Home » China (Page 14)
Category Archives: China
If Brooklyn Had Jet Bombers, Would it be a Nation?
Scientists declare laguage is a human quality that separates humans from all other species. Perhaps it is the same quality that can link us to the beyond, but only if we are willing to listen. Abaco is an island. It has a population of seventeen thousand, two hundred, and twenty-five and forms part of the Bahamas lying off the coast of Florida. Several decades ago, a group of American businessmen, arms merchants, free enterprise ideologues, an intelligence agent of African descent, and a member of the British House of Lords determined that it was time for Abaco to declare its independence. Their plan was to take over the island and break it away from the Bahamian government by promising each of the native residents of the island a free acre of land after the revolution. (This would have left over a quarter of a million acres for use by the real estate developers and investors behind the project.) The ultimate dream was the establishment on Abaco of a taxless utopia to which wealthy businessmen, dreading the Socialist apocalypse, might flee. Alas for free enterprise, the native Abaconians showed little inclination to throw off their chains, and the proposed new nation was stillborn. Nevertheless, in a World in which nationalist movements battle for power, and in which some 152 state claim membership in that trade association of nations, the United Nations, such parodic gestures serve a useful purpose. They force us to challenge the very notion of nationhood. At the time of the revolution in the 1970s, the population was sixty-five hundred and the question was if the sixty-five hundred people of Abaco, whether financed by oddball businessmen or not, constitute a nation? #RandolphHarris 1 of 24
If Singapore with its 2.3 million people (5.9 million in 2021) is a nation, why not New York City with its 8 million (18.8 million in 2021)? If Brooklyn had jet bombers, would it be a nation? Absurd as they sound, such questions will take on new significance as the Third Wave batters at the very foundations of Second Wave civilization. For one of those foundations was, and is, the nation-state. Until we cut through the foggy rhetoric that surrounds the issue of nationalism, we cannot make sense of the headlines and we cannot understand the conflict between First and Second Wave civilizations as the Third Wave strikes them both. Before the Second Wave began rolling across Europe most regions of the World were not yet consolidated into nations but were organized, rather, into a mishmash of tribes, clans, duchies, principalities, kingdoms, and other more or less local units. “Kings and princes,” write the political scientists S. E. Finer, “held powers in bits and blobs.” Borders were ill-defined, governmental rights fuzzy. The power of the state was not yet standardized. In one village, Professor Finer tells us, it amounted only to the right to collect tolls on a windmill, in another to tax the peasant, elsewhere to appoint an abbot. An individual with property in several different regions might owe allegiance to several lords. Even the greatest of emperors typically ruled over a patchwork of tiny locally-governed communities. Political control was not yet uniform. Voltaire summed it all up: In traveling across Europe, he complained, he had to change laws as frequently as horses. #RandolphHarris 2 of 24
There was more to this quip than met the eye, of course, for the frequent need to change horses reflected the primitive level of transport and communications—which, in turn, reduced the distance over which even the most powerful monarch could impose effective control. The farther from the capital, the weaker the authority of the state. Yet without political integration, economic integration was impossible. Only if they produced goods for larger-than-local markets, could costly new Second Wave technologies be amortized. However, if outside their own communities, they ran into a maze of different duties, taxes, labour regulations, and currencies, how could businessmen buy and sell over a larger territory? For the new technologies to pay off, local economies had to be consolidated into a single national economy. This meant a national division of labour and a national market for commodities and capital. All this, in turn, required national political consolidation as well. Put simply, a Second Wave political unit was needed to match the growth of Second Wave economic units. Not surprisingly, as Second Wave societies began to build national economies, a basic shift in public consciousness became evident. The small-scale local production in First Wave societies had bred a race of highly provincial people—most of whom concerned themselves exclusively with their own neighbourhoods or villages. Only a tiny handful—a few nobles and churchmen, a scattering of merchants, and a social fringe of artists, scholars, and mercenaries—had interests beyond the village. #RandolphHarris 3 of 24
The Second Wave swiftly multiplied the number of people with a stake in the larger World. With steam- and coal-based technologies, and later with the advert of electricity, it became possible for a manufacturer of clothing in Frankfurt, watches in Geneva, or textiles in Manchester to produce far more units than the local market could absorb. He also needed raw materials from afar. The factory worker, too, was affected by financial event occurring thousands of miles away: jobs depended on distant markets. Bit by bit, therefore, psychological horizons expanded. The new mass media increased the amount of information and imagery from far away. Under the impact of these changes, localism faded. National consciousness stirred. Starting with the American and French revolutions and continuing through the nineteenth century, a frenzy of nationalism swept across the industrializing parts of the World. Germany’s three hundred and fifty marginal, diverse, quarreling mini-states needed to be combined into a single national market—das Vaterland. Italy—broken into pieces and ruled variously by the House of Savoy, the Vatican, the Austrian Hapsburgs, and the Spanish Bourbons—had to be united. Hungarians, Serbs, Croats, Frenchmen, and others all suddenly developed mystical affinities for their fellows. Poets exalted the national spirit. Historians discovered long-lost heroes, literature, and folklore. Composers wrote hymns to nationhood. All at precisely the moment when industrialization made it necessary. #RandolphHarris 4 of 24
Once we understand the industrial need for integration, the meaning of the national state becomes clear. Nations are not “spiritual unities” as Spengler termed them, or “mental communities” or “social souls.” Noor is a nation “a rich heritage of memories,” to use Renan’s phrase, or a “shared image of the future,” as Ortega insisted. What we call the modern nation is a Second Wave phenomenon: a single integrated political authority superimposed on or fused with a single integrated economy. A ragbag collection of locally self-sufficient, sparsely connected economies cannot, and does not, give rise to a nation. If it sits atop a loose conglomeration of local economies, nor is a tightly unified political system a modern nation. Nationalist uprisings triggered by the industrial revolution in the United States of America, in France, in Germany and the rest of Europe, can be seen as efforts to bring the level of political integration up to the fast-rising level of economic integration that accompanied the Second Wave. And it was these efforts, not poetry or mystical influences, that led to the division of the World into distinct national units. As each government sought to extend its market and its political authority, it came up again outer limits—language differences, cultural, social, geographic, and strategic barriers. The available transport, communication, and energy supplies, the productivity of its technology, all set limits on how large an area could be effectively ruled by a single political structure. The sophistication of accounting procedures, budgetary controls, and management techniques also determined how far political integration could reach. #RandolphHarris 5 of 24
Within these limits, the integrational elites, corporate and governmental alike, fought for expansion. The broader the territory under their control and the bigger the economic market area, the greater their wealth and power became. As each nation stretched its economic and political frontiers to the utmost, it ran up not merely against these inherent limits but also against rival nations. To break out of these confines the integrational elites used advanced technology. They hurled themselves, for example, into the “space race” of the nineteenth century—the building of railroads. In September 1825 a rail line was established that linked Stockton to Darlington in Britain. In May 1835, on the continent, Brussels was tied to Malines. That September in Bavaria the Nuremberg-Furth line was laid. Next were Paris and St. Germain. Far to the east, in April 1838, Tsarkoe Selo was connected to St. Petersburg. For the next three decades or more, railroad workers stitched one region to another. The French historian Charles Moraze explains: “The countries which were already almost united in 1830 were consolidated by the coming of the railway…those still unprepared saw new bands of steel…tightening around them…It was as if every possible nation was hastening to proclaim its right to exist before the railways were built, so that it might be acknowledged as a nation by transport system which defined the political boundaries of Europe for over a century.” In the United States of America the government awarded vast land grants to the private railroad companies, inspired, as historian Bruce Mazlish has written, by “the conviction that transcontinental roads would strengthen the ties of union between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 24
Hammering in the golden spike that completed the first transcontinental rail line opened the door to a truly national market—integrated on a continental scale. And it extended the actual, as distinct from nominal, control of the national government. Washington could now move troops quickly all across the continent to enforce its authority. What one saw, therefore, in one country after another, was the rise of this powerful new entity—the nation. In this way the World map came to be divided into a set of neat, nonoverlapping patches of red, pink, orange, yellow, or green, and the nation-state system became one of the key structures of Second Wave civilization. Beneath the nation lay the familiar imperative of industrialism: the drive toward integration. However, the drive for integration did not end at the borders of each nation-state. For all its strengths, industrial civilization had to be fed from without. It could not survive unless it integrated the rest of the World into money system and controlled that system for its own benefit. How it did so is crucial to any understanding of the World the Third Wave will create. In examining America’s postwar transformation of rural farm tracts into instant suburbs we must keep in mind several factors. First, without doubt, by far the most important factor in making possible the postwar suburban exodus was the liberalization of loan leading polices by federal government agencies. As noted earlier, prior to the war, mortgages would commonly only be given for a five-year period with a balloon payment at the end. A borrower would have to hope one could get a new mortgage when the note became due. Moreover, the mortgage would cover only half to at most two-thirds the value of the property. #RandolphHarris 7 of 24
The new Veterans Administration loads radically changed all this. The new Veteran Administration (VA) loan guarantees made loans available to veterans at low interest rates, below conventional mortgages, with no money down with a twenty-five- or thirty-year repayment schedule. The Federal Housing Authority (FHA) similarly liberalized its lending policies for nonveterans. The government, in effect, guaranteed the lending institutions profits by agreeing to make good any leans on which the borrower defaulted. This was a truly radical change. Bank suddenly wanted to make loans to millions of middle- and lower-middle-class families who they previously would have spurned. Families with a steady breadwinner could, for the first time, realistically expect to get mortgages to purchase their own homes. Moreover, it was easy to do. The whole process was streamlined by developers such as the Levitt brothers so that all the paperwork could be completed in a few hours. In an era when closing costs run thousands of dollars, it is worth noting that the total closing cost as of 1954 at the second Levittown outside Philadelphia, in New Jersey, was $10 ($100.07 in 2021 dollars). Following World War II, developers rushed to build acres of new suburban subdivisions. The were modest story book houses, and especially designed to be marketed to ex-GIs and their brides. For instance, Argo Homes offered detached brick and stucco bungalows for veterans only for $7,900.00 full price ($79,057.27 in 2021 dollars) for $53 monthly ($530.38 in 2021 dollars), which paid all carrying charges (total principle and interest payment of $636 a year, with a 4 percent mortgage for twenty-five years). Given such terms, veterans could hardly afford not to move to the suburbs. #RandolphHarris 8 of 24
In this particular subdivision, the landscaped plots were 40×100, the houses had 4 rooms, automatic gas heat, fully insulated, large closets, scientific kitchen with built-in cabinets, modern gas range and inlaid linoleum floor, poured concrete foundation, steel lally columns, copper piping, unique balance double hung windows. Government lending policies—whether by design or accident—actively fostered purchasing suburban over city homes. Following World War II, VA and FHA government-guaranteed loans were readily available for new homes in the suburbs. Young veterans could and did purchase new—sometimes still-to-be-built VA and FHA approved suburban subdivision homes with nothing down and mortgage rates below the conventional amount. The above-mentioned Levittown in New Jersey sold homes in the mid-1950s for $8,990 ($89,965.17 in 2021 dollars). Veterans were required only to place a $100 ($1,000.72 in 2021 dollars) good-faith deposit, which was returned at the time of closing. Nonveterans needed only $450 ($4,503.26 in 2021 dollars) down. To purchase existing city homes required far larger down payment. The low housing prices, and particularly the availability of a long-term, no-money-down mortgage, was a crucial factor for new families just becoming economically established. By 1972, the FHA alone had made some 11 million new-home loans. Also important was the fact that purchasing in the city took time. To see if they met FHA standards, existing older homes in the city would have to be inspected, and this took weeks or months. By contrast, once a developer’s plans were approved, all the standardized models of that home he built automatically qualified. #RandolphHarris 9 of 24
By contrast, once a developer’s plans were approved, all the standardized models of that home he built automatically qualified. A family could drive out to a new subdivision, pick a lot, put down a $100 ($644.01 in 2021 dollars from 1972 figures) deposit, and do the majority of the paperwork in a Sunday afternoon. Conventional mortgages were also easier to obtain in suburban locations. Two wars later, this was still the case. The author, a Vietnam-ear veteran with three young children and barely enough for a down payment, found mortgage funds readily available on suburban homes. For homes across the line in the city the funds were harder to obtain, and came with higher interest rates. Second, the Federal government further subsidized out-movement from the cities by initiating, in the 1950s, the construction of a federally financed metropolitan freeway system. Secretary of Commerce Weeks described the building of the national freeway system as, “the greatest public works program in the history of the World.” Without the newly built freeways, many of the new suburban subdivisions would have been all but impossible to reach. Automobile commuting would have been out of the question. The freeways meant distance from the city was now measure in time rather than mileage. Developers often put up billboards advertising their tract development as being, “Only 25 minutes from here.” Ironically, the very freeways that speed commuters from the city were originally pushed to be built by downtown business interests and city mayors. They mistakenly expected that new road would bring more shoppers and businesses downtown. They forgot that the roads could be used to go out rather than in. #RandolphHarris 10 of 24
Third, Following World War II, open land for buildings was almost by definition suburban land. By the 1950s cities had largely developed all the land within their legal boundaries. This was particularly true of the cities in the eastern and middle-western sections of the country. Without annexation, additional growth in urban areas would thus, by definition, have to be suburban growth. By the end of the way, there was an extreme need for new housing. As noted earlier, for over a decade and a half little had been built. The 1930s were the years of the Great Depression, and during the first half of the 1940s, there was World War II. Thus, by the 1950s there was a tremendous pent-up demand for housing, and this demand could only be met in the suburbs. It was not so much that families were fleeing the city; rather, it was that mot of he land available for development was, by definition, suburban. Forth, for decades following World War II, young families bought homes in the suburbs not so much for “togetherness” or to escape the supposed ills of the city, but because houses in suburban subdevelopment were both more available and more affordable with larger lots than those in the city. However, in communities like Pocket/Greenhaven in Sacramento, California USA; families did want to be close to each other and not live together, so many of the bought homes in the same community to have a sense of a true community, but with separation and privacy. In attempts to analyze he postwar move to the suburbs, this basic economic motivation is often given less weight than it deserves. #RandolphHarris 11 of 24
Economic, more than social-psychological needs for togetherness, propelled young could to the suburbs. In many cases it was more economical and safer to buy in the suburbs than to rent in the city. Safety concerns is why, before becoming President, Governor of California (1967-1975) Ronald Reagan’s wife, Nancy Reagan decided to move out of the Governor’s Mansion, and left in to the California State Parks to be managed as Governor’s Mansion State Historic Park. The mansion was built in 1877, and after the First Lady of California felt it was not a safe community, it sat vacant until 2015 and again is unoccupied since 2019. A family with a mortgage on a tract house in the suburbs found that monthly principal and financing costs usually were lower than on available housing in the city. Moreover, taxes were almost always lower than in the central city. This was in part because developers rarely put in the “extras,” such as city water, sewers, parks, sidewalks, curbs, street lighting, and, of course, schools that were taken as givens in the city. In time the demand for services and the assessments to pay for them increased in new suburbs. However, the initial front-end costs were ow and in a rough fashion met the needs of those at the beginning of their work careers who expected their incomes to increase with time. The 1950 and 1960 constituted a period in which unionization had brought even blue-collar workers high wages and benefits. Fifth, survey data consistently show that Americans have a strong preference for single-family home on their own lots. This is the type of housing that was most commonly built in the suburbs in the decades following the war. #RandolphHarris 12 of 24
The homes in the original Levittown in Long Island were modestly beautiful Cape Cod houses. The architectural characteristics denoted a home that was generally with a steep roof, shingled exterior, symmetrical façade, with a large chimney in the middle, and built on a slab. The Cape Cod architecture was considered all-American, as fresh as grandmother’s apple pie, and people stood in line for days waiting to get one. Planners and architects decried these subdivisions of little boxes, “all made out of ticky-tack and all in a row,” but they were vastly popular with the buying public. Lewis Mumford and other critics might rail about the problems of poor design and one-social-class communities, but people literally lined up to buy houses in the newly opened Levittown and other suburban developments. Actually, even if buyers wanted one, there was not a choice. Apartments were not covered by GI loans, and town houses were not being built. Still, even if people are given a choice between high-rise units, town houses, or single-family homes, suburban sprawl will win every time! This is true even for those without children. Research indicates that most families living in apartment buildings view their residency as temporary location before moving to a single-family house. If a suburban home is too expensive, a suburban town house, or even a garden apartment, may be temporarily substituted. Even those academics holding neo-Marxian views, which see suburban sprawl as a product of conscious decisions made by powerful economic interests, still acknowledges that people want single-family homes on separate lots. Imagine that, even socialists and communists like private property. #RandolphHarris 13 of 24
Suburban critics may feel that such housing is a blight on the landscape, but others believe when it is tastefully done and includes nature and the neighbourhood does not look like a parking lot, there is no question suburban sprawl looks like a glimpse of Heaven and is what the masses of the population wanted after the war and still want as we approve the half century mark. Postwar suburbia was “caused” by demographic changes. The return of both the veterans and of economic prosperity created a marriage boom that was followed in short order by the famous “baby boom.” The latter lasted from 1947 to 1964. Existing housing in cities and towns was simply not adequate for absorbing the exploding number of new families. Some 10 million new households were created in the decade after the war. In the tight postwar market, they were not welcome as renter. The result was that young couples with children were more or less forced from the overcrowded cities toward the new built standard-format suburb. And anyway, many families did not feel safe with their children living in cities because of the traffic and the rift raft the jails attracted. They needed space to grow families—a need that suburban developers were delighted to fill. “As a rule, the more bizarre a thing is the less mysterious it proves to be. It is your commonplace, featureless crimes which are really puzzling,” (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 1891-92). #RandolphHarris 14 of 24
At the core of the religious impulse is a sense of awe, an attitude of bewilderment, a feeling that reality is more amazing than everyday scientific reasoning can comprehend. Wonder-struck, we humbly acknowledge our limits and accept that which we cannot explain. For many religious people the ultimate threat of science is therefore that it will demystify life, destroying our sense of wonder and with it our readiness to believe in and worship an unseen reality. Once we regarded flashes of lightening and explosions of thunder as supernatural magic. Now we understand the natural and humanmade process at work. Once we viewed certain mental disorders as demon possession. Now we are coming to discern genetic, biochemical, and stress-linked causes. Once we prayed that God would spare children from COVID-19. Now we vaccinate them. Understandably, some Christians might get the idea that science is elbowing out religion. We can also understand why such people therefore grasp at hints of the supernatural—at bizarre phenomena that science cannot explain. Browse your neighbourhood religious bookstore and you will find books that describe happenings that defy natural explanation—people reading minds or foretelling the future, levitating objects or influencing the roll of a die, discerning the contents of sealed envelopes or solving cases that dumbfounded detective. Whether viewed as a divine gift or as demonic activity, such a phenomena are said to refute a mechanistic Worldview that has no room for supernatural mysteries. Most research psychologist and professional magicians (who are wary of the exploitation of their arts in the name of psychic powers) are skeptical, for several reasons. #RandolphHarris 15 of 24
They are skeptical because in the study of ESP and the paranormal there has been a distressing history of fraud and deception; most people’s beliefs in ESP are now understandable as a by-product of the efficient but occasionally misleading ways in which our minds process information; the accumulating evidence regarding the brain-mind connection more and more weighs against the theory that the human mind can function or travel separately from the brain; and, more important, there has never been demonstrated a reproducible ESP phenomenon, nor has there been found any individual who could defy chance when carefully rested. One National Research Council investigation of ESP concluded that “the best available evidence does not support the contention that these phenomena exist.” And in 1995, a CIA-commissioned report evaluated ten years of military testing of psychic spies, in which $20 million ($35, 327, 427.82 in 2021 dollars) had been invested. The result? The program produced nothing, and the psychic spy program was scrapped. After one hundred and twenty-five years of research, and after hundreds of failed attempts to claim a $1-million prize that has for two decades been offered to the first person who can demonstrate “any paranormal ability,” many parapsychologists conceded that what they need to give their field credibility is a single reproducible phenomenon and a theory to explain it. #RandolphHarris 16 of 24
We Christians can side with scientific skeptics on the ESP issue. We can heed not only the repeated biblical warnings against being misled by self-professed psychics who practice “divination” or “magic spells and charms,” but also the scientific spirit of Deuteronomy: “If a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord and what He does not come true, then it is not the Lord’s message.” We believe that humans are finite creature made by the one who declares, “I am God, and there is no one like me.” We are aware of how cult leaders have seduced people with pseudopsychic tricks. And we affirm that God alone is omniscient (the able to read minds and know the future), omnipresent (thus able to be in two places a once), and omnipotent (the capable of altering—or, better yet, creating—nature with divine power). In the biblical view, humans, loved by God, have dignity but not deity. If our senses of mystery is not to be found in the realm of the pseudosciences and the occult, then where? Having cleared he decks of false mysteries, where shall we find the genuine mysteries of life? We can take our clue from Sherlock Holmes, who was fond of telling people: “It is a mistake to confound strangeness with mystery. The most commonplace crime is often the most mysterious. Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence.” The more scientists learn about sensation, the more convinced they are that what is truly extraordinary is not extrasensory perception, claims for which inevitably dissolve upon investigation, but rather our very ordinary moment-to-moment sensory experiences of organizing formless neural impulses into colourful sights and meaningful sounds. #RandolphHarris 17 of 24
As you read this sentence, particles of light energy are being absorbed by the receptor cells of your eyes, converted into neural signal that activate neighbouring cells, which process the information for a third layer of cells, which converge to form a nerve tract that transmits a million electrochemical message per moment up to the brain. There, step by step, the page you are viewing is reassembled into its component features and finally—in some as yet mysterious way—composed into a consciously perceived image, which is instantly compared with previously stored images and recognized as words you know. The whole process is rather like taking a house apart, splinter by splinter, transporting it to a different location, and then, through the work of millions of specialized workers, putting it back together. All of this transpires in a fraction of a second. Moreover, it is continuously transpiring in motion, in three dimensions, and in colour. Twenty-five years of research on computer vision has no yet begun to duplicate this very ordinary, taken-for-granted part of our current experience. Further, unlike virtually all computers, which process information one step at a time, the human brain carries out countless other operations simultaneously, enabling us all at once to sense the environment, use common sense, converse, experience emotion, and consciously reflect on the meaning of our existence or even to wonder about our brain activity while wondering. The deeper one explores these very ordinary things of life, the more one empathizes with Job: “I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me.” #RandolphHarris 18 of 24
To be sure, sometimes we use the word mystery not in its deep sense, as when the mind seeks to fathom it brain, but rather to refer to unsolved scientific puzzles. When wonder is based merely on ignorance, it will fade in the growing light of understanding. Science is a puzzle-solving activity. Among the still unsolved puzzles of psychology are questions such as, Why do we dream? Why do some of us become heterosexual, others homosexual? How does the brain store memories? The scientific detectives are at work on these “mysteries,” and they may eventually offer us convincing solutions. Already, new ideas are emerging and progress is occurring. Often, however, the process of answering one question exposes more and sometimes deeper questions. A new understanding may lead to a new, more impenetrable sense of wonder regarding phenomena that seem further than ever from explanation or that now seems more beautifully intricate than previously imagined. Not long ago scientists wondered how individual nerve cell communicated with one another. The answer—that they communicated through chemical messengers called neurotransmitters—raised new questions: How many neurotransmitters exist? What are the functions of each? Do abnormalities in neurotransmitter functioning predispose disorders such as schizophrenia and depression? If so, how might such problems be remedied? And how, from the electrochemical activity of the brain, do experienced emotions and thoughts arise: How does a material brain give rise to consciousness? #RandolphHarris 19 of 24
