his parents did. What are we to make of this? Do Christians really believe that their god would actually strike the children of "sinning" parents, with the plague? Is that the kind of God they want to worship, or is even worthy of worship?

The sins of the father are visited upon the son. Do we really want to revere a God who would strike the innocent children of "sinning" parents, with plague just to make a point. Is there another way we might interpret that statement of Jesus?

Consider this. In his book, Family Secrets, John Bradshaw, the family therapist out of Texas, tells the story of a man who got a red rash around his neck, every Feburary 14. Why? Well, we found out that his mother and grandmother both killed themselves on or near that day, in different years. This man was what Bradshaw calls the "symptom bearer" of his family.

So children can carry and physically bear the marks of their parents angst and dread. Maybe this was the sin (might have been a transliteration challenge, but "sin" was the closest approximation of the expression that early Christian chroniclers could think of).

Alright, I'll leave it there for now. Next time I will begin my discussion of Death of a Salesman.

wingedcentaur

Good Evening Friends,

There are three events we should note briefly. First, this is the eighth anniversary of 9/11. I'm sure all of you have been reflecting on where you were and what your were doing on that day, as I have; and I'm sure most of us have reflected privately and in conversation with family, friends, and perhaps even strangers as to how we assimilate these events and their aftermath into our historical narrative as Americans, and what this can, should, and does mean for us and the world going forward.

Second: the President of the United States gave an address recently to a joint session of Congress, making clear the priorities he wants to see emphasized in any healthcare legislation that finds its way onto his desk. As you know, during the part when he said that undocumented persons, who are in America illegally would not get benefits, Representative Joseph Wilson shouted out "You lie."

A) I found it odd that the president even felt the need to say this; but I do seem to dimly recall an incident a few years back when Congress failed to pass an expansion of the CHP health insurance program for children because of Republican opposition, for fear that the legislation would inadvertently cover the children of undocumented persons from Latin America. What can one say about this?

1. I am personally loathe to criminalize crossing into the borders of another country without papers.

2. I think we should connect the issue of illegal immigration to NAFTA, and the paradox of America having a war on drugs (in addition to our wars on crime and terrorism) that we insist the rest of the world join us in, while having relatively loose gun control laws (I hear that most of the guns the drug cartels are shooting each other up with down there in Mexico come from the United States).

3. I think the only real healthcare reform is single payer of the same quality that I imagine that every member of Congress enjoys. But deep down in their hearts they, even and perhaps especially the Republicans, feel they deserve it as our rulers, the rulers along with the Executive Branch of America and therefore the Free World and therefore The World. And as such they have the weight of the cosmos on their shoulders, and therefore they must be free from such mundane concerns like paying the taxes, getting an affordable deal on a home mortgage, worrying about their own children's future, making a living, and organizing their own health insurance coverage, and so forth.

4. In my humble opinion, whatever modest reform is passed by Congress and signed by the president this year must cover everyone in America who pays taxes (as I understand the vast majority of undocumented workers do) for it, whatever it is, to work. To try to avoid covering every tax payer would be to invite a nightmare of bureaucratic complexity and perhaps profiling by name. You may have heard of the problems with so-called E-Verify for immigration/citizenship status, mistakenly targeting legal immigrants for deportation. Imagine that a woman is wrongly thrown off coverage because of her last name - just at the point when her doctor has told her she has malignant cancer and that she needs a double mastectomy immediately.

B. Joe Wilson. What is there to say about this? What would happen if we held politicians to a one hundred percent, total accuracy and truth standard for every word that comes out of their mouth about policy? Civil discourse on matters of public policy between politicians, between politicians and journalists and politicians and the public would be rendered impossible. We all know this full well; and that includes Representative Wilson. That's all I'll say about that.

Third: President Obama gave an address to school children encouraging to study hard, make good grades, and to figure out what their contribution to society will be, and so on and so forth. In the next post I'll share some of my own views about education. I'll talk about a book that influenced my thinking mightily, The End of Homework by Etta Kralovec and John Buell. I will also describe, glancingly, how this relates to my own thinking about knowledge and information.

Until next time then,

wingedcentaur

Good Evening Friends,

I'm going to begin a group of speculations concerning a continuing interest of mine, the reconciliation of religion and humanism. What do I mean by reconciliation? Good question, I mean, frankly, that it is one of my fondest hopes that one day humanism, as a naturalistic philosophy, will stop viewing religion as basically a six or seven thousand year old historical global delusion, consumed by fools. I think this is essentially the viewpoint of at least a certain wing of the humanist camp. I hope humanism will come to realize and appreciate the great creative contributions religion, as a component of what I consider the totality of "philosophy," has actually made to various branches of human knowledge. It goes without saying that there is a certain intellectual arrogance involved.

My hope for religion as a total body of thought, perhaps naively, will come up to date scientifically, primarily by embracing evolution. Maybe some religionists are offended by the idea of evolution, the notion that we are descended from apes. This is not precisely what the theory has ever said, but don't let's bother with such distinctions here. The point is that they don't want to be associated with big, dumb, wild, hairy animals, and knuckle draggers, I almost forgot to say 'knuckle-draggers.'

But if any of you grew up watching Wild Kingdom (hosted by Lorne Green from Bonanza and some guy before him) on Saturday mornings and other nature programs, including Nature on PBS, you have an appreciation of the majesty of all the creatures of the land, sea, and air. And when it comes to our closest relatives of the hairy primate family, we see the sensitivity and complexity of their lives with one another and individually, and one says to himself: it's not so bad being an ape. Why should we be ashamed to be associated with this?

What I shall try to persuade you of, those of you who need persuading, that there might, there just might be more intellectual content to religion than you may think. I want to try to persuade humanists, those who are persuadable, that to even think of abolishing religion is like willfully abolishing one of our five senses.

Here's my thesis: the ancient masters, those original mystically inclined founders of all the world's religions both "major" and "minor," sometimes said things, expressed ideas and notions, and made observations about nature, psychology, and other things of the secular purview, which had no available clinical or scientific framework within which they could be understood; and so they were integrated into the only available system of comprehension of the time, religion.

I believe that partially through this process, religion did become somewhat exaggerated and distorted. I may return to that point later. Anyway, let me conclude this introduction. The topic I'm going to focus on is reincarnation, an eastern concept mostly, I think, but not unknown to us in the west, but of course, it is not very familiar to us in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic cultural framework.

I'll define the term next time. But while I do not subscribe to the spiritual theory of reincarnation, in that there is an immortal soul which is reborn over and over again, intact, in different bodies, I will try to make a case for a secular equivalent I call psychological reincarnation and partial psychological reincarnation.

