In Gay Science, Nietzsche puts the news of God's death in the mouth of a madman. People take no notice of him -- yet the image is striking: he carries a lantern in the morning, searching everywhere for God who cannot be found. We have killed him, you and I. We are all his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? Realizing that no one believes him, the madman considers the bystanders: "I come too early. My time has not yet come. This great event is still on its way, still traveling; it has not yet reached the ears of men... This deed os still more distant from them than the most distant stars -- and yet they have done it themselves." Later that day, he visits the churches in the town and sings a requiem aeternam deo. "What are these churches now, if not the tombs and sepulchres of God?"
Quote from: bedizen on August 17, 2007, 09:18:42 AMQuote from: the grasshopper on August 15, 2007, 04:29:45 PMThere are several forms of reincarnation in many Hindu religions. In Buddhism too, a person is born and reborn dozens of times until he learns to master his emotions and desires. Life is believed to be for the purpose of overcoming the desires of the body. Through a series of births and deaths a person finally achieves Nirvana, when the cycle of births and deaths ends, and one is born no more. Nirvana is supposed to be a state of bliss where one has reached the state beyond birth and death. In some Hindu religions, one can be reborn as an animal, an insect, a worm... etc. One Indian saint told his disciples that he would come as a rat in the next life. There is an Indian temple in his honor where they still continue to feed and protect rats of the neighborhood daily for fear that one of them might be the reincarnation of that saint. There is another Hindu god, Hanuman, who was incarnated as a monkey in his last appearance. They have a temple for him too, where they feed monkeys daily, protect and care for them in the environs of the temple. That is a good thing I guess -- it encourages people to treat other animals with respect! Are you being sarcastic? If that's the case, I seriously urge you to reconsider your position, attitude and words!
Quote from: the grasshopper on August 15, 2007, 04:29:45 PMThere are several forms of reincarnation in many Hindu religions. In Buddhism too, a person is born and reborn dozens of times until he learns to master his emotions and desires. Life is believed to be for the purpose of overcoming the desires of the body. Through a series of births and deaths a person finally achieves Nirvana, when the cycle of births and deaths ends, and one is born no more. Nirvana is supposed to be a state of bliss where one has reached the state beyond birth and death. In some Hindu religions, one can be reborn as an animal, an insect, a worm... etc. One Indian saint told his disciples that he would come as a rat in the next life. There is an Indian temple in his honor where they still continue to feed and protect rats of the neighborhood daily for fear that one of them might be the reincarnation of that saint. There is another Hindu god, Hanuman, who was incarnated as a monkey in his last appearance. They have a temple for him too, where they feed monkeys daily, protect and care for them in the environs of the temple. That is a good thing I guess -- it encourages people to treat other animals with respect!
There are several forms of reincarnation in many Hindu religions. In Buddhism too, a person is born and reborn dozens of times until he learns to master his emotions and desires. Life is believed to be for the purpose of overcoming the desires of the body. Through a series of births and deaths a person finally achieves Nirvana, when the cycle of births and deaths ends, and one is born no more. Nirvana is supposed to be a state of bliss where one has reached the state beyond birth and death. In some Hindu religions, one can be reborn as an animal, an insect, a worm... etc. One Indian saint told his disciples that he would come as a rat in the next life. There is an Indian temple in his honor where they still continue to feed and protect rats of the neighborhood daily for fear that one of them might be the reincarnation of that saint. There is another Hindu god, Hanuman, who was incarnated as a monkey in his last appearance. They have a temple for him too, where they feed monkeys daily, protect and care for them in the environs of the temple.
Quote from: c l o g on September 02, 2008, 10:56:53 PMIn Gay Science, Nietzsche puts the news of God's death in the mouth of a madman. People take no notice of him -- yet the image is striking: he carries a lantern in the morning, searching everywhere for God who cannot be found. We have killed him, you and I. We are all his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? Realizing that no one believes him, the madman considers the bystanders: "I come too early. My time has not yet come. This great event is still on its way, still traveling; it has not yet reached the ears of men... This deed os still more distant from them than the most distant stars -- and yet they have done it themselves." Later that day, he visits the churches in the town and sings a requiem aeternam deo. "What are these churches now, if not the tombs and sepulchres of God?"