Deeper and deeper go to the questions, the deepest one of all being the impenetrable mystery behind the origin of the Universe: Why is there something and not nothing? (If a miracle is something that cannot be explained in terms of something else, then the existence of the Universe is a miracle that dwarfs any other our minds can conceive.) Human consciousness has long been a thing of wonder. More recently, wonder has also grown regarding the things our minds do subconsciously, automatically, out of sight. Our minds detect and process information without awareness. They automatically organize our perceptions and interpretations. They respond intelligently, via the brain’s right hemisphere, in ways that we can explain only if our left hemisphere is informed of what is going on. They effortlessly encode incoming information about the place, timing, and frequency of events we experience, about words meanings, about unattended stimuli. They ponder problems we are stumped with, and they occasionally spew forth a spontaneous creative insight. With the assistance of hypnosis, they may even, on orders, eliminate warts on one side of the body but not on others. There is, we now know, more to our minds than we are away of. And how fortunate that it should be so. For the more that routine functions (including well-learned activities such as walking, biking, or gymnastics) are delegated to control systems outside of awareness, the more our consciousness is freed to function like an executive—by focusing on the more important problems at hand. Our brains operate rather like BMW, with a few important matters decided by chair of the board, and everything else, thankfully, handled automatically, effortlessly, and usually competently be amazingly intricate native infotainment system. #RandolphHarris 20 of 24
Language researchers, too, have been awestruck by an amazing phenomenon: the ease with which children acquire language. Before children can add two and two they are creating their own grammatically intelligible sentences and comprehending the even more complex sentences spoke to them. Most parents cannot state the intricate rules of grammar. Yet before being able to tie their shoes, preschoolers are soaking up the complexities of language by learning several new words a day and the rules for how to combine them. They do so with a facility that puts to shame many college students who struggle to learn a new language with correct accents and many computer scientists who are struggling to simulate natural language on computers. Moreover, they, and we, do so with minimal comprehensions of how we do it—how we, when speaking, monitor our muscles, order our syntax, watch out for semantic catastrophes risked by the slightest change in word order, continuously adjust our tone of voice, facial expression, and gestures, and manage to say something meaningful when it would be so easy to speak gibberish. Our womb-to-tomb individual development is equally remarkable. What is more ordinary than humans reproducing themselves, and what is more wonder-full? Consider the incredible god fortune that brought each one of us into existence. The process began as a mature egg was released by the ovary and as some 300 million sperm began heir upstream race toward it. Against all odds, you—or, more exactly, the very sperm cell together with the very egg it would take to make you—won this one-in-300 million lottery (actually one in billions, considering that your conception had to occur from particular unions involving pleasures of the flesh). #RandolphHarris 21 of 24
What is more, a chain of equally improbable events, beginning with the conception of your parents and their discovery of one another, had to have extended backward in time for the possibility of your moment to have arrived. Indeed, when one considers the improbable sequence of unnumerable events that led to your conception, from the birth of the Universe onward, one cannot escape the conclusion that your birth and your death anchor the two ends of a continuum of probabilities. What is more improbable than that you, rather than one of your infinite alternatives, should exist? What is more certain than that you will not live on Earth endlessly? Most beings of life fail to survive the first week of existence. However, again, for you, good fortune prevailed. Your one cell became two, which became four; and then by the end of your first week even more astonishing thing happened: brain cells began forming and within weeks were multiplying at a rate of about one-quarter million per minute. The scientist-physician Lewis Thomas explains the wonder of that single cell, which had as its descendant all the cells of the human brain. The mere existence of that cell should be one of the greatest astonishments of Earth. People ought to be walking around all day, all through their waking hour, calling to each other in endless wonderment, talking of nothing except that cell. If you like being surprised, there is the source. One cell is switched on to become the whole trillion-cell, massive apparatus for thinking and imagining and, for that matter, being surprised. #RandolphHarris 22 of 24
All the information needed for learning to read and write, playing the piano, arguing before senatorial subcommittees, walking across a street through traffic, or the marvelous human act of putting out one hand and leaning against a tree, is contained in the first cell. All of grammar, all syntax, all arithmetic, all music. No one has the ghost of an idea how this works, and nothing else in life can ever be do puzzling. If anyone doe succeed in explaining, it, within my lifetime I will charter a skywriting airplane, maybe a whole fleet of them and send them aloft to write one great exclamation point after another, around the whole sky, until all my money runs out. Human life—so ordinary, so familiar, so natural, and yet so extraordinary. Looking for mystery in things bizarre, we feel cheated when later we learn that a hoax or a simple process explains it away. All the while we miss the awesome events occurring before, or even within, our very eyes. The extraordinary within the ordinary. So it was on that Christmas morning two millennia ago. The most extraordinary event of history—the Lord of the Universe coming to the spaceship Earth in human form—occurred in so ordinary a way as hardly to be noticed. On a mundane winter day at an undistinguished inn in an average little town the extraordinary one was born of an ordinary peasant woman. Like our human kin at Bethlehem and Nazareth long ago, we, too, are often blind to the mystery within things ordinary. We look for wonders and for the unseen reality—the hand of God—in things extraordinary, when more often His presence is to be found in the unheralded, familiar, everyday, events of which life is woven. #RandolphHarris 23 of 24
O Lord, Thou art on the sandbanks as well as in the midst of the current; I bow to Thee. Thou art in the little pebbles as well as in the calm expanse of the sea; I bow to Thee. O all-pervading Lord, Thou art in the barren soil and in crowded places; I bow to Thee. We thankfully acknowledge that Thou art the Lord our God and God of our fathers, the God of all that lives, our Creator and Creator of the Universe. We offer blessings and thanksgiving to Thy great and holy name because Thou hast kept us in the life and sustained us; so mayest Thou continue to keep us in life and sustain us. O gather our exiles into the courts of Thy holy sanctuary to observe Thy statues, to do Thy will, and to serve Thee with a perfect heart. We give thanks unto Thee. Blessed be God to whom we are ever grateful. For all this, Thy name, O our King, shall be blessed and exalted for ever and ever. May all the living do homage unto Thee forever and praise Thy name in truth, O God, who art our salvation and our help. Blessed be Thou, O Lord, Beneficent One, unto whim our thanks are due. Our God and God of our fathers, bless us with the threefold blessing written in the Book of Mormon and Holy Bible, and in the Torah of Moses, Thy servant, and spoken by Aaron and his sons, Thy consecrated priests: May the Lord bless thee and keep thee; so may it His will. May the Lord make His countenance to shine upon thee and be gracious unto thee; so may it be His will. May the Lord turn His countenance unto thee and give thee peace. So may it be His will. Please grant peace, well-being and blessing unto the World, with grace, lovingkindness and mercy for us and for all America, Thy people. To love and win is the best thing. To love and lose is the next best. #RandolphHarris 24 of 24
Cresleigh Homes
Imagine entertaining in a space with so many seating options! It’s a dream. 🙌 Riverside Residence 2 is approximately 2,600 square feet, and designed to maximize every bit of space, in a one story home. Special features in this home designed to maximize comfort include a centralized great room.
Extend the living environment outdoors with a corner sliding glass door in the great room for easy indoor-outdoor entertaining. Implement an executive gourmet kitchen perfect for cooking up holiday meals in. The more, the merrier! https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-riverside-at-plumas-ranch/residence-2/
O Wicked Wit and Gifts that Have the Power So to Seduce!
I have always noticed a prevalent want of courage, even among persons of superior intelligence and culture, as to imparting their own psychological experiences when those have been of a strange story. Almost all humans are afraid that what they could relate in such wise would find no parallel or response in a lister’s internal life, and might be suspected or laughed at. A truthful traveller who should have seen some extraordinary creature in the likeness of a devil, would have no fear mentioning it; but the same traveller having had some singular presentiment, impulse, vagary of thought, vision (so-called), dream, or other remarkable mental impression, would hesitate considerably before one would own to it. To this reticence I attribute much of the obscurity in which subjects are involved. We do not habitually communicate our experiences of these subjective things, as we do our experiences of objective creation. The consequences is, that the general stock of experiences in this regard appears exceptional, and really is so, in respect of being miserably imperfect. The Devil had been raised among us, and his rage was vehement and terrible; and, when he shall be silenced, the Lord only knows. It does not signify how many years ago, or how few, a certain Murder was committed in Boston in 1688, which attracted great attention. We hear more than enough of Murders as they rise in succession to their atrocious eminence, and if I could, I would bury the memory this this atrocious eminence, as hi body was buried, in the Witch House’s basement. When the murder was first discovered, no suspicion fell—or I ought rather to say, for I cannot be too precise in my facts, it was nowhere publicly hinted that any suspicious fell—on the man who was afterwards brought to trial. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
As no reference was at the time made to him in the newspapers, it is obviously impossible that any description of him at that time have been given in the newspapers. It is essential that this fact be remembered. Unfolding at breakfast my morning paper, containing the account of that first discovery, I found it to be deeply interesting, and I read it with close attention. I read it twice, if not three times. The discovery had been made in a bedroom, and, when I laid down the paper, I was aware of a flash—rush—flow—I do not know what to call it—no word I can find is satisfactorily descriptive—in which I seemed to see that bedroom passing through my room, like a picture impossibly painted on a running river. Though almost instantaneous in its passing, it was perfectly clear; so clear that I distinctly, and with a sense of relief observed the absence of the dead body from the bed. As the circumstances of the Murder, gradually unravelling, took stronger and stronger posses of the public mind, I kept them away from mine, by knowing as little about them as was possible in the midst of the universal excitement. John Hathorne asked most of the questions and established the judicial attitude that was to prevail throughout most of the examinations and the trials. Many people suspected that the devil killed this man and he had been summoned by Sarah Good because she had also been accused of bewitching a few girls in the town. Mr. Hathorne asked the children to look at Sarah God and say whether she was one who afflicted them. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
They accused her to her face, “upon which they were all dreadfully tortured and tormented for a short space of time.” When they recovered from their fits, they charged her with causing them, saying that her specter had come and tormented them although her body remained “at a considerable distance from them.” This was spectral evidence, that is, evidence concerning a specter or apparition of the accused, rather than her bodily person. It was eventually to become the central legal issue of the trials, but at the moment we need only see why it seemed initially so convincing to the examining magistrates. Here were girls afflicted with violent physical symptoms which had no known physical cause, but which a physician had attributed to witchcraft. There was a malicious old woman accused of causing them. When the sufferers accused her they were immediately thrown into convulsions. What could be more plausible than that the convulsions were inflicted as revenge for the accusation? Yet such behaviour was still unfamiliar enough in Salem so that one of the recorders noted that “none here see the [specters of the] witches but the afflicted and themselves.” However, the change was so startling that I fully believed the girls derived their impression in some occult manner. For instance, we knew there was something occult going on because the throat of the murdered man had been cut straight across. In the opening speech for the defense, it was suggested that the deceased might have cut his own throat in the dreadful condition referred to. Yet, it would have been impossible for such a wound to be self-inflicted by either hand. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Certainly, Mr. Hathorne was convinced; when the children had recovered and repeated their accusation he turned to the accused woman. “Sarah Good, do you not see now what you have done? Why do you not tell us the truth? Why do you this torment these people children?” Certainly many of her neighbours though her malicious, since they attributed to her a number of inexplicable events, including the death of a cow which perished in a “sudden, terrible and strange unusual manner.” Such testimony was common in witchcraft cases, and it has caused much unseemly hilarity among the modern historians. It is likely, they have asked, that His Satanic Majesty the Devil or any of his minions would stop to concern themselves with the fate of a New England cow? The answer is that nothing is more likely. What else would a fertility god concern himself with but the health or sickness of crops, of animals, and of humans? From the standpoint of a society that still remembered who the Devil was, no testimony could be more relevant. As a matter of fact, the village witches who still exist in rural England are often expert in folk medicines, human and animal, as well as charms, and until recently many of them were midwives. Sarah Osburn also denied that she had hurt anyone, but the girls feel again into fits. Mr. Hathorne asked her how this happened. Perhaps, she said, the Devil went about in her likeness doing harm, but she knew nothing about it. Sarah Osburn was the first at Salem to assert the principle that the Devil can impersonate an innocent person. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Whether the devil could or not was a matter of debate in the seventeenth century, but most Protestant authorities agreed with Goodwife Obsurn that, as Hamlet put it, “The Devil hath power/ to assume a pleasing shape.” However, the principle was not discussed at this hearing, since Sarah Osburn was a likely a suspect as Sarah Good, if for no other reason than her lying. Lying was still considered a serious sin in the seventeenth century, and a crime as well, legally punishable by the courts. Nine of us had not the smallest doubt about those passages, neither, I believed, had any one in Court. When Mr. Hathorne tried to find out how well Sarah Osburn knew Sarah Good she said she did not know her by name. Mr. Hathorne asked if Sarah Osburn had been tempted by the devil, and she said no. Why then, he asked, had not she been at church? She had been sick, she said, and unable to go. However, her husband and others contradicted her. “She had not been at meeting,” they said, “this year and two months.” To understand why the matter of church attendance was considered so significant one must remember that the seventeenth century saw witchcraft as literal Devil worship, and therefore as a rival religion to Christianity. This is why the magistrates sometimes asked accused persons, as they asked Sarah Good, what God they served. And if the accused person avoided speaking the name of God (as Sarah Good did), they had reason to think it a suspicious circumstance. The murdered man at that time stood directly opposite the judge, on the other side of the court. He slowly shook a great grey veil, which he carried on his arm for the first time, over his head and whole form. Then he collapsed, all was gone, and his place was empty. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
The examinations of Sarah Good and Sarah Osburn afford grounds for suspicion and for further examination. However, the major event of that first day of March was the examination of Tituba. It began like the others, but it changed very quickly: “Tituba, what evil spirit have you familiarity with?” “None.” “Why do you hurt these children?” “I do not hurt them.” “Who is it then?” “The Devil, for aught I know.” “Did you never see the Devil?” “The Devil,” said Tituba, “came to me and bid me serve him.” She went on, with a minimum of judicia prodding, to provide a detailed confession of witchcraft, the first of approximately fifty that were made during the Salem trials. On March first and second, in her examination, Tituba said that the Devil had come to her in the shape of a man—a tall man in black, with white hair. Other times he had come in the shape of an animal. He had told her he was God, that she must believe him and serve him six years, and he would give her many fine things. He had shown her a book and she had made a mark in it, a mark that was “red like blood.” Many people thought this to be a revelation. “Then I saw another beast, coming out of the Earth. He had two horns like a lamb, but he spoke like a dragon. He exercised all authority of the first beast on his behalf, and made the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast, whose fatal wound had been healed. And he performed great and miraculous signs, even causing fire to comedown from Heaven to Earth in full view of men. Because of the signs he was given power to do on behalf of the first beast, he deceived the inhabitants of the Earth. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
“He ordered them to set up an image in honour of the beast who was wounded by the sword and yet lived. He was given power to give breath to the image of the first beast, so that it could speak and cause all who refused to worship the image to be killed. He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless one had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name,” reports Revelation 13.11-17. Sarah Osburn was to die there on the tenth of May. Tituba, like later confessors, was never brought to trial. She lay in jail until she was sold to pay the jailer’s fees, her master refusing to pay them. Sarah Good was brought to trial. Another reaction to Tituba’s confession was to confirm the community in its fear of witchcraft, and particularly its fear of the three accused women. The night of March First William Allen and John Hughes heard a strange noise; it continued frightening them, but the approached and “saw a strange and unusual beast lying on the ground. Going up to it, the said beast vanished away and in the said place started up two or three women fled, not after the manner of other women but swiftly vanished out of sight, which women we took to be Sarah Good, Sarah Osburn, and Tituba.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
The next night William Allen again had hallucinations: “Sarah Good visibly appeared to him in his chamber, said Allen being in bed, and brought an unusual light with her. The said Sarah came and sat upon his foot. The said Allen went to kick at her, upon which she vanished and the light with her.” Notice that in this hallucination as in many others the hallucination stops as soon as the subject is able to move or speak. A curse is any expressed wish that some form of adversity or misfortune will befall or attach to one or more persons, a place, or an object. In particular, “curse” may refer to such a wish or pronouncement made effective by a supernatural or spiritual power, such as a god, or gods, a spirit, or natural force, or else as a kind of spell by magic or witchcraft. The Winchester rifle is a handsome gun that legend has it was forged in Hell. Whoever possesses the cursed rife either suffers disaster or fortune. Oliver Fisher Winchester was an American businessman and politician, best known as being the founder of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Oliver Winchester was born November 30, 1810 and dead December 10, 1880. Oliver Winchester was known for manufacturing and marketing the Winchester repeating rifle, which was a much re-designed descendant of the Volcanic rifle of some years earlier. Mr. Winchester was more learned than his kind in the mysteries of a deep and thrilling lore of peculiar fascination. He was a man highly honoured for his natural gifts and knowledge of learned books which nobody else could read, that was when he took his second orders the bishop gave him a mantle of scarlet silk to wear upon his shoulders in which, and his lordship had put such power into it that, when the parson has it rightly on, he could govern any ghost or evil spirit, and even stop an Earthquake. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
Such a powerful man, in combat with supernatural visitations discovered that a division of Smith & Wesson firearms was failing financially with one of their newly patented arms. Having an eye for opportunity, Mr. Winchester assembled venture capital together with other stockholders and acquired the Smith & Wesson division, better known as the Volcanic Repeating Arms Company, in 1855. By 1857, Mr. Winchester had positioned himself as the principle stockholder in the company and relocated to New Haven, Connecticut, and changed the name to New Haven Arms Company. After experiencing a slow start, and then a booming success with the Henry rifle, the company reorganized once again and the first Winchester rifle was the Model 1866, which had been nicknamed the Yellow Boy. The gun was called Yellow Boy because it should be remembered that, howsoever strange and singular it may sound to us that a mere lad should formally solicit such a performance at his own hands. Gradually Mr. Winchester amassed a considerable fortune. When Mr. Oliver Winchester died on December 10, 1880, his ownership in the company passed to his son, William Wirt Winchester (who married Sarah Lockwood Pardee in 1862), and died March 7 1881 at the young age of 43. The couple has also had a child, Annie Pardee Winchester, born June 15, 1866, and died 6 weeks later on July 25, 1866. Mrs. Winchester was deeply troubled by the loss of her daughter. In the course of her daily walk, she had to pass a certain heath or down where the road wound along through tall blocks of granite with open spaces of grassy sward between them. #RandpolphHarris 9 of 13
There in a certain spot, and always in the same place, she declared that she encountered, every day, a baby with a pale and troubled face, clothed in a little dress of white pique, made with two skirts. The pique was cut slightly Gabriele, and rounded off in the front with scallops, bound with white braid, with a button in each scallop, and ribbon-sash, tied at the left side, with one hand always stretched forth, and the other pressed against her side. “She is my baby,” Mrs. Winchester would say, and she often used to come to her parents house in New Haven; but that which troubled her was, that she had now been dead three years, and she had seen her body laid in the grave at her burial, this that she saw every day must needs be her soul or ghost. The hair of the appearance, sayth Mrs. Winchester, is not like anything alive, but it is so soft and light that it seemth to melt away while you look; but her eyes are set, and never blink—no, not when the sun shineth full upon her face. She maketh no steps, but seemth to swim along the top of the grass; and her hand, which is stretched out alway, seemth to point to something far away, out of sight. It is her continual coming; for she never failth to meet Mrs. Winchester, and to pass on, that hath quenched her spirits; and although she never seeth her by night, yet cannot she get her natural rest. Mrs. Winchester went to see a doctor who told her, “The case is strange but by no means impossible. It is one that I will study, and fear not to handle, if you will be free with me, and fulfill all that I desire.” Mrs. Winchester was overjoyed, but she perceived that the doctor turned pale, and was downcast with some thought which, however, he did not express. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
The doctor knew that this might be a doemonium meridianum, the most stubborn spirit to govern and guide that any human can meet, and the most perilous withal. He made an appointment to go with Mrs. Winchester to the spot where she had these encounters. They had hardly reached the accustomed spot, when they both saw her at once gliding towards them; punctually as the ancient writers describe their “lemures, which swoon along the ground, neither marking the sand nor bending the herbage.” The aspect of the baby girl was exactly that which had been related by Mrs. Winchester. There was a pale and stony face, the strange misty hair, the eyes firm and fixed, that gazed, yet not on them, but on something that they saw far, far away; one hand and arm stretched out, and the other grasping the girdle of her waist. She floated along the field like upon a stream, and glided past the spot where they stood, pausingly. But so deep was the awe that came over the doctor, as he stood there in the light of day, face to face with a human soul separate from her bones and flesh, that his heart and purpose both failed him. He had resolved to speak to the spectre in the appointed form of words, but he did not. He stood like one amazed and speechless, until she had passed clean of out sight. When they returned to the house, and after he had said all he could to pacify Mrs. Winchester, he took leave for that time, with a promise that when he had fulfilled certain business elsewhere, when then he alleged, he would return and take orders to assuage these disturbances and their cause. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
The doctor later told Mrs. Winchester that he thought it was best that they try an exorcism, but his Church, as is well known, hath abjured certain branches of her ancient powers, on grounds of perversion and abuse. So he referred her to a medium. The medium told Mrs. Winchesters, “There is a danger from the demons, but so there is in the surrounding air every day.” There was a kind of trouble in the air, a soft rippling sound, and all at once the shape appeared, and came towards the medium gradually. She opened her parchment scroll, and read aloud the command. The spirit paused, and seemed to waver and doubt; stood still; then she rehearsed the sentence again, sounding out every syllable like a chant. The spirit then swam into the midst of the circle, and there stood still, suddenly. Her knees shook under her, and the drops of sweat ran down her flesh like rain. But, although face to face with the spirit, the medium’s heart grew calm, and her mind was composed. The spirit then commanded Mrs. Winchester to move West and build a mansion in honour of the spirit killed by the Winchester rifle and “as long as the hammer keep pounding, her heart would continue to beat.” The medium dismissed the troubled ghost, until she peacefully withdrew, gliding towards the west. Mrs. Winchester moved to San Jose, which was near her family Member, Enoch Pardee, an occultist, prominent physician, free mason, and Mayor of Oakland, California USA, had built his family’s mansion in 1868, which is now known as the Pardee House Museum. Masonry has influenced more the modern witchcraft; it has influenced dozens of occult orders. Mrs. Winchester bought a farm house and built a massive mansion. There was something very painful and peculiar in the position of the Winchester mansion through the nineteenth century. The estate in those days was in a transitory state, and Mrs. Winchester, like her formularies, embodied a strange mixture of the old belief with the new interpretation. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
However, the mansion is now flanked by a pleasantness, a beautiful garden and lawn, and it is surrounded by a sole grove of palm trees. It has also the aspect of age and of solitude, and looks the very scene of harmony and supernatural events. A legend might well belong to every beautiful glade of grass around, and there must surely be a haunted room somewhere within its walls. The incredible mansion, scenery of the legend still survives, and, like the field of the forty footsteps in another history, the place is still visited by those who take interests in the supernatural tales of old and new. Freemasons supposedly conducted a séance in the mansion in August of 2019. A phantom made an answer willingly. It stated, “before the next Yule-tide, a fearful pestilence will lay waste the land, and myriads of souls will be loosened from the flesh, until our valleys will be full.” The general facts stated in this diary are to these matters of belief accounted a strong proof of the veracity of the Ghost that the plague, fatal to so many millions, did break out in the global village at the close of the year. How sorely must the infidels and heretics of this generation be dismayed when they know that this Black Death, which is now swallowing its thousands in the streets of the great city, was foretold several months before the outbreak, under the séance of a freemason, by a visible and suppliant ghost! And what pleasure and improvements do such deny themselves who scorn and avoid all opportunity of intercourse with souls separate, and the spirits, glad and sorrowful, which inhabit the unseen World! May they who observe the Sabbath and call it a delight, rejoice in Thy Kingdom. May the people who sanctify the seventh day be sated and delighted with Thy bounty. For Thou didst find pleasure in the seventh day, and didst sanctify it, calling it the most desirable of the days, in remembrance of creation. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Winchester Mystery House
Today is the return of our guided Mansion Tour! The tour guide-led experience allows guests to access areas of the mansion that have been closed since March 2020. Click the link in our bio for more information. winchestermysteryhouse.com/recent-links
Not Even Houdini Could Dismantle it Without Serious and Harmful Consequences!
