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There is No Dignity and No Courage in Deception—Fat Meat is Greasy!
Deep unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state. The World is imperfect; enlightenment comes from the progressive betterment of the World through the beneficent influence of Reason and Nature, the moral order of the Universe is unchanging. In the lowest as well as in the highest strata of human society, filial piety towards parents is wont to recede before other interests. The obscure legends which have been handed down to us from the primeval ages of human society in mythology and folklore give a deplorable idea of the despotic power of the father, and the ruthlessness with which it was exercised. Even in our own middle-class families, the father commonly fosters the growth of the germ of hatred which is naturally inherent in the paternal relation, by refusing to allow the son to be a free agent or by denying him the means of becoming so. A physician often has occasion to remark that a son’s grief at the loss of his father can quench his gratification that he has at last obtained his freedom. #RyanPhillippe 1 of 8
Fathers, as a rule, cling desperately to as much of the sadly antiquated potestas patris familias as still survives in our modern society, and the poet who, like Ibsen, puts the immemorial strife between father and son in the foreground of his drama is sure of this effect. The causes of conflict between mother and daughter arise when the daughter grows up and finds herself watched by her mother when she longs for real sexual freedom, while the mother is reminded by the budding beauty of her daughter that for her the time has come to renounce sexual claims. All these circumstances are obvious to everyone, but they do not help us to explain dreams of the death of their parents in persons for whom filial piety has long since come to be questionable. The only way you can get to know the truth of God is to stop trying to find out by being born again. If you obey God in the first thing He shows you, then He instantly opens up the next truth to you. God will never reveal more truth about Himself to you until you have obeyed what you already know. I thank you, Father that You have hidden these things from the wise and prudent and have revealed them to babes. #RyanPhillippe 2 of 8
Suppose two similar dates in front of an individual who has a strong desire for them, but who is unable to take them both. Surely the individual will take one of them through a quality in that individual’s nature of which is to differentiate between two similar things. All the distinguishing qualities have mentioned, like beauty or nearness or facility in taking, we can assume to be absent, but still the possibility of the taking remains. You can choose between two answers: either you merely say that an equivalence in respect to one’s desire cannot be imagined—but this is a silly answer, for to assume it is indeed possible—or you say that if an equivalence is assumed, the individual will remain for every hungry and perplexed, looking at the dates without taking one of them, and without a power to choose or to will, distinct from one’s desire. And this again is one of those absurdities which are recognized by the necessity, in the human and the divine, the real working of the act of choice, must necessarily admit a quality the nature of which is to differentiate between two similar things. #RyanPhillippe 3 of 8
No one likes to acknowledge that they have made a mistake in the choice of one’s profession, and every individual, worthy of the name, will row long against wind and tide before one allow oneself to cry out, “I am baffled!” and submits to be floated passively back to land. Every individual’s work, pursed steadily, tends to become an end itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of one’s life. Reason can find no preference, that will is incapable of any immediate selection, yet delay is dangerous and pointless. The imagination, moreover, is most strongly affected by what is suggested or hinted at and not by what is plainly stated. Fear plays a large part in our enjoyment of the sublime. Such fear is diminished by knowledge, but sharpened by veiled intimations. Obscurity, not clarity, is the property of the most powerfully moving art; it is our ignorance of things that causes all our admiration and chiefly excites our passions. The first duty of rulers and legislators is to the present, not to the future; their energies should be devoted to the correction of real ills, not to the promotion of an ideal order that exists only in the imagination. #RyanPhillippe 4 of 8
An employer owes a good worker something beyond the wages paid, and a worker owes a good employer something beyond work done. We must put great faith in the inherited wisdom of tradition. The moral order of the temporal World must necessarily include some evil, by reason of original sin. People ought not to reject what is good in tradition merely because there is some admixture of evil in it. In human’s confused situation, advantages may lie in balances and compromises between good and evil, even between one evil and another. It is an important part of wisdom to know how much evil should be tolerated. To search for too great a purity is only to produce fresh corruption. People are simply not at liberty to destroy the state and its institutions in the hope of some contingent improvement. On the other hand, people have a paramount duty to prevent the World from getting worse—a duty to guard their inherited liberties and privileges. A wonderful thing about God’s silence is that His stillness is contagious—it gets into you, causing you to become perfectly confident so that you can honestly say, “I know that God has heard me.” #RyanPhillippe 5 of 8
One day, I found a lady depressed and weeping. She said: “I do not want to see my relatives any more; they must shudder at me.” Thereupon, almost without any transition, she tells me that she had remembered a dream, whose significance, of course, she does not understand. It seems that it was contrary to nature and therefore impossible to achieve liberty without any real knowledge of what she meant by it. It does moral social hard by pretending that real differences were unreal, as they inspire false hopes and vain expectations in those destined to travel in the obscure walk of laborious life. God’s silence is the very proof that He has heard you. If Christ is bringing you into the understanding that prayer is for the glorying of His Father, the He will give you the first sign of His intimacy—silence. Although God often speaks the language understood by that age—the language of calculation, expediency, utility, and political rights—He has a mind which His contemporaries, and many others, cannot readily comprehend. #RyanPhillippe 6 of 8
Being conscious, above all things, of the reality and unavoidability of evil, might lead one to the claim that the only hope for humankind is to cling to safeguards which have stood the tests of time. One’s hope for bliss may lay in Heaven; on Earth, our policy is to defend the tolerable, and sometimes the bad, against the immeasurably worse. Instead of becoming less personal, we are required to become more personal. What we could gloss over in other circumstances can no longer be avoided. Whereas we may have seen each other through a glass darkly, now we are to attend to each other in person and in the same location. The transition from a negative to an optimistic event requires our human presence. Of what does human presence consist? The end and the means of human presence are truth in the situation. There is to be as much full human contact as possible. What we say and what we do is communication in the search of communion. We intentionally seek a relationship. There is no dignity and no courage in deception. Living calls out all of our fullness. #RyanPhillippe 7 of 8
If we have known only a fraction of the truth previously, now we are to know it as fully as possible. For that is the heart of love, and faith and grace somehow have their grounding in love. The issue is not whether we share what is happening. Instead the issue is how we share what is happening. Truth that looms so awesome in anticipation looks so simple in retrospect. What we felt would damage and destroy, we discover actually helps us heal. However, how to see reality and how to get to the truth seems so complicated. One must understand, it does not force presence where one prefers privacy. It does not perpetuate privacy where one wants presence. Truth creates a genuinely human relationship. With such an invitation from the living, what matters is reaching out in love. We can help others by responding to their life situation as theirs. Many people may still be in a state of shocked denial. They may have moved into bitterness and envy. They may engage in magical maneuverings, negotiating now for this and now for that. They may be staggered by the loss of livelihood and life and love. They may have found the peace that nothing can dislodge. What is important is not what they are experiencing, but rather that we be present to them in their experience. #RyanPhillippe 8 of 8
Kaleidoscopic Hell—Doing Ceases and Only being Remains
Britney Spears makes her own runway, I make my own news. All good ends can be worked out by good means. Those that cannot, are bad; and may be counted so at once, and left alone. Whoever offends against the laws of honor in the least instance is treated as the highest delinquent. Here is no excuse, no pardon; and one doth nothing who leaves anything undone. Because of the nature of attachment, the first state preceding the actual experiencing of loss is that of fear of loss. This is usually defended in one of two ways. One is to increase the intensity of the attachment by ever persistent attempts to strengthen the bonds. This approach is based on the fantasy that the greater the bond, the less likelihood of loss. However, this is the very maneuver that often precipitates loss in person relationships, because the other person struggles to be free of the possessive attachment and the amount of restrictive control they feel being placed upon them. Thus, because what we hold in mind tends to manifest, the fear of a loss can, paradoxically, be the mechanism of bring about that loss. #RyanPhillippe 1 of 6
Our highest state is love, and it all begins with ourselves. When we love ourselves, others will love us. When we respect ourselves, other will respect us. Hope is a charming passion, the only real friend of a human thought. The most precious gift of Heaven, hope. Another way that the fear of loss is handles is by the psychological mechanism of denial. We see this around us every day, many people want to play ostrich, bury their heads in the sand and pretend that they do not see nor hear what is going on around them in an effort of refusing to face the inevitable. All the warning signs are there, but the person does not take heed. Thus, for example, the man who is obviously in the process of losing his job tends not to notice. Death and dying force upon us a certain honesty about life and living. Where truth is lacking in living, truth will be lacking in dying. In fact, life and death appear related: the more life the easier death; the less life the more terrible death. I do not mean these in the physical and literal sense, but rather in the human and figurative sense. In the face of finitude, we find ourselves driven to deal with our work, our worth, our love, our life. #RyanPhiliipee 2 of 6
What is most terrifying about dying and death is the lack of living connectedness. Without presence, we are without hope; without contact, we are without grounding. So, we find we are required to face what separates the living from the dying. We find we are required to face our own limits and our own end. For we, too, will die. In facing death, we are finding life. And in finding life, we establish a living connectedness. We come closer to one another for mutual gratification and upbuilding. The courage to be is inseparably linked with the courage to be known. The existential demand upon each of us individually has its accompanying interpersonal demand. I can be courageous if I can communicate to a significant other what matters desperately to me. Communication constitutes the core of the doing of being. When I can say to you what I am experiencing, then we have entered into a transforming communion. Distance disappears. Loneliness lessens. Isolation is swallowed up by oneness. As I am known, so I am. #RyanPhillippe 3 of 6
There is no love without a ray of faith and trust. Now is the time. Here is the place. What one person says to another in the face of death counts more intensely than in any other here-and-now. The one who is anticipating the end wants to be heard, aches to be understood, longs to be in touch. There is a heightened awareness that every word matters, each moment counts, every gesture carries special weight. The quality of the connectedness replaces the quantity of the connections. A sense of eternity comes with experiencing being known by another and knowing the other right here and right now. The letters to my father meant so very much to him and there were some things he wanted to say to express the struggle and pain that he felt about losing relationships that were important to him….as I sit here writing this, I think about all the time we spent together and all the car rides and how he probably went home and cried in silence, but was always happy when I saw him. Time is the pacifier of every woe, the qualifier of every disappointment. #RyanPhillippe 4 of 6
Countless times I have had very little courage of my own, and I know that such an attitude is wrong and one certainly should pray about it. Pray for strength and courage and grace to meet whatever proves to be the experience. And that I have done, or I do not see how I could have gotten through these past years. I think worst of all is that no one is dying, but it feels like it when people you love have wronged you. These days sometimes seem unendurable. When one thinks of words to describe them, the words kaleidoscopic hell are the only ones that some to mind. Without prayer, I do not see how I could have endured this. The thing that meant so much to me was your understanding of me enough to know that you could say what you did then—that it looked as though we were heading for a certain crisis, you hoped and prayed it might be for the better, but realized it might be for the worse. The fact that we have been able to show our love and affection for each other is one of the precious things of life. We have faced the ultimate issues of life together. #RyanPhillippe 5 of 6
There is abundant love in the Universe, there is abundant love in me, and I see myself as the eternal soul that I really know I am. I play an important part in the World. Lord, give me guidance to help me see my path. Give me clarity to help me discover my worth. I am a Divine being and I love myself deeply, as I am worthy of love of others. The soul’s life has seasons of its own; periods not found in any calendar, times that years and months will not scan. I call upon the energies of the Sun and Earth to help me find my confidence. You want nothing but patience; or give it a more fascinating name: call it faith. Also, with self-love comes clarity and compassion, two treasured ingredients in magic. Therefore, it is important that we practice self-love, it is a muscle that requires exercise. Time heightened our blessing, and our precious years are like a setting Sun, which gathers fresh splendor, as it gradually vanishes from our sight. #RyanPhillippe 6 of 6

