Home » American Dream (Page 33)
Category Archives: American Dream
Affection and Friendship Should Not Interfere with the Fullest Attainment of Our Final End!
Every true American believes with all their hearts that when an American is tired of America, one is tired of life. With certain qualifications, a person is happy when one is in the way of a successful execution (more or less) of a rational plan of life drawn up under (more or less) favourable conditions, and one is reasonably confident that one’s intentions can be carried through. Thus we are happy when our rational plans are going well, our more important aims being fulfilled, and we are with reason quite sure that our good fortune will continue. The achievement of happiness depends upon circumstances and luck, and hence the gloss about favourable conditions. While I shall not discuss the concept of happiness in any detail, we should consider a few further points to brings out the connection with the problem of hedonism. First of all, happiness has two aspects: one is the successful execution of a rational plan (the schedule of activities and aims) which a person strives to realize, the other is one’s state of mind, one’s sure confidence supported by good reasons that one’s success will endure. Being happy involves both a certain achievement in action and a rational assurance about the outcomes. This definition of happiness is objective: plans are to be adjusted to the conditions of our life and our confidence must rest upon sounds beliefs. Alternatively, happiness might be defined subjectively as follows: a person is happy when one believes that one is in the way of a successful execution (more or less) of a rational plan, and so on as before, adding the rider that is one is mistaken or deluded, then by contingency and coincidence nothing happens to disabuse one of one’s misconceptions. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
By good luck one is not cast out of one’s fool’s paradise. Now the definition to be preferred is that which best fits the theory of justice and coheres with our considered judgments of value. We have assumed that the parties in the original position have correct beliefs. They acknowledge a conception of justice in the light of general truths about persons and their place in society. Thus it seems natural to suppose that in framing their plans of life they are similarly lucid. Of course none of this is strictly argument. Eventually one has to appraise the objective definition as part of the moral theory to which it belongs. Adopting this definition, and keeping in mind the account of rational plans presented earlier, we can interpret the special characteristics sometimes attributed to happiness. For example, happiness is self-contained: that is, it is chosen solely for its own sake. To be sure, a rational plan will include many (or at least several) final aims, and any of these may be pursed partly because it complements and furthers one or more other aims as well. Mutual support among ends pursued for their own sake is an important feature of rational plans, and therefore these ends are not usually sought solely for themselves. Nevertheless executing the entire plan, and the enduring confidence with which this is done, is something that we want to do and to have only for itself. All considerations including those of right and justice (using here the full theory of good) have already been surveyed in drawing up the plan. And therefore the whole activity is self-contained. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
Happiness is also self-sufficient: a rational plan when realized with assurance makes a life fully worthy of choice and demands nothing further in addition. When circumstances are especially favourable and the execution particularly successful, one’s happiness is complete. Within the general conception one sought to follow, there is nothing essential that is lacking, no way in which it could have been distinctly better. So even if the material means that support our mode of life can always be imagined to be greater, and a different pattern of aims might often have been chosen, still the actual fulfillment of the plan itself may have, as compositions, paintings, and poems often do, a certain completeness which though marred by circumstance and human failing is evident from the whole. Thus some become exemplars of human flourishing and models for emulation, their lives being as instructive in how to life as any philosophical doctrine. A person is happy then during those periods when one is successfully carrying through a rational plan and one is with reason confident that one’s efforts will come to fruition. One may be said to approach blessedness to the extent that conditions are supremely favourable and one’s life complete. Yet it does not follow that in advancing a rational plan one is pursuing happiness, not at least as this is normally meant. For one thing, happiness is not one aim among others that we aspire to, but the fulfillment of the whole design itself. However, also, I have supposed first that rational plans satisfy the constraints of right and justice (as the full theory of the good stipulates). #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
To say someone that one seeks happiness does not, it seems, imply that one is prepared either to violate or to affirm these restrictions. Therefore the acceptance of these limits should be made explicit. And secondly, the pursuit of happiness often suggests the pursuit of certain sorts of ends, for example, life, liberty, and one’s own welfare. Thus persons who devote themselves selflessly to a righteous cause, or who dedicate their lives to furthering the well-being of other, are not normally thought to seek happiness. It would be misleading to say this of saints and heroes, or of those whose plan of life is in some marked degree supererogatory. They do not have the kinds of aims that fall under this heading, admittedly not sharply defined. Yet, when their plans succeed, saints and heroes and persons whose intentions acknowledge the limits of right and justice, are in fact happy. Although they do not strive for happiness, they may nevertheless be happy in advancing the claims of justice and the well-being of others, or in attaining the excellences to which they are attracted. However, how in general is it possible to choose among plans rationally? What procedure can an individual follow when faced with this sort of decision? Previously I said that a rational plan is one that would be chosen with deliberative rationality from among the class of plans of all of which satisfy the principles of rational choice and stand up to certain forms of critical reflection. We eventually reach a point though where we just have to decide which plan we most prefer without further guidance from principle. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
There is however one device of deliberation that I have not yet mentioned, and this is to analyze our aims. That is, we can try to find a more detailed or more illuminating description of the object of our desires hoping that the counting principles will then settle the case. Thus it may happen that a fuller or deeper characterization of what we want discloses that an inclusive plan exists after all. Let us consider again the example of planning a holiday. Often when we ask ourselves why we wish to visit two distinct places, we find that all of them can be fulfilled by going to one place rather than the other. Thus we may want to study certain styes of art, and further reflection may bring out that one plan is superior or equally good on all these counts. In this sense we may discover that our desire to go to Paris is more intense than our desire to go to Rome. Often however a finer description fails to be decisive. If we want to see both the most famous church in Christendom and the most famous museum, we may be stuck. Of course these desires too many be examine further. Nothing in the way that most desire are expressed shows whether there exists a more revealing characterization of what we really want. However, we have to allow for the possibility, indeed for the probability, that sooner or later we will reach incomparable aims between which we must choose with deliberative rationality. We may trim, reshape, and transform our aim in a variety of ways as we try to fit them together. Using the principles of rational choice as guidelines, and formulating our desires in the most lucid form we can, we may narrow the scope of purely preferential choice, but we cannot eliminate it altogether. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
The indeterminacy of decision seems to arise, then, from the fact that a person has many aims for which there is no ready standard of comparison to decide between them when they conflict. There are many stopping points in practical deliberation and many ways in which we characterize the things we want for their own sake. Thus it is easy to see why the idea of there being a single dominant end (as opposed to an inclusive end) at which it is rational to aim is highly appealing. For if there exists such an end to which all other ends are subordinate, then presumably all desires, insofar as they are rational, admit of an analysis which shows the counting principles to apply. The procedure for making a rational choice, and the conception of such a choice, would then be perfectly clear: deliberation would always concern means to ends, all lesser ends in turn being ordered as means to one single dominant end. The many finite chains of reasons eventually converge and meet at the same point. Hence a rational decision is always in principle possible, since only difficulties of computation and lack of information remain. Now it is essential to understand what the dominant-end theorists wants: namely, a method of choice which the agent oneself can always follow in order to make a rational decision. This there are three requirements: the conception of deliberation must specify: a first person procedure which is generally applicable and guaranteed to lead to the best result (at least under favourable conditions of information and given the ability to calculate). We have no procedures meeting these conditions. A random device provides a general method but it would be rational only in special circumstances. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
In everyday life we employ schemes of deliberation acquired from our culture and modified during the course of our personal history. However, there is no assurance that these forms of reflection are rational. Perhaps they only meet various minimum standards which enable us to get by, all the while falling short of the best that we might do. Thus if we seek a general procedure by which to balance our conflicting aims so as to single out, or at least to identify in thought, the best course of action, the idea of a dominant end seems to give a simple and natural answer. Let us consider then what this dominant end might be. It cannot be happiness itself, since this state is attained by executing a rational plan of life already set out independently. The most we can say is that happiness is an inclusive end, meaning that the plan itself, the realization of which makes one happy, includes and orders most implausible to think of the dominant end as a personal or social objective such as the exercise of political power, or the achievement of social acclaim, or maximizing one’s material possessions. Surely it is contrary to our considered judgments of value, and indeed inhuman, to be so taken with but one of these ends that we do not moderate the pursuit of it for the sake of anything else. For a dominant end is at least lexically prior to all other aims and seeking to advance it always takes absolute precedence. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Thus the dominant end is serving God, and by this means saving our soul. Heavenly Father desires that we find true, lasting happiness. Our happiness is the design of all the blessings He gives us—gospel teachings, commandments, priesthood ordinances, family relationship, prophets, temples, the beauties of creation, and even the opportunity to experience adversity. God’s plan for our salvation is often called “the great plan of happiness,” reports Alma 42.8. He sent His Beloved Son to carry out the Atonement so we can be happy in this lie and receive a fulness of joy in the eternities. Furthering the divine intentions is the sole criterion for balancing subordinate aims. It is for this reason alone that we should prefer health to sickness, riches to poverty, honour to dishonour, a long life to a short one, and, one might add, friendship and affection to hatred and animosity. “Wickedness never was happiness,” reports Alma 41.10. Other seek only to have fun in life. With this as their main goal, they allow temporary pleasure to distract them from lasting happiness. They rob themselves of the enduring joys of spiritual growth, service, and hard work. As we seek to be happy, we should remember that the only way to real happiness is to live the gospel. We will find peaceful, eternal happiness as we strive to keep the commandments, pray for strength, repent of our sins, participate in wholesome activities, and give meaningful service. We must be indifferent to all attachments whatsoever, for these become inordinate once they precent us from being like equalized scales in a balance, ready to take the course that we believe is most for the glory of God. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
It should be observed that this principle of indifference is compatible with our enjoying lesser pleasures and for allowing ourselves to engage in play and amusements. For these activities relax the mind and rest the spirit so that we are better fitted to advance more important aims. Thus although Aquinas believes that the vision of God is the last end of all human knowledge and endeavour, he concedes play and amusements a place in our life. Nevertheless these pleasures are permitted only to the extent that the superordinate aim is thereby advanced, or at least not hindered. We should arrange things so that our indulgences in frivolity and jest, in affection and friendship, do not interfere with the fullest attainment of our final end. The extreme nature of dominant-end views is often concealed by the vagueness and ambiguity of the end proposed. Thus if God is conceived (as surely He must be) as a moral being, then the end of serving Him above all else is left unspecified to the extent that the divine intentions are not clear from revelation, or evident from natural reason. Within these limits a theological doctrine of morals is subject to the same problems of balancing principles and determining precedence which trouble other conceptions. Since disputed questions commonly lie here, the solution propounded by the religious ethic is only apparent. And certainly when the dominant end is clearly specified as attaining some objective goal such as political power or material wealth, the underling fanaticism and inhumanity are manifest. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
Human good is heterogeneous because the aims of the self are heterogenous. Although to subordinate all our aims to one end does not strictly speaking violate the principles of rational choice (not the counting principles anyway), it still strikes us as irrational, or more likely as mad. The self is disfigured and put in the service of one of its ends for the sake of system. Governments are composed of persons who meet occasionally in a hall to make speeches and to write resolutions; of human studying papers at desks, receiving and answering letters and memoranda, listening to advice and giving it, hearing complaints and claims and replying to them; o clerks manipulating more papers; of inspectors, tax collectors, law enforcement, and soldiers. These officials have to be fed, and often they overeat. They would often rather go fishing, or have pleasures of the flesh, or do anything than shuffle their papers. They have to sleep. They suffer from indigestion and asthma, bile and palpitation, become bored, tired, careless, and have nervous headaches. They know what they happen to learn, they are away of what they happen to observe, they can imagine what they happen to be interested in, they can accomplish only what they can command or persuade an unseen multitude to do. What is so remarkable about America is that millions of people believe more in the power of prayer than in the power of politics; they believe the message to “repent, be converted, and trust Jesus Christ” can topple even an authoritarian leader. They believe their deliverance is spiritual. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
Such belief runs counter to the myth that all human problems are political and solvable by all-powerful human institutions. An extreme example was the prominent New Right leader who declared in 1985, after Congress failed to pass his legislative agenda, “The only way to have a genuine spiritual revival is to have legislative reform…I think we have been legislated out of the possibility of a spiritual revival.” Evidently, the work of the Kingdom of God has been defeated by a majority vote in the kingdoms of man. I am sure that individual did not mean to deny the sovereignty of God, but his statement insinuates that nothing can be accomplished except through the government. Jacques Ellul could well have been describing this leader when he wrote that politics has become “the supreme religion of the age.” This political illusion springs from a diminishing belief in God and the growth of big government. What people once expected from the Almighty, they now expect from the almighty bureaucracy. That is bad trade for anyone; but for the Christian, it is rank idolatry. The media encourages the illusion. Stories of spiritual conversion, growth, and revival do not make god thirty-second news spots. While the everyday actions of ordinary citizens lack headline punch, politics offers confrontation, controversy, and scandal. When religion does make the cover of Time or a spot on the network news, it is usually the result of scandal, as extraordinary as the coverage of Jim and Tammy Bakker. That is not a complaint; it I simply the way the news business works, which in turn is merely satisfying the public appetite for sleazy gossip, crime, dramatically suggestive headlines, fiction, outlandish stories, and aggressive reporters. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
Although most people claim they do not believe most of what the news reports, yet they are drawn to its promise of insider knowledge and hot scoops about celebrities, politicians, and aliens from outer space. New coverage gravitates to political centers, exalting the momentary, assuring suspense. The public waits expectantly for the next installment in the unfolding political soap opera. On one level media and government are natural antagonists; on another they are natural allies, depending on each other for their influence. News organizations concentrate their resources in political capitals; governments gear their policies and decisions for primetime audiences. The media spotlight politics and political feeds in the media. Because the illusion serves those with the power to perpetuate it, neither side cares to expose it. People watch the news like it a heavy weight fight, listening to reporters give breathless blow-by-blow accounts of propaganda, as they often ignore real news that matters. The view back home sits in front of the TV, like a mindless goldfish, being spoon fed junk news. Thousands of journalist are constantly pounding the pavements, desperate for something to film. Some camera operators shot footage of each other. Others give up and go out for fondue. Much of the news treads perilously close to heresy. If this were the seventh century, many reporters would probably be accused by Dr. William Griggs of having the evil hand upon them. News is a big business, after all, having hundreds of millions riding on Nielsen ratings. National Network personalities hold multimillion dollar contracts, and they, as well as many print journalists, enjoy the handsome rewards of celebrity. Even in nations with public-owned media, the illusion guarantees power, privilege, and access to the elite. These are not willingly surrendered. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
This unwavering focus heightens both the promise and expectations of what government can do. Political rhetoric, therefore, mist offer panaceas to all human ills. If elected, can anyone recall a major candidate who di not claim he or she could solve any problem? However, most politicians know that more than 80 percent of the federal budget—entitlement programs and other congressionally mandated outlays—are beyond their control. Most candidates cannot have a balanced budget and federal judges often strip the president of their power to make changes to the government so society keeps getting worse, instead of improving. Politicians have little choice. Modern technology has reduced all issues to their lowest common denominator. Since there is no time to explain the complexities of the budget process, and since instant perceptions shape voter attitudes, politicians can do no more than create appealing visual impressions. Former Budget Director David Stockman chided Regan aides Baker and Meese for being more interested in the evening network news than in government policy. However, perhaps they were more realistic. Policy has no meaning apart from how it is perceived, and that perception is heavily influenced by newscasters. That is why Lyndon Johnson obsessively watched three evening news programs simultaneously on a three-console television set. He knew public reaction to the televised portrayal of Vietnam would influence opinion far more than battlefield strategies. He was right: the outcome of that war was decided in American living rooms. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
To maintain the illusion, government attempts to shape, even manipulate public perceptions. The White House gives assignments to people to do just that. Staff members work full time studying daily news briefings, monitoring public reactions to presidential speeches, taking daily polls, and feeding positive information to friendly reporters. Often they aggressively try to manipulate public opinion. For example, immediately after every presidential speech, a White House staff member usually unleashes a small army of assistants who will call key leaders in every walk of life. They might make five hundred calls, each following the same script: “The president asked me to call you to find out what your thought of his announced policy.” The reactions are usually collated, typed, and within hours a report surveying the opinions of hundreds of leaders is in the president’s hands. Helpful information, but the staff also influences public reactions toward acceptance of their policy. To be told that the president wants one’s opinion flatters even the cynics. Those called rarely offer a critical reply; most can hardly wait to call their friends and casually mention that “by the way, the president just called” to ask their opinion. So when journalists Tomi Lahren and Yamiche Alcindor has very public interactions with President Trump about their news reports, it was really a big deal to be acknowledged. With the government policy so dependent on public reaction, it is little wonder that the celebrity syndrome has become such a major force in Western politics. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
The subtle danger of all this manipulation is that people no longer view their own circumstances as reality. Only what appears in print and on the screen as well. The humans of the present day suffer from acute television intoxication. They do not believe in their own experiences, one’s own judgment and one’s own thought. In their eyes, a fact becomes true when one has read an account of it in the paper, and one measures the importance by the size of the headlines. This has resulted in people giving out false, distorted, or outdated information because no one calls to the agencies involved to verify if. However, people who do not trust the news actually do verify information before they take it as a fact because they know how dangerous disinformation can be. Still, many individuals gradually loses all sense of continuity. Whether a policy is good or bad, a success or a failure, is of no account; all that matters is the emotion its instant image induces. No one remembers from one day to the next. On a Monday a president can say, “The Russians blinked.” Everyone is happy. The next day it is disclosed the Russians did not blink—we did—but no one remembers. So on to the next night. The process is mesmerizing. Images pile on images, day after day, anesthetizing the public so they feel individually important and that all power resides in images they see on their television screens. This eventually erodes their own sense of political responsibility and makes them easy prey to the appetite of an authoritarian state. The consequence is irresistible. The chief characteristic of tyranny is isolation of the individual, denying one access to the public realm where one would show oneself, see and be seen, ear and be heard. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
Even democracies need institutions and agencies through which the individual can resist the tendency of all central governments to grow larger, stronger, and more domineering. For the only thing that stands between the multitudes and totalitarianism are the mediating structures of society: families, small groups of citizens, churches, voluntary associations that are independent and resistant to the collective state. If the American experiment is to succeed, it will require the continued help of voluntary associations. Of all these independent institutions, the church should be the one best able to expose the political illusion. For the message of a transcendent reality is resounding warning against the futility of seeking immorality from the instruments and institutions of this life. Mastery of nature through technology has given modern humans the illusions that one has mastered life itself. The message of the Kingdom is that only God is master of life, and attempts to create alternatives to His rule are futile. The fall of the Roman Empire plainly demonstrated that no work of mortal hands can be immortal, and it was accomplished by the rise of the Christian gospel of an everlasting individual life to its position as the exclusive religion of Western humankind. Both together made any striving for an Earthly immortality futile and unnecessary. The Kingdom of God is not dependent on power in the kingdoms of humans. It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in princes. Political kingdoms may rise and fall—but the Kingdom of God goes on forever. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
Modern history is replete with similar lessons about the futility of putting ultimate trust in much-vaunted political systems. When a greedy tyrant is overthrown, the idealist replacing him or her promises liberation and hope for the oppressed. The people are jubilant. However, in a short time the “liberator” becomes the oppressor oneself, resplendent in one’s $6,500 designer glasses. When autocracy is replaced by bureaucracy, only the icons change. Ideology, which in so many parts of the World has replaced true religion, is powerless as well. The promised utopias of the twenty-first century., either Marxist of Fascist, are doomed because they accept the essential premises of current civilization and move with its lines of internal development: Thus, utilizing what this World itself offers them, they become slaves, although they think they are transforming it. Even massive weapons of destruction fail to assure anything for today’s mightiest governments. Wars reach no permanent solutions; there is no such things as a lasting peace or, as American so fondly believed, “a war to end all wars.” Terrorists stalk the globe, and government can do little to stop them. Wars proliferate; political solutions fail; frustrations rise. Yet we continue to look to governments to resolve problems beyond their capability. The illusion persists. Nowhere is that more evident than in one troubled corner of the World. However, even there, in the midst of carnage, violence, and hatred, the example of a few people offers hope, pointing the way for civilization to emerge from darkness. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
Each of us must gain for oneself the authentic mystical experience. Sugar can be known only by its sweet taste, the Overself only by opening the doors of the mind to consciousness of its presence. Those who have had this overwhelming experience require no arguments to make them believe in the soul. They know that they are the soul. An experience which is so convincing, so real, that no intellectual argument to the contrary can stand against it, is final. Let others say what they will, one remains unswayed. A glimpse is a transitory state of mental enlightenment and emotional exaltation. It I an experience of self-discovery, not the discovery of some other being, whether a guru or a god. These brief flashes bring with them great joy, great beauty, and great uplift. They are, for most people, their first clear vivid awakening to the existence and reality of a spiritual order of being. The contrast with their ordinary state is so tremendous as to shame it into pitiful drabness. The intention is to arouse and stimulate them into the longing for re-entry into the spirit, a longing which inevitably express itself in the quest. In the past these glimpse experiences were regarded as wholly religious. Today the truth about them is better understood. They may be aesthetic, psychological, intellectual, or creative—happening outside the religious circle. All our ordinary experience comes to us through sense responses or intellectual workings. However, here is a kind of experience which does not come through these two channels. It is not a series of sensations nor a series of thoughts. What is it, then? Philosophy says it belongs to the transcendental World. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
The uniqueness of this moment shines out against the relatedness of all other moments. Words only limit it by their precision and their pressure, yet they are all some of us have with which to make a likeness of it to show friends, or to hold before the ardent seekers, or even to return to ourselves in dark and difficult periods. The glimpse may be best compared to a moment of wakefulness in a long existence of sleep. These mystical glimpses have close parallels with the best features of the best types of religious conversion. Indeed, as might be expected, they are deeper and more developed and better controlled forms of them. These glimpses, these transcendental visitations bring joy, serenity, and understanding. No rational explanation has given of the seemingly eccentric characters of these glimpses, no reasonable theory of their why, what, how, and when. The mystical experience may be beyond reasoned analysis but it is not beyond reasonable description. Putting words together on paper to tell how this glimpse lifts one out of the ordinariness of the common existence, is a work anyone must enjoy doing. It is a brief and temporary enlargement of consciousness, in theological language, an improvement of its connection with God. How is one to describe this experience? It is an expansion, and yet also a concentration, of consciousness. It is not enough to say that someone has had a mystical experience. This phrase can over the most opposite, the most widely different experiences. The experience is so beautiful that no description can transfer the feelings it awakens from one heart to another. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
There are the real waking moments of a person’s life: for the rest one is asleep without ever guessing that one is. It is not the highest point of the moral experience, although that approaches it, or can help to being it on, or acts as a preparation for it. It is not the peak of the aesthetic experience, although that fulfills the same services. A long time I have lived with you and now we must be going separately to be together. Perhaps I shall be the wind to blur your smooth waters so that you do not see your face too much. Perhaps I shall be the star to guide your uncertain wings so that you have direction in the night. Perhaps I shall be the fire to separate your thoughts so that you do not give up. Perhaps I shall be the rain to open up the Earth so that your seed may fall. Perhaps I shall be the snow to let your blossoms sleep s that you may bloom in spring. Perhaps I shall be the stream to play a song on the rock so that you are not alone. Perhaps I shall be a new mountain so that you always have a way home. Here are life’s highest processes, an experience beyond thinking and an awareness beyond the sensual. During this period one is in God. These rare moments lift one out of one’s terrestrial self and detach one from one’s lower human self. Only a poet could portray these experiences as they deserve; to write of them with outer photographic exactness only is to half-lose them. In religious language one is in God, and in mystical language God is in one. One has reached a World which is as much beyond good as it is beyond evil. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Magnified and sanctified be the name of God throughout the World which He hath created according to His will. May He establish His kingdom during the days of your life and during the life of your life and during the life of all the house of America, speedily, yea, soon; and say ye, Amen. May His great name be blessed for every and ever. Exalted and honoured be the name of the Holy One, blessed be He, whose glory transcends, yea, is beyond all praises, hymns and blessings that humans can render unto Him; and say ye, Amen. When I call upon the Lord, ascribe greatness unto our God. O Lord, open Thou lips and my mouth shall declare Thy praise. Praised art Thou, O Lord our God and God of our fathers, Go of Abraham, God of Isaac, and God of Jacob, mighty, revered and exalted God. Thou bestowest lovingkindness and possessest all things. Mindful of the patriarchs’ love for Thee, Thou wilt in Thy love bring a redeemer to their children’s children for the sake of Thy name. Please remember us unto life, O King who delightest in life, and inscribe us in the Book of Life so that we may live worthily for Thy sake, O Lord of life. O King, Thou Helper, Redeemer and Shield, be Thou praised, O Lord, Shield of Abraham. Thou, O Lord, art mighty forever. Thou callest the dead to immortal life for Thou art mighty in deliverance. Thou causest the wind to blow and the rain to fall. Thou sustainest the living with lovingkindness, and in great mercy callest the departed to everlasting life. Thou upholdest the falling, healest the sick, settest free those in bondage, an keepest faith with those that sleep in the dust. Who is like unto Thee, Almighty King, who decreest death and life and bringest forth salvation? God provides an experience of complete security—so rarely found among people in the World today. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
BRIGHTON STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH
Rancho Cordova, CA |
Now Selling!
Brighton Station at Cresleigh Ranch is Rancho Cordova’s newest home community! This charming neighborhood offers an array of home types with eye catching architecture styles such as Mid-Century Modern, California Modern, Prairie, and Contemporary Farmhouse.
Located off Douglas Road and Rancho Cordova Parkway, the residents of Cresleigh Ranch will enjoy, being just minutes from shopping, dining, and entertainment, and quick access to Highway 50 and Grant Line Road providing a direct route into Folsom. Residents here also benefit from no HOA fees, two community parks and the benefits of being a part of the highly-rated Elk Grove Unified School District.
Best of all, each Cresleigh home comes fully equipped with an All Ready connected home! This smart home package comes included with your home and features great tools including: video door bell and digital deadbolt for the front door, connect home hub so you can set scenes and routines to make life just a little easier. Two smart switches and USB outlets are also included, plus we’ll gift you a Google Home Hub and Google Mini to help connect everything together!
Cresleigh offers enchanting homes that have all the amenities you have come to expect in a grand home.
This is the Beginning, When People Will Be Opening their Eyes!
