Post by Deleted on Sept 18, 2017 0:05:10 GMT
The activities I’ve seen on this board led me to some thoughts about the centrality of dialogue in the human experience.
Humanity has developed the enormous capacity for desire, interactivity, evangelizing, suppression, deceit (including self-deceit,) and sublimation, so any person whose behavior we would judge has been raised in a context that, barring some all-powerful and omniscient entity, we don’t fully understand. Such an entity - according to a well-known quote attributed to Epicurus (and used as Graham’s signature,) given all the horrors we have endured, such as child abuse (especially when institutionalized, such as in the Catholic Church or private schools,) the Holocaust and other attempts at genocide - would logically be either malevolent or self-contradictory. Elites, however, have found the belief in such an entity useful – getting their people to identify with the ruling class and to feel fear of and contempt for outsiders. Moreover, to passify those who might see through such a rouse, the dominant western empires dreamed up, with the help of their various conquered societies, tales of heaven – unprovable, but attractive enough for many people to believe in them.
As an example of how such deceit and bullying has played out in recent history, I’ll follow Rachel’s example of using myself. I was raised Catholic in a mostly Catholic town. My father had also been raised in that religion, and was a lector for many years. Here is an essay that might give you an idea of how strange some of the things my religion taught are:
www.hprweb.com/2013/08/abortion-unmasking-the-demon/
Since my father was usually at work when we were home (awake,) my mother was left to the disciplinarian role except in extreme cases – when he would bring a child to the cellar and use a belt. She had been raised Presbyterian in a small town, which had been founded by members of this religion, and went to a three-room elementary schoolhouse. She later had trouble fitting in to larger schools, at her request being moved from a large high school to a (most likely less diverse) much smaller one. After failing one college due to severe homesickness (an administrator pronounced her too immature to manage,) she entered an Episcopal (the religion of her beloved grandfather, a man of many talents who had died when she was a girl,) School of higher learning, one closer to home, and she was married and pregnant before she graduated. Perhaps somewhat disenchanted with her mother’s religion due to her Pastor forbidding her playing a Catholic air in his church, and liking the (Episcopalian-like) aesthetics of Catholicism, she converted to that religion after she met my father. They settled down in their own house soon after I was born and attended a church that had been built (to more modern aesthetics) for a schoolhouse – Plans for a larger church there never materialized. More widely, Vatican II was making numerous changes to Catholicism, and, as far as I know, she saw none of these as improvements. (One that comes to mind was allowing women to attend church without hats and gloves.) Lastly, the town itself was not only less prosperous than the one where she grew up, but soon lost its rural charm to the rapid progress of malls and fast-food restaurants.
She developed a fervor (by the time I was able to detect these things) - intense even compared to her peers in our town - for censoring what we listened to, read, and watched, trying to make us conform to her idea of a perfect family.
Bullying doesn’t stop with pastors and parents – elder siblings pick it up against their younger ones - in my case, my brothers, especially the two eldest. Although the eldest was more physically abusive (and more crude verbally, calling names, etc.,) the other, Will, was just as much of a bully, sometimes in a supportive capacity and sometimes on his own. My mother had a busy social life and sometimes left one or both in charge when she went out. One night, as I tried to watch a program, “son number two” sat next to me on the sofa and made fun of it for the whole show. Soon afterwards, when I tried to reciprocate, he chased me throughout the house until he caught me and choked me into submission. Usually, though, he found more subtle (cowardly) ways to insult us or make us look (and/or feel) bad or stupid.
He could easily anger our mother, who, for reasons outlined above, felt as if she had come down in the world. She was also fixated on her weight and seemed always on a diet or overindulging. Once, when her second son mocked her for having accused him of not letting the dog in when he was right in the next room, she started screaming at Will for constantly reading and discussing Dante, and threw a chair against a closet door, putting a hole in it. She was also angry at my father’s drinking, which she felt excessive (although she always kept a bottle of her favorite liquor in one of the kitchen cabinets.) One night I had to get up after bedtime and saw the refrigerator light was on. Turning, I saw my third eldest sibling holding the door. He asked me if I had left it open, and I said I hadn’t. The next day, my mother asked me who had left that door open. Being a bit scared and inarticulate, I just named the brother whom I had seen, and he was punished. That night, my mother entered my room as I was lying in my bed (the top bunk.) She was very serious, and asked if I was sure that it was that brother. I told her the whole story. She repeated it back to me, and I confirmed, yes, that was what I had seen. She then lost control, trying to hit me over the guard rail of the bunk, with each attempted blow crying, “Liar! Liar! Liar!...” Nevertheless, she almost always came across to others as a wise, good natured woman.