Inevitable March of the World Spirit

I hope there are not many in this World to whom the thought of honor being tied to money ever appears possible. It was not merely that works of art and culture provide the historian with the most fertile material for the interpretation of previous phases of human experience; history itself is (or should be) a form of art. The mechanical piling up of the results of specialized research, dear to scientific historians, is not enough; there must also be intuition, an imaginative ability to re-create the vision of life underlying the relics left by former times. To see the past in these terms is to see it as the expression of the inexhaustible creative power of the human mind—great individuals, great artistic achievements, great moments of civilization, all exemplified in different ways its potentialities. Scholarship, painstaking investigation, were indeed essential, but they must be properly used and directed. Only thus could a particular source or authority throw light on the character of a person, the significance of a style, the pervasive atmosphere of a period. Ultimately, the subject of historical study is humans themselves, not the hypostatized abstractions of the philosophers of history. The historical process follows a fixed and predetermined course, betrayed a fundamental blindness to its most striking feature, the revelation of individual originality and creativity. Likewise, their astrological impatience to set the limits to its future by talk of the World plans and metaphysical goals are not only unwarranted, it failed to respect the very conditions of uncertainty and suspense that make human achievement possible. From this point of view, and insofar as the development of humankind is concerned, a future known in advance is an absurdity. The tide of historical speculation is starting to recede. Philosophers, rather than continuing to offer sweeping interpretations of the human past, have turned their attention toward examining the distinctive characteristics of historical thought and inquiry, with prophetic insights displaying in their analysis of contemporary trends the many subtle and individual observations.

When they depict the Universe, they draw a serpent devouring its own tail, marked with variegated scales. By the scales, they suggest the stars in Heavens. This beast is the heaviest of the animals, as the Earth is heaviest [of elements]. It is the smoothest, like water. And each year it sheds its skin, it [represents old age]. However, the fact that it uses its own body for food signifies that whatever things are generated in the World by Divine Providence are received back into it by [a gradual process of] diminution. Names are a special form of complex signs. A demon’s name is sometimes meaningful in a simple sense, that sometimes names of spirits are taken from those things over which they are set, being as it were borrowed from the stars, or humans, or places, or times, or such like things, the divine name. For example, Zedekiel is one name of the spirit of Jupiter, from the Hebrew name of Jupiter zedek, or if we call them [these demons] from the Latin words…Joviel. Names have a singular referent—a demonic names refer only to a single demon. At the same time, written names are aggregates, combinations of basic written forms to make up complex, representative structures. Moreover, names were impressed upon objects by Adam, and hence have an arbitrary symbolic character not dependent on the characters or elements of which they are constituted. Adam’s function as nomothete is well known, but it is crucial to recognize the relationship between Adam’s naming and the Divine nominative function. As the great operator doth produce divers species, and particular things by the influences of the Heavens, and by the elements, together with the virtues of planets; so according to the properties of the influences proper names result to things, and are put upon them by hum who numbers the multitude of the stars, calling them by their names, of which names Christ in another place speaks, saying, Your names are written in Heaven.

Adam therefore that gave the first names to things, gave them all names influences of the Heavens, and propertites of all things, gave them names according to their natures, as it is written in Genesis, where God brought all things that he had created before Adam, that he should name them, and as he named anything, so the name of it was, which names indeed contain in them wonderful powers of things signified. Every voice therefore that is significant, first of all signifies by the influence of the celestial harmony; secondly, by the imposition of humans…However when both significations meet in any voice or name, which are put upon them by the said harmony or human, then that name is with a double virtue, viz. natural, and arbitrary, made most efficacious to act, as oft as it shall be uttered in due place, and time, and seriously with an intention exercised upon the matter rightly disposed, and that can naturally be acted upon by it. Therefore, names like signs in general, can be doubly powerful if they combine natural and arbitrary modes of signification. For Ancient Egyptians, the divine nature of the Universe was manifested in a multitude of ways. The process of syncretism, by which two or more deities were combined to form a single cult, was also central to religion in Ancient Egypt. Two of the most important deities, Amun and Ra, for example, were fused to create Amun-Ra, the god of creation. Amun-Ra means hidden light. He is the ultimate god of the entire Ancient Egypt; man of the Egyptians considered him as the God of Kings and King of Gods! He is the oldest and the most worshiped ruler of ancient Egypt. In the Ptolemaic Period (332-30 BC), Greek gods Zeus and Helios with Osiris and Apis, perhaps in a move towards political and cultural unity.

The Ancient Egyptians worshiped a number of gods and goddesses, each of whom had different roles or functions, as well as a variety of creations myths. In keeping with the complex and varied nature of their religion, the Ancient Egyptians had several theories of the creation of the Universe. These creation myths evolved in the country’s major cult centres and usually concentrated on the role played by local gods. Ancient Egyptian theology rarely engages with the notion of the end of existence. Where it is mentioned, it is imagined as an apocalyptic destruction followed by a return to the state of the Universe before time began, in which only the gods Atum and Osiris survive. Along with the Sun god, Ra, Osiris, the primary god of the dead, was one of the most important deities in the pantheon. In Ancient Egyptian mythology, Osiris was killed by his evil brother Seth, and his dismembered body was mummified and resurrected by his wife, the Goddess Isis. During the Old Kingdom (2686-2181 BC), the deceased pharaoh was identified with Osiris and was believed to experience rebirth in the same way that the murdered god did. During the First Intermediate period (2181-2055 BC), however, it seems that it became possible for commoners to be resurrected in the manner of Osiris, as a sort of ‘democratization of the afterlife’ took place. Mummification was designed to make the deceased resemble Osiris as much as possible, in the hope that this would ensure eternal life in the underworld. Osiris presided over the weighing of the Heart ceremony in the afterlife. In this ritual, the deceased made the negative confession, swearing that they had not committed any of a list of offences, then their heart was weighed against the feather of Maat, symbol of truth and harmony. Osiris judged the results of the ritual and was responsible for deciding whether the deceased was worthy of resurrection.