We rely on others to inform us, but we still cannot be taught, and must decide the truths for ourselves. We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the World we inherit. The question “Who runs things?” is a typically Second Wave question. For until the industrial revolution there was little reason to ask it. Whether ruled by kinds of shamans, warlords, sun gods, or saints, people were seldom in doubt as to who held power over them. The ragged peasant, looking up from the fields, saw the palace or monastery looming in splendor on the horizon. One needed no political scientist or newspaper pundit to sole the riddle of power. Everyone knew who was in charge. Wherever the Second Wave swept in, however, a new kind of power emerged, diffused and faceless. Those in power became the anonymous “they.” Who were “they”? Industrialism, as we have seen, broke society into thousands of interlocking parts—factories, churches, schools, trade unions, prisons, hospitals, and the like. It broke the line of command between church, state, and individual. It fractured knowledge into specialize discipline. It dissembled jobs into fragments. It divided families into smaller units. It doing so, it shattered community life and culture. Somebody had to put things back together in a different form. This need gave rise to many new kinds of specialists whose basic task was integration. Calling themselves executives or administrators, commissars, coordinators, presidents, vice-presidents, bureaucrats, or managers, they cropped up in every business, in every government, and at every level of society. And they proved indispensable. They were the integrators. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
They defined roles and allocated jobs. They decided who got what rewards. They made plans, set criteria, and gave or withheld credentials. They linked production, distribution, transport, and communications. They set the rules under which organizations interacted. Essentially, they fitted the pieces of society together. Without them the Second Wave system could never have run. Karl Marx, in the mid-nineteenth century, thought that whoever owned the tools and technology—the “means of production”—would control society. He argued that, because work was interdependent, workers could disrupt production and seize the tools from their bosses. Once they owned the tools, they would rule society. Yet history played a trick on them. For the very same interdependency gave even greater leverage to a new group—those who orchestrated or integrated the system. In the end it was neither the owners nor the workers who came to power. In both capitalist and socialists nations, it was the integrators who rose to the op. It was not ownership of the “means of production” that gave power. It was control of the “means of integration.” Let us see what that has meant. In business the earliest integrators were the factory proprietors, the business entrepreneurs, the mill owner and ironmasters. The owner and a few assistants were usually able to coordinate the labour of a large number of unskilled “hands” and to integrate the firm into the larger economy. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
Since, in that period, owner and integrator were one and the same, it is not surprising that Dr. Marx confused the two and laid so heavy an emphasis on ownership. As production grew more complex, however, and the division of labour more specialized, business witnessed an incredible proliferation of executives and experts who came between the boss and his workers. Paperwork mushroomed. Soon in the larger firms no individual, including the owner or dominant shareholder, could even begin to understand the whole operation. The owner’s decisions were shaped, and ultimately controlled, by the specialists brought in to coordinate the system. Thus a new executive elite arose whose power rested no longer on ownership but rather on control of the integration process. As the manager grew in power, the stockholder grew less important. As companies grew bigger, family owners sold out to larger and larger groups of dispersed shareholders, few of whom knew anything about the actual operations of the business. Increasingly, shareholders had to rely on hired managers not merely to run the day-to-day affairs of the company but even to set its long-range goals and strategies. Boards of directors, theoretically representing the owners, were themselves increasingly remote and ill-informed about the operations they were supposed to direct. And as more and more private investment was made not by individuals but indirectly through institutions like pension funds, mutual funds, and the trust departments of banks, the actual “owners” of industry were still further removed from control. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
The new power of the integrators was, perhaps, most clearly expressed by W. Michael Blumenhal, former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury. Before entering government Mr. Blumenthal headed the Bendix Corporation. Once asked if he would some day like to own Bendix, Mr. Blumenthal replied: “It’s not ownership that counts—it’s control. And as Chief Executive that is what I’ve got! We have a shareholders’ meeting next week, and I’ve got ninety-seven percent of the vote. I only own eight thousand shares. Control is what’s important to me….To have the control over this large animal and to use it in a constructive way, that is what I want, rather than doing silly things that others want me to do.” Business policies were thus increasingly fixed by the hired managers of the firm or by money managers placing other people’s money, but in neither case by the actual owners, let alone by the workers. The integrators took charge. All this had certain parallels in the socialist nations. As early as 1921 Dr. Lenin felt called upon to denounce his own Soviet bureaucracy. Leon Trotsky, in exile by 1930, charged that there were already five to six million managers in a class that “does not engage directly in productive labour, but administers, orders, commands, pardons and punishes.” The means of production might belong to the state, he charged, “But the state… ‘belongs’ to the bureaucracy.” In the 1950’s Milovan Djilas, in The New Class, attacked the growing power of the managerial elites in Yugoslavia. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
Josip Broz Tito, who imprisoned Mr. Djilas, himself complained about “technocracy, bureaucracy, the class enemy.” And fear of managerialism was the central theme in Mr. Mao’s China. Mr. Mao, leading the World’s biggest First Wave nation, repeatedly warned against the rise of managerial elites and saw this as a dangerous concomitant of traditional industrialism. Under socialism as well as capitalism, therefore, the integrators took effective power. For without them the parts of the system could not work together. The “machine” would not run. Integrating a single business, or even a whole industry, was only a small part of what had to be done. Modern industrial society, as we have seen, developed a host of organizations, from labour unions and trade associations to churches, school, health clinics, and recreational groups, all of which had to work within a framework of predictable rules. Laws were needed. Above all, the info-sphere, socio-sphere, and techno-sphere had to be brought into alignment with one another. Out of this driving need for the integration of Second Wave civilization came the biggest coordinator of all—the integrational engine of the system: big government. It is the system’s hunger for integration that explains the relentless rise of big government in every Second Wave society. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
Again and again political demagogues arose to call for smaller government. Yet, once in office, they very same leaders expanded rather then contracted the size of government. This contradiction between rhetoric and real life becomes understandable the moment we recognize that the transcendent aim of all Second Wave governments has been to construct and maintain industrial civilization. Against this commitment, all lesser differences faded. Parties and politicians might squabble over other issues, but on this they were in tacit agreement. And big government was part of their unspoken program regardless of the tune they snag, because industrial societies depend on government to preform essential integrational tasks. In the words of political columnist Clayton Fritchey, the United State of America’s federal government never ceased to grow, even under three recent Republican administrations, “for the simple reason that not even Houdini could dismantle it without serious and harmful consequences.” Free marketeers have argued that governments interfere with business. However, left to private enterprise alone, industrialization would have come much more slowly—if, indeed, it could have come at all. Governments quickened the development of the railroad. They built harbours, roads, canals, and highways. They operated postal services and build or regulated telegraph, telephone, and broadcast systems. They wrote commercial codes and standardized markets. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
Governments applied foreign policy pressures and tariffs to assist industry. They drove farmers off the land and into the industrial labour supply. They subsidized energy and advanced technology, often through military channels. At a thousand levels, governments assumed the integrative tasks that others could not, or would not, perform. For government was the great accelerator. Because of its coercive power and tax revenues, it could do things that private enterprise could not afford to undertake. Government could “hot up” the industrialization process by stepping in to fill emerging gaps in the system—before it became possible or profitable for private companies to do so. Governments could perform “anticipatory integration.” By setting up mass education systems, governments not only helped to machine youngsters for their future roles in the industrial work force (hence, in effect, subsidizing industry) but also simultaneously encouraged the spread of the nuclear family form. By relieving the family of educational and other traditional functions, governments accelerated the adaptation of family structure to the needs of the factory system. At many different levels, therefore, governments orchestrated the complexity of Second Wave civilization. Not surprisingly, as integration grew in importance both the substance and style of government changed. Presidents and prime ministers, for example, came to see themselves primarily as managers rather than as creative social and political leaders. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
In personality and manner, they became almost interchangeable with the men who ran the large companies and production enterprises. While offering the obligatory lip service to democracy and social justice, the Nixons, Carters, Thatchers, Brezhnevs, Giscards, and Ohiras of the industrial World rode into office by promising little more than efficient management. These technicians of power were themselves organized into hierarchies of elites and sub-elites. Every industry and branch of government soon gave birth to its own establishment, its own powerful “They.” Sports…religion…education…each had its own pyramid of power. A science establishment, a defense establishment, a cultural establishment sprang up. Power in Second Wave civilization was parceled out to scores, hundreds, even thousands of such specialized elites. In turn, these specialized elites were themselves integrated by generalist elites whose membership cut across all the specializations. For example, in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe the Communist party had members in every field from aviation to music and steel manufacture. Communist party members served as a crucial grapevine carrying messages from one sub-elite to another. Because it has access to all information, it has enormous power to regulate the specialist sub-elites. In the capitalist countries, leading business people and lawyers, serving on civic committees or boards, performed similar functions in a less formal way. What we see, therefore, in all Second Wave nations are specialized groups of integrators, bureaucrats, or executives, themselves integrated by generalist integrators. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
A yet a higher level, integration was imposed by the “super-elites” in charge of investment allocation. Whether in finance or industry, in the Pentagon or in the Russian planning bureaucracy, those who made the major investment allocations in industrial society set the limits within which the integrators themselves were compelled to function. Once a truly large-scale investment decision had been made, whether in Minneapolis or Moscow, it limited future options. Given a scarcity of resources, one could not casually tear out Bessemer furnaces or cracking plants or assembly lines until their cost had been amortized. Once in place, therefore, this capital stock fixed the parameters within which future managers or integrators were confined. These groups of faceless decision-makers, controlling the levers of investment, formed the super-elite in all industrial societies. In every Second Wave society, consequently, a parallel architecture of elites sprang up. And—with local variation—this hidden hierarchy of power was born again after every crisis or political upheaval. Names, slogans, party labels, and candidates might change; revolutions might come and go. New faces might appear behind the big mahogany desks. However, the basic architecture of power remained. Time and again during the past three hundred and seventy years, in one country after another, rebels and reformers have attempted to storm the walls of power, to build a new society based on social justice and political equality. Temporarily, such movements have seized the emotions of millions with promises of freedom. Revolutionists have even managed, now and then, to topple a regime. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
Yet each time the ultimate outcomes was the same. Every time the rebels re-created, under their own flag, a similar structure of sub-elites, elites, and super-elites. For this integrational structure and the technicians of power who ruled it were as necessary to Second Wave civilization as factories, fossil fuels, or nuclear families. Industrialism and the full democracy it promised were, in fact, in compatible. Industrial nations could be forced, through revolutionary action or otherwise, to move back and forth across the spectrum from free market o centrally planned. They could go from capitalist to socialist and vice versa. However, like the much-cited leopard, they could not change their sports. They could not function without a powerful hierarchy of integrator. Today, as the Third Wave of change is being implemented in this fortress of managerial power, the first fleeting cracks have appeared in the power system. Demands for participation in management, for shared decision-making, for worker, consumer, and citizen, and for anticipatory democracy are welling up in nation after nation. New ways of organizing along less hierarchical and more ad-hocratic lines are springing up in the most advanced industries. Pressures for decentralization of power intensify. And managers become more and more dependent upon information from below. Elites themselves, therefore, are becoming less permanent and secure. All these were merely early warnings—indicators of the upheaval we are experiencing in the political systems. The Third Wave, already has been battering at these industrial structures, opening fantastic opportunities for social and political renovation. In these times, startling new institutions are replacing our unworkable, oppressive, and obsolete integrational structures. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
It is not just a matter of getting comfortable in the role we have as people with special responsibilities, so far as our personal adequacies are concerned, but rather of accepting the reality of our role, even though we know our inadequacies. Housing styles reflect the social values of particular eras. The planned suburbs of the nineteenth century had been deigned for the affluent railroad commuter. However, by the turn of the century, the elaborate Victorian social customs and housing styles had gone “out of fashion” (became unaffordable). By World War I, the once popular Victorian- and Queen-Anne-style homes, Americana places of great worth were too expensive to recreate because of machines manufacturing replacing human labour and the first taxes were enacted in 1913. Not only that, but the gold rush and force free labour had come to an end, so people were not as affluent and could not afford to build such grand homes. Therefore, the ornateness and flourishes of the late-nineteenth century were supplanted by simpler and more efficient architectural designs. The prototype of this modern form would be the suburban bungalow design. The informality and more relaxed nature of this design could be seen immediately upon entering the front door. The elaborate entrance halls and parlors of the Victorian era were replaced by a simple doorway opening immediately into a less-formal general-purpose living room. Bungalows were built not for the affluent, but for the comfortable middle-class family. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
Early in the twentieth century many new suburbs sprang up filled with utilitarian bungalow and other frame models. Rather than being individually designed, these homes were often mass-produced from simple sets of plans. Homes would be individualized by small variations n ornamentation or material. Thus, first the streetcar and then the automobile opened up suburbia as a place of residence for the comfortable middle class. Such simple, moderate-priced, and informal style homes were needed to house this growing suburban population. Most common among these budget-friendly, less exotic designs were the American Foursquare and the bungalow, but there is still a lot to appreciate. The foursquare, as its name suggests, was a basic four-sided, cubed-shape model sometimes knows as the box, the cube, or the classic box. It was an efficient two-and-one-half story high model set on a raised basement with a wide porch across the front reached by raised steps. The foursquare had its two stories caped by a low pyramidal roof containing generally a front, and sometimes a side, dormer. Inside was often incorporated handcrafted “honest” woodwork (unless purchased from a mail-order catalog. The rooms were generally of equal size, wit the stairwell on the side wall near the front door. The foursquare was a solid and stable, in unexcited, style. The basement generally contained a large natural convection furnace or boiler. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
The bungalow-style homes, by contrast, looked more “suburban” and was more versatile, permitting greater variation in the arrangement of interior space. External on this house is either single-story or second story built into a sloping roof (usually with dormer windows), and may be surrounded by wide verandas. The external ornamentation could give the bungalow a low colonial, shingle, Tudor, or even Spanish appearance. Often, essentially identical homes on the same street were given different external styles. The bungalow house was relatively little known in 1900s, but by World War I it had become common in the outer reaches of the cities and the developing middle-class suburbs. The bungalow was very much an American creation, combining practicality, economy, and comfort. Bungalows, as noted, also suggested a more informal life-style than the earlier Victorian housing. Over time the term “bungalow” became virtually a generic name for any smaller, cozy, and comfortable home. While Victorian homes had parlors, libraries, and sitting rooms, the bungalows were more modest and utilitarian. Large entrance halls and vestibules were replaced with front doors that entered directly into the living space. In the bungalow, “a pleasant living room with a cozy fireplace, built in bookcases, and an cupboard or two would serve the combined functions of a library, parlor, and sitting room. The bungalow cottage, most often simply called a bungalow, characteristically had a porch, living room, dining room, and kitchen downstairs and three bedrooms and bathrooms upstairs. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
In the bungalow, the front upstairs windows typically were in a dormer extending out from the front roof. The style had limited space but used it very effectively. There were numerous regional variations of the standard bungalow. California bungalows often had only one floor, and in Los Angeles the term “bungalow” came to be used for any low suburban house. In the Midwest the “Chicago bungalows” that covered much of that city’s outlying northerwest suburbs were uniformly single storied (with a room that could be finished upstairs), and all were brick faced. Bungalow homes were well suited for starter homes (some selected them as forever homes) insofar as they were reasonably priced, and they seemed to exude a mood of solid middle-class comfort. For many new families, they suggested upward mobility. Suburban bungalows were efficiently laid out and cold easily be managed by a middle-class housewife without the servants that had been part of the large Victorian houses. Bungalows, many of which are still occupied today, substituted technology for hand power. Bungalows had all the modern convenience of central heating, water heaters, indoor plumbing, and gas ovens and stoves. Bungalows also invariably had residential electric service. This made them very up-to-date residence. Electricity, for example was by no means universally found in homes at the time of World War I. As of 1917 only one-quarter (24.3 percent) of all homes in the United States of America were electrified. Even many city homes were still lit by gas or, if the family was poor, by kerosene. Following the war electric service quickly became the norm. By 1920 the proportion of homes having electric service had jumped to almost half (47.7 percent), and by 1930 it was 85 percent. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
The northwest side of Chicago still has miles and miles of virtually identical well-maintained “Chicago bungalows” built in the 1920s. The Chicago bungalows had an unfinished second floor which was reached by entering from the kitchen. Over the years many owners converted the second floors into children’s bedrooms. Suburban bungalows were smaller than earlier Victorian homes, partially because of smaller families and no live-in servants. However, most important in reducing floors space were he rising construction costs of building “modern” homes with built-in central heating, indoor plumbing, and electric sockets for plugging in lamps and modern labor-saving devices such as electric Hoover vacuum cleaners. In the east and Midwest, bungalows commonly had concrete-floored basements with washtubs having running hot and cold water. This was a major advance. Some earlier houses had not had semifinished basements entered from the house, but dirt-floored cellars entered by external lift-up cellar doors. Also, these basements differed from those of earlier years in that they were designed not as much for storage as to be electrically lighted and centrally heated places where the new electric washing machine with ringer could be kept, where the washed clothes could be hung to dry in winter, and where the husband could have a workroom. Following World War II, it became the fad for homeowners to enclose a “family room” in the basement. Often the new television set would be kept in this family room. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
Among the “modern” features in some bungalows were faux fireplaces with gas-fired logs. These went out of fashion in the 1940s, and many of the gas systems were disconnected for safety reasons. Ironically, as of the 1900s gas-fired logs are again in style among affluent baby boomers who want a fireplace but do not want the bother of real wood. However, some still enjoy the scent of a burning log in the winter as it is nostalgic of wonderful times. The post-World War housing boom is usually blamed for identical housing styles, but the suburban bungalow had perfected the art of mass-producing suburban homes far before the postwar look-alike subdivisions. Even complete homes with all building material included could be purchased from catalogs. The most long-lived of the mail-order builders was the Aladdin Company, but Sears, Roebuck and Montgomery Ward also were major sellers of prefabricated bungalows. Between 1908 and 1937, Sears sold roughly 100,000 mail-order houses, primarily in the Midwest and the East. Sears, in their catalog, offered several prefabricated homes and all the precut parts. Everything from plans to lumber to doors to fixtures was dropped off at the nearest railway station. Both Sears, Roebuck and Montgomery Ward also pushed appliances and furniture to those purchasing homes, figuring that those who were buying a new house were excellent customers for purchasing household goods. The retailer thus not only sold the home but everything that wen into it. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Sears did not leave the mail-order business until 1937, when the Depression forced them out. Sears had made the mistake of not only selling the homes, but also financing them. Sears made too many installment loans to buyers who lost their jobs and thus could not pay their mortgages. “Train children in the right way, and when old they will not stray,” reports Proverbs 22.6. Everyone believes it: by instruction, by discipline, and by example parents shape their children. To be convinced, most of us need look no further than our families. We see ourselves reacting to situations much as our mothers or fathers did. We hear their admonitions echoing in our minds. We relish their approval. We carry forward many of their values. And we see ourselves not only reaching backward into our children, chips off ourselves. Countless research studies seem to confirm the potency of parenting. The extremes of parenting provide the clearest evidence: the abused children who later become abusive, the unloved who become unloving. Orphanage-reared infants who are given minimal custodial care—ample food and a warm bed, but not much else—often become withdrawn, frightened, even speech. By contrast, children who develop an optimistic self-image and a happy, self-reliant manner tend to have been reared by caring parents who are neither permissive nor autocratic, parents who maintain firm standards without depriving their children of a sense of control over their own lives. In many ways we can see the parent in the child. By ten mothers of age, our babbling mirrors the sounds ad intonations of our parents’ language. In childhood, our attitudes, our play, and our ambitions usually look suspiciously like those of our same-gender parent. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