I'm going to do this by examining the Arthur Miller play of 1949, Death of a Salesman, a book by family therapist, John Bradshaw called Family Secrets, - both of which I will examine in detail, and lastly, I will refer to a National Geographic Channel (channel 43 in my area) about how the next Dalai Lama in Tibet is chose. I am going to show how these three things are related in making my case for psychological reincarnation. This should take about two weeks, I think. I will begin tomorrow.

Until next time then

wingedcentaur

Good Morning Friends,

I'd like to say a word about the Snuggly, you know, the blanket with sleeves - which I understand now comes in leopard and zebra. Friends, as you know, there are some youngsters of a certain age who develop a prolonged attachment to their favorite blanket, or their "blanky," as they adorably refer to it. Most of them are gently encouraged, over time, to give up their blanky, and in most cases this weening happens successfully.

But perhaps the blanket serves as a symbol of stability or readily available comfort. I myself did not have a favorite blanket but I had a Teddy Bear. But seriously folks, what are we to make of the repackaging of a childhood comfort crutch and marketing it to adults? And there is something ironic in this too.

For years activists have been saying that advertisers are not playing fair by marketing grossly unhealthy, sugar permeated (really corn syrup - let's give a nod to the subsidized, global, American based agribusiness industry) cereals to adults through their children, who wil sometimes make a scene in the middle of the supermarket if their parents don't buy the latest jelly donut flavored cereal with a picture of a cartoon superhero on the box.

Now, can it be said that the Snuggly is something marketed to adults through their own inner child? I may be making too much of this, but I fail to see the reason why people need to wear their blankets. In the commercial I believe I even saw someone wearing it at a football game. So, doesn't the Snuggly unintentinally, at least, of encourage a regression on the part of adults, to childhood, to a certain extent.

Is the next step to make the Snuggly for children? Instead of weening them off their blankets, why not just make jackets out of them? I may be wrong, but can we say that the Snuggly is indicative of and emblematic of the desperation of American capitalism, that things such as the Snuggly are what we are producing?

The new market is the inner children of adults. It seems that we don't make much in America anymore, like, say, cars because the revenues earned by manufacturing cannot compare, apparently, to the paper shuffling of speculative finance.

I have an idea. You know, some youngsters are especially fond of stuffed animals. I, myself, had a Teddy Bear two decades ago. Why not make wearable stuffed animals, so that your Teddy can always be with you?! The head would fold in and back to form the hood... And their should be a way to adjust the size so that it serves as either a coat of bear, a small bear or large bear...

Let me close with this. Having said all of this, having made the following commentary, I feel the temptation to run out and buy a Snuggly for myself. Frankly, those things look like fun. I'm so pathetic.

wingedcentaur

Good Evening Friends,

As promised I'm going to say a few words about the fiction of fantasy writer, Piers Anthony, one of his world creations, the land of Xanth, centaurs, and two other topics addressed in a cursory fashion, and all in one post.

I call myself the winged centaur because I have a minor aesthetic preoccupation with centaurs. I think they are magnificent creatures, and I don't mind telling you that I sometimes wish I could transform into one for a little while each day. But I would want to change back.

I am also intrigued by the ideas of transhumanism. This is the notion that the human form need not always be precisely what it is today in the future, that it might take a variety of forms through genetic engineering or fusion with nano technology, and so forth. For transhumanists the human body has come to be what it is through the remarkable but nevertheless indifferent process of evolution; and this means that the body was not designed in Heaven by God and made to be unchangeable; and therefore why not change it if we like to fit different circumstances; and a certain amount of transfiguration is almost inevitable anyway.

I am not a total transhumanist but I am inspired by those visionary ideas, and my thinking certainly tends in that direction. I consider myself a religious humanist or religious naturalist, not an atheist not an agnostic really. I do not feel the need or the inspiration to forcefully assert the non-existence of "God." Though I find I do not think much about the God question personally, I don't share the view of some atheists that humankind must somehow give up religion to advance or take "the next step..."

I believe that if the majority of the world's people were to do that, we as a species would lose a good part of our creative imagination in other areas. As I wrote in the very first post in this blog, for me, religion is a component of the totality of what I understand to be "philosophy," which I think of as the unmanned space probe of human knowledge. From the Existentialist point of view (or an Existentialist point of view, mine) much of human behavior has a purpose and aim that goes beyond the immediate, apparent object. And in many cases human behavior goes far beyond this into a modality I have termed "groping for the infinite" (though not necessarily divine).

I am not an agnostic, in that our acknowledged ignorance of "God" does not impel me to secularism, per se. Though there is no "god" that I pray to, or church I attend, or "religious" or spiritual practices I adhere to, I do not consider myself secular even though I agree with most of the views of secular humanists.

I am a religious humanist or naturalist, and only waver in accepting the title 'humanist' because I hold out the possiblity that there might be innumerable intelligences in the universe between ourselves and "God." I imagine there might be other sentient beings somewhere in the universe, groping in the darkness as we do, trying to figure out who and what they are and what the purpose of their lives are.

By the way, I do not believe that any extraterrestial has ever visited our world. I am persuaded by the argument that the amount of energy needed to propel a vehicle of some kind through airless "space" is so unimaginably vast as to preclude serious consideration on the part of any other space crawling race. If we ever do manage to make contact with another sentient species, I imagine it would have something to do with a development of communication technology of unimaginable scope and power and personal utility like Google Earth to the zillionth degree times a factor of one trillion. This is a point I may return to in another group of speculations. Indeed, it might be that physical transport to and from the homeworlds of other sentient species will never be possible, for some reason, and even if it was humans might find that it is physically impossible to exist in physical proximity to other sentient species because of different environmental acclimations. Some of them might beathe only methane gas or something like that.

Anyway, I believe that there other things religion can and should attend to besides how to get "saved."

To return to our main theme. I had previously thought that the fantasy fiction of Piers Anthony was a bit too whimsical for my taste. I think I'm changing my mind. But there was one novel of his I read decades ago called Battle Circle, which I believe is out-of-print now. This novel was not like his current or recent work at all. There was no magic or magical or fantastic creatures in this book. Let me tell you, and I don't say this lightly, Battle Circle was/is a tour de force of rugged adventure. I would go so far as to call it fantasy adventure noir, yes noir.

I will forego giving you a description of the plot, as I do not remember most of it anyway. It was decades ago as I said. But take my word for it, Battle Circle: think UFC with weapons - on steroids!

One day, as I was browsing the book shelves of our public library, about ten years ago, I came upon the image of a winged centaur for the first time. It was on the cover of a book by Mr. Anthony. I thought something like: A bit of overkill, isn't it? For a creature who is already near-perfection. Can such an oddity actually fly?!