The Winchester Mystery House

Meet talkative ghosts at The Winchester Mystery House and learn the heartwarming story of a child ghost who lingers with today’s patrons. https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Red Record–I Would Not have Revealed any of this had they Left me Alone!!!!!
When you start guessing what people will react to, you can find all kinds of reasons why not to write a story. After a story appears pressure sometimes occurs, sending clear signals never to do it again. Special interest sometimes try to squelch stories or insist on self-serving angles, and usually these attempts are made quietly, even tacitly, among executives—country club decision-making. Sometimes the pressure is exerted on media advertising people, who quietly exert influence on the newsroom. However, news is supposed to have an agenda and that agenda is to make society a better place, educate people, give them facts, scientific information, stories about technology, the environment, and health material. Lately, all these puzzling instabilities in the news and reporters’ repertoire are not careless or stupid blunders of reasoning. They are calculated, illuminating, disturbing indications of how immensely hard it is becoming for the government to control America and keep foreign interest out of American business. Unreality is a big business. It involves the expenditure of billions of dollars annually. It is deliberately manufactured and sold on a gigantic scale. The consequence is society is less and less able to face its true problems directly, honestly, and intelligently. #RandolphHarris 1 of 11
A pervading, powerful sense of unreality has infiltrated the land. Right now, many people are rioting and looting and protesting the coronation of President Donald Trump, but they do not understand why he is trying so hard to secure American boarders. It has nothing to do with racism, but he is trying to prevent terrorist attacks and reduce crime rate. We already have an immigration system, where people apply to get citizenship, and in due time they are granted the privilege of becoming an American, or not. God did not intend for everyone to be an American, or else we would have a one World government, no boarders, and President Trump would control the World. What people like about America is the resources and the fact that people are free to earn money and have property. However, other people, and a lot of them do not like Americans, they do not like America, and they want to come over here and bring their lawless culture, tear things up, and cause conflict, and that is what the President is trying to stop. Our unique cultural history predisposes the U.S. especially towards a cult of unreality because no one is speaking, no one is reading, and according to the principals of evolution, this will produce a population indistinguishable from organic drones. #RandolphHarris 2 of 11
The vast, powerful entertainment industry and the influence it now wields over every part of American society suggest that a bleak and torpid epic may lie ahead. Aviv Nevo is a Jewish man born in 1965 in Bucharest, Romania and then moved to Tel Aviv, Israel as an infant. He is an Israeli and American venture capitalist who is a major shareholder in Time Warner. Time Warner, Inc. is an American multinational media and entertainment conglomerate business, which has its main office in New York City. It is currently the World’s third largest entertainment company in terms of revenue. Time Warner also controls HBO, Turner Broadcasting, The CW Television Network, Warner Brothers, CNN, DC Comics, and Hulu. So, Aviv Nevo is basically controlling much of the American news and entertainment that you have seen and that is probably why so much of the news is gossip, lacking sources, fake, distorted, and why so many of the reporters are now at work lying, displaying adolescent behavior, and becoming extremely sloppy and their commentary does not make sense. Aviv Nevo does not have Americans best interest at heart and as long as he can keep you all in an uproar and distracted, he is able to divide America. #RandolphHarris 3 of 11
We have empowered the TV to become one of the most powerful forces in our lives. The consequences is that the TV news not only defines what is reality, but much more importantly and disturbingly, the perception that a news organization has of its audience is evident by the stories that they provide you with. Several New York newspaper publishers, concerned about the escalating expense of sending reporters to gather faraway news, got together in 1848 to share stories. By together sending one reporter, the newspapers cut costs dramatically. They called their cooperative venture the Associated Press (AP). So, the stories could be used by member newspapers of different political persuasions, reporters were told to write from a nonpartisan point of view. The result was supposed to be a fact-oriented kind of news writing often called objective reporting. However, this many not always be the case. Some reporters still have a commitment to social improvement, and include a willingness to crusade against corruption, but if most of the news is coming from one main source, it may be biased and distorted. Unreality has become in effect our primary mode of reference. #RandolphHarris 4 of 11
The TV news now dominates how we think and what we think of ourselves and others, and how we define our World. When writing an essay in college, your professors always tell you to get at least three sources, none of which are internet based to make sure you do a fair job. Much of the information you are receiving today from the news, usually all comes from the same source, and is reported exactly the same on all of the stations and it is hyperbolized and fabricated news to attract viewers. Commercial television news makes so much money doing its worst, it cannot afford to do its best. Astronomers have found structures that look like faces on Mars, and other animals, and river beds that no longer have water. I am convinced that Mars was once inhabited by rational human beings like ourselves, who had the misfortune, some thousands of years ago, of creating an Associated Press and digesting the information they received as fact, and not questing the content or demanding the truth. I bet you did not even know the rings of Saturn produce noise that was recorded by NASA, and it sounds like music from a 1960s-horror film, but it is actually very relaxing and soothing. #RandolphHarris 5 of 11
Many of you have absolutely no idea what is going on in the real World, how you kids are feeling at school, or even if your spouse is getting enough to eat because you are overwhelmed with fake political news. Their hearts could be bleeding and you would not know because you are so obsessed with TV news. So many of our current problems seem to generate the same general kind of solution, which actually intensifies the problems themselves! Protesting is making Americans look like idiots around the World, and people are getting hurt and dying and no one seems to care. You all are upset because people have to obey gender laws that are in place to keep us safe. You guys are upset because the President wants to enforce immigrations rules, but no one is upset that 100 people have been killed in Chicago, Illinois USA this year already and it is only the second month of 2017?! In a World gone mad as the result of overwhelming complexity, the need for coherence does not diminish. It becomes even greater. An economic interest suggests that the news-gathering process produces an emphasis on the deviant Black villains or the President to produce higher ratings. #RandolphHarris 6 of 11
Now that we are getting a better picture of how the news media is misrepresenting people, all people, we really need to spend more time investigating what news viewing might do to news viewers. All viewers should also work to be more critical and challenging of the news that we consumer, especially with regards to economics, crime, and race. Perhaps if such steps are taken we can begin to move toward breaking down the stereotypes and ignorance that divide us, and stop the jazz journalism that has a tabloid form of information. Journalistic policy about race should only be revealed when it is a key component of the story. For instance, Ida Wells brought first-class ticket for a car at the front of the train, but when the conductor saw she was Black, he told her to go to the rear. First-class, he reported was “set apart for White ladies and gentlemen.” Ida Wells, refused and she was thrown off the train. She sued, citing various constitutional guarantees, and won before a Memphis, Tennessee USA jury. The Tennessee Supreme Court, however, said she was harassing the railroad and overturned the jury verdict. #RandolphHarris 7 of 11
The cause, in 1885, was among the first involving racial equality in public transportation. The attention the Ida Wells case received made it clear that the 21-year-old schoolteacher was a powerful force in American history, and that so was the press. She bought into a small weekly newspaper, the Free Speech, and began crusading for better schools for Black children. The school board, embarrassed, fired her. So she went into journalism full times as editor. In 1892, a mob lynched three Black grocers whose store had been successful against their competitors. Idea Wells pulled out all the stops in her coverage, reporting the details that led to the lynchings and denouncing the community for condoning what had happened. It was thorough, courageous reporting, and it received wide attention. Soon Ida Wells was writing for the New York Age, with her articles a fixture in almost all of the nation’s 400 Black newspapers. Ida Wells continued her work on lynchings as mob vigilantisms, amassing data that there were becoming more common. #RandolphHarris 8 of 11
In 1892, Ida Wells counted 2,565 lynchings, which was three times higher ten years earlier. She urged readers to arm themselves for self-protection: “A Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every home.” Her office was attacked. To continue her crusade, Ida Wells went to England, beyond the mobs’ reach, to rail against American racial injustice, including lynchings of Black men, on every forum she could find. Her boos, A Red Record, contained alarming statistics on American lynchings. By now an internationally recognized figure, Ida Wells felt relatively safe to return to the United States on the lecture circuit with the press sure to follow her every word. States in American began prosecutions for lynchins, and the number declined. Memphis, Tennessee USA had no more lynchings for 25 years. Ida Wells eventually settled in Chicago, Illinois USA, were she continued her journalistic crusade for social justice and other reforms, including women’s rights. #RandolphHarris 9 of 11
In fearless pursuit of the facts, Ida Wells went alone to lynchings and riots. Her factual reports, published widely, provided indisputable evidence of injustice and persecution and built general sympathy for both law enforcement and legislation to correct social wrongs. And in continuing Mrs. Ida Wells-Barnett’s work, I would like to tell you how important women are. In China, by the year 2024, there will be one woman to every twenty-four men, and dating has become a business. Men have to not only be extremely attractive, but they have to have great careers and houses in prime real estate. Dates with women are arranged by a broker, and within 10 minutes a woman reviews your credentials, meets you in person, and if she does not like you, or you do not qualify, she will seriously walk away without a second thought. Also, while we are talking about World news, why do we not have more information about Vivek Ranadive, who is the chairman of the Sacramento Kings, who built that new arena, which cost more than $588 million, which was more than 50 percent funded by the public, and the public was not even allowed to vote on it, nor does the arena have parking and it is responsible for all the expensive parking tickets many of you are getting and the extended ticketing hours that go until 10pm. If we cannot find coherence in ideas or intellectual patterns alone, then we seek it in alternate forms such as in cult personalities; in pseudo, popular heroes; in entertaining and amusing faces that soothe over our need for satisfying explanations. #RandolphHarris 10 of 11
TV news has become almost pure entertainment and is a clear from its adoption of most of the techniques that are characteristic of entertainment. I personally cannot wait to move into a house so I can enjoy a new yard and turn the TV news off and stop watching it. The easy flowing conversation and back and forth banter among the news team that has the appearance of being spontaneous is often annoying and rehearsed as much as any talk show. At best we witness a form of improvisational melodrama. The fact that rarely if ever do we witness open conflict, debate, and confrontation between news anchors. However, if you watch news in Japan, you will notice it is far more informative and serious. Furthermore, while many male anchors in American become feminized and lack the skills to do serious news reports, several of the women have been picking of the slack and doing stories, I would not feel safe doing, going to place and talking to people, I myself would not feel comfortable. So, I commend the excellence in journalism displayed by the women and a few of the men. Many cultures, one World. #RandolphHarris 11 of 11