I was frequently sick throughout second grade, and afterwards became very shy. I often found I had misplaced things when I had been sure I had left them in a particular spot, and my mother frequently scolded me for being “absent minded,” once spanking me for having lost a mitten. Having delegated the drilling of my times tables to my eldest brothers, she became red-faced with fury that I did not know them when she quizzed me on them.
Before reading the works of Dante, Will liked the books, Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. (He once pretended to be Dr. Jekyll when interacting with me, then turning into Mr. Hyde to pinch me, then back into Dr. Jekyll when I pulled away from him, then back when I slowed my retreat.) For a while he wanted to be a scientist. His experiences in junior high school started him on a path that killed whatever humanistic optimism he had as well as his scientific ambition. In the latter case, he studied under a teacher who gave him poor grades for what appeared a petty reason. In the former, in addition to having already had trouble connecting to people, his participation in school politics brought attention from a wider pool of the bullies in his class. That same year, he was suspended for a number of days for insulting a teacher’s knowledge of the class subject. My parents took him to a psychologist, who pronounced him a genius.
I believe this experience led him to explore religion as well as to fuel his arrogant misanthropy. He liked to stage debates (often in the form of mock trials or elections) with the third eldest and me. In arguments he frequently angered or otherwise diverted/frustrated his opponent until he “won,” and later found ways to remind us of his “victories” without mentioning our names so we couldn’t call him out for mocking us without looking “oversensitive.” I became very bookish, trying to find ways to become smarter. He then decided he should try to direct this attempt. He once gave me The Will to Believe, a book of essays by William James. I was not interested, but he kept badgering me until I started it. I got to a part of an early essay in which James uses a vivisected dog, one that was still conscious, as an example of how God could be right to inflict suffering, even on people who can’t understand how such torture is required, and I stopped reading it. I told my brother I had finished the book, and he replied, “Ha ha, made you read it.” Meanwhile, he would often criticize, mock, or even condemn books I chose for myself. If he found a poem I wrote, moreover, he would criticize it at length. One day I made a schedule to help me get more done, and he criticized the act of scheduling oneself. I made it anyway and hung it on my wall. A few days later, he asked if I was following it. When I told him I was, he said, “I guess you don’t need it anymore, then,” and tore it up. Such practices made me almost unable to voice dissent - or frequently even opinion, afraid I might anger others or look stupid. Such an orientation as these stories exemplify, to the extent that it primarily tries to dominate others and stunt their ability to inform themselves (and trust their ability to inform themselves,) or even interact with those outside their constricting social circle, I call a “strangler’s orientation.”
However, perhaps because my mother’s family was more open intellectually than my parents and peers (Although raised protestant, her father was an agnostic,) I developed a desire to attain and retain reliable knowledge throughout my life and a curiosity about cultures outside of mine. One of my best friends from elementary school onward was a Jehovah Witness who later became a pagan (we continue to be friends, first drawn together by our love of reading and sense of humor, then by a shared interest in horror stories and later “Monty Python,” We often quoted and laughed at references many others would not get.) I read voraciously – at the library, if I thought the book would be taken away. When I approached my teens, my mother joined Al-Anon, and brought me, the brother closest to me in age, and my youngest sibling to Alateen, which meetings allowed me to see people drawing on “higher powers”* that were not necessarily the God I had been taught to worship (or even god(s) as such,) and I found the words, “take what you need and disregard the rest” heartening in its tolerant orientation. The experience also made me aware that I was not the only one suffering a dysfunctional home-life. The dialogues I had with my Witness friend and at these meetings helped re-connect me with the world, after having been isolated by the “objective” rule of a Catholic God (seasoned with Presbyterian/Episcopalian snobbishness) and the spirit nearly choked out of me by the “subjective” ** will to believe of an older brother. I would call the orientation that has allowed me to re-connect a “Grower’s orientation,” and would call the conversation that supports such an orientation my higher power.
*People in twelve-step programs call on a higher power which helps them to face the difficulties caused by their addiction. According to alcoholrehab.com,
“Non-believers can struggle with the concept of a higher power in Alcoholics Anonymous. In the Big Book, there is a whole chapter called We Agnostics, encouraging those who lack religion that they can still work the 12 Steps. This is because there is no obligation to accept the theist idea of a higher power. Atheists can view it as the power of the group, or as an impersonal force in nature. All that is required is that they believe that this power is greater than they are, and that they can benefit from it.” – Emphasis mine.