Piers Anthony is author of a series of novels set in the magical land of Xanth. Through a misunderstanding I had thought, until a few days ago, that Mr. Anthony had created a new race of beings called Che Centaurs. I was talking with a friend of mine about this and he put me straight. He told me that Che is the name of the first organically born winged centaur. It seems that in Xanth, winged centaurs are a cross between a "regular" centaur and a creature called a hippogriffin.

Xanth is an interesting place. Early in its history, it seems that every sentient being in Xanth is either born of magic, that is intrisically magical or possessed magic. Regular centaurs, at one time early in their history were magical not possessed of magic. But now they are a full-fledged indigenous race to Xanth, regular centaurs possess magic. It seems that every sentient being born in Xanth possesses one magical talent of some kind.

Anyway, according to my friend, there is, in Xanth, a special enchanted lake that has the awesome power of causing two beings of entirely different species, who meet at this body of water, to both become sexually attracted to one another (which is how centaurs came about in this world) and cohabitate, facilitating whatever anatomical shifting and biological and genetic modifications are necessary to do that and have children.

I was intrigued. I fired questions at him. Who put that lake there and why? What was his purpose? What did he mean by this? How do the two participants feel about this? For example, does the horse maintain his desire to mate with humans? No, that particular human, my friend said. And the human maintains the desire to mate with that particular horse.

I'll just close with this. I am intrigued because I am curious about the very real psychosexual phenomena of bestiality. I wonder what the aim is of people who engage in these activities. Is it possible to analyze this behavior through an Existentialist critique?

wingedcentaur

Good Evening Friends,

In keeping with our change of pace, a series of reflections containable in a single post each, I'd like to say a word about this financial crisis we're in. This should be quick because I don't know anything about the financial architecture or economy of this country. But since that trivial little detail did not stop John McCain from running for president twice, our ignorance should not stop us from blathering on about the matter and groping, in our way, for understanding for ourselves - after a fashion.

Friends, the word 'greed' might come up sometime during this discussion. So let me start by saying this: if I've said it once I said it a thousand times - well, four or five times at least, anyway - that greed always, always, always comes from fear. I want you to remember that, greed always come from fear.

I think of a nation's economy like the human body. The financial infrastructure of a nation is like the metabolism of the body. The metabolism is the engine of the body responsible for converting incoming food into sugars, fats, carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals, ammino acids, whatever, that are needed to keep the body healthy and functioning normally.

The incoming nutrients or "food," in economic terms, with respect to the nation's financial metabolism are people with good jobs and good prospect or people starting small businesses, let's also say. A person walks into a bank, with a good job and/or otherwise good prospects, and applies for a loan to buy a house, which she wil fill with a spouse and children, perhaps a pet or two, thereby making it a home. She may also get a loan for a car, which she wil use, principally, to take herself to and from work, drive the kids to school, and haul them around to judo lessons, ballet lessons, play dates, and so forth.

In this way we can say that she is ingested into the system. Society's main interest in the home she creates is that it will serve as the base from which she will launch her children into the world, hopefully as productive citizens; hopefully they wil be able and willing to get a decent education by which, presumably, they will be able to get satisfying careers that add value to society. This after-effect with the children is the equivalent of the metabolization of nutrients into the body's vital components.

If the body is starved, I mean with literally no food coming in, the metabolism will faithfully do its work by turning the body itself into its own sustenance. The metabolism will make the body feed upon itself. Under the economic paradigm we have, finance must always finance something - even itself.

A much less extreme variant of metabolic abuse is the regular consumption of the body of "junk" food, chocolate bars, sugared cereals (especially corn syrup), potato chips, and so forth. All things in moderation. So its alright if such fare are occasional snacks but not good if they make up the staple of someone's diet. In such a case I'd imagine that the metabolism would have to work much, much harder to extract anything of value from such a diet, than it would have to with a regular diet consisting of the four basic food groups.

Side note: In thinking about this topic it strikes me that there is a bulimic aspect to the American economy, in the way that it always, intially builds up or takes in jobs with good productive value (i.e., manufacturing jobs of various sorts with decent pay and benefits and time off) and then discharges them through outsourcing (and their replacement at home with an excessive proliferation of "junk food" jobs (retail jobs with no prospects, security guard, jobs with big multinational shipping corporations working like a horse loading tractor trailers, and on and on).

In fact I'm reminded of a cartoon I heard about. There is a young man and the caption below him reads something like: 'Don't tell me this new economy doesn't make jobs. I know it does. I have three of them.' The picture shows him on a bike with a sack around the handlebars filled with multiple copies of the Daily Bugle he delivers as one of his jobs. He is wearing a security guard cap, and a Wal-Mart badge.

We are informed that this whole mess originated with a housing "bubble." To my way of thinking any and all "bubbles" are emblematic and indicative of a basic systemic acknowledgement that there is a fundamental lack in a country's economy.

Consider this. Suppose someone is living on four hours of sleep a day, drinking fifteen cups of coffee a day, smoking a half a pack of cigarettes a day, and eating a diet consisting mainly of snickers bars, doritos, stuffed hot dogs from trucks or convenience stores, jumbo grape slushies, skittles. How might one keep himself going, and with the illusion of vitality to boot.

One might take amphetamines and this would indeed give him the illusory feeling of vigor. If you think about it, this is a kind of chemical "borrowing." I am analogizing this to what a country might do in encouraging its citizens to live on credit in various ways, do a yo-yo thing with interest rates, push through sweeping financial deregulatory legislation and practice.

People say Greenspan is to blame. People say Phil Gramm is to blame for pushing through the Financial Services Modernization Act in the nineties, which Clinton signed. During the election campaign people spoke of regulators beign "asleep at the switch."

One heard this phrase over and over again, "regulators asleep at the switch." I kept thinking to myself 'What switch?' 'Where is the switch?' 'What is the switch do?' 'Does one turn the switch on or off?'

But such massive deregulation occurred because the body of the American economy was starving and derivatives, credit default swaps, and the like are merely the body feeding on itself. Either that or the system was suffering from extreme malnourishment and the metabolism had to work much harder to extract anything of value from the poor nutrients coming in.

Suppose someone on the Snickers/Marlboro lifestyle is one hundred and sixty pounds. Suppose he takes in ten thousand calories a day and he burns twelve thousand and five hundred calories. What kind of shape would he be in at the end of the year? The metabolism is much too strong for that body. I am making the argument, in a different way, that Kevin Phillips is when he speaks and writes of the over-financialization of an economy.