Hope is a Charming Passion—The Only Reason Friend of Human Thought

Love, the gay child of sympathy and esteem, is, when attended by delicacy, the only happiness worth a reasonable human’s pursuit, and the choicest gift of Heaven. We do not and cannot see our World as a theater of conflict between supernatural powers, the demonic seeking to possess and destroy us, and God intervening to secure our salvation. Moreover, miracle stories lie at the very heart of New Testament belief: If Christ be not raised, your faith is vain (I Corinthians 15.17). Thus, the crucial question is: must a human, in order to be a Christian, commit oneself simultaneously to two mutually incompatible World pictures—that of twentieth century science and that of the first-century prescientific speculation? To attempt this is to make Christian belief unnecessarily difficult. It is equally unrewarding to view Christianity as a strictly and objectively historical religion and anxiously to sift all the evidence for and against the recorded events of the life of Christ. The evidence is substantial enough to show that Christ indeed lived and that he made a quite extraordinary impact upon certain contemporaries. #RandolphHarris 1 of 8

However, if religious faith is to stand or fall with the historicity of, say, the birth stories of the Easter narratives, if its degree of assurance must rationally be tempered with the historical probabilities, the assurance will be pitifully uncertain, and faith will almost certainly fall. Some people may properly grant that a very large part of the New Testament message is couched in mythical language and does not record objective history. This mythical material is not, however, an embarrassment, and it need not be discarded. It can be interpreted as indirect description not of the cosmos but of the conditions and possibilities of human existence. Historical studies derive their real seriousness not from sheer factuality but from what they discover about viable ways of life and viable options for human decision. Among such options, the Christian gives pre-eminence to that displayed in the accounts of the cross and the resurrection. For it is through these that God makes available a distinctively authentic and free mode of existence to all humanity. It is also believed that freedom is a privilege, not a right. #RandolphHarris 2 of 8

The only way one will have freedom is by obeying conditions and these conditions are both supernatural and human. The rules of God state that we must be good people and have right actions and thought and we will go to Heaven. The human laws state that we much behave sane and obey the laws to keep our privilege of freedom. What happens when we enter into the inner sense of the World? We leave the World of space and enter into the World of movement; the noun World is transformed into a verb. As spatial location is itself a quality of things, so motion from place to place is an objective fact. Our Sun is a star, and all of the stars give out without taking in. The aim of our soul is to increase porosity on the side of giving out and to reduce it on the side of taking in. A human being in this aged nation of ours is a very wonderful whole, the slow creation of long interchanging influences; and charm is a result of two such wholes, the one loving and the one loved. However, all humans almost are villains in their hearts because we feel inauthentic life in and after the flesh, the life of the natural human who is alienated from God. #RandolphHarris 3 of 8

How Hell should become by degrees so natural, and not only tolerable but even agreeable, is a thing unintelligible but by those who have experienced it. The idea of eternal life is Hell is totally scary and this should be enough motivation for people to be good. Habit hath so vast a prevalence over the human mind, that there is scare anything too strange or too strong to be asserted of it. On the authentic type of existence, there is a total acceptance of the fundamental conditions of our life. This involves, for any human, a realization of one’s own death, not as some vague, unpleasant, but indefinite future event, but as something whose constant presence, in possibility, should modify one’s sense of one’s own existence at every moment. Christianity, too, speaks, of renouncing the World and a life entangled with the World, of dying to the life of self. It has, however—or ought to have—some very different thing to say about life eternal. People should see and accept the limitations on our freedom imposed by the given circumstances of our lives as so far lived (facticity); one sees the present moment as the locus of decision, and it is in the future that one will work out those authentic possibilities of existence for which one decides. Earth should not look like a halfway house. #RandolphHarris 4 of 8

God speaks in a way that overwhelms us by revealing the depths of our ignorance. We show our ignorance of Him in the very way we decide to serve Him. Are we worshipping God in a way that will raise us up to where we can take hold of Him, having such intimate contact with Him that we know His mind about the ones for whom we pray? If we are not heedful and pay no attention to the way the Spirit of God works in us, we will become spiritual hypocrites. We see other people failing, and then we take our discernment and turn it into ridicule and criticism, instead of turning it into intercession. Such projects are the manifestation of a crude and vulgar optimism that springs us from the arrogant and egotistical assumption that our time is the consummation of all time and tended to justify the crimes and disasters of previous ages as necessary to the promotion of what came afterward. The role of moral judgment in history and life cannot be spirited away in this complacent manner; but neither, on the other hand should we allow our views of the past to be distorted by moral predilection peculiar to our own time and society. #RandolphHarris 5 of 8

Be careful that you do not become a hypocrite by spending all of your time trying to get others right with God before you worship Him yourself. What is above all requisite for true historical understanding is a contemplative, disinterested sense of the abiding and tragic aspects of human existence. Only through such detachment from prevailing concerns and preoccupations could the historian transcend the barriers that separate the mental life of one age from that of another. It is not merely that work of art and culture that has provided us with the most fertile material for interpretation of previous phases of human experience; history itself was (or should be) a form of art. The mechanical piling up of the results of specialized research, dear to so-called scientific historians, is not enough; there must also be intuition, an imaginative ability to re-create the vision of life underlying the relics left by former times. Remember our way back to God takes a lot of work. When are born into the World, we sometimes forget our Godly ways, much like people with much like people with Dementia forget the World around them. #RandolphHarris 6 of 8

The Bible is a way for us to get back to God, much like how in the Netherlands, a radical idea is being tested. There are self-contained villages where people with dementia show, cook, and live together—safely. The village has things that will remind the Alzheimer’s suffers of the World they grew up in, there are Victorian houses, telephone booths, clock towers, cobble stone roads, and the village is closed to the outside World with gates and security fences. To see the past in these terms is to see it as the expression of the inexhaustible creative power of the human mind—great individuals, great artistic achievements, great moments of civilization all exemplified in different ways its potentialities. So, this is how building and restoring your own faith in God will protect you from ways that are ungodly, it will surround you with God’s armor. Scholarship, painstaking investigation, are indeed essential, and they must be properly used and directed. #RandolphHarris 7 of 8

Only thus could a particular source or authority throw light on the character of a person, the significance of a style, the pervasive atmosphere of a period. My experiences are not worth anything unless they keep me at the Source of truth—God. Be relentless and hard on yourself if you are in the habit of talking about the experiences you have had. Faith based on experience is not faith; faith based on God’s revealed truth is the only faith there is. A new creed became mine—a belief in happiness. The wise order of providence has ordained that we shall makes others happy in being so ourselves. The happiness of some lives is distributed pretty evenly over the whole stretch from the cradle to the grave, while that of others comes all at once, glorifying some particular epoch and leaving the rest in shadow. I believe in some blending of hope and sunshine sweetening the worst lots. I believe that this life is not all; neither the beginning nor the end. I believe while I tremble; I trust while I weep. #RandolphHarris 8 of 8