Although I have made many mistakes over my lifetime, the faith I have had in such dialogue has helped me to remain unusually healthy into my mid-fifties, having avoided drowning in the subjective pleasures of drugs and/or alcohol - I don’t completely abstain, but I could have easily allowed it to overwhelm me as a way to escape my problems, rather than face them. This is a common problem in my family; my father died fairly young from heart problems aggravated by years of smoking (Though he had quit about ten years before his death, he developed emphysema and had to use oxygen) and drinking. The brother who went to meetings with me was an alcoholic by (at least) college, then, when that caused him many problems, switched to different drugs, finally taking steroids, abusing a sleeping medication, and taking an antidepressant without counselling – he ended up hanging himself (I understand this is not uncommon for those taking this antidepressant.) The eldest had drug and alcohol problems since (at least) his mid-teens, and, after several minor heart attacks, has had a pacemaker put in.
Further, I am still connecting with others who want to dialogue – as well as rebelling against those who want to prevent such connections or disrupt their conversations.
In looking over the history of Christianity, I have found that Jesus’ ideas, as expressed in the gospels (with the possible exception of John,) were primarily an expression of a Grower’s orientation.
Unfortunately, since (at least) Paul’s telling slaves to obey their masters and wives to obey their husbands, elitists have been trying to appropriate and/or strangle his message ever since.
** I have written about “objective,” “subjective,” and “intersubjective” morality on an earlier thread:
IMDB2.freeforums.net/thread/48054/intersubjective-morality.
A few further thoughts: As sentient beings we can only thrive when trying to further our knowledge and development, which is aided by widening discourse, so it serves us to learn as much of our contexts as we can, especially when we have acted inappropriately or perceive others behaving inappropriately. A criticism of such behavior that keeps the foregoing in mind would acknowledge that there is no ultimate, to-be-constructed perfection that we or others or society will ever attain. Such acknowledgment sees the enormity of the universe as a source of danger and wonder and helps people to look beyond their own ideals to find commonalities and find more gentle but effective ways to gain and facilitate communication of knowledge of these dangers and wonders. If religion is to be of service to humanity, it must encourage this Growers’ orientation.
Humanity has developed the enormous capacity for desire, interactivity, evangelizing, suppression, deceit (including self-deceit,) and sublimation, so any person whose behavior we would judge has been raised in a context that, barring some all-powerful and omniscient entity, we don’t fully understand. Such an entity - according to a well-known quote attributed to Epicurus (and used as Graham’s signature,) given all the horrors we have endured, such as child abuse (especially when institutionalized, such as in the Catholic Church or private schools,) the Holocaust and other attempts at genocide - would logically be either malevolent or self-contradictory. Elites, however, have found the belief in such an entity useful – getting their people to identify with the ruling class and to feel fear of and contempt for outsiders. Moreover, to passify those who might see through such a rouse, the dominant western empires dreamed up, with the help of their various conquered societies, tales of heaven – unprovable, but attractive enough for many people to believe in them.
As an example of how such deceit and bullying has played out in recent history, I’ll follow Rachel’s example of using myself. I was raised Catholic in a mostly Catholic town. My father had also been raised in that religion, and was a lector for many years. Here is an essay that might give you an idea of how strange some of the things my religion taught are:
www.hprweb.com/2013/08/abortion-unmasking-the-demon/
Since my father was usually at work when we were home (awake,) my mother was left to the disciplinarian role except in extreme cases – when he would bring a child to the cellar and use a belt. She had been raised Presbyterian in a small town, which had been founded by members of this religion, and went to a three-room elementary schoolhouse. She later had trouble fitting in to larger schools, at her request being moved from a large high school to a (most likely less diverse) much smaller one. After failing one college due to severe homesickness (an administrator pronounced her too immature to manage,) she entered an Episcopal (the religion of her beloved grandfather, a man of many talents who had died when she was a girl,) School of higher learning, one closer to home, and she was married and pregnant before she graduated. Perhaps somewhat disenchanted with her mother’s religion due to her Pastor forbidding her playing a Catholic air in his church, and liking the (Episcopalian-like) aesthetics of Catholicism, she converted to that religion after she met my father. They settled down in their own house soon after I was born and attended a church that had been built (to more modern aesthetics) for a schoolhouse – Plans for a larger church there never materialized. More widely, Vatican II was making numerous changes to Catholicism, and, as far as I know, she saw none of these as improvements. (One that comes to mind was allowing women to attend church without hats and gloves.) Lastly, the town itself was not only less prosperous than the one where she grew up, but soon lost its rural charm to the rapid progress of malls and fast-food restaurants.
