"Are you so sure that the person who is always crying out to be SAVED has not decided 1000 times already to accept his lot of pointless suffering SIMPLY BECAUSE it is easier than shouldering any true responsibility? Are you enabling a delusion? is it possible that your contempt will be more salutary than your pity? You are associating with people who are bad for you because it is easier. You know it and your friends know it. you are bound by an unwritten contract. One aimed at failure and suffering of the stupidest sort, to sacrifice the future to the present. You don't all talk about it and get together and say "let's take the easy path! and indulge at the moment." You don't mention any of that, but you know what is really going on. Before you help somebody, you should find out why that person is in trouble. Don't assume always that this person is a noble victim of unjust circumstances and exploitation. That is the most unlikely explanation, not the most probable, it's normally never that simple. If you buy the story that everything horrible just happened on its own, with no personal responsibility on the part of the victim you deny that person all agency in the past present, and future. You strip them of all power in this manner. I think your default assumption should be the fact that people don't take the high road because it is too hard. Vice and failure are easy, it's easier not to shoulder a burden, not to think, not to care, and not to do. It's easier to procrastinate and drown tomorrow's goals in today's cheap pleasures. How do we know that your suffering is not a demand from martyrdom for my resources anyway!?
I'll just cover the above portion tonight. I'm exhausted.
You mentioned agency. That is an apt word as an overture to this discussion. It is within our agency to have control over our most basic instincts. Your animal nature. Carnal. Eat, drink, pleasure, excess, depravity. This is the unfortunate duality of man. We are eternally torn between our basest instincts as animals or to subdue those instincts in lieu of that which we know is healthy and selfless. That which helps all those around us. As men, our responsibility is to be the protectors, the leaders, the masters of everything in our world.
I say unfortunate because it is not our fault - as in, we didn't choose what we are as humans. The amygdala is responsible for basest behavior - disgust, hatred, anger, fury. Sociopaths feel these things yet are unable to feel what healthy people do which is the cognitive portion of our mind. This is what you'd call the thinking portion. The part that says don't do this or do that - even those things you physically or mentally don't really want to do. This is the rational, empathic, caring, generous portion of your mind. Sociopaths (now referred to as ASPD) lack that part. They have the disgust but are not able to feel empathy. Not only are they unable to feel empathy, pity, or remorse, they still feel revulsion, disgust, et al.
We often imprison these people or lock them away because it's an obvious danger to others. It's our last resort. Still, they are not choosing to be that way. You wouldn't say, "that schizophrenic is a jerk," or, "that aspergers is a real punk." That would be ridiculous. They're all ill in the sense that their brains don't function in a manner which suits the majority. They are atypical, if you'll forgive me.
Another milder form would be not organic but rather through experiences. Nature vs nurture. An example I'll use is people who hate religion (they call themselves atheists) and people who are religious or spiritual (these people are religious). After all, talking to an invisible god or eating human flesh would appear atypical if you didn't understand what they are doing. Seems atypical to me.
But see, most of the people that hate religion (and the religious), were likely hurt at some point. Maybe in early development. Possibly stopping their development. And the people that are religious found peace in that way of life, and also maybe at an early developmental stage so they hold on to it.
I consider myself scientifically minded. I didn't have those developmental roadblocks. So I use the only tool I have left which is logic. I normally don't like to discuss my beliefs because I don't want to influence those around me. That's their journey. But I also have mine. And it breaks down like this;
There is no known law in the periodic table of elements that states that all the different disparate elements mixed together long enough in exactly the right circumstances they will always form a self-aware being. None. Amazingly, we are sentient beings. Could self aware life have formed by happenstance? An accident? A stray shot of lightning? I don't know. Learning to say, "I simply don't know," is a talent that people need to work on and practice.
But we are self-aware. That means the universe came into existence or was created in a manner that one day it would be able to look upon itself and be aware of it's own existence. How can we know this for a fact? Because we are here. We are part of the universe. We are part of a living planet that is part of the universe which = the universe is alive and sentient through us. Can I say without a doubt that the universe in its vastness doesn't have a collective intelligence? No. I simply don't know. Maybe the universe is filled with living planets that give the universe the consciousness we call "god". Again, I don't know.
So the only logical step I can take or conclusion I can come to as an unencumbered person is that we don't know.
The atheists can exist in their denial and nihilism and that's fine. The religious can exist in their faith and that's fine as well. They can die and go into the darkness of the void or be taken up to the heavens. Either is fine by me. I am agnostic in that I don't know for a fact. On any of it. One exception: It is my HOPE that there is a collective and benign intelligence watching over the universe. But I can't prove it exists. So where does that leave us?
We know for a fact that the whole universe was entangled at the quantum level in the beginning so it's likely that some entanglement still exists. Everything affects everything else because as we are all part of the living universe which, as I previously stated, is a logical conclusion. It's the only conclusion.
It is for this reason that I consider both atheism and religion to be bizarre ritualistic behaviour. You know, eating the flesh of christ or grabbing some Arbys, going to the beach, walking into the sea and leaving it all behind.
Whatever the state, nobody can deny that these "enlightened" atheists and "religious" fanatics have rendered our history an absolute bloodbath of torture, death, martyrdom, and horror.
A wise man once said, "To truly know god is to understand that god is ultimately unknowable." Who said that? I think that it was me. Though I don't make a habit of quoting myself.
I'll get to the second half this weekend. Goodnight.
.gif "IP Gear")