The Winchester Mystery House

The brave and the fearless will find all the contact information and tour options they need to tour The Winchester Mystery House. https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Nature Equips All Creatures with what is Most Expedient for them
In so complex a thing as human nature, it is hard to find rules without exceptions. The World, or cosmos, is an organic whole animated by a World soul or an entelechy that is revealed in the structure, function, and connection of its parts. We cannot know the real nature of things, but only their appearances and effects. God, or the Absolute, in creating the cosmos out of nothing, created it not as something external or alien to him (for then it would limit the Absolute, which is impossible), but as an emanation of his own nature; the World is God as becoming, the divine fused with nothingness. Many people speak of karma, and it usually means what goes around comes around. The path to creating a good destiny or fate, has to do with a person’s actions in this state of existence, and their actions and words are what brings them their reality. This path has the following stages: right views, right aspirations, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right contemplations. It all has to do with one’s frame of mind and the aspirant and the mystical knowledge of the ultimate truth for the serenity that goes with it. #RandolphHarris 1 of 6
The goal is to restore good health. We have been taught that humans have free will, but how can this true? If God tells us that we have to be good in order to receive his grace, how can we really have free will? Good actions lead to grace and this restricts accountability to a narrow and extrinsic sphere of material liberty. Some people do not know good behavior from deviant behavior and will do things like donate to charity and become spokes people for underrepresented groups as a means of masking their bad behavior and making themselves feel better about their wicked behavior. Others do charity work because they really care about people and the community and truly want to save lives. Practical psychology is a great means of understanding acceptable human behavior because it is more concrete and explains why certain behaviors are unhealthy and why others behaviors are good, and this will help to heal the human will from sin. However, revelation is essential to this healing process. The human will’s independence of the intellect is important in revelation. People have it within their power to reflect, to weigh, and to appreciate, before they act. #RandolphHarris 2 of 6
When food is scarce, and when food is plenty, a wolf grows bold. Some religions ban the taking of life; stealing; wrong sexual relations; wrong use of speech (not just lying; malicious gossip, for instance, even if true is forbidden); and the consumption of drugs and alcohol. And this is why some people practice celibacy. Also, intoxicants are banned, since it is held that these cloud such awareness. Mediating between the Absolute and the cosmos, uniting them both within itself, is a third being—Sophia, the principle of divine wisdom. As the World of Platonic ideas, Sophia is the ideal basis of the cosmos; as the object of divine love, purely receptive and conceiving everything within herself as the womb of being, Sophia is eternal femininity; as the principle of the Divine within the created, she is the World soul, or entelechy; as a participant with the Trinity in the generation of the cosmos, she is kind of a fourth hypostasis in God. However, still, the ultimate metaphysical identity is consubstantiality of God and the cosmos. Nonetheless, humans are not by nature destitute of truth and love, nobility and purity—the annals of the World show how untrue it is. #RandolphHarris 3 of 6
Many people still are confused with the problem of evil and human freedom. Evil, perhaps, can be attributed to the nothingness or nonbeing that is the substratum of the cosmos: through the willfulness of created beings, nothingness is actualized as a chaotic force erupting into the created World, which in itself is not evil but simply incomplete. And yet, it not much of human kind itself, pushing on its blind way, driven by a dream of its greatness and its power upon the dark paths of excessive cruelty and of excessive devotion. Therefore, human freedom must be a doctrine of self-creation: humans are free even in act by which one comes into existence, for God allows humans to collaborate in their own creation; at the same time, Sophia guides history by kind of necessity. If one sees success from within the labyrinthine path, sees the kind of soul involved in success, sees also what success looks like from the point of view of the soul of the World, well, the whole quality of success changes. One things it through thoroughly from the side of the individual and from the side of the World and this thinking through becomes a way of ensouling. This kind of thinking forms the path to freedom because the forces of the soul have been released. #RandolphHarris 4 of 6
We find this direction of soul movement in individual development. In early life of a person, during childhood, all the powers of the soul are bound up in bodily development; they make the body. Later, during adolescence, the soul forces go into the development of the ego—the ego is simply consciousness as a mirror of the body. By body here, we are speaking more of thoughts, memories, sensations, and images that one already has; these are all reflected in what is called the ego. Later, these creating forces of soul become more and more free. Violence belongs to imagination as its inherent shaping force, and when it does not have the container of image it goes wild because something essential has been removed. In present culture violence, itself has become a dominant image as if it were expressing a need for attention. Nearly every contemporary film centers on violence and lack of beauty. During the medieval person, Christianity proclaimed the strictly spiritual nature of God and Christ and stigmatized all material existence as the work of the Devil. #RandolphHarris 5 of 6
In Medieval times, the Bogomiles rejected the doctrine of the Incarnation and of the bodily life of Christ as well as every material aspect of religious thought and practice—sacraments, the cross, church edifices, and ecclesiastical ceremonies. They advocated asceticism and simple spiritual devotion. Even with all considered, the World God created is good, and when human begin to work alongside God in creation, things become very good. Time is not the mind’s form of comprehending the events it perceives. The heart says yes there is something here to behold beyond what I think or feel about it. The heart does not strive after meaning, but rather allows the things to disclose themselves. Therefore, the true nature of humans is far from being in itself evil; it abounds with benevolence, charity, and pity, coveting praise and honor, and shunning shame and disgrace. Bad education, bad habits, and bad customs, debauch our nature, and drive it headlong as it were into vice. No one is born into the World without one’s allotment. Nature equips all creatures with what is most expedient for them. #RandolphHarris 6 of 6

