If the Tao (another Good Book) is right, then there is goodness, in us, but not the kind we can perceive.That's not what that means.
selfish “worse than beasts” practices to spawning do-gooders out to destroy evil doers at all costsIf you are out to destroy others at all costs, you're off the nice list.
I thought I am the bad guy here stepping on everybody’s toes deliberately.You are. Way to avoid the question.
What, then, is your reading of the Tao Te Ching about “human goodness”?
I am making myself a pot of Dragon Well (Chinese green tea). I look forward to some reflective conversation with you, Lausten.
This has once again gone of topic by two posters who know nothing
Ok Xain, I am out of here. It’s your topic. I will catch Lausten somewhere else to continue this.
Sree: “I doubt that Bob is correct in asserting that the creationist has gotten something beneficial from the Good Book.”
I reviewed my post and I did not see where I mentioned “creationist”.
I think I will not be wrong when I say that we will find fruits and nuts among the members of any group, religious or otherwise. I find it worthwhile to dismiss radicals at both ends of the curve and stay within one standard deviation.
I think you will find no significant differences among most religions as to how its members should conduct themselves in society other than their appeals for the individual to accept a specific higher authority. The utility of any religion is that it provides boundaries for our conduct. I see no reason to be concerned about what another believes as long as his behavior doesn’t adversely affect me or other members of society. It is what one does that matters, not what one may believe.
This thread isn’t about religion
To get this back on track this is the book that I am talking about:
Way back when life was indeed better. It was also simpler and here was no time wasted on acquiring “stuff”.
A group of men would get together for a hunt and come back that evening with a weeks worth of meat for the entire tribe.
The women would have prepared the vegetables which they gathered and dug up and cooked and roasted along with meat.
The next few days were spent in lounging or making primitive tools .
The rest of the time was spent in drinking kava and story telling . Everything was a communal affair and there was no need for money.
Today it is very different. Life revolves on the acquisition of stuff.
No one could tell it better than George Carlin;
And this humorous narrative is backed by ;
Xains link to; Fear of Nature
2. Sacred Authority Complex - as separation from nature occurs (domestication of plants and animals), meaning become “abstract,” one doesn’t live in a world, but in a worldview, i.e., a worldthought, a place where meaning/certainty has to be put back into life, because the Self has been removed from Nature/natural cycles. Therefore verticality arises in social and religious life - some things have more meaning than others, according to what economically benefits those at the top of the hierarchy. “Idea” takes over for/dominates “experience” as revealer of truth, and it’s projected upward in hierarchies toward an idealistic godhead that is not ordinarily experienced, or only by the tops of the human hierarchy or by ecstatic trance. manipulation (leading to domination) of natural cycleshttp://www.fearofnature.com/wandering-god-berman
I’m not entirely sure if that’s sarcasm or not. Like what do you mean by humorous narrative?
As as for the Carlin stuff I’m not like that on vacation. I pack everything into one suitcase and I don’t unpack it when I get to a hotel, I just take what I need.
Also that quoted post just sounds like he doesn’t want to admit that meaning is abstract and arbitrary and that there are “worldviews”. It sounds to me like he just hates science for “removing most of the magic” in the world.
If anyone else were asking that, I might give a more thorough answer, but I know you are not a serious person. What informs you Sree? Why are you nice to people? To me, it starts with an understanding that I don’t like my toes stepped on, and I can see that other creatures are like me and have similar senses, so I work with them to avoid mutual toe steppage. You can just keep building from there.For me it's the realization that anyone I talk to could be one straw away from going off and killing everyone they know, starting with me. Be nice to people. You never know who the nuts are until their Trump-sticker covered van is being impounded as evidence.
Can we keep this on topic please
Xain said,I’m not entirely sure if that’s sarcasm or not. Like what do you mean by humorous narrative?
No I was not sarcastic and I used your link and the Carlin skit in support of my posit.
We have become a complete material society, wantonly destroying nature to make room for our convenience and comfort. And now we complain that the earth is reacting to our reckless behavior in acquiring more “STUFF”.
It is a scientific fact that today people spend much more time in pursuit of wealth than in the past. I have personally lived like Henry David Thoreau did at Walden Pond, and those were the best years of my life.
This divorce from nature was correctly identified in the allegory of Adam and Eve being kicked out from Paradise because they ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge, or in scientific terms humans became smart and started to control nature instead of living within it’s rules.
We divorced ourselves from nature and the effects of our wanton disregard of natural laws are becoming slowly apparent.
In our greed we have released as much sequestered CO2 into the atmosphere in 300 years of pumping oil out of the ground as what took nature to sequester that CO2 as oil in hundreds of millions of years.
We have a sying; “Don’t mess with mother Nature” and then we just raped Her over and over and over and over and over, …till death do us part.
Oh, I think the quoted post that you linked was more about how Berman hates science for robbing the magic from the world.
I also don’t think your post quite matches his. HG did hunt species to extinction but the scale isn’t what it is today (so even back then we weren’t about balance), and the picture you paint wasn’t always the norm. There were cases were entire tribes starved to death because they couldn’t feed anyone and violence seemed to be quite frequent among tribes back then.
