Month: January 2018

https://www.treehugger.com/culture/niksen-delightful-dutch-concept-doing-nothing.html

Won’t see me posting literal tree hugger articles too often.  But I like this idea of “doing” nothing.  I don’t speak Dutch, but it seems reasonable to suppose the niks part of it is related to the Germans “Nichts”, in which case a more or less literal translation is nothing-ing.

We all need to do nothing sometimes.  No schedule.  No plan of attack for our relaxation. I will wonder aloud again if it is perhaps their Day of Rest which has, at least in some measure, made the Jews so creative.  That, and 3,000 years of cultural natural selection, in what has been a hostile environment for most of it.

None of us have seen an atom.  How do we know they exist?  Because people who study these things tell us they exist, and more importantly, because the belief that they exist has concrete tangible benefits.  We can predict chemical reactions.  We can build new materials.  This idea has clear utility.

Should we not demand the same of spiritual paths?  What spiritual technology does, for example, Christianity offer?  Where does it say “if you do x, y, and z, then a, b and c will happen”?

The thing is that much of the purported benefit of Christian (and Islamic) belief rests in what will happen in the NEXT life.  And for a great many people, as this creed is received, it amounts practically to a system of social control through conditioned terror of unseen but important realities.  People cross lifetimes afraid of sinning, because they fear hell.  In such conditions, true personal learning is impossible.

What I want to help develop is something which reliably builds perceptual coherence, personal moralities based on that perceptual coherence, and social realities that are desirable that are an emergent property of the pervasive presence of the first two.

All the contemplative/meditative practices have what they claim to be technologies of the spirit, but we have reached a time where we need to make them actual technologies, to test them, to apply the methods of science.

I am being a little foggy, but this is something I felt today. I will allow it to continue to develop.

Is a “poetic spirit” what leads to poetry, or the possibility of creation what leads to a poetic spirit?

Is art the point, or the artist? I believe the latter. I believe Kum Nye is a way of becoming an artist of experience. Every time I do it, something new flows through me.

I think they are about the only team in the league that could make most Americans root for the Patriots, if they even watch the game, which I won’t be doing.  My football season ended with a tough loss by the Georgia Bulldogs. And a victory by that other team.

There was once a violent, ignorant and idolatrous king.  One day he swore that if his personal idol accorded him a certain advantage in life, he would capture the first three people who passed by his castle, and force them to dedicate themselves to idol worship.

Sure enough, the king’s wish was fulfilled, and he immediately sent soldiers on to the highway to bring in the first three people whom they could find.

These three were, as it happened, a scholar, a Sayed (descendant of Muhammad the Prophet) and a prostitute.

Having them thrown down before his idol, the unbalanced king told them of his vow, and ordered them to all bow down in front of the image.

The scholar said: “This situation undoubtedly comes within the doctrine of ‘force majeure’. There are numerous precedents allowing anyone to appear to conform with custom if compelled, without real legal or moral culpability being in any way involved.”

So he made a deep obeisance to the idol.

The Sayed, when it was his turn, said: “As a specially protected person, having in my veins the blood of the Holy Prophet, my actions themselves purify anything which is done, and therefore there is no bar to my acting as this man demands.”

And he bowed down before the idol.

The prostitute said: “Alas, I have neither intellectual training nor special prerogatives, so I am afraid that, whatever you do to me, I cannot worship this idol, even in appearance.”

The mad king’s malady was immediately banished by this remark.  As if by magic he saw the deceit of the two worshippers of the image.  He at once had the scholar and the Sayed decapitated, and set the prostitute free.

Idries Shah, Wisdom of the Idiots. 45-46

I was contemplating this morning that Courtney Love/Harrison is one of the only people to have spoken out publicly about Harvey Weinstein before this whole thing exploded. I was contemplating the hypothesis that it cost her movie roles–she made no acting appearances as far as I can tell between 2002 and 2017–but then I read she had MAJOR drug and following behavioral problems, so that could also explain it quite nicely.

But I was also drawing an interesting, to me, analogy, between the failure–the near universal failure, outside of one sidelined “fuck up”–to speak out about abuses that were widely known, and the failure of Christ’s followers to admit who they were.  Peter famously denied knowing him three times.

Later, the martyrdom which followed refusing to repudiate their faith created many Christian saints.  Regrettably, Christians are STILL being martyred in the Middle East, in many cases by people Obama actively supported.

But if you BELIEVE something, really believe it, really feel it from your toes to the top of your head, IT SHOWS.  Meryl Streep, Oprah, Matt Damon, Ben Affleck: they don’t REALLY believe in the rights of women.   Not when it is inconvenient.  And nobody was going to die if they told the full truth publicly.  They weren’t going to die.  It might not have even hurt their careers, which is to say their bank accounts and their vanity.

By their fruits ye shall know them applies equally to people who spout off about egalitarian virtue and human rights as Christians, who at least knowingly accept a standard of accountability.

I’m up early, behaving myself, executing plans, and I got to thinking about how terrifying it must have been for Courtney Harrison to be nude dancing for adult men at age 16.