An Offended Friend is No Common Enemy–The Press has too Much Freedom!
It is just like that time in life where not much makes sense and you want to call your dad and get his advice on life. I know that he had it harder than I do, being a Vietnam veteran, and coming home from the war with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which is a rare cancer that impacts less than 200,000 people a year, and then having an operation, where he was cut from his sternum to his stomach to remove the cancer. After the surgery, he was told that he had three to five years to live and would never have kids. Before enlisting in Vietnam, his father was a veteran of World War II, and he got a young lady pregnant, my father’s mother, and they had to get married because it was the right thing to do, but they were not in love. Years later, they divorced, and my grandfather’s second wife could not have kids of her own, and she did not want to be a stepmother to my father because it reminded her of something she could never have, could never do, and I guess it made her feel like less of a woman. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
As a young man, my dad went to live with his grandmother, and she did her best to support him, and she did a really great job. However, I guess it can be really hard growing up and knowing that your parents did not want you. He went on to buy a go to college and buy a house in Oakland Hills, and defying all odds, he ended up having four daughters and one son. His only son being the young of them all. It just goes to show that miracles do happen. Nonetheless, because of my father’s exposure to agent orange, in the Vietnam war, that is how he contracted Hodgkin’s lymphoma (cancer), and I was born with Spina Bifida, which is a birth defect that is a result of the Agent orange altering his genetic code, I suppose. All of the other kids are lucky, they were born perfectly normal. Being born with a birth defect, it is always something I have tried to hide all of my life. From looking at me, you never would know that I had one. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
As a child, I was always under a doctor’s care, and have had some very serious medical procedures done, which have caused nerve damage, one almost caused me to bleed to death, and another one that was done to correct some damage caused prolonged bleeding that was unexpected. And as a teen, I got a job at a coffee shop, had a lot of friend, and had a pretty normal life as a teen, but I never played sports because with two spinal surgeries, I never wanted to push the limits. And I saved up my money and got a car I really love, right from the dealership. So anyway, it is kind of sad when you are born with limitations and people do the best they can to alienate you and destroy the thing you have worked for. However, I have faith in God that he will somehow deliver me from this situation and things will be restored. Since my father has not been around, things have gotten really strange. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
The World seems like a totally differ place now than it used to, and I know that is not the norm for everyone. People still have normal lives and live in harmony. However, for some reason, nothing in my life is private anymore, from my therapy sessions to my medical records. Somehow a group local reporters has unbridled access to my life, and they stop by my parents’ house and talk to them, and have just seemed to invade my family and kind of made relationships rocky and rather mysterious to the point where many people do not talk, others have had to go to rehab. It is like many of them have been a curse and some of them a blessing. However, the last ten years, my life have never been the same. These reporters follow me around assaulted me, and you would be surprised, they will even show up at family functions, and can even slam into the back of your car and use you. Yeah, the President is right, “Freedom of the Press,” has gone a little too far. In the process, because my information is being leaked all over the place someone has even filed a tax return using my social security number. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Nevertheless, I am also sure many of you have heard the rumors these reporters have spread about me and because of “accidents” and dangerous situations, like my car getting shot at, it is not really safe to go anywhere, and I have lost many of my friends and just spend my days writing, in hopes of being discovered and building a career, while waiting on justice. And it can be rather lonely. I was watching “48 Hours: Stalked” last night and I know what it is like to feel like a prisoner in your own home, but the benefit is those people have one individual stalking them, not a group of people who feel like they own you. I have also heard rumors that I was “bought,” and I am like how do you buy a person, you do know this is America, right? Not only that, but I am a grown man and single and an American citizen, so how does this happen? #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
Nonetheless, I suppose I am kind of lucky, I have experienced hardships, but am luckier than some others. I am sure you have heard of Alexander Umansky, who at the age of 35, was a business man in North Hollywood, when he was set up to be kidnapped by one of his employees and held for a ransom of $235,000.00. The family paid the ransom and their beloved some was still killed, his organs were harvested and his body was dumped in a reservoir. It was later discovered that a gang in America did that to him. Hard to believe an employee, someone who was paying, would put his life in danger, but it just goes to show you, some people are willing to do some strange thangs for some change. And the kidnappers were doing very well, they were not struggling to get buy, they had mansions and nice cars, but wanted to turn to organized crime to make easy money. So, in being a live, I guess I am lucky. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
Nonetheless, I really desire family. I do not know much of my father’s family, as they were very private. In fact, the only Harris’ I got meet were my dad, siblings, and grandfather. And my grandfather was a very professional man, tall, straight auburn hair, beige skin, and was always very calm. He did not talk much. I mean, he would talk, but we never knew much about him. He did pretty well in his life, and besides his service in the war, I had no idea what he did for a living. He passed away in 2010, and he had a private funeral service, only one person was invited. So, over the years, I have been online looking for other Harris’, and have found a few on social media. No idea if we are related, but I see some typical Harris features, like the hairline and the lips. Some of them are from Europe, where my grandfather’s family was from and some for other countries. A couple of them are famous and I am like their biggest fans, in my opinion, and look at them as a virtual family. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
My biggest thing, is I want a normal life, and family and do not care for all of the uncertainty and mystery of my life, and my virtual family gives me a sense of normalcy. Other than that, I live around a bunch of people I have nothing in common with, I have one friend and we joke around daily, and whenever I talked to my mother, she tries to convince me what is going on in my life is normal, but I know it is not. The fact is most people have never been victims of crime and do not know anyone who has. Many families are very loving and have dinners together and totally normal lives. Normal people do not use others, steal from them, slander them, terrorize them and vandalize their property. I really have no idea what is going on, but when you have gone through it most of your life, some might convince you this is the new normal, but it is not. I think back to childhood and remember when my life was actually normal. Like, it is just really weird when you get a text from a phone with your sister’s name on it, then the person calls you and it is a guy who sounds just like you….yeah. This is not normal. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
On that note, I would say stay away from reporters, and celebrities, they are dangerous people. They have resources and access to information and are often above the law. If you want a normal life, you will listen to me. When people are used to breaking the laws, and getting away with it, or buying their ways out of trouble, no telling what they will do to cover it up. And finally, once they get caught up and cannot lie or buy their way out of trouble, they can become very dangerous people. Other than that, I have been kind of helping someone I am not really happy with and want to cut ties with this person because a lot of this has to do with a prostitute he was dating, but people keep telling me to stick with him, and I really do not want to. Let us remember, to not imagine evils which we do not feel, nor injure life by misrepresentations. Either people improve upon their character or they do not.#RandolphHarris 9 of 13
It is too often assumed that a person’s fancy is a person’s real mind. I too, much like my grandfather, always wanted to keep my life private, but hopefully telling my truth will somehow help me regain my freedom and life. This is not what I thought what life was about, nor is this the life I thought I would be living, especially when several generations of my family has fought for American freedom, but this is what life is like. One just has to realize that this is how these people behave in this area, it is in accordance with their nature, so that behavior should be accepted or expected even if it is not what I like. I just have to give up my self-determination and yield to the teachings, designs, and instructions of God. One either deals with it or get ate up. The lesson is to be thankful to be alive. Living is a blessing. It is a society built upon wickedness, evil, and atrocity. I cannot convince them what they are doing is wrong. If they do not change their ways, God will bring about destruction on them. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
They are using the law as a shield for their misdeeds and bad behavior. People do not miss freedom until they are put in a position like this. And when they sit around and see other people living their lives as they wish to live, that is when one realizes how important human rights are. The degree of civilization attained by a society depends upon its wealth and upon the manner in which this wealth is distrusted; such factors are in turn dependent upon the population of the country concerned, and the size of the population is determined by its food supply. In countries where cheap food is plentiful, the population increases in a fashion that has led to the labor’s market’s becoming overstocked; as a consequence, there is unemployment and also poverty, since there is an inevitable tendency in societies where there is a surplus of labor for laborers to be underpaid and for immense economic inequalities to develop. Such examples are Egypt, Peru, Mexico, India, and America where riches are concentrated in a very few hands and where the vast majority of the inhabitants live in a miserable and depressed condition: Among nations subjected to these conditions, the people have counted for nothing, they have no voice in the management of the state, no control over the wealth their own industry created. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
Whenever we follow our desires and our passions, we become compromises. What is it that makes you compromised? Cookies, chips? Or do you what the power? What is it that makes you compromises, or why do you choose to become compromised? I realize that there was a World where human beings were bought and sold and that people could show such cruelty and shamelessness, but I did not realize this happens in America. It is like God himself died. I guess God put me in this type of situation, this type of environment to see if my focus was really on God and not materialism. America is supposed to be a nation of ideal conditions. Here, the food supply is not supposed to be so abundant as to lead to overpopulation, nor was it so scanty as to make the accumulation of wealth and the enjoyment of leisure (on which intellectual progress depends) impossible. Here, also, the temperate climate is favorable to enterprise and the energetic exploitation of natural resources; moreover, the aspect that nature has presented to human beings is of less extreme and unpredictable character than in other parts of the World. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
Thus, America is not regarded with a superstitious awe as a terrifying and insuperable power, but is saw instead as something that obeys regular laws and is therefore capable of being tamed and utilized for their purposes. Here, people are supposed to be the master of their nature, and consequently the key to the development of American culture lay in the influence exercised by the laws of the human mind. The progress America has made from barbarism to civilization is entirely due to its intellectual activity. Rulers of the nation are only the creatures of the age, never its creators. Enlightened legislation occurs only as some consequences of the pressure exerted by the changes in the climate of opinion, these being due in the first instance to the efforts of cold and able thinkers who belong to the intellectual, and not the governing, classes; nor will such legislation be effective unless the ground has been prepared for it and the age is ripe. Generally speaking, the legitimate functions of the government is to such things as the maintenance of order and the preservation of public health. We must help to turn the eyes of the public away from the political surface of events, making them look more closely at the technological and economic realities of human life that lie beneath. This is important for our intellectual progress and the spirit of time. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13

The Function of Criminal Law is to Punish Wickedness or Immorality

In a Universe in which the wicked prospered, there might be no incentive to virtue. You would not want your beautiful daughter or handsome son going to prison with serial killers because they shoplifted. Violent crimes are considered the most threatening because they involve offenses against persons. They include homicide, aggravated assault, forcible rape. The word justice is used in varying context. The punishment meted out by the state to a criminal or by a parent to his or her children is not the same as the punishment boxers give or receive. The latter, however, is punishment only in a metaphorical sense, for it lacks several of the features necessary to a standard case of punishment. Characteristically, punishment is unpleasant. In it inflicted on an offender because of an offense one has committed; it is deliberately imposed, not just the natural consequence of a person’s action (like a hang-over), and the unpleasantness is essential to it, not an accidental accompaniment to some other treatment (like the pain of the dentist’s drill). It is imposed by an agent authorized by the system of rules against which an offense has be committed; a lynching is not a standard case of punishment. #RandolphHarris 1 of 6

Philosophers who have written on punishment have usually had in mind punishment mainly connected with the questions of justification. Currently the economy is not in great condition, and it takes more than ten years for people to get into affordable housing. The prisons and the court systems are overcrowded, public defenders and other law enforcement officials do have adequate resources to always do their jobs as well as they would like to or lack to the funds to investigate crimes as they should. And with the costs of housing, food, energy, insurance, clothing, and fuel rising, there not enough affordable housing to go around, so the community is really hurting. Nevertheless, Assembly member Jim Cooper (Democrat of Elk Grove, California USA), along with some special interest grounds is creating AB 1326, which would change the threshold for a felony from $950.00 for the individual occurrence of crime, to the aggregate amount of the crime value, in a 1-year period, totaling $950.00. What that means if that if someone was caught stealing less than $950.00, and if they were caught, they would face a misdemeanor, which is usually one year or less in jail, or a fine and possible probation. #RandolphHarris 2 of 6