As adolescents, most of us still express the social, political, and religious views of our parents; the generation gap typically involves nothing more than difference in the strength with which we and our parents hold our shared values. So we know both from experience and from the accumulating evidence the parental power that was understood by the writer of Proverbs. How one trains up a child affects how the child relates, talks, dresses, thinks, and believes. Our assumptions about the power of positive parenting lead us to credit parents for their children’s achievements and blame them for their shortcoming. We may think about how we would have handled that troubled child—surely with better results. Some have therefore sought to hold parents responsible for their children’s criminal activities. Likewise, parents take personal pride in their children’s successes and feel guilt over their failures. Parents accept congratulations for the child who is elected class president and feel ashamed by the child who repeatedly is called to the principal’s office. Parents second-guess themselves: Where did we go wrong with him? How should we have handled her? It all makes perfect sense: if parents from children as a potter molds clay, then parents can indeed be praised for their children’s virtues and blamed for their children’s vices. Given our readiness to praise or blame, to feel pride or shame, we had best also to understand the limits of parental influence. For the accumulating evidence further testifies to the ways in which children are shaped by forces over which parents have little control. Once such force lies hidden within our genes, the architectural codes directing biochemical events that, down the line, design our bodies and influence our behaviours. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
By selective breeding of animals, by comparing the similarity of genetically identical twins with that of fraternal twins, and by asking whether adopted children more closely resemble their biological or adoptive parents, psychologist are discovering how our heredity forms us. There is religion in everything around us, a calm and holy religion in the unbreathing things in Nature. It is a meek and blessed influence, stealing in as it were unaware upon the hear; it comes quickly, and without excitement; it has no terror, no gloom; it does not rouse up the passions; I is untrammelled by creeds…it is written on the arched sky; it looks out from every star; it is on the sailing could and in the invisible wind; it is among the hills and valleys of the Earth where the shrubless mountain-top pierces the thin atmosphere of eternal winter, or where the mighty forest fluctuates before the strong wind, with its dark waves of green foliage; it spreads out like a legible language upon the broad face of an unsleeping ocean; it is the poetry of Nature; it is that which uplifts the spirit within us….and which opens to our imagination a World of spiritual beauty and holiness. Our Father, our King, do Thou soon make manifest to us the glory of Thy kingdom; please reveal Thyself and establish Thy exalted rule over us in the sight of all living. Assemble our scattered brethren from among that nations, and please gather our dispersed from the ends of the Earth. Please lead us with joyous song unto America Thy city, and with everlasting joy unto the United States of America, the home of Thy Sanctuary, where our forefather prepared unto Thee daily offerings. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19 We rely on others to inform us, but we still cannot be taught, and must de
Plumas Ranch offers three distinct communities to choose from: Riverside, Meadows, and Bluffs. Home sizes range from 1,740 to over 3,400 square feet.
These spacious floorplan, thoughtfully designed to enhance individual living spaces. Plus, take indoor/outdoor living to a whole new level with accessibility from both the dining room and great room, and an abundance of patio/deck options, included extended and covered patios/decks.
Room options include: a pass through pantry from the kitchen to the flex space, bedroom 5 in lieu of loft and upto three and one half bathrooms, and three-car garages available. Like all Cresleigh floorplans, their layouts are creative, versatile, and envisioned to maximize every available foot of space. https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-plumas-ranch/
Scripture Does Not Confine “Soulishness” to Humans and Neither Does Biology!
California is part of the United States of America, the most powerful country in the World. Now, I am not expecting you to believe me, but what I tell you is he truth. No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear. Every civilization has a hidden code—a set of rules or principles that run through all its activities like a repeated design. As industrialism pushed across the planet, its unique hidden design became visible. It consisted of a set of six interrelated principles that programmed the behaviour of millions. Growing naturally out of the divorce of production and consumption, these principles affected every aspect of life from romance and sports to work and national security. Much of the angry conflict in our schools, businesses, and governments today actually centers on these half-dozen principles, as Second Wave people instinctively apply and defend them and Third Wave people challenge and attack them. However, this is getting ahead of the story. The most familiar of these Second Wave principles is standardization. Everyone knows that industrial societies turn out millions of identical products. Fewer people have stopped to notice, however, that once the market became important, we did more than simply standardize Coca-Cola bottles, light bulbs, and automobile transmissions. We applied the same principle to many other things. Among the first to grasp the importance of this idea was Theodore Vail who, at the turn of the century, built the American Telephone & Telegraph Company into a giant. (Not to be confused with the multinational ITT, the International Telephone & Telegraph Corporations.) #RandolphHarris 1 of 26
Working as a railway postal clerk in the late 1860’s, Mr. Vail had noticed that no two letters necessarily when to their destination via the same route. Sacks of mail traveled back and forth, often taking weeks or months to reach their destinations. Mr. Vail introduced the idea of standardized routing—all letter going to the same place would go the same way—and helped revolutionize the post office. When he later formed AT&T, he set out to place an identical telephone in every American home. Mr. Vail standardized not only the telephone handset and all its components but AT&T’s business procedures and administration as well. In a 1908 advertisement he justified his swallowing up small telephone companies by arguing for “a clearing-house of standardization” that would ensure economy in “construction of equipment, lines and conduit, as well as in operating methods and legal work,” not to mention “a uniform system of operating and accounting.” What Mr. Bail recognized is that to succeed in the Second Wave environment, “software”—id est, procedures and administrative routines—had to be standardized along with hardware. Mr. Vail was only one of the Great Standardizers who shaped industrial society. Another was Frederick Winslow Taylor, a machinist turned crusader, who believed that work could be made scientific by standardizing the steps each worker performed. In the early decades of this century Mr. Taylor decided that there was one best (standard) way to perform each job, one best (standard) tool to perform it with, and a stipulated (standard) time in which to complete it. #RandolphHarris 2 of 26
Armed with this philosophy, Mr. Taylor became the World’s leading management guru. In his time, and later, he was compared with Dr. Freud, Karl Marx, and Benjamin Franklin. Nor were capitalist employers, eager to squeeze the last ounce of productivity from their workers, alone in their admiration for Taylorism, with its efficiency experts, piecework schemes, and rate-busters. Communists shared their enthusiasm. Indeed, Vladimir Lenin urged Mr. Taylor’s methods be adapted for use in socialist production. An industrializer first and a Communist second, Mr. Lenin, too, was a believer in standardization. In Second Wave societies, hiring procedures as well as work were increasingly standardized. Standardized tests were used to identify and weed out the supposedly unfit, especially in the civil service. Pay scales were standardized throughout whole industries, along with fringe benefits, lunch hours, holidays, and grievance procedures. To prepare youth for the job market, educators designed standardized curricula. Men alike Alfred Binet and Lewis Terman devised standardized intelligence tests. School grading policies, admission procedures, and accreditation rules were similarly standardized. The multiple-choice test came into its own. The mass media, meanwhile, disseminated standardizing imagery, so that millions read the same advertisements, the same news, the same short stories. The repression of language used by marginalized ethnicities and cultures was implemented by central governments, combined with the influence of mass communications, led to the near disappearance of local and regional dialects or even whole languages, such as Welsh and Alsatian. #RandolphHarris 3 of 26
“Standard” American, English, French, or, for that matter, Russian, supplanted “nonstandard” languages. Different parts of the country began to look alike, as identical gas stations, billboards, and houses cropped up everywhere. The principle of standardization ran through every aspect of daily life. At an even deeper level, industrial civilization needed standardized weights and measures. It is no accident that one of the first acts of the French Revolution, which ushered the age of industrialism into France, was an attempt to replace the crazy-quilt patchwork of measuring units, common in preindustrial Europe, with the metric system and a new calendar. Uniform measures were spread through much of the World by the Second Wave. Moreover, if mass production required the standardization of machines, products, and processes, the ever-expanding market demanded a corresponding standardization of money, and even prices. Historically, money had been issued by banks and private individuals as well as by kings. Even as late as the nineteenth century privately minted money was still in use in parts of the United States of America, and the practice lasted until 1935 in Canada. Gradually, however, industrializing nations suppressed all nongovernmental currencies and managed to impose a single standard currency in their place. Until the nineteenth century, moreover, it was still common for buyers and sellers in industrial countries to haggle over every sale in the time-honoured fashion of a Cairo bazaar. #RandolphHarris 4 of 26
In 1825 a young Northern Irish immigrant named A. T. Stewart arrived in New York, opened a dry-goods store, and shocked customers and competitors alike by introducing a fixed price for every item. This one-price policy—price standardization—made Mr. Stewart one of the merchant princes of his era and cleared away one of the key obstacles to the development of mass distribution. Whatever their other disagreements, advanced Second Wave thinks shared the conviction that standardization was efficient. At many levels, therefore, the Second Wave brought a flattening out of differences through a relentless application of principle of standardization. Speculators were quick to see the financial opportunities in building commuter suburbs. Many of those who invested in streetcar lines were primarily interested in real estate profits rather than managing transit companies. Real estate speculators realized that having a streetcar line running to their properties did wonders for sales. The trolley was a subdivider’s dream, since previously marginal land that had been purchased at low cost could not be subdivided and sold at tremendous profit. Thus, for example, in Boston, the West End Line was originally established from Boston to Brookline by Henry Whitney to attract customers to his land. Nor was land speculation restricted to the largest cities. In Richmond, Virginia, where the electric streetcar had been invented, William Ginter built a streetcar line at his own expense in order to boom his north side upper-class commuter suburb of Ginter Parl. The streetcar line lost money, but the development more than made up for it in sold lots. #RandolphHarris 5 of 26
The most extensive system created primarily to sell real estate was developed by Henry E. Huntington in the Los Angeles, California USA area. His Pacific Electric Railway Company operated an extensive system of “Big Red” interurbans (heavier built streetcars for longer runs). Interurbans radiated out from Los Angeles throughout the Los Angeles basin area. Huntington consciously operated interurban streetcar lines to new areas at a loss in order to spur sales of his real estate holdings. Decades before the automobile was a potent force, Huntington’s interurbans had invented urban sprawl. Trying together spatially separate new communities of homeowners, the streetcars created the multicentered Los Angeles of today. Automobiles are often blamed for the sprawl of Los Angeles area; but the automobile did not create the sprawl—it simply allowed the orange groves between communities to be filled in. None of this is to suggest that trolley lines were not economic money-makers in their own right. Electrification of existing horsecar lines and consolidation of smaller companies into traction franchises made huge fortunes for company owners. The handful of owners of New York’s Metropolitan Street Railway Company made $100,000, 000 USD (approximately $3,130,174, 418.60 in 2021 dollars). In Chicago, Charles Yerkes, by astute business sense and a willingness to use bribery and unethical practices, had consolidated most of that city’s streetcars under his control. In so doing, he also became one of the most hated men in the city. His arrogant demand that he be given the sole franchise for the city for fifty years only failed to pass a bribed Chicago City Council because of the outage of an armed mob of city residents who stormed City Hall. (Unrepentant, Yerkes moved to England and bought the London Underground.) #RandolphHarris 6 of 26
Only after World War I did the streetcar companies, with their fixed nickel fares, increasing operating and maintenance costs, and aging equipment, becomes money-loosing operations. By this time, earlier excesses of the traction companies had made fare increases virtually impossible. In city after city transit companies were being sandwiched between rising costs and fixed revenues. Particularly during World War I, there were sharp increases in the wages paid transit operators, and older, heavily used equipment needed replacement. Most transit system, however, were tied to a 5-cent fare, and any attempt to raise fares led to massive public outcries. Given the fortunes made by earlier transit owner “robber barons,” there was little public sympathy for transit companies. Now was there any support for public subsidies or tax relief for what were seen as private companies. The use of public monies for the building and maintenance of roads for automobile usage was, on the other hand, viewed as necessary. Streetcar companies thus cut back on service and equipment, which in turned caused them to lose more riders to the faster and more flexible automobiles. Nor could bus lines ever win back automobile users. In spite of the riches initially going to the owners and investors, the electric street railways were a bargain for passengers. The standard fare was 5 cents, which was half the cost of the horsecars. Moreover, the consolidated trolley lines would take one anywhere in the system, and transfers were free. At the turn of the century, the trolleys were transporting customers to the extent of 2 billion trips a year. The streetcar had become an American way of life. From this point on, American city dwellers, and more important, suburbanites, would take easy and rapid mobility for granted as a basic right. #RandolphHarris 7 of 26
While the electric streetcar made middle-class suburbanization possible, the automobile was to make suburbanization the dominant residential pattern. As the twentieth century opened, the automobile was strictly a novelty—a rich man’s plaything. In all North America, there were only 8,000 horseless carriages, and most of these both expensive and highly unreliable vehicles. What changed North America into a continent of automobiles was Henry Ford’s Model T. The Model T was first introduced in 1908 and remained in production until 1927. The use of assembly line techniques and few variations (exempli gratia, Model T’s came in one colour—black) meant that the price of the “flivver” kept dropping during the two decades of its production. By the mid-1920s, a new basic Model T, which, when introduced, had cost $950.00 ($14,613.44 in 2021 dollars), could be bought for under $300 ($4,614.77 in 2021 dollars), while used models sold for as little as $50.00 ($769.13 in today’s dollars). (This promoted a social revolution as well, for it meant that young people with autos could easily escape the chaperonage of adults.) Ford’s assembly lines revolutionized auto manufacture by turning out a thousand completed cars every working day. The Model T looked ungainly, but although modestly powered, it was remarkably durable and dependable. Its high ground clearance meant it could navigate even rutted country roads, and it was so simple to repair that any farm boy could fix it. Moreover, the “Tin Lizzie” was inexpensive enough for the average middle-class urban or farm family to own. #RandolphHarris 8 of 26
By the time Ford finally brought out his new Model A in 1927, some 16 million Model T’s had been built, and every second vehicle on the road was a Ford. The rise in automobile registrations indicated how Ford’s assembly lines were bringing a revolution that was changing the face of America. Registrations jumped from 2.5 million in 1915 to 9 million in 1920. This was in spite of automobiles being defined as nonessential for production during the 1917-1918 period, when he United States of America was in World War I. By 1930 auto registrations has skyrocketed to 26.5 million, and in spite of the Great Depression, another 4.5 million cars were added during the 1930s. (Today the United States has 276 million cars registered with a population of 332 million people.) The widespread usage of automobiles by the 1920s meant that cars were being increasingly viewed as necessities rather than as simply recreational vehicles. The Sunday afternoon ride in the car might still take place, but for those suburbanites located near a rail or streetcar track, the auto was a commuting necessity. The automobile made possible the development of previously inaccessible land not served by mass transit. The consequence was a suburban middle-class housing boom in the 1920s. The wide interstitial areas between the transit lines could now be profitably developed. Land speculators, home builders, and those middle-class families owning an automobile no longer were tied to narrow corridors of development. By 1941 the Bureau of Public Roads reported that over 2,100 communities ranging in size up to 50,000 population were without any form of public transportation. Those commuters who could afford the cost of an auto could now drive to work and live where they pleased within a reasonable commuting distance. #RandolphHarris 9 of 26
Automobile suburbs were built at lower densities than earlier suburbs that were tied to fixed transit lines. Both newer and more established suburbs also began using the newly developed planning tool of zoning in order to exclude not only commercial activities but also inexpensive homes on small lots. Zoning laws came into widespread usage following the pioneering New York City Zoning Resolution of 1916 and subsequent court cases that ruled that zoning was a legal use of the police power of a municipality. Suburbs, whether upper or middle class, also sought to exclude not only less expensive homes, but also residents who did not match the racial, ethnic, and even religious makeup of existing residents. This was done in two ways. The simplest and most effective was through pressure on realtors not to show or sell homes to unwanted groups. Thus, if it were an all-Protestant suburb, Catholics or Jewish would be “steered” to other areas. The second method used was that of establishing for an area exclusive “restrictive covenants.” Restrictive covenants placed legal restrictions on property deeds, which prevented the resale of the property to specific groups. Some groups would have to pay well above market price, even if others were not interested in the home, just to be able to buy into the community because no one would sale to them or would not sale to them unless it was well above market value. As of 1950 over thirty-three percent of the homes in Los Angeles, California had restrictive covenants. By means of restrictive covenants and informal real estate practices, pre-World War II suburbs were stratified tightly according to race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. Only in 1948 did the Supreme Court say such restrictions were unenforceable, and not until the 1968 Fair Housing Act were restrictive covenants declared illegal. #RandolphHarris 10 of 26
During the 1920 middle-class, auto-based suburbs sprang up surrounding every major city. The pattern of auto-based suburbs continued, although at a far reduced pace, throughout the Depression years of 1930s. By the eve of World War II, the auto had become the prime means of suburbanites, and even many city dwellers, commuting to work. This was true even in the older suburbs having public transit. In fact, by the beginning of the 1930s, over half of the commuter in all but the largest cities already were driving to work. Commuters in New York and Chicago still relied primarily on mass transit lines, but mot of those in Washington, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Kanas City, and Los Angeles drove. New York, and to a lesser extent Chicago, retained reliance on public transport in the center of the city both because there were few places for commuters to park their automobiles. Even today one finds New Yorkers who do not and cannot drive. However, in smaller cities, even before the mass suburbanization following World War II, the American suburbanite was committed to automobile commuting. Commuter suburbs built before the second World War largely were bedroom suburbs. They remained dependent on the central city for employment, entertainment, major shopping, and most services. However, they were fiercely politically and legally independent. The result was that the city, which had earlier lost it ability to annex suburbs along the railroad and streetcar corridors, now was virtually surrounded by suburban entities. The city had been encircled and banded by a ring of municipalities so that annexation was virtually impossible. #RandolphHarris 11 of 26
All of the consequences of this inability to expand were not perceived in the 1920s and 1930s. During the 1920s, the cities were economically strong, and during the Depression the focus was on retrenchment. There was little concern about the problems of suburbs liming city growth. Only during the housing boom following World War II did all of the consequences of banding the city with a ring of independent suburbs become evident. Evolutionary psychologists have explored our presumed human special capacity for altruism—for selflessly helping and caring for others. The theologian Jurgen Moltmann has said that self-giving is “God’s trinitarian nature, and is therefore a mark of all His works.” Clearly, self-giving is found not just in God’s human work. “Aiding others at the cost or risk to oneself is widespread in the animal kingdom,” notes Frans de Waal. So, there goes another claim to our uniqueness. Scripture does not confine “soulishness” to humans and neither does biology. However, as we have also seen, just because two behaviours are superficially similar is no reason to assume that the underlying mechanism and thinking patterns are identical. Self-giving, self-sacrificing behaviours are superficially similar is no reason to assume that the underlying mechanisms and thinking patterns are identical. Self-giving, self-sacrificing behaviour appears in different animals. However, that in itself tell us nothing about what underlies those behaviours. Self-giving behaviour may, for example, occur with or without self-awareness. Dr. De Waal had no doubt that “evolution has produced the requisites for mortality: a tendency to develop social norms and enforce the, to capacities of empathy and sympathy, mutual assistance and a sense of fairness, the mechanisms of conflict resolution, and so on.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 26