Nothing is quite as funny as the unintended humour of reality. The original position is designed to be a fair and impartial point of view that is to be adopted in our reasoning about fundamental principles of justice. In taking up this point of view, we are imagining ourselves in the position of free and equal persons who jointly agree upon and commit themselves to the principles of social and political justice. The main distinguishing feature of the original position is “the veil of ignorance”: to insure impartiality of judgment, the parties are deprived of all knowledge of their personal characteristics and social and historical circumstances. The two principles of justice guarantee the equal basic rights and liberties needed to secure the fundamental interests of free and equal citizens and to pursue a wide range of conceptions of good. The second principle provides fair equality of education and employment opportunities enabling all to fairly compete for powers and positions of office; and it secures for all a guaranteed minimum of the all-purpose means (including income and wealth) that individuals need to pursue their interests and to maintain their self-respect as free and equal persons. Persons in the original position give pride of place to their interest in the equal freedoms. The intuitive idea behind the precedence of liberty is that if the persons in the original position assume that their basic liberties can be effectively exercised, they will not exchange a lesser liberty for an improvement in the economic well-being, at least not once a certain level of wealth has been attained. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
It is only when social conditions do not allow the effective establishment of these rights that one can acknowledge their restriction. Only if it is necessary to enhance the quality of civilization so that in due course the equal freedoms can be enjoyed by all can the denial of equal liberty can be accepted. The lexical ordering of the two principles is the long-run tendency of the general conception of justice consistently pursued under reasonably favourable conditions. Eventually there comes a time in the history of a well-ordered society beyond which the special form of the two principles takes over and holds from then on. What must be shown then is the rationality of this ranking from the standpoint of the parties in the original position. Clearly the conception of goodness as rationality and the principles of moral psychology have a part in answering this question. Now the basis for the priority of liberty is roughly as follows: as the conditions of civilization improve, the marginal significance for our god of further economic and social advantages diminishes relative to their interests of liberty, which become stronger as the conditions for the exercise of the equal freedoms are more fully realized. Beyond some point it becomes and then remains irrational from the standpoint of the original position to acknowledge a lesser liberty for the sake of greater material means and amenities of office. This is so because as the general level of well-being raises (as indicated by the index of primary goods the less favoured can expect) only the less urgent wants remain to be met by further advances, at least insofar as human’s wants are not largely created by institutions and social forms. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
At the same time the obstacles to the exercise of the equal liberties decline and a growing insistence upon the right to pursue our spiritual and cultural interests assert itself. Increasingly it becomes more important to secure the free internal life of the various communities of interests in which persons and groups seek to achieve, in modes of social union consistent with equal liberty, the ends and excellences to which they are drawn. In addition humans come to aspire to some control over the laws and rules that regulate their association, either by directly taking part themselves in its affairs or indirectly through representatives with whom they are affiliated by ties of culture and social situation. To be sure, it is not the case that when the priority of liberty holds, all material wants are satisfied. Rather these desires are not so compelling as to make it rational for the persons in the original position to agree to satisfy them by accepting a less than equal freedom. The account of the good enables the parties to work out a hierarchy among their several interests and to note which kinds of ends should be regulative in their rational plans of life. Until the basic wants of individuals can be fulfilled, the relative urgency of their interest in liberty cannot be firmly decided in advance. It will depend on the claims of the least favoured as seen from the constitutional and legislative stages. However, under favourable circumstances the fundamental interest in determining our plan of life eventually assumes a prior place. One reason for this I have discussed in connection with liberty of conscience and freedom of thought. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
And a second reason is the central place of the primary good of self-respect and the desire of human beings to express their nature in a free social union with others. Thus the desire for liberty is the chief regulative interest that the parties must suppose they all will have in common in due course. The veil of ignorance forces them to abstract from the particulars of their plans of life, thereby leading to this conclusion. The serial ordering of the two principles then follows. Now it might seem that even though the desire for an absolute increase in economic advantages declines, human’s concern for their relative place in the distribution of wealth will persist. In fact, if we suppose that everyone wishes a greater proportionate share, the result could be a growing desire for material abundance all the same. Since each strives for an end that cannot be collectively attained, society might conceivably become more and more preoccupied with raising productivity and improving economic efficiency. And these objectives might become so dominant as to undermine the precedence of liberty. Some have objected to the tendency to equality on precisely this ground, that it is thought to arouse in individuals an obsession with their relative share of social wealth. However, while it is true that in a well-ordered society there is most likely a trend to greater equality, its members take little interest in their relative position as such. As we have seen, they are not much affected by envy and jealousy, and for the most part they do what seems best to them as judged by their own plan of life without being dismayed by the greater amenities and enjoyments of others. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
Thus there are no strong psychological propensities prompting them to curtail their liberty for the sake of greater absolute or relative economic welfare. The desire for a higher relative place in the distribution of material means should be sufficiently weak that the priority of liberty is not affected. Of course, it does not follow that in a just society everyone is unconcerned with matters of status. The account of self-respect as perhaps the main primary good has stressed the great significance of how we think others value us. However, in a well-ordered society the need for status is met by the public recognition of just institutions, together with the full and diverse internal life of the many free communities of interest that equal liberty allows. The basis for self-esteem in a just society is not then one’s income share but the publicly affirmed distribution of fundamental rights and liberties. And this distribution being equal, everyone has a similar and secure status when they meet to conduct the common affairs of the wider society. No one is inclined to look beyond the constitutional affirmation of equality for further political ways of securing one’s status. No one is inclined to look beyond the constitutional affirmation of equality for further political position from a strategic point of view. It would also have the effect of publicly establishing their inferiority as defined by the basic structure of society. This subordinate ranking in the public forum experienced in the attempt to take part in political and economic life, and felt in dealing with those who have a greater liberty, would indeed be humiliating and destructive of self-esteem. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
And so by acquiescing in a less than equal liberty one might lose on both counts. This is particularly likely to be true as society becomes more just, since equal rights and public attitudes of mutual respect have an essential place in maintaining a political balance and in assuring citizens of their own worth. Thus while the social and economic differences between the various sectors of society, the noncomparing groups as we may think of them, are not likely to generate animosity, the hardships arising from political and civic inequality, and from culture and ethnic discrimination, cannot be easily accepted. When it is the position of equal citizenship that answers to the need for status, the precedence of equal liberties becomes all the more necessary. Having chosen a conception of justice that seeks to eliminate the significance of relative economic and social advantages as supports for human’s self-confidence, it is essential that the priority of liberty be firmly maintained. So for this reason too the parties are led to adopt a serial ordering of the two principles. In a well-ordered society then self-respect is secured by the public affirmation of the status of equal citizenship for all; the distribution of material means is left to take care of itself in accordance with the idea of pure procedural justice. Of course doing this assumes the requisite background institutions which narrow the range of inequalities so that excusable envy does not arise. Now this way of dealing with the problem of status has several noteworthy features which may be brought out as follows. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
Suppose to the contrary that how one is valued by others depends upon one’s relative place in the distribution of income and wealth. In this case, having a higher status implies having more material means than a larger fraction of society. Thus not everyone can have the highest status, and to improve one person’s position is to lower that of someone else. Social cooperation to increase the conditions of self-respect is impossible. The means of status, so to speak, are fixed, and each human’s gain is another’s loss. Clearly this situation is a great misfortune. Persons are set at odds with one another in the pursuit of their self-esteem. Given the preeminence of this primary good, the parties in the original position surely do no want to find themselves so opposed. If not impossible, it would tend, for one thing, to make the good of social union difficult to achieve. Moreover, if the means of providing a good are indeed fixed and cannot be enlarged by cooperation, as mentioned in the discussion of envy, then justice seems to require equal shares, ceteris paribus. However, an equal division of all primary gods in irrational in view of the possibility of bettering everyone’s circumstances by accepting certain inequalities. Thus the best solution is to support the primary good of self-respect as far as possible by the assignment of the basic liberties that can indeed be made equal, defining the same status for all. At the same time, distributive justice as frequently understood, justice in the relative shares of material means, is relegated to a subordinate place. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Thus we arrive at another reason for factoring the social order into two parts as indicated by the principles of justice. While these principles permit inequalities in return for contributions that are for the benefit of all, the precedence of liberty entails equality in the social bases of esteem. Now it is quite possible that this idea cannot be carried through completely. To some extent human’s sense of their own worth may hinge upon their institutional position and their income share. If, however, the account of social envy and jealousy is sound, then, with the appropriate background arrangements, these inclinations should not be excessive, at least not when the priority of liberty is effectively upheld. However, if necessary, theoretically we can include self-respect in the primary goods, the index of which defines expectations. Then in applications of the difference principle this index can allows for the effects of excusable envy; the expectations of the less advantaged are lower the more severe these effects. Whether some adjustment for self-respect has to be made is best decided from the standpoint of the legislative stage where the parties have more information about social circumstances and the principle of political determination applies. Admittedly this problem is an unwelcome complication. Since simplicity it itself desirable in a public conception of justice, the conditions that elicit excusable envy should if possible be avoided. Expectations of the less advantaged can be understood so as to include the primary good of self-esteem. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
Now some may want to object to this account of the priority of liberty that societies have other ways of affirming self-respect and of coping with envy and other disruptive inclinations. Thus in a feudal or in a caste system each person is believed to have one’s allotted station in the natural order of things. One’s comparisons are presumably confined to within one’s own estate or caste, these ranks becoming in effect so many noncomparing groups established independently of human control and sanctioned by religion and theology. Humans resign themselves to their position should it ever occur to them to question it; and since all may view themselves as assigned their vocation, everyone is held to be equally fated and equally noble in the eyes of providence. This conception of society solves the problem of social justice by eliminating in thought the circumstances that give rise to it. The basic structure is aid to be already determined, and not something for human beings to affect. On this view, it misconceives human’s place in the World to suppose that the social order should match principles which they would as equals consent to. Now to this idea, parties re to be guided in their choice of a conception of justice by a knowledge of the general facts about society. They take for granted than that institutions are not fixed but change overtime, altered by natural circumstances and the activities and conflicts of social groups. The constraints of nature are recognized, but humans are not powerless to shape their social arrangements. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
This assumption is likewise part of the background of the theory of justice. It follows that certain ways of dealing with envy and other aberrant propensities are closed to a well-ordered society. For example, it cannot keep them in check by promulgating false or unfounded beliefs. For our problem is how society should be arranged if it is to conform to principles that rational persons with true general beliefs would acknowledge in the original position. The publicity condition of requires the parties to assume that as members of society they will also know the general facts. The reasoning leading up to the initial agreement is to be accessible to public understanding. Of course, in working out what the requisite principles are, we must rely upon current knowledge as recognized by common sense and the existing scientific consensus. However, there is no reasonable alternative to doing this. We have to concede that as established beliefs change, it is possible that the principles of justice which it seems rational to choose may likewise change. Thus when the belief in a fixed natural order sanctioning a hierarchical society is abandoned, assuming here that this belief is not true, a tendency is set up that points in the direction of two principles of justice inertial order. The effective protection of the equal liberties becomes increasingly of first importance. When God wants to punish people, he gives the unjust leaders. So the answer is for the people to repent, turn from their ways, be converted, and seek God. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
Some people only care about power and what they can do with power. May the Lord come down to protect our people. Democracy is not prescribed in the Bible, and Christians can and do live under other political systems. However, Christians can hardly fail to love democracy, because of all systems it best assures human dignity, the essence of our creation in God’s image. If a candidate wins by cheating, he or she can only be forgiven by God if one renounced the office one has obtained by fraud. There will be no divine forgiveness for this act of injustice without a previous decision to repay the damage done. However, apparently God’s forgiveness is unimportant to some ruling. When politicians rig the vote, it means all the passion for democracy and all the prayers of the people are meaningless. A government that assumes or maintains power through fraudulent means has no moral basis. If it does not of itself freely correct the evil it has inflicted on the people, then it is our serious moral obligation as a people to make it do so. Nonetheless, there is enormous sin attached to fratricidal strife. As moral outrage grows, it is important to study the Bible. God has ordained government to preserve order, but even a bad government is better than no government—which results in chaos. Government’s authority comes from God; it is a delegation. Therefore, governments—all governments—whether they acknowledge it or not, rule under God. However, does God give an unrestricted delegation? Certainly not. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
As Jesus Christ made clear with the coin, there are two realms—and Caesar is not to usurp what belongs to God. Any government that violates the law that is higher than its own is exceeding the legitimate authority God has granted. Government must always be respected, otherwise anarchy results; but the nation may attempt to venerate a culture or race. “When the state is made to serve the aspirations of race or nation instead of the cause of justice for all, it becomes a demonic state warranting resistance and rejection by the Christian faith,” reports Donald Bloesch, Crumbling Foundations (Grand Paris, Mich.: Zondervan, 1984), 183. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it, “If government persistently and arbitrarily violates its assigned task, then the divine mandate lapses.” In that case the state becomes evil incarnate, as in Nazi Germany. Instead of acting as God’s instrument for preserving life and order, it does the reverse, destroying life and order. Then the church must resist. Though as argued earlier, the church’s primary function is evangelization and ministering to spiritual needs; as the principle visible manifestation of the Kingdom of God, it must be the conscience of society, the instrument of moral accountability. Richard Neuhaus eloquently wrote that “the church can and should subject to moral questioning every political agenda or cause, thus keeping the entirety of human politics under the transcendent judgement of God.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
The church’s first duty then would be to publicly expose the state’s immorality. The government should not be involved in corruption, oppression, the deprivation of civil liberties, nor the taking of innocent lives. As a second step the church should refuse to have any part in the state’s immorality. The church must take the next more severe measures of resistance lest its words be rendered hollow. The great evangelist Charles Finney refused communion to slave-holders. Others organized the underground railroad and rescued fugitive slaves from prison. Many ministers broke the law, were arrested, and some imprisoned. However, that state’s evil, even as egregious as slavery, does not give an unrestricted license to disobey any law; only the unjust law can properly be contested. While active resistance may succeed, as it did with slavery and the Civil-Rights Movement, it may not, however, be enough in the face of the raw power modern totalitarian states have achieved. So, when all peaceable means fail, what does the Christian do? Is revolution ever justified? Scottish reformation theologians like John Knox and Samuel Rutherford believed they could be, advocating the right of Christians to rise up against ungodly rulers. Many ministers in the colonies agreed as well; when they preached that the people had the authority to resist the king when the king violated God’s commands, they were setting the stage for the American Revolution. After dumping tea in Boston Harbour the next step of resistance was the musket. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
A Boston preacher said that for a people to “arise unanimously and resist their prince, even to dethrone him, is not criminal but a reasonable way of vindicating their liberties and just rights.” John Adams observed, “The revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people, a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations.” Some Christian activists today loosely call for a new American Revolution just as the young radical youth movements did in the sixties. However, history reveals, revolution most often results, after the bodies are buried, in one form of tyranny replacing another. G.K. Chesterton summed it up well: “The real case against revolution is this: That there always seems to be much more to be said against the old regime than in favour of the new regime.” So for the Christian, revolution is never to be lightly regarded. It is the most extreme form of disobedience. It could only be contemplated on the same justification as a just war; that is, that there must be a better alterative as a result of the revolution. Its advantages must outweigh the suffering, and the evil employed in the revolution must prevent a far greater evil than the status quo. This was the reasoning that caused Albert Einstein to abandon his pacifism in the face of a dictator’s rise to power. “To prevent the greater evil, it is necessary that the lesser—the hated military—be accepted for the time being,” Einstein contended. It was this reasoning the caused Bonhoeffer to patriciate in the plot to assassinate this dictator. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
For Christians to justify participation in revolution, therefore, they would have to be convinced that the state had become totally opposed to the purposes of God for the state and there was no other recourse to prevent massive evil. The Exodus from Egypt is often cited as a model for political action by liberation theologians, but they ignore the fact that in the Exodus, God did not overthrow the political system in Egypt. He extracted His own people from that system, taking them to Mount Sinai that they might worship Him. In the light of this, then, what about America? What lessons are to be drawn from it? We must be aware to prevent a regime’s refusal to allow free elections, the suspensions of civil liberties, the massive corruption of the governmental process, the trampling of human rights, and a leader’s own blasphemous, at times messianic pretensions, which give the church a mandate to act. The church should be mobilized to say no to evil. The first stage of an individua approach should be entirely biblical. By preaching repentance and conversion, one can encourage outbreaks of spiritual revival all across America. One should call for people to pray for their country. A courageous cardinal and ordinary citizens can open a crack of light in the dark canopy that envelops so much of planet Earth. Through peaceful actions and resistance to evil, the Kingdom of God will be made visible again. The Late Francis Schaeffer once wrote, “If here is no place for civil disobedience, then the government has been made autonomous, and as such, it has been put in the place of the living God.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
The belief that government is autonomous, the ultimate repository of power, the solution to all of society’s ills, is the greatest imposter of the twenty-first century. Christians and the church have no higher calling than to expose it by every legitimate means. To some people the great trouble about any argument for the Supernatural is simply the fact that argument should be needed at all. If so stupendous a thing exists, ought it not be obvious as the sun in the sky? It is not intolerable, and indeed incredible, that knowledge of the most basic of all Facts should be accessible only by wire-drawn reasonings for which the vast majority of humans have neither leisure nor capacity? I have great sympathy with this point of view. However, we must notice two things. When you are looking at a garden from a room upstairs it is obvious (once you think about it) that you are looking through a window. However, if it is the garden that interests you, you may look at it for a long time without thinking of the window. When you are reading a book, it is obvious (once you attend to it) that you are using your eyes: but unless your eyes begin to hurt you, or the book is a text book on optics, you may read all evening without once thinking of eyes. When we talk we are obviously using langue and grammar: and when we try to talk a foreign language we may be painfully aware of the fact. However, we are talking English, we do not notice it. When you shout from the top of the stirs, “I am in half a moment,” you are usually conscious that you have made the singular am agree with the singular I. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
There is indeed a story told about a Native American who, having learned several other languages, was asked to write a grammar of the language used by his own tribe. He replied, after some thought, that it had no grammar. The grammar he had sued all his life had escaped his notice all his life. He knew it (in once sense) so well that (in another sense) he did not know it existed. All these instances show that the fact, and through which alone you have access to all the other facts, may be precisely the one that is most easily forgotten—forgotten not because it is so remote or abstruse but because it is so near and so obvious. And that is exactly how the Supernatural has been forgotten. The Naturalists have been engaged in thinking about Nature. They have not attended to the fact that they were thinking. The moment one attends to this it is obvious that one’s own thinking cannot be merely a natural event, and that therefore something other than Nature exists. The Supernatural is not remote and abstruse: it is a matter f daily and hourly experience, as intimate as breathing. Denial of it depends on a certain absent-mindedness. However, this absent-mindedness is in on way surprising. You do not need—indeed you do not wish—to be always thinking about windows when you are looking at gardens or always thinking about eyes when you are reading. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
In the same way the proper procedure for all limited and particular inquiries is to ignore the fact of your own thinking, and concentrate on the object. It is only when you stand back from particular inquiries and try to form a complete philosophy that you must take it into account. For a complete philosophy must get in all the facts. In it you turn away from specialized or truncated thought to total thought: and one of the facts total thought must think about is Thinking itself. There is thus a tendency in the study of Nature to make us forget the most obvious first of all. And since the Sixteenth Century, when Science was born, the minds of humans have been increasingly turned outward, to know Nature and to master her. They have been increasingly engaged on those specialized inquiries for which truncated thought is the correct method. It is therefore not in the least astonishing that they should have forgotten the evidence for the Supernatural. The deeply ingrained habit of truncated thought—what we call the “scientific” habit of mind—was indeed certain to lead to Naturalism, unless this tendency were continually corrected from some other source. However, no other source was at hand, for during the same period humans of science were coming to be metaphysically and theologically uneducated. That brings me to the second consideration. The state of affairs in which ordinary people can discover the Supernatural only by abstruse reasoning is recent and, by historical standards, abnormal. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
All over the World, until quite modern times, the direct insight of the mystics and the reasonings of the philosopher percolated to the mass of the people by authority and tradition; they could be received by those who were no great reasoners themselves in the concrete form of myth and ritual and the whole pattern of life. In the conditions produced by a century or so of Naturalism, plain humans are being forced to bear burdens which plain humans were never expected to bear before. We must get the truth for ourselves or go without it. There may be two explanations for this. It might be that humanity, in rebelling against tradition and authority, has made a ghastly mistake; a mistake which will not be less fatal because the corruptions of those in authority rendered it very excusable. On the other hand, it may be that the Power which rules our species is at this moment carrying out a daring experiment. Could it be intended that the whole mass of the people should now move forward and occupy for themselves those heights which were once reserved only for the sages? Is the distinction between wise and simple to disappear because all are now expected to become wise? If so, our present blunderings would be but growing pains. However, let us make no mistake about our necessities. If we are content to go back and become humble plain humans obeying a tradition, well. If we are ready to climb and struggle on till we become sages ourselves, better still. However, the human who will neither obey wisdom in others nor adventure for her oneself is fatal. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
A society where the simple many obey the few seers can live: a society where all were seers could live even more fully. However, a society where the mass is still simple and the seers are no longer attended to can achieve only superficiality, baseness, ugliness, and in the end extinction. On or back we must go; to stay here is death. One other point that may have raised doubt or difficulty is the advanced reasons for believing that a supernatural element in present in every rational human. The presence of human rationality in the World is therefore a Miracle. Human Reason an Morality have been mentioned not as instances of Miracle (at least, not of the kind of Miracle you wanted to hear about) but as prods of the Supernatural: not in order to show that Nature ever is invaded but that there is a possible invader. Whether you choose to call the regular and familiar invasion by human Reason a Miracle or not is largely a matter of words. Its regularity—the fact that it regularly enters by the same door, human pleasures of the flesh—may incline you not to do so. It looks as if it were (so to speak) the very nature of Nature to suffer this invasion. However, then we might later find that it was the very nature of Nature to suffer Miracles in general. Fortunately the course of our argument will allow us to leave this question of terminology on one side. We are going to be concerned with other invasions of Nature—with what everyone would call Miracles. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Our question could, if you liked, be put in the form, “Does Supernature every produce particular results in space and time except through the instrumentality of human brains acting on human nerves and muscles?” I have said “particular results” because, on our view, Nature as a whole is herself one huge result of the Supernatural: God created her. God pierces her wherever there is a human mind. God presumably maintains her in existence. The question is whether He ever does anything else to her. Does God, beside all this, ever introduce into her events of which it would not be true to say, “This is simply the working out of the general character which God gave to Nature as a whole in creating her”? Such events are what are popularly called Miracles: and it will be in this sense only that the word Miracle will be used from now on. Do not stand at my grace and weep, I am not there. I do not sleep. I am a though rays of light that glow. I am the diamond glint on snow. I am the moonlight on the shinning sea. I am the gentle autumn rain. When you wake in the morning hush, I am the swift, uplifting rush or quiet birds in circling flight. I am the soft starlight at night. Do not stand at my grace and weep. I am not there. I do not sleep. Our God and God of our fathers, we thank Thee for Thy Torah, our priceless heritage. May the portion we have ready today inspire us to do Thy will and to seek further knowledge of Thy word. Thus our minds will be enriched and our lives endowed with purpose. May we take to heart Thy laws by which humans truly live. Happy are all who love Thee and delight in Thy commandments. Amen. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
Cresleigh Homes
There’s something irresistible about eating at the island; it’s casual, yet festive. Guests can be part of the food prep, and everyone gets to make merry together all evening long.
Meadows Res 1 shows just how well single story living suits the family who loves to entertain!
Residence One at Cresleigh Meadows holds 2,054 square feet of single story living. The open concept design includes three bedrooms, two bathrooms and a two car garage plus workshop. Through the charming front porch enter into the foyer, where two secondary bedrooms lead off to a Jack and Jill bathroom. The kitchen comes fully equipped with a large eat-in island, stainless steel appliances, and quartz counters. The great room is spacious and full of natural light. The Owner’s suite is nestled in the rear of the home separate from the secondary bedrooms, providing maximum privacy. Enjoy a spa like experience in the Owner’s bathroom with a large walk in shower and large soaking tub.
Best of all, each Cresleigh home comes fully equipped with an All Ready connected home! This smart home package comes included with your home and features great tools including: video door bell and digital deadbolt for the front door, connect home hub so you can set scenes and routines to make life just a little easier. Two smart switches and USB outlets are also included, plus we’ll gift you a Google Home Hub and Google Mini to help connect everything together!
There is nothing more important than a good, safe, secure home. Come and see why Cresleigh is America’s Favourite.
#CresleighHomes
#PlumasRanch
Wise Humans, Good Humans, Patriotic Humans are to be Found in All Communities!
If Americans could be made to believe that their sufferings were for some remote, high sacrificial end, perhaps it would be possible for them to become reconciled to their plight; but sharing the culture that condemns them, and seeing that lust for trash is what blinds the nation to their claims, is what sets storms rolling in the soul of America. The United State of America is so unique from other nations because it is a nation of laws, not a nation of humans. A nation of laws means that legal decrees, not people rule. Whether it be the most common American members or members of Congress, high-ranking bureaucrats or the president of the United States of America, everyone is governed by the same laws, regardless of their station. All must be held to the just laws of America. America’s founds extolled a nation of laws, for they knew that only a fairly enforced legal system could protect liberty and property against corruption and tyranny. God is in fact the author of liberty and to retain it, the inhabitant of the land must be protected by His might hand. There is no other power that can protect that liberty. In order for us to enjoy this protection of His might, we must accept God as our God and keep His commandments. “Behold, this America is a choice land, and whatsoever nation shall possess it shall be free from bondage, and from captivity, and from all other nations under Heaven, if they will but serve the God of the land, who is Jesus Christ,” reports Ether 2.12. The God of this land is also the King of the land. And this is true. #RandolphHarris 1 of 25
Manifest Destiny is a phenomenon. Jesus spoke here in America, and He proclaimed, “This lad shall be a land of liberty, and there shall be no kings upon it. For I, the Lord, the king of Heaven, will be their king, and I will be light unto them forever, that hear my words. For it is a choice land, saith God, wherefore I will have all humans that dwell thereon that they shall worship me,” reports 2 Nephi 10.11-19. The alternative to enjoying this liberty and happiness through acceptance of and obedience to Jesus Christ is made clear by Manifest Destiny. Manifest Destiny is a tangible blessing from God that has created American history. It is a systematic body of concepts and beliefs that powers American life and culture. The right of our manifest destiny to over spread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development and great creation of liberty and federative development of self government entrusted to us is a promise that we shall flourish. “Whoso should possess this land of promise, from that time henceforth and forever, should serve him, the true and only God, or they should be swept off when hey are ripened in iniquity,” reports Ether 2.8-9. It is as a right that we serve God and obey the laws as that of the tree to the space of air and the Earth be suitable for the full expression of its principle and destiny of growth. When people follow the guidance of God of the land, they reach great heights. The Lord in the very beginning revealed to Adam a perfect form of government for the benefit of humans. We believe that governments are instituted of God. #RandolphHarris 2 of 25
Individual freedom is necessary. No law shall be passed that takes away from a human the right of free choice. Free agency is fundamental as law of human conduct. Humans have a right to obey or disobey that laws as they please, and take the consequences. That government is best which has as its aim the administration of justice, social well-being and the promotion of prosperity among its members. We must recognize that property rights are essential to human liberty. The individual has three great rights, equally sacred from arbitrary interference: the right to one’s life, the right to one’s liberty, and the right to one’s property. The three rights are so bound together as to be essentially one right. To give a human one’s life, but to deny one one’s liberty, is to take from one all that makes life worth living. To give one liberty, but take from one the property which is the fruit and badge of one’s liberty, is to still leave one a slave. Laws are enacted for the protection of society, and have no value except when they are administered in righteousness and justice. If dishonest humans occupy administrative offices, laws cannot be so administered in righteousness and justice. The Lord says, “When the wicked rule, the people mourn.” Wise humans, good humans, patriotic humans are to be found in all communities, in all political parties, among all creeds. None but such humans should be chosen. Without beneficent laws, righteously administered, the foundations of civilization crumble, anarchy reigns, decay and dissolution follow. #RandolphHarris 3 of 25
We call upon all members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints throughout the World to honour the laws of God, and obey and uphold the law of the land; and we appeal to good humans everywhere, regardless of creed, party affiliation, race, culture, or condition to join with us in an effort to put into operation the words of President Lincoln, the great emancipator, that our country may continue to be a light to the World, a loyal, law-abiding, God-fearing nation. We claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscience; and allow all humans the same privilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may. However, we claim absolutely no right, no prerogative whatever, to interfere with any other people. A good government must secure for every citizen the free exercise of conscience. Matters of belief or religious practice should not be interfered with, unless they oppose laws formulated for the common good. There should be no mingling of religious influence with the civil governments. We believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in obeying, honouring, and sustaining the laws. The main psychological root of the liability to envy is a lack of self-confidence in our own worth combined with a sense of impotence. Our way of life is without zest and we feel powerless to alter it or to acquire the means of doing what we still want to do. This creation the notion of resentment. By contrast, someone sure of the worth of one’s plan of life and one’s ability to carry it out is not given to rancor nor is one jealous of one’s good fortune. #RandolphHarris 4 of 25
Even if one could, one has no desire to level down the advantages of others at some expense to oneself. This hypothesis implies that the least favoured tend to be more envious of the better situation of the more favoured the less secure their self-respect and the greater their feeling that they cannot improve their prospects. Similarly the particular envy aroused by competition and rivalry is like to be stronger the worse one’s defeat, for the blow to one’s self-confidence is more severe and the loss may seem irretrievable. It is general envy, however, that mainly concerns us here. There are three conditions that encourage hostile outbreaks of envy. The first of these is the psychological condition we have just noted: persons lack a sure confidence in their own value and in their ability to do anything worthwhile. Second (and one of two social conditions), many occasions arise when this psychological condition is experienced as painful and humiliating. The discrepancy between oneself and others is made visible by the social structure and style of one’s society. The less fortunate are therefore often forcibly reminded of their situation, sometimes leading them to an even lower estimation of themselves and their mode of living. And third, they see their social position as allowing no constructive alternative to opposing the favoured circumstances of the more advantaged. #RandolphHarris 5 of 25
To alleviate their feelings of anguish and inferiority, they have no choice but to impose a loss on those better placed even at some cost to themselves, unless of course they are to relapse into resignation and apathy. Now, if not to present these conditions, many aspects of a well-ordered society of to mitigate. It is clear that, although it is a psychological state, social institutions are a basic instigating cause. However, the contract conception of justice supports the self-esteem of the citizens generally more firmly than other political principles. In the public forum each person is treated with the respect due to a sovereign equal; and everyone has the same basic rights that would be acknowledged in an initial situation regarded as fair. The members of the community have a common sense of justice and they are bound by ties of civic friendship. Obedience implies a higher attitude than mere submission, for obedience has its root in good intent; submission may spring from selfishness or meanness of spirit. Though obedience and submission both imply restraint on one’s own will, we are obedient only from a sense of right; submissive from a sense of necessity. Honour expressed an act or attitude of an inferior towards a superior. When applied to things it is taken in the sense of holding honour. Thus, in honouring the law, we look upon it as something which is above selfish desires or indulgences. To sustain signifies to hold up; to keep from falling. To sustain the law, therefore, is to refrain from saying or doing anything which will weaken it or make it ineffective. #RandolphHarris 6 of 25
We obey the law from a sense of right. We honour the law because of its necessity and strength to society. We sustain law by keeping it in good repute. This is in our connection with stability. The greater advantages of some are in return for compensating benefits for the less favoured; and no one supposes that those who have a larger share are ore deserving from a moral point of view. Happiness according to virtue is rejected as a principle of perfection: regardless of the excellences that persons or associations display, their claims to social resources are always adjudicated by principles of mutual justice. For all these reasons the less fortune have no cause to consider themselves inferior and the public principles generally accepted underwrite their self-assurance. The disparities between themselves and others, whether absolute or relative, should be easier for them to accept than in other forms of polity. Turning to the second condition, both the absolute and the relative differences allowed in a well-ordered society are probably less than those that have often prevailed. Although in theory the difference principle permits indefinitely large inequalities in return for small gains to the less favoured, the spread of income and wealth should not be excessive in practice, given the requisite background institutions. Moreover the plurality of associations in a well-ordered society, each with its secure internal life, tends to reduce the visibility, or at least the painful visibility, of variations in human’s purposes. For we tend to compare our circumstances with others in the same or in a similar group as ourselves, or in positions that we regard as relevant to our aspirations. #RandolphHarris 7 of 25
The various associations in society tend to divide it into so many noncomparing groups, the discrepancies between these divisions not attracting the kind of attention which unsettles the lives of those less well placed. And this ignoring of differences in wealth and circumstances is made easier by the fact that when citizens do meet one another, as they must in public affairs at least, the principles of equal justice are acknowledged. Moreover in everyday life the natural duties are honoured so that the more advantaged do not make an ostentatious display of their higher estate calculated to demean the condition of those who have less. After all, if the disposing conditions for envy are removed, so probably are those for jealousy, grudgingness, and spite, the converses of envy. When the less fortunate segments of society lack the one the more fortunate will lack the other. Taken together these features of a well-ordered regime diminish the number of occasions when the less favoured are likely to experience their situation as impoverished and humiliating. Even if they have some liability to envy, it may never be strongly envoked. Finally, considering the last condition, it would seem that a well-ordered society as much as any other offers constructive alternatives to hostile outbreaks of envy. The problem of general envy anyway does not force us to reconsider the choice of the principles of justice. As for particular envy, to a certain extent it is endemic to human life; being associated with rivalry, it may exist in any society. #RandolphHarris 8 of 25
The more specific problem for political justice is how pervasive are the rancor and jealousy aroused by the quest for office and position, and whether it is likely to distort the justice of institutions. It is difficult to settle this latter in the absence of the more detailed knowledge of social forms available at the legislative stage. However, there sees to be no reason why the hazards of particular envy should be worse in a society regulated by justice as fairness than by any other conception. The principles of justice again seems relatively stable. A question has been asked man times. In the case of a conflict between requirements made by the law revealed by the word of God, and those imposed by the secular law, which of these authorities would members of the Church be bound to obey? The word of God is to come first. So essentially, God should be in and influence the government because the number one rule of God is to be honest and if one cannot honestly enforce the law, they have no right in government. In all civilized nations the people are accorded the right to pray, and this right is assured by what maybe properly called a common law of humankind. No earnest soul is cut off from communion with one’s God; and with such an open channel of communication, relief from burdensome laws and redress from grievances may be sought from the power that holds control of nations. “Bad laws, if they exist, should be repleaded as soon as possible; still, while they continue in force, they should be religiously observed,” reports President Abraham Lincoln. This is the view of the Church. #RandolphHarris 9 of 25
While there are many forms of equality, and egalitarianism admits of degrees, there are conceptions of justice that are recognizably equalitarian, even though certain significant disparities are permitted. The two principles of justice fall under this heading. The different conception of equality which they define is acknowledged on the supposition that envy does not exist. For behold, you should not fear humans more than God, you should be faithful and God will extend His arm, and He will be with you in every time of trouble. Children of God are chosen to do the work of the Lord. Repent of that which thou hast done, and thou art still chosen, and art again called to the world. Except thou doest this, thou shalt become as other humans, and have no more gift. When thou delivers up that which God has given thee sight and power to translate thou delivers up that which is sacred into the hands of a wicked human who depends upon one’s own judgment, and boasts in one’s own wisdom; and this is the reason that thou will lose thy privileges for a season. Nevertheless, God’s work shall go forth, for, inasmuch as the knowledge of the Saviour has come unto the World, through the testimony of the Jewish people, even so shall the knowledge of a Saviour come unto our people, and to the Americans through the testimony of their fathers. And this testimony shall come to the knowledge of all. For this very purpose are these plates preserved that the promises of the Lord might be fulfilled, which He made to His people. And the Americans might come to the knowledge of their fathers, and they might know the promise of the Lord. And they may believe the gospel and rely upon the merits of Jesus Christ, and be glorified through faith in his name and through their repentance they might be saved. I cancel every demonic assignment against you and your purpose. The plans of the enemy will not prevail. In Jesus’ name, Amen. #RandolphHarris 10 of 25
Joseph Smith was very sorry he had been unfaithful, and he humbled himself before God, determining to try harder to keep all of the Lord’s commandments. Later, within a month, the gift and the plates were returned to Joseph, but he was not allowed to translate the same record again. By revelation Joseph was told that wicked people had the lost manuscript. The Lord, Jesus Christ said; Behold, Satan, has put it into their hearts to alter the words, because they have altered the words, they read contrary from that which you translated and caused to be written. On this wise the Devil has sought to lay a cunning plan, the he may destroy this work. Verily I say unto you, that I will not suffer that Satan shall accomplish his evil design in this thing. Behold, they say and think in their hearts, We will see if God has given him power to translate, if so, he will also give him power again; and if he bringeth forth the same words, behold, we have the same with us, and we have altered them. Therefore, they will not agree, and we will say that he has lied in his words, and that he has no gift, and that he has no power; therefore, we will destroy him, and also the work. Behold, I say unto you, that you shall not translate again those words which have gone forth out of your hands. For, behold, if you should bring forth the same words, they will say that you have contradicted yourself. And, behold, they will publish his, and Satan will harden the hearts of the people to stir them up to anger against you, that they will not believe my words. #RandolphHarris 11 of 25
The Lord told Joseph that the part of the record he had translated which had been lost (about one hundred and sixteen pages) was a shorted story of the Nephite record; and that the golden plates also contained the complete story. Joseph was told he should translate the full record rather than the shortened one he had previously translated: the Lord said: I will not suffer that they shall destroy my work; yea, I will show unto them that y wisdom is greater than the cunning of the Devil. Behold, I am Jesus Christ, the Son of God. I came unto my own, and my own received me not. I am He who said, Other sheep have I which are not of this fold, unto my disciples, and many there were that understood me not. And I will show unto this people, that I had other sheep, and I will also bring to light my gospel, which was ministered unto them. And this I do, that I may establish my gospel, that there may not be so much contention. Yea, Satan doth stir up the hearts of the people to contention, concerning the points of my doctrine; and in these things they do err, for they do wrest the Scriptures, and do not understand them. Therefore, I will unfold unto them this great mystery; for behold, I will gather them as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, if they will not harden their hearts. Behold, this is my doctrine: Whosoever repenteth and cometh unto me, the same is my church Whosoever is of my church, and endureth of my church to the end, one will I establish upon my Rock. And now, remember the words of your Redeemer, your Lord, and your God. Amen. #RandolphHarris 12 of 25