A virtuous (i.e. good) person is praised by others for the good he does to them. The virtues -- obedience, chastity, justness, industriousness, etc. -- will actually harm the person who possesses them! If you possess a virtue... you are its victim! Thus we praise virtue in others because we derive advantages from it. And as far as moral beliefs are concerned, they are always group beliefs, and the group is greater than any dissenting individual. With morality, the individual can only ascribe value to himself as a function of the mass. Moral censure and control can only emerge through social consensus. Morality is thus the herd-instinct in the individual. It represents the power of those who are individually weak but collectively strong. Their moral laws will (they hope) protect them, as well as justify them and the way they live.
Aggressiveness is introjected, internalized, it is, in point of fact, sent back to where it came from, that is, it is directed against his own ego. There it is taken over by a portion of the ego, which sets itself over against the rest of the ego as super-ego, and which now, in the form of conscience, is ready to put into action against the ego the same harsh aggressiveness that the ego would have liked to satisfy upon other, extraneous individuals. The tension between the harsh super-ego and the ego that is subjected to it, is called by us the sense of guilt; it expresses itself as a need for punishment. Civilization therefore obtains mastery over the individuals dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city.
By means of identification he takes the unattackable authority (of the father, JB) into himself. The authority now turns into his super-ego and enters into possession of all the aggressiveness which a child would have liked to exercise against it. The child's ego has to content itself with the unhappy role of the authority – the father – who has been thus degraded. Here, as so often, the real situation is reversed: 'If I were the father and you were the child, I should treat you badly.' The relationship between the super-ego and the ego is a return, distorted by a wish, of the real relationships between the ego, as yet undivided, and an external object. That is typical, too. But the essential difference is that the original severity of the super-ego does not – or does not so much – represent the severity which one has experienced from him (the father), or which one attributes to him; it represents rather one's own aggressiveness towards him. If this is correct, we may assert truly that in the beginning conscience arises through the suppression of an aggressive impulse, and that it is subsequently reinforced by fresh suppressions of the same kind.The identification with the external authority leads to a split within the subject. The ego itself remains identified with the real father, who appears now, after the creation of the superego, as degraded authority. The creation of the superego reverses the direction of the original aggression back against the subject. An external threat becomes internalized; this process enhances the subject's primary aggression and distorts the perception of the threat: What the subject experiences in relation to the external threat is not so much the real situation but the strength of its own aggression against it. Conscience arises thus from the suppression of an aggressive impulse and increases in strength with each successive repression.
The Look [...] Sartre describes being alone in a park, at this time, all relations in the park (e.g. the bench is between two trees) are available, accessible and occurring -- for him. When another person arrives in the park, there is now a relation between that person and the bench, and this is not entirely available to him. The relation is presented as an object (e.g. man glances at watch), but is really not an object, it cannot be known. It flees from him. The other person is a "drainhole" in the world, they disintegrate the relations of which Sartre was earlier the absolute centre. This transformation is most clear when one sees a mannequin that they confuse for a real person for a moment. While they are believing it is a person, their world is transformed, and everything exists as an object that partially escapes them. During this time the world comes on to you differently, and you can no longer have a total subjectivity. The world is now his world, a foreign world that no longer comes from you, but from him. The other person is a threat to the order and arrangement of your whole world ... Your world is suddenly haunted by the Other's values, over which you have no control. When they realize it is a mannequin, and is not subjective, the world seems to transfer back, and they are again in the center.