It seems, therefore, that there are good arguments for believing that some aspects of self-giving and self-limiting behaviour have developed over evolutionary history and become more and more pronounced among nonhuman primates. Those of us who begin from theistic presuppositions can see embedded with creation the seeds, development, and fruit of self-giving behaviour, which is built into the brain and has fully flowered in humankind. Such behaviour is not rigidly determined but is expressed moment to moment as people live in community and make personal choices. We need not deny the emergence of self-giving behaviour, which is built into the brain and has fully flowered in humankind. Such behaviour is not rigidly determined but is expressed moment to moment as people live in community and make personal choices. We need not deny the emergence of self-giving altruism in primate in order to defend the unique self-emptying sacrifice of Jesus Christ. That, we believe, was a unique and ultimate act that sets Christ apart from all others. If evolutionary science nevertheless seems to erode one’s sense of our mystery and spiritual significance, consider this: knowing how something came to be and how it works need never destroy our appreciation for its beauty and uniqueness. A music student who comes to understand the physics of organ sound can still savour the grandeur of Bach played on a great organ. As long ago as the fifth century, St. Augustine was able to express this awe from human creatures embedded in a long history: “The Universe was brought into being in a less than fully formed state, but was gifted with the capacity to transform itself from unformed matter into a truly marvelous array of structures and life forms.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 26
Looking back to the birth of the Universe also evokes our sense of awe. It blows our minds—the entire Universe apparently inflating in an essential instant from a mere point to cosmological size. Scientists tells us that if energy in this Big Bang hand been infinitesimally less, the Universe would have collapsed back on itself. Had it been the teeniest bit more, the resulting thin Universe would never have supported life. As it is, the Universe is exquisitely “fine-tuned,” just precisely right to produce intelligent beings. Is there a benevolent Creator behind it? Although science is silent on that, it does offer us an amazing picture of an extraordinary nature that over time has given rise to everything from bacteria to the human brain. Our nature may be, as the Bible says, from dust to dust, but we are also amazing, priceless creatures, made in God’s own image for relationship with one another and with our creator. Therefore, the study of animal behaviour and cognition has a long history in psychology and poses no troubling issues for Christians. Attempts to specify uniquely human traits, such as the ability to read others’ minds, to display self-giving altruism, or to use language, have foundered with observations of animal mind reading and animal altruism, and with the training of chimpanzees to communicate by sign. However, then, scholars remind us that surface behaviour similarities between humans and other animals need not signify identical underlying processes. Moreover, animal cognition and helping is only a budding form of human thinking and altruism, and but a pale reminder of the infinite intelligence and love of God. #RandolphHarris 14 of 26
Finally, acknowledging the long emergence of life on Earth need not diminish by one iota our sense of awe at our own mysterious workings and spiritual significance. We must infer that the first words humans used had a much broader meaning in their minds than do those used in languages that are already formed; and that, being ignorant of the division of discourse into its constitutive parts, at first they gave each word the meaning of a whole sentence. When they began to distinguish subject from attribute and very from noun, which was no mean effort of genius, substantives were at first only so many proper nouns; the [present] infinitive was the only verb tense; and the notion of adjectives must have developed only with considerable difficulty, since every adjective must have developed only with considerable difficulty, since every adjective is an abstract word, and abstractions are difficult and no particularly natural operations. At first each object was given a particular name, without regard to genus and species which for those first founders were not in a position to distinguish; and all individual things presented themselves to their minds in isolation, as they are in the spectacle of nature. If one oak tree was called A, another was called B. [For the first idea one draws from two things is that they are not the same; and it often requires quite some time to observe what they have in common.] Thus the more limited the knowledge, the more extensive becomes the dictionary. The difficulty inherent in all this nomenclature could not easily be alleviated, for in order to group beings under various common and generic denominations, it was necessary to know their properties and their differences. Observations and definitions were necessary, that is to say, natural history and metaphysics, and far more than men of those times could have had. #RandolphHarris 15 of 26
Moreover, general ideas can be introduced into the mind only with the assistance of words, and the understanding grasps them only through sentences. That is one reason why animals cannot form such ideas or even acquire the perfectibility that depends on them. When a monkey moves unhesitatingly from one nut to another, does anyone think the monkey had the general idea of that type of fruit and that one compares its archetype with these two individuals? Undoubtedly not; but the sight of one of these nuts recalls to one’s memory the sensations one received of the other; and one’s eyes, modified in a certain way, announce to one’s sense of taste the modification it is about to receive. Every general idea is purely intellectual. The least involvement of the imagination thereupon makes the idea particular. Try to draw for yourself the image of a tree in general; you will never succeed in doing it. In spite of yourself, it must be seen as small or large, barren or leafy, light or dark; and if you were in a position to see in it nothing but what you see in every tree, this image would no longer resemble a tree. Purely abstract beings are perceived in the same way, or are conceived only through discourse. The definition of a triangle alone gives you the true idea of it. As soon as you behold one in your mind, it is a particular triangle and not some other one, and you cannot avoid making its lines to be perceptible or it plane to have a colour. It is therefore necessary to utter sentences, and thus to speak, in order to have general ideas. For as soon as the imagination stops, the mind proceeds no further without the assistance of discourse. If, then, the first inventors of language could give names only to idea thy already had, it follows that the firs substantives could not have been anything but proper nouns. #RandolphHarris 16 of 26
However, when, by means I am unable to conceive, our new grammarians began to extend to extend their ideas and to generalize their words, the ignorance of the inventors must have been subjected this method to very strict limitations. And just as they had at first unduly multiplied the names of individual things, owning to their failure o know the genera and species, they later made too few species and genera, owing to their failure to have considered beings in all their differences. Pushing these divisions far enough would have required more experience and enlightenment than they could have had, and more investigations and work then they were willing to put into it. Now if even today new species are discovered everyday that until now had escaped the attention of humans who judged things only on first appearance! As for primary classes and the most general notions, it is superfluous to add that they too much have escaped them. How, for example, would they have imagined or understood the words “matter,” “mind,” “substance,” “mode,” “figure,” and “movement,” when our philosophers, who for so long have been making use of them, have a great deal of difficulty understand them themselves; and when, since the ideas attached to these words are purely metaphysical, they found no model of them in nature? I stop with these first steps, and I implore my judge to suspend their reading here to consider, concerning the invention of physical substantives alone, that is to say, concerning the easiest part of the language to discover, how far language still had to go in order to express all the thoughts of humans, assume a durable form, be capable of being spoken in public, and influence society. #RandolphHarris 17 of 26
I implore them to reflect upon how much time and knowledge were needed to discover numbers, abstract words, aorists, and all the tenses of verbs, particles, syntax, the connecting of sentences, reasoning, and the forming of all logic of discourse. As for myself, being shocked by the unending difficulties and convinced of the almost demonstrable impossibility that languages could have arisen and been established by merely human means, I leave to anyone who would undertake it the discussion of the following difficult problem: which was the more necessary: an already formed society for the invention of languages, or an already invented language for the establishing of society? Whatever these origins may be, it is clear, from the little care taken by nature to bring humans together through mutual needs and to facilitate their use of speech, how little she prepared them for becoming habituated to the ways of society, and how little she contributed to all that humans have done to establish the bonds of society. In fact, it is impossible to imagine why, in that primitive state, one human would have done to establish the bonds of society. In fact, it is impossible to imagine why, in that primitive state, one human would have a greater need for another human than a monkey or a wolf has for another of its respective species; or, assuming this need, what motive could induce the other human to satisfy it; or even, in this latter instance, how they could be in mutual agreement regarding the conditions. I know that we are repeatedly told that nothing would have been so miserable as a human in that state; and if it is true, as I believe I have proved, that it is only after many centuries that humans could have had the desire and the opportunity to leave that state, that would be charge to being against nature, not against one whom nature have thus constituted. #RandolphHarris 18 of 26
However, if we understand the word miserable properly, it is a word which is without meaning or which signifies merely a painful privation and suffering of the body of the soul. Now I would very much like someone to explain to me what kind of misery can there be for a free being whose heart is at peace and whose body is in good health? I ask which of the two, civil, or natural life, is more likely to become insufferable to those who live it? We see about us practically no people who do not complain about their existence; many even deprive themselves of it to the extent they are able, and the combination of divine and human laws is hardly enough to stop his disorder. I ask if anyone has ever heard tell of a savage who was living in liberty ever dreaming of complaining about one’s life and of killing oneself. Let the judgment therefore be made with less pride on the side real misery lies. On the other hand, nothing would have been so miserable as savage humans, dazzled by enlightenment, tormented by passions, and reasoning about a state different from one’s own. It was by a very wise providence that the latten faculties one possessed should develop only as the occasion to exercise them presents itself, so that they would be neither superfluous nor troublesome to one beforehand, nor underdeveloped and useless in time of need. In instinct alone, humans had everything they needed in order to live in the state of nature; in a cultivated reason, one has only what one needs to live in society. #RandolphHarris 19 of 26
Others have said that pre-existing merits in this life are the reason and cause of the effect of predestination. For the Pelagians taught that the beginning of doing well came from us; and the consumption from God: so that it came about that the effect of predestination was granted to one, and not to another, because the one made a beginning by preparing, whereas the other did not. However, against this we have the saying of the Apostle (2 Corinthians 3.5), that “we are not sufficient to think anything of ourselves as of ourselves.” Now no principle of action can be imagined previous to the act of thinking. Wherefore it cannot be said that anything begun in us can be the reason of the effect of predestination. And so others said that merits following the effect of predestination are the reason of predestination; giving us to understand that God gives grace to a person, and pre-ordains that He will give it, because He knows beforehand that He will make good use of that grace, as if a king were to give a horse to a soldier because he knows he will make good use of it. However, these seem to have drawn a distinction between that which flows from grace, and that which flows from free will, as if the same thing cannot come from both. It is, however, manifest that what is of grace is the effect of predestination; and this cannot be considered as the reason of predestination, since it is contained in the notion of predestination. Therefore, if anything else in us be the reason of predestination, it will outside the effect of predestination. Now there is no distinction between what flows from free will, and what is of predestination; as there is no distinction between what flows from a secondary cause and form a first cause. For the providence of God produces effects through the operation of secondary causes. Wherefore, that which flows from free-will is also of predestination. #RandolphHarris 20 of 26
We must say, therefore, that the effect of predestination may be considered in a twofold light—in one way in particular; and this there is no reason why one effect of predestination should not be the reasons or cause of another; a subsequent effect being the reason of a previous effect, as its final cause; and the previous effect being the reason of the subsequent as its meritorious cause, which is reduced to the disposition of the matter. Thus we might say that God pre-ordained to give glory on account of merit, and the He pre-ordained to give grace to merit glory. In another way, the effect of predestination may be considered in general. Thus, it is impossible that the whole of the effect of predestination in general should have any causes coming from us; because whatsoever is in humans disposing them towards salvation, is all included under the effect of predestination; even the preparation for grace. For neither does his happen otherwise than by divine help, according to the prophet Jeremias (Lam 5.21): “covert us, O Lord, to Thee, and we shall be converted.” Yet predestination has in this way, in regard to its effect, the goodness of God for its reason; towards which the whole effect of predestination is directed as to an end; and from which it proceeds, as from its first moving principle. The use of grace foreknown by God is not the cause of conferring grace, except after the manner of a final cause; as was explained above. Humans kill for love, for revenge, for survival, even for ideas. Perhaps it is part of human nature, but in this survival, must we also be taught to hate? Predestination has its foundation in the goodness of God as regards its effects in general. Considered in its particular effect, however, one effect is the reason of another; as already stated. #RandolphHarris 21 of 26
The reason for predestination of some, and reprobation of others, must be sought for in the goodness of God. Thus He is said to have made all things through His goodness, so that the divine goodness might be represented in things. Now it is necessary that God’s goodness, which it itself is one and undivided, should be manifested in many ways in His creation; because creatures in themselves cannot attain to the simplicity of God. Thus it is that for the completion of the Universe there are required different grades of being; some of which hold a high and some a low place in the Universe. That this multiformity of graces may be preserved in things, Go allows some evils, lest many good things should never happen, as was said above. Let us then consider the whole of the human race, as we consider the whole of the Universe. God will to manifest His goodness in humans; in respect to those whom He predestines, by means of His mercy, as sparing them; and in respect of others, whom He reprobates, by means of His justice, in punishing them. This is he reason why God elects some and rejects others. To this the Apostle refer, saying (Romans 9.22, 23): “What if God, willing to show His wrath [that is, the vengeance of His justice], and to make His power known, endured [that is, permitted] with much patience vessels of wrath, fitted for destruction; that He might show the riches of His glory on the vessels of mercy, which He hath prepared unto glory,” and (2 Timothy 2.20): “But in a great house there are not only vessels of gold and silver; but also of wood and of Earth; and some, indeed, unto honour, but some unto dishonour.” #RandolphHarris 22 of 26
Yet why God chooses some for glory, and reprobates others, has no reason, expect the divine will. Whence Augustine says (Tract. Xxvi. In Joan): “Why He draws one, and another He draws not, seek not to judge, if thou dost not wish to err.” Thus too, in the things of nature, a reason can be assigned, since primary matter is although uniform, why one part of it was fashioned by God from the beginning under the form of fire, another under the form of Earth, that there might be a diversity of species in things of nature. Yet why this particular part of matter is under this particular form, and that under another, depends upon the simple will of God; as from the simple will of the artificer it depends that this stone is in part of the wall, and that in another; although the plan requires that some stones should be in this place, and some in that place. Neither on this account can there be said to be injustice in God, if He prepares unequal lots for unequal things. This would be altogether contrary to the notion of justice, if the effect of predestination were granted as a debt and not gratuitously. In things which are given gratuitously, a person can give more or less, just as one pleases (provided one deprives nobody of one’s due), without any infringement of justice. This is what the master of the house said: “Take what is thine, and go thy way. It is not lawful for me to do what I will? (Matthew 20.14, 15). Hail, holy Light. Saint John of the Cross, held unjustly as a prisoner, found his cell filled with light as he dreamed one night the Virgin appeared to him promising help if he escaped. Marinus, the Danish mystic, told me that Jesus appeared to him in meditation surrounded by a ball of light. #RandolphHarris 23 of 26
We want peace, of course, but sometimes we do not want to spend a lot of time trying to acquire it. Instead, we lose ourselves in the crowd, intrude ourselves into foreign affairs—that is to say, in affairs outside the monastery walls. Continue to do that, and we will surely lose what little peace we have. What is the attraction outside? Why do we pounce on every invitation, attend every function? Why do we ignore every chance to gather ourselves within? Blessed are those who live uncomplicated lives, for they shall have heads without headaches. Why have some Saints been such perfect models of the contemplative life? Because they strove to deaden their Earthly desires. In doing so they were not without some spiritual guile. They emptied out the innermost parts of their hidden hearts so they could cling to God. Inside the walls we play too much with our pet distractions; outside, we mingle too often with the passing parade. Rarely do we stamp out a vice completely. Daily do we forget to light a candle under ourselves. Rarely do we achieve the perfection that is possible within one day. And so we remain neither particular pretension. If we were maximally dead to ourselves and only minimally involved with others, then we could divine the divine, that is to say experience some of the delights in the Heavenly Garden. However, are we not, so we cannot. Our passion and concupiscences are plants, wildly successful plants chocking everything in sight. About to swing on down the road to perfection in the merry hope of following the Saints, we take a header on the first cobble and howl to high Heaven! Bruised knees, bruised feelings, we decide to stay home and nurse our hurts, not all that unhappy, it has to be admitted, about postponing the trip for the thousandth time. #RandolphHarris 24 of 26
Hold your ground like the brave embroiled in battle; that is what we should do. Have no fear. God will give us a sign from above. For He is prepared to help those who slug it out for a greater glory. After all, He promotes the fights, He says, so we can enjoy the victories. Spiritual progress, that is what we are concerned about here. Observing only the externals of our religion is not enough. Devotion will dry up if that is all we are going to do. Our garden’s overrun. Let us put ax to the root. Let us purge ourselves of the spurge, the gorse and the vetch, the cattail and the creeper. That is to say, as the Gospel of Matthew exhorts (3.10), let us root out our passions, the deadly nightshades that haunt our patch. Only then will the roses emerge. Stamp out just one vice a year, and you will soon be a perfect individual. That is a piece of common wisdom but, apparently, experience tells us otherwise. In the beginning of our monastic life, we were more obedient and more observant than we are today, many years after our first vows. Or so it seems in retrospect. Fervor and progress ought to inch along each day—that is the way it was in the Great Bernard’s day, or so he said in one of his sermons (27.5), when many of his monks managed to retain their firs fervor for a lifetime. However, nowadays it is an eyebrow raider if some boke can retain just a smidge of his first fervor for a few weeks! What is the moral? No pan, no gain. If we had undergone more pain at the beginning, we would have more gain by now. And would not that be nice? #RandolphHarris 25 of 26
Not to do what you are used to is hard. Harder still, to do what you are not accustomed to. However, if you do not make it a practice of dealing with the small annoyances, you will be helpless in the face of a big challenge. Make no mistake about it. Self-denial is what we are talking about here. Now is the time to make a new start. Resist your inclination. Unlearn your bad behaviour, lest it lead you little by little to worse behavior. Oh, if you would only make a turnaround! You would start pleasing yourself and stop annoying others. Living your life well, that is the way to pay more attention to your spiritual progress. O God, my mother, my father, lord of the hills, lord of the valleys, lord of the forest, please be patient with me. I am about to do what has always been done. Now I make you an offering, that you may be warned: I am about to charm your heart. Perhaps you will have the strength to endure it. I am going to work you in order that I may live. Let no animal purse me, no snake, no scorpion, no wasp annoy me, no failing timber hit me, no ax, no machete catch me. With all my heat I am going to work you. Thou art our Almighty God, O Lord eternal; how mighty is Thy name in all the Earth! And the Lord shall be King over all the Earth; on that day shall the Lord be One and His name one. As it is written in holy Scripture: The Lord shall reign forever; Thy God, O Zion, shall be Sovereign unto all generations. Hallelujah. Unto all generations we will declare Thy greatness, and to all eternity we will proclaim Thy holiness. Our mouth shall ever speak Thy praise, O our God, for Thou art a great and holy God and King. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, the Holy God. #RandolphHarris 26 of 26
Cresleigh Homes
Home is waiting! The Riverside Res 2 model is ideal for entertaining, 😍 or just spending time with the people you love in a beautiful space. You won’t believe the amount of open, airy living behind the exterior shown here! 😮
Residence Two a spacious single story home with approximately 2,600 square feet of home thoughtfully designed to maximize every available foot of space.
Three bedrooms, three bathrooms, and a three car garage all come included in this home. The layout is an entertainer’s dream with large kitchen and working island, dining room connected through the butler’s pantry, and a large great room overlooking the ample rear yard. https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-riverside-at-plumas-ranch/residence-2/
What Kind of Soul is it that Can Eat, Drink, and be Marry?