I am indifferent to the efficacy of re-regulation of the financial system. What this means to me is this: suppose someone is being held prisoner somewhere and only allowed to eat Skittles, Doritos, and drink grape soda three times a day. Someone says 'Time for regulation,' which means no more Skittles, say. So financial regulation does not address the structural issues with our economy.

Alright, I'll leave it there. There's more I could say, of course, but I did promise to keep this at one post.

Tomorrrow I'll talk about fantasy writer, Piers Anthony, the land of Xanth, centaurs, and a magic lake that can not only cause beings from different species to fall in love, desire to mate, and - hold on to your hat - but also to make it biologically possible for them to do so, whatever it takes.

wingedcentaur

Good Morning Friends,

Just for a change of pace I thought I'd try laying out some reflections that I can deal with in one post each. By the way, I will be discussing in more detail, exteriorized tribalization/internalized self-tribalization in upcoming reflections on evolution.

Right now I'd like to say a word about the media. We all hear this: newspapers are in trouble. News services are slashing jobs. They are severely cutting back or closing their foreign bureaus. Readership is down, way down. Some editors are considering monetizing the content they put on the Internet.

Editors come on the radio and talk about the need to adapt to a richer, more dynamic media landscape. They pull out their hair in public. Heavens to Betsy! their business model is broken. Now I don't mean to sound unsympathetic...... Oh wait, yes I do.

Why are their readers, their subscribers, and indeed, advertizers abandoning them? After all, they do their best to be pluralistic, fair and balanced, even-handed, non-ideological, objective, and so forth. These editors wonder aloud, with a lump in their throats, what will become of our democratic republic without newspapers. They try to predict the future. What will the new media landscape look like twenty years from. Indeed, what role might the blogosphere play?

There are editors and reporters who caution us about seeing the Internet as the new promised land. Be wary of those bloggers and other free-wheeling Internet operators, those unschooled, untrained, unpolished cyber-ruffians. Even when they are on the radio one can imagine them wagging their finger in a schoolmarmish way.

The question before us is: what makes good media? I'm going to say the good news media is media, left, right, or center, which does sound structural work on the underlying issues involving particular stories. What does that mean? What do I mean by 'structural work?'

Let me address that with a negative example. One kind of media that I avoid is what I call obvious slam media. There is an Internet news service, who shall remain nameles, liberal Democrat in orientation. By the way, one mistake I think newspapers made was in denying their ideological perspective. It's striking how 'ideology' has become a dirty word. I believe that acknowleding up front an organization's ideological perspective, or bias, if you like, actually makes for more objective, if objectivity is necessarily something to strive for.

But anyway back to this nameless Internet news service of liberal Democrat orientation. There was a story in that cyberpaper about Chiness spying against the United States involving nuclear secrets of some kind, ranging over a period of time vaguely between 1980 and 2000 - vaguely. According to the story it seems that Republicans were blaming President Clinton. This story marshalled facts to show that it was actually Reagan's fault - so there!

Imagine two children on the playground saying "Did not!" "Did to!" "Did not!" "Did to" "Did not!" "Did to!" And on and on and on and on. This partisan sniping does not help the rest of us understand the underlying issue which is: what is the nature of international espionage? What is its legitimacy or lack thereof.

I suppose most nations have intelligence services that spy on their friends and enemies alike. America spies on other countries and other countries spy on us. Sometimes they're going to have their successes. No country can fully seal themselves off from such vulnerability. Any society that could and did probably wouldn't produce much worth stealing anyway (i think I read something like that somewhere).

We might also add that the basic mandate of intelligence services, at their most benign, is to break international law everyday, by suborning (is that the word?) treason. And its worth linking this to the CIA tortue scandal. How relevant is it for President Obama to order them to return to interrogation techniques limited to the army field manual? How relevant is trying to "fix" the CIA so that they go back to breaking the law, on a regular basis, just a little bit.

But this story in this cyberpaper had none of that. It was only concerned with scoring points against Republicans. So far, from what I've seen, all of their stories are like this. In short, maybe readership of newspapers are falling off is because people feel that the traditional purveyors of information about our world have gradually become less capable of explaining a world to us that, starting with 9/11, seems to be far, far more complex than we ever imagined and that the regular news organizations ever hinted at.

wingedcentaur.

Friends, many of you have, no doubt, had the following experience. You find yourself in a relationship with someone very attractive person, beautiful in the classic sense according to "abstract universal human qualties." You find yourself working very hard to get that person to be a better person. You work mightily to unearth the noble person that you know is in there "deep down inside."

What you were trying to do was make the person as beautiful on the inside as he or she was exquisite to you on the outside. But you found that your efforts were wasted on individuals whose fundamental characters were highly dubious at best, and tending toward the sinister at worst. But you would not have worked so hard if you had not been physically attracted to the person first.

When we are attracted to a person we hope that he or she is as desirable on the inside as they appear to us on the outside. Either that or we try to make the person over into something we think best fits their angelic beauty. But the initial pull is always physical, follow me? So when we find that the person who is outwardly beautiful to us proves to be as "good" on the inside, without any intervention from ourselves, then this can be the basis of Desire, at least, on the starting point for Love.

"Spirits" or "hearts" do not fall in love with each other, bodies do. It is always like this. It can be no other way, in my opinion. And so too, it was with the young woman in our case study.

Suppose the young man, the "neo" "little person" had not been murdered, and he and his fiancee had been able to get married. The durability of their love would still be under threat, by viral agents of a specific nature, a process I've been describing all along. But this is a dynamic at play in all relationships, at least in their formative stages, more or less.

Sidenote: Why do so many Hollywood marriages crash and burn?

They speak of the strain of conducting the personal relationship in the public eye. Its hard being them, these celebrities followed around by the paparazzi taking their pictures and the celebrity journalists writing their stories. They say that living in a "fish bowl" undemines any relationship.

But why should this be so? Why should other people observing you and your partner affect how the two of you relate to each other? What precisely does one have to do with the other?

Its about everything we've been talking about. We must know that that the act of seeing or observing is not a passive activity. We affect what we see; we affect it by the act of seeing it (Pragmatism). So the Hollywood faces the process of imposition of dark motives, very much more intensely and yes, constantly that you and I do, with the pictures (sometimes no doubt digitally manipulated for greates effect) and stories in the tabloid literature, and the presentations on television on the tabloid expose shows.

The process of "viral infection," I've been describing sets in and pretty soon, if you're one or the other in one of these Hollywood relationships, you do not know where the sweet, loving person you married or did whatever with, ends and where the bastard "everybody" says he is begins. Finally you "don't know" the person anymore. The relationship is dissolved and thus another dream is shattered.

