Posted on 02/15/2003 4:18:25 PM PST by PatrickHenry
Fancy words, psychobabble, trite expressions and euphemisms. But, where is the beef?
Oops, I'm making one more post tonight.
Atlas may have shrugged, but Achilles just wretched in agony, crippled by that simple observation.
You should have told me upfront. I wouldn't have wasted my time.
I think the threat of a false and twisted idea of altruism which you must be referring to has burgeoned and begun to fade in the 20th Century.
Hey, pay attention! YOUR national debt is nearly 7 trillion dollars! YOUR nation is bankrupt trying to pay for the socialist morass created by the altruistic philosophy. Do you have any idea what YOUR share of this insanity is? 90% of the states in this nation are dead broke trying to fund this insanity. Get a clue. It is a failed paradigm.
I think a greater threat is a weird combination of false and superficial ideas of personal liberty and security.
This is an irrational statement, not derived from reality.
The roots that make this apparently conflicted set of desires exhalted as "uberprinciples" so weird are roots fed by such notions as man being merely a complex animal (a very unnatural concoction) and that private behavior has no universal consequences.
This is an even more irrational statement (if there can even be such a thing) based upon no perceivable provable concept.
But there are answers to the bitterly cold, modern problems that we have had, if we would let our opaque and hardened shells be removed. There is light and there is warmth.
Oh, how nice and touchy feelie. How psycho babble fuzzy! Thanks for demonstrating exactly what I was saying about logic being abandoned for emotional mush. bye
Seconded.
Thank you and thank you.
Assertion Without Proof. There are few things more ludicrious than when someone denies a proven point by merely making a denial assertion. I know it would require you to actually think, but can you possibly stretch yourself enough to think about this statement? If you do you will see how wrong it is, if you cannot, it proves you cannot think, do not know the purpose of definitions, or simply are so brainwashed that logic is impossible for you. In any case, this is the second time you've presented me with an irrational post. If you can't put together a rational statement, don't post to me.
Self interest can and must include maintenance of the community in which one lives, just as housecleaning, though work, improves our level of comfort.
So what? This statement says nothing.
Second, self interest is subjective, and many people enjoy being altruistic. Christianity seeks to foster this in people in whom this motive is latent.
Most people are brainwashed into thinking they MUST be altruistic, have it crammed into their heads from their earliest moments (you must share johnnie! Bad johnnie, mustn't be selfish) which goes against the natural feeling of every human being. It must be literally pounded into them. There is no 'latent' natural altruism. Altruism is a method of psychological control. All the rest is after the fact justification.
You already conceded the point. It cannot be anything but strictly natural, or we couldn't know about it. You simply cannot take a phenomenon like 'will' and define it as something other than 'natural' without defining away your ability to discern it, (i get so tired of saying this) BY DEFINITION. Either your definition and concept represents something 'natural' or it is fantasy, since you cannot experience anything outside the 'natural' world. If you can experience something, it then becomes part of the 'natural' world. If you want to say God is the natural world, I have no problem with that. But I don't think YOU understand where your little ripples will then lead you.
Which leads me to depart from my normal custom and actually take umbrage with a correspondent, on two points.
And umbrage? What kind of umbrella is that? Did you pay for it before you took it?
First, apparently you didn’t conduct a meditation on the Walker passage I quoted. You analyzed it instead.
Yes, exactly. There was nothing to meditate on, it was irrational. If you think that 'meditation' is based upon reflecting upon thoughts then you don't know what true meditation is. Which is probably what the problem is here. You are talking down to someone who has been there and is standing above you. Your high horse is merely a rocking horse, dear.
And I’m sorry you didn’t do the meditation, because Walker ended it with a perfectly lovely Zen koan that I thought you would find particularly appealing.
Stop projecting and start listening. You have so many filters going I'm surprised you can see anything at all. Stop trying to cram everything that comes your way into your little comfortable box. It won't fit. I don't care much for Zen koans. I know them, I went there, I wasted years there, but I also see right thru them. It is why Zen is frozen in some picturesque past like a leaf in the ice of a frozen lake. It goes nowhere. Zen is about acceptance, not about growing. That is why it never made a single machine, never contributed to progress in any way. It is a pretty picture painted for the leisure classes to while away the time while they all get older and closer to death. Yuch!
YOU: First, apparently you didn’t conduct a meditation on the Walker passage I quoted.
YOU: Second, you must think me a moron to advise me that “proper meditation is silent.” Well, Duh! Your reference to me “thinking about the unthinkable,” and do I ever stop doing that, is perfectly gratuitous, and misses the point of the meditation to which you seem to refer entirely.
These two paragraphs are mutually exclusive. One cannot meditate upon a passage and be entirely silent at the same time. One is either silent, or one is thinking. Years and years and years of meditation have proven this to me. Most people don't meditate. Most people indulge in imagination and think they meditate. Your statements here are self evident.
That particular mental operation involves clearing the mind of all thoughts, of getting rid of all words. Its object is to completely “still the mind.” There is to be no “thinking.” Then, if you can hold this state for long enough (and that’s surprisingly difficult), you get to see what happens next – which is the object of the exercise.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You've got the formula down pat. Reminds me of the story of the student who comes in and says "Master, I finally know how to meditate" and the Sensei just hits him with a stick. Like the old saying, He who doesn't know speaks, he he knows is silent.