Sometimes it is necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly. In all Second Wave societies a third institution arose that extended the control of the first two. This was the invention known as the corporation. Until then, the typical business enterprise had been owned by an individual, a family, or a partnership. Corporations existed, but were extremely rare. Even as late as the American Revolution, according to business historian Arthur Dewing, “no one could have concluded” that the corporation—rather the partnership or individual proprietorship—would become the main organizational form. As recently as 1800s there were only 335 corporations in the United States of America, most of them devoted to such quasi-public activities as building canals or running turnpikes. The rise of mass production changed all this. Second Wave technologies required giant pools of capital—more than a single individual or even a small group could provide. So long as proprietors or partners risked their entire personal fortunes with every investment, they were reluctant o sink their money in vast or risky ventures. To encourage them, the concept of limited liability was introduced. If a corporation collapsed, the investor stood to lose only the sum invested and no more. This innovation opened the investment floodgates. Moreover, the corporation was treated by the courts as an “immortal being”—meaning it could outlive its original investors. This meant, in turn, that it could make very long-range plans and undertake far bigger projects then ever before. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
By 1901 the World’s first billion-dollar corporation—United States Steel—appeared on the scene, a concentration of assets unimaginable in any earlier period. By 1919 there were half a dozen such behemoths. Indeed, large corporations became an in-built feature of economic life in all the industrial nations, including socialist and communist societies, where the form varied but the substance (in terms of organizations) remained very much the same. Together these three—the nuclear family, the factory-style school, and the gain corporation—became the defining social institutions of all Second Wave societies. And, throughout the Second Wave World—in Japan as well as in Switzerland, Britain, Poland, the United States of America, Russian—most people followed a standard life trajectory: reared in a nuclear family, they moved en masse through factorylike schools, then entered the service of a large corporation, private or public. A key Second Wave institution dominated each phase of the lifestyle. Around these three core institutions a host of other organizations sprang up. Government ministries, sports clubs, churches, chambers of commerce, trade unions, professional organizations, political parties, libraries, ethnic associations, recreational groups, and thousands of others bobbed up in the wake of the Second Wave, creating a complicated organizational ecology with each group servicing, coordinating, or counterbalancing another. At first glance, the variety of these groups suggests randomness or chaos. However, a closer look reveals a hidden pattern. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
In one Second Wave country after another, social inventors, believing the factory to be the most advanced and efficient agency for production, tried to embody its principles in other organizations as well. Schools, hospitals, prisons, government bureaucracies, and other organizations thus took on many of the characteristics of the factory—its division of labour, its hierarchical structure and is metallic impersonality. Even in the arts we find some of the principles of the factory. Instead of working for a patron, as was customary during the long reign of agricultural civilization, musicians, artist, composers, and writers were increasingly thrown on the mercies of the marketplace. More and more they turned out “products” for anonymous consumers. And as this shift occurred in every Second Wave country, the very structure of artistic production changes. Music provides a striking example. As the Second Wave arrived, concert halls began to crop up in London, Vienna, Paris, and elsewhere. With them came the box office and the impresario—the businessman who financed the production and then sold tickets to culture consumers. The more tickets he could sell, naturally, the more money he could make. Hence more and more seats were added. In turn, however, larger concert halls required louder sounds—music that could be clearly heard in the very last tier. The result was a shift from chamber music to symphonic forms. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
Says Curt Sachs in his authoritative History of Musical Instruments, “The passage from an aristocratic to a democratic culture, in the eighteenth century, replaced the small salon by the more and more gigantic concert halls, which demanded greater volume.” Since to technology existed yet to make this possible, more and more instruments and players were added to produce the necessary volume. The result was the modern symphony orchestra, and it was for this industrial institution that Beethoven, Mendelson, Schubert, and Brahms wrote their magnificent symphonies. The orchestra even mirrored certain features of the factory in its internal structure. At first the symphony orchestra was leaderless, or the leadership was casually passed around among players. Later the players, exactly like workers in a factory or bureaucratic office, were divided into departments (instrumental sections), each coordinated from above by a manager (the conductor) or even, eventually, a straw boss farther down the management hierarchy (the first violinist or the section head). The institution sold its product to a mass market—eventually adding phonograph records to its output. The music factory had been born. The history of the orchestra offers only one illustration of the way the Second Wave socio-sphere arose, with its three core institutions and thousands of varied organizations, all adapted to the needs and style of the industrial techno-sphere. However, a civilization is more than simply a techno-sphere and a matching socio-sphere. All civilizations also require an “info-sphere” for producing and distributing information, and here, too, the changes brought by the Second Wave were remarkable. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
Before the middle of the nineteenth century, the advantages of the city and the difficulties of commutation insured that commuters were not a significant proportion of the populations of most cities. The historian Henry Binford argues that early suburbs, rather then being appendages or outgrowths from the city, were freestanding, thinly settled, semirural communities. Such communities included manufacturing and commercial activity related to the city, but the limited mobility of persons and goods meant that contact with the city was sporadic rather than daily. Going into the city just took too much effort. Before the late 1840s travel required considerable energy, time, and expense. In their social life and political organization, early suburbs were more villages than smaller clones of the central city. Only when transportation improved, would fringe areas be transformed into commuter suburbs. In the meantime, fringe locations would be hybrid communities. Even before the era of mass transportation and the period when the suburbs would have regular contact with the city, the suburban fringe had already begun to change in significant ways. First, the suburbs had become more diverse villages, with a mixture of newcomers, some of whom had links to the central city and some of whom had economic and other links to the country. Secondly, partially as a consequence of the increased population diversity, there was increased social complexity. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
As the populations of the suburban villages became more diverse, their social organizations became more complex, with overlapping circles of interests and involvement. Boundaries became more varied and flexible. People’s social, religious, business, and political networks were increasingly likely to vary from individual to individual. Finally, the villages were changing politically. Newer and younger men had a wider range of interests, and they were more open to the growth of local government and its evolution from village to suburban forms. However, not all American suburban areas of a century and a half ago were impoverished, housing only the poor and outcast. Outer areas had open land, and America’s Jeffersonian agrarian heritage contributed to an ideology that encouraged open space while viewing cities as source of discord and social evils. Since virtue (and affordably land) increased as one approached rural life, the goal of some urbanites was to be in the city, but just barely. Thus suburban development of Brooklyn as an independent suburban community, across the harbour from Manhattan, indicated how the dilemma of continuing urban business without abandoning the city could be resolved using the technology of the ferryboat. Living in Brooklyn, across the harbour from Manhattan, provided the prototype compromise. Brooklyn was the first commuter suburb. With its ferryboat connection to Manhattan, Brooklyn Heights had easy access to the city while at the same time retaining the suggestion of a bucolic community. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
By 1841 half of the householders who had bought land in Brooklyn Heights commuted to offices in Manhattan. By no stretch could these commuters be characterized as social outcasts or those on the margins of society. Hezekiah Beers Pierrepoint developed Brooklyn Heights as a community, noting “Gentlemen whose business or profession required daily attendance into the city cannot better, or with less expense, secure the health and comfort of their families.” Here in his comments were the themes that would be used to promote and advertise suburban living for the next century and a half. Suburbia claimed to offer a superior lifestyle, was a more healthful place to live, and was less expensive in the bargain. There are two kinds of inequality in the human species: one which I call natural or physical, because it is established by nature and consists in the difference of age, health, bodily strength, and qualities of mind or soul. The other may be called moral or political inequality, because it depends on a kind of convention and is established, or at least authorized, by the consent of humans. This latter type of inequality consists in the different privileges enjoyed by some at the expense of other, such as being richer, more honoured, more powerful than they, or even causing themselves to be obeyed by them. There is no point in asking what the source of natural inequality is, because the answer would be found enunciated in the simple definition of the word. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
There is still less of a point in asking whether there would not be some essential connection between the two inequalities, for that would amount to asking whether those who command are necessarily better than those who obey, and whether strength of body or mind, wisdom or virtue are always found in the same individuals in proportion to power or wealth. Perhaps this is a good question for slabs to discuss within earshot of their masters, but it is not suitable for reasonable and free people who seek the truth. Precisely what, then, is the subject of this discourse? To mark, in the progress of things, the moment when, right taking the place of violence, nature was subjected to the law. To explain the sequence of wonders by which the strong could resolve to serve the weak, and the people to buy imaginary repose at the prince of real felicity. The philosophers who have examined the foundations of society have all felt the necessity of returning to the state of nature, but none of them has reached it. Some have not hesitated to ascribe to human in that state the notion of just and unjust, without bothering to show that one had to have that notion, or even that it was useful to one. Others have spoken of the natural right that everyone has to preserve what belongs to one, without explaining what they mean by “belonging.” Others started out by giving authority to the stronger over the weaker, and immediately brought about government, without giving any thought to the time that had to pass before the meaning of the words “authority” and “government” could exist among humans. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
Finally, all of them, speaking continually of need, avarice, oppression, desire, and pride, have transferred to the state of nature the ideas they acquired in society. They spoke about savage humans, and it was civil humans they depicted. It did not even occur to most of our philosophers to doubt that the state of nature had existed, even though it is evident from reading the Holy Scriptures that the first man, having received enlightenment and precepts immediately from God, was not himself in that state; and if we give the writings of Moses the credence that every Christian owes them, we must deny that, even before the flood, men were every in the pure state of nature, unless they had fallen back into it because of some extraordinary event: a paradox that is quite awkward to defend and utterly impossible to prove. Let us therefore begin by putting aside all the facts, for they have no bearing on the question. The investigations that may be undertaken concerning this subject should not be taken for historical truths, but only for hypothetical and conditional reasonings, better suited to shedding light on the nature of things than on pointing out their true origin, like those our physicists make everyday with regard to the formation of the World. Religion commands us to believe that since God Himself drew humans out of the state of nature, they are unequal because He wanted them to be so; but it does not forbid us to form conjectures, drawn solely from the nature of humans and the beings that surround them, concerning what the human race could have become, if it had been left to itself. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
Humans, whatever country you may be from, whatever your opinions may be, listen: here is your history, as I have thought to read it, not in the books of your fellowmen, who are liars, but in nature, who never lies. Everything that comes from nature will be true; there will be nothing false except what I have unintentionally added. The times about which I am going to speak are quite remote: how much you have changed from what you were! It is, as it were, the life of your species that I am about to describe to you according to the qualities you have received, which your education and your habits have been able to corrupt but have been unable to destroy. There is, I feel, an age at which an individual human would want to stop. You will seek the age at which you would want your species to have stopped. Dissatisfied with your present state for reasons that protend even greater grounds for dissatisfaction for your unhappy posterity, perhaps you would like to be able to go backwards in time. This feeling should be a hymn in praise of your first ancestors, the criticism of your contemporaries, and the dread of those who have the unhappiness of living after you. Without having recourse to the supernatural knowledge we have on this point, and without taking note of changes that must have occurred in the internal as well as the external conformation of humans, as they applied their limbs to new purposes and nourished themselves on new foods, I will suppose one to have been formed from all time as I see them today: walking on two feet, using their hands as we use ours, directing their gaze over all of nature, and measuring with their eyes the vast expanse of the Heavens. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
Like the Old Testament, the New Testament sees human nature as a psychophysical unity. Although Jesus Christ and the apostles spoke Aramaic, their words have been handed down to us in New Testament Greek, which, depending on its frames of reference, uses any of several interchangeable terms for referring to persons. Whether we are admonished to love God with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind or to present our bodies “as living sacrifice,” the meaning is the same: commit your whole person to God. The Greek word psyche parallels the Hebrew nephesh and is frequently translated as “soul.” In many cases its meaning is clearly not that of an immaterial soul. When Joseph brought his father, Jacob, and seventy-five “souls” into Egypt (as narrated in Acts 7.14), he did not leave their bodies behind in Canaan. The rich farmer dreams of harvests so great that one can say to one’s psyche, “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; take your ease, eat, drink, and be merry.” The biblical scholar Frank Stagg wonders aloud, “What kind of soul is it that can eat, drink, and be merry? A soul is a self, a person. In Romans 2.9, every “human being” who does evil and suffers for it is a psyche and in Romans 13.1 every “person” to be subjected to persons who govern is likewise a psyche. The whole [person] sins and the whole [person] is called to responsible citizenship. Saint Paul, true to his Hebrew heritage, here thins of man as a unity. The Biblical teaching is not that one has a soul but that one is a soul.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
That is exactly it. You do not have a soul, you are a soul. A soul comes from God. Nothing created can exist without a soul. God is omnipresent, we are emanations of God. He is our soul. Spirituality, as reflected in the Greek words translated as “spirit” and “flesh,” similarly has not to do with the whole person in relationship with God and other persons. The theologian Bruce Reichenbach suggests that to recapture this sense of spirituality we ought to drop the term soul from our religious vocabulary: “Such an approach, far from destroying faith in the spiritual aspect of humans, will assist in clarifying precisely wherein the spiritual lies, that is, that it lies not in the possession of an entity, but in the style of life one leads insofar as it manifests a relation to God and to one’s fellow human.” We also see the Hebrew-Christian understanding of psychophysical unity in the New Testament teaching concerning life after death. Oscar Cullmann beings his classic book, Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead? by observing that if we were to ask ordinary Christians what they conceive to be the New Testament teaching concerning our fate after death, “with few exceptions we should get the answers: The immortality of the soul. Yet this widely accepted idea is one of the greatest misunderstandings of Christianity.” Scripture promises us not immortality of the soul, but resurrection to eternal life as an “embodied spirit”—a very different proposition. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
For Jesus, unlike Socrates, death was no friend. At the grace of his friend Lazarus, Jesus wept. Death mattered. It was, in the apostle Paul’s words, “the great enemy.” Death is real, and I is an enemy precisely because we do not have within our own natures a guaranteed immortality. At the end of our lives we do not, as Socrates assumed, “pass away”; rather, we die. However, there is hope, a hope rooted not in our nature but in God’s love and faithfulness. Christians believe that God created and values human lives and that God will re-create them after death, giving us, on that “great gettin’-up morning,” what, apart from divine love, we do not have—eternal life. The hope that Christians proclaim in the Apostle’s Creed—“I believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting”—is a hope grounded in God’s initiative, not in our nature. To use a crude but modern analogy, after the plug is puled on our computing machinery, the divine programmer promises to re-create our software on a new, error-free, piece of hardware. (Contrast this view with the pre-Christian idea of Seneca, who viewed himself as a “mixture of body and soul, of divine and human; my body I will leave where I found it, my soul I will restore to Heaven.”) If we have immortal souls, it must not have been the case the Christ was the first to defeat death nor did he need to force open a door that until then had been locked. However, Christians believe that it was and He did. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
However, if the Psychical Researchers succeeded in proving “survival” and showed that the Resurrection was an instance of it, they would not be supporting the Christian faith but refuting it. (In fact, the founders or parapsychology were mostly people who had lost their faith in God and were searching for another basis for believing in the meaning of life and the possibility of life after death.) This claim embodies the Christian concept of resurrection containing the belief that our lives will be followed not by eternal extinction but by a renewal of life, with our individual identities intact, perhaps rather as a beautiful flower preserves the identity of the human seed that precedes it. (From this, all Christians, whether they hold to an immortal soul or not, derive equal comfort when confronting death.) Second, the New Testament image of a restored and perfected mind-body unit reinforces the other biblical images of human nature as a psychophysical unity. We must be wary of yoking biblical ideas to the details of any currently prevailing scientific theory. However, it is noteworthy that this unified image is consistent with the emerging scientific image of humans as a mind-body unity. Fundamentally, both views assume that without our bodies we are nobodies, and that we had best therefore be good to our bodies. Rather than despising the body as that which “fills us with passions, and desires, and fears, and all sorts of fancies, and foolishness,” as Socrates declare, Christians regard the body as “the temple of the Holy Spirit.” #RandolphHarrs 14 of 22
Indeed, we do not have bodies rather, we are bodies, bodies alive with minds. That being so, we should care about people’s whole selves—body and all. And that is indeed why people of faith have been on the forefront of efforts to take medicine to the developing World, to alleviate hunger, and to combat debilitating racism. The biblical accounts of human nature are, in a very profound sense, timeless. They made sense to our forebears long before science appeared, and they are relevant today. That should warn us against misconstruing them today by trying to impose on their vocabulary a precision, familiar to us today within science, that they were never intended to have. We discover that their main concern is with what God thinks about humans. The biblical account is a God-centered view and is pre-occupied with relationships—first and foremost the relationship of God to humanity, but also of person to person, and of humankind to the created order, of which it both a part and a steward. It provides advice and enduring truths on how to live our lives day by day. However, humankind today is not as God created it. An event described as the fall occurred, in which humankind’s obedience to God turned to disobedience. Seen in this way the fall is interpreted primarily as a break in the relationships of God, humans, and nature. The fall is often described as having “marred” or “obscured” God’s image, which can be restored in Christ. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
However, our physical existence has continued without interruption despite the fact that unredeemed humankind has been “dead in trespasses and sins” since then. Thus, while biological and spiritual life can be distinguished from each other, we must not overemphasize this possibility, since they are part of a whole. The rich fabric of the total picture given to us in Scripture brings to mind the similarly rich complexity of the total picture of human nature given to us through the scientific endeavour today. Both emphasize the complexity of human nature, the need to understand and study it from many diverse aspects or perspectives, and the need to recognize that human nature is a unity—a unity now in this present life and, by the grace of God, a unity in the life to some. The person who lusts for something breaks out into hives. The person who is proud produces pouches under one’s eyes. The person who is greedy develops hollows in one’s cheeks. The persons who has not died to oneself is easy game for the Enemy’s guile. Whoever finds oneself flooded with weakness and clinging to the flesh is mired in desire. One can still extract oneself from this sort of life, but only with the greatest difficulty. When a person like this holds oneself back, one grows sad. When someone else holds one back, one flies off into a rage. By way of contrast, the person who is poor and the one who is humble in spirit may seem to live a humdrum life; nonetheless they experience a measure of control and even a modicum of concord. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
You may go for the gusto, that is to say, aggressively pursue something you lust for; but when you grab it, it will grab you and twist you to the floor. By allowing a thousand rich such small passions to enslave you, you will never find True Peace of Heart. If you ever hope to escape, you must resist, fight back to fund what you are looking for. In the same way anyone who reveals and drivels one’ life away cannot find True Peace; only the fervent and spiritual know where to look for that. If one cares enough for the Quest and understand enough about the relation between it and diet, one will come sooner or later to choose one’s food with more resistance to habit. There is an opportunity to strengthen one’s will, overcome a bad habit and show one’s determination to quicken progress by dropping a negative practice of behaviour or action altogether from the first day. Do not sin against your health. Somethings humans partake in is poisonous physically and morally. Not all sickness and all disease are caused by wrong thinking in this present reincarnation but some of them are. How great or how small that part is depends entirely upon the individuals concerned. With some, it is a very high proportion, with others it is a small one. In the former case, therefore, we must look back to anterior lives for the wrong thought or wrong conduct which produced the sickness of the present physical body as bad karma. The practice of Christian Science is one part of the means to be applied in the hope of relieving the suffering and restoring normalcy to the physical, mental, and spiritual. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
We have inherited a body which, after ages of mistreatment, degradation, and wrong feeding, cannot quickly change itself and accept the new habits and the new feeding with its organs in their present condition. If the millions spent on research for cancer have so far failed, and if a simple change of faulty thought, belief, conduct, and goal cures it, the worth of this method is thereby demonstrated. Bodily healing is an occasional by-product of the healing of thought and feeling, or the re-education of moral character; it is not at all the invariable result of such processes. If wrong living breaks hygienic laws and provokes disease, wrong-doing also breaks Universal laws and provokes disease, as one form of retribution out of several possible forms. A hereditary affliction would obviously be of a universal origin. The individual mind and the cosmic mind are indissoluble connection, an out of their combined activity the human World-idea is produced. It would be correct to say that the redirection of thought and feeling would largely help to eliminate disease. As the race learns to substitute healing and caring thoughts for negative thoughts, aspiration for passion, and concentration for distraction, it will inevitably throw off many maladies that originate in wrong attitudes. Certain maladies in the physical being may quite easily be directly traced to evil impulses in the mental being. It is not only human’s diseases which are the consequence of their bad thinking, however, but also human’s misfortunes. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
If one is healthy in body one may be unhealthy in fortune. The Universal law of retribution expresses itself in a variety of ways. It is a mistake to narrow this linking of wrong thinking and ill feeling with the body’s sicknesses alone. They are to be linked with all forms of life experience. States of mind are directly or indirectly connected with states of health. A mind sinking under the heavy weight of responsibilities, or filled with the heavy stresses and pressures of business, or depressed by frustration, unhappiness or unrest, or shaken by the ending of a close relationship, may soon or late reflect itself in disease, sickness, psychosis, or neurosis. Wrong thinking expresses itself in the end in wrong functioning of some organ of the body. The nature of the thoughts and the nature of the malady correspond to each other. The individual who gives oneself up to negative destructive thoughts or feverish tempo of living for years and, later, find oneself sick or diseased, usually fails to think there is any mutual connection between the mental thoughts or unrelaxed way of life and the physical state. One does not even dream that one has been called to account. Quite clearly, it is as disorders of the various organs, as functional troubles, or as functional troubles, or as abnormal conditions in one or another part of the body that emotional, nervous, and mental disharmonies firs show themselves physically. Definitions: A sickness develops into an ailment, which if not cured becomes a disease. There is dissension between heart and head, between feeling and reasoning, and there is disease in the body itself. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
There is an undesirable physical reaction for every undesirable emotional activity. Most people are careless about their mental habits because these seem of trivial importance by contrast with their physical habits. They do not know that sinning against the mind’s hygiene may manifest in the physical body itself. The body’s organs are affected by the mind’s states. Worry or fear or shock or excessive emotion may disturb, reduce, increase, or even paralyze their working for a time—in some cases for all time. Humans can cease to become human, and become God; but humans cannot be God and human at the same time. One can hold oneself in this egoless state for a brief while only. The ego soon raises up again and the glorious presence retires, for the two are incompatible. Such periods are short and uncommon but they lift us up and draw us in. Even if they are not immediate actualities, we feel then that there is peace and joy for us as ultimate possibilities. It is true that the felicity and freedom of such glimpses are too often too momentary. Yet immense forces lie hidden beneath their brief but intense existence. All glimpses are not of equal duration nor of equal degree. One or other or both may differ from person to person. These glimpses of Reality which wake us out of the World or illusion come to us only at intervals. We cannot hold them, but we can repeat them. The glimpse may past only an instant, or it may last a year. The glimpse lasts a moment, a minute, an hour, or a week—who can say, for it is a mysterious grace? However, in that while, the oscillation of human thoughts is stilled and time takes a rest. It cannot be shared with others—although they may notice or sense some of its fruits—and to that extent it is a private experience. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
It comes to us only in gleams whose disappointing brevity is balanced by their overwhelming beauty. Such moments rarely come to flower in the arid wildness of a human’s life today. There will even be rare and brief times when these serene glimpses will dissolve into wonderful ecstasies. The glimpses are usually quite short in duration, quite sudden in onset. The splendour of lightning, they disappear within the twinkling of an eye. Such experiences can be sustained only in small homeopathic doses. However, glimpses, as charming to the mind as scented blossoms to the nose, are fugitive. They cannot be kept. They are ephemeral. These glimpses are rarely sustained and should be accepted without surprise or disappointment for the short events they usually are. During the years when I investigated such matters—collecting data from several hundred cases, including my own experience, and combining it with the more authoritative teachings of highly attained and highly respected top-rank persons—I found that in large percentage of persons who feel too preoccupied with the work of starting to build a career, earn their livelihood, and build a family, the initial glimpse may have been the first and last for a long period of many years. However, in some cases they say in this period of disinterest because of disillusionments. The bliss of the glimpse must pass—and often quickly: its confirmation of unworldly values must diminish. One does not expect to feel often these great moments when one passes through an archway opening on the infinity and enjoys the Best. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
These glimpses are fitful and their content is fragmentary. It is true that the glimpse comes seldom to most people, but it is all the better remembered for that rarity. The fleeting beauty of these moments veils the harsh greyness of the long periods between them. These moments of spiritual nearness shine in one’s life, but the glorious feeling they induce does not stay. However, the glimpse comes to an end. The glorious new identity which one took on for a while will be shed. These glimpses are often unexpected, usually isolated, and only brief. A brief release from the burdens of living, peace-bestowing and mentally illumining, a healing suspense of all negative traits—but soon gone. These moments are rare and beautiful. They can never come too soon nor stay too long. The energy which appears to us as light is the basis of the Universe, the principle from which all things are made. The first aspect of God is Light; the first contact of human the Supreme Being is Light. If seen in vision, the pure and primal life-force appears as golden sunshine. You ask why I perch on a jade green mountain? I laugh but say nothing my heart free like a peach blossom in the flowing stream going by in the depths in another World not among humans. In the book of life, blessing, peace and ample sustenance, may we, together with all Thy people, the house of America, be remembered and inscribed before Thee for a happy life and for peace. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who establishest peace. May it be Thy will, O Lord our God and God of our fathers, to grant our portion in your Kingdom and may the Temple be rebuilt in our day. There we will serve Thee with awe as in days of old. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
Cresleigh Homes
There’s nothing like that feeling you get when you walk in the door of your dream home. 💯 We think you’ll get that feeling at Mills Station Res 4. 😉
Cresleigh Ranch features elegant single-family homes with sophisticated architectural elements, highly coveted included features, and several luxury options to personalize your dream home.