The important of separating envy from the moral feelings can be seen from several examples. Suppose first that envy is held to be pervasive in poor less affluent societies. The reason for this, it may be suggested, is the general belief that the aggregate of social wealth is more or less fixed, so that one person’s gain is another’s loss. The social system is interpreted, it might be said, as a naturally established and unchangeable zero-sum game. Now actually, if this belief were widespread and the stock of goods were generally thought to be given, then a strict opposition of interests would be assumed to obtain. In this case, it would be correct to think that justice requires equal shares. Social wealthy is not viewed as the outcome of mutually advantageous cooperation and so there is no fair basis for an unequal division of advantages. What is said to be envy may in fact be resentment which might or might not prove to be justified. Dr. Freud’s speculations about the origin of the sense of justice suffer from the same defect. He remarks that this sentiment is the outgrowth of envy and jealousy. As some members of the social group jealously strive to protect their advantages, the less favoured are moved by envy to take them away Eventually everyone recognizes that they cannot maintain their hostile attitudes toward one another without injury to themselves. Thus as a compromise they settle upon the demand of equal treatment. The sense of justice is a reaction-formation: what was originally jealousy and envy is transformed into a social feeling, the same sense of justice that insists upon equality for all. #RandolphHarris 13 of 25
Dr. Freud believes that this process is exemplified in the nursey and in many other social circumstances. Yet the plausibility of one’s account assumes that the initial attitudes are correctly described. With a few changes, the underlying features of the example he depicts correspond to those of the original position. That persons have opposing interests and seek to advance their own conception of the god is not at all the same thing as their being moved by envy and jealousy. As we have seen, this sort of opposition gives rise to the circumstances of justice. Thus if children compete for the attention and affection of their parents, to which one might say they justly have an equal claim, one cannot assert that their sense of justice springs form jealousy and envy. Certainly children are often envious and jealous; and no doubt their moral notions are so primitive that the necessary distinctions are not grasped by them. However, waiving these difficulties, we could equally well say that their social feelings arise from resentment, from a sense that they are unfairly treated. And similarly one could say to conservative writers that it is mere grudgingness when those better circumstances reject the claims of the less advantaged to greater equality. However, this contention also calls for careful argument. None of these charges and countercharges can be given credence without first examining the conceptions of justice sincerely held by individuals and their understanding of the social situation in order to see how far these claims are indeed founded on these motives. #RandolphHarris 14 of 25
None of these remarks is intended to deny that the appeal to justice is often a mask for envy. What is said to be resentment may really be rancor. However, rationalizations of this sort present a further problem. In addition to showing that a person’s conception of justice is not itself founded on envy, we must determine whether the principles of justice cited in one’s explanation are sincerely held as this is shown in their being applied by one to other cases in which one is not involved, or even better, in which one would suffer a loss from their being followed. Dr. Freud means to asset more than the truism that envy and jealousy, and that without this energy, there would be no (or much less) desire to give justice. Conceptions of justice have few attractions for us other than those deriving from these and similar feelings. It is claim that is supported by erroneously conflating envy and resentment. Unhappily the problem of the other special psychologies must go untouched. They should in any case be treated in much the same way as envy. One tries to assess the configuration of attitudes toward risk and uncertainty, domination and submission, and the like, that just institutions are likely to generate, and then to estimate whether they are likely to render theses institutions unworkable or ineffective. We also need to ask whether, from the point of view of the persons in the original position, the conception chosen is acceptable or at least tolerable whatever our special proclivities may turn out to be. #RandolphHarris 15 of 25
The most favourable alternative is that which allows a place for all these different tendencies insofar as they are likely to be encouraged by a just basic structure. There is a division of labour so to speak between persons with contrary inclinations. Of course some of these attitudes may earn a premium in the way that certain trained abilities do, as for example the willingness to be adventuresome and to take unusual risks. However, if so, the problem is o all fours with the return to natural assets and it is covered by the discussion of distributive shares. What a social system must not do clearly is to encourage propensities and aspirations that it is bound to repress and disappoint. So long as the pattern of special psychologies elicited by society either supports its arrangements or can be reasonably accommodated by them, there is no need to reconsider the choice of a conception of justice. I believe, though I have not shown, that the principles of justice as fairness pass this test. When people can measure the extent of their freedom in two or three paces, and realize for the first time in their lives they have nothing else to do, but sit on a bunk, as they say passes into night and they continue to sit there because they are in prison—that is when it dawns on them how important freedom is. Even the children of a wealthy family, children of charismatic, gregarious politicians may suddenly find themselves stripped of everything that has propped up their egos. All their plans, friends, their busy work schedule, all their carefully cultivated followers will be gone, and replaced by the sheer loneliness and boredom of the prison cell and the venomous hostility of their guards. And they will keep waiting for justice, for a deal. Surely the United States Constitution could not simply leave them to rot in prison! #RandolphHarris 16 of 25
Imagine half a year going by before you are confronted with any charges. Then a fraudulently concocted murder case is brought, and a rigged military court condemns you to death. This is a bad dream, for the real reason for your imprisonment is the President is a communist and has lust for money and greed for power. Then imagine within his or her two-term limit as president due to expire in a few short weeks, the president declares martial law, granting him or herself almost unlimited powers. Then he or she can have you and other political opponents thrown into prison. The president may never intend to leave office—and may be determined never to let a popular rival out to silence him or her. Prison has the bewildering effect on many, which causes them to lose all sense of direction and perspective. One may become better not only at the president, but at the World, even at God. Injustice causes some to hate everyone and their prison guard may goad on an individual. Imagine if sometimes they put your dinner plate on the ground and let a mongrel dog wolf part of it down; then, kicking the dog aside, they give you what and left, and if you do not eat it, you get placed on suicide watch. In a matter of weeks, this could cause an individual to lose forty pounds, suffer two heart attacks. And when you are not longing for revenge, you want to die. However, much like Joseph Smith, if you keep your faith in God, He will show you that such losses are not in vain as you find your true life in Christ. What is this suffering is what draws you closer to the Lord and saves you from a life of eternal flames in the pits of hell? Therefore, continue to search for meaning in life. Find great inspiration in the Holy Bible to motivate your life and struggle for your country. Then, even if your prison is physical, or only in your mind, kneel in your jail cell and give your life to Jesus Christ. #RandolphHarris 17 of 25
Even if you are overcome with grief for your anger towards God, please beg for forgiveness. There is a close connection between frequent and solid spiritual experiences between us and the development of faith in the elaborate and creative purposes of God. This is derived from the close connection between Father and child because we are here with God now, needing Him and He says, “I am thinking of you,” and even though we may not be able to see God, we are having Him as part of our current experience, even when we are unaware. The fortune individual will have had many times when one was with God but not are of Him except for the security of knowing that He was there when needed. We are fortune because our environment is fulfilling one of the essentials needed if one is to have highly developed creativity. Because we have somehow had God there when He was not an obvious part of our experience, one can discover the Lord after we think He is absent (from experience) for a while. The individual will have had the experience of tolerating God’s absence without having to feel the terror that He might be lost forever. As we build our faith our experience will flicker between “God here when He is not here,” and “God not here when He is here.” One has thereby discovered that one can hold on to a concept—the symbol—which stands for the available God—has become pleasantly and interestingly established. We can play peekaboo with it. We can make the symbol happen while waiting for God to come along. The symbol can fill the interval of waiting, a small space of time. #RandolphHarris 18 of 25
The symbol stands for God—it stands for “You who normally come soon after I realize that I need You. Something arouses in my mind, an anticipation, a phantasy of something good. Then there is a small gap an absence, an interval of time. Then You came.” All one’s viewpoints, one’s life, most of all one’s bitterness—all will change. One will have a sense that life has suddenly moved into a different channel with another purpose. It is for our doubting hearts to believe that spiritual power—which is peaceful, prayerful, humane, forgiving, willing to suffering on the side of the poor and oppressed—can change society. We know that the gospel affects the lives of individuals, but can it make an impact on institutions and governments, where the heartless realities of power pierce like a knife? It is hard to fathom this. Nevertheless, it can happen. It does happen. One can never quite calculate how one conversation in a mental or physical prison cell may set in motion a train of events to shake a nation. Many people in prisons want to die. However, when they find Christ, they acquire a new maturity, and, though one may also retain their natural ebullience, a relative serenity that have never had before manifests. Some people will sense an individual has undergone something like a religious conversion as a result of years of injustice inflicted in a cell or in their own community. And indeed they have, but it will take away none of their heartfelt concern for their nation. #RandolphHarris 19 of 25
In countries that suffer from communism, the president uses martial law as a cover while they rape the country. Leaders and their business cronies have been known to bleed nations dry, making huge profits through monopoly powers and putting the money into New York real estate and Swiss banks. Meanwhile, half the working population cannot find jobs. The ugly scabs of the slums, many without running water or flushing toilets, spread across Sacramento and other cities. Marxist guerrillas are quickly gaining around, and the some in positions of authority, riven by corruption, seem unable to stop them. They may find it easier to savage poor peasants than to fight the Communists. Things may even reach a pint where anyone who helps the poor will be under suspicion. Army units have arrested, killed, and tortured even Catholic priests and nuns who have chosen to work with the desperately poor in other countries. While in America, some people, even the rich and famous, are given bonuses and jobs to help extort those suffering injustices. A few Catholics have, it is true, take the side of the Marxists, but the vast majority simply minister in the name of Jesus to those in need. Between the Marxist insurgency and a president who becomes a dictator, there is little room in the middle. Some people, even many in America, have seen the ruthless side of communism—after all they suffer and lose their lives just because of who they are. It is true, one can fight hatred with a greater hatred, but it is more effective to fight hatred with greater Christian love. #RandolphHarris 20 of 25
Do much soul searching and pursue your freedom struggle through the path of nonviolence, fully cognizant that this ay be the longer and more arduous road. And you may suffer solitary confinement once again, and possibly death. However, by taking the road of revolution, how many lives, other then one’s, will have to be sacrificed? Humans are ordained to eternal life through the providence of God, it likewise is part of that providence to permit some to fall away from that end; this is called reprobation. Thus, as predestination is a part of providence, in regard to those ordained to eternal salvation, so reprobation is a part of providence in regard to those who turn aside from that end. Hence reprobation includes the will to permit a person to fall into sin, and to impose the punishment of damnation on account of that sin. Symbols can stand for what will come. However, equally, they can stand for what may come, what may not come, or what will not come again. All kinds of conceptual processes can fill the interval between the moment when we have phantasy of something and the moment of finding something. Transitional objects and other symbols appear where there had been either nothing, or an experience of something not there. God loves all humans and all creatures, inasmuch as He wishes them all some good; but He does not wish every good to them all. So far, therefore, as He does not wish this particular good—namely, eternal life—He is said to hate or reprobate them. Reprobation different in its causality from predestination. This atter is the cause of what is expected in the future life by predestined—namely, glory—and of what is received in this life—namely grace. #RandolphHarris 21 of 25
Reprobation, however, is not the cause of what is in the present, namely sin; but it is the cause of abandonment by God. It is the cause, however, of what is assigned in the future—namely, eternal punishment. However, guilt proceeds from the free-will of the person who is reprobated and deserted by grace. In this way, the word of the prophet is true—namely, “Destruction is thy own, O Israel.” Reprobation by God does not take away from the power of the person reprobated. Hence, when it is said that the reprobated cannot obtain grace, this must not be understood as implying absolute impossibility: butt only conditional impossibility: as was said above does not do away with the liberty of choice. Whence, although anyone reprobated by God cannot acquire grace, nevertheless, that one falls into this or that particular sin comes from the use of one’s free will. Hence is rightly imputed to one as guilt. It is as if it were illuminated through a succession of continuously changing filters. You discover that the first phase of your involvement was no more than a prelude or an overture before the curtain vanished. You come to see that sin began by enticing you with an illusion—the illusion of a light-filled hedonistic joy, evil disguised by sun-drenched window—and to accept that what you are in fact confronted with is nothing more or less than the successive layers of the thinnest of honey-comb marks laid down gently in whispers of lies upon the canvas surface. #RandolphHarris 22 of 25
However, when the curtain has risen and the any the painting of lies continues to such your eyes into itself, it will engulf your soul with its entertainment. The uniform skin of God’s grace evaporates in part because in tenuous existence came about only through the adhering to God’s commandments and your organization of forms of faith, which was a shimmering ray of love inviting the Holy Ghost in your temple. However, as this shimmer disintegrates, it gives way to billowing and boundless hazes of black smoke, to seemingly limitless vistas of your soul space. It is the duty of citizens of any country to remember that they have individua responsibilities, and that they must operate within the law of the country in which they have chosen to live. No member of the Church can be accepted as in good standing whose way of life is one of rebellion against the established order of decency and obedience to law. We cannot be in rebellion against the law and be in harmony with the Lord, for He has commanded us to “be subject to the powers that be, until He reigns whose right it is to reign,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 58.22. And one of these days He is going to come. The exception to this principle would be when the Lord directs His people through His prophets to take an opposing stand to government. Otherwise they recognize the established authority of government. Remember that the Lord holds all of us responsible for our conduct here. He held our father Adam responsible for his conduct, but no more than He does us, in proportion to the station we hold. #RandolphHarris 23 of 25
The kings of the Earth will have to give an account to God, for their conduct in a kingly capacity. Kings are heads of nations, governors are heads of provinces; so are fathers or husbands governors of their own houses, and should act accordingly. Because some regard the theory and practice of one’s subject from the inside, they mystic can discuss it with a correctness and authority which most critics do not possess because they are outside it. They are largely in the dark about it—one is actually in the light. Those who has never felt it in themselves nor seen in demonstrated in others cannot understand the blessedness of such a state. Because they are unready for it, they cannot endure such an experience. The peace it imparts is too impersonal and would suffocate them. The detachment which it creates makes the Worldly life seem less important and is too frightening. The recognition that this experience does happen is increasingly rapidly in Western counties but in the East, it has never been doubted. The criticism that mystical experience is subjective and illusory is being dropped, as it ought to be Those who have never experienced this state yet venture to criticize it as illusory are dealing with mere words, not facts. If the ordinary human seldom gets these subtler experiences it is because one’s nature is too coarse, one’s mind too physically based, one’s focus too personal to permit one to receive them. Deep within one’s own heart, hidden within one’s own consciousness, every person carries all the evidence for the truth of these teachings that one is ever likely to need. #RandolphHarris 24 of 25
That arrogance which denies Heaven to the unorthodox does not trouble the mystic. One finds Heaven here in this life, now before the transition of death. At such times, unexpected and unsought though they are, one feels the nearness of God, the love of God, the reality of God. Whoever ventures to call them delusions s oneself deluded. Those who are dead are never gone: they are there in the shimmering light. The dead are not under the Earth: they are there in the blue sky, they are in the clouds that drift above, they are in the rain that falls, they are in the sun that shines, they are in the moon the beams, they are in the trees that provide shade, they are in the crowd, the dead are not dead. Those who are dead are never gone, they are in your heart, they are in the eyes of an innocent child, they are in the flames in your fireplace. They are in the forest, they are in the house, they are not dead. When the Ark rested, Moses said: Mayest Thou, O Lord, dwell among the myriads of the families of America. Arise, O Lord, unto Thy sanctuary, Thou, and the Ark of Thy strength. Let Thy priest be clothed with salvation; and Thy faithful ones exult. For the sake of David, Thy servant, reject not Thine anointed. I have given your good teaching; forsake not My Torah. It is a Tree of Life to them that hold fast to it, and everyone who upholds it is happy. Its ways are ways of pleasantness, and all its paths are peace. Turn us unto Thee, O Lord, and we shall return; renew our days as of Heaven. This nation and all nations, together with president, queens, kings, emperors, judges, and all humans, righteous and wicked, have go to go into the spirit World and stand before the bar of God. They have got to give an account of the deeds done in the body. #RandolphHarris 25 of 25
Cresleigh Homes
Outdoor and indoor living flow seamlessly in Mill Station Res 3! That space for herb and vegetable gardening just off the porch means you can snip some extra cilantro for your tacos any time! 🌱 https://cresleigh.com/mills-station/residence-3/
With the arrival of spring—and warmer temperatures—comes the urge to spend every minute in outdoor rooms. These outdoor living spaces a perfect place to lounge.
Cresleigh Homes offers exceptional architecture, single-family homes with vistas, patios, balconies, butler’s pantries, upstairs lofts, and other incredible amenities. Featured are also open and spacious home designs, with personalizing options that gives you the freedom to create the home of your dreams. Come and see why Cresleigh is America’s Favourite!
#CresleighHomes
#CresleighRanch
Even the Truth Can Spread and Not Only the Popular Lie!
It is easy enough to praise humans for the courage of their convictions. I wish I could teach the sad young of this mealy generation the bravery of this confusion. The hardest job kids face today is learning good manners without seeing any. We all learn by experience but some of us have to go to summer school. The malignant forms of aggression—sadism and necrophilia—are not innate; hence, they can be substantially reduced when the socioeconomic conditions are replaced by conditions that are favourable to the full development of human’s genuine needs and capacities: to the development of human self-activity and human’s genuine need and capacities: to the development of human self-activity and human’s creative power as its own end. Exploitation and manipulation produce boredom and triviality; they cripple human self-activity and all factors that make humans into a psychic cripple turn one also into a sadist or a destroyer. Humans, have in our day become a source of suspicion and distrust of all against all. Credulity is one our worst enemies, but that is the makeshift the neurotic always resorts to in order to quell the doubter in one’s own heart or to conjure one out of existence. The result is that modern humans know oneself only in so far as one can become conscious of oneself—a capacity largely dependent on environment conditions, knowledge and control of which necessitated of suggested certain modifications of one’s original instinctive tendencies. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
Their consciousness therefore orients itself chiefly by observing and investigating the World around one, and it is to the latter’s peculiarities that one must adapt one’s psychic and technical resources. This task is so exacting, and its fulfilment so profitable, that one forgets oneself in the process, losing sight of one’s instinctual nature and putting one’s own conception of oneself in place of one’s real being. In this way one slips imperceptibly into a purely conceptual World where the products of one’s conscious activity progressively take the place of reality. The Communist revolution has debased humans far lower than collective psychology has done, because it robs one of one’s freedom not only in the social but in the moral and spiritual sphere. Aside from the political difficulties, this entailed a great psychological disadvantage for the West that had already made itself unpleasantly felt in the days of German Nazism: we can now point a finger at the shadow. Optimism is an alienated form of faith, pessimism an alienated form of despair. If one truly responds to humans and their future, id est, concernedly and “responsibly,” one can respond only by faith or by despair. Rational faith as well as rational despair are based on the most thorough, critical knowledge of all the factors that are relevant for the survival of humans. The basis of rational faith in humans is the presence of a real possibility for one’s salvation; the basis for rational despair would be the knowledge that no such possibility can be seen. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
Most people are quite ready to denounce faith in human’s improvement as unrealistic; but they do not recognize that despair is often just as unrealistic. It is easy to say: “Humans have always been killer.” However, the statement nevertheless is not correct, for it neglects to take into account the intricacies of history of destructiveness. It is equally easy to say, “The desire to exploit others is just human nature”; but again, the statement neglects (or distorts) the facts. In brief, that statement, “Human nature is evil,” is not a bit more realistic than the statement, “Human nature is good.” However, the first statement is much easier to make; anyone who wants to prove human’s evilness finds followers most readily, for one offers everybody an alibi for one’s own sins—and seemingly risks nothing. Yet the spreading of irrational despair is in itself destructive, as all untruth is; it discourages and confuses. Preaching irrational faith or announcing false Messiahs is hardly destructive—it seduces and then paralyzes. The attitude of the majority is neither that of faith nor that of despair, but, unfortunately, that of complete indifference to the future of humans. With those who are not entirely indifferent, the attitude is that of “optimism” or of “pessimism.” They are accustomed to identifying human achievement with technical achievement, human freedom with freedom from direct coercion and the consumer’s freedom to choose between many allegedly different commodities. The dignity, cooperativeness, kindness of the primitive do not impress them; technical achievement, wealth, toughness do. Centuries of rule over technically backward people of different colour have left their stamp on the optimists’ minds. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
How could a “savage” be human and equal, not to speak of superior, to the humans who can fly to the moon—or by pushing a button, destroy millions of living beings? The optimists live well enough, at least for the moment, and they can afford to be “optimists.” Or at least that is what they think because they are so alienated that even the threat to the future of their grandchildren does not genuinely affect them. The “pessimists” are really not very different from the optimists. They live just as comfortably and are just as little engaged. The fate of humanity is as little their concern as it is the optimists’. They do not feel despair; if they did, they would not, and could not, live as contentedly as they do. And while their pessimism functions largely to protect the pessimists from any inner demand to do something, by projecting the idea that nothing can be done, the optimists defend themselves against the same inner demand by persuading themselves that everything is moving in the right direction anyway, so nothing needs to be done. To have faith means to dare, to think the unthinkable, yet to act within the limits of the realistically possible; it is the paradoxical hope to expect the Messiah every day, yet not to lose heart when He has not come at the appointed hour. This hope is not passive and it is not patient; on the contrary, it is impatient and active, looking for every possibility of action within the realm of real possibilities. Least of all is it passive as far as the growth and the liberation of one’s own person are concerned. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
There are several limitations to personal development determined by the social structure. However, those alleged radicals who counsel that no personal change is possible or even desirable within present-day society use their revolutionary ideology as an excuse for their personal resistance to inner change. The situation of humankind today is too serious to permit us to listen to the demagogues—least of all demagogues who are attacked to destruction—or even to the leaders who use only their brains and whose hearts have hardened. Critical and radical thought will only bear fruit when it is blended with the most precious quality humans are endowed with—the love of life. Hate, as a relation to objects is older than love. It derives from the narcissistic ego’s primordial repudiation of the external World. It really seems as though it is necessary for us to destroy some other thing or person in order not to destroy ourselves, in order to guard against the impulsions to self-destruction. A sad disclosure indeed for the moralist! Humans are looked upon as an isolated system, driven by two impulses: one to survive (ego instinct) and one to have pleasure by overcoming the tensions that in turn were chemically produced within the body and localized in the “erogenous zones.” However, there is no need for psychoanalysis to be ashamed to speak of love, for religion itself said: “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” This, however, is more easily said than done. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
Emotional bonds are means of identification. Whatever leads humans to share important interests produces this community of feeling, these identifications. And the structure of human societies is to a large extent based on them. “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” It is known throughout the World and is undoubtedly older than Christianity, which puts it forward as its proudest claim. Yet it is certainly not very old; even in historical times it was still strand to humankind. Let us adopt a naïve attitude towards it, as though we were hearing it for the first time; we shall be unable then to suppress a feeling of surprise and bewilderment. Why should we do it? What good will it do us? However, above all, how shall we achieve it? How can it be possible? My love is something valuable to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection It imposes duties on me for whose fulfillment I must be ready to make sacrifices. If I love someone, one must deserve it in some way. (I leave out of account the use one may be to me in important ways that I an love myself in one; and one deserves it if one is so much more perfect than myself that I can love my ideal of my own self in one. Again, I have to love one if one is my friend’s son, since the pain my friend would feel if any harm came to one would be my pain too—I should have to share it. However, if one is a stranger to me and if one cannot attract me by any worth of one’s own or any significance that one may already have acquired for my emotional life, it would be for hard for me to love one. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
Indeed, I should be wrong to do so, for my love is valued by all my own people as a sign of my preferring them, and it is an injustice to them if I put a stranger on a par with them. However, I am to love one (with this universal love) merely because one, too, is an inhabitant of this Earth, like an insect, and Earth-worm or a grass-snake, then I fear that only a small modicum of my love will fall to one’s share—not by any possibility as much as, by the judgment of my reason, I am entitled to retain for myself. The contradiction between death instinct and Eros (fundamental and creative love) confronts humans with a real and truly trading alternative. A real alternative because one can decide to attack and wage war, to be aggressive, and to express one’s hostility because one prefers to do this rather than to be sick. That this alternative is a tragic one hardly needs to be proven. And now we are struck by the significance of the possibility that the aggressiveness may not be able to find satisfaction in the external World because it comes up against real obstacles. If this happens, it will perhaps retreat and increase the amount of self-destructiveness holding sway in the interior. Holding back aggressiveness is in general unhealthy and leads to illness. However, science and learning to control the environment and making is more palatable for habitation and cultivation of agriculture, along with religion and psychology is good for humans. Humans are freed from the tragic choice between destroying either others or oneself, because the energy of destructive instinct is used for the control over nature. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
However, we must ask, can this really be so? Can it be true that destructiveness becomes transformed into constructiveness? What can “control over nature” mean? Taming and breeding animals, gathering and cultivating plants, weaving cloth, building huts, manufacturing pottery, and many more activities including the construction of machines, railroads, airplanes, and skyscrapers. All these acts of constructing, building, unifying, synthesizing, and, indeed, if one wanted to attribute them to one of the two basic instincts, they might be considered as being motivated by Eros rather than by the death instinct. With the possible exception of the killing animals for their consumption and killing humans in war, both of which could be considered as rooted in destructiveness, control, and mastery over nature is not destructive but constructive. The death instinct turns into the destructive instinct when, with the help of special organs, it is directed outwards, on to objects. However, civilization leads to the holding back of aggressiveness and results in physical illness, and this is why so many people go to church, are in therapy, and on psychotropic drugs. Many human beings want to deal with their aggression in health ways and have a peaceful, well-behaved community. The forlorn state of consciousness in our World is due primarily to loss of instinct, and the reason for this lies in the development of the human mind over the past aeon. The more power humans have over nature, the more one’s knowledge and skill went to one’s head, and the deeper became one’s contempt for the merely natural and accidental, for all irrational data—including the objective psyche, which is everything that consciousness in not. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
The Church recommends, in order to maintain society, that we develop more faith. Faith is a gift of grace and depends on human’s good will and pleasure. The seat of one’s faith, however, is not consciousness but spontaneous religious experience, which brings the individual’s faith into immediate relation with God. Here each of us must ask: Have I any religious experience and immediate relation to God, and hence that certainty which will keep me, as an individual, from dissolving in the crowd? To this question there is an optimistic answer only when the individual is willing to fulfil the demands of rigorous self-examination and self-knowledge. If one does this, one will not only discover some important truths about oneself but will also have gained a psychological advantage: one will have succeeded in deeming oneself worthy of serious attention and sympathetic interests. One will have set one’s hand, as it were, to a declaration of one’s own dignity and taken the first step towards the foundations of one’s consciousness—that is, towards the unconscious, the only available source of religious experiences. This is certainly not to say that what we call the unconscious is identical with God or is set up in His place. It is simply the medium from which religious experience seems to flow. As to what the further cause of such experience may be, the answer to this lies beyond the range of human knowledge. Knowledge of God is a transcendental problem. When it comes to answering the crucial question that hangs over our time like a threat, the religious person enjoys a great advantage. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
The religious person has a clear idea of the way one’s subjective existence is grounded in one’s relation to “God.” God is an anthropomorphic idea whose dynamism and symbolism are filtered through the medium of the unconscious psyche. Anyone who wants to can at least draw near to the source of such experiences, no matter whether one believes in God or not. Exotic races have ceased to be peepshows in ethnological museums. They have become our neighbours, and what was yesterday the private concern of the ethnologist is today a political, social, and psychological problem. We may hope for humans of understanding and humans of good will, and must therefore not grow weary of reiterating those thoughts and insights which are needed. Even the truth can spread and not only the popular lie. Only a fool can permanently disregard the conditions of one’s own nature. In fact, this negligence is the best means of making one an instrument of evil. Harmless and naivete are as little helpful as it would be for a cholera patient and those in one’s vicinity to remain unconscious of the contagiousness of the disease. One the contrary, they lead to the projection of the unrecognized evil in the “other.” This strengthens the opponent’s position in the most effective way, because the projection carries the fear which we involuntarily and secretly feel for our own evil over to the other side and considerably increases the formidableness of one’s threat. What is even worse, our lack of insight deprives us of the capacity to deal with evil. Here, of course, we come up against ne of the main prejudices of the Christian tradition, and one that is a great stumbling block to our policies. We should, so we are told eschew evil and, if possible, neither touch for mention it. For evil is also the thing of ill omen, that which is tabooed and feared. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
This apotropaic attitude toward evil, and the apparent circumventing of it, flatter the primitive tendency in us to shut our eyes to evil and drive it over some frontier or other, like the Old Testament scapegoat, which was supposed to carry the evil into the wilderness. However, if one can no longer avoid the realization that evil, without human’s ever having chosen it, is lodged in human nature itself, then it bestrides the psychological stage as the equal and opposite partner of good. This realization leas straight to a psychological dualism, already unconsciously prefigured in the political World schism and in the even more unconscious dissociation in modern humans. The dualism does not come from this realization; rather, we are in a split condition to begin with it. It would be an insufferable thought that we had to take personal responsibility for so much guiltiness. We therefore prefer to localize the evil in individual criminals or groups of criminals, while washing our hands in innocence and ignoring the general proclivity to evil. This sanctimoniousness cannot be kept up in the long run, because the evil, as experience shows, lies in humans—unless, in accordance with the Christian view, one is willing to postulate a metaphysical principle of evil. The great advantage of this view is that it exonerates human’s conscience of too heavy a responsibility and foists it off on the devil, in correct psychological appreciation of the fact that humans are much more the victims of their psychic constitution than its inventor. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
Considering that the evil of our day puts everything that has ever agonized humankind in the deepest shade, one must ask oneself how it is that, for all our progress in the administration of justice, in medicine and in technology, for all our concern with life and health, monstrous engines of destruction have been invented which could easily exterminate the human race. No one will maintain that the atomic physicists are a pack of criminals because it is to their efforts that we owe that peculiar flower of human ingenuity, the hydrogen bomb. The vast amount of intellectual work that went into the development of nuclear physics was put forth by humans who dedicated themselves to their task with the greatest exertion and self-sacrifice, and whose moral achievement could therefore just as easily have earned them the merit of inventing something useful and beneficial to humanity. However, even though the first step along the road to a momentous invention may be the outcome of a conscious decision, here, as everywhere, the spontaneous idea—the hunch or intuition—plays an important part. In other words, the unconscious collaborates too and often makes decisive contributions. So it is not the conscious effort alone that is responsible for the result; somewhere or other the unconscious, with its barely discernible goals and intentions, has its finger in the pie. If it puts a weapon in your hand, it is aiming at some kind of violence. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
Knowledge of the truth is the foremost goal of science, and if in pursuit of the longing for light we stumble upon an immense danger, then one has the impression more of fatality than of premeditation. It is not that present-day humans are capable of greater evil than the humans of antiquity or the primitive. One merely has incomparably more effective means with which to realize one’s propensity to evil. As one’s consciousness has broadened and differentiated, so one’s moral nature has lagged behind. That is the great problem before us today. Reason alone no loner suffices. If only because of their dangerousness, in theory, in lies within the power of reason to desist from experiments of such hellish scope as nuclear fission. However, fear of evil which one does not see in one’s own bosom but always in somebody else’s checks reason every time although everyone knows that the use of this weapon means the certain end of our present human World. The fear of universal destruction may spare us the worst, yet the possibility of it will nevertheless hang over us like a dark cloud so long as no bridge is found across the World-side psychic and political split—a bridge as certain as the existence of the hydrogen bomb. It is in the nature of political bodies always to see evil in the opposite group, just as the individual has an ineradicable tendency to get rid of everything one does not know and does not want to know about oneself by foisting it off on somebody else. The perfect have no needs of others, but weakness has, for it seeks support and does not confront its partner with anything that might force one into an inferior position and even humiliate one. When high idealism plays too prominent a role, this humiliation may happen only too easily. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
Whenever unjust is uncertain and police spying an terror are at work, human beings fall into isolation, which, of course, is the aim and purpose of the dictator State, since it is based on the greatest possible accumulation of depotentiated social units. To counter this danger, the free society needs a bond of an affective nature, a principle of a kind like caritas, the Christian love of your neighbour. However, it is just this love for one’s fellow humans that suffers most of all from the lack of understanding wrought by projection It would therefore by very much in the interest of the free society to give some thought to the question of human relationship from the psychological point of view, for in this resides its real cohesion and consequently its strength. Where love stop, power begins, and violence, and terror. What our age thinks as the “shadow” and inferior part of the psyche contains more than something merely negative. The very fact that through self-knowledge, that is, by exploring our own souls, we come upon the instincts and their World of imagery should throw some light on the powers slumbering in the psyche, of which we are seldom aware so long as all goes well. We are living in what the Greeks called the right moment for a metamorphosis of the gods, of the fundamental principles and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious within us who is changing. If humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science, coming generations will have to take to account of this momentous transformation. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
As at the beginning of the Christian era, so again today we are faced with the problem of general moral backwardness which has failed to keep pace with our scientific, technical, and social progress. So much is at stake and so much depends on the psychological constitution of modern humans. Are they capable of resisting the temptation to use their powers of the purpose of staging a World conflagration? Are humans conscious of the path they are treading, and what the conclusions are that must be drawn from the present World situation and their own psychic situation? Do they know that they are on the point of losing the life-preserving myth of the inner human which Christianity has treasured up for one? Does one realize what lies in store should this catastrophe ever befall one? Is one even capable of realizing that this would in fact be a catastrophe? And finally, does the individual know that one is the makeweight that tips the scales? Happiness and contentment, equability of mind and meaning—fulness of life—these can be experienced only by the individual and not by a State, which, on the one hand, is nothing but a convention agreed to by independent individuals and, on the other, continually threatens to paralyse and suppress the individual. The psychiatrist is one of those who know most about the conditions of the soul’s welfare, upon which so infinitely much depends in the social sum. The social and political circumstances of the time are certainly of considerable significance, but their importance for the weal or woe of the individual has been boundlessly overestimated in so far as they are taken for the sole deciding fact. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
In this respect all our social goals commit the error of overlooking the psychology of the person for whim they are intended and—very often—of promoting only one’s illusions. I hope, therefore that a psychiatrist, who in the course of a long life has devoted oneself to the causes and consequences of psychic disorders, may be permitted to express one’s opinion, in all the modesty enjoined upon one as an individua, about the questions raised by the World situation today. I am neither spurred on by excessive optimism nor in love with high ideals, but am merely concerned with the fate of the individual human being—that infinitesimal unit on whom a World depends, and in whom, if we read the meaning of the Christian message aright, even God seeks His goal. Testimony to the existence and reality of the glimpse will be found in the literatures of all peoples through all times. It is not a newly manufactured idea, nor a newly manufactured fancy. A human who denies it is foolish so to limit one’s own possibilities, but one may learn better with time. These glimpses cannot rightly be dismissed by the scientist as merely self-suggested or wholly hallucinatory. Nor can they properly be regarded by the metaphysician as valueless for truth. As human beings we live by experience, and they are personal experiences which help to confirm the truth of the impersonal bases underneath them and which encourage us to continue on the same path. The Overself is a living reality. If the quest were merely an intellectual conception or an emotional fancy, nobody would waste one’s years, one’s endeavours, and one’s energies it. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
The Overself is not only a necessary conception of logical thought. It is also a beautiful fact of persona experience. There are three signs, among others, of the Soul’s presence in a Soul-denying generation. They are: moral conscience, artistic imagination, and metaphysical speculation. Criticism which knows only sensuous and intellectual experience can be litter valid here if, indeed, it is not entirely irrelevant. When a human confuses the nature of the mind with its own thoughts, when one is unable properly to analyse consciousness and memory, when one has never practised introspection and meditation successfully, one can know nothing of the soul and may well be sceptical of its existence. That the Overself is not the product of an inflated imagination but has a real existence, is a truth which any human who has the required patience and submits to the indispensable training may verify oneself. It is not a dim abstraction but a real presence. Not a vauge theory but a vital fact. To the human of insight there is something strange, ironic, and yet pathetic in the spectable of those who turn the consciousness and the understanding derived from the Overself against the acknowledgement of Its existence. If one can shed the mummy wrappings of acquired notions, complacent bigotries, and superstitious customs, and look at a problem with fresh eyes, one is more likely to succeed in one’s quest for truth. If one can re-examine the whole meaning of it as though it were a newly discovered problems, one is more likely to move towards it correct solution. If one will refuse to be intimidated by dietary precedent, and begin to rethink the whole matter of eating’s why and wherefore, one will reach astonishing results. For much nonsense about diet has come down to us by ignorant tradition and unthinking inheritance. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
As one draws closer to the soul of things, one comes more into harmony with Nature. And if one is true to one’s instincts, one will eat one’s food more and more as Nature herself produces it. Inferior and even harmful foods have been eaten for so long that most people have become addicted to them and, through habitual use, come to like them. It is true that several of these food have been part of a civilized diet for generations, but the duration of an error does not make it less an error, and does not justify its continuance. It is a fact worthy speculating upon that many groups of early Christians were mystical and had a special diet. Had they not been ousted by the Emperor Constantine—whose imperialistic political purpose they did not serve—from the official Christianity which he (and not Jesus) established, we might today have seen half the Christian World holding a faith in mystical beliefs and eating special diets. The France of Louis XII saw some remnants of those early sects, such as the Albigenses, Montanists, and Camisards—and no less than one third of total population of the country—living on special diets. Luigi Cornaro lived to a hundred in Italy on a strictly limited daily quantity of food. Dr. Josiah Oldfield was nearing his hundred year when I last visited England and attributed the fact to avoiding eating too much, which he termed “the great evil.” He is also an enthusiastic advocate of special diets. In the moment when you feel that actual contact with the One Infinite Life-Power has been made, draw it into the body and let it permeate every part, every organ, and every atom. It will tend to dissolve sickness and drive out disease. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
Healing powers are like prayers, they can cross oceans and traverse continents as readily and as speedily as can radio waves or thought. Telepathy is a fact and the basis of this operation. The ministrations of absent healing are most successful when the individual is passive and receptive to them. Hence the work of its power is most effective when the sufferer is sleeping or relaxing. I am the family of the Universe, and with all of us together I do not fear being alone; I can reach out and touch a rock or a hand or dip my feet in water Always there is some body close by, and when I speak I am answered by a plane’s roar or the bird’s whistling or the voice of others in conversation far apart from me When I lie down to sleep, I am in the company of the dark and the starts. Breathe to me, sheep in the meadow. Sun and moon, my father and my fathers brother, shine your light on me. My sister, Earth, hold me up to be blessed. Sun and moon, I smile at you both and spread my arms in affection and lay myself down at full length of the Earth to know I love it too and am never to be separated from it In no way shall death part us. Life up your heads, O ye gates, yea, lift them up, ye everlasting doors, that the King of glory may come in. Who is the King of glory? The Lord strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle. Life up your hears, O ye gates, yes, lift the up, ye everlasting doors, that the King of glory may come in. Who then is the King of glory? The Lord of hosts; He is the King of glory. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
Cresleigh Homes
Graphic wall detailing is SO hot right now…but you know what never goes out of style? Thoughtful floor plans that maximize space in the bedroom and luxury in the bathroom (featured is a secondary bedroom, and secondary bathroom). We’re loving Brighton Station Res 2 for its single story living that amplifies comfort!