She developed a fervor (by the time I was able to detect these things) - intense even compared to her peers in our town - for censoring what we listened to, read, and watched, trying to make us conform to her idea of a perfect family.
Bullying doesn’t stop with pastors and parents – elder siblings pick it up against their younger ones - in my case, my brothers, especially the two eldest. Although the eldest was more physically abusive (and more crude verbally, calling names, etc.,) the other, Will, was just as much of a bully, sometimes in a supportive capacity and sometimes on his own. My mother had a busy social life and sometimes left one or both in charge when she went out. One night, as I tried to watch a program, “son number two” sat next to me on the sofa and made fun of it for the whole show. Soon afterwards, when I tried to reciprocate, he chased me throughout the house until he caught me and choked me into submission. Usually, though, he found more subtle (cowardly) ways to insult us or make us look (and/or feel) bad or stupid.
He could easily anger our mother, who, for reasons outlined above, felt as if she had come down in the world. She was also fixated on her weight and seemed always on a diet or overindulging. Once, when her second son mocked her for having accused him of not letting the dog in when he was right in the next room, she started screaming at Will for constantly reading and discussing Dante, and threw a chair against a closet door, putting a hole in it. She was also angry at my father’s drinking, which she felt excessive (although she always kept a bottle of her favorite liquor in one of the kitchen cabinets.) One night I had to get up after bedtime and saw the refrigerator light was on. Turning, I saw my third eldest sibling holding the door. He asked me if I had left it open, and I said I hadn’t. The next day, my mother asked me who had left that door open. Being a bit scared and inarticulate, I just named the brother whom I had seen, and he was punished. That night, my mother entered my room as I was lying in my bed (the top bunk.) She was very serious, and asked if I was sure that it was that brother. I told her the whole story. She repeated it back to me, and I confirmed, yes, that was what I had seen. She then lost control, trying to hit me over the guard rail of the bunk, with each attempted blow crying, “Liar! Liar! Liar!...” Nevertheless, she almost always came across to others as a wise, good natured woman.
I was frequently sick throughout second grade, and afterwards became very shy. I often found I had misplaced things when I had been sure I had left them in a particular spot, and my mother frequently scolded me for being “absent minded,” once spanking me for having lost a mitten. Having delegated the drilling of my times tables to my eldest brothers, she became red-faced with fury that I did not know them when she quizzed me on them.
Before reading the works of Dante, Will liked the books, Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. (He once pretended to be Dr. Jekyll when interacting with me, then turning into Mr. Hyde to pinch me, then back into Dr. Jekyll when I pulled away from him, then back when I slowed my retreat.) For a while he wanted to be a scientist. His experiences in junior high school started him on a path that killed whatever humanistic optimism he had as well as his scientific ambition. In the latter case, he studied under a teacher who gave him poor grades for what appeared a petty reason. In the former, in addition to having already had trouble connecting to people, his participation in school politics brought attention from a wider pool of the bullies in his class. That same year, he was suspended for a number of days for insulting a teacher’s knowledge of the class subject. My parents took him to a psychologist, who pronounced him a genius.
I believe this experience led him to explore religion as well as to fuel his arrogant misanthropy. He liked to stage debates (often in the form of mock trials or elections) with the third eldest and me. In arguments he frequently angered or otherwise diverted/frustrated his opponent until he “won,” and later found ways to remind us of his “victories” without mentioning our names so we couldn’t call him out for mocking us without looking “oversensitive.” I became very bookish, trying to find ways to become smarter. He then decided he should try to direct this attempt. He once gave me The Will to Believe, a book of essays by William James. I was not interested, but he kept badgering me until I started it. I got to a part of an early essay in which James uses a vivisected dog, one that was still conscious, as an example of how God could be right to inflict suffering, even on people who can’t understand how such torture is required, and I stopped reading it. I told my brother I had finished the book, and he replied, “Ha ha, made you read it.” Meanwhile, he would often criticize, mock, or even condemn books I chose for myself. If he found a poem I wrote, moreover, he would criticize it at length. One day I made a schedule to help me get more done, and he criticized the act of scheduling oneself. I made it anyway and hung it on my wall. A few days later, he asked if I was following it. When I told him I was, he said, “I guess you don’t need it anymore, then,” and tore it up. Such practices made me almost unable to voice dissent - or frequently even opinion, afraid I might anger others or look stupid. Such an orientation as these stories exemplify, to the extent that it primarily tries to dominate others and stunt their ability to inform themselves (and trust their ability to inform themselves,) or even interact with those outside their constricting social circle, I call a “strangler’s orientation.”