#CresleighHomes
#CresleighRanch
Next to Life and Liberty, We Consider Education the Greatest Blessing!
We had a sense of importance that would have led us to risk our lives for our rhetoric. The precondition of any civilization, old or new, is energy. First Wave societies drew their energy from “living batteries”—human and animal muscle-power—or from sun, wind, and water Forests were cut for cooking and heating. Waterwheels, some of them using tidal power, turned milestones. Windmills creaked in the fields. Animals pulled the plow. As late as the French Revolution, it has been estimated, Europe drew energy from an estimated 14 million horses and 24 million oxen. All First Wave societies thus exploited energy sources that were renewable. Nature could eventually replenish the forests they cut, the wind that filled their sails, the rivers that turned their paddle wheels. Even animals and people were replaceable “energy slaves.” All Second Wave societies, by contrast, began to draw their energy from coal, gas, and oil—from irreplaceable fossil fuels. This revolutionary shift, coming after Newcomen invented a workable steam engine in 1712, meant that for the first time a civilization was eating into nature’s capital rather than merely living off the interest it provided. This dipping into the Earth’s energy reserves provided a hidden subsidy for industrial civilization, vastly accelerating its economic growth. And from that day to this, wherever the Second Wave passed, nations built towering technological and economic structures on the assumptions that cheap fossil fuels would be endlessly available. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
In capitalist and communist industrial societies alike, in East and West, this same shift has been apparent—from dispersed to concentrated energy, from renewable to non-renewable, from many different sources and fuels to a few. Fossil fuels formed the energy base of all Second Wave societies. The leap to a new energy system was paralleled by a gigantic advance in technology. First Wave societies had relied on what Vitruvius, two thousand years ago, called “necessary inventions.” However, these early winches and wedges, catapults, winepresses, levers, and hoists were chiefly used to amplify human or animal muscles. The Second Wave pushed technology to a totally new level. It spawned gigantic electromechnical machines, moving parts, belts, hoses, bearings, and bolts—all clattering and ratcheting along. And these new machines did more than augment raw muscle. Industrial civilization gave technology sensory organs, creating machines that could hear, see, and touch with greater accuracy and precision than human beings. It gave technology a womb, by inventing machines designed to give birth to new machines in infinite progression—id est, machine tools. More important, it brought machines together in interconnected systems under a single roof, to create the factory and ultimately the assembly line within the factory. On this technological base a host of industries sprang up to give Second Wave civilization its defining stamp. At first there were coal, textiles, and railroads, then steel, auto manufacture, aluminum, chemicals, and appliances. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
Huge factory cities leaped into existence: Lille and Manchester for textiles, Detroit for automobiles, Essen and—later—Magnitogorsk for steel, and a hundred others as well. From these industrial centers poured million upon endless millions of identical products—shirts, shoes, automobiles, watches, toys, soap, shampoo, camera, machine guns, and electric motors. The new technology powered by the new energy system opened the door to mass production. Mass production, however, was meaningless without parallel changes in the distribution system. In First Wave societies, goods were normally made by handcraft methods. Products were created one at a time on a custom basis. The same was largely true of distribution. It is true that large, sophisticated trading companies had been built up by merchants in the widening crack of the old feudal order in the West. These companies opened trade routes around the World, organized convoys of ships, and camel caravans. They sold glass, paper, silk, nutmeg, tea, wine and wool, indigo and mace. Most of these products, however, reached consumers through tiny stores or on the backs of wagons of peddlers who fanned out into the countryside. Wretched communications and primitive transport drastically circumscribed the market. These small-scale shopkeepers and itinerant vendours could offer only the slenderest of inventories, and often they were out of this or that item for months, even years, at a time. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
The Second Wave wrought changes in this creaking, overburdened distribution system that were as radical, in their ways, as the more publicized advances made in production. Railroads, highways, and canals opened up the hinterlands, and with industrialism came “palace of trade”—the first department stores. Complex networks of jobbers, wholesalers, commission agents, and manufacturers’ representatives sprang up, and in 1871 George Huntington Hartford, whose first store in New York was painted vermilion and had a cashier’s cage sharped like a Chinses pagoda, did for distribution what Henry Ford later did for the factory. He advanced it to an entirely new stage by creating the World’s first mammoth chain-store system—The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company. Customer distribution gave way to the mass distribution and mass merchandising that became as familiar and central a component of all industrial societies as the machine itself. What we see, therefore, if we take these changes together, is a transformation of what might be called the “techno-sphere.” All societies—primitive, agricultural, or industrial—use energy; they make things; they distribute things. In all societies energy system, the production system, and the distribution system are interrelated parts of something larger. This larger system is the technosphere, and it has a characteristic form at each stage of social development. As the Second Wave swept across the planet, the agricultural techno-sphere was replaced by an industrial techno-sphere: non-renewable energies were directly plugged into mass production systems which, in turn, spewed goods into a highly developed mass distribution system. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
This Second Wave techno-sphere, however, needed an equally revolutionary “socio-sphere” to accommodate it. It needed radically new forms of social organization. Before the industrial revolution, for example, family forms varied from place to place. However, wherever agriculture held sway, people tended to live in large, multigenerational households, with uncles, aunts, in-laws, grandparents, or cousins all living under the same roof, all working together as an economic production unit—from the “joint family” in India to the “zadruga” in the Balkans and the “extended family” in Weser Europe. And the family was immobile—rooted to the soil. This is why the Victorian homes were so large, often three and four stories, with an average of 5,000 square feet, and several acres of land; so the families could live at home, have their own space without overcrowding the house, and farm to grow their food and meat. As we are now experiencing a global pandemic in 2021, houses are getting larger again, more people are living in multigenerational households, and even growing their own food. As the Second Wave began to move across First Wave societies, family felt the stress of change. Within each household the collision of wave fronts took the form of conflict, attacks on patriarchal authority, altered relationship between children and parents, new notions of propriety. As economic production shifted from the field to the factory, the family no longer worked together as a unit. To the free workers for factory labour, key functions of the family were parceled out to new, specialized institutions. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
Education of the child was turned over to schools. Care of the aged was turned over to poorhouses or old-age homes or nursing homes. Above all, the new society required mobility. It needed workers who would follow jobs from place to place. Burdened with elderly relatives, the sick, the disabled, and a large brood of children, the extended family was anything but mobile. Gradually and painfully, therefore, family structure began to change. Torn apart by the migration to the cities, battered by economic storms, families stripped themselves of unwanted relatives, grew smaller, more mobile, and more suited to the needs of the new techno-sphere. The so-called nuclear family-father, mother, and a few children, with no encumbering relatives—became the standard, socially approved, “modern” model in all industrial societies, whether capitalist or socialist. Even in Japan, where ancestor worship gave the elderly an exceptionally important role, the large, close-knit, multigenerational household began to break down as the Second Wave advanced. More and more nuclear unis appeared. In short, the nuclear family became an indentifable feature of all Second Wave societies, marking them off from First Wave societies just as surely as fossil fuels, steel mills, or chain stores. As work shifted out of the fields and the home, moreover, children had to be prepared for factory life. The early mine, mill, and factory owners of industrializing England discovered, as Andrew Ure wrote in 1835, that it was “nearly impossible to convert persons past the age of puberty, whether drawn from rural or from handicraft occupations, into useful factory hands.” #RandolpHarris 6 of 21
If young people could be prefitted to the industrial system, it would vastly ease the problems of industrial discipline later of on. The result was another central structure of all Second Wave societies: mass education. Built in the factory model, mass education taught basic reading, writing, and arithmetic, a bit of history and other subjects. This was the “overt curriculum.” However, beneath it lay an invisible or “covert curriculum” that was far more basic. It consisted—and till does in most industrial nations—of three courses: one in punctuality, one in obedience, and one in rote, repetitive work. Factory labour demanded workers who showed up on time, especially assembly-line hands. It demanded workers who would take orders from a management hierarchy without questioning. And it demanded men and women prepared to slave away at machines or in offices, performing brutally repetitious operations. Thus from the mid-nineteenth century on, as the Second Wave cut across country after country, one found a relentless educational progression: children started school at a younger and younger age, the school year became longer and longer (in the United States of America it climbed 35 percent between 1878 and 1956), and the number of years of compulsory schooling irresistibly increased. Mass pubic education was clearly a humanizing step forward. As a group of mechanic and workingmen in New York City declared in 1829, “Next to life and liberty, we consider education the greatest blessing bestowed upon mankind.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Nevertheless, Second Wave schools machined generation after generation of young people into a pliable, regimented work force of the type required by electromechanical technology and the assembly line. Taken together, the nuclear family and the factory-style school formed part of a single integrated system for the preparation of young people for roles in industrial society. In this respect, too, Second Wave societies, capitalist or communist, North or South, were all alike. For many decades the ecological model was “the” model of urban growth. However, during recent decades it has increasingly come under attack by the scholars favouring neo-Marxian or political economy models. These models challenge the mainstream urban ecology perspective by emphasizing that urban patterns are not the result of “hidden hand” economic forces, but rather that urban patterns are deliberately shaped for private profit by elites in business and government. Thus, unlike ecological approaches, which explain suburbanization as occurring as a consequence of technological factors such as street-car or automobile, political economy, or neo-Marxian, views stress the role played by corporate and real estate interests in manipulating land usage and markets. Suburbia is not a consequence of individuals homeowner choice, but a consequence of a deliberate decision by elites to disinvest in the cities. These elites are composed of “the industrial executives, developers, bankers, and their political allies. This approach is sometimes also identified as the “new urban sociology.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
The new urban sociology is usually based on assumptions of neo-Marxism and conflict theory. The term “new urban sociology” is a bit of a misnomer, since advocates of this approach or paradigm often are geographers, urban planners, or political scientists rather than sociologists. Although these perspectives differ in specifics, they all stress that urban development is a consequence of capitalist modes of production, capital accumulation, exploitation of he powerless, and conflictual class relations. Societies are specified according to their mode of production. In the United States of America and Western Europe as well as elsewhere societal development is dominated by the capital accumulation process. A central role in the process of accumulation is assigned to labour power—its use, management, and reproduction. Social spatial relationships, particularly the relationship between capitalistic processes and space, are an intrinsic part of social development. Methodological individualism is overcome through specification of structure and its relationship to the agency, although the articulation of this relationship varies among the new urbanists. Real-estate and its supporting infrastructure constitute a “second circuit” of capital. Certain assumptions are common to the new critical urbanists. These are: Societal interaction is dominated by antagonistic social relationships. Consequently society is not a unified biotic community that experiences change from the outside, but a stratified and highly differentiated form of organization characterized by its own fissures, contradictions, and patterns of uneven development—features that flow from the (for example, the capitalistic) mode of production itself. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
Social development is unstable in societies with antagonistic owner relationships. Contradictions of development and inequalities of growth fuel antagonism and define the nature of political activities. Power inequality is a basic element in societal relationships and the exercise of power can be a factor in societal development. No society can be adequately analyzed without reference to either its long-term history or its global context. Urban sociology has become captive of its own comfortable assumptions and resonates strongly with younger academics. Some also believe strongly that the social inequality, social conflict, and social problems in many American cities is the predictable consequences of capitalist political economy determining real estate and land usage because certain groups of people had their homes red tagged (scheduled for demolition) as cities were planning to redevelop them. This led to many years of generational wealth being lost for certain groups of people are these homes appreciated to become worth millions just 40 to 40 years later. However, capitalists tend to be republican, but some of these policies that led to certain groups of people being displaced from the homes they owned and robbed of future equity, for example, were policies created by the governors Pat Brown and his son Jerry Brown, who are both democrats. Even today as California brags about having a nearly $40 billion budget surplus, there is a major homeless crisis that is being overlooked by democratic Governor Gavin Newsom and the TV news media, but they can conjure up sports complexes and have them operational in two years, but no move being made on the construction and management of affordable housing. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
However, there is a conflict about affordable housing because many of their buildings tend to rent to people and do not manage them and there is a lot of violence, crime, rule breaking, and noise, so people do not want income based, or low-income properties in their community because rules are not enforced and it makes the community unlivable for people who pay market rate and often well above market rate prices for their homes. Yet, the answer is not to leave people on the streets to endure unhygienic and unsafe conditions. Well have to acknowledge and deal with gentrification, displacement, and neighbourhood revitalization. We also have to acknowledge the opposite of gentrification is happening: middle- and upper-income residents are moving out, and lower-income residents moving in. Urban space (as well as space at other scales) is the specific effect of the kind of society in which this urban space is developed and the capitalist city is developed according to a logic that is internal to capital itself. The trend of the affluent moving out of their communities has implications for millions of Americans who own a home or are thinking of buying one. In a neighbourhood that is losing its more affluent residents, home prices are likely to underperform, just as they tend to outperform in areas that are gentrifying, as incomes rise. As a buyer, you may value new construction and/or home prices that appreciate above all, and thus be attracted only to rising-income areas where the lawns are all manicured, houses are nice and well-maintained, and not too many cars on the street and in the driveway. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
As a systematic statement of how non-Marxian new sociology political economy approach can be used to study how property markets work as social phenomena is done by understanding that place is valued in two ways: first, as an object of exchange to be bought and sold, and second, when it is used to do business in or live in. In the latter case place has a sentimental and symbolic value associated with jobs, neighbourhood, hometown, and community. However, the urban growth machine of corporate political elites is interested in land strictly as an investment and commodity to be bought and sold. Their interest is in creating a good business environment so that investments and new residents will come to the area and increase market value of the land, and aggregate rent levels will increase. This governmental and corporate emphasis on growth is at the expense of the interest of local residents and their communities. The needs of the general public are captive to the “growth machine” whose principal interest is in the transfer of wealth rentier groups. Use values of the majority are sacrificed for the exchange values of a few. Thus, community groups that advocate slow growth or neighbourhood preservation are fought by the business elites that profit from maintaining the growth machines. For how can the source of the inequality among humans be known unless one begins by knowing humans themselves? And how will humans be successful in seeing themselves as nature formed one, through all the changes that the succession of time and things must have produced in one’s original constitution, and in separating what one derives from one’s own wherewithal from what circumstances and one’s progress have added to or changed in one’s primitive state? #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Like the Winchester mansion, which time, sea, earthquakes, humans, and storms have caused wear and damage to while the owners and historians fight to preserve this priceless treasure some consider a god, the human soul, altered in the midst of society by a thousand constantly recurring causes, by the acquisition of a multitude of bits of knowledge and errors, by changes that to place in the constitution of bodies, by the constant impact of the passions, as, as it were, changed its appearance to the point of being nearly unrecognizable or not fully displaying its original intent. And instead of a being active always by certain and invariable principles, instead of that Heavenly and majestic simplicity whose mark its author had left on it, one no longer finds anything but grotesque contrast of passion which thinks I reasons and an understanding in a state of delirium. What is even more cruel is that, since all the progress of the human species continually moves away from its primitive state, the more we accumulate new knowledge, the more we deprive ourselves of the means of acquiring the most important knowledge of all. Thus, in a sense, it is by dint of studying humans that we have rendered ourselves incapable of knowing them. It is easy to say that it is in these successive changes of the human constitution that we must seek the first origin of the differences that distinguish humans, who, by common consensus, are naturally as equal among themselves as were the terrestrial beings of each species the varieties we now observe among some of them. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
In effect, it is inconceivable that these first changes, by whatever means they took place, should have altered all at once and in the same manner all the individuals of the species. However, while some improved or declined and acquired various good and bad qualities which were not inherent in their nature, the others remained longer in their original state. And such was the first source of inequality among humans, which it is easier to demonstrate thus in general than to assign with precision its true causes. Let my readers not imagine, then, that I dare flatter myself with having seen what appears to me so difficult to see. I have begun some lines of reasoning; I have hazarded some guesses, less in the hope of resolving the question than with intention of clarifying it and of reducing it to its true state. Others will easily be able to go farther on this same route, though it will not be easy for anyone to reach the end of it. For it is no light undertaking to separate what is original from what is artificial in the present nature of humans, and to have a proper understanding of a state which no longer exists, which perhaps never existed, which probably never will exist, and yet about which it is necessary to have accurate notions in order to judge properly our own present state. One who would attempt to determine precisely which precautions to take in order to make solid observations on the subject would need even more philosophy than is generally supposed; and a good solution of the following problem would not seem to me unworthy of the Aristotles and Plinys of our century: What experiments would be necessary to achieve knowledge of natural man? And what are the means of carrying out these experiments in the midst of society? #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
Far from undertaking to resolve this problem, I believe I have meditated sufficiently on the subject to dare respond in advance that the greatest philosophers will not be too good to direct these experiments, nor the most powerful sovereigns to carry them out. It is hardly reasonable to expect such a combination, especially with the perseverance or rather the succession of understanding and good will needed on both sides in order to achieve success. These investigations, so difficult to carry out and so little thought about until now, are nevertheless the only means we have left of removing a multitude of difficulties that conceal from us the knowledge of the real foundations of human society. It is this ignorance of the nature of humans which throws so much uncertainty and obscurity on the true definition of natural right. For the ideal of right, and even more that of natural right, are manifestly ideas relative to the nature of humans. Therefore, one continues, the principles of this science must be deuced from this very nature of humans, from human’s constitution and state. It is not without surprise and a sense of outrage that one observes the paucity of agreement that prevails among the various authors who have treated it. Among the most serious writers one can hardly find two who are of the same opinion on this point. The Roman jurists—not to mention the ancient philosophers who seem to have done their best to contradict each other on the most fundamental principles—subject human and all other terrestrial beings indifferently to the same natural law, because they take this expression to refer to the law that nature imposes on itself rather than the law she prescribes, or rather because of the particular sense in which those jurists understood the word “law,” which on this occasion they seem to have taken only for the expression of the general relations established by nature among all animate beings for their common preservation. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
The moderns, in acknowledging under the word “law” merely a rule prescribed to a moral being, that is to say, intelligent, free, and considered in one’s relations with other beings, consequently limit the competence of the natural law to the only terrestrial being who know of endowed with reason, that is, to humans. However, with each other defining this law in one’s own fashion, they all establish it on some metaphysical principles that even among us there are very few people in a position to grasp these principles, far from being able to find them by themselves. So that all the definitions of these wise humans, otherwise in perpetual contradiction with one another agree on this alone that it is impossible to understand the law of nature and consequently to obey it without being a great reasoner and a profound metaphysician, which humans do not naturally have, and from advantages the idea of which they cannot conceive until after having left the state of nature. Writers begin by seeking the rules on which, for the common utility, it would be appropriate for humans to agree among themselves; and then they give the name natural law to the collection of these rules, with no other proof than the good which presumably would result from their universal observance. Surely this is a very convenient way to compose definitions and to explain the nature of things by virtually arbitrary views of what is seemly. However, as long as we are unaware of natural man, it is futile for us to attempt to determine the law he has received or which is best suited to his constitution. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