We do asses the gravity of an offense and try to ensure that the punishment for a trivial offense is less severe than a serious one. However, if AB 1326 passes, there is now a running tab on your record, and if you steal up to $950.00 or more from a store or any other place or any other place in one year, you are facing a felony. So, that means if a person goes shopping and walks out of the store with a pair of shoes that cost $500.00, and later on that year steals a shopping cart of food that is valued at $450.00, that individual is now facing a felony. A misdemeanor is a serious crime, but usually does not prohibit one from getting a job. However, a felony is extremely bad, and means that you will spend more than a year in prison and will not be able to get a job because most people will not hire felons. It is, prima facie, wrong to deliberately inflict suffering or deprivation on another person, yet AB 1326 consists in doing precisely this. Some people unintentionally steal. A person may try on a pair of shoes and forget to pay for them. Other people steal out of need, not for fun. Punishment is necessary to annul the wrong done by the criminal, but AB1326 seems to a cry of injustice. #RandolphHarris 3 of 6

Justice is supposed to reinforce the community’s respect for its legal and moral standards, which criminal acts would tend to undermine if they were not solemnly denounced. Recently, Governor Jerry Brown allowed early release of “Non-violent” felons, as a way to reduce overcrowding in California’s prisons. Proposition 57 released people into the community who were convicted of: rape by intoxication, rape of an unconscious person, human trafficking involving sex act with minors, drive-by-shooting, assault with a deadly weapon, hostage taking, attempting to explode a bomb at a hospital or school, domestic violence involving trauma, supplying a firearm to a gang member, hate crime causing physical injury, failing to register as a sex offender, arson, discharging a firearm on school grounds, lewd acts against a child 14 or 15, false imprisonment of an elder through violence. Inmates continue to walk out of prison early because of this law, which was designed to reduce prison overcrowding. Many of the people being released are individuals who have actually killed people and robbed people with guns. These crimes upset the balance of the moral order, which can be restored only by one being made to suffer. #RandolphHarris 4 of 6

Punishment is supposed to impress both on the criminal and one everyone else that a breach of the law and morals is so serious that society must prevent it. It is absolutely terrifying to hear that the person who tried to kill you, or the person who shot you, or the person who raped you, or the person who beat you is coming back into your community, and we are repopulating the prison and charging people with felonies for shop lifting. How can a community justify AB1326 when it negates the justice system? This bill does not restore the balance or annul the wrong, when others convicted of more serious crimes were released from prison. Yes, shoplifting is a problem, but the bag ban in California has made it much harder for stores to detect who is a customer and who is stealing. Yet, by releasing serious criminals and replacing them with shoplifters, the consequences are we are, as a society, inflicting intrinsic evil on suffering human beings. The most serious offenses against morals deserve the most severe penalties. The function of criminal law is to punish wickedness or immorality in order to maintain a kind of cosmic distributive justice. #RandolphHarris 5 of 6

To eliminate shoplifting might need heavier penalties then to eliminate murder, and that would be monstrous. If we call shoplifting trivial, we mean that each one causes relatively little suffering; therefore, we are prepared to put up with more of it than rather than incur the cost of making offenders suffer heavy penalties. Murder and extortion, on the other hand, cause so much more suffering that if heavier penalties would yield even a small reduction in the number of offenses, there might be a net gain even through offenders would suffer more than they did before. Severe penalties ought to be restricted to serious offenses, and would can argue that we call an offense serious precisely because it causes a great deal of suffering. One violent crime happens every 22 seconds. One murder every 32.9 minutes, forcible rape every 5.8 minutes, robbery every 1.2 minutes, aggravated assault every 34.8 seconds, burglary every 14.9 seconds, larceny-theft every 4.5 seconds, motor vehicle theft every 25.7 seconds. Therefore, we should save law enforcement resources so they have the time and means to investigate and prevent the. Only serious crimes are worth averting at the cost of severe penalties. #RandolphHarris 6 of 6

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The Sex Involves Brain, Mind, Body and Trauma—The Body Keeps Score!

Whenever you say good-bye to someone, you never know if you will see them again. Every individual personality has more characteristics than the co-host of a Wendy Williams show. As the son of a prosperous businessman, who left me sufficient money to devote my life to private study and writing. Some of my idols are great thinkers of the Victorian age, such as J.S. Mill, Spencer, and T.H. Huxley. Growing up, I was formally educated, but also largely self-educated, as I was a delicate child, and it was unwise for me to take work involving much strain. With the consequence that I was never much tormented with what is called Education, but allowed to purse my own undisturbed…whatever I may be supposed to know I taught myself. I conducted my own reading and research, after university (which by any standards were vast) in the absence of all external supervision or direction. However, I do regret not having gone to Oxford or Cambridge, considering both universities to be in a contemptible condition, my gift are far from negligible, as I was equipped with natural aptitudes and talents that more than compensated for their enrichment programs. A person can be generally high in a factor without showing every single trait. #RandolphHarris 1 of 9

Openness involves an appreciation of things others might consider impractical and a readiness for new and unusual experiences. My memory is excellent, and I can express myself both in writing and conversation with great fluency and eloquence, and am considered a first-class linguist; I possess moreover, an immense capacity for methodical work, together with an intense intellectual curiosity and a meticulous eye for detail. Through my preparation of this enormous enterprise, my chief concern was finding something that makes me happy. Above all, the one thing we have not assumed is that reality, especially its knowledge by humans, is independent of our minds, needs, and social purposes. The very description of reality is shot through and through with human needs, passions, and emotions. It is also strongly affected by the nature of our minds and the general culture of which we are a part. For instance, human language plays such a strong and vital role in the description of, not to say the basic human ability to experience, reality, that it is impossible to sever completely the connection between what is known from the nature of the knower. #RandolphHarris 2 of 9

If one is wrong, a great deal of suffering can be inflicted, and this is why some people wonder if the actions of humans, and therefore of societies, governed by fixed laws, or are they the result either of chance or of supernatural interference? So far, the theory of supernatural interference is concerned, this, together with the associated theological doctrine or predestination, remains a barren hypothesis, since no conceivable experience can count for or against the truth. On the other hand, the view that what occurs in the realm of human affairs is the product of chance seems to be demonstrably false; it has, however, been given an aura of spurious respectability by metaphysical philosophers who have carried the principle in question over into the sphere of individual human psychology. There it emerged as the famous doctrine of free will, according to which a mysterious, undetermined power of free choice is held to be directly vouched for by evidence of the introspective consciousness. #RandolphHarris 3 of 9

Some people used to cut open live animals and marvel at how well they imitated the sensation of pain, when (according to those particular people) as being without souls and rationality they could not actually feel pain. Therefore, it is clear that people’s convictions are culturally contingent. It is precisely such blind reliance upon the findings of individual introspection that has been the besetting sin of metaphysicians, leading them to construct their impressive-looking, through nonetheless mutually incompatible, systems in accordance with a radically mistaken procedure. Most people believe that all living being, animated or inanimate feel pain. And, for most, assuming that a being cannot suffer means that one need not give that creature any consideration when it comes to how that being is treated. By contrast, in order to achieve a realistic conception of the nature and workings of the human psyche it is necessary to adopt an external and general view of human behavior analogous to that taken by natural scientists in the investigation of nonhuman phenomena. #RandolphHarris 4 of 9

From this altered standpoint, it can indeed be seen that the actions of humans are subject to regularities as strict and mathematically exact as those that operate in others spheres of scientific inquiry. As a conclusive demonstration of this thesis, look at the evidence afforded by large-scale statistical surveys concerning the numbers of marriages contracted, and of murders and suicides committed, in particular countries and towns during successive years; the results provide an overview of trends and interrelationships between various parts of the criminal justice system to promote informed decision-making in administration, nationally and internationally. The relative uniformity of the results obtained would be unintelligible on any other assumption than that there are certain social laws capable of keeping the level constant. The perceived seriousness of the crime, first and primarily as defined by the victim, second as defined by law enforcement, apparently accounts for most of the variance in whether a crime is reported and officially recorded; personal characteristics of the offender and victim have only minor effects. #RandolphHarris 5 of 9

The general condition of society and how they sometimes interpret the statistical data is misleading. For instance, accurate statistics on the frequency of men who are physically forced into sexual situations and victimized while they are incapacitated has been difficult to obtain for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that men are even less likely than women to report they have been victims of s sexual assault. One reason for this failure to report may be that men fear that they will be judged harshly if they reported the abuse. At least one study supports this claim (Spencer & Tan, 1999). The authors found that men who reported being sexually abused were viewed negatively, especially by other men. Another reason that sexual assault of male is reported less often is because it receives much less attention. The sexual assault of men is rarely reported in the media or in the psychological and medical literature. The result is that very little research has been conducted on the issue of sexual aggression among men. #RandolphHarris 6 of 9

