Good thoughts, Miriam. Or is it simply that I agree with you that
makes it good. No matter, I would hope that others on this list would
dig down and offer their thoughts.
But for now, it's off to do some good in the world.
Carl Jarvis
On 11/9/14, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
> Carl wrote in part, in response to my question about how the existence of
> God relates to the financial crisis,
> And that brings me back to your query regarding the roll God plays in
> all of this.
> It is my contention that we have built our civilization on a faulty
> foundation. Like my neighbor trying to fit square cabinets into a
> house that has shrunk and twisted and settled with age, he is
> attempting to alter the shape of that which cannot be changed. Not
> without tearing down the entire building and starting from scratch.
> And so it is with the foundation we have been building upon for
> thousands of years.
> Way back when Man first looked about himself in wonder and fear, he
> made sense out of all that surrounded him by deciding that it was
> created. And since Man made that determination, he also decided by
> whom and for what purpose this universe was created.
> All that followed was predicated on that decision. And Man became
> different from all other life upon Planet Earth.
> And down through the thousands of years, everything Man did to his
> fellow Humans, to all life and to the entire planet, was justified and
> blessed by God. Even today when many do not hold a belief in the
> traditional God, we are conditioned to think of ourselves as Masters
> of All we survey. We are special. We are smarter and more clever
> than all other living things. It is this God Complex that will bring
> down the Human Race. Mother Earth will win in the long haul, changing
> herself and out lasting our meager efforts to continue existing.
> There are no two ways about it. If we do not dismiss God and all the
> surrounding beliefs that we are above all other life upon this planet,
> we will continue pushing our way to the cliff's edge. We invented God
> to explain all that we did not understand. Now we can uninvent God,,
> knowing that there rational answers to all we once called,
> "Mysteries", and given enough time and research and investigation,
> many of the unknowns will be answered. But this will only come to
> pass when Man takes his place among, rather than over, Earth's living
> creatures. And in order to do this, we will have to dismiss God. We
> can certainly thank Him for having given us the belief that we were
> superior, and thus enabling us to survive in a very harsh, uncaring
> world. But we have carried it far too far. And we are in danger of
> that All Mighty Powerful All Knowing God becoming our Terminator.
>
> And that caused me to think that, in fact, our perceptions of what is
> happening around us, of history, of who we are, are imbedded in the culture
> of the society in which we live. So when Carl talks about letting go of all
> the false premises on which our actions and assumptions are built, he's
> suggesting that by some act of will, we can strip ourselves of a good part
> of the foundations of our society and our personalities. This conditioning
> process which has shaped us, has been in my mind in another context today.
> Yesterday, I told Alice about a novel that I thought she would enjoy
> reading, The Garden of Letters. The book takes place in Italy during World
> War 2 and it is about a young woman who plays the cello, and who becomes
> involved in the Resistance. I was listening to it while eating breakfast
> and
> I thought about how so many really good books were written about what
> happened during World War 2, so many that focused on the horrors that
> european jews underwent and the bravery of the people who tried to resist
> the Nazis. Then I read the article about the Gazan fisherman that I posted
> to the list. I began thinking about all of the material I've been reading
> lately about the history of the Palestinians. These are articles that
> described how badly the Palestinians were treated by the British under the
> British Mandate, how they were treated by the newborn state of Issrael, how
> the land that had been ceded to them in the partition approved by the U N
> in
> 1947 was immediately stolen from them when Israel proclaimed itself as a
> new
> state. And I realized that one of the reasons that none of us have ever had
> an emotional response to what was done, and is being done, to the
> Palestinians, is that they're not included in our cultural value system.
> You
> have to look hard to find good novels written about Palestinian life, about
> their culture, about what they've suffered. They have been blacked out of
> our consciousness except as disgruntled terrorists. My point is, in
> response
> to Carl, and in general, people believe in, and are profoundly influenced
> by
> their cultural myths. That is why the people who took control of our
> country
> in 2000, were able to steal our civil liberties and commit us to eternal
> war. The case had been building to make Muslims our latest enemy, replacing
> Russia, and all those beliefs about American exceptionalism were just
> sitting there, waiting to be exploited.
>
> Miriam
>
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