This single story home boats an ideal layout with 2,427 square feet, of thoughtfully designed living space, three bedrooms, three bathrooms, and a three car garage. https://cresleigh.com/brighton-station/residence-2/
The Cresleigh Collection presents an ideal balance of design and luxury, offering gorgeous single-family homes ranging from approximately 2,000 up to nearly 4,000 square feet of living space. You’ll love the flexibility offered by the unique interior and beautiful private yards.
Humans Never Ask Who is Paying for this Paradise?
Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the stage to write an autobiography. Today unconscious adaption is no longer adequate. Faced with the power to alter the gene, to create new species, to populate the planets or depopulate the Earth, humans must now assume conscious control of evolution itself. As the number of social components grows and change and makes the whole system less stable, it becomes less and less possible to ignore the demands of political minorities. The best way to deal with angry or recalcitrant minorities is to open the system further, bringing them into it as full partners, permitting them to participate in social goal-setting, rather than attempting to ostracize or isolate them. Young people forced into prolonged adolescence and deprived of the right to partake in social decision-making will grow more and more unstable until they threaten the overall system. In short, in politics, in industry, in education, goals set without the participation of those affected will be increasingly hard to execute. The continuation of top-down technocratic goal-setting procedures will lead to greater and greater social instability, less and less control over the forces of change; an ever-greater danger of cataclysmic, human-destroying upheaval. To master change, we shall therefore need both a clarification of important long-range social goals and a democratization of the way in which we arrive at them. And this means nothing less than the next political revolution in the techno-societies—a breathtaking affirmation of popular democracy. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
Avoiding future shock as one rides the waves of change, one must master evolution, shaping tomorrow to human need. Instead of rising in revolt against it, one must, from this historic moment on, anticipate and design the future. Our first and most pressing need, therefore, before we can begin to gently guide our evolutionary destiny, before we can build a humane future, is to halt the runaway acceleration that is subjecting multitudes to the threat of future shock while, at the very same moment, intensifying all the problems they must deal with—war, ecological incursions, racism, the obscene contrast between rich and poor, the revolt of the young, and the rise of a potentially deadly mass irrational. There is no facile way to treat this wild growth, this cancer in history. There is no magic medicine, either, for curing the unprecedented disease it bears in its rushing wake: future shock. We must take radically curative procedures for the society—new social services, a future-facing education system, new ways to regulate technology, and a strategy for capturing control of change. Other ways must also be found. Yet the basic thrust is diagnosis. For diagnosis precedes cure, and we cannot begin to help ourselves until we become sensitively conscious of the problem. By making imaginative use of change to channel change, we cannot only spare ourselves the trauma of future shock, we can reach out and humanize distant tomorrows. When the light of truth seems to depart from humans, there will be souls looking for light, and who are filled with perplexity and sorrow. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
Seeking salvation, people will be thirsting for the knowledge of the living God, for some assurance of life beyond the grave. A rational individual is not subject to envy, at least when the differences between oneself and others are not thought to be the result of injustice and do not exceed certain limits. Nor are the parties influenced by different attitudes toward risk and uncertainty, or by various tendencies to dominate or to submit, and the like. These special psychologies I have also imagine to be behind the veil of ignorance along with the parties’ knowledge of their conception of the god. One explanation for these stipulations is that as far as possible, the choice of a conception of justice should not be affected by accidental contingencies. The principles adopted should be invariant with respect to differences in these inclinations for the same reason that we want them to hold irrespective of individual preferences and social circumstances. These assumptions tie in with the Kantian interpretation of justice as fairness and greatly simplify the argument from the standpoint of the original position. The parities are not swayed by individual differences in these propensities, thereby avoiding the complications in the bargaining process that would result. If any, without rather definite information about which configuration of attitudes existed, one might not be able to say what agreement would be reached. In each case it would be contingent upon the particular hypothesis laid down. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
Unless we could show some distinctive merit from a moral point of view in the postulated array of special psychologies, the principles adopted would be arbitrary, no longer the outcome of reasonable conditions. And if possible, since envy is generally regarded as something to be avoided and feared, at least wen it becomes intense, it seems desirable that the choice of principles should not be influenced by this trait. Therefore, for reasons both of simplicity and moral theory, I have assumed an absence of envy and lack of knowledge of the special psychologies. Nevertheless these inclinations do exist and in some way they must be reckoned with. First of all, we proceed on the presumptions just mentioned, and it is illustrated by most of the argument so far; secondly, we must ask whether the well-ordered society corresponding to the conception adopted will actually generate feelings of envy and patterns of psychological attitudes that will undermine the arrangements it counts to be just. At first we reason as if there is no problem of envy and the special psychologies; and then having ascertained which principles would be settled upon, we check to see whether just institutions so defined are likely to arouse and encourage these propensities to such an extent that the social system becomes unworkable and incompatible with human good. If so, the adoption of the conception of justice must be reconsidered. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
However, should the inclinations engendered support just arrangements, or be easily accommodated by them, the first part of the argument is confirmed. The essential advantage of the two-step procedure is that no particular constellation of attitudes is taken as given. We are simply checking the reasonableness of our initial assumptions and the consequences we have drawn from them in the light of the constraints imposed by the general facts of our World. The reasons why envy poses a problem, namely the fact that the inequalities sanctioned by the difference principle may be so great as to arouse envy to a socially dangerous extent. The envy experienced by the least advantaged towards those better situated is normally general envy in the sense that they envy the more favoured for the kinds of good and not for the particular objects they possess. The upper classes say are envied for their greater wealthy and opportunity; those envying them want similar advantages for themselves. By contrast, particular envy is typical of rivalry and competition. Those who lose out in the quest for office and honour, or for the affections of another, are liable to envy the success of their rivals and to covet the same thing that they have won. Our problem then is whether the principles of justice, and especially the difference principle with fair equality of opportunity, is likely to engender in practice too much destructive general envy. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
The definition of envy that seems appropriate for this question deals with fixed ideas. Suppose that the necessary interpersonal comparisons are made in terms of the objective primary goods, liberty, and opportunity, income and wealth, which for simplicity I have normally used to define expectations in applying the difference principle. Then we may think of envy as the propensity to view with hostility the greater good of others even though their being more fortunate than we are does not detract from our advantages. We envy persons whose situation is superior to ours (estimated by some agreed index of goods as noted above) and if it is necessary to five up something of ourselves, we are willing to deprive them of their greater benefits. When others are aware of our envy, they may become jealous of their better circumstances and anxious to take precautions against the hostile acts to which our envy makes us prone. So understood envy is collectively disadvantageous: If only the discrepancy between them is sufficiently reduced, the individual who envies another is prepared to do things that make them both worse off. Thus Kant, whose definition I have pretty much followed, quite properly discusses envy as one of the vices of hating humankind. Envy and spite are passions; their names already imply badness. As Kant observers, there are many occasions when we openly speak of the greater good of others as enviable. Thus we may remark upon the enviable harmony and happiness of a marriage or a family. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
Similarly, one might say to another that one envies one’s greater opportunities or attainments. In these cases, those of benign envy, there is no ill will intended or expressed. We do not wish, for example, that the marriage or family should be less happy or harmonious. By these conventional expressions we are affirming the value of certain things that others have. We are indicating that, although we possess no similar good of equal value, they are indeed worth striving for. Those to whom we address these remarks are expected to receive them as a kind of praise and not as a foretaste of our hostility. A somewhat different case is that of emulative envy which leads us to try to achieve what others have. The sight of their greater good moves us to strive in socially beneficial ways for similar things for ourselves. Thus envy proper, in contrast with benign envy which we freely express, is a form of rancor that tends to hard both its object and its subject. It is what emulative envy may become under certain conditions of defeat and sense of failure. A further point is that envy is not a moral feeling. No moral principle need be cited in its explanation. It is sufficient to say that the better situation of others catches our attention. We are downcast by their good fortune and no longer value as highly what we have; and this sense of hurt and loss arouses our rancor and hostility. Thus one must be careful not to conflate envy and resentment. For resentment is a moral feeling. If we resent our having less than others, it must be because we think that their being better off is the result of unjust institutions, or wrongful conduct on their part. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
Those who express resentment must be prepared to show why certain institutions are unjust or how others have injured them. What marks off envy from the moral feelings is the different way in which it is accounted for, the sort of perspective from which the situation is viewed. We should note also the nonmoral feelings connected with envy but not to be mistake for it. In particular, jealousy and grudgingness are reverse, so to speak, to envy. A person who is better off may wish those less fortunate than one to stay in their place. One is jealous of one’s superior position and begrudges them the greater advantages that would put them on a level with oneself. And should this propensity extend to denying them benefits that one does not need and cannot use oneself, then one is moved by spite. Spite is characterizes as being pleased at the bad fortune of others, whether deserved or not. For the idea that jealousy, grudgingness, and spite are the reverse of envy, the feelings of those who envied and who possess what is wanted. These inclinations are collectively harmful in the way that envy is, since the grudging and spiteful human is willing to give up something to maintain the distance between oneself and others. Envy and grudgingness are vices. As we have seen, the moral virtues are among the broadly based traits of character which it is rational for persons to want in one another as associates. Thus vices are broadly based traits that are not wanted, spitefulness and envy being clear cases, since they are to everyone’s detriment. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
He parties will surely prefer conceptions of justice the realization of which does not arouse these propensities. We are normally expected to forbear from the actions to which they prompt us and to take the steps necessary to rid ourselves of them. Yet sometimes the circumstances evoking envy are as compelling that given human beings as they are no one can reasonably be asked to overcome one’s rancorous feelings. A person’s lesser position as measured by the index of objective primary goods may be so great as to wound one’s self-respect; and given one’s situation, we my sympathize with one’s sense of loss. Indeed, we can resent being made envious, for society may permit such large disparities in these goods that under existing social conditions these differences cannot help but cause a loss of self-esteem. For those suffering this hurt, envois feelings are not irrational; the satisfaction of their rancor would make the better off. When envy is a reaction to the loss of self-respect in circumstances where it would be unreasonable to expect someone to feel differently, this is excusable. Since self-respect is the main primary good, the parties would not agree, I shall assume, to count this sort of subjective loss as irrelevant. Therefore the question is whether a basic structure which satisfies the principles of justice is likely to arouse so much excusable envy that the choice of these principles should be reconsidered. As the dialectical discussion proceeds, a point is reached when an evaluation of these individual impulses becomes necessary. By that time the individual should have acquired enough certainty of judgment to enable one to act on one’s own insight and decision and not from the mere wish to copy convention—even if one happens to agree with the collective opinion. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
Unless one stands firmly on one’s own feet, the so-called objective values profit one noting, since they then only serve as a substitute for character and so help to suppress one’s individuality. Naturally, society has an indisputable right to protect itself against arrant subjectivisms, but, in so far society is itself composed of de-individualized human beings, it is completely at the mercy of ruthless individuals. Let it band together into groups and organizations as much as it likes—it is just this banding together and the resultant extinction of the individua personality that makes it succumb so readily to a dictator. A millions zeros joined together do not, unfortunately, add up to one. Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but our fatally shortsighted age thinks only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations, though one would think that the World has seen more than enough of what a well-disciplined mob can do in the hands of a single madman. Unfortunately, this realization does not seem to have penetrated very far—and our blindness is extremely dangerous. People go on blithely organizing and believing in the sovereign remedy of mass action, without the least consciousness of the fact that the most powerful organizations can be maintained only by the greatest ruthlessness of their leaders and the cheapest of slogans. Curiously enough, the Churches too want to avail themselves of mass action in order to cast of the devil with Beelzebub—the very Churches whose care is the salvation of the individual soul. They do not appear to have heard of the elementary axiom of mass psychology that the individual becomes morally and spiritually inferior in the mass, and for this reason they do not bother themselves overmuch with their real task of helping the individual to achieve a metanoia, a rebirth of the spirit—Deo concedente. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
If the individual is not truly a regenerated spirit, it is, unfortunately, only too clear that society cannot be either, for society is the sum total of individuals in need of redemption. I can therefore see it only as a delusion when the Churches try—and they apparently do—to rope the individual into some social organization and reduce one to a condition of diminished responsibility, instead of raising one out of the torpid, mindless mass and making clear to one that one is the one important factor and that the salvation of the World consists in the salvation of the individual soul. It is true that mass meetings parade these ideas before one and seek to impress them on one’s mind by dint of mass suggestion, with the melancholy result that once the intoxication has worn off the mass human promptly succumbs to another even more obvious and still louder slogan. One’s individual relation to God would be an effective shield against these pernicious influences. Did Christ, perchance, call his disciples to him any followers who did not afterwards cry with the rest, “Crucify him!” when even the rock named Peter showed signs of wavering? And are not Jesus and Paul prototypes of those who, trusting their inner experience, have gone their individual ways in defiance of the World? This argument should certainly not cause us to overlook the reality of the situation confronting the Church. When the Church tries to give shape to the amorphism mass by uniting individuals into a community of believers and to hold such an organization together with the help of suggestion, it is not only performing a great social service, but it also secures for the individual the inestimable boon of a meaningful form life. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
These, however, are gifts which as a rule only confirm certain tendencies and do not change them. As experience unfortunately shows, the inner human remains unchanged however much community one has. One’s environment cannot give one as a gift something which one can win for oneself only with effort and suffering. On the contrary, a favourable environment merely strengthens the dangerous tendency to expect everything from outside—even that metamorphosis which external reality cannot provide. By this I mean a far-reaching change of the inner man, which is all the more urgent in view of the mass phenomena of today and the still greater problems of overpopulation looming in the future. It is time we asked ourselves exactly what we are lumping together in mass organizations and what constitutes the nature of the individual human being, id est, of the real human not the statistical human. This is hardly possible except by a new process of self-reflection. All mass movements, as one might expect, slip with the greatest ease down an incline plane made up of large numbers. Where the many are, there is security; what the many believe must of course be true; what the many want must be worth striving for, and necessary, and therefore good. In the clamour of the many resides the power to snatch wish-fulfilments by force; sweetest of all, however, is that gentle and painless slipping back into the kingdom of childhood, into the paradise of parental care, into happy-go-luckiness and irresponsibility. All the thinking and looking after are done from the top; to all questions there is an answer, and for all needs the necessary provision is made. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
The infantile dream state of the mass human is so unrealistic that one never thinks to ask who is paying for this paradise. The balancing of accounts is left to a higher political or social authority, which welcomes the task, for its power is thereby increased; and the more power it has, the weaker and more helpless the individual becomes. Whenever social conditions of this type develop on a large scale, the road to tyranny lies open and the freedom of the individual turns into spiritual and physical slavery. Since every tyranny is ipso facto immoral and ruthless, it has much more freedom in the choice of its methods than an institution which still takes account of the individual. Should such an institution come into conflict with the organized State, it is soon made aware of the very real disadvantage of its morality and therefore feels compelled to avail itself of the same methods as its opponent. In this way the evil spreads almost of necessity, even when direct infection might be avoided. The danger of infection is greater when decisive importance is attached to larger numbers and to statistical values, as is everywhere the case in our New World. The suffocating power of the mases is paraded before our eyes in one form or another every day in the newspapers, and the insignificance of the individual is rubbed into one so thoroughly that one loses all hope of making oneself heard. The outworn ideals of liberte, egalite, fraternite help one not at all, as one can direct this appeal only to one’s executioners, the spokesman of the masses. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the person who is as well organized in one’s individuality as the mass itself. I fully realize that his proposition must sound well-neigh unintelligible to the human of today. The helpful medieval view that humans are a microcosm, a reflection of the great cosmos in miniature, has long since dropped away from one, although the very existence of one’s World-embracing and World-conditioning psyche might have taught one better. Not only is the image of the macrocosm imprinted upon one’s psychic nature, but one also creates this image for oneself on an ever-widening scale. One bears this cosmic “correspondence” within one by virtue of one’s reflecting consciousness on the one hand, and, on the other, thanks to the hereditary, archetypal nature of one’s instincts, which bind one to one’s environment. However, one’s instincts not only attach one to the macrocosm, they also, in a sense, tear one apart, because one’s desires pull one in different directions. In this way one falls into continual conflict with oneself and only very rarely succeeds in giving one’s life an undivided goal—for which, as a rule succeeds in giving one’s life an undivided goal—for which, as a rule, one must pay very dearly by repressing other sides of one’s nature. One often has to ask oneself whether this kind of single-mindedness is worth forcing at all, seeing that the natural state of the human psyche consists in a jostling together of its components and their contradictory behaviour—that is, in a certain degree of dissociation. The Buddhist name for this is attachment to the “ten thousand things.” Such a condition cries out for order and synthesis. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
Just as the chaotic movements of the crowd, all ending in mutual frustration, are impelled in a definite direction by a dictatorial will, so the individual in one’s dissociated state needs a directing and ordering principle. Ego-consciousness would like to let its own will play this role, but overlooks the existence of powerful unconscious factors which thwart its intentions. If it wants to reach the goal of synthesis, it must first get to know the nature of these factors. It must experience them, or else it must possess a numinous symbol that expresses them and leads to their synthesis. A religious symbol that comprehended and visibly represented what is seeking expression in modern humans might possibly do this; but our conception of the Christian symbol to date has certainly not been able to do so. On the contrary, that frightful World split runs right through the domains of the “Christian” American man, and our Christian outlook on life has proved powerless to prevent the recrudescence of an archaic social order like Communism. This is not to day that Christianity is finished. I am, on the contrary, convinced that it is not Christianity, but our conception and interpretation of it, that has become antiquated in the face of the present World situation. The Christian symbol is a living thing that carries in itself the seeds of further development. It can go on developing; it depends only on us, whether we can make up our minds to mediate again, and more thoroughly, on the Christian premises. This requires a very different attitude towards the individual, towards the microcosm of the self, from the one we have adopted hitherto. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
That is why nobody knows what ways of approach are open to humans, what inner experiences one could still pass through and what psychic facts underlie the religious myth. Over all this hangs so universal a darkness tat no one can see why one should be interested or to what end one should commit oneself. Before this problem we stand helpless. This is not surprising, since practically all the trump cards are in the hands of our opponents. They can appeal to the big battalions and their crushing power. Politics, science, and technology stand ranged on their side. The imposing arguments of science represent the highest degree of intellectual certainty yet achieved by the mind of humans. So at least it seems to the human of today, who has received hundred-fold enlightenment concerning the backwardness and darkness of past ages and their superstitions. That one’s teachers have themselves gone seriously astray by making false comparisons between incommensurable factors never enters one’s head. All the more so as the intellectual elite to whom one puts one’s questions are almost unanimously agreed that what science regards as impossible today was impossible at all other times as well. Above all, the facts of faith, which might give one the chance of an extramundane standpoint, are treated in the same context as the facts of science. Thus, when the individual questions the Churches and their spokesperson, to whom is entrusted the cure of souls, one is informed that to belong to a church—a decidedly Worldly institution—is more or less de rigueur; that the facts of faith which have become questionable for one were concrete historical events; that certain ritual actions produce miraculous effects; and that the sufferings of Christ have vicariously saved one from sin and its consequences (id est, eternal damnation). #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
If, with the limited means at one’s disposal, one begins to reflect on these things, one will have to confess that one does not understand them at all and that only two possibilities remain open to one: either to believe implicitly, or to reject such statements because they are flatly incomprehensible. Whereas the humans of today can easily think about and understand all the “truth” dished out to one by the State, one’s understanding of religion is made considerably mire difficult owing to the lack of explanations. (“Do you understand what you re reading?” And he said, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” Acts 8.30.) If, despite this, one has still not discarded all one’s religious convictions, this is because the religious impulse rests on an instinctive basis and is therefore a specifically human function. You can take away human’s gods, but only to give one others in return. The leaders of the mass State could not help being deified, and wherever crudities of this kind have not yet been put over by force, obsessive factors arise in their stead, charged with demonic energy—money, work, political influence and so forth. When any natural human function gets lost, id est, is denied conscious and intentional expression, a general disturbance results. Hence, it is quite natural that with the triumph of the Goddess of Reason a general neuroticizing of modern humans should set in, a dissociation of personality analogous to the splitting of the World today by the Iron Curtain. This boundary line bristling with barbed wire runs through the psyche of modern humans, no matter on which side one lives. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
And just as the typical neurotic is unconscious of one’s shadow in one’s neighbour or in the human beyond the great divide. It has even become a political and social duty to apostrophize the capitalism of the one and the communism of the other as the very devil, so as to fascinate the outward eye and prevent it from looking within. However, just as the neurotic, despite unconsciousness of one’s other side, has a dim premonition that all is not well with one’s psychic economy, so Western humans have developed an instinctive interest in one’s psyche and in “psychology.” Thus it is that the psychiatrist is summoned willy-nilly to appear on the World stage, and questions are addressed to one which primarily concern the most intimate and hidden life of the individual, but which in the last analysis are the direct effects of the Zeitgeist. Because of its personal symptomatology this material is usually considered to be “neurotic”—and rightly so, since it is made up of infantile fantasies which ill accord with the contents of an adult psyche and are therefore repressed by our moral judgment, in so far as they reach consciousness at all. Most fantasies of this kind do not, in the nature of things, come to consciousness in any form, and it is very improbable, to say that the least of it, that they were ever conscious and were consciously repressed. Rather, they seem to have been present from the beginning or, at any rate, to have arisen unconsciously and to have persisted in that state until the psychologist’s intervention enabled them to cross the threshold of consciousness. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
The activation of unconscious fantasies is a process that occurs when consciousness find itself in a situation of distress. Were that not so, the fantasies would be produced normally and would then bring no neurotic disturbances in their train. In reality, fantasies of this kind belong to the World of childhood and give rise to disturbances only when prematurely strengthened by abnormal conditions of conscious life. This is particularly likely to happen when unfavourable influences emanate from the parents, poisoning the atmosphere and producing conflicts which upset the psychic balance of the child. When a neurosis breaks out in an adult, the fantasy World of childhood reappears, and one is tempted to explain the onset of neurosis causally, as due to the presence of infantile fantasies. However, that does not explain why the fantasies did not develop any pathological effects during the interim period. These effects develop only when the individual is faced with a situation which one cannot overcome by conscious means. The resultant standstill in the development of personality opens a sluice for infantile fantasies, which, of course, are latent in everybody but do not display any activity so long as the conscious personality can continue on its way unimpeded. When the fantasies reach a certain level of intensity, they begin to break through into consciousness and create a conflict situation that becomes perceptible to the individual oneself, splitting one into two personalities with different characters. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
The dissociation, however, had been prepared long before in the unconscious, when the energy flowing off from consciousness (because unused) reinforced the negative qualities of the unconscious and particularly the infantile traits of the personality. Since the normal fantasies of a child are nothing other, at bottom, than the imagination of instincts, and may thus be regarded as preliminary exercises in the use of future conscious activities, it follows that the fantasies of the neurotic, even though pathologically altered and perhaps perverted by the regression of energy, contain a core of normal instinct, the hallmark of which is adaptedness. A neurotic illness always implies an unadapted alteration and distortion of normal dynamisms and of the “imagination” proper to them. Instincts, however, are highly conservative and of extreme antiquity as regards both their dynamism and their form. Their form, when represented to the mind, appears as an image which expressed the nature of the instinctive impulse visually and concretely, like a picture. If we could look into the psyche of the yucca moth, for instance, we would find in it a pattern of idea, of a numinous or fascinating character, which not only compels the moth to carry out its fertilizing activity on the yucca plant but helps it to “recognize” the total situation. Instinct is anything but a blind and indefinite impulse, since it proves to be attuned and adapted to a definite external situation. This latter circumstance gives it its specific and irreducible form. Just as instinct is original and hereditary, so, too, its form is age-old, that is to say, archetypal. It is even older and more conservative than the human form. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
These biological considerations naturally apply also to Homo sapiens, who still remain within the framework of general biology despite the possession of consciousness, will, and reason. The fact that our conscious activity is rooted in instinct and derives from it its dynamism as well as the basic features of its ideational forms has the same significance for human psychology as for all other members of the animal kingdom. Human knowledge consists essentially in the constant adaptation of the primordial patterns of ideas that were given us a priori. These need certain modifications, because in their original form, they are suited to an archaic mode of life but not to the demands of a specially differentiated environment. If the flow of instinctive dynamism into our life is to be maintained, as is absolutely necessary for our existence, then it is imperative that we should remould these archetypal forms into ideas which are adequate to the challenge of the present. The Overself is not something imagined or supposed. Its presence is definitely felt. If a human asks why one can find no trace of God’s presence in oneself, I answer that one is fully of evidence, not merely traces. God is present in one as consciousness, the state of being aware; as thought, the capacity to think; as activity, the power to move; and as stillness, the condition of ego, emotion, intellect, and body which finally and clearly reveals what these other things simply point to. “Be still, and know that I am God” is a statement of being whose truth can be tested by experiment and whose value can be demonstrated by experience. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
When we realize that the intellect can put forth as man arguments against this theme as for it, we realize that there is in the end only one perfect proof of the Overself’s existence. The Overself must prove itself. This can come about faintly through the intuition or fully through the mystical experience. Whoever needs proofs of the authenticity of this experience has not had it. The difficulty of collecting and studying, sifting and describing the varieties of mystical experience which may be found is a barrier to the expansion of scientific psychology. For those persons who are most eager to talk about their own experiences are the most dubious and unreliable source. Those who are the least eager, feeling the matter to be too private, personal, intimate, and sacred, are able to offer valuable evidence. The human whose mind is rounded out to perfection knows full well truth cut in half and things do not exist apart from the mind. We know ourselves to be made from this Earth. We know this Earth is made from our bodies. For we see ourselves. And we are nature. We are nature seeing nature. We are nature with a concept of nature. Nature weeping. Nature speaking of nature. The Earth is the Lord’s and all its fulness, the World, and they that dwell thereon. For He hath founded it upon the seas, and established it upon the floods. Who shall ascend the mountains of the Lord? And who shall stand in His holy place? One that hath clean hands, and a pure heart; who hath not set one’s mind on what is false, and hath not sworn deceitfully. One shall receive a blessing from the Lord, and righteousness from the God of one’s salvation. Such is the generation of them that seek God, that seek the presence of the God of Jacob. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
Cresleigh Homes
The largest floor plan in the development award goes to Mills Station Res 4 🏆 – and if you love to entertain, this just might be your new home. No need to feel cramped even when you have guests! 🙌
Residence Four at Mills Station boasts 2,692 square feet in the largest home in the community. The open concept design includes four bedrooms, three and one half bathrooms and a two car garage plus workshop.