And now to return to our case study. Everybody tells her constantly how altruistic she is to give her love to "someone like that." In time she may come to see herself as a missionary of love to the less fortunate without even consciously formulating such a conceit. However her behavior toward her husband changes in a way that he feels is patronizing. She of course does not know what he's talking about........ and thus another dream is shattered.

wingedcentaur

Good Evening Friends,

We have been concerned with two features of Existentialism:
A) as an authentic mode of behavior, standing when and if necessary, in contradistinction to "abstract universal human qualities; and
B) as an encapsulation of what I consider to be the ontological reality of the consciousness: consciousness is not what it is but what it is not; and we have also been inquiring into how the nature of the consciousness makes it or the Self prone to "viral infection," in the form of external imposition by others of dark renderings of motives to you with respect to your actions; and these renderings become intermingled with your own motivation matrix so that you do not know where your feelings, wants, and desires start and those that society, as a whole, say are right and proper for you to have, end.

We have been applying these features of Existentialism to the area of love. We have been concerned with a specific case study from a popular television detective series, CSI: crime scene investigation unit. There was the pretty young woman of average height and the beautiful young man, a "neo" indeed, who was also a "dwarf," or "little person." The young man, of course, had been murdered by the girl's father, himself a "dwarf," as I have mentioned. The father murdered the young man because he did not want his grandchildren to be condemned, as he conceived the matter, to living life in America as dwarves.

Why did the young woman want to marry the young man in question, the "neo?" Because she loved him and was possibly;" In-Love with him, of course. But how did she come to fall in love with him? The same way other people come to fall in love with each other, she was physically/sexually attracted to him. We must be absolutely clear on this point.

I would further argue that she is and always had been physically/sexually attracted to men who are shorter than her, perhaps much shorter, indeed, the shorter the better, the direct inverse of the "tall" part in the "tall, dark, and handsome" paradigm. Much shorter men are her aesthetic preference, and this is so even if she'd never had the chance to act on her desire with the men she dated before she met her fiancee.

If this were not so then we are left with such folderol like: "I looked past his appearance;" "I fell in love with his spirit;" "It is the beauty of his heart or soul that matters to me;" or "looks have never been very important to me;" "There's more to life than transitory physical attractiveness."

Now I don't mean to make light of such heartfelt sentiments... well, I do just a little bit. Given what we know to be the physical basis of attraction (no matter what your physical/sexual/aesthetic preferences are), these statements are nonsensical from the point of view of Existential critique, no matter how sincerely she believes them and holds them to be true. Furthermore, these assertions of devotion which ignore the physical, delivers an insult to the young man in question, because they suggest that he cannot be physically/sexually/aesthetically attractive to any other women than those in the "little person" community.

These admittedly hypothetical, sentimental eruptions of hers, devoid of the physical that mask her own true desire, have been imposed upon her by others, her family, friends, and other intimates, who always tell her how large-hearted and altruistic she is for giving her love to "someone like that," which I think is a rough approximation of how at least some of them might have conceived the matter. In time perhaps she comes to believes that she is an exceptionally giving person for giving her love to "someone like that," just as everyone around her keeps telling her.

You know, I hear there are some viruses that are so insidious in their operation that they can invade a system and mask their presence, making their host think everything is just fine, normal, routine.

There is no smell, no taste, no sound. There is no pain, no feeling or sensation of any kind. But you have been invaded.

To be continued,

wingedcentaur

Guess who?

Now, during the investigation led by the forensic staff of the crime scene investigation unit in the vanguard, with which the actual police detectives were allowed to tag along - so that they might learn, we were taken into the social/sexual world of "little people," dwarfs (dwarves), excuse me for saying.

I want to pause here to note something. There are social clubs for exceptionally tall people (men have to be over 6'2" and women have to be taller than 5'10" generally. There are also social clubs for very exceptionally short people. What does this mean? I think what this means is that these groups of people, on either extreme end of the height spectrum, feel the need to congregate together in temporary solace, in refuge from us, we of average height. This is emblematic of something I call exteriorized tribalization/internalized self-tribalization.

I mean exteriorized as opposed to externalized. This term of tribalization is the imposition by others of the proper physical, aesthetic nature of heterosexual relationships, that couples should fit norms of symmetry I have described. Society tribalizes every heterosexual couple we see in this way. Only if we have aesthetic preferences that are quite contrary to the consensus norm, those preferences we are supposed to have, do we break out of that paradigm. Internalized self-tribalization is indicated by the formation, by people on either end of the height spectrum, of tall persons and short persons social clubs.

One can only internalize something that is imposed upon him. Internalized self-tribalization happens because of exteriorized tribalization. The self-tribalizing group self-tribalizes because they have accepted and resigned themselves, I'm sure bitterly, to the aesthetic judgments of the prevailing, dominant paradigm, and therefore, in a sense, separate themselves physically from the majority, who think they themselves embody the accepted aesthetic norm.

The self-tribalizing group must resent the majority of the prevailing paradigm, whose aesthetic values stand in contradistinction to their very existential (small 'e') identity, even as the former takes on and applies to themselves and among themselves, these very aesthetic values.

Say whaaaaaaaat???!!!

The main contact or witness for the investigators was a vivacious, spunky young woman who was heavily involved in the "scene," as it were; and who was/is herself, a "little person." She is a well known character actress whose name I can't recall right now. She told them that the deceased had been a "neo."

According to her a "neo" is a "dwarf" whose features are perfectly proportioned as though he were not born a "little person," who usually have phenotypical morphological variations recognizable in the face and hands, and so forth. Being a neo, this young had been a genetic superstar in the 'little person" social community and he could have "had his pick" of young ladies in that community, according to the witness for the investigators.

Stay with me here. What we have is an additional sub-tribalization within the self-tribalized group. Or, because we love tongue twisters so much, this is an interiorized-exteriorized tribalization by and of the self-tribalized community.

So the rejected, tribalized and self-tribalized community, marginalized for not being "normal," paradoxically still clung to the aesthetic reverence of the dominant paradigm, which rejected them, of "perfect" symmetry of face and features. It's hard to know what to say about this.

It turns out the the young woman's father, himself a "dwarf," killed her fiancee. The reason he gave was that if they got married their children would each have a "fifty percent chance of being a dwarf," and he couldn't have that. "It was a hate crime, self-hate," said Grishom wisely. He was always saying gosh darned deep stuff like that.

But we are not done yet. We still have to apply this principle to the star-crossed lovers: consciousness is not what it is but what it is not. We will consider the couple as if the young "neo" had not been killed. But we shall do that next time.