As for nature, it does break my heart. I guess it’s why I have a dislike of humans. As a kid I grew up watching nature documentaries and dreaming of traveling to all these different places to see these animals in person, I even considered making a career out of it (until I learned it doesn’t pay). But now it just breaks my heart to see many reefs bleaching, the Amazon on fire, ice caps melting, all the places I dreamed of will vanish and no one seems to give a damn.
Xain said,As for nature, it does break my heart. I guess it’s why I have a dislike of humans. As a kid I grew up watching nature documentaries and dreaming of traveling to all these different places to see these animals in person, I even considered making a career out of it (until I learned it doesn’t pay). But now it just breaks my heart to see many reefs bleaching, the Amazon on fire, ice caps melting, all the places I dreamed of will vanish and no one seems to give a damn.As for nature, it does break my heart. I guess it’s why I have a dislike of humans. As a kid I grew up watching nature documentaries and dreaming of traveling to all these different places to see these animals in person, I even considered making a career out of it (until I learned it doesn’t pay). But now it just breaks my heart to see many reefs bleaching, the Amazon on fire, ice caps melting, all the places I dreamed of will vanish and no one seems to give a damn.
I believe I have identified one problem, which is the continuation of our path to global calamity by releasing 4 billion years worth of sequestered CO2 back into the atmosphere in just 300 years of the Industrial Age by our wanton consumption of oil and coal without acknowledging the dangers of the now known facts about pollution and the amount of oil reserves still available.
ENVIRONMENT
122,672 Forest loss this year (hectares) 165,149 Land lost to soil erosion this year (ha) 851,624,661 CO2 emissions this year (tons) 283,060 Desertification this year (hectares) 230,986 Toxic chemicals released in the environment this year (tons)and
285,459,225 Energy used today (MWh), of which: 242,999,011 - from non-renewable sources (MWh) 42,987,670 - from renewable sources (MWh) 1,788,701,692,945 Solar energy striking Earth today (MWh) 58,547,624 Oil pumped today (barrels) 1,520,930,603,978 Oil left (barrels) 15,861 Days to the end of oil (~43 years) 1,098,331,691,887 Natural Gas left (boe) 57,807 Days to the end of natural gas 4,320,288,402,155 Coal left (boe) 148,975 Days to the end of coalhttps://www.worldometers.info/
850 Million tons of CO2 dumped back into the atmosphere, THIS YEAR, 2020
2019
By the end of the year, emissions from industrial activities and the burning of fossil fuels will pump an estimated 36.8 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And total carbon emissions from all human activities, including agriculture and land use, will likely cap off at about 43.1 billion tons.https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/co2-emissions-will-break-another-record-in-2019/
The mathematics;
We dump an average of some 40 billion tons of CO2 back into the earth’s atmosphere, EVERY YEAR!
This is not a trivial number, this is a global event of major proportions in progress.
Well I’m saying that life back then wasn’t exactly better as skirmishes between tribes usually ended in the total extinction of the other (no sparing women or children). Also I would call it making a living so much as a fight for survival. Starvation was pretty common if you couldn’t find anything or hunting everything down (which still occurred). It just sounds to me that humans were screwed then and now except now, I can only pray, we can see our actions have consequences.
But it it still doesn’t get over my dislike of humans for being stupid and thinking this stuff just goes without end or that they need the latest iPhone or whatever. The number of possessions I have can fit in a backpack (if we are talking vitals). I don’t like having a bunch of stuff in my room, and sometimes I ask before I buy if I’m doing this because I like it or to just relate to other people (it’s crazy how often it’s the second one).
As a kid I kind of of marveled at this created world that humans lived in and how states are just lines on a map. But apparently no one cares about that, and I’m wasting my breath talking about the environment. People just don’t know how connected everything in the world is and that no one is an island or a “self made man”. It’s hard for me to have love for a life form that can be so blind at times.
profound stuff there Xian
Xain, if things had gone a little differently, you might have been the 1st Greta Thunberg. (Man, I think she’s great.)
She’s got the spot light for now but I’m not holding out hope that she’ll change much.
Unlike folks see how tied together everything on the planet is they’ll never change. I saw it and I was a kid. I remember daydreaming one time on my way from school about this being a simulation I wake up in some sci fi reality. I didn’t give it much value it was just curious to me.
Maybe it’s because I grew up on nature documentaries and ended up loving them so much and memorized the food web so much that it was pretty much evident what happens when you take one part away. My favorite film was Princess Mononoke because of its nature themes, and how mans greed can destroy everything. It’s where we are going anyway, but our doom won’t come from a giant slime consuming everything.
The more I look at it all the more I think it’s about seeing and not knowing. It’s one thing to know about the doom we cause, but to truly grasp it, to see. To (in a single blink) see how everything in the world is tied together and fully understand the gravity of it all. As far as I can describe it it’s a feeling in my head, like all the information clicks by in a blink, the web of everything. I can tell people what they know but making them see is hard.