However, perhaps because my mother’s family was more open intellectually than my parents and peers (Although raised protestant, her father was an agnostic,) I developed a desire to attain and retain reliable knowledge throughout my life and a curiosity about cultures outside of mine. One of my best friends from elementary school onward was a Jehovah Witness who later became a pagan (we continue to be friends, first drawn together by our love of reading and sense of humor, then by a shared interest in horror stories and later “Monty Python,” We often quoted and laughed at references many others would not get.) I read voraciously – at the library, if I thought the book would be taken away. When I approached my teens, my mother joined Al-Anon, and brought me, the brother closest to me in age, and my youngest sibling to Alateen, which meetings allowed me to see people drawing on “higher powers”* that were not necessarily the God I had been taught to worship (or even god(s) as such,) and I found the words, “take what you need and disregard the rest” heartening in its tolerant orientation. The experience also made me aware that I was not the only one suffering a dysfunctional home-life. The dialogues I had with my Witness friend and at these meetings helped re-connect me with the world, after having been isolated by the “objective” rule of a Catholic God (seasoned with Presbyterian/Episcopalian snobbishness) and the spirit nearly choked out of me by the “subjective” ** will to believe of an older brother. I would call the orientation that has allowed me to re-connect a “Grower’s orientation,” and would call the conversation that supports such an orientation my higher power.
*People in twelve-step programs call on a higher power which helps them to face the difficulties caused by their addiction. According to alcoholrehab.com,
“Non-believers can struggle with the concept of a higher power in Alcoholics Anonymous. In the Big Book, there is a whole chapter called We Agnostics, encouraging those who lack religion that they can still work the 12 Steps. This is because there is no obligation to accept the theist idea of a higher power. Atheists can view it as the power of the group, or as an impersonal force in nature. All that is required is that they believe that this power is greater than they are, and that they can benefit from it.” – Emphasis mine.
Although I have made many mistakes over my lifetime, the faith I have had in such dialogue has helped me to remain unusually healthy into my mid-fifties, having avoided drowning in the subjective pleasures of drugs and/or alcohol - I don’t completely abstain, but I could have easily allowed it to overwhelm me as a way to escape my problems, rather than face them. This is a common problem in my family; my father died fairly young from heart problems aggravated by years of smoking (Though he had quit about ten years before his death, he developed emphysema and had to use oxygen) and drinking. The brother who went to meetings with me was an alcoholic by (at least) college, then, when that caused him many problems, switched to different drugs, finally taking steroids, abusing a sleeping medication, and taking an antidepressant without counselling – he ended up hanging himself (I understand this is not uncommon for those taking this antidepressant.) The eldest had drug and alcohol problems since (at least) his mid-teens, and, after several minor heart attacks, has had a pacemaker put in.
Further, I am still connecting with others who want to dialogue – as well as rebelling against those who want to prevent such connections or disrupt their conversations.
In looking over the history of Christianity, I have found that Jesus’ ideas, as expressed in the gospels (with the possible exception of John,) were primarily an expression of a Grower’s orientation.
Unfortunately, since (at least) Paul’s telling slaves to obey their masters and wives to obey their husbands, elitists have been trying to appropriate and/or strangle his message ever since.
** I have written about “objective,” “subjective,” and “intersubjective” morality on an earlier thread:
IMDB2.freeforums.net/thread/48054/intersubjective-morality.
A few further thoughts: As sentient beings we can only thrive when trying to further our knowledge and development, which is aided by widening discourse, so it serves us to learn as much of our contexts as we can, especially when we have acted inappropriately or perceive others behaving inappropriately. A criticism of such behavior that keeps the foregoing in mind would acknowledge that there is no ultimate, to-be-constructed perfection that we or others or society will ever attain. Such acknowledgment sees the enormity of the universe as a source of danger and wonder and helps people to look beyond their own ideals to find commonalities and find more gentle but effective ways to gain and facilitate communication of knowledge of these dangers and wonders. If religion is to be of service to humanity, it must encourage this Growers’ orientation.