Good Night,

wingedcentaur

Good Evening Friends,

Let's get right into the case study I have in mind. I am thinking of a show originally premiered on CBS called CSI: crime scene investigation unit. I am thinking of the original series with Grishom, a combination of Sherlock Holmes and..... Spock, I suppose. For those of you unfamiliar with the show, its about the process of crime detection which focuses on the forensic work of the scientific crime scene analysis division of the police force. The actual police detectives are treated as benign entities, at best, rather extraneous, and an actual impediment to justice at worst.

The was an episode in which the murder victim (like all mystery shows these days, murder is just about the only crime dealt with) was a "dwarf," or "little person." The young man, in life, had stood somewhere in the neighborhood of four feet tall, or a little more than that. He had been killed by hanging. Before he was murdered he had been making plans to marry a young woman of average size.

Let's pause here to take a look at this. What is the "abstract universal human quality" in play here? It is the one of symmetry, the one that poses, the heterosexual romantic ideal, for a woman, of the "tall, dark, and handsome" man. The unwritten popular conviction, or feeling, is that the man should always be taller, heavier, and stronger than the woman in a heterosexual romantic couple, and that it is right and proper that this be so.

When we are presented with an inversion of this paradigm our reaction may range from mild surprise to shock, depending upon the degree. We see this in television daytime talk shows like Maury Povich and others. These shows frequently have episodes where they feature so-called "Extreme Opposite Couples." The abstract universal human quality of symmetry is dramatically upset with these couples, every individual of which, incidentally and tragically, has been made to dance their way to the stage to the beat of bad techno music.

One might see an exceptionally tall young woman, well over six feet tall and a gentleman well under five feet tall. One might see a huge, burly lumberjack of a man who looks like he's six-foot-six and at least three hundred pounds and a woman well under four feet tall, tiny, maybe one hundred pounds or so. One might see a thirty-something black man with dredlocks and a morbidly obese sixty-something white woman. And finally, let's say we might see a pretty young blond, "All-American" woman, an adult film actress and a morbidly obese Mexican cab driver. In this instance we have a couple that not only upsets the symmetry paradigm in terms of physicality but also the cultural paradigm; by that I mean the economic, lifestyle and lifestyle expectation paradigm, I do not speak of ethnicity.

The studio audience claps, whistles, and laughs. Their reaction has an amused yet censorious, prohibitive feel to it. One can tell that the studio audience, as a whole, are, in their minds, being treated to a carnival freak show.

Now let us return to the young couple in the CSI episode. It should be clear that the young woman, of average height, had made an Existential choice, in that she has broken dramatically from the traditional paradigm, as I have described. The young man in question has, of course, made an Existential choice, to an even greater degree than his fiancee, because according to the unwritten law of "abstract universal human qualities," he had surrendered his perceived male role of Me-Tarzan-you Jane, Hulk smash, in which the man, in a heterosexual romantic relationship has, at least the physical dominance.

But for our purposes let's focus on the woman.

To be continued.

wingedcentaur

Good Evening Friends,

What does it mean to act in an Existential way? It means to proceed with integrity by disentangling ourselves from certain "abstract universal human qualities," when these threaten to undermine our authenticity. Consciousness is not what it is but what it is not. Because this is so the consciousness is malleable and impressionable, prone to certain kinds of "viral infection," as I have mentioned before.

I have been fighting the temptation to address a certain point. I'd like to leave it go in favor of speed and directness. But I have lost that battle of wills, so I will merely note the point here. I have been saying how impressionable and prone to "infection" the consciousness is to such an extent that, as I have said before, we often "do not think with our own minds and feel with our own hearts."

This would seem to contradict another assertion I'd made previously. I said that human interaction is naturally and necessarily of an assimilative character; and that this assimilation is crucial to maintaining the vitality and dynamism, the very life of the Self. How do we reconcile this contradiction?

Let me put it this way. The body must eat, drink, and breathe to live. In certain instances, for different reasons, if we are unlucky we find that our food, or water, or very air is contaminated in some way. We may fall ill or even die. But does this mean that people should stop eating, drinking, and breathing to protect ourselves?

I'm going to go right into my "case study" in the next post.

wingedcentaur

Good Evening Friends,

One of the meanings that I take away from the statement consciousness is not what it is but what it is not is this: there are times when we literally do not think with our own minds and feel with our own hearts, that is our uncorrupted minds and hearts.

Have you ever had this experience? Someone has accused you of something that was not true - something minor. You deny the accusation repeatedly and sincerely (perhaps this person is or was a friend of yours) but he insists on imposing this false guilt upon you. He is unrelenting because he has made up his mind and cannot be swayed. Finally you give up, resigned, and you say something to yourself like; "Fine! If that's what he wants to think, then let him!"

The crime could be anything. Maybe you were accused of trying to steal someone else's girlfriend or boyfriend. Maybe you were accused of undermining a co-worker or spreading vicious rumors about someone. Remember we are proceeding on the assumption that the allegation is not true. Most of us could probably summon anecdotes at will, its routine.

But if we look at such instances very closely, I think we find that something very interesting has happened, to you, the accused. Your personality has been virally infected and the infection stays with you over the coming days, weeks, months, and even years. The Self has become infected, strangely enough. But when I use the word 'infected' I am talking about routine infections of the Self that are encountered that are just as ordinary as the viruses, germs, bacteria, and the like that the physical body picks up every day, but that people with adequately or normally functioning immune systems, render inert.

But this, in part, is the reason why vacations are so important for the body and the Self, or mind, or even "spirit," if you like. To borrow language from the computer field, the most important thing to do during a vacation is to defrag or defragment your Self of external impositions of dark renderings of motives concerning your actions, or the allegations of actions you have not engaged in. The failure to do this can account, at least in part, for somone taking a month-long holiday and returning not in the least refreshed. And some extol the benefits of meditation. They say that twenty minutes of transcendental meditation confer upon them similar benefits as several hours of deep sleep.

But I have not explained what I mean by infection of the Self or infection of the personality. Someone has accused you of something. At first you vigorously deny it but your accuser persists and will not be convinced to the contrary. You give up and resign yourself, leaving your, perhaps former friend, to his opinion. At this time you have actually been infected with a tiny portion of the dark motives that your accuser sought to impute to you. Your motivation matrix [* that's why I love philosophy, you get to have fun making up words!] has been virally infected by a tiny portion of a fraction of the dark motives that were imputed to you.

Your very act of pushing them away, in frosty resignation actually opens the pathway to the infection. There is no smell, no taste. There is no pain, no sensation at all. But you have been infected. Thereafter your feeling about the matter is a combination mostly of your own self-orginated thoughts, feelings, and motivations, and those foreign bodies, those outside orignated dark motives which are imputed to you.