#CresleighHomes
#CresleighRanch
Why then the World’s Mine Oyster, Which I with Sword Will Open!
The “generation gap” is the cause of the brewing social revolution. Parents teach their children to obey and to have a blind trust for authority, so their only other option is to rebel because they are not taught to communicate and negotiate or compromise. By the time parents realize there is a problem, then their sons and daughters are unreasonable and beyond their command. The youth are now edging the middle age out of power. Corporations, a last stronghold of maturity and responsibility, are now recruiting vice presidents whose major qualifications are a B.A. degree and an age under thirty. In the end, however, social futurism must cut even deeper. For technocrats suffer, too, from the virus of elitism. To capture control of change, we shall, therefore, require a final, even more radical breakaway from technocratic tradition: we shall need a revolution in the very way we formulate our social goals. Rising novelty renders irrelevant the traditional goals of our chief institutions—state, church, corporation, army, and university. Acceleration produces a faster turnover of goals, a greater transience of purpose. Diversity or fragmentation leads to a relentless multiplication of goals. Caught in this churning, goal-cluttered environment, we stagger, future shocked, from crisis to crisis, pursuing a welter of conflicting and self-cancelling purposes. Nowhere is this more starkly evident than in our pathetic attempts to govern our cities. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
New Yorkers, within a short span, have suffered a nightmarish succession of disasters: the death of Aaliyah in a preventable airplane crash, Twin Towers destroyed by airplanes and over 3,500 lives lost in a single day, a water shortage, a subway strike, racial violence in the community and schools, hackers shutdown of a pipeline that supplies gasoline, a housing shortage, a fuel oil strike, a pandemic, a breakdown of telephone service, a teacher walkout, a power blackout, to name just a few. In its City Hall, as in a thousand city halls all over the high-technology nations, technocrat dash, firebucket in fist, from one conflagration to another without the least semblance of a coherent plan or policy for the urban future. This is not to say no one is planning. On the contrary; in this seething social brew, technocratic plans, sub-plans, and counter-plans pour fourth. They call for new highways, new roads, new power plants, new schools, more parking, new malls, and high-speed Internet. They promise better hospitals, housing, mental health centers, welfare programs. However, the plans cancel, contradict and reinforce one another by accident. Few are logically related to one another, and none to any overall image of the preferred city of the future. No vision—utopia or otherwise—energizes our efforts. No rationally integrated goals bring order to the chaos. And at the national and international levels, the absence of coherent policy is equally marked and doubly dangerous. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
It is not simply that we do not know which goals to pursue, as a city or as a nation. The trouble lies deeper. For accelerating change has made obsolete the methods by which we arrive at social goals. The technocrats do not yet understand this, and, reacting to the goals crisis in knee-jerk fashion, they reach for the tried and true methods of the past. Thus, intermittently, a change-dazed government will try to define its goals publicly. Instinctively, it establishes a commission. In 2019 President Trump pressed into service, among others, a general, a judge, a couple of industrialist, border security, a few college presidents, and a labour leader to “develop a broad outline of coordinated national policies and programs” and to “set up a series of goals in various areas of national activity.” In due course, a red-white-and-blue paperback appeared with the commission’s report, Goals for Americans. Neither the commission nor its goals were able to reach their objective because federal judges and politicians and the mainstream screens news media, and some of the public fought against the American First agenda. The battle continued and the juggernaut of change continued to roll through America not fully realized, as it were, by a managerial intelligence. A far more significant effort to tidy up governmental priorities was still being initiated by President Trump as he successfully rolled out life saving vaccines, tax cuts, and relief checks to help the public. There was also the introduction of a planning program budgeting system throughout the federal establishment. The goal was to try to run programs much more closely and rationally to organizational goals. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
Thus, for example, by applying it, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare can assess the costs and benefits of alternative programs to accomplish specified goals. However, who specifies these larger, more important goals? The inception of the planning and budgeting program and the systems approach is a major governmental achievement. It is of paramount importance in managing large organizational efforts. However, it leaves entirely untouched the profoundly political question of how the overall goals of a government or a society are to be chosen in the first place. President Trump wanted to Make America Great Again. He said it was “time we addressed ourselves, consciously and systematically, to the question of what kind of a nation we want to be.” He thereupon put his finger on the quintessential question. However, once more the method chosen for answering it proved to be inadequate. “Today, I have ordered the establishment, within the White House, of a National Goals Research Staff,” the President announced. “This will be a small, highly technical staff, made up of experts in the collection…and processing of data relating to social needs, and in the projection of social trends.” Such a staff, located within shouting distance of the Presidency, could be extremely useful in compiling goal proposals, in reconciling (at least on paper) conflicts between agencies, in suggesting new priorities. If it did nothing but force high officials to question their primary goals, staffed with excellent social scientists and futurists, it could earn its keep. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
Yet even this step, like the two before it, bear the unmistakable imprint of the technocratic mentality. For it, too, evades the politically charged core of the issue. How are preferable futures to be defined? And by whom? Who is to set goals for the future? Behind all such efforts runs the notion that national (and, by extension, local) goals for the future of society ought to be formulated at the top. This technocratic premise perfectly mirrors the antiquated bureaucratic forms of organization in which line and staff were separated, in which rigid, undemocratic hierarches distinguished leader from led, manager from managed, planner from plannee. Yet the real, as distinct the glibly verbalized, goals of any society on the path to super-industrialism are already too complex, too transient and too dependent for their achievement upon the willing participation of the governed, to be perceived and defined so easily. We cannot hope to harness the runaway forces of change by assembling a kaffee klatsche of elders to set goals for us or by tuning the risk over to a “highly technical staff.” A revolutionary new approach to goal-setting is needed. Nor is this approach likely to come from those who play-act at revolution. One radical group, seeing all problems as a manifestation of the “maximization of profits” displays, in all innocence, an econocentricism as narrow as that of the technocrats. Another hopes to plunge us willy-nilly back into the pre-industrial past. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
Still another sees revolution exclusively in subjective and psychological terms. None of these groups is capable of advancing us toward post-technocratic forms of change management. By calling attention to the growing ineptitude of the technocrats and by explicitly challenging not merely the means, but the very goals of industrial society, today’s young radicals do us all a great service. However, they no more know how to cope with the goals crisis than the technocrats they scorn. An orientation toward the future has been the hallmark of every revolutionary—but many people suffer from a disbelief in the future. The masses find themselves incapable of formulating a future. We must urge people to incorporate the future in the present by, in effect, living the life styles of tomorrow today. However, if this only leads to a pathic charade—free societies, cooperatives, pre-industrial communes, few of which have anything to do with the future, and most of which reveal, instead, only a passionate penchant for the past, then we need to try harder. Yet, the irony is compounded when we consider that some (though hardly all) of today’s young radicals also share with the technocrats a streak of virulent elitism. While decrying bureaucracy and demanding “participatory democracy” they, themselves, frequently attempt to manipulate the very groups of workers, marginalized groups or students on whose behalf they demand participation. The working mases in the high-technology societies are totally indifferent to calls for a political revolution aimed at exchanging one form of property ownership for another. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
For most people, the rise in affluence has meant a better, not a worse, existence, and they look upon their much envied “suburban middle-class lives” as fulfillment rather than deprivation. Faced with this stubborn reality, undemocratic element in America seems to indicate that the masses are too bourgeosified, too corrupted and addled by Madison Avenue to know what is good for them. And so, even if it means stuffing it down the throats of thee who are too unenlightened to know their own interests, a revolutionary elite must establish a more humane and democratic future. In short, the goals of society have to be set by an elite. Technocrat and anti-technocrat often turn out to be elitist brothers under the skin. Yet systems of goal formulation based on elitist premises are simply no longer “efficient.” In the struggle to capture control of the forces of change, they are increasingly counter-productive. For under super-age of information, democracy becomes not a political luxury, but a primal necessity. Democratic political forms arose in the New World not because a few geniuses willed them into being or because man showed an “unquenchable instinct for freedom.” They arose because the historical pressure toward social differentiation and toward faster paced systems demanded sensitive social feedback. In complex, differentiated societies, vast amounts of information must flow at ever faster speeds between the formal organizations and subcultures that make up the whole, and between the layers and sub-structures within these. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
We have already seen that despite the individualistic features of justice as fairness, the two principles of justice provide an Archimedean point for appraising existing institutions as well as the desires and aspirations which they generate. These criteria provide an independent standard for guiding the course of social change without invoking a perfectionist or an organic conception of society. However, the question remains whether the contract doctrine is a satisfactory framework for understanding the values of community and for choosing among social arrangements to realize them. It is natural to conjecture that the congruence of the right and the good depends in large part upon whether a well-ordered society achieves that good of community. One of the conditions of the original position is that the parties know that they are subject to the circumstances of justice. They assume that each has a conception of one’s good in the light of which one presses claims against the rest. So although they view society as a cooperative venture for mutual advantage, it is typically marked by a conflict as well as by an identity of interests. Now there are two ways of viewing these suppositions. The first is taken by the theory of justice: the idea is to derive satisfactory principles from the weakest possible assumptions. The premises of the theory should be simple and reasonable conditions that everyone or most everyone would grant, and for which convincing philosophical arguments can be given. At the same time, the greater the initial collision of claims into which the principles can introduce an acceptable order, the more comprehensive the theory is likely to be. Therefore a deep opposition of interests is presumed to obtain. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
The other way to think of these suppositions is to regard the as describing a certain kind of social order, or a certain aspect of the basic structure that is actually realized. Thus we are led to the notion of private society. Its chief features are first that the persons comprising it, whether they are human individuals or associations, have their own private ends which either competing or independent, but not in any case complementary. And second, institutions are not thought to have any value in themselves, the activity of engaging in them not being counted as a good but if anything as a burden. Thus each person assesses social arrangements solely as a means to one’s private aims. No one takes account of the good of others, or of what they possess; rather everyone prefers the most efficient scheme that gives one the largest share of assets. (Expressed more formally, the only variables in an individual’s utility function are commodities and assets held by one, and not items possessed by others nor their level of utility.) We may suppose also that the actual division of advantage is determined largely by the balance of power and strategic position resulting from existing circumstances. Yet this division may of course be perfectly fair and satisfy the claims of mutuality. By good fortune the situation may happen to lead to this outcome Public goods consist largely of those instrumentalities and conditions maintained by the state for everyone to use for one’s own purposes as one’s means permit, in the same manner that each has one’s own destination when traveling along the highways. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
The theory of competitive markets is a paradigm description of this type of society. Since the members of this society are not moved by the desire to act justly, the stability of just and efficient arrangements when they exist normally requires the use of sanctions. Therefore the alignment of private and collective interests is the result of stabilizing institutional devices applied to persons who oppose one another as indifferent if not hostile powers. Private society is not held together by a public conviction that its basic arrangements are just and good in themselves, but by the calculations of everyone, or of sufficiently many to maintain the scheme, that any practicable changes would reduce the stock of means whereby they pursue their personal ends. It is sometimes contended that the contract doctrine entails that private society is the ideal, at least when the division of advantages satisfies a suitable standard of reciprocity. However, this is not so, as the notion of a well-ordered society shows. And as I have just said, the idea of the original position has another explanation. The account of goodness as rationality and the social nature of humankind also requires a different view. Now the sociability of human beings must not be understood in a trivial fashion. It does not imply merely that society is necessary for human life, or that by living in a community humans acquire needs and interests that prompt them to work together for mutual advantage in certain specific ways allowed for and encouraged by their institutions. Nor is it expressed by the truism that social life is a condition for our developing the ability to speak and think, and to take part in the common activities of society and culture. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
No doubt even the concepts that we use to describe our plans and situation, and even to give voice to our personal wants and purposes, often presuppose a social setting as well as a system of belief and thought that are the outcome of the collective efforts of a long tradition. These facts are certainly not trivial; but to use them to characterize our ties to one another is to give a trivial interpretation of human sociability. For all of these things are equally true of persons who view their relations purely instrumentally. The social nature of humankind is best seen by contrast with the conception of private society. Thus human beings have in fact shared final ends and they value their common institution and activities as good in themselves. We need one another as partners in ways of life that are engaged in for their own sake, and the successes and enjoyments of others are necessary for and complimentary to our own good. These matters are evident enough, but they call for some elaboration. In the account of goodness as rationality we came to the familiar conclusions that rational plans of life normally provide for the development of at least some of a person’s powers. The Aristotelian Principle points in this direction. Yet one basic characteristic of human beings is that no one person can do everything that one might do; nor a fortiori can one do everything that any other person can do. The potentialities of each individual are greater than those one can hope to realize; and they fall short of the powers among humans generally. Thus everyone mist select which of one’s abilities and possible interests one wishes to encourage; one must plan their training and exercise, and schedule their purist in an orderly way. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
Different persons with similar or complementary capacities may cooperate so to speak in realizing their common or matching nature. When humans are secure in the enjoyment of the exercise of their own powers, they are disposed to appreciate the perfections of others, especially when their several excellences have an agreed place in a form of life the aims of which all accept. Thus we may say that it is through social union founded upon the needs and potentialities of its members that each person can participate in the total sum of the realized natural assets of the others. We are led to the notion of the community of humankind the members of which enjoy one another’s excellences and individuality elicited by free institutions, and they recognize the good of each as an element in the complete activity the whole scheme of which is consented to and gives pleasure to all. This community may also be imagined to extend over time, and therefore in this history of a society the joint contributions of successive generations can be similarly conceived. Every human being, then, can act with only one dominant faculty at a time; or rather, our whole nature disposes us at any given time to some single form of spontaneous activity. It would therefore seem to follow from this that humans are inevitably destined to a partial cultivation, since one only enfeebles one’s energies by directing them to a multiplicity of objects. However, humans have it in their power to avoid this one-sidedness, by attempting to unite the distinct and generally separately exercised faculties of this nature, by bringing into spontaneous cooperation, at each period of one’s life, the dying sparks of activity, and those which the future will kindle, and endeavouring to increase and diversify the powers with which one works, by harmoniously combining them, instead of looking for mere variety of objects for their separate exercise. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
What is achieved, in the case of the individual, by union of past and future with the present, is produced in society by the mutual cooperation of its different members; for, in all stages of one’s life, each individual can achieve only one of those perfections, which represent the possible features of human character. It is through a social union, therefore, based on the internal wants and capacities of its members, that each is enabled to participate in the rich collective resources of all the others. As a pure cause to illustrate this notion of social union, we may consider a group of musicians every one of whom could have trained oneself to play equally as well as the others any instrument in the orchestra, but who each have by a kind of tacit agreement set out to perfect their skills on the one they have chosen so as to realize the powers of all in their joint performances. If one were to learn how to make complete use of all one’s natural capacities, every individual human will have to live for a vast length of time, and therefore it will require perhaps an incalculable series of generations of humans. A communist society is one in which each person completely realizes one’s own nature, in which one expresses all of one’s power. In any event, it is important not to confuse the idea of social union with the high value put upon human diversity and individuality, or with the conception of the good as the harmonious fulfillment of natural powers by (complete) individuals; nor finally, with gifted individuals, artists, states-people, and so one, achieving this for the rest of humankind. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
Rather, in the limiting case where the powers of each are similar, the group achieves, by a coordination of activities among peers, the same totality of capacities latent in each. Or when these powers differ and are in suitable ways complementary, they express the sum of potentialities of the membership as a whole in activities that are intrinsically good and not merely cooperation for social or economic gain. In either case, persons need one another since it is only in active cooperation with others that one’s powers reach fruition. Only in a social union is the individual complete. Our predecessors in achieving certain things leave it up to us to pursue them further; their accomplishments affect our choice of endeavours and define a wider background against which our aims can be understood. To say that humans are historical beings is to day that the realization of powers of human individuals living at any one time takes the cooperation of many generations (or even societies) over a long period of time. It also implies that this cooperation is guided at any moment by an understanding of what has been done in the past as it is interpreted by social tradition. By contrast with humankind, every individual terrestrial being can and does do what for the most part it might do, or what any other of its kind might or can do that lives at the same time. The range of realized abilities of a single individual of the species is not in general materially less than the potentialities of others similar to it. The striking exception is the difference of pleasures of the flesh. This is perhaps why an affinity of pleasures of the flesh is the most obvious example of the need of individuals both human and other terrestrial beings for each other. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
Yet this attraction may take but a purely instrumental form, each individual treating the other as a means to one’s own pleasure or the continuation of one’s line. Unless this attachment is fused with elements of affection and friendship, it will not exhibit the characteristic features of social union. Now many forms of life possess the characteristic of social union, shared final ends and common activities valued for themselves. Science and art provide ready-to-hand illustrations. Likewise families, friendships, and other groups are social unions. There is some advantage though in thinking about the simpler instances of games. Here we can easily distinguish four sorts of ends: the aim of the game as defined by its rules, say to score the most runs; the various motives of the players in playing the game, the excitement they get from it, the desire for exercise, and so on, which may be different for each person; the social purposes served by the game which may be unintended and unknown to the players, or even to anyone in the society, these being matters for the reflective observer to ascertain; and then finally, the shared end, the common desire of all the players that there should be a good play of the game. If the same is played fairly according to the rules, if the sides are more or less evenly matched, and if they players all sense that they are playing well, only then can this shared end be realized. However, when this aim is attained, everyone takes pleasure and satisfaction in the very same thing. A good play of the game is, so to speak, a collective achievement requiring the cooperation of all. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
Now the shared end of a social union is clearly not merely a common desire for the same particular thing. Grant and Lee were one in their desire General Ulysses S. Grant and General Robert E. Lee were one in their desire to hold Richmond, Virginia USA but this desire did not establish community between them. Persons generally want similar sorts of things, liberty and opportunity, shelter and nourishment, yet these wants may put them at odds. Whether individuals have a shared end depends upon the more detailed features of the activity to which the excellences and enjoyments of each are complementary to the good of all. Each can then take pleasure in the actions of the other as they jointly execute a plan acceptable to everyone. Despite their competitive side, many games illustrate this type of end in a clear way: if everyone’s zest and pleasure are not to be languish, the public desire to execute a good and fair play of the game must be regulative and effective. The development of art and science, of religion and culture of all kinds, high and low, can of course be thought of in much the same way. Learning from one another’s efforts and appreciating their several contributions, human beings gradually build up systems of knowledge and belief; they work out recognized techniques for doing things and elaborate styles of feeling and expression. In these cases the common aim is often profound and complex, being defined by the respective artistic, scientific, or religious tradition; and to understand this aim often takes years of discipline and study. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
The essential thing is that there be a shared final end and accepted ways of achieving it which allow for the public recognition of the attainments of everyone. When this end is achieved, all find satisfaction in the very same thing; and this fact together with the complementary nature of the good of individuals affirms the tie of community. I do not wish to stress, however, the cases of art and science and high forms of religion and culture. In line with the rejection of the principle of perfection and the acceptance of democracy in the assessment of one another’s excellences, they have no special merit from the standpoint of justice. Indeed the reference to games not only has the virtue of simplicity but in some ways is more appropriate. It helps to show that the primary concern is that there are many types of social union and from the perspective of political justice we are not to try to rank them in value. Moreover these unions have no definite size; they range from families and friendships to much larger associations. Nor are there limits of time and space, for those widely separated by history and circumstance can nevertheless cooperate in realizing their common nature. A well-ordered society, and indeed most societies, will presumably contain countless social unions of many different kinds. With these remarks as preface, we can now see how the principles of justice are related to human sociability. The main idea is simply that a well-ordered society (corresponding to justice as fairness) is itself a form of social union. Indeed, it is social union of social unions. Both characteristic features are present: the successful carrying out of just institutions is the shared final end of all the members of society, and these institutional forms are prized as good in themselves. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
Let us consider these features in turn. The first is quite straightforward. In much the same way that players have the shared end to execute a good and fair play of the game, so the members of a well-ordered society have the common aim of cooperating together to realize their own and another’s nature in ways allowed by the principles of justice. This collective intention is the consequence of everyone’s having an effective sense of justice. Each citizen wants everyone (including oneself) to act from principles to which all would agree in an initial situation of equality. This desire is regulative, as the condition of finality on moral principles requires; and when everyone acts justly, all find satisfaction in the very same thing. The explanation of the second feature is more involved, yet clear enough from what has been said. We have only to note the various ways in which the fundamental institutions of society, the just constitution and the main parts of the legal order, can be found good in themselves once the idea of social union is applied to the basic structure as a whole. Thus first of all, we can say that everyone’s acting to uphold just institutions is for the good of each. Human beings have a desire to express their nature as free and equal moral persons, and this they do most adequately by acting from the principles that they would acknowledge in the original position. When all strive to comply with these principles and each succeeds, then individuality and collectively their nature as moral persons is most fully realized, and with it their individual and collective good. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
Further, a just constitutional order, when adjoined to the smaller social unions of everyday life, provides a framework for these many associations and sets up the most complex and diverse activity of all. In a well-ordered society each person understands the first principles that govern the whole scheme as it is to be carried out over many generations; and all have a settled intention to adhere to these principles in their plan of life. Thus the plan of each person is given a more ample and rich structure than it would otherwise have; it is adjusted to the plans of others by mutually acceptable principles. Everyone’s more private life is so to speak a plan within a plan, this superordinate plan being realized in the public institutions of society. However, this larger plan does not establish a dominant end, such as that of religious unity or the greatest excellence of culture, much less national power and prestige, to which the aims of all individuals is rather that the constitutional order should realize the principles of justice. And if the Aristotelian Principle is sound, this collective activity must be experienced as a good. We have seen that the moral virtues are excellences, attributes of the person that it is rational for persons to want in themselves and in one another as things appreciated for their own sake, or else as exhibited in activities so enjoyed. Now it is clear that these excellences are display in the public life of a well-ordered society. Therefore the companion principle to the Aristotelian Principle implies that human appreciate and enjoy these attributes in one another as they are manifested in cooperating to affirm just institutions. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
It follows that the collective activity of justice in the preeminent form of human flourishing. For given favourable conditions, it is by maintaining these public arrangements that persons best express their nature and achieve the widest regulative excellences of which each is capable. At the same time just institutions allow for and encourage the diverse internal life of associations in which individuals realize their more particular aims. Thus the public realization of justice is a value of community. A well-ordered society does not do away with the division of labour in the most general sense. To be sure, the worst aspects of this division can be surmounted: no one need be servilely dependent on others and made to choose between monotonous and routine occupation which are deadening to human thought and sensibility. Each can be offered a variety of tasks so that the different elements of one’s nature find a suitable expression. However, even when work is meaningful for all, we cannot overcome, nor should we wish to, our dependence on others. In a fully just society persons seek their good on ways peculiar to themselves, and they rely upon their associates to do things they could not have done, as well as things they might have done but did not. It is tempting to suppose that everyone might fully realize one’s powers and that some at least can become complete exemplars of humanity. However, this is impossible. It is a feature of human sociability that we are by ourselves but parts of what we might be. We must look to others to attain the excellences that we must leave aside, or lack altogether. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
The collective activity of society, the many associations and the public life of the largest community that regulates the, sustains our efforts and elicits our contribution. Yet the good attained from the common culture far exceeds our work in the sense that we cease to be mere fragments: that art of ourselves that we directly realize is joined to a wider and just arrangement the aims of which we affirm. The division of labour is overcome not by each becoming complete in oneself, but by willing and meaningful work within a just social union of social union in which all can freely participate as they so incline. The works, and the designs, and the purposes of God, can not be frustrated, neither can they come to naught, for God does not walk in crooked paths. Remember, remember, that it is not the work of God that is frustrated, but the work of humans. For although a human may have many revelations, and have power to do many mighty works, yet, if one boasts in one’s own strength, and follows after the dictates of one’s own will, one must fall and insure the vengeance of a just God upon one. Behold, you have been intrusted with these things, but how strict were your commandments. And remember, also, the promises which were made to you, if you did not transgress them. Clouds are flowing in the river, waves are flying in the sky. Life is laughing in pebble. Does a pebble ever die? Flowers grow out of the Earth, such a miracle to see. What seems dead and what seems dying makes for butterflies to be. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
Life is laughing in a pebble, flowers bathe in morning dew. Dust is dancing in my footsteps, and I wonder who is who. Clouds are flowing in the river, clouds are drifting in my teas, on a never-ending journey, what a miracle to be! Let them praise the name of the Lord, for is name alone is exalted. His glory is above the Earth and Heaven. He hath given glory unto Hi people, praise to all His faithful ones, to the children of America, a people near to Him. Hallelujah. Ascribe unto the Lord, ye ministering Angels, ascribe unto the Lord glory and power. Render unto the Lord the glory due unto His name; worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness. The voice of the Lord is over the waters; the God of glory thundereth! The Lord is over the great waters. The voice of the Lord is mighty; the voice of the Lord is fully of majesty. The voice of the Lord breaketh the cedars; yea, the Lord shattereth the cedars of Tahoe. He maketh the mountains leap like a calf, Tahoe and Sacramento like a wild ox. The voice of the Lord causeth the desert to tremble; the Lord maketh the desert a Heavenly temple. The voice of the Lord maketh the oak trees dance, and strippeth the forest bare; while in His Temple everything proclaims His glory. The Lord was King at the Flood; the Lord shall remain King forever. May the Lord give strength unto His people; may the Lord bless His people with peace. There is no other way to settle doubts concerning the soul with incontestable certainty than the way of getting personal knowledge of it by a mystical glimpse. Even when a human denies the Overself and thinks it out of one’s view of life, one is denying and thinking by means of the Overself’s own power—attenuated and reflected though it be. One is able to reject the divine presence with one’s mind only because it is already in one’s mind. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
BRIGHTON STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH
Rancho Cordova, CA |
Now Selling!
Brighton Station at Cresleigh Ranch is Rancho Cordova’s newest home community! This charming neighborhood offers an array of home types with eye catching architecture styles such as Mid-Century Modern, California Modern, Prairie, and Contemporary Farmhouse.
Located off Douglas Road and Rancho Cordova Parkway, the residents of Cresleigh Ranch will enjoy, being just minutes from shopping, dining, and entertainment, and quick access to Highway 50 and Grant Line Road providing a direct route into Folsom. Residents here also benefit from no HOA fees, two community parks and the benefits of being a part of the highly-rated Elk Grove Unified School District.
Best of all, each Cresleigh home comes fully equipped with an All Ready connected home! This smart home package comes included with your home and features great tools including: video door bell and digital deadbolt for the front door, connect home hub so you can set scenes and routines to make life just a little easier. Two smart switches and USB outlets are also included, plus we’ll gift you a Google Home Hub and Google Mini to help connect everything together!
Welcome to Cresleigh Homes, America’s Favourite! Our homes are designed for seamless integration between indoors and outdoors. The colors, the trim, the sightlines – everything combines to make you feel like you’re experiencing the best of both worlds – at the same time! See more pictures from our Brighton Station Res 4 model via the link in profile. https://cresleigh.com/brighton-station/
We Cannot Shift the Responsibility for What We Do on to Others!