Actually the state should pay for sexually active women to revert to virginity (or at least pay for an operation that will allow them to give the impression that they are virgins). France does, even though France is such a militantly secular nation that hijabs are banned in school, and even though the only women interested in "hymenoplasty," as the procedure is known, are Muslims for whose intended husbands their non-virginity will be a deal-breaker. Dr. Bernard Paniel is an obstetrician-gynecologist for France's public health system, and over many years has become the go-to guy for Muslim women who need to be "mended" before their wedding night, or face the wrath of their shamed, traditionally-minded grooms and the probable annulment of their marriage. Dr. Paniel "mends" about 30 broken hymens a year with a simple procedure that can be performed with a local anesthetic. He considers himself the "oil in the machine" that allows tradition to carry on, and is teaching the procedure, which he learned as a visiting doctor in a Tunisian hospital in the 1960s, to his younger colleagues. Dr. Paniel doesn't issue "virginity certificates" as some of his colleagues do, but perhaps just as controversially -- and resulting in the same effect -- he does provide his patients with vials of blood to produce on their wedding night. It is an understatement to observe that such (in our culture) medieval-era proofs of virginity -- blood on the wedding night sheets displayed to witnesses -- is utterly outmoded, a relic of pre-enlightened times in Judaism and Christianity. But the continuing, and consequential fixation with virginity amongst observant Muslim men is a reality, and the practice of hymenoplasty has now become a legal and political hot chestnut in France. For in April a court in the northern French city of Lille annulled a marriage between a convert to Islam and a French woman of North African provenance on the grounds that her husband had discovered on their wedding night that she was not a virgin. It is expected that the ruling will encourage Muslim men with retrograde views of women's obligations to believe the state supports their perspective. This will escalate demands for premarital virginity inspections, which in turn will up the demand for hymenoplasties. The verdict was only made public two weeks ago, and it is causing a ferment of denunciation. Last week 150 members of the European Parliament denounced the ruling as an act of "serious regression." Those who stand to lose the most from the ruling are modern Muslim women. The Muslim women's rights group "Ni putes ni Soumises" (neither prostitutes nor submissive) claim surgeons performing the intervention have overstepped their professional bounds. Illustrating this well-taken point, gynecologist Jacques Milliez, head of the ethics committee of the London-based International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics, admits that he routinely issues certificates attesting to the "virginity" of his patients, and says many other colleagues do as well, whether the women are sexually active or not. Sihem Habchi, the group's president, asks: "Does it really help? Doesn't it just bolster this tradition and this hypocrisy?" Dr. Milliez justifies his actions on the grounds that he is saving women from being ostracized by their communities. Nevertheless he is worried about the effects of the ruling and is organizing a "summit" around the procedure's ethics to be held in October.
Quote from: del ray on July 10, 2006, 07:56:03 PMQuote from: notabiggie on June 05, 2006, 07:56:52 AMHierarchical, authoritarian institutions tend to be self-perpetuating, because growing up under their influence creates submissive/authoritarian personalities -- people who both "respect" authority (based on fear of punishment) and desire to exercise it themselves on subordinates. Individuals with such a character structure do not really want to dismantle hierarchies, because they are afraid of the responsibility entailed by genuine freedom. It seems "natural" and "right" to them that society's institutions, from the authoritarian factory to the patriarchal family, should be pyramidal, with an elite at the top giving orders while those below them merely obey. Thus we have the spectacle of so called "Libertarians" and "anarcho" capitalists bleating about "liberty" while at the same time advocating factory fascism and privatised states. In short, authoritarian civilisation reproduces itself with each generation because, through an intricate system of conditioning that permeates every aspect of society, it creates masses of people who support the status quo. So basically the nuclear family, as the base unit of consensus society, with its attendant "oedipal miseries," a response to the "agricultural revolution" with its imposed scarcity and its imposed hierarchy has to be abolished? I've read some authors advocate the more primal and more radical model -- the band. The typical hunter/gatherer nomadic or semi-nomadic band consists of about 50 people. Within larger tribal societies the band-structure is fulfilled by clans within the tribe, or by sodalities such as initiatic or secret societies, hunt or war societies, gender societies, "children's republics," and so on. If the nuclear family is produced by scarcity (and results in miserliness), the band is produced by abundance -- and results in prodigality. The family is closed, by genetics, by the male's possession of women and children, by the hierarchic totality of agricultural/industrial society. The band is open -- not to everyone, of course, but to the affinity group, the initiates sworn to a bond of love. The band is not part of a larger hierarchy, but rather part of a horizontal pattern of custom, extended kinship, contract and alliance, spiritual affinities, etc.In fact in our society many forces are working -- largely invisibly -- to phase out the nuclear family and bring back the band. Breakdowns in the structure of Work resonate in the shattered "stability" of the unit-home and unit-family. One's "band" nowadays includes friends, ex-spouses and lovers, people met at different jobs and pow-wows, affinity groups, special interest networks, mail networks, etc. The nuclear family becomes more and more obviously a trap, a cultural sinkhole, a neurotic secret implosion of split atoms -- and the obvious counter-strategy emerges spontaneously in the almost unconscious rediscovery of the more archaic and yet more post-industrial possibility of the band. The very fluidity and temporality of networks created proves to be one of the fortes, instead of a downside, of the arrangement indeed.