Let me put it this way. Suppose someone threw a germ ball at you. You swat it away. The germ ball flies away from you in the direction you slapped it - mostly. The act of slapping it breaks the germ ball up somewhat, and a few of the spores fly into your body,yes, the opposite direction to which you slapped the germ ball. And these germ spores penetrate the pores of your skin and work their way into your bloodstream and so on and so forth.

Tomorrow I'll give my version of a case study. But for now just know that this dynamic, in part, comes into play in the destruction of relationships, friendships, marriages, and even what may drive nations into war, as both sides rachet up the propaganda. That'll do it for now.

Good Night,

wingedcentaur

Good Morning Friends,

Existentialism is defined in The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (1991) as follows: a philosophical and literary movement that came to prominence in Europe, particularly in France, immediately after World War II, and that focused on the uniqueness of each human individual as distinguished from abstract universal human qualities.

I also gave what seems to me to be the ontological main ingredient of Existentialism: consciousness is not what it is but what it is not.

What are these abstract universal human qualities? To quote the Dictionary again, they are "... conventional expectations about what so-called human nature (a concept rejected by Sartre) supposedly requires in a given situation."

We are informed in the same passage that the protagonists in the novels of Albert Camus such as The Stranger, Nausea, and The Plague epitomize the "uniqueness of the existentialist antihero who acts out of authenticity, i.e., in freedom from any conventional expectations about what so-called human nature (a concept rejected by Sartre) supposedly requires in a given situation, and with a sense of personal responsibility and absolute lucidity that precludes the "bad faith" or lying to oneself that characterizes most conventional human behavior."

I am not familiar with these works by Camus. But the Richard Wright novel The Outsider features a protagonist, Cross Damon, who can be described as an existentialist antihero. But I have to say that this is not a model of existentialist behavior that we should aspire to. In fact I would say that it was Damon's failure to act with existential authenticity that caused his crisis. He tried to force himself into conformity for most of his life until he reached his breaking point and "snapped," faking his own death, getting a new name and changing his "identity," burning down a government office, murdering four people, and then when he is tracked down by a humpbacked cop, whose name I forgot, and he is wife and two children, whom he abandoned, pretends with all his might that he does not know them.

Willie Loman in The Death of a Salesman has the same problem. He is, in a sense, a tragic existentialist antihero. His crisis, also, is caused by his failure to act with personal authenticity in the first place that causes his crisis. He works at a profession that he is no good at and doesn't even like, for various reasons I will discuss in the future. He lies about how good he is at it and enjoys it to his family. But he should have been making his living at carpentry, working with his hands. He should have taken his brother, Ben, up on his offer to have Willie and his family go out to Alaska with him to "manage" some properties for him out there, but the salesman refused for reasons we'll go into in future.

Willie carries on a affair with a woman in Boston, a secretary with a Department store, who always promised Willie that the next time he's in Boston "... I'll put you right through to the buyers." In addition to that lie to his wife, we learn that, for some time, Willie has been borrowing two hundred dollars a week from a family friend and pretending to Linda, his wife that it is his pay.

Tragicomic sidenote: Every time Willie comes home from a sales trip (he's been a road man for the Wagner Company for a long time), Linda asks him how the Chevy ran. When his two sons are around he extols the virtues of the Chevy to the heavens. But when the boys are away he says, privately to Linda, "Goddamn Chevy, they ought to prohibit the manufacture of that car."

Willie has a schizophrenic relationship with his two sons. But enough of that for now.

So, the goal of existentialist behavior is to act with authenticity, freedom from abstract universal human qualities, conventional expectations about what human nature requires in a given situation. But all such conventional expectations are not bad and need not be rejected out of hand for the sake of reactionism. And what are "abstract universal human qualities?"

I would say they are abstract because they are unwritten and often not consciously thought about until they, these abstractions, are confronted by a reality representing their perceived diametrical opposite. These human qualities are "universal" only because everybody thinks everybody else thinks they are.

Let me give an example. I'll do so next time.

wingedcentaur

Good Evening Friends,

Are we just about ready to wrap this up? We have been investigating the basis, or lack thereof whichever the case may be, for the Zionist certainty that God specifically decreed that the land of Palestine belongs to the Jews. Even if it was "His" desire that they come into "possession" of it, did Yahweh order the Jews to specifically use violent and coercive means to wrest the land away from the Canaanites and then the Arab Palestinians?

I gave a cursory discussion of mysticism and reccomended a masterful work on the subject by Gopi Krishna called The Secret of Yoga. I talked about the funny ways the human minds works in relation to an outside authoritative voice giving us undefined directives. I gave an example: the marriage counselor and the exercise he put all the married couples on The Oprah Winfrey Show many, many, many years ago.

Of course I can't prove the arguments I'm making. But my basis for making them is this: do we really want to follow a God that sponsors genocide? I'm not being provocative. I use the word 'genocide' in that I believe all war is an act of genocide, whether or not the U.N. technical definition of genocide is approached, reached, or surpassed in this or that "conflict."

The historical novelist James Michener gave an illustration. He wrote a novel about the development of the Jewish nation in ancient times. I forget the name of it but there is a scene when the Israelites are wiping out the Canaanites. Yahweh is walking with Moses and at one point Yahweh says to Moses something like "I don't do this because I hate the Canaanites, but because I love you (the Israelites)."

The only way I can think to describe this is pathological. This is so even granting that the Bible is a synthesis of theologies of the period. This is so also granting that all "gods" of the era tended to be warrior-deities. That statement is pathological because the god is quite unhesitating in committing genocide - by modern technical standards - against a people not because he has anything against them, no grievance of any kind, but because the mere existential (small 'e') existence of the Canaanites is in the way of God's Jewish national project. This God is casually nihilistic to a staggering degree.

I know what you're thinking. You still want to object to my "projecting" "our" values on ancient societies. But centuries before Moses the emerging Judaism was on the cutting edge. It was the first Near Eastern religion to introduce ethics, the first that dared to actually hold its god accountable to act with justice.

I am thinking of the scene where Abraham bargains with God about the destruction of two cities. He makes various arguments and bargains God down to lower and lower numbers of righteous people that needed to be present in the cities for Yahweh to stay his wrathful hand.

I'll end this segment there, then.

wingedcentaur

Good Morning Friends,

We are investigating, in our necessarily limited way, the question of how it is that Zionist know that God had, millennia ago, decreed that the land of Palestine belonged to the Jews; and if it was "His" will that they "possess" it in such a way that, on Yahweh's orders, specifically barred the Canaanites and then the Arab Palestinians from also possessing it or having the fully equal right of enjoyment of all the land. During the course of development of all the world's religions, communities received word about their god's instructions for them, state of feeling toward them, and various other updates, through the agency of prophets, seers, mystics, or whatever one would like to call particular sensitive, spiritually gifted individuals, who achieved the Transcendant state by means I have already alluded to.