It is not only that you cannot go home again; you cannot pretend to be from a place you only visited. While imaginetic centers concentrate on partial images of tomorrow, defining possible futures for a single industry, an organization a city or its subsystems, however, we also need sweeping, visionary ideas about the society as a whole. Multiplying our images of possible futures is important; but these images need to be organized, crystallized into structured form. In the past, utopian literature did this for us. It played a practical, crucial role in ordering human’s dreams about alterative futures. Today we suffer for lack of utopian ideas around which to organize competing images of possible futures. Most traditional utopias picture simple static societies—id est, societies that have nothing in common with super-age of information. B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two,the model for several existing experimental communes, depicts a pre-industrial way of life—small, close to the Earth, built on farming and handcraft. Even those two brilliant anti-utopias, Brave New World and 1984, now seem oversimple. Both describe societies based on high technology and low complexity: the machines are sophisticated but the social and culture relationships are fixed and deliberately simplified. Today we need powerful new utopian and anti-utopian concepts that look forward to super-age of informationism, rather than backward to simpler societies. These concepts, however, can no longer be produced in the old way. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
First, no book, by itself, is adequate to describe a super-age of information future in emotionally compelling terms. Each conception of a super-age of information utopia or anti-utopia needs to be embodied in many forms—films, plays, noels and works of art-rather than a single work of fiction. Second, it may now be too difficult for any individua writer, no matter how gifted, to described a convincingly complex future. We need, therefore, a revolution in the production of utopias: collaborative utopianism. We need to construct “utopia factories.” One way might be to assemble a small group of top social scientists—an economist, a sociologist, an anthropologist, and so on—asking them to work together, even live together, long enough to hammer out among themselves a set of well-defined values on which they believe a truly super-age of information utopia society might be based. Each member of the team might then attempt to describe in nonfiction form a sector of an imagined society built on these values. What would its family be like? Its economy, laws, religion, pleasures, youth culture, music, art, its sense of time, its degree of differentiation, its psychological problems? By working together and ironing out inconsistencies, where possible, a comprehensive and adequately complex picture might be drawn of a seamless, temporary form of the super-age of information. At this point, with the completion of detailed analysis, the project would move to the fiction stage. Novelists, film-makers, science fiction writers and others, working closely with psychologists, could prepare creative works about the lives of individual characters in the imagined society. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
Meanwhile, other groups could be at work on counter-utopias. While Utopia A might stress materialist, success-oriented values, Utopia B might base itself on sensual, hedonistic values, C on the primacy of aesthetic values, D on individualism, E on collectivism, and so forth. Ultimately, a stream of books, plays, film, and television programs would flow from this collaboration between art, social science and futurism, thereby educating large numbers of people about the cost and benefits of the various proposed utopias. Finally, if social imagination is in short supply, we are even more lacking in people willing to subject utopian ideas to systematic test. More and more young people, in their dissatisfaction with the age of information, are experimenting with their own lives, forming utopian communities, trying new social arrangements, from group marriage to living-learning communities. Today, as in the past, the weight of established society comes down hard on the visionary who attempts to practice, as well as merely preach. Rather than ostracizing utopians, we should take advantage of their willingness to experiment, encourage them with money, if not respect. Most of today’s “intentional communities” or utopian colonies, however, reveal a powerful preference for the past. These may be of value to the individuals in them, but the society as a whole would be better served by utopian experiments based on super- rather than pre-industrial forms. Instead of a communal farm, why not a computer software company whose program writers live and work all in one residential neighbourhood? #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
Why not an education technology company whose members pool their money and merge their families? Instead of raising radishes or crafting sandals, why not an oceanographic research installation organized along utopian lines? Why not a group medical practice that takes advantage of the latest medical technology but whose members accept modest pay and pool their profits to run a completely new-style medical school? Why not recruit living groups to try out the proposals of the utopia factories? In short, if we base our experiments on the technology and society of tomorrow rather than that of the past, we can use utopianism as a tool rather than an escape. And once done, why not the most rigorous, scientific analysis of the results? The findings could be priceless, were they to save us from mistakes or lead us toward more workable organizational forms for industry, education, family life or politics. Such imaginative explorations of possible futures would deepen and enrich our scientific study of probable futures. They would lay a basis for the radical forward extension of the society’s time horizon. They would help us apply social imagination to the future of futurism itself. Indeed, with these as a background, we must consciously begin to multiply the scientific future-sensing organs of society. Scientific futurist institutes must be spotted like nodes in a loose network throughout the entire governmental structure in the techno-societies, so that in every department, local or national, some staff devotes itself systematically to scanning the probable long-term future in its assigned field. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
Futurists should be attached to every political party, university, corporation, professional association, trade union and student organization. We need to train thousands of young people in the perspectives and techniques of scientific futurism, inviting them to share in the exciting venture of mapping probable futures. We also need national agencies to provide technical assistance to local communities in creating their own futurist groups. And we need a similar center, perhaps jointly funded by American and European foundations, to help incipient futurist centers in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. We are in a race between rising levels of uncertainty produced by the acceleration of change, and the need for reasonably accurate images of what at any instant is the most probable future. The generation of reliable images of the most probable future thus becomes a matter of the highest national, indeed, international urgency. As the globe is itself dotted with future-sensors, we might consider creating a great international institute, a World futures data bank. Such an institute, staffed with top caliber men and women from all the sciences and social sciences, would take as its purpose the collection and systematic integration of predictive reports generated by scholars and imaginative thinkers in all the intellectual disciplines all over the World. Of course, those working in such an institute would know that they could never create a single, static diagram of the future. Instead, the product of their effort would be constantly changing geography of the future, a continually re-created overarching image based on the best predictive work available. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
The men and women engaged in this work would know that they must work with inadequate data; they would appreciate the difficulties inherent in exploring the uncharted territories of tomorrow. However, humans already know more about the future than they have ever tried to formulate and integrate in any systematic and scientific way. Attempts to bring this knowledge together would constitute one of the crowing intellectual efforts in history—and one of the most worthwhile. Only when decision-makers are armed with better forecasts of future events, when by successive approximation we increase the accuracy of forecast, will our attempts to manage change improve perceptibly. For reasonably accurate assumptions about the future are a precondition for understanding the potential consequence of our own actions. And without such understanding, the management of change is impossible. If the humanization of the planner is the first stage in the strategy of social futurism, therefore, the forward extension of our time horizon is the second. To transcend technocracy, we need not only to reach beyond our economic philistinism, but to open our minds to more distant futures, both probable and possible. One consequence of trying to be objective, of attempting to frame our moral conceptions and judgments from a shared point of view, is that we are more likely to reach agreement. Indeed, ceteris paribus (other things equal), the preferred description of the initial situation is that which introduces the greatest convergence of opinion. It is partly for this reason that we accept the constraints of a common standpoint, since we cannot reasonably expect our views to fall into line when they are affected by the contingencies of our different circumstances. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
However, of course our judgments will not coincide on all questions, and in fact many is not most social issues may still be insoluble, especially if viewed in their full complexity. This is why the numerous simplifications of justice as fairness are acknowledged. We have only to recall the reasons for such notions as the veil of ignorance, pure procedural justice (as opposed to allocative justice), lexical ordering, the division of the basic structure into two parts, and so on. Taken all together the parties hope that these and other devices will simplify political and social questions so that the resulting balance of justice, made possible by the greater consensus, outweighs what may have been lost by ignoring certain potentially relevant aspects of moral situations. The complexity of problems of justice is up to the persons in the original position to decide. Although ethical differences are bound to remain, seeing the social World from the original position does permit essential understandings to be reached. The acceptance of the principles of right and justice forges the bonds of civic friendship and establishes the basis of comity amidst the disparities that persist. Citizens are able to recognize one another’s good faith and desire for justice even though agreement may occasionally break down on constitutional questions and most certainly on many issues of policy. However, unless there existed a common perspective, the assumption of which narrowed differences of opinion, reasoning and argument would be pointless and we would have no rational grounds for believing in the soundness of our convictions. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
It is clear that this interpretation of autonomy and objectivity depends upon the theory of justice. The idea of the original position is used to give a consistent rendering of both notions. Of course, if it is believed that the principles of justice would not be chosen, the content of these conceptions would have to be suitably altered. One who holds that the principle of utility would be consented to thinks that our autonomy is expressed by following this criterion. Nevertheless, the general will be the same, and both autonomy and objectivity are still explicated by reference to the initial situation. However, some have characterized autonomy and objectivity in an entirely different way. They have suggested that autonomy is the complete freedom to form our moral opinions and that the conscientious judgment of every moral agent ought absolutely to be respected. Objectivity is then attributed to those judgments which satisfy all the standards that the agent oneself has in one’s liberty decided are relevant. These standards may or may not have anything to do with taking up a common point of view that others might reasonably be expected to share; nor of course is the corresponding idea of autonomy connected with such a perspective. I mention these other interpretations only to indicate by contrast the nature of the contract doctrine. From the standpoint of justice as fairness it is not true that the conscientious judgements of each person ought absolutely to be respected; not is it true that individuals are completely free from their moral convictions. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
If they mean that, having arrived at our moral opinions conscientiously (as we believe), we always have a claim to be allowed to act on them, these contentions are mistaken. The problem here is that of our deciding how one is to answer those who strive to act as their erring conscience directs them. How do we ascertain that their conscience and not ours is mistaken, and under what circumstances can they be compelled to desist? Now the answer to these questions is found by ascending to the original position: when one seeks to impose on us conditions that violate the principles to which we would each consent in that situation, a person’s conscience is misguided. And when the conflict is viewed from that perspective, we can resist one’s plans in those ways that would be authorized. We are not literally to respect the conscience of an individual. Rather we are to respect one as a person and we do this by limiting one’s actions, when this proves necessary, only as the principles we would both acknowledge permit. In the original position the parties agree to be held responsible for the conception of justice that is chosen. There is no violation of our autonomy so long as is principles are properly followed. Moreover, these principles stipulate that on many occasions we cannot shift the responsibility for what we do on to others. Those in authority are accountable for the policies they pursue and the instructions they lay down. And those who acquiesce in carrying out unjust commands or in abetting evil deigns cannot in general plead that they did not know better or that the fault rests solely with those in higher positions. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
The details concerning these matters belong to partial compliance theory. The essential point here is that the principles that best conform to our nature as free and equal rational beings themselves establish our accountability. Otherwise autonomy is likely to lead to a mere collision of self-righteous wills, and objectivity to the adherence to a consistent yet idiosyncratic system. God has told us through His prophets that we are free to choose between good and evil. We may choose liberty and eternal life by following Jesus Christ. We are also free to choose captivity and death by following Satan. “Wherefore, humans are free according to the flesh; and all things are given them which are expedient unto humans. And they are free to choose liberty and eternal life, through the great Mediator of all humans, or to choose captivity and death, according to the captivity and power of the devil; for he seeketh that all humans might be miserable like unto himself,” reports 2 Nephi 2.27. In our premortal life we have moral agency. One purpose of Earth life is to show what choices we will make. “And to bring about his eternal purposes in the end of humans, after he had created our first parents, and the beast of the field and the fowls of the air, and in fine, all things which are created, it must needs be that there was an opposition; even the forbidden fruit in opposition to the tree of life; the one being sweet and the other bitter. Wherefore, the Lord God gave unto humans that they should act for themselves. Wherefore humans could not act for oneself save it should be that ne was enticed by the one,” reports 2 Nephi 2.15-16. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
If we are forced to choose the right, we would not be able to show what we would choose for ourselves. Also, we are happier doing things when we have made our own choices. Agency was one of the principal issues to arise in the premotal Council in Heaven. It was one of the main causes of the conflict between the followers of Christ and the followers of Satan. Satan said, “Behold, here am I, send me, I will by thy son, and I will redeem all humankind, that one soul shall not be lost, and surely I will do it; wherefore give me thine honour,” reports Moses 4.1. In saying this, he “rebelled against God and sought to destroy the agency of human.” Reports Moses 4.3. His offer was rejected, and he was cast out of Heaven with his followers. “And it came to pass that Adam, being tempted of the devil—for, behold, the devil was before Adam, for he rebelled against me, saying, “Give me thine honour, which is my power; and also a third part of the hosts of Heaven turned he away from me because of the agency; and they were thrust down, and this came the devil and his angels,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 29.36-37. Agency makes our life on Earth a period of testing. When planning the mortal creation of His children, God said, “We will prove [test] them herewith, to see if they will do all things whatsoever the Lord their God shall command them,” reports Abraham 3.25. Without the gift of agency, we would have been unable to show our Heavenly Father whether we would do all that He commanded us. Because we are able to choose, we are responsible for our actions. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
When we choose to live according to God’s plan for us, our agency is strengthened. Right actions increase our power to make more right choices. “And now remember, remember, my brethren, that whosoever perisheth, perisheth unto oneself; and whosoever doeth iniquity, doeth it unto oneself; for behold, ye are free; ye are permitted to act for yourselves; for behold, God hath given unto you a knowledge and he hath made you free. He hath given unto you that ye might know good from evil, and he hath given unto you that ye might choose life or death; and ye can do good and be restored,” reports Helaman 14.30-31. As we obey each of our Father’s commandments, we grow in wisdom and strength of character. Our faith increases. We find it easier to make right choices. We began to make choices as spirit children in our Heavenly Father’s presence. Our choices there made us worthy to come to Earth. Our Heavenly Father wants us to grow in faith, power, knowledge, wisdom, and all other good things. If we keep His commandments and make right choices, we will learn and understand. We will become like Him. “One that keepeth his commandments receiveth truth and light, until he is glorified in truth and knoweth all things,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 93.28. In times of social doubt and loss of faith in long established values, there is a tendency to fall back on the virtues of integrity: truthfulness and sincerity, lucidity and commitment, or, as some say, authenticity. If no one knows what is true, at least we can make our beliefs our own way and not adopt them as handed to us by others. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
If the traditional moral rules are no longer relevant and we cannot agree which ones should take their place, we can in any event decide with a clear head how we mean to act and stop pretending that somehow or other it is already decided for us and we must accept this or that authority. Now of course the virtues of integrity are virtues, and among the excellences of free persons. Yet while necessary, they are not sufficient; for their definition allows for mist any content: a tyrant might display these attributes to a high degree, and by doing so exhibit a certain charm, not deceiving oneself by political pretenses and excuses of fortune. It is impossible to construct a moral view from these virtues alone; being virtues of form they are in a sense secondary. However, joined to the appropriate conception of justice, one that follows for autonomy and objectivity correctly understood, they come into their own. The idea of the original position, and the principles chosen there, show how this is achieved. A well-ordered society affirms that autonomy of persons and encourages the objectivity of their considered judgments of justice. Any doubts that its members may entertain about the soundness of their moral sentiments when they reflect upon how these dispositions were acquired may be dispelled by seeing that their convictions match the principles which would be chosen in the original position or, if they do not, by revising their judgments so that they do. However, Christians should not unwarily plunge into the political marshlands, thinking they will drain the swamp. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
There are traps. Political classics use strategies to curry the favour of disparate special-interest groups, one by one, assembling voting blocs into a surprise majority. They often write off the marginalized groups like people of certain ethnic groups or status, like the disabled and/or senior citizens, but reach out to popular causes or traditional supporters in business and political party; they ignore people who do not have much of a voice, but exploit whatever allies that will allow themselves to be cultivated. Then key leaders are invited to the White House, following a scenario staged for maximum benefit. They are allowed to dine with politicians in the executive dining room located in the basement of the West Wing. Guest are escorted past saluting guards, down a long corridor lined with dramatic photographs of the president in action, then pause at the door of the dining room, where the situation room is pointed out. Everyone knows of the legendary super-secret national-security nerve center. The very words conjure up images of map covered walls, whirring computers, and a bevy of generals studying the movements of other nations. (Actually, it is nothing more than a large, crowded office with some communications equipment and old charts on the wall; the real command centers have been moved to the Pentagon after World War II.) The executive dining room is paneled in rich, hand-rubbed mahogany, lined with a waiting row of red-jacket Navy stewards. Seated at the dozen tables, huddled in conversation, are most of the cabinet and senior staff. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
The dramatic effect overwhelms even the staunchest adversary. Some people who have never been to the White House before will be so impressed that during their first lunch they will declare their allegiance to help in your campaign. When you properly seduce people, they will willingly sign up to get played. Most people want to be razzle dazzled and made to feel special, even if they know it is temporary and not authentic. And of course, if the does not sell them, then the crowd is walked upstairs to the Oval Office to mee the president. The president is the master at the game. He will always give his dazzled visitor gold-plated cuff links with the presidential seal. The person will be so overwhelmed as the president leaves almost bowing, not more than sixty seconds later. It is not easy to resist the allure of the Oval Office. All kind of groups are taken to see the president, from friendly cattlemen to sophisticated educators enraged over budget cuts or the pandemic. It is always the same. In the reception room they rehearse their angry lines and reassure one another, “I’ll tell him what’s going on. He’s got to do something.” When the assistant comes to escort the group in, they set their jaws and march toward the door. However, once it swings open, the assistant announcing, “The president will see you,” it is as if they have suddenly sniffed some intoxicating fragrance. Most people become as self-conscious as Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden after eating the forbidden fruit about even stepping on the blue carpet on which is sculpted the Great Seal of the United State of America. And the president’s voice and presence fills the room. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
Invariably, the lions of the waiting room become the lambs of the Oval Office. No one ever shows outward hostility. Most, except the labour leaders, forget their best-rehearsed lines. They nod when the president speaks, and in those rare instances when they disagree, they do so apologetically, assuring the president that they personally respect his opinion. And that is why the fake news media is used to spread propaganda. People do not realize how powerful the president is until they meet him. They have no idea how blessed they will feel in the ornate White House, it is like their minds have been erased and they are under a spell. Ironically, none are more complaint than the religious leaders. Of all people, they should be the most aware of the sinful nature of humans and the least overwhelmed by pomp and protocol. However, theological knowledge sometimes wilts in the face of Worldly power. That is why meetings for evangelical groups, denominational councils, and individual religious leaders are frequently scheduled. The weekly church services scheduled most Sundays for the East Room provide great opportunities as well. To select the preacher, it is determined who will give the White House the greatest impact—politically, that is, not spiritually. Many people in the White House are nominal Christians at best and have no way to judge the spiritual. And there are always two hundred or more seats to be filled, the tickets are like keys to the political kingdom. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
Then there are invitations to social functions and state dinners. The quota for this event is filled with the support from people the White House covets the most. It is difficult to resist the allure of the most regal of events, the state dinner, held in honour of visiting World leaders. Each of the twelve tables seat ten of the most influential people in America—Supreme Court justices, senators, ambassadors, film stars, cabinet members—and targets for political support. For instance, if the White House needs several electoral-rich Northeastern and Midwestern states to win an election, one may call a prominent Christian leader whose influence is particularly great in that region and invite one for a private dinner cruise with the president. As they arrive at the Washington Navy Yard, sailors in white dress uniforms line the gangway at attention and salute as the crew boards the presidential yacht, Sequoia. Its mahogany sides and brass fitting make it sparkle like the most grand Victorian mansion as it eases away from the dock. The Washington skyline fades into the distance, and the president escorts the guests to dinner in the main salon. White House china, silver, and crystal appoint the starched white tablecloth; stewards scurry back, back, forth and forth serving chateaubriand and the vintage La Fete Rothschild. The dinner discussion is as impressive as the food. When the guest musters the courage to raise points of concern to the religious community, the president shows an amazing grasp of even the intricate details of those issues (being briefed thoroughly by a dutiful assistant that afternoon). Every now and then, the president will stop and say to his assistant, “I want this done. This man is right. You order the attorney general to take care of that tomorrow morning.” Then he will resume the conversation. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
It is all sham, of course. The president means what he is saying, and the people present even think some of the things will be accomplished. However, whatever else happens, that religious leader is convinced that the president is on his side. You can attract more bees with flowers, than force and daggers. Before arriving at Mount Vernon, the president will then lead the crew to the foredeck and stand at attention as the colours are retired, his hand over his heart. The guest will do the same. When the bugle has faded, the ship will be docked; a waiting Marine helicopter takes their new friend back to the airport, and other returns the president and assistant back to the White House lawn. It is wrong to suggest that the leader is unduly influenced; but even such a wise, honourable, and religious man cannot help but be impressed by the trappings of power. He gets what he wants—the president’s ear on certain key issues. And they get what they want. The president’s prominent public friendship with this leader sends a powerful sign to millions of voters. And in the fall, it can allow one to carry more than 58 percent of the vote in many Northeastern and Midwestern precincts that have never before voted for a Republican. This is not to suggest that the White House is engaged in a sinister conspiracy to corrupt the church It is simply the way political systems work. People in power use power to keep themselves in power. Even if they are genuinely interested in a special-interest group’s agenda—or naturally disposed to their position—they will work that relationship for everything they can get out of it. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
In totalitarian regimes some officials are so unscrupulous as to feign religious interest simply to ensnare Christians. In Nicaragua, President Daniel Ortega maintains two offices. When he is receiving church people or American visitors, he sits in a Bible-laden office adored with crucifixes. When he meets with government officials or visitors from socialist nations, he occupies an office displaying Marxist slogans and pictures of such revolutionary heroes as Marx, Engels, and Lenin. I am not advocating that religious groups of leaders boycott the White House or the palaces and parliaments of the World. That is where the political action is and Christian need to influence policies for justice and righteousness. That is in the best biblical tradition of Jeremiah, Amos, Micah, Daniel, and a host of others—though many prophets clearly preferred the desert to the palace. However, Christians (and others as well) need to do so with eyes open, aware of the snares. The demon inherent in every [political] part is at all times ready enough to disguise oneself as the Holy Ghost. Governments, to have a rational foundation for the control of the masses, are obliged to pretend that they are professing the highest religious teaching known to humans Consider several of the most dangerous pitfalls awaiting the unwary. The church is not and must never allow itself to become another special-interest group lined up at the public trough. For in doing so, it would sacrifice its claim to objective ethical concern which [is the church’s] chief political as well as moral resource. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
If the church were to become a mere interest group, it would then be measured and honoured according to political and not moral criteria. The great strength of the American church is that it is not linked to a partisan cause. By way of contrast, European people reject the clergy less because they are representatives of God than because they are friends of authority. A second danger is the politics can be like the tabloid girlfriend, or the lead model for a popular brand who forgets they are merely playing a role and no more than a public servant. Christian leaders who are courted by political forces may soon begin to overestimate their own importance. The head of one large international relief agency mistakenly came to believe that heads of state welcomed him because of who he was rater than what he represented. It was not delusions of power. He left his family and was eventually removed from his position—after doing great harm to the cause he had served for much of his life. A side effect of this delusion is that rather than lose their access to political influence, some church leaders have surrendered their independence. “If I speak out against this policy, they reason, “I will not get invited to dinner and my chances to become minister will be cut off.” While such rationalizing is understandable, the result is exactly the opposite; they keep their place but lose their voice and thus any possibility of holding government to moral account. In this way the gospel becomes hostage to the political fortunes of a particular movement. This is the third and perhaps most dangerous snare. Both liberals and conservatives have made this mistake of aligning their spiritual goals with a particular political agenda. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
People of faith must never be made to feel that if they disagree with the pastor’s partisan politics, that they are not people of faith. Several years ago, a prominent leader of a large Christian mission visited a developing nation ruled by an authoritarian leader. Th leader was friendly to the United States of America and held a regal dinner party at the palace honouring the mission executive. The awestruck visitor publicly and effusively praised the head of state. Months later when that head of state was deposed, the Christian’s mission work in that country was deposed right along with him. Inevitably, this kind of political alignment compromises the gospel. All successful Christian social theory in the immediate future must be based on this truth: the religion be not made an instrument of political ideology. Because it tempts one to water down the truth of the gospel, ideological alignment, whether on the left or right, accelerates the church’s secularization. When the church aligns itself politically, it gives priority to the compromises and temporal successes of the political World rather than its Christian confession of eternal truth. And when the church gives up its rightful place as the conscience of the culture, the consequences for a society can be horrific. As we have seen, many German churches in the 1930s allied themselves with the new nationalistic movement. One churchman even described the Nazis as a “gift and miracle of God.” It was the confessing church, not the politically-minded church, which retained its orthodoxy and thus resisted the perceived evils of Mr. Hitler’s state. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
Today’s liberation theologians have fallen into this trap, putting ideology ahead of orthodoxy. It began, as did many Christian political movements, with noble intentions. Righteously outraged at injustices to the poor in so-called Christian cultures, priests and church workers began to organize communities for actions. So far, so good. However, as those organizations failed to solve problems, frustrations grew; attacks on structures became more strident. When Christians put economic issues ahead of spiritual salvation, they are embracing economic determinism; it is then but a short step to revolutionary politics, Marxism, and the fatal mistake of believing the Kingdom of God can be ushered in by political means, as Father Ernesto Cardenal, a Nicaraguan government official, well illustrates: “A World of perfect communism is the Kingdom of God on Earth.” Does all this mean that Christian cannot work with political groups? Certainly not. In fact, often Christians must work with coalitions of like-minded people who have different motivations. However, in order to maintain their Christian identity, they must inwardly detach themselves from the motivations and ultimate goals of their ideological colleagues. In World War II, for example, a devout Christian might have fought to stop the ethnical cleansing of Nazism and the Holocaust because one believed God commanded that the state is to restrain evil. Next to one in the same position might have been a soldier fighting solely for national pride or honour. Both would have been shooting at the same enemy, but for different reasons. Today Christians may find themselves suspect—I have experienced this myself—to the very people on whose side they are fighting. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
However, this is the price they must pay to preserve their independence and not be beholden to any political ideological alignment. Only a church free of any outside domination can be the conscience of society and hold government morally accountable before God to live up to its own claims. And as the church faithfully fulfills this role, even the most determined of tyrants topple. Justice without mercy is tyranny, and mercy without justice is weakness. Justice without love is pure socialism, and love without justice is baloney. “And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from Heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house they were sitting,” reports Acts 2.12. Receive the power of Pentecost for increase, multiplication, and miracles. If you have been asking God for a supernatural turnaround in your life, healing, deliverance, or a financial breakthrough know that Miracles are coming! Increase is coming! Multiplication is coming! The great sea has set me in motion. Set me adrift, and I move as a fish in the river. The arch of sky and mightiness of storms encompasses me, and I am left trembling with joy. The eyes of all look hopefully to Thee, God, and Thou givest them their food in due season. Thou openest Thy hand, and satisfies every living thing with favour. The Lord is righteous in all His ways, and gracious in al His works. The Lord is near unto all who call upon Him, to all who call upon Him in truth. He will fulfill the desire of them that revere Him; He will also hear their cry, and will save them. The Lord preserveth all them that love Him; but all the wicked will He bring low. My mouth shall speak the praise of the Lord; let all humans bless His holy name for ever and ever. We will bless the Lord from this time forth, and forevermore. Hallelujah. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
MILLS STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH
Rancho Cordova, CA |
Now Selling!
Mills Station at Cresleigh Ranch is Rancho Cordova’s newest home community! This charming neighborhood offers an array of home types with eye catching architecture styles such as Mission, Mid-Century Modern, California Modern, and Contemporary Farmhouse.
Located off Douglas Road and Rancho Cordova Parkway, the residents of Cresleigh Ranch will enjoy, being just minutes from shopping, dining, and entertainment, and quick access to Highway 50 and Grant Line Road providing a direct route into Folsom. Residents here also benefit from no HOA fees, two community parks and the benefits of being a part of the highly-rated Elk Grove Unified School District.
You love your life, but at Cresleigh Ranch, it gets even better! With an array of beautifully designed two story homes and spacious, ranch-style cottage homes, this is the peaceful community you have been looking for!
Rancho Cordova is a prominent suburb of the Sacramento Metropolitan Statistical Area and a Home Rule Municipality located in Sacramento County, California, United States of America.
Bear in Mind that Even Impossibility is Often Temporary!