But it misses the object, which is to experience consciousness as a state of pure awareness – that is, keenly aware of the presence of a unique self, a conscious mind, that precedes all thought and which constitutes the matrix in which all thought takes place.
Now, are you talking Zen? In Zen there is no 'self' of any kind, 'self' is seen to be an illusion created by the selfish reasoning mind. So if you are saying this is the 'object' of Zen meditation you are wrong. Thought in Zen is always considered a hindrance. It should never take place. What you say here contradicts that. You do not know whereof you speak.
Now if you are speaking of some other kind of meditation, that is another story.
IMHO, you don’t want to “fiddle around” with that particular meditative form.
In my less than humble opinion you should hold your rash opinions about me to yourself. Not only are they offensive, they prove you make judgements about others when you can't possibly have enough information to make such judgements. Unless you are bucking to lose what little respect for you that remains. To the point, there is only one form of meditation, all else is fantasy. That was the point. You were terming something meditation that isn't meditation, just another way of thinking. Meditation is without thought. One cannot 'meditate' on something.
This gets into a very esoteric point. There are good schools of philosophy and there are wrong schools, phony schools. People who get wrapped up in a wrong school get just enough to let them think they are really getting something, but because they don't have the power to discriminate between the real and the unreal, true and false, reality and fantasy, they never realize what they are in is a wrong school. There are always clues, like the contradictions you present here, that if examined reveal false ideas. But people caught within these never see them until they step outside them. If they ever do.
You've done the classic dodge here. Ignoring all the points where I proved you wrong and focusing upon those elements that you feel you can 'take umbrage' with. Fact is, your whole post here is throwing more stuff against the wall, all opinions, all suppositions, all assertions, all questions, but not one rational refutation of a single point I made.
Makes my point, keep in irrational, keep it in the muddy realms of unprovable philosophical sophistry, and denigrade logical thought in the process.
And I just noticed something reviewing for post.
Your reference to me “thinking about the unthinkable,” and do I ever stop doing that,
Though you meant the opposite, you inadvertently spoke the truth here. I do believe they refer to this as a Freudian slap!!! Maybe the slap will wake you up.
It isn't a false dichotomy, and your sloppy denigration doesn't make it one. The world you now live in is proving the point, in reality. The tax burden is over 40% and growing. No nation has long survived with a tax burden over 25% percent. Those who refuse to learn from history are condemned to repeat it. The pity is I am subject to your collective blindness. And you made the point yet again. Only an irrational, straw man, ad homimem, phony assertion without proof attack contrary to all the reasoned arguments I presented. Just the kind of thing I'd expect from a dyed in the wool altruist.
I gather somebody's been reading Lord Keynes -- and Ayn Rand -- 'way too long. Time perhaps to visit a far more interesting contemporary of Keynes'-- that would be one Joseph Shumpeter.
Keynes is refuted almost daily here:
http://www.mises.org/default.asp
Subscribe to their daily newsletter, learn something outside your narrow prejudices.
And if your following comments truly reflect Shumpeter's thoughts, he isn't worth reading either.
It probably isn't underrated. It is probably rated properly, which is why it is ignored.
Take, for example, "naturalism". To the Materialists, natural means physical and physical includes matter and energy, only. To you, natural includes intangibles such as will. This is semantics, not substance. Words are not the thing, they are a mental construct and not "natural". If they, words and will, are defined as natural, as you hve done, if natural includes "all of the above", we lose the ability to discern, the very basis for all analysis and discussion. Here's your comment:
You simply cannot take a phenomenon like 'will' and define it as something other than 'natural' without defining away your ability to discern it, ([I] get so tired of saying this) BY DEFINITION ...
Well, wrong. This is wordplay only. And you are ranting. What, LW, is your problem?
The statement is not easily understood, much like the admonition to never seethe a baby goat in its mother's milk. (Exd 23:19, Exd 34:26, Deu 14:21), a warning which cannot be reasoned, but instead must be received in the spirit. Likewise, in the above meditation, reason fails but the spirit comprehends.
In the same way, not everyone has the ability to hear Truth:
My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me: - John 10:27
Why do ye not understand my speech? [even] because ye cannot hear my word. – John 8:43
Meanwhile, I’m reading what I can on M-theory on the web, it is an alternative to the inflationary model suggesting an extra-dimensional shockwave as the inception of our universe. This one is appealing since it views particles as a collection of membranes, and my “sense” is that the physical realm is an ocean of wave phenomenon with particles as placemarkers and messengers.
All of this brings me to the link I’d like for you and betty boop to scan when you have a chance, since it looks at all of them. The excerpt is from the conclusions:
The Cosmological Constant – Carroll, Enrico Fermi Institute (pdf)
…the majority of the matter content must be in an unknown non-baryonic form.
Nobody would have guessed that we live in such a universe… We happen to live in that brief era, cosmologically speaking, when both matter and vacuum are of comparable magnitude. Within the matter component, there are apparently contributions from baryons and from a non-baryonic source, both of which are also comparable (although at least their ratio is independent of time.) This scenario staggers under the burden of its unnaturalness, but nevertheless crosses the finish line well ahead of any competitors by agreeing so well with the data.
Apart from confirming (or disproving) this picture, a major challenge to cosmologists and physicists in the years to come will be to understand whether these apparently distasteful aspects of our universe are simply surprising coincidences, or actually reflect a beautiful underlying structure we do not as yet comprehend. If we are fortunate, what appears unnatural at present will serve as a clue to a deeper understanding of fundamental physics.
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