What if we could, theoretically, determine somehow with certainty that the answer to the original question (Did God give the land of Palestine to the Jews?) was no? What would this mean? Would this mean that there is no God? Were some of the ancient Jewish prophets mistaken?

Among people who suscribe to divine prophecy, I don't think enough room is given for simple human error and how it can be compounded over generation after generation after generation after generation..., and there is no accounting for the funny ways that the human mind works. I hinted at my own view by citing the masterful book by Gopi Krishna, The Secret of Yoga. Let me give an example now.

Many, many, many years ago, on The Oprah Winfrey show there was a marriage counselor on. He was talking about something to do with marital communication or some such. What I remember most vividly, though, was a little exercise he put the married couples in the audience through.

He had them all stand up. The wives were given an object to hold in their fists. Then he told the husbands to get it from them. All of the husbands pried, wrenched, and tugged at their wives hands, trying to pull their fingers open and get the prize. This went on for an alloted period of time unitl the counselor brought it to a halt.

The thing that the marriage counselor pointed out, I hope to the chagrin of every one of the husbands, is that not one of them had even thought to merely ask their wives for the object. What does this mean?

It means that a person, or group of people, at the sound of an outside authoritative voice giving undefined instructions to acquire something, are prone to immediately taking the violent and coercive route. Not only that but I would venture to say that as the husbands were violently struggling against their wives, the object - in the minds of the husbands (an object they did not even know the identity of) - became their property. I would venture to say that they saw their wives resistance as recalcitrance and insolence. Again, not only that but I would additionally offer that during the tiny slice of time, the husband saw their wives as unjustly preventing them from coming into possession of something that "rightfully" belonged to them.

In that brief moment in time all the love, all the years of friendship and marriage, all their lives together, their children, all their shared hopes and dreams, fears, frustrations, setbacks, and tragedies went out the window in a struggle for power. And though I think the husbands would deny it out of embarassment, I am convinced this is so nevertheless. This exercise was most instructive and gives us pause for reflection, don't you think so?

Let me end this post with this question: Why didn't the ancient Jews, coming out of slavery in Egypt, go to the land of the Canaanites and simply ask to live their as full citizens? If accepted and if, later, they found their rights being abrogated, the appropriate response would have been to agitate politically for full rights.

Until next time

wingedcentaur

Friends, What is mysticism?

This question is central to our inquiry about the existential (small 'e') basis for Zionism. As you know, all the world's religions were founded by mystics or seers or prophets or whatever you wish to call certain deeply introspective, spiritually gifted individuals, who, through self-deprivations, meditation, breathing exercises, and other aesthetic and contemplative exercises, achieved, for a time, a heightened and deepened awareness of the sublime.

There is an excellent book on this called The Secret of Yoga by Gopi Krishna. It was published in the sixties as a part of the Religious Perspectives Series. When I read the book twenty years ago, I had been quickly persuaded by his thesis overall and specifically his argument about the nature of the Transcendant moment the mystic experiences, and continue to subscribe to them to this day.

Gopi Krishna said that the ascendant mystic does not actually come into contact with God upon the moment of Transcendance, as much as he thinks it is. The mystic actually comes into contact with a higher part of himself, in a sense, and the enlargement of his consciousness onto the cosmic plane is so dramatic that he feels like he has come in contact with God.

But if it were God he comes into direct awareness of, then why do we have so many variations of religious doctrine? How is the worldwide "confusion" to be explained? Also, according to Gopi Krishna, it is rather a bit of fancy, as the say in Britain, on our part to think that the very next step in the evolutionary scale of the universe, is God. Why shouldn't there be innumerable levels of consciousness, forms of intelligence between ourselves and God?

We'll wrap this up in the next post, I think.

Good Night,

wingedcentaur

Good Evening Friends,

On the ride home from work I thought about what a difficult inquiry we are embarking on. First of all, we have not yet even clearly defined the question. Let's try to do that now.

Did God grant the Jews the land of Palestine by decree?
Obviously we cannot give a definitive answer to that question. We are simply not in a position to know what God said at any time, much less thousands of years ago. Despite the claims of fundamentalists, we have no way of rationally debating this question, as such. And yet we must raise the question.

Why must we raise a question we cannot possibly answer? Because religio-political fundamentalist Jews have answered the question, most emphatically in the affirmative. And it is this conviction that is central to Zionism, is it not? What we can do is ask of the Zionists, how they know this. How do they know that God specifically and exclusively ceded the land of Palestine to the Jews?

Scriptural evidence will not do. The Arab Palestinians are obviously not persuaded by the Torah, is it?

But our purpose, here, is not to engage in exercises of logical analysis. I am not skilled at such things like analytic philosophy and logic and things like that. Let's just say, for the sake of argument, that God did tell the Jews to take possession of the land of Palestine. But does this end our inquiry and condemn us to talking in circles about the sixty seven borders, two-state solution, right of return, Oslo Accords, check points, proprietorship of Jerusalem, the six-day war, U.N. sanctions, and so on and so forth?

Not at all. Our inquiry is only just begun. Our next question is: what does "possession" mean? Did God tell the Jews to take "possession" of the land of Palestine through violent and coercive means; and did God mean the Jews to take possession of the land that would bar first the Canaanites and now the Arab Palestinians from also possessing it and enjoying the Canaanites and Palestinians the equal right of enjoyment of the land?

It is probable that many of the Jewish prophets, mystics, and seers said that God said to take the land of Palestine by force and kill all the inhabitants there. The secular humanist perspective might say, 'But of course, it is about all too human greed, imperial ambition and bloodlust, and so forth. Organized religion is nothing but a fraud, a mask for ruthlesss self-interest.' This implies, furthermore, that the spiritual work done by prophets, seers, mystics, and yogis is not "real" or legitimate, in that these individuals spout some mumbo jumbo and profess a belief in things, they themselves actually do not believe in, so that they may establish and maintain their control over the ignorant, unwashed masses.

But if I say that it is probable that many of the ancient Jewish prophets, seers, and mystics said that God gave his people specific orders to take the land of Canaan by force; aren't I implying that these prophets deliberately relayed a false message from "God" for their own power hungry purposes? And, doesn't all of this ultimately take the Israeli-Palestinian issue out of the realm of the abstract and place it firmly in the secular, political, and wholly human?

I think it would be exceedingly cynical and depressing to think that all of the prophets and sages who originated all the world's religions, had just been part of a vast intermillennial scam all along. But what other interpretation is there?

We'll consider this next time.

wingedcentaur