Friends, the French Existentialist philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that "Man exists without justification" and therefore is "condemned to be free." I may go into fuller detail as to what those statements mean at another time. But what we get from that is the idea that we must inquire about the implications our actions have for everybody else in the world.

What if everybody in the world acted as you do. Collectivity is far more important in the absence of "justification" (from God). The notion actually makes more sense than the way I am presenting it, but it is related to an idea about "God" I heard.

It is the counterintuitive idea that: if God does not exist then nothing is permitted; and if God does exist then everything is permitted. This is so because of "sin" and "salvation" and divine "forgiveness." One can live a deliberately profligate, degenerate life, literally breaking all ten commandments, "repent", and then be forgiven and allowed the ultimate prize of admission to heaven after death.

You know what this reminds me of? Basketball or any organized sport. A team can have a losing record and perform terribly for most of the season. But if they get it all together in time, get their ducks in a row, as it were, and win just enough game in the end to qualify to play in the finals. And if they're good enough and lucky enough, they will be "redeemed," win the championship, get into heaven, and the record books.

With this analogy have we profaned and degraded the divine or have we unduly amplified the significance of sports? In other words, have we trivialized life or have we given cosmic precedence to sports and diversion in general?

Is this merely a falsehood we have asserted in this blog post, or is it a dynamic that actually takes place in our society? Some might argue that the latter is so, and I don't think I could disagree with them. I'll just let the matter rest there.

Trivia question: What NBA team had the worst regular season and still went on to win the title?

To continue then, when you are the victim of "identity theft," your belief in the inviolability of your uniqueness has been compromised. All someone has to do is steal a few numbers from you in some way and suddenly they can enjoy all the benefits of your fantastic credit rating, all the benefits of being YOU without the burdens.

Occasionally it can take years for a victim of identity fraud to get his "good name" back and he is interested in taking measures to insure against future violation - to insure that this time the system will bloody well know who he is, and so on and so forth.

All violence, of any kind, is an attack on belief in some way.

All violence is an expression of greed: greed for money; greed for fame; greed for power; greed for social status, praise, public approbation; greed for love...

Bigamy, as we have examined the phenomena can be thought of as greed for love; it is the desire of the bigamist to have the "perfect" mate with the proper mixture of qualities - remember we talked about bigamy with the analogy of the Star Trek Voyager episode in which Tuvak, the Vulcan, and Neelix, the ship chef and alien from a species whose name I don't remember, had a accident in the transporter and fused into one being Teelix or Nuvak....

Bigamy can also be thought of as greed for personal security. I remember a Mary Higgins Clark novel in which one of the main characters was a bigamist (suspicion had been in the air that he might have also been a murderer, but he wasn't) and for whom an amateur but convincing psychoanalytic explanation: he had been abandoned by his parents as a very young child. As an adult he sought to make sure that he always had a "home" to go back to. He was hedging his bets.

Greed comes from fear. Greed is the fear that you have to constantly accumulate just to keep from losing what you already have. It's the fear that if you don't keep expanding, growing, accumulating you will be swallowed up like a minnow or pilot fish by a whale, literally or figuratively. It is the fear that if you were to lose all of your money and material possessions, there would be nobody around to pick you up when you fall face first in the gutter, destitute, perhaps clutching a crack pipe.

But people who live to add dollars to dollars, walk around knowing the price of everything and value of nothing, are probably right. You find yourself living in that great, big mansion on the hill all by yourself.

What does it mean, the expression "he has more money than God"? It means that "he" is almost unimaginably rich in concrete terms. Those words are also an expression of envy. The person saying it would, of course, like to have "more money than God." This is a statement I have previously called an expression of the desire to "grope for the infinite."

God cannot be poor presumably, therefore the stock broker, or hedge fund guy wants to make it as impossibel for himself to be poor as it is for God to be poor. It is a bit easier to fall into destitution in America than any other developed, capitalist country with no public healthcare plan....

And so forth. Greed is an attempt to fill an unfillable hole in your "soul," which is like a cosmic black hole. The more matter you dump into it... well, it doesn't actually matter, the black hole just sucks it up.

Greed presupposes a certain level of accumulation and ability to grasp. You cannot be greedy without a certain amount of power to start with.

Fear = Greed = Violence. Therefore all violence comes from fear. Does this mean that all criminals (purveyors of violence) are motivated by fear?

First of all, it depends upon your definition of "criminal." The category is easier to define legally than philosophically. The man who steals a ham to feed his children is technically a "criminal" but for our purposes he is not, since his action cannot be said to have been motivated by greed, because greed presupposes a certain degree of power to grasp more than what is your due.

A man who is reduced to stealing a ham to feed his children, cannot be said to be very powerful. Nor can undocumented workers from Mexico, "criminals," be said to be greedy.

What is a sociopath? We'll look at that next time.

wingedcentaur