Here is the thing: I do not feel hate in my heart for people who are different.  I myself am different, and always have been.  What I feel hate for is the people who want to destroy EVERYTHING.

It might be that, say, conservative Christians sometimes make homosexuals feel unwelcome.  This is bad, in some ways.  I continue to believe that exclusive homosexuality–versus bisexuality–is psychologically driven, but whether true or not, some people find this the most congenial, best way to live, and I don’t fault them for it.  It is none of my business, so I would back them in opposing any laws restricting their freedom of behavior, at least until it came to adopting children.

But all that convoluted thinking aside–and this was not the point of this post–NIHILISM HURTS EVERYONE EQUALLY.  It makes life a horror for all human beings.  It makes it impossible to figure out where you are, who you are, where you are going, where it is worth going to, how to connect with others, and how to derive any enjoyment from life at all.

If I believed that believing nothing was the prerequisite for accepting homosexuality–I don’t, to be clear–then I would reject homosexuality.  This would be better for everyone but homosexuals, and if I were a Christian, it would still be my duty to love them even though–and perhaps particularly because–they were sinners.

I take homosexuality as perhaps a bad example out of many.  The choice is not between nothing and bigotry.  This is the point I am making.  There is always space for creative negotiation, reconciliation of difference, and the finding of common humanity WITHIN the domain of principle and belief.  This is the whole point of the Enlightenment.

I was noodling around on my other website, and found some stuff I forgot about.  Here is one, that is not linked on the main page: http://www.goodnessmovement.com/files/Download/Supply%20side%20economics.pdf

 Non-denominational, the term could be variously interpreted. Positive Christianity allayed fears among Germany’s Christian majority as expressed through their hostility towards the established churches of large sections of the Nazi movement.^[2] In 1937, Hans Kerrl, the Nazi Minister for Church Affairs, explained that “Positive Christianity” was not “dependent upon the Apostle’s Creed“, nor was it dependent on “faith in Christ as the son of God“, upon which Christianity relied, rather, it was represented by the Nazi Party: “The Fuehrer is the herald of a new revelation”, he said.^[3] To accord with Nazi antisemitism, Positive Christianity advocates also sought to deny the Semitic origins of Christ and the Bible. In such elements Positive Christianity separated itself from Nicene Christianity and is considered apostate by all of the historical Trinitarian Christian churches, whether Catholic, Orthodox or Protestant.
Hitler was supportive of Christianity in public, but he was hostile to it in private. Hitler identified himself as a Christian in an April 12, 1922 speech.^[4] Hitler also identified himself as a Christian in Mein Kampf. However, historians, including Ian Kershaw and Laurence Rees, characterize his acceptance of the term “Positive Christianity” and his involvement in religious policy as being driven by opportunism, and by a pragmatic recognition of the political importance of the Christian Churches in Germany.^[2]Nevertheless, efforts by the regime to impose a Nazified “positive Christianity” on a state controlled Protestant Reich Church essentially failed, and it resulted in the formation of the dissident Confessing Church which saw great danger to Germany from the “new religion”.^[5] The Catholic Church also denounced the creed’s pagan myth of “blood and soil” in the 1937 papal encyclical Mit brennender Sorge.

I have been reading the history of the Spanish Civil War and that of Franco, and Franco strongly disliked Hitler’s de facto rejection of Christianity.

There is a, to me, interesting point here, which is that Franco alone, as far as I know, called himself “right wing”.  I read Spanish historians do not call him “fascist”.  They call him authoritarian.  He was a monarchist, and cultural traditionalist.  Hitler and Mussolini supported him, as I understand it, in effect because they liked his style, and because he specifically opposed Communism, with Fascism and National Socialism having both been formed in large measure to oppose Communism, while keeping many of its elements.

Thus, there is a cultural and political divide here which is not insignificant.  Franco was not Hitler.  He WAS “right wing”, on his own account, but this meant that he believed in an authoritarian government based on God and Country, which he specifically did NOT equate with Fascism, which he considered not quite godless, but close enough to spark dislike on his part.

For Western intellectuals, the Spanish Civil War was a major event.  I am surprised at myself that I have never taken the time until now to learn more about it.  I knew the very rough outline, but have not read any books on it.

I do think, though, that Franco “rescued” Spain from what likely would have become a Soviet aligned abusive dictatorship.  He killed a lot of people in the process, which is awful, but no Communist can say they oppose that in principle.

So often in life, when we become extreme in one thing, we conjure into being the very opposite.  In important respects, then, we fight in the other what we cannot own in ourselves.  The Communists, in my view, created Franco, Hitler, and Mussolini.  And collectively they killed VASTLY more people than Hitler ever dreamed of. It may well be that in the Spanish Civil War Franco was the more prolific murderer, but no one can say what would have happened if the misnamed “Republicans” had won.  The history of other Communist victories does not give one much reason to believe it would have ushered in an era of peace and goodwill, to put it mildly.

“Ah”, I can hear them muttering plaintively “at least when we were destructive we felt creative”.

This murmur lies over our political landscape even now.  Burning down the world can feel exciting.  This is why war has been so common in human history, and war is what they  are waging.