Quote from: notabiggie on June 05, 2006, 07:56:52 AMHierarchical, authoritarian institutions tend to be self-perpetuating, because growing up under their influence creates submissive/authoritarian personalities -- people who both "respect" authority (based on fear of punishment) and desire to exercise it themselves on subordinates. Individuals with such a character structure do not really want to dismantle hierarchies, because they are afraid of the responsibility entailed by genuine freedom. It seems "natural" and "right" to them that society's institutions, from the authoritarian factory to the patriarchal family, should be pyramidal, with an elite at the top giving orders while those below them merely obey. Thus we have the spectacle of so called "Libertarians" and "anarcho" capitalists bleating about "liberty" while at the same time advocating factory fascism and privatised states. In short, authoritarian civilisation reproduces itself with each generation because, through an intricate system of conditioning that permeates every aspect of society, it creates masses of people who support the status quo. So basically the nuclear family, as the base unit of consensus society, with its attendant "oedipal miseries," a response to the "agricultural revolution" with its imposed scarcity and its imposed hierarchy has to be abolished? I've read some authors advocate the more primal and more radical model -- the band. The typical hunter/gatherer nomadic or semi-nomadic band consists of about 50 people. Within larger tribal societies the band-structure is fulfilled by clans within the tribe, or by sodalities such as initiatic or secret societies, hunt or war societies, gender societies, "children's republics," and so on. If the nuclear family is produced by scarcity (and results in miserliness), the band is produced by abundance -- and results in prodigality. The family is closed, by genetics, by the male's possession of women and children, by the hierarchic totality of agricultural/industrial society. The band is open -- not to everyone, of course, but to the affinity group, the initiates sworn to a bond of love. The band is not part of a larger hierarchy, but rather part of a horizontal pattern of custom, extended kinship, contract and alliance, spiritual affinities, etc.In fact in our society many forces are working -- largely invisibly -- to phase out the nuclear family and bring back the band. Breakdowns in the structure of Work resonate in the shattered "stability" of the unit-home and unit-family. One's "band" nowadays includes friends, ex-spouses and lovers, people met at different jobs and pow-wows, affinity groups, special interest networks, mail networks, etc. The nuclear family becomes more and more obviously a trap, a cultural sinkhole, a neurotic secret implosion of split atoms -- and the obvious counter-strategy emerges spontaneously in the almost unconscious rediscovery of the more archaic and yet more post-industrial possibility of the band.
Hierarchical, authoritarian institutions tend to be self-perpetuating, because growing up under their influence creates submissive/authoritarian personalities -- people who both "respect" authority (based on fear of punishment) and desire to exercise it themselves on subordinates. Individuals with such a character structure do not really want to dismantle hierarchies, because they are afraid of the responsibility entailed by genuine freedom. It seems "natural" and "right" to them that society's institutions, from the authoritarian factory to the patriarchal family, should be pyramidal, with an elite at the top giving orders while those below them merely obey. Thus we have the spectacle of so called "Libertarians" and "anarcho" capitalists bleating about "liberty" while at the same time advocating factory fascism and privatised states. In short, authoritarian civilisation reproduces itself with each generation because, through an intricate system of conditioning that permeates every aspect of society, it creates masses of people who support the status quo.
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