When you look directly at an insane person, all you see is a reflection of your own knowledge that one is insane, which is not to see one at all. To see one, you must see what one saw. In a World of accelerant change, next year is nearer to us than next month was in a more leisurely era. This radically altered fact of life must be internalized by decision-makers in industry, government and elsewhere. Their time horizons must be extended. To plan for a more distant future does not mean to tie oneself to dogmatic programs. Plans can be tentative, fluid, subject to continual revision. Yet flexibility need not mean shortsightedness. To transcend technocracy, our social horizons must reach decades, even generations, into the future. This requires more than a lengthening of our formal plans. It means an infusion of the entire society, from top to bottom, with a new socially aware future-consciousness. One of the healthiest phenomena of recent years has been the sudden proliferation of organizations devoted to the study of the future. This recent development is, in itself, a homeostatic response of society to the speed-up of change. Within a few year we have seen the creation of future-oriented think tanks like the Institute for the Future; the Commission on the Year 2000, and the Harvard Program on Technology and Society; the appearance of futurist journals in England, France, Italy, Germany and the United States of America; the spread of university courses in forecasting and related subjects; the spread of university courses forecasting and related subjects; the convocation of international futurist meetings in Oslo, Berlin, and Kyoto; the coalescence groups like Futuribles, Europe 2000, Mankind 2000, the World Future Society. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Future centers are to be found in West Berlin, in Prague, in London, in Moscow, Rome and Washington, in Caracas, even in the remote jungles of Brazil at Belem and Belo Horizonte. Unlike conventional technocratic planners whose horizons usually extend no further than a few years into tomorrow, these groups concern themselves with change fifteen, twenty-five, even fifty years in the future. Every society faces not merely a succession of probable futures, but an array of possible futures, and a conflict over preferable futures. The management of change is the effort to convert certain possibilities into probables, in pursuit of agreed-on preferables. Determining the probably calls for science of futurism. Delineating the possible calls for an art of futurism. Defining the preferable calls for a politics of futurism. The Worldwide futurist movement today does not yet differentiate clearly among these functions. Its heavy emphasis is on the assessment of probabilities. Thus in many of these centers, economists, sociologists, mathematicians, biologist, physicists, operations researchers and others invent and apply methods for forecasting future probabilities. At what date could aquaculture feed half the World’s population? What are the odds that electric cars will supplant gasoline automobile in the next fifteen years? What changes are most probably in leisure patterns, urban governments, race relations? Stressing the interconnectedness of disparate events and trends, scientific futurists are also devoting increasing attention to the social consequences of technology. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
The Institute for the Future is, among other things, investigating the probable social and culture effects of advanced communications technology. The group at Harvard is concerned with social problems likely to arise from bio-medical advances. Futurists in Brazil examine the probable outcomes of various economic development policies. The rationale for studying probable futures is compelling. It is impossible for an individual to live through a single working day without making thousands of assumptions about the probable future. The commuter who calls to say, “I will be home at six” bases one’s prediction on assumptions about the probability that the train will run on time. When mother sends Johnny to school, she tacitly assumes the school will be there when he arrives. Just as a pilot cannot steer a ship without projecting its course, we cannot steer our personal lives without continually making such assumptions, consciously or otherwise. Societies, too, construct an architecture of premises about tomorrow. Decision-makers in industry, government, politics, and other sectors of society could not function without them. In periods of turbulent change, however, these socially-shaped images of the probable future become less accurate. The breakdown of control in society today is directly linked to our inadequate images of probable futures. Of course no one can “know” the future in any absolute sense. We can systematize and deepen our assumptions and attempt to assign probabilities to them. Even this is difficult. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
Attempts to forecast the future inevitably alter it. Similarly, once a forecast is disseminated, the act of dissemination (as distinct from investigation) also produces a perturbation. Forecasts tend to become self-fulfilling or self-defeating. As the time horizon is extended into the more distant future, we are forced to rely on informed hunch and guesswork. Moreover, certain unique events—assassinations, for example—are, for all intents and purposes, unpredictable at present (although we can forecast classes of such events). Despite all thus, it is time to erase, once and for all, the popular myth that the future is “unknowable.” The difficulties ought to chasten and challenge, not paralyze. We should admit into our thinking the idea of approximations, that is, that there are varying degrees of accuracy and inaccuracy of estimate. A rough idea of what lies ahead is better than none, and for many purposes extreme accuracy is wholly unnecessary. We are not, therefore, as helpless in dealing with future probabilities as mist people assume. The British social scientist Donald G. MacRae correctly assert that “modern sociologists can in fact make a number of comparatively short term and limited predictions with a good deal of assurance.” Apart from the standard methods of social science, however, we are experimenting with potentially powerful new tools for probing the future. These range from complex ways of extrapolating existing trends, to the construction of highly intricate models, games and simulations, the preparation of detailed speculative scenarios, the systematic study of history for relevant analogies, morphological research, relevance analysis, contextual mapping and the like. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
In comprehensive investigation of technological forecasting, Dr. Erich Jantsch, formerly a consultant to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and a research associate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has identified scores of distinct new techniques either in use or in the experimental stage. The Institute for the Future in Middletown, Connecticut, a prototype of the futurist think tank, is a leader in the design of new forecasting tools. One of these is Delphi—a method largely developed by Dr. Olaf Helmer, the mathematician-philosopher who is one of the founders of the IFF. Delphi attempts to deal with very distant futures by making systematic use of the “intuitive” guesstimates of large numbers of experts. The work Delphi has led to a further innovation which has special importance in the attempt to prevent future shock by regulating the pace of change. Pioneered by Theodore J. Gordon of the IFF, and called Cross Impact Matrix analysis, it traces the effect of one innovation on another, making possible, for the first time, anticipatory analysis of complex chains of social, technological and other occurrences—and the rates at which they are likely to occur. We are, in short, witnessing a perfect extraordinary thrust toward more scientific appraisal of future probabilities, a ferment likely, in itself, to have a powerful impact on the future. It would be foolish to oversell the ability of science, as yet, to forecast complex events accurately. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Yet the danger today is not that we will overestimate our ability; the real danger is that we will under-utilize it. For even when our still-primitive attempts at scientific forecasting turn out to be grossly in error, the very effort helps us identify key variables in change, it helps clarify goals, and it forces more careful evaluation of policy alternatives. In these ways, if no others, probing the future pays off in the present. If we are to shift the planner’s time horizon and infuse the entire society with a greater sense of tomorrow, anticipating probably futures, however, is only part of what needs doing. For we must also vastly widen our conception of possible futures. To the rigorous discipline of science, we must add the flaming imagination of art. Today as never before we need a multiplicity of visions, dreams and prophecies—images of potential tomorrows. Before we can rationally decide which alternative pathways to choose, which cultural styles to pursue, we must first ascertain which are possible. Conjecture, speculation and the visionary view thus become as coldly practical a necessity as feet-on-the-floor “realism” was in an earlier time. This is why some of the World’s biggest and most touch-minded corporations, once living embodiment of presentism, today hire intuitive futurists, science fiction writers and visionaries as consultants. A gigantic European chemical company employs a futurist who combines a scientific background with training as a theologian. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
An American communications empire engages a future-minded social critic. A glass manufacturer searches for a science fiction writer to imagine the possible corporate forms of the future. Companies turn to these “blue-skyers” and “wild birds” not for scientific forecasts of probabilities, but for mind-stretching speculations about possibilities. Corporations must not remain the only agencies with access to such services. Local government, schools, voluntary associations and others also need to examine their potential futures imaginatively. One way to help them do so would be to establish in each community “imaginetic centers” devoted to technically assisted brainstorming. These would be places where people noted for creative imagination, rather than technical expertise, are brought together to examine present crises, to anticipate future crises, and to speculate freely, even playfully, about possible futures. What, for example, are the possible futures of urban transportation? Traffic is a problem involving the movement of humans and objects through spaces? To speculate about this question, an imaginetic center might enlist artists, sculptors, dancers, furniture designers, parking lot attendants, and a variety of other people who, in one way or another, manipulate space imaginatively. Such people, assembled under the right circumstances, would inevitably come up with ideas of which the technocratic city planners, the highway engineers and transit authorities have never dreamed of. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Musicians, people who live near airports, jackhammer people and subway conductors might well imagine new ways to organize, mask or suppress noise. Groups of young people might be invited to ransack their minds for previously unexamined approaches to urban sanitation, crowding, ethic conflict, care of the aged, or a thousand other present and future problems. In any such effort, the overwhelming majority of ideas put forward will, of course, be absurd, funny or technically impossible. Yet the essence of creativity is a willingness to play the fool, to toy with the absurd, only later submitting the stream of ideas to harsh critical judgment. The application of the imagination to the future thus requires an environment in which it is safe to err, in which novel juxtaposition of ideas can be freely expressed before being critically sifted. We need sanctuaries for social imagination. While all sorts of creative people ought to participate in conjecture about possible futures, they should have immediate access—in person or via telecommunications—to technical specialists, from acoustical engineers to zoologists, who could indicate when a suggestion is technically impossible (bearing in mind that even impossibility is often temporary). Scientific expertise can employ skilled specialists not to predict the future, but examine alternative futures to show the choices open. An appropriate model, for example, could help a group of imagineers visualize the impact on a city if its educational expenditures were to fluctuate—how this would affect, let us say, the transportation system, the theaters, the occupational structure and healthy of the community. Conversely, it could show how changes in these other factors might affect education. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
The rushing stream of wild, unorthodox, eccentric or merely colorful ideas generated imagination must, after they have been expressed, be subjected to merciless screening. Only a tiny fraction of them will survive this filtering process. These few, however, could be of the utmost importance in calling attention to new possibilities that might otherwise escape notice. As we move from poverty toward affluence, politics changes from what mathematicians call a zero sum game into a non-zero sum game. In the first, if one player wins another must lost. In the second, all players can win. Finding non-zero sum solutions to our social problems requires all the imagination we can muster. A system for generating imaginative policy ideas could help us take maximum advantage of the non-zero opportunities ahead. If congruence fails for a well-ordered society, it seems bound to fail everywhere. On the other hand, it is by no means a foregone conclusion even in this instance that the right and the good are congruent. For this relation implies that the members of a well-ordered society, when they appraise their plan of life by the principles of rational choice, will decide to maintain their sense of justice as regulative of their conduct toward one another. The requisite match exists between the principles of justice that would be agreed to in the absence of information and the principles of rational choice that are not chosen at all and applied with full knowledge. Principles accounted for in strikingly different ways nevertheless fit together when those of justice are perfectly realized. Of course, this congruence has its explanation in how the contract doctrine is set up. However, the relation is not a matter oof course and its basis needs to be worked out. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
When we reflect on their psychological origins, we sometimes doubt the soundness of our moral attitudes. Thinking that these sentiments have arisen in situations marked say by submission to authority, we may wonder whether they should not be rejected altogether. Since the argument for the good of justice depends upon the members of a well-ordered society having an effective desire to act justly, we must allay these uncertainties. Imagine then that someone experiences the promptings of one’s moral sense as inexplicable inhibitions which for the moment one is unable to justify. Why should one not regard them as simply neurotic compulsions? If it should turn out that these scruples are indeed largely shaped an accounted for by the contingences of early childhood, perhaps by the course of our family history and class situation, and that there is nothing to add on their behalf, then there is surely no reason why they should govern our lives. However, of course to someone in a well-ordered society there are many things to say. One can point out to one the essential features of the development of the sentiment of justice and how eventually the morality of principles is to be understood. Moreover one’s moral education itself has been regulated by the principles of right and justice to which one would consent in an initial situation in which all have equal representation as moral persons. As we have seen, the more conception adopted is independent of natural contingencies and accidental social circumstances; and therefore the psychological process by which one’s moral sense has been acquired conform to principles that one oneself would choose under conditions that one would concede are fair and undistorted by fortune and happenstance. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Nor can someone in a well-ordered society object to the practices of moral instruction that inculcate a sense of justice. For in agreeing to principles of right the parties in the original position at the same time consent to the arrangements necessary to make these principles effective in their conduct. Indeed, the adaptability of these arrangements to the limitations of human nature is an important consideration in choosing a conception of justice. Thus no one’s moral convictions are the result of coercive indoctrination. Instruction is throughout as reasoned as the development of understanding permits, just as the natural duty of mutual respect requires. None of the ideals, principles, and precepts upheld in the society takes unfair advantage of human weakness. A person’s sense of justice is not a compulsive psychological mechanism cleverly installed by those in authority in order to insure one’s unswerving compliance with rules designed to advance their interests. Nor is the process of education simply a casual sequence intended to bring about as an end result the appropriate moral sentiments. As far as possible each stage foreshadows in its teaching and explanations the conception of right and justice at which it aims and by reference to which we will later recognize that the moral standards presented to us are justified. These observations are evident consequences of the contract doctrine and the fact that its principles regulate the practices of moral instruction in a well-ordered society. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
Following the Kantian interpretation of justice as fairness, we can say that by acting from these principles persons are acting autonomously: they are acting from principles that they would acknowledge under conditions that best express their nature as free and equal rational beings. To be sure, these conditions also reflect the situation of individuals in the World and their being subject to the circumstances of justice. However, this simply means that the conception of autonomy is that fitting for human beings; the notion suited to superior or inferior natures is most likely different. Thus moral education is education for autonomy. In due course everyone will know why one would adopt the principles of justice and how they are derived from the conditions that characterize one’s being an equal in a society of moral persons. It follows that in accepting these principles on the basis we are not influenced primarily by tradition and authority, or the opinions of others. However necessary these agencies may be in order for us to reach complete understanding, we eventually come to hold a conception of right on reasonable grounds that we can set out independently for ourselves. Now on the contract view the notions of autonomy and objectivity are compatible: there is no antinomy between freedom and reason. Both autonomy and objectivity are characterized in a consistent way by reference to the original position. The idea of the initial situation is central to the whole theory and other basic notions are defined in terms of it. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Thus acting autonomously is acting from principles that we would consent to as free and equal rational beings, and that we are to understand in this way. Also, these principles are objective. They are the principles that we would want everyone (including ourselves) to follow were we take up together the appropriate general point of view. The original position defines this perspective, and its conditions also embody those of objectivity: its stipulations express the restrictions on arguments that force us to consider the choice of principles unencumbered by the singularities of the circumstances in which we find ourselves. The veil of ignorance prevents us from shaping our moral view to accord with our own particular attachments and interests. We do not look at the social order from our situation but take up a point of view that everyone can adopt on an equal footing. In this sense we look at our society and our place in its objectively: we share a common standpoint along with others and do not make our judgments from a personal slant. Thus our moral principles and convictions are objective to the extent that they have been arrived at and tested by assuming this general standpoint and by assessing the arguments for them by the restrictions expressed by the conception of the original position. The judicial virtues such as impartiality and considerateness are the excellences of intellect and sensibility that enable us to do these things well. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
If it moves the minds and hearts of an increasing number of humans, Christian faith may work wonders. However, if professed Christians forsake Heaven as their destination and come to fancy that the state may be converted into the terrestrial paradise—why they are less wise than Marx. Christians in politics can make a difference. Human plant, and God, using many people, brings the crop. In recent years many Christians have urged a more direct approach for bringing needed social change: simply elect Christians to political office. One spokes persons has even suggested a religious version of affirmative action; if, for example, 24 percent of the people are born again, then at least 24 percent of the officeholders should be born again. Others have argued that Christians should “take dominion” over government, with those in public office speaking “for God as well as for the American people.” On the surface this shortcut might seem to some an appealing answer to America’s declining morality. It is, however, simplistic and dangerous triumphalism. To suggest that electing Christians to public office will solve all public ills is not only presumptuous and theologically questionable, it is also untrue. Today’s misspent enthusiasm for political solutions to the moral problems of our culture arises from a distorted view of both politics and spirituality—too low a view of the power of a sovereign God and too high a view of the ability of humans. The idea that human systems, reformed by Christian influence, pave the road to the Kingdom—or at least, to revival—has the same utopia n ring that one finds in Marxist literature. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
This idea about human systems, which are reformed by Christian influence being the path to the Kingdom of God also ignores the consistent lesson of history that shows that laws are most often reformed as a result of powerful spiritual movements. I know of no case where a spiritual movement was achieved by passing laws. In addition, history puts the lie to the notion that just because one is devout, one will be a just and wise ruler. Take the nineteenth-century leader who forged a unified Germany from a cluster of minor states. Otto von Bismarck-Schonhausen was a committed Christian who regularly read the Bible, spoke openly of his devotion to God, and claimed divine guidance in response to prayer. “If I were no longer a Christian, I would not serve the king another hour,” he once declared. Yet Mr. Bismarck was also the ruthless architect of Deutaschland Uber Alles (Germany Over All), a Worldview that allegedly started two World wars. Historians describe Mr. Bismarck as a Machiavellian master of political duplicity who specialized in blood and iron. Power can be just as corrupting—or confusing—to the Christian as to the non-Christian. And the results in some ways are more horrible when power corrupts men or women who believe they have a divine mandate. Their injustices are then committed in God’s name. This is why an eminent conservative historian has suggested that “religious claims in politics should vary inversely with the power or prospects for power one has.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
It is a fair distinction: Prophets should make religious claims. Political leaders should not—otherwise they can become ayatollahs. So the first test for public office should not be a spiritual one. The celebrated claim that “the ability to hear from God should be the number one qualification of U.S. presidency” is dangerously misguided. The Church’s mission is to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ, not to elect politicians. The Church is neutral in matters of party politics. This applies in all of the many nations in which it is established. The Church encourages its members to play a role as responsible citizens in the communities, including become informed about issues and voting in elections. It expects its members to engage in the political process in an informed and civil manner, respecting the fact that members of the Church come from a variety of backgrounds and experiences and may have differences of opinion in partisan political matters. Request candidates for office not to imply that their candidacy or platforms are endorsed by the Church, and reserves the right as an institution to address, in a nonpartisan way, issues that it believes have significant community or moral consequences or that directly affect the interest of the Church. Politicians, like those in any other specialized field, should be selected on the basis of their qualifications and abilities as well as on their moral character. Even in Israel’s theocracy, Jethro advised Moses to select “capable men…who fear God,” to help in governing the Jewish nation. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
Mr. Jethro’s advice makes sense. If terrorists were to take control of an airport, would we want police officers who were merely devout Christians handling the situation, or would we choose those who had specialized training in hostage negotiations? Luther had it right when he said he would rather be ruled by a competent Turk than an incompetent Christian. The triumphalist mindset also fails to make the crucial distinction between a Christian’s function as a private citizen and as an officeholder. As private citizens, Christians are free to advocate their Christian view in any and every form. In American that is a fundamental constitutional right. Christian citizens should be activists about their faith, striving by their witness to “Christianize” their culture—not by the force of the sword, but by the force of their ideas. However, Christians elected to public office acquire a different set of responsibilities. Now they hold the power of the sword, which God has placed with government to preserve order and maintain justice. Now they act not for themselves but for all whom they serve. For this reason, they cannot use their office to evangelistically “Christianize” their culture. Their duty is to ensure justice and religious liberty for all citizens and beliefs. This does not mean they can compromise their faith or their first allegiance to God; they should speak freely of their Christian faith and witness Christian values in their lives. However, they cannot use their offices to seek a favoured position for Christianity of the church. “We have this treasure in Earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us,” reports 2 Corinthians 4.7. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
The Christian state is one that gives no special public privilege to Christian citizens but seeks justice for all as a matter of principle. At the turn of the century a towering Dutch theologian, Abraham Kuyper, was elected prime minister of the Netherlands. His opponents voiced fears of theocratic oppression. Instead, his administration was a model of tolerance and public pluralism as Kuyper affirmed proportional representation, that the legitimate rights of all be fully represented. If we Christians today understood this distinction between the role of the private Christians citizen and the Christian in government, they might sound less intimidating. If secularists understood correctly the nature of Christian public duty they would not fear, but welcome responsible Christian political involvement. If they keep the commandments of the Lord, I believe many of today’s adults will be active participants in temporal blessings. With prosperity will come a unique challenge—a test that will try many to their spiritual core. As you step into this new World of property and engage in converting your education and skills into financial success, you will always have to distinguish between wants and needs. You will have two choices. Will your motivation to build and acquire the blessings of the Lord be for personal gratification, for the recognition of humans, and for power, influence, and self-aggrandizement? Or will your motivation be to glorify God, to work to help usher in the growth and expansion of His Church? #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
The Lord is not telling us that we should not be prosperous or that prosperity is a sin. On the contrary, He has always blessed His obedient children However, He is telling us that we should seek prosperity only after we seek, find, and serve Him. Then, because our hearts are right, because we love Him first and foremost, we will choose to invest our resources wisely in preparing for the Kingdom of God. If you choose to seek riches for the sake of riches, you will fall short. You will never be satisfied. You will be empty, never finding true joy and lasting happiness. The trial of your faith in the next few years will likely not be that you lack the material things of this World. Rather it will be in choosing what to do with the temporal blessing you receive. Every situation in human life can be approached from two possible points of view. The first is the limited one and is that of the personal self. The second is the larder one and is that of Universal Self. The larger and longer view always justifies itself in the end. Each Overself is like a circle whose center is in some individual but whose circumference is not in any individual. We must not imagine that the subordination of this personal identity leads to any loss of consciousness—rather the reverse. Humans become more, not less, for one emerges into the fullness and freedom of one Universal life. One thinks of oneself as: “I, A. B., am a point within the Overself,” whereas before one only thought: “I am A.B.” #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
The higher self keeps the same kind of individuality without being separate that each facet of diamond keeps. The light which shines through it shines equally through all facets alike, remaining one and the same. The individuality is beyond personality—its level is higher. The one must prompt while the other must watch the pitiless destruction of its wishes and hopes, its values and desires, until only the pure being of individuality is left. It is a kind of impersonal being but it is not utterly devoid of all individuality. As a wave sinks back into the sea, so the consciousness which passes out of the personal self sinks back into its higher individuality. This is the general mind being our small personal minds, the one behind the many. God has saved for the final inning some of His strongest children, who will help bear off the Kingdom triumphantly. Birds nest in my arms, on my shoulder, behind my knees, by my heart there are quail, they must think I am a tree. The swans think I am a fountain, they all come down and drink when I walk. When sheep stroll by, they pass over me, and perched on my fingers, the sparrows eat, the ants think I am the Earth, and humans think I am nothing. Believers shall declare the glory of Thy Kingdom, and talk of Thy might; to make known to the sons of man His mighty acts, and the glorious majesty of His Kingdom. Thy Kingdom is an everlasting Kingdom, and Thy dominion endureth throughout all generation. The Lord upholdeth all who fall, and raiseth up all who are bowed down. God will put you on the heart of someone to restore you and bless you big time, in the name of Jesus Christ! Amen. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
Cresleigh Homes
What’s even better than a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf stocked with books? A coffee table that can hold even more. 😉
The Home Hub in your #MillsStation Residence 4 home is yours to create how you wish. Office, study, playroom — make it your own! 📝https://youtu.be/Y7YTiF0JjQg
Those Who Can Give Justice are Owed Justice!
There is no yesterday, so what is left is today. Praise God from whom all blessings flow. The signs of the Kingdom of God are like a human planting a seed. We do our part; but then God makes the seed grow. For it is God who produces the signs of His Kingdom on this Earth. We are merely the instruments. The Kingdom of God will transform places of hopelessness in the kingdom of man. Justice and hope will be found where there was once only inequity and despair. When we consider the basis of equality, the features of human beings in virtue of which they are to be treated in accordance with the principles of justice, what are our relationships with other human persons supposed to be like? We examine what determines the range of application of conceptions of justice. We may distinguish three levels where the concept of equality applies. The first is to the administration of institutions as public systems of rules. In this case equality is essentially justice as regularity. It implies the impartial application and consistent interpretation of rules according to such precepts as to treat similar cases similarly (as defined by statutes and precedents) and the like. Equality at this level is the least controversial element in the commonsense idea of justice. The second and much more difficult application of equality is to the substantive structure of institutions. Here the meaning of equality is specified by the principles of justice which require that equal basic rights be assigned to all persons. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
Presumably this excludes animals; they have some protection certainly but their status is not that of human beings. However, this outcome is still unexplained. We have yet to consider what sort of beings are owed the guarantees of justice. This brings us to the third level at which the question of equality arises. The natural answer seems to be that it is precisely the moral persons who are entitled to equal justice. Moral persons are distinguished by two features: first they are capable of having (and are assumed to have) a conception of their good (as expressed by a rational plan of life); and second they are capable of having (and are assumed to acquire) a sense of justice, a normally effective desire to apply and to act upon the principles of justice, at least to a certain minimum degree. We use the characterization of the persons in the original position to single out the kind of beings to whom the principles chose apply. After all, the parties are though of as adopting these criteria to regulate their common institutions and their conduct toward one another; and the description of their nature enters into the reasoning by which these principles are selected. Thus equal justice is owed to those who have the capacity to take part in and to act in accordance with the public understanding of the initial situation. One should observe that moral personality is here defined as a potentiality that is ordinarily realized in due course. It is this potentiality which brings the claims of justice into play. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
We see, then, that the capacity for moral personality is a sufficient condition for being entitled to equal justice. This fact can be used to interpret the concept of natural rights. For one thing, it explains why it is appropriate to call by this name the rights that justice protects. These claims depend solely on certain natural attributes the presence of which can be ascertained by natural reason pursuing common sense methods of inquiry. The existence of these attributes and the claims based upon them is established independently from social conventions and legal norms. The propriety of the term “natural” is that is suggests the contrast between the rights identified by the theory of justice and the rights includes the idea that these rights are assigned in the first instance to persons, and that they are given a special weight. Claims easily overridden for other values are not natural rights. Now the rights protected by the first principle have both of these features in view of the priority rules. This justice as fairness has the characteristic marks of a natural rights theory. Not only does it ground fundamental rights on natural attributes and distinguish their bases from social norms, but it assigns rights to persons by principles of equal justice, these principles having a special force against which other values cannot normally prevail. Although specific rights are not absolute, the system of equal liberties is absolute practically speaking under favourable conditions. Nothing beyond the essential minimum is required. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
Whether moral personality is also a necessary condition, I shall leave that aside. I assume that the capacity for a sense of justice is possessed by the overwhelming majority of humankind, and therefore this question does not raise a serious problem. That moral personality suffices to make one a subject of claims is the essential thing. We cannot go far wrong in supposing that the sufficient condition is always satisfied. Even if the capacity were necessary, it would be unwise in practice to withhold justice on this ground. The risk to just institutions would be too great. It should be stressed that the sufficient condition for equal justice, the capacity for moral personality, is not all stringent. When someone lacks the requisite potentiality either from birth or accident, this is regarded as a defect or deprivation. There is no race or recognized group of human beings that lacks this attribute. Only scattered individuals are without this capacity, or its realization to the minimum degree, and the failure to realize it is the consequence of unjust and impoverished social circumstances, of fortuitous contingencies. Furthermore, while individuals presumably have varying capacities for a sense of justice, this fact is not a reason for depriving those with a lesser capacity of the full protection of justice. Once a certain minimum is met, a person is entitled to equal liberty on a par with everyone else. A greater capacity for a sense of justice, as shown say in a greater skill and facility in applying the principles of justice and in marshaling arguments in particular cases, is a natural asset like any other ability. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
The special advantages a person receives for its exercises are to be governed by the difference principle. Thus is some have a preeminent degree the judicial virtues of impartiality and integrity which are needed in certain positions, they may properly have whatever benefits should be attached to these offices. Yet the application of the principle of equal liberty is not affected by these differences. It is sometimes thought that basic rights and liberties should vary with capacity, but justice as fairness denies this: provided the minimum for moral personality is satisfied, a person is owed all the guarantees of justice. First of all, when considering the basis of equality, it may be objected that equality cannot rest n natural attributes. There is no natural feature with respect to which all human being are equal, that is, which everyone has (or which sufficiently many have) to the same degree. If we wish to hold a doctrine of equality, it might appear we must interpret it in another way, namely as a purely procedural principle. Thus to say that human beings are equal is to say that none has a claim to preferential treatment in the absence of compelling reasons. The burden of proof favours equality: it defines a procedural presumption that persons are to be treated alike. Departures from equal treatment are in each case to be defended and judged impartially by the same system of principles that hold for all; the essential equality is thought to be equality of consideration. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
There are several difficulties with this procedural interpretation. For one thing, it is nothing more than the precept of treating similar cases similarly applied at the highest level, together with an assignment of the burden of proof. Equality of consideration puts no restrictions upon what grounds may be offered to justify inequalities. There is no guarantee of substantive equal treatment, since slave and caste systems (to mention extreme cases) may satisfy this conception. The real assurance of equalities lies in the content of the principles of justice and not in these procedural presumptions. The placing of the burden of proof is not sufficient. However, further, even if the procedural interpretation imposed some genuine restrictions on institutions, there is still the question why we are to follow the procedure in some instances and not others. Surely it applies to creatures who belong to some class, but which one? We still need a natural basis for equality so that this class can be identified. Moreover, it is not the case that founding equality on natural capacities is incomplete with an egalitarian view. All we have to do is to select a range property (as I shall say) and to give equal justice to those meeting its conditions. For example, the property of being in the interior of the unit circle is a range of property points in the plane. All points inside this circle have this property although their coordinates vary within a certain range. And they equally have this property, since no point interior to a circle is more or less interior to it than any other interior point. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
Now whether there is a suitable range property for singling out the respect in which human beings are to be counted equal is settled by the conception of justice. However, the description of the parties in the original position identifies such a property, and the principles of justice assure us that any variations in ability within the range are to be regarded as any other natural asset. There is no obstacle to thinking that a natural capacity constitutes the basis of equality. How then can it seem plausible that founding equality on natural attributes undermines equal justice? The notion of a range property is too obvious to be overlooked. There must be a deeper explanation. The answer, I think, is that a teleological theory is often taken for granted. Thus, if the right is to maximize the net balance of satisfaction, say, then rights and duties are to be assigned so as to achieve this end. Among the relevant aspects of the problem are human’s different productive skills and capacities for satisfaction. It may happen that maximizing aggregate welfare requires adjusting basic rights to variations in these features. Of course, given the standard utilitarian assumptions, there is a tendency to equality. The relevant thing, however, is that in either case the correct natural basis and the appropriate assignment of rights depend upon the principle of utility. It is the content of the ethical doctrine, and the fact that it is a maximizing notion, that allows variations in capacity to justify unequal fundamental rights, and not the idea that equality is founded on natural attributes. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
An examination of perfectionism would, I believe, lead to the same conclusion. However, justice as fairness is not a maximizing theory. We are not directed to look for differences in natural features that affect some maximand and therefore serve as possible grounds for different grades of citizenship. Although agreeing with many teleological theories in the relevance of natural attributes, the contract view needs much weaker assumptions about their distribution to establish equal rights. It is enough that a certain minimum is generally fulfilled. First of all, when considering some other points, it should be noted that the conception of moral personality and the required minimum may often prove troublesome. While many concepts are vague to some degree, that of moral personality is likely to be especially so. However, these matters are, I think, best discussed in the context of definite moral problems. The nature of the specific issue and the structure of the available general facts may suggest a fruitful way to settle them. In any case, one must not confuse the vagueness of a conception of justice with the thesis that basic rights should vary with natural capacity. The minimal requirements defining moral personality refer to a capacity and not to the realization of it. A being that has this capacity, whether or not it is yet developed, is to receive the full protection of the principles of justice. Since infants and children are thought to have basic rights (normally exercised on their behalf by parents and guardians), this interpretation of the requisite conditions seems necessary to match our considered judgments. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
Moreover, regarding the potentiality as sufficient accords with the hypothetical nature of the original position, and with the idea that as far as possible the choice of principles should not be influenced by arbitrary contingencies. Therefore it is reasonable to say that those who could take part in the initial agreement, were it not for fortuitous circumstances, are assured equal justice. Now of course none of this is literally argument. I have not set out the premises from which this conclusion follows, as I have tried to do, albeit not very rigorously, with the choice of conceptions of justice in the original position. Nor have I tried to prove that the characterization of the parties must be used as the basis of equality. Rather this interpretation seems to be the natural completion of justice as fairness. The problem of those who have lost their realized capacity temporarily through misfortune, accident, or mental stress can be regarded in a similar capacity of children in connection with paternalism. However, those are more or less permanently deprived of moral personality may present a difficulty. It is assumed that the account of equality would not be materially affected. First of all, the simplicity of the contract view of the basis of equality is worth emphasizing. The minimum capacity for the sense of justice insures that everyone has equal rights. The claims of all are to be adjudicated by the principles of justice. Equality is supported by the general facts of nature and not merely by a procedural rule without substantive force. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
Nor does equality presuppose an assessment of the intrinsic worth of persons, or a comparative evaluation of their conceptions of the good. Those who can give justice are owed justice. When other accounts of equality are examined, the advantages of these straightforward proposition become more evident. For example, one might think that equal justice means that society is to make the same proportionate contribution to each person’s realizing the best life which one is capable of. Offhand this may seem an attractive suggestion. It suffers however from serious difficulties. For one thing it not only requires a method of estimating the relative goodness of plans of life, but it also presupposes some way of measuring what counts as an equal proportionate contribution to persons with different conceptions of their good. The problem in applying this standard are obvious. A more important difficulty is that the greater abilities of some may give them a stronger claim on social resources irrespective of compensating advantages to others. One must assume that variations in natural assets will affect what is necessary to provide equal proportionate assistance to those with different plans of life. However, in addition to violating the principle of mutual advantage, this conception of equality means that the strength of human’s claims is directly influenced by the distribution of natural abilities, and therefore by contingencies that are arbitrary from a moral point of view. The basis of equality in justice as fairness avoids these objections. The only continency which is decisive is that of having or nor having the capacity for a sense of justice. By giving justice to those who can give justice in return, the principle of reciprocity is fulfilled at the highest level. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
