I’m headed for the Bible Belt.

I’m headed for Texas.

I think we are all of us under construction, in a society that has forgotten how to bear with us.

This is a fascinating comment. I may not 100% agree with it, but it raises an interesting point.

The problem with your problem with Jesus is that it forgets that leftism is a Christian heresy. There are no such things as pagans or atheists in the west – just pagan-Christians and atheist-Christians. In short, leftism espouses Christianity’s universal compassion and pacifism, without providing any of Christianity’s reasons for doing so. If we’re not all sons of the same Father, then you, pal, ain’t my brother, and I have no reason to spend a dime of my own money to see that you don’t die in a gutter.

Face it – mercy is illogical. They call it “cold, hard logic” for a reason. Secular leftists dismiss Christianity as a fantasy, but at least it provides reasons to do what it tells you to do. Believing that reason and logic can lead you to mercy and charity is a fantasy that not even the most starry-eyed snake handler could, on a moment’s reflection, believe in.

- Nergol, comments section, ‘Elite Versus Elitny‘

Basically, to what extent has the West been shaped by the Christian ideal of mercy?

Remember, even rape was commonly seen as acceptable as the spoils of war before Christianity changed that . . . the very fact that we think certain things are repulsive (sexual violence, pedophilia, etc.) has been shaped in large part by Christian ideals.

My prior post may have horrified a few people who think of divinity as a construct of the mind. I can appreciate that from that point of view, the human-divine relation appears to be an inversion of the typical real/unreal relationship.

However, religion is far from the only field in which people place the unreal (if unreal it is) above the real. Consider the number of people humanity has executed for being enemies of the state.

Is not the state similarly a collaborative fiction? If you consider religion a fiction, you can hardly deny that most of our groups and associations are at least equally fictions. A nation is real only because we make it so, due to our persistent beliefs and actions in accordance with those beliefs. Most of you wouldn’t be surprised to learn that a government executed someone for treason, or on suspicion of plotting terrorism, or the like. Is that not all theoretical? None of it is physically real (the terrorism because whatever act they plot hasn’t happened yet.) We make many labels for things which are orderings or assemblies of smaller components – calling a chair a chair and a desk a desk – but do not be confused into thinking this has any physical reality. A chair has no “chair nature.” It has only the nature of its component particles. Similarly, our concept of people as discrete entities – so central to our ordering of society – is itself a convenient fiction.

It’s silly to the point of incoherence to point fingers at people for believing in religion, and then turn around and believe in laws, treaties, governments, inalienable rights*, assemblies of nations. All these things exist in the mind and are made real by peoples’ adherence.

If you don’t like it, you don’t like it. No problem. But don’t act as if it’s categorically some horrible mental flaw that you have no part in. Odds are, you’re carrying around quite a few mental constructs of your own.

*I mean really, why define as inalienable rights things like access to the Internet, which 70% of the planet doesn’t have anyway? At least put the infrastructure in place to guarantee it first, if you’re going to mouth off about it.

I feel there is a fundamental disconnect here when talking of an omnipotent deity who has all the rights where people have none. To wit:

@agnophilo @Somefishytales – So hitler was sent by god to kill 6 million jews? How is god then not evil?

Because it flat-out doesn’t apply to Him. I’m not going to say you have to agree to this worldview, but if you do it, at least try taking it whole hog and not just piecemeal, because that way it’s bound to look incoherent.

Look, I am a writer. In the course of telling a story I may create and dispose of any number of imaginary beings – people who could suffer, be maimed, or die just as easily as they could find redemption, happiness, perfection, success. I have a perfect right to do this because they exist as adjuncts to the story. Their highest purpose, their destiny, is to tell the story they were created to tell. No more, no less. I may feel sympathy for them, and I may even tweak the story to give them a happier ending, but whether I do or don’t, nothing in that says anything about my own goodness or vileness.

If you accept that there is a supreme Creator, we are in some sense the fictional constructs of His mind. He has, therefore, a perfect right to heap any kind of abuse upon us, if such is our reason for existing. That we find life worth living is, then, either evidence of some benevolence, or of our ability to fool ourselves, a delusion which makes us suitable for the roles assigned to us.

