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Politics : Evolution -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Solon who wrote (19872)	1/19/2012 3:16:27 PM
From: 2MAR$	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 69300

That was Dave's reading over there , how he summed up that experience in Vietnam ...we we're drinking one night just a few years after graduating , in a bar in Oakland , Ca after hours ....there were a few Oakland cops in the place in the back having a couple too and we were gambling with this saavy Chinese bartender some chinese dice game and David kept taking his money . Big beautifully dressed guy , really friendly but unvelievably sharp , was one of the best corporate headhunters in SF ...poor Chinese Bartender kept losing while Dave kept speaking to him in Mandarin...finally he came down to me and asked totally beside himself : "yo frend speek better chinese & know china history better than me & he never lose! Who is he fucking CIA ?!! " we were all cracking up , told him you don't want to know , just listen we speaks ...was a great fellow but bad marriage to a spoiled japonese rich girl met in college , introduced me to the incredibly beautiful daughter of Korean Airlines VP going to art school then , that was a wonderful time . Well maybe a little wild ...

To: Solon who wrote (19872)	1/19/2012 11:29:07 PM
From: 2MAR$	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 69300

Do we decide that all life is precious according to some higher power "___'s" law , for obviously it is not when war is at hand yet we do so conclude in our law . Do we make this capital offense for reasons of the body possessing a soul or for that life's value & potential for living fully those rightful days that would be his or her naturally , to live & grow and experience all that they could . That life is one's first & most precious possession by virtue of the mother that gave you life thru her pain in childbirth, to raising, teaching & protecting our young till maturity & the society that decides this "right of the individual" to seek its enlightenment and the value we place on "living" . The chance to work towards that happiness & the protections to do so from harm... His concluding words of the passage in Glanvill -- "Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will." Interesting enough this tempest in a teapot of the belief in an afterlife, in spirits that were better chracterized no higher than some persisting primitive superstition and the will intent on inerpreting natural events thru the lens of a mind held in belief's sway , in fact it is "belief" that in some ways aids reason and man can perfectly perform other thought processes & functions even to the highest order . Even though all & everything around points to one reality , that when one is dead one is gone and that is the end of all things . What has cause so too has end and that voilition of your life (or lack of) may be passed on but you yourself are gone, but why so much fear of death ...because it is perpetuated in the teachings . *I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself ~* D H Lawrence A world is born & it dies , the same is true we know for the stars that also live a span & die ...yet it is only we that may live forever for it is our deepest fear & our greatest conceit to think so and those good well meaning madmen thought to unite into one whole under this hallucination & illusion in the face of everything around them does come to its end . But we doth protest & protest loudly & softly ,in the vast popular life of the youth seeking society to the stubborn churches that carry this torch of insanity successfully for it is so intertwined with some good moral & ethical examples and the comfort that this offers . The belief in "heaven" to my eyes is the greatest weakness of religion and paradoxically its greatest strength ....imagine that . Everyone in their hearts have his or her doubts but since its so unimaginable why question it . But its the right to live in any fantasy one wants as David used to say , different strokes for differnt folks .... just keep its civil & humorous . *here you just cant help yourself , i know ;o)

To: Solon who wrote (19872)	1/19/2012 11:54:33 PM
From: 2MAR$	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 69300

This clergyman Joseph Glanvill from which Poe quotes , interesting that he was both a religious natural philosopher who also made a great effort to champion the belief in demons , witches & spirits in a valiant attempt to resusitate this superstition back to the religious norm . This was being challenged at that time in the middle 17th century by certain so called atheistic thinkers. So Glanville went about writing and becoming known for : en.wikipedia.org Glanville is known also for Sadducismus Triumphatus (1681), which decried scepticism about the existence and supernatural power of witchcraft and contained a collection of seventeenth-century folklore about witches. In England men such as Boyle, Henry More, Ralph Cudworth and Joseph Glanvill battled to stabilize belief in the existence and operations of apparitions and spirits as part of a wider drive to uphold religion, authority and tradition. *[16]* Imagine that , as church lady would say isnt that special , lol, cause later we find Glanvill's work so influenced Cotton Mather to pursue the Salem Witch trials : Sadducismus Triumphatus deeply influenced Cotton Mather's Wonders of the Invisible World (1693), written to justify the Salem witch trials in the following year. Here basically you have Brumar and all religionist's philosophy or sacred fears in a nutshell , those beliefs are so sacred and must be upheld for all the good they do for without which there's only social chaos , like nurse Ratchet in One Flew Over , we must have order & you must take your medication !! ;o) These and others ( Richard Baxter, Meric Casaubon, George Sinclair) believed that the tide of scepticism on witchcraft, setting in strongly by about 1670, could be turned back by research and sifting of the evidence. [17] Like More, Glanvill believed that the existence of spirits was well documented in the Bible, and that the denial of spirits and demons was the first step towards atheism. Atheism led to rebellion and social chaos and therefore had to be overcome by science and the activities of the learned. Israel cites a letter from More to Glanvill, from 1678 and included in Sadducismus Triumphatus, in which he says that followers of Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza use scepticism about "spirits and angels" to undermine belief in the Scripture mentioning them.