A further observation is that we can now more fully reconcile two conceptions of equality. Some writers have distinguished between equality as it is invoked in connection with the distribution between equality as it is invoked in connection with the distribution of certain goods, some of which will almost certainly give higher status or prestige to those who are more favoured, and equality as it applies to the respect which is owed to persons irrespective of their social position. Equality of the first kind is defined by the second principle of justice which regulates the structure of organizations and distributive shares so that social cooperation is both efficient and fair. However, equality of the second kind is fundamental. It is defined by the first principle of justice and by such natural duties as that of mutual respect; it is owed to human beings as moral persons. The natural basis of equality explains its deeper significance. The priority of the first principle over the second enables us to avoid balancing these conceptions of equality in an ad hoc manner, while the argument from the standpoint of the original position shows how this precedence comes about. The consistent application of the principle of fair opportunity requires us to view persons independently from the influences of their social position. However, how far should this tendency be carried? It seems that even when fair opportunity (as it has been defined) is satisfied, the family will lead to unequal chances between individuals. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
Is the family to be abolished then? Taken by itself and given a certain primacy, the idea of equal opportunity inclines in this direction. However, within the context of the theory of justice as a whole, there is much less urgency to take this course. The acknowledgment of the difference principle redefines the grounds for social inequalities as conceived in the system of liberal equality; and when the principle of fraternity and redress are allowed their appropriate weight, the natural distribution of assets and the contingencies of social circumstances can more easily be accepted. We are more ready to dwell upon our good fortune now that these differences are made to work to our advantage, rather than to be downcast by how much better off we might have been had we had an equal chance along with others if only all social barriers had been removed. The conception of justice, should it be truly effective and publicly recognized as such, seems more likely than its rivals to transform our perspective on social World and to reconcile us to the dispositions of natural order and the conditions of human life. Last of all, we should recall here the limits of a theory of justice. Not only are many aspects pf morality left aside, but no account is given of right conduct in regard to animals and the rest of nature. A conception of justice is but one part of a moral view. While I have not maintained that the capacity for a sense of justice is necessary in order to be owed the duties of justice, it does seem that we are not required to give strict justice anyway to creatures lacking this capacity. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
However, it does not follow that there are no requirements at all in regard to them, not in our relations with the natural order. Certainly it is wrong to be cruel to animals and the destruction of whole species can be a great evil. The capacity for feelings of pleasure and pain and for the forms of life which of animals are capable clearly imposes duties of compassion and humanity in their case. These beliefs, however, are outside the scope of the theory of justice, and it does not seem possible to extent the contract doctrine so as to include them in a natural way. A correct conception of our relations to animals and to nature would seem to depend upon a theory of the natural order and our place in it. One of the tasks of metaphysics is to work out a view of the World which is suited for this purpose; it should identify and systematize the truths decisive for these questions. How far justice as fairness will have to be revised to fit into this larger theory it is sound as an account of justice among persons, it cannot be too wrong when these broader relationships are taken into consideration. Technocrats, experts in science or technology who have a lot of power in or influence with the government of industry, suffer from econo-think. They look at the World and analyze the way the World works by comparing the cost of an action with the benefit generated. Except during war and dire emergency, they start from the premise that even non-economic problems can be solved with economic remedies. Social futurism challenges this root assumption of both Marxist and Keynesian managers. In its historical time and place, industrial society’s single-minded pursuits of material progress served the human race well. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
As we hurtle toward the super age of information, however, a new ethos emerges in which other goals begin to gain parity with, and even supplant those of economic welfare. In personal terms, self-fulfillment, social responsibility, aesthetic achievement, hedonistic individualism, and an array of other goals vie with and often overshadow the raw drive for material success. Affluence serves as a base from which humans begin to strive for varied post-economic ends. At the same time, in societies arrowing toward super-age of information, economic variables—wages, balance of payments, productivity—grow increasingly sensitive to change in the non-economic environment. Economic problems are plentiful, but a whole range of issues that are only secondarily economy break into prominence. Racism, the battle between the generations, crime, cultural autonomy, violence—all these have economic dimensions; yet none can be effectively treated by econocentic measures alone. The move from manufacturing to health-care and social assistance, the psychologization of both goods and services, and ultimately the shift toward experiential production all tie the economic sector much more tightly to non-economic forces. Consumer preference turn over in accordance with rapid life style changes, so that the coming and going of subcults is mirrored in economic turmoil. Super-age of information production requires workers skilled in symbol manipulation, and computer information science, so that what goes on in their heads becomes much more important than in the past, and much more dependent upon computers, technology, and algorithm. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
Because many more American corporations are investing part of their sizeable portfolios in companies selected not for economic payout alone, but for their potential contribution to solving urban problems, providing jobs for hard-core unemployed, in organizing literacy and job-training programs, and scores of other unfamiliar activities, including worrying about water, air, and noise pollution, improving the aesthetic appearance of the company’s trucks and equipment, and fostering experimental preschool learning programs in underserved communities, and supporting cultural groups; although this is accurately signaling the direction of change, none of this necessarily implies that big companies are growing altruistic; it merely underscores the increasing intimacy of the links between the economic sector and powerful cultural, psychological, and social forces. While these forces batter at our doors, however, most technocratic planners and managers behave as though nothing had happened. They continue to act as though the economic sector were hermetically sealed off from social and psychocultural influences. Indeed, econocentric premises are buried so deeply and held so widely in both capitalist and communist nations, that they distort the very information systems essential for management of change. For example, all modern nations maintain elaborate machinery for measuring economic performance. We know virtually day by day the directions of change with respect to productivity, prices, investment, and similar factors. Through a set of “economic indicators” we gauge the overall health of the economy, the speed at which it is changing, and the overall directions of change. Without these measures, our control of the economy would be far less effective. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
By contrast, we have no such measures, no set of comparable “social indicators” to tell us whether the society, as distinct from the economy, is also healthy. We have no measures of the “quality of life.” We have no systematic indices to tell us whether people are more or less alienated from one another; whether education is more effective; whether art, music and literature are flourishing; whether civility, generosity or kindness are increasing. Gross National Product is our Holy Grail, but we have no environmental index, no census statistics to measure whether the country is more livable from year to year. On the surface, this would seem a purely technical matter—something for statisticians to debate. Yet it has the most serious political significance, for lacking such measures it becomes difficult to connect up national or local policies with appropriate long-term social goals. The absence of such indices perpetuates vulgar technocracy. Little known to the public, a polite, but increasingly bitter battle over this issue has begun in Washington. Technocratic planners and economists see in the social indicators idea a threat to their entrenched position at the ear of the political policy maker. In contrast, the need for social indicators has been eloquently argued by such prominent social scientists as Dr. Bertram M. Gross and Wayne State University, Eleanor Sheldon and Wilbert Moore of the Russell Sage Foundation, Daniel Bell and Raymond Bauer of Harvard. We are witnessing, says Gross, a “widespread rebellion against what has been called the ‘economic philistinism’ of the Untied States government’s resent statistical establishment.” #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
This revolt has attracted vigorous support from political and government officials who recognize our desperate need for a post-technocratic social intelligence system. In the near future, we can expect the same revolt to break out in other World capitals as well, once again drawing a line between technocrats and post-technocrats. The danger of future shock, itself, however, points to the need for new social measures not yet even mentioned in the fast-burgeoning literature on social indicators. We urgently need, for example, techniques for measure the level of transience in different communities, different populations groups, and in individual experience. It is possible, in principle, to design a “transience index” that could disclose the rate at which we are making and breaking relationships with the things, places, people, organizations and informational structures that comprise our environment. Such an index would reveal, among other things, the fantastic differences in the experiences of different groups in society—the static and tedious quality of turnover in the lives of others. Government policies that attempt to deal with both kinds of people in the same way are doomed to meet angry resistance from one or the other—or both. Similarly, we need indices of novelty in the environment. How often do communities, organizations or individual have to cope with first-time situations? How many of the articles in the home of the average working-class family are actually “new” in function or appearance; how many are traditional? #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
What level of novelty—in terms of things, people or any other significant dimension—is required for stimulation without over-stimulation? How much more novelty can children absorb than their parents—if it is true that they can absorb more? In what way is gaining related to lower novelty tolerances, and how do such differences correlate with the political and intergenerational conflict now tearing the techno-societies apart? By studying and measuring the invasion of newness, we can begin, perhaps, to control the influx of change into our social structures and personal lives. And what about choice and over choice? Can we construct measures of the degree of significant choice in human lives? Can any government that pretends to be democratic not concern itself with such an issue? For al the rhetoric about freedom of choice, no government agency in the World can claim to have made any attempt to measure it. The assumption simply is that more income or affluence means more choice and that more choice, in turn, means freedom. Is it not time to examine these basic assumptions of our political systems? If we are to prevent future shock and build a humane super-age of informational society, post-technocratic planning must deal with precisely such issues. A sensitive system of indicators geared to measuring the achievement of social and cultural goals, and integrated with economic indicators, is part of the technical equipment that any society needs before it can successfully reach the next stage of eco-technological development. It is an absolute precondition for post-technocratic planning and change management. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
This humanization of planning, moreover, must be reflected in our political structures as well. To connect the super-age of information social intelligence system with the decisional centers of society, we must institutionalize a concern for the quality of life. Thus it has been proposed by people in the social indicators movement that there is a creation of a Council of Social Advisers to the President. Such a Council, as they see it, would be modeled after the already existing Council of Economic Advisers and would perform parallel functions in the social field. The new agency would monitor key social indicators precisely the way the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) keeps its eye on economic indices, and interpret changes to the President. It would issue an annual report on the quality of life, clearly spelling out our social progress (or lack of it) in terms of specified goals. This report would thus supplement and balance the annual economic report prepared by the CEA. By providing reliable, useful data about our social condition, the Council of Social Advisers would begin to influence planning generally, making it more sensitive to social costs and benefits, less coldly technocratic and econocentric. Proponents differ as to whether the Council of Social Advisers ought to be organizationally independent or become a part of a larger Council of Economic and Social Advisers. All sides agree, however, on the need for integrating economic and social intelligence. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
The establishment of such councils, not merely at the federal level but at state and municipal levels as well, would not at the federal level but at state and municipal levels as well, would not solve all our problems; it would not eliminate conflict; it would not guarantee that social indicators are exploited properly. In brief, it would not eliminate politics from political life. However, it would end recognition—and political force—to the idea that the ais of progress reach beyond economics. The designation of agencies to watch over the indicators of change in the quality of life would carry us a long way toward that humanization of the planner which is the essential first stage of the strategy of social futurism. Replace fear with faith—faith in God and the power of the Atonement of the Lord Jesus Christ. As we think of the future, we should be filled with faith and hope. Always remember that Jesus Christ—the Creator of the Universe, the architect of our salvation, and the head of this Church—is in control. He will not permit His work to fail. He will be victorious over all darkness and evil. And He invites us all, members of His church and others who are the honest in heart, to join in the battle for the souls of God’s children. Along with all else we will do in life, we must also dedicate and consecrate our heart, might, mind, and strength to His cause, walking in faith and working with conviction. Face the future with optimism. I believe we are standing on the threshold of a new era of growth, prosperity, and abundance. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
I think the next few years will bring a resurgence in the World economy as new discoveries are made in communication, medicine, energy, transportation, physics, computer technology, and other fields endeavor. Many of these discoveries, as in the past, will be the result of the spirit whispering insights into and enlightening the minds of truth-seeking individuals. With these discoveries and advances will come new employment opportunities and prosperity for those who work hard and especially for those who strive to keep the commandments of God. This has been the case in other significant periods of national and international economic growth. People, we rainclouds closer to the sun and full of life soaking up the knowledge of the Earth and storing it within ourselves, moving on to spread truth through the World. We clouds are loved and feared, ready to explore and give new life to a dying planet. Beautiful clouds, casting shadows of love, shadows of dignity, shadows of healing. Giving of ourselves to promote life, while realizing our ability to destroy rainclouds, we are nature, natural! People, we rainclouds are closer to the run and full of life. May the Father of mercies who dwells on high, in His mighty compassion, remember the loving, upright and blameless souls and all the holy communities in America who laid down their lives for the sanctification of the divine name. Even as they were devoted and faithful in life, so in death they were not parted. They were swifter than eagles and stronger than lions to do the will of their Master and the desire of their Rock. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
May our God remember them for good with other righteous of the World, and bring retribution for blood of His servants which has been shed, in accordance with the promise given in the in the Law of Moses, reiterated in the Books of the Prophets and again stated in the Sacred Writings: Sing aloud, O ye nations, for God des bring to judgment those who shed the blood of His servants. Wherefore should the nations say, “Where is their God?” Let the retribution of Thy servants’ blood be made known among the nations in our sight. For God, the Avenger of bloodshed, will not forget the cry of the humble. He will judge among the nations, and crushing evil, will emerge triumphant. Happy are they that dwell in Thy house; they will ever praise Thee. Happy is the people who thus fare; yea, happy is the people whose God is the Lord. I will extol Thee, my God, O King, and I will bless Thy name for ever and ever. Every day will I bless Thee, and I will praise Thy name for ever and ever. Great is the Lord, and highly to be praised; His greatness is unsearchable. One generation shall laud Thy works to another, and shall declare thy might acts. On the majestic glory of Thy splendor, and on Thy wonderous deeds will I meditate. And humans shall proclaim the might of Thy tremendous acts, and I will recount Thy greatness. They shall make known the fame of Thy great goodness, and shall exult in Thy righteousness. The Lord is gracious and full of compassion, long forbearing, and abundant in kindness. The Lord is good to all, and His tender mercies are over all His works. All Thy works shall praise Thee, O Lord, and Thy faith one shall bless Thee. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
Cresleigh Homes
Lovely on the outside, dreamy on the inside! Mills Station Res 2 has a laundry room that will have you pinching yourself. We’re thrilled to show off this home’s design; it features Universal Design concepts that prioritizes life’s transitions and aging in place. Learn more from a sales associate! https://cresleigh.com/mills-station/residence-2/
Cresleigh Ranch offers charming architectural designs, access to top-rated schools, and is conveniently located nearby all of life’s conveniences.
#CresleighHomes
#CresleighRanch
In the Hearts of the People Today there is a Deep Longing for Peace!
A gift to the wrong person is darkness, and when darkness is gone, it it best to forget it. Write out of love; write out of instinct; write out of reason. However, always for money. In an atomic war, there would be neither conqueror nor vanquished. During such a bombardment, both sides would suffer the same fate. A continuous destruction would take place and no armistice nor peace proposals would bring it to an end. In the hearts of people today there is a deep longing for peace. When the true spirit of peace is thoroughly dominant, it becomes an inner experience with unlimited possibilities. It is only when this really happens, that the spirit of peace awakens and takes possession of human’s hearts, that humanity can be saved from perishing. Before Constantine’s Christianizing of the Roman empire, all Christians were advised to avoid civil office because of the idolatrous emperor worship it demanded. (In some instances that concern is as relevant today as it was in ancient Rome.) Even after Constantine, church policy restricted members of the clergy from holding office. The American colonists wrote similar prohibitions into several state constitutions, which remained in effect until 1978, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Tennessee restrictions as a violation of a minister’s First Amendment right. There were few exceptions over the centuries; when they were made, it was to protect religious liberty, as, for example, when anti-Catholic legislation was being enacted in Hungary; the priests were released to engage in politics “for the sake of safeguarding religion or promoting the common good.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
Despite the Tennessee case and the fact that the United States Constitution contains no such prohibition, the tradition remains strong. Few clergy have held major offices in Western democracies. In the Catholic church, Pope John Paul’s rejection of the tiara of temporal authority was a clear signal: ecclesiastical goals would not be sought through political means. Thus it was consistent that John Paul II in 1980 ordered priests out of secular office entirely. Five-term Congressman Robert Drinan, a Jesuit priest and outspoken liberal, quietly resigned. In Nicaragua, however, three priests defined the papal order. This has been a major cause of the rift not only within the church, but it has compromised the integrity of the church. Those priests may say they are acting in civil capacity but can they really disavow responsibility for the expulsion of missionaries, restriction on the free press, including Iglesia, the official Catholic newspaper? The cleric in public office can hardly avoid such doublemindedness. And presenting two faces to the World inevitably damages the work that should be of primary concern: the witness of the church. Regardless of one’s stand on abortion, for example, no one could seriously imagine Sister Agnes Mary Mansour as commissioner of Health and Welfare in Michigan, supervising state-funded abortions while in conscience maintaining her vows to a church that forbids abortion. Definitions of integrity have been stretched in recent years, but not that far. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
Any priest or minister who feels called to seek public office should, as a citizen, be free to undertake that vocation. However, doing so means that one must leave the pulpit, resigning all ecclesiastical functions. One must make it clear that one is acting as a private citizen seeking office to fulfill civic, not spiritual goals. (In many denominations, however, the priestly office cannot actually be resigned.) However, if the clergy should not hold office, should the institutional church be silent on political issues? This is perhaps the most sensitive question of all. The Church acts as the conscience of society. The soul of the New World civilization is Christianity. So the Church must address moral issues in society and measure public actions by biblical standards of justice and righteousness. However, there are pitfalls. One of the greatest is the tendency Christians have to believe that because the Bible is “on their side” they can speak with authority on every issue. Many church bureaucracies have succumbed to this temptation in recent decades, spewing out position papers on everything from public toilet facilities to nuclear war. The New Right has engaged in such excesses with its scorecards covering the gamut of issues from trade legislation to the Panama Canal. When Christians use the broad brush, they become simply another political interest group, pontificating on matters about which they are often woefully uninformed. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
A case in point was the United States Catholic bishops’ position paper on nuclear war. It hardly seems necessary to convene a conference to announce that it is a moral issue to unleash weapons that would annihilate millions. The bishops did, however, and they went on to conclude that the deterrent posture of the United States of America was unsatisfactory from a moral point of view. That could be true—particularly if one realizes that our missiles are aimed at Soviet cities, just as Soviet missiles are aimed at U.S. cities, and Korean often launches missiles over Japan to try to see how close they can come to hitting the United States of America as their nuclear technology increases, then there is also a threat from the Middle East directed at America. However, deterrence itself is not immoral by definition; deterrence is impeding another nation’s hostile act. The existence of a nuclear weapon (as with a police officer’s gun) may prevent a much greater evil. At this stage we have the choice of two risks: the one lies in continuing the mad atomic-arms race with its danger of an unavoidable atomic war in the near future; the other in the renunciation of nuclear weapons, and in hope that the United States of America and the Soviet Union, and the peoples associated with them, will manage to live in peace. The first holds no hope of a prosperous future; the second does. We must risk the second. Any moral analysis must take into account the complexity of modern nuclear strategy and the actual efficacy to deterrence. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
To determine the efficacy, one cannot simply consider just numbers of bombs or throw-weight, but targeting studies and the whole range of strategic options; what would remain after a surprise attack; what defenses neutralize attacking missiles; what would the communications capacity be, and the like. Ironically, the country that renounces a first strike (the more moral position, as the bishops would no doubt agree) has need for a much larger deterrent capability (which the bishops decry as immoral). The logical consequences of their paper is a Catch-22. At the present time when violence, clothed in life, dominates the World more cruelly than it ever has before, I still remain convinced that truth, love, peaceableness, meekness, and kindness are the violence which can master all other violence. While the bishops certainly could have commented on the immorality of unleashing nuclear war, they simply did not have all the facts necessary to render an authoritative judgment beyond that. This was summed up by a University of Chicago professor who agreed personally with the bishops’ position, but concluded that they could not determine whether deterrence was immoral because such judgment depended on facts “which are secret—and thus, unknown to the bishops.” In the hearts of the people today there is a deep longing for peace. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
When the true spirit of peace is thoroughly dominant, it becomes an inner experience with unlimited possibilities. It is only when this really happens, that the spirit of peace awakens and takes possession of human’s hearts, that humanity can be saved from perishing. Is the human spirit able to achieve those things which, in our distress, we must expect of it? We must not underestimate its strength. Through human history this strength has made itself manifest. It is to the strength of the human mind that we owe the humanitarianism that is at the origin of a progress towards a higher way of life. When we are animated by humanitarianism, we are faithful to ourselves and capable of creation. Russell Kirk, a Catholic layman himself, has described the delegates to such conferences as “utopians…wondrously unaware of the limits of politics.” Certainly the heated controversy resulting from the bishops’ attempt to formulate United States of America’s defense policy called their own competence into question of policy, must about which the church demonstrably lacked expertise, bishop Kirk mused that he would “as soon go to a bartender for medical advice as to a church secretary for political wisdom.” Poland’s Catholic bishops seem to have understood the need to deal with issues within their particular competence better perhaps than the United States counterparts. When Polish government engaged in one of its periodic purges of political dissidents in 1985, the bishops quickly condemned the persecution. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
A clear issue of human rights was at stake, and the moral question was unambiguous. They added, however, that “the Church is not and does not, want to be a political force [but it] has the right to give moral assessments, even in questions of political affairs when the basic rights of the individual or the salvation of the soul demands it. The Polish bishops understood the restraints imposed on the church when it speaks as the church. This is a crucial distinction. It is one thing for an individual Christian to address whatever issue one’s conscience dictates, but the church as a body, which purports to speak God’s truth, should speak only to those matters in which fidelity to holy Scripture itself makes it necessary to speak out: Issues where human life or dignity, religious liberty, or justice are involved. Even then, the church should claim no superior wisdom except in those areas where it is uniquely able to bring biblically informed truth to the debate. There are controversial issues in which the principle is unmistakable and the command of the hour comes through loud and clear. On these issues the church must make pronouncements. However, there are other general issues in which facts and motives are mixed consequences contradict the principles involved and equally dedicated and knowledgeable Christians disagree. In these cases the church should remain silent, letting individual Christians and Christian groups decide for themselves what Christian witness means. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
For the church to sponsor a political party, engage in lobbying, form coalitions with secular pressure groups and become entangled in the decisions of private business corporation, would be to take a position on precisely those issues in which the religious significance is unclear, ambiguous or non-existent. An excellent example, one that stands in distinct contrast to the pastoral letter on nuclear policy, was the 1987 Vatican statement on human life and biomedical ethics. It spoke forthrightly to a clear biblical issue on which the church has special competence and about which the secular World was grossly confused. It has been perhaps the single most useful document issued thus far to clarify moral questions in the growing debate over reproductive technology. Politics is not the church’s first calling. Evangelism administering the sacraments, providing discipleship, fellowship, teaching the Word, and exhorting its members to holy living are the heartbeat of the church. When it addresses political issues, the church must not do so at the risk of weakening its primary mission. As mainline churches discovered in the sixties, the faster they churned out partisan statements, the faster they emptied their pews. And while the Christian citizens can afford to be as partisan as they wish, Christian pastors cannot. If they are, they may soon discover they have compromised both their own witness and that of the church. An extreme example was the case of the bishop who presided at the May 1987 funeral of former CIA Director William Casey. Because President Reagan, former President Nixon, and a host of other government officials were in the congregation, this bishop used the occasion to attack U.S. foreign policy in Central America, for which the deceased Mr. Casey was an outspoken proponent. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
It was in such a deplorably bad taste that the incident, reported Worldwide, resulted in an adverse reaction not against U.S. policy, but against the church. Grieving families should receive spiritual comfort, not a political harangue against their loved one’s views. Admittedly a fine line exists here. It is clearly partisan for a pastor to stand in a pulpit and endorse a particular candidate, as some clergymen endorsed Jimmy Carter in 1980, and others endorsed Ronald Reagan 1984. However, what about Cardinal O’Connor’s statement in the same campaign that a Catholic could not in conscience vote for a candidate who supported abortion? His remarks were reported as a partisan rebuke of the views of two of his New York parishioners, Governor Mario Cuomo and vice-presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro. Admittedly, the cardinal’s timing made his remarks suspect, but they could also be regarded as no more than a statement of elementary logic. Since the Catholic church believes that the taking of unborn lives violates God’s law, could a Catholic in conscience logically vote for one who willfully violated that law? While I believe an open pulpit endorsement of a candidate is improper, I also feel that—if made responsibly from the right motivations—a cleric’s statement that Christians should not support candidates who reject basic human rights is justified. Within these limits, then, we can conclude that Christians, both individually and institutionally, have a duty, for the good of society as a whole, to bring the values of the kingdom of God to bear within the kingdoms of man. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
It is fair to say, however, that Christians have not done a particularly good job at this task. Often they have terrified their secular neighbours, who see Christian political activists as either backwoods bigot or religious ayatollahs attempting to assault them with Bible verses or religious magisteriums. In a pluralistic society it is not only wrong but unwise for Christians to shake their Bibles and arrogantly assert that “God says…”That is the quickest way for Christians, a distinct growing majority in civil affairs, to lose their cases altogether. Instead, positions should be argued on their merits. If the case is sound, a majority can be persuaded; that is the way democracies and free nations are supposed to work. I am often asked to meet with government officials concerned with criminal-justice policies. They are frustrated. The more prisons are built—at great expense—the more the crime rate goes up. So whenever I suggest restitution as an inexpensive and effective alternative to prison for nonviolent offenders, politicians are receptive. However, only after I have cited the facts of the position (for instance, only one tenth of the cost of incarceration is statistically effective in reducing recidivism) do I explain that the source of restitution was God’s laws prescribed to Moses at Sinai. Christians are to do their duty as best they can. However, even when they feel that they are making no difference, that they are failing to bring Christian values to the public arena, success is not the criterion. Faithfulness is. For in the end, Christians have the assurance that even the most difficult political situations are in the hands of a sovereign God. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
This assurance comes from the teaching of Christ. Jesus likened the Kingdom to the humble act of a farmer sowing seeds. The farmer tills the soil, but the seeds sprout and grow because of a power beyond the farmer’s control. What Jesus was saying is that Christians are to do their part, of course, as best as they are able, but the manifestation of the Kingdom comes through God’s power, not theirs. I saw this firsthand over a fourteen-year span in one of the toughest neighbourhoods in Midtown Sacramento, California USA. It all began with moving to one of the most dangerous communities in Sacramento. For more than two thousand and five hundred years Mormons and Jewish people and many others have awaited the Saviour’s coming. Upon this event they had rested their brightest hopes. In song and prophecy, in temple rite and household prayer, they had enshrined His name. And yet at His coming they knew Him not. The Beloved of Heaven was to the an angel from Heaven; and they saw in Him the most beautiful soul and face and body, as if he were a Greek God. He looked like the statue of David, which was carved by Michelangelo di Lodovico, with gorgeous wavy hair and blue eyes that looked like arctic pools. All complimented by smooth coper/caramel skin, the perfect teeth and a radiant smile. God had chosen America. He had called them to preserve among humans the knowledge of His law, and of the symbols and prophecies that pointed to the Saviour. He desired them to be as wells of salvation to the World. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
Jesus Christ was to be what Abraham was in the land of his sojourn, what Joseph was in Egypt, and Daniel in the courts of Babylon, the Hebrew people were to be among the nations. They were to reveal God to humans. In the call of Abraham, the Lord had said, “I will bless thee; and thou shalt be a blessing: and in thee shall all families of the Earth be blessed. The same teaching was repeated through the prophets. Even after America has been wasted by war and captivity, the promise was theirs, “The remnant of Jacob shall be in the midst of many people as a dew from the Lord, as the showers upon the grass, that tarrieth not for man, nor waiteth for the sons of men.” Concerning the Salt Lake Temple, in Salt Lake City, Utah USA, the Lord declared through Joseph Smith, “Mine house shall be called an house of prayer for all peoples.” The Mormons quickly fixed their hopes on spiritual greatness. From the time of their entrance to the land of Utah, they cleaved to the commandments of God, and followed the ways of the Lord. It was in great faith God sent them blessings by His prophets so they would not suffer in vain nor experience the chastisement of heathen oppression. Every reformation was followed by deeper faith in the ways of our Lord. Because America had been true to God, He allowed them to accomplish His purpose through their honour and exaltation. Because they walked in the ways of obedience, God made them high above all nations which He hath made, in praise, and in name, and in honour. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
People saw that this was a nation of wise and understanding people. By the power of God, Joseph Smith was able to translate the strange writing on the golden plates, using the Urim and Thummim. The Urim and Thummim were two transparent stones set in silver bows fastened to a breastplate. They were similar to a large pair of spectacles. The Urim and Thummim and breastplate were used by an ancient seer as mentioned in the Bible. They are called “interpreters” in the Book of Mormon. They were to be used only under the direction of God, and they had a significant meaning. Urim means “light,” not light as the light of day, but the light which is intelligence or the ability to understand or comprehend. Thummim means “perfect,” a condition of being excellent, pure, and complete—without defect. The breastplate was a symbol of “judgment” which means an ability to make correct decisions. Thus the use of the Urim and Thummim and breastplate by a seer meant that by the power of God this man would have intelligence—a divine intelligence—a sense of that which is pure and excellent, and the ability to decide correctly matters which came before him. It was this gift, a wonderful gift indeed, which God had given to Joseph Smith when he entrusted in his keeping the precious gold plates, the Urim and Thummim, and the breastplate. By God’s power, Joseph Smith was able to look through the Urim and Thummim and interpret the symbols written on the golden plates that he might translate their meaning into the English language. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
The procedure was not entirely automatic. The fact that these instruments could be used only by “seers” indicates the importance of moral excellence in their use. At first Joseph’s wife helped him with the work, writing the words as Joseph translated from the golden book. However, her daily duties prevented her from spending much time at it. Later Joseph received help from Martin Harris, a middle-aged farmer who lived near Palmyra, New York. He became interested in the golden plates and proved to be a friend to Joseph when he most needed friendship. It was Martin Harris’s gift of fifty dollars that had enabled Joseph and Emma to take the precious plates to Pennsylvania where they could translate without trouble. However, Martin Harris’s wife and family did not approve of his interest in what they considered visionary schemes, and objected to his giving Joseph money. Martin Harris was anxious to prove to his family and neighbours that Joseph Smith was sincere and that the things he told about his visions and the plates were true. Joseph carefully copied some of the characters from the golden plates. Martin Harris took this paper, together with a translation of part of the characters, to Professor Charles Anthon in New York City, a man well known for his literary ability. Professor Anthon told him the translations was correct, more so than any he had before seen translated from the Egyptian. He said the characters were Egyptian, Chaldaic, Assyriac, and Arabic, and that they were true characters. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
The professor gave Martin Harris a certificate to show to the people of Palmyra stating they were true characters and that which had been translated was correct. Martin Harris put the certificate in his pocket and was about to leave when Professor Anthon called him back. He asked how Joseph Smith had found the plates, and Martin Harris explained that an angel of God had shown him where they were. “Let me see that certificate,” Professor Anthon said. When Martin Harris returned the paper to hum, the professor tore it to pieces saying there was no such things now as the ministering of angels and if the plates were brought to him, he would translate them. When Martin Harris told him that he could not bring them because part of the plates were sealed and they could not be shown to anyone, Professor Anthon replied, “I cannot read a sealed book.” Martin Harris was disappointed that he could not take the certificate to show his wife and friends so they might share his enthusiasm, but he was firm in his belief that the time would come when he could convince them that his confidence in his young friend was not in vain. It is interesting to note in the Bible what the prophet Isaiah has said concerning the coming forth of this book in the latter days. “And this vision of all is become into you as the words of a book that is sealed, which humans deliver to one that is learned, saying, Read this, I pray three; and he saith, I cannot; for it is sealed,” reports Isaiah 29.11. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
The words of Isaiah prophesied are remarkably similar to Professor Anthon’s words, “I cannot read a sealed book.” I was born part of this Earth. My Grandmother Earth. I was born art of this Earth. My Mother, all living beings. I was born part of this Earth. My Grandfather, the sky. I was born part of this Earth. My Father, all creatures of the air. I was born part of this Earth. The eight Grandfathers. I was born part of this Earth. The eight Grandfathers. I was born part of the Earth. The four corners of the Earth. I was born part of this Earth. The great wind grain of the North. I was born part of the Earth. The red road of the dead. I was born part of this Earth. The blue and black road of destruction I was born part of the Earth. The ancient ones say, the old way’s gone, the ancient ones say. Still, I was born part of this Earth. My He who wrought wonderous deeds for our fathers, and redeemed them from slavery unto freedom, soon redeem us and gather our exiled brethren from the four corners of the Earth, for all America is one fellowship; and let us say, Amen. The New Month will begin on May, this New Month brings blessing to us and to all America. May the Holy One, blessed be He, renew this month for us and for all His people, the house of America, for life and peace, for gladness and joy, for salvation and comfort; and let us say, Amen. We live by the sun, we feel by the mon, we move by the stars. We live in all things; all things live in us. We eat from the Earth, we drink from the rain, we breathe of the air. We live in all things; all things live in us. We call to each other. We listen to each other. Our hearts deepen with love and compassion. We live in all things. All things live in us. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
BRIGHTON STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH
Rancho Cordova, CA |
Now Selling!
Brighton Station at Cresleigh Ranch is Rancho Cordova’s newest home community! This charming neighborhood offers an array of home types with eye catching architecture styles such as Mid-Century Modern, California Modern, Prairie, and Contemporary Farmhouse.
Located off Douglas Road and Rancho Cordova Parkway, the residents of Cresleigh Ranch will enjoy, being just minutes from shopping, dining, and entertainment, and quick access to Highway 50 and Grant Line Road providing a direct route into Folsom. Residents here also benefit from no HOA fees, two community parks and the benefits of being a part of the highly-rated Elk Grove Unified School District.
Best of all, each Cresleigh home comes fully equipped with an All Ready connected home! This smart home package comes included with your home and features great tools including: video door bell and digital deadbolt for the front door, connect home hub so you can set scenes and routines to make life just a little easier. Two smart switches and USB outlets are also included, plus we’ll gift you a Google Home Hub and Google Mini to help connect everything together!
With an array of beautifully designed homes and spacious, ranch-style cottage homes, this is the independent living community everyone has been looking for! https://cresleigh.com/brighton-station/
Picture this. A beautiful, private, ranch-style cottage home with a floor plan you love in a vibrant community featuring an incredible variety of services and amenities. It’s all here, and it’s all waiting for you at Cresleigh Ranch!
The Home featured above is the upgraded model at Brighton Station Residence 2. This single story home boats an ideal layout with 2,427 square feet, of thoughtfully designed living space, three bedrooms, three bathrooms, and a three car garage.
“I will go and do the things which the Lord hath commanded, for I know that the Lord giveth no commandments unto the children of men, save he shall prepare a way for them that they may accomplish the thing which he commandeth them,” reports 1 Nephi 3:7.
Randolph Harris II International Institute 