Christians (in standard theology) don’t construct evil as “bad things happening to us.” That’s too petty, too shallow, too self-centered. They construct it as “out of accord with divine plan” or “out of accordance with divine will.” That means that if you’ll take what He gives you, and like it, or don’t live under His roof (this reality.) Of course this burns, and most people can’t truly accept it, because how can we accept that we are irrelevant, that at a cosmic level we have no rights, or that we are at the mercies of an intelligence who has a plan in mind that we can’t comprehend? That’s ego speaking, and no matter what we don’t have in common, each of us has an ego.

You may accept or reject this system of thought. But don’t act like the Hitler question is a “gotcha.” It only shows misunderstanding of the system.

If you train yourself to ferret out any and all negativity in society, you’re likely sabotaging your chances of happiness.

You know, if you look for negativity, you will find it. Not saying it won’t find you regardless, sometimes. But hey.

I posted this previously with the byline, “I love humanity.”

It wasn’t ironic or sarcastic. I do love humanity and this reminds me of its greatness.

Sure, okay, the people there are horribly confused about how the calendar works. They are factually wrong. But within each of them is an engine, an engine that strives to incorporate information. An engine that flags that information as in discrepancy, and seeks to reconcile that.

An engine that makes mistakes.

There’s no problem with making mistakes, unless you make nothing but mistakes. Success is made of mistakes piled atop one another. And – though I’m probably going to get flak for saying this – there’s no problem with being slightly out of touch with reality.

Sherlock is pretty big right now. What is Sherlock Holmes famous for? Among other things, for having the audacity to say it does not matter whether the moon goes round the earth or earth goes round the moon. It sounds absurd, yes, but really, when was the last time you did something where it mattered whether you knew that fact or not? If you’re a physicist, or a sailor, then you need to know this stuff. But if you are a member of the broad majority of humanity, it honestly does not matter whether or not you know that. It’s a harmless quirk, because none of your decisions affect the positioning of the moon or the earth.

What you do need to know is how to close that deal, or how to get funded, or how to keep that job. That puts food on the table for you and your loved ones. That keeps you from being kicked out for not paying rent. That fulfills your baseline requirements. Once you have those down – and only once you have those down – you can learn about the sun and the moon and the stars.

Walk before you run. Crawl before you walk. And fix the errors in the later processes later. You may be laughed at, but you’ll survive.

@BarackObama: Higher education should not be a luxury. http://t.co/67dGfBIW

Okay, that sounds awesome, until you stop to think about what it means.

A luxury good is something that all people do not need. So something not being a luxury means that everyone needs it. This is normally a category that includes food, shelter, and water. If we add higher education, that means we are talking about a society where shoeshine boys, janitors, clerks, strippers, mailmen, etc. all have jobs that require higher education. Do we truly wish that?

If it happened today, most people would then be overeducated for their positions, making them extremely unlikely to find their jobs fulfilling. It would also saddle them with unnecessary debt from college.

If you’re going to say all people should have the opportunity for higher education, fine. But don’t say it shouldn’t be a luxury. That means something very different, and potentially economically disastrous for society.

threeinbeijing:

I have concluded that blogs dedicated to following one person, an actress, singer, athlete, whatever they be… are very, very unhealthy. It is one thing to appreciate the talent of an individual, and to respect what they represent. But they are still people. They have flaws. They get flustered and…

This is fascinating to me because I don’t think it’s about the person, at all. Rather, it’s about the image of the person. The two are, shall we say, overlapping (in a Venn diagram sense) but not the same.

If someone dedicated a shrine to me (nobody’s been crazy enough to yet) it would be to the spirit of moritheil, not to moritheil. No matter how much it was nominally in my name, it would really be to their own private appreciation of what they think of me. And I am comfortable enough wearing that image, like a second skin, or a business suit, or a giant mecha, but I can live with that distinction. I was, after all, a fiction writer. But perhaps not everyone knows who they are – in which case I suppose it must be rather baffling to be suddenly confronted with an image you that is slightly different from the real you. In that case, I suppose, people will refuse accolades, reject gifts, discard titles, all to retain some sense of who they really are.

Sometimes people like you for you. Sometimes they just like your sweet ride.