In fact, it has only been in the last two decades that many states have revised their criminal codes to include adult males as victims within the definition of rape. While the vast majority of rape victims are women, research indicates that as many as 3 percent of men have been raped. Gay men, prison inmates, and prisoners of war are particularly at risk for assault. However, so are heterosexual men. It is usually considered more serious when a man takes an intoxicated female home and has the sex with her, while she is under the influence, but the same thing happens to men. Often times women will have the sex with a man, while he is incapacitated and sometimes they get pregnant, but it is not considered rape because men are viewed as sexual beast, who always want the sex. Sometimes men may not even realize that they have been a victim of rape and end up fathering unexpected children, and that is perhaps why there are so many men who have unwanted children or feel forced to marry women they do not love. #RandolphHarris 7 of 9

There is a mere existence of a proportional average, observed over a period of time, necessitated, with a kind of irresistible momentum, and the commission of a particular number of male victimization of rape crimes, resulting with a female getting pregnant happens in any given year. Some women used to look at this as a pay day, they could have a baby by a man, force him to marry her, and never have to work, or supplement her income by collecting child support. However, sometimes unexpected and unwanted pregnancies leads to violence. One young lady was allegedly punched twice in her stomach and thrown down a flight of stairs after conceiving a child by a young man without his permission. Needless to say the child was never born. As a result, a picture is presented wherein human beings appears as the helpless victims of social forces over which they can exert no effect influence or control—a conclusion in no way entails the premises. As sometimes very doubtful generalizations concerning the factors influencing the evolution of human societies appealed in providing explanations. #RandolphHarris 8 of 9

The sexual assault of heterosexual and homosexual men are not, as some previous theorists have alleged, innate racial characteristics or mysterious national spirits. Civilization has made little further reference to precise numerical regularities or frequencies. Learned behavior, and indeed all culture, is the result of psychological adaptions that have evolved over long periods of time. Those adaptions, like all traits of the individual human beings, have both genetic and environmental components. We fervently believe that, just as the tiger’s stripes and the mermaids tail are the results of past Darwinian selection, so also is rape. Love may do much, but friendship shall do wonders; friendship, the nobler passion of the mind, born with the soul, must still with that survive, when love, the silly baby of the fancy, can no more. Much less pleasure in being the master of acres than the friend of man. If you are celibate, or not sexually active, then it is probably best to let someone know upfront. And more parents need to talk with the children about how serious the sex is. #RandolphHarris 9 of 9

To Season Old Dishes with New Sauces—The Language of Demons and Angels

Source: SF_Daily_Photo (instagram.com)
The food of thy soul is light and space. Sin has a habit of persisting, and is remorseless in its choice of vehicles. Force and matter are fundamentally the same thing, contemplated from different standpoints. The highest glory of a human being is being created in the image of God. Force and matter were regarded as entirely distinct entities resulting from the activities of supernatural beings. The Universe or matter with its properties, conditions or movements is eternal and cannot have been created. Therefore, some people reject all theories of an independent or supernatural force created the Universe. Motion is a necessary condition, and eternal and inseparable property, of matter. Motion is the very essence of force. Thus, no matter is dead or motionless, motion is matter’s mode of existence. When you can do without a supernatural agent, do not bring him in. Considerable confusion has resulted in a widespread belief that some lawgivers outside or above nature prescribed scientific laws. #RandolphHarris 1 of 7
There can be no matter without force, no mind without matter, no arrangement without nature, no Earth without Heaven, no time without eternity—and vice versa. The rattling thunderbolt hath but his clap, the lightning but his flash, and as they both come in a moment, so do they both end in a minute. Human laws necessarily presuppose some controlling will or lawyer, but laws of nature do not. In no sense are natural laws imposed upon matter or upon nature; rather, they express the interaction of physical force. Scientific laws are mechanical and immutable, and describe all possible behavior. Nothing can happen in any aspect of nature that violates natural laws, and no outside influence can change them. Human behavior is, of course, no exception. We must learn to accommodate ourselves to the discovery that some of those cunningly fashioned instruments called human souls have only a very limited range of music, and will not vibrate in the least under a touch that fills others with tremulous rapture or quivering agony. In short, all nature is unified, including the unexplored parts of the Universe, and the same laws hold everywhere and at all times. #RandolphHarris 2 of 7
Thinking can and must be regarded as a special mode of general natural motions and is characteristic of the central nervous elements in the same way that contraction is characteristic of muscles. Waves know the last secrets of many a stout ship, never heard of from the days she let port. Every wave in my eyes seems a soul. Better slay the body than the soul; and if it be the direst of sins to the murderers of our own bodies, how much more to be a soul-suicide. (Disclaimer: That is a metaphor, do not harm anything.) All intellectual activity stems from sensations and the responses to sensations. The words: mind, spirit, thought, sensibility, volition, and life do not designate any entities; rather, they designate properties, capacities, or actions of living substances. Mind, for example, is only a collective word that comprehensively includes all of the activities of the brain and its parts. Consciousness is an activity of certain parts of the brain, but it is not known precisely how matter brings forth consciousness. The detailed explanation of consciousness must wait until more is known about matter. #RandolphHarris 3 of 7
There is no house for the soul where dwells a shadow of untruth. Souls differ like locks, preachers must differ like keys, or the fewer should the Church open for God to pass in. Souls will not be saved by brute force. Natural laws cannot but be reflected or reproduced in some measure in human knowing, since that knowing is derived from sensation. The two great movements of the soul are the desire of honor and the fear of shame. Humans are no poor drifting seaweed of the Universe. Human intellectual behavior, although dependent to a considerable extent on the size and weight of the brain, is also dependent on other factors. Humans have souls; which, if they will, puts them beyond fortune’s finger and the future’s spite. In addition to morphological, histological, and chemicophysical circumstance within the brain, exercise, training, and environmental factors are important. Sometimes, many individuals are unlikely to develop their intellectual potentialities because of their geographical environment; day laborers compelled to live in constant drudgery likewise will not be likely to realize their capacities. #RandolphHarris 4 of 7
Lukewarmness of soul, which sends forth but feeble desires, sends also but feeble lights; so that those who are guilty of it, not knowing anything clearly, cannot fasten on anything with perseverance. All things-in-themselves, exists only for each other and derive significance only from their mutual relations. If there is not a sex in the soul, custom and education have established one in our ideas. Theological notions are relative to culture and often to individuals. Not only what humans are, but also what they want, do, think, feel, depends on the necessities of nature, and there might be a minute scope for free volition. The acceptance of determinism would lead to a change in many attitudes, especially in regard to criminals. The vast majority of criminals should be looked upon as unfortunates rather than as objects of execration. Morality can be defined as the law of an equal mutual respect for general as well as private human rights, which law itself has for its object to provide the largest amount of human happiness. #RandolphHarris 5 of 7
That which promotes happiness is good; that which disturbs or undermines it is evil. Self-love is the most powerful motive of all human actions. A proper social organization will assume that the welfare of one person is not detrimental to the welfare of others and that promotion of the individual’s happiness will promote general welfare. Given the way people behave, the adoption of ethical theory might lead some people to strive only for their own transitory pleasure. However, if this should happen, such egoistic hedonists will do no more damage than that done by those supposedly following a theological morality. Pantheism is an attempt to season old dishes with new sauces. The “Unknowable” of the agnostics is nothing more than the good old God of the theologians. A soul is something that has eluded all the search of the anatomist. If a human optician were to supply an instrument made in the same way, it would be at once rejected as a bad piece of workmanship. #RandolphHarris 6 of 7
Wondrous Worlds on World! Lo, round and round me, awful spells: all glorious, vivid constellation’s, God’s diadem ye are! To you, ye stars, humans owes their subtlest raptures, thoughts unspeakable, yet full of faith. The existence of the planet Vulcan was proved. Superstition and ignorance are two of the most dangerous enemies of humanity. The truth is often unpleasant, and inveighed against a fictitious happiness based on emotionally consoling falsehoods. The divorced mates, Spirit and Substance, were hard to reunite: they greeted each other, not in an embrace, but a racking sort of struggle. Is the soul a shadow seated in the house of sin? Or is the body really in the soul? The separation of spirit from matter is a mystery, and the union of spirit with matter is a mystery also. Seeing every power and virtue is from above, from God, from the intelligences and stars, who can neither err nor do evil, it is necessary, that all evil, and whatsoever is found disagreeing and dissonant in these inferior things, do proceed, not from the malice of the influence, but from the evil disposition of the reviver…Therefore we being well disposed, the celestial influences cooperate all things for good; but being evil disposed, and having for our sins, that divine good, which was in us, departed from us, all things work for evil. #RandolphHarris 7 of 7