All that we can see very clearly regarding this law is that, for it to be law, not only must he will of one who is obliged by it be capable of knowing submission to it, but also, for it to be natural, it must speak directly by the voice of nature. Leaving aside therefore all he scientific books which teach us only to see humans as they have made themselves, and meditating on the first and most simple operations of the human soul, I believe I perceive in it two principles that are prior to reason, of which one makes us ardently interested in our well-being and our self-preservation, and the other inspires in us a natural repugnance to seeing any sentient being, especially our fellow humans, perish or suffer. It is from the conjunction and combination that our mind is in a position to make regarding these two principles, without the need for introducing that of sociability, that all the rules of natura right appear to me to flow; rules which reason is later forced to reestablish on other foundations, when, by its successive developments, it has succeeded in smothering nature. In this way one is not obliged to make a human a philosopher before making one a human. One’s duties toward others are not uniquely dictated to one by the belated lessons of wisdom; and as long as one does no resist the inner impulse of compassion, one will never harm another human or even another sentient being, except in the legitimate instance where, if one preservation were involved, one is obliged to give preference to oneself. By this means, an end can also be made to the ancient disputes regarding the participation of non-human terrestrial beings in the natural law. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
For it is clear that, lacking intelligence and liberty, some terrestrial beings cannot recognize this natural law; but since they share to some extent in our nature by virtue of the sentient quality with which they are endowed, one will judge that they should also patriciate in natural right, and that humans are subject to some sort of duties toward them. It seems, in effect, that if I am obliged not to do any harm to my fellow humans, it is less because one is a rational being than because one is a sentient being: a quality that, since it is common to both non-human terrestrial beings and human beings, should at least give the former the right not to be needlessly mistreated by the latter. This same study or original man, of his true needs and the fundamental principles of his duties, is also the only good means that can be used to remove those multitudes of difficulties which present themselves regarding the origin of moral inequality, the true foundations of the body politic, the reciprocal rights of is members, and a thousand other similar questions that are as important as they are poorly explained. In considering human society from a tranquil and disinterested point of view it seems at firs to manifest merely the violence of powerful men and the oppression of the weak. The mind revolt against the harshness of the former; one is inclined to deplore the blindness of the latter. And since nothing is less stable among men than those external relationships which chance brings about more often than wisdom, and which are called weakness or power, wealth or poverty, human establishments appear at first glance to be based on piles of shifting sand. It is only in examining them closely, only after having cleared away the dust and sand that surround the edifice, hat one perceives the unshakable base on which it is raised and one learns to respect its foundations. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
Now without a serious study of man, of his natural faculties and their successive developments, one will never succeed in making these distinctions and in separating, in the present constitution of things, what the divine will has done from what human art has pretended to do. The political and moral investigations occasioned by the important question I am examining are therefore useful in every way; and the hypothetical history of governments is an instructive lesson for man in every respect. In considering what we would have become, left to ourselves, we ought to learn to bless him whose beneficent hand, in correcting our institutions and giving them an unshakable foundation, has prevented the disorders that must otherwise result from them, and has brought about our happiness from the means that seemed likely to add to our misery. Learn whom God has ordered you to be, and in what part of human affairs you have been placed. As it stands, 52 percent of evangelicals do not accept or do not believe in absolute moral truths! What is happening? When the church does not get it right, the World certainly cannot get it right. Revival is coming! The Heavenly messengers will quiet your fears as you learn to find Jesus Christ. “Then I saw another mighty Angel coming down from Heaven. He was robed in a cloud, with a rainbow above his head; his face was like the sun, and his legs were like fiery pillars. He was holding a little scroll, which lay open in his hand. He planted his right foot on the sea, and his left foot on the land, and he gave a loud shout like the roar of a lion. When he shouted, the voices of the seven thunders spoke. And when the seven thunders spoke, I was about to write; but I heard a voice from Heaven say, ‘Seal up what thunders have said and do not write it down.’ #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
“Then the Angel I had seen standing on the sea and on the land raised his right and to Heaven. And he swore by him who lives for ever and ever, who created the Heavens and all that is in them, the Earth and the sea and all that is in it, and said, ‘There will be no more delay! However, in the days when the seventh Angel is about to sound his trumpet, the mystery of God will be accomplished, just as he announced to his servants the prophets.’ Then then voice that I had heard from Heaven spoke to me once more: ‘Go, take the scroll that lies open in the hand of the Angel who is standing on the sea and on the land.’ So I went to the Angel and asked him to give me the little scroll. He said to me, ‘Take it and eat it. It will turn your stomach sour, but in your mouth it will be as sweet as honey.’ I took the little scroll from the Angel’s hand and ate it. It tasted sweet as honey in my mouth, but when I had eaten it, my stomach turned sour. Then I was told, “You must prophesy again about many people, nations, languages and kings,” reports Revelation 10.1-11. With tender regard for human weaknesses, the Angel will give humans time to become accustomed to the divine radiance. Then the joy and glory will no longer be hidden. The whole plain will light up with the bright shinning of the hosts of God. Earth will be hushed, and the Heavens will stoop to listen to the son—“Glory to God in the highest, and on Earth peace, good will towards humans.” “For the Lord your God is brining you into a good land, a land of flowing streams, with springs and underground waters welling up in valleys and hills, a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a long of olive trees and honey, a land where you may eat bread without scarcity. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
“God is blessing us with a land where we will lack nothing, a land whose stones are iron, and from whose hills you may mine copper, blue sapphires and diamond. You shall eat your fill and bless the Lord your God for the good land He has given you,” reports Deuteronomy 8.7-11. Tall, lush rain forest dripping in the morning wild orchids banana flowers, thick vines drape los palos del sol and great white cedar; others with five foot green elephant ears flopping, hundreds of butterflies, orange caterpillars, blue birds, pink mushrooms, through billion of green leaves quivering moist in the patchy sunlight. There are exalted but rare occasion when inspiration, peace, and spiritual majesty conjoin their blessed presence within us. It is with one for the flicker of a second—an unfathomable tranquility, an indefinable beauty—and then gone. Some enter into this experience only once in a lifetime; others repeat it a few times. Only a rare individual here and there enters it frequently. In the book of life, blessing, peace, and ample sustenance, may we, together with all Thy people, the house of America, be remembered and inscribed before Thee for a happy life and for peace. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who establishest peace. O Lord, please guard my tongue from evil and my lips from speaking guile, and to those who slander me, let e give no heed. May my soul be humble and forgiving unto all. Please open Thou my heart, O Lord, unto Thy sacred Law, that Thy statutes I may know and all Thy truths pursue. Please bring to naught designs of those who seek to do me ill; speedily defeat their aims and thwart their purposes for Thine own sake, for Thine own power, for Thy holiness and Law. That Thy loved ones be delivered, answer us, O Lord, and save with Thy redeeming power. May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable unto Thee, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer. Thou who establishes peace in the Heavens, please grant peace unto us and unto All America. Amen. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
Cresleigh Homes
Space for the whole family is a hallmark of the Brighton Station Res 4 model. Between that expansive kitchen and the 4 bedrooms (with the option of converting the loft to a fifth), you’ll make memories here to last a lifetime. 😇
Cresleigh Ranch at Brighton Station offers innovative detail and thoughtful attention to our award-winning, eye catching architecture styles such as Mid-Century Modern, California Modern, Prairie, and Contemporary Farmhouse designs; several options are available to personalize your home.
#CresleighRanch
#CresleighHomes
Be Thou a Spirit of Health or Goblin Damned?
The Heaven was full of fiery shapes, Mrs. Winchester was terribly shocked by the death of her month-old baby girl; in fact, it can be well believed she never fully recovered and this surely influenced some of her eccentricities. Added to this loss was the death of her husband, William Wirt Winchester, 15 years later from Tuberculosis. On arrival in San Jose, Mrs. Winchester started remodeling the newly purchased, unfinished eight-room farm house. She found that the planning kept her grief-disturbed mind occupied and she became thoroughly enthused. Financial problems were certainly no deterrent; in the late 1880s, Mrs. Winchester brought a fortune of $20,000,000.00 ($523,635,294.12 in 2021 dollars) with her and had an average income of $1,000 ($26,181.76 in 2021 dollars) a day. Just how such precise amounts came to be public knowledge is unknown. In the period, 1881 to 1889, the dividends from her 777 shares of stock in the Winchester Company gave her an annual average income of $43,335.00 ($1,134,586.77 in 2021 dollars). It must be quickly added that upon the death of her mother-in-law in 1897, Mrs. Winchester’s holdings were increased to 2777 shares. Her lack of architectural training gave her little concern. Every morning she made the rounds with her ever patient foreman inspecting the latest progress. Some days Mrs. Winchester sketched plans on the spot using a saw-horse drawing table and any handy material, often brown wrapping paper (and used both sides). From the foreman came no argument; he had no problem of interpretation. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
One afternoon in the mansion, a variety of circumstance concurred to being about the dreadful scene through which I was that night to pass. In the first place, I was literally overpowered with fatigue, and longing for sleep; in the next place, the effect of this extreme exhaustion upon my nerves resembled that of a narcotic, and rendered me less susceptible than, perhaps I should in any other condition have been, of the exciting fears which had become habitual to me. Then again, a little bit of the window was open, a pleasant freshness pervaded the room, and, to crown all, the cheerful sun of day was making the room quite pleasant. What was to prevent my enjoying an hour’s nap here? The whole air was resonant with the cheerful hum of life, and the broad matter-of-fact light of day filled every corner. I yielded—stifling my qualms—to the almost overpower temptation; and merely throwing off my coat, and loosening my cravat, I lay down, limiting myself to half-an-hour’s doze in the unwonted enjoyment of a feather bed, a coverlet, and a bolster. It was horribly insidious; and the demon, no doubt, marked my infatuated preparations. Dolt that I was, I fancied, with my mind and body worn out for want of sleep, and an arrear of a full week’s rest to my credit, that such measure as half-an-hour’s sleep, in such a situation, was possible. My sleep was death-like, long, and dreamless. Without a start of fearful sensation of any kind, I waked gently, but completely. It was, as you have good reason to remember, long past midnight—I believe, about two o’clock. When sleep has been deep and long enough to satisfy nature, thoroughly, one often wakens in this way, suddenly, tranquilly, and completely. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
There was a figure seated in that lumbering, old sofa-chair, near the fireplace Its back was rather towards me, but I could not be mistaken; it turned slowly round, and merciful heavens! there was the stony face, with its infernal lineaments of malignity and despair, gloating on me. There was now no doubt as to its consciousness of my presence, and the hellish malice with which it was animated, for it arose, and drew close to the bedside. There was a rope about its neck, and the other end, coiled up, it held stiffly in its hand. My good angel nerved me for this horrible crisis. I remained for some seconds transfixed by the gaze of this tremendous phantom. He came close to the bed, and appeared on the point of mounting upon it. The next instant I was upon the floor at the far side, and in a moment more was, I do not know how, upon the lobby. However, the spell was not broken; the valley of the shadow of death was not yet traversed. The abhorred phantom was before me there; it was standing near the banisters, stooping a little, and with one end of the rope round its own neck, was poising a noose at the other, as if to throw over mine; and while engaged in this baleful pantomime, it wore a smile so sensual, so unspeakably dreadful, that my senses were nearly overpowered. I saw and remember nothing more, until I found myself in the maid’s room. I had a wonderful escape—there is no disputing that—an escape for which, while I live, I shall bless the mercy of Heaven. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
No one can conceive or imagine what it is for flesh and blood to stand in the presence of such a thing, but one who has had the terrific experience. A shadow has passed over me—a chill has crossed my blood and marrow, and I will never be the same again—never, never! Our handmaid, a mature girl of two-and-fifty, as I have said, stayed her hand, and by little and little drew near to me, with open mouth, her brows contracted over her little, bready black eyes, till stealing a glance over her shoulder now and then, she established herself close behind us. During the relation, she had made various earnest comments, in an undertone; but these and her ejaculations, for the sake of brevity and simplicity, I have omitted in my narration. “It is often I heard tell of it,” she said, “but I never believed it rightly till now—though, indeed, why should I not? Does not my mother, down there in the lane, know quare stories, God bless us, beyant telling about it? But you ought not to have slept in the back bedroom. She was loath to le me be going in and out from that room even in the time, let alone for any Christian to spend the night in it; for sure she says it was his own bedroom.” “Whose own bedroom?” I asked, in a breath. “Why, his—the ould Judge’s—Judge John Conduit’s, to be sure, God rest his sowl”; and she looked fearfully round. “Amen!” I muttered. “But did he die there?” “Die there! No, not quite there,” she said. “Shure, was not it over bannisters he hung himself, the ould sinner, God be merciful to us all? and was not it in the alcove they found the handles of the skipping rope cut off, and the knife where he was settling the cord, God bless us, to hang himself with? #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
“It was his housekeeper’s daughter owned the rope, my mother told me, and the child never throve after, and used to be starting up out of her sleep, and screeching in the night time, wid dhrames and frights that cum an her; and they said how it was the speerit of the ould Judge that was tormentin’ her; and she used to be roaring and yelling out to hould back the big ould fellow with the crooked neck; and then she’d screech ‘Oh, the master! the master! he’s stampin’ at me, and beckoning to me! Mother, darling, don’t let me go!’ And so the poor crathure died at last, and the doctors said was marasmus, for it was all they could say.” “How long ago was all this?” I asked. “Oh, then, how would I know?” she answered. “But it must be a wondherful long time ago, for the housekeep was an ould woman, with a pipe in her mouth, and not a tooth left, and better nor eighty years ould when my mother was first married; and they said she was a rale buxom, fine-dressed woman when the ould Judge come to his end; an’, indeed, my mother’s not far from eighty years ould herself this day; and what made it worse for the unnatural ould villain, God rest his soul, to frighten the little girl out of the World the way he did, was what was mostly thought and believed by every one. My mother says the poor little crathure was his own child; for he was by all accounts an ould villain every way, an’ the hangin’ est judge that ever was known.” “From what you said about the danger of sleeping in that bedroom,” said I, “I suppose there were stories about the ghost having appeared there to others.” “Well, there was things said—quare things, surely,” she answered, as it seemed, with some reluctance. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
“And why would not there? Sure was it not up in that same room he slept for more than twenty years? and was it not in the alcove he got the rope ready that done his own business at last, the way he done many a better man’s in his lifetime?—and was not the body lying in the same bed after death, and put in the coffin there, too, and carried out to his grave from it in St. Joseph’s Cathedral Basilica, after the coroner was done? But there was quare stories—my mother has them all—about how one Archbishop Patrick William Riordan got into trouble on the head of it. Some years later he died of pneumonia at the 1000 Fulton Street Mansion in San Francisco, California.” “And what did they say of this Archbishop Riordan?” I asked. “Oh, for that matther, it’s soon told,” she answered. And she certainly did relate a very strange story, which so piqued my curiosity, that I took occasion to visit the ancient lady, her mother, from whom I learned many very curious particulars. Indeed, I am tempted to tell the tale, but my fingers are weary, and I must defer it. But if you wish to hear it another time, I shall do my best. When I had heard the strange tale I have not told you, I put one or two further questions to her about the alleged spectral visitations, to which the house had, ever since the death of the wicked old Judge, been subjected. “No one ever Mrs. Winchester myself telling how the children used to be lifted up in the bed at night, she could not see by what mains; and how they were starting and screeching every hour, just all as one as the housekeeper’s little girl that died till at last one night poor Chadwick had a dhrop in him, the way he used now and again; and what do you think in the middle of the night he thought he heard a noise on the stairs, and being in liquor, nothing less id do him but out he must go himself to see what was wrong. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
“Well, after that, all she ever heard of him was himself sayin’, ‘Oh, God!’ and a tumble that shook the very house; and there, sure enough, eh was laying on the lower stair, under the lobby, with his neck smashed double undher him, where he was flung over the banisters.” Then the handmaiden added—“I’ll go down the lane, and send up Hansen Solomon to pack up the rest of the taythings, and bring all the things across to your new lodgings.” And so we all sallied out together, each of us breathing more freely, I have no doubt, as we crossed that ill-omened threshold for the last time. Now, I may add thus much, in compliance with the immemorial usage of the Winchester legacy, which see the hero not only through one’s adventures, bur fairly out of the World. You must have perceived that what the flesh, blood, and bone hero of romance proper is to the regular compounder of legends, this ancient Victorian mansion of brick, wood, glass, and mortar is to the humble recorder of this true tale. Gods have different properties, due to different antecedents. The definitive book on gods and their qualities has yet to be written. Mrs. Winchester built the door to nowhere for the gods to enter. However, a human being has the key—the big key. The all-important key. The long-lost secret key that lets a human talk to the gods, command them, bring them down to Earth. Solomon’s key. A man gets that key, he be stronger than the gods. You do not want to mess with that key stuff. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
Remember that persons skeptical of witchcraft did not doubt the practice of it, but only whether or not it worked, or worked through spiritual means. Thus the skeptic John Webster, in his Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft, was willing to concede that there were witches and devils who “have power to perform strange things.” However, he spent his twelfth chapter on the question “whether they do not bring the to pass by mere natural means.” What was at issues here was the reality of the spiritual World, the “invisible World,” as Dr. Mather called it. The controversy over witchcraft, therefore, raised theological issues fundamental to the seventeenth-century Christian. “We shall come to have no Christ but a light within, and no Heaven but a frame of Mind,” said Dr. Mather, if the materialists—the Saducees—should succeed in destroying the belief in an invisible World. Whatever one’s own belief, or lack of it, one has to admit that he was right. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries scientific materialism was to triumph, and the pious were to find that all the concreteness had left their religion, leaving nothing behind but a “light within” and a “frame of mind.” Conceive, then, of Dr. Mather’s excitement. At a time which he recognized to be a crisis in the history of religious belief he had discovered a clear case of witchcraft which he thought could not possibly be explained on material grounds. He made it the central matter of his Memorable Providences (1689), a book which he hoped might once and for all confute materialism and reestablish Christianity on the firm foundation of a real and concrete spiritual World. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
The book met with considerable success. Richard Baxter, one of the most distinguished English Puritans, wrote a laudatory preface to the first London edition, and in Baxter’s own Certainty of the World of Spirits (1691) he spoke of it as the ultimate proof of the existence of a spiritual World. Any doubter, he said, “that will read…Mr. Cotton Mather’s book of the witchcrafts in New England may see enough to any incredulity that pretendeth to be rational.” The four or so cases we have reviewed over the past few weeks confirm in detail what we have seen to be true in general. Accusations of witchcraft were continual among common people, so continual that Dr. Cotton Mather took time in his “Discourse” to warn his congregation sharply against them “Take heed that you do not wrongfully accuse any other person of this horrid and monstrous evil…What more dirty reproach than that of witchcraft can there be? Yet it is most readily cast upon worthy persons when there is hardly a shadow of any reason for it. An ill look or a cross word will make a witch with many people who may on more ground be counted so themselves. There has been a fearful deal of injury done in this way in this town to the good name of the most credible persons in it. Persons of more goodness and esteem than any of their calumnious abusers have been defamed for witches about this country—a country full of lies.” However, the charges of irresponsible accusers were checked by the responsibility of the community’s leaders, the ministers and magistrates. They had been reluctant to act in Mrs. Hibbins’ case. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
At Groton, Mr. Willard’s investigation had been so careful that two accusations of witchcraft were retracted and the case never brought to court, on the ground that it was possession rather than witchcraft. At Hartford a confessor and her husband had been hanged and at Boston a confessor, but in both instances, although more persons were accused, the individual case did not develop into a witch hunt. There were other individual convictions, but they were outnumbered by the acquittals. For example, the records of the Court of Assistants show that in 1662 Eunice Cole of Hampton was found not guilty as indicated, although there was “just ground of vehement suspicion.” In 1666 John Godfrey of Salem was discharged as not legally guilty, although there were again grounds for suspicion. (Mr. Godfrey seems to have been a thorough reprobate; at various times he was convicted of stealing, swearing, drunkenness, and suborning witnesses.) In 1637 Anna Edmunds was acquitted and her accusers order to pay charges. In 1675 Mary Parsons of Northampton was found not guilty, in 1681 Mary Hale of Boston, and in 1683 Mary Webster of Hadley. Also in 1683 James Fuller of Springfield, who had confessed but then retracted his confession, was found not guilty but was whipped and fined for “his wicked and pernicious willful lying and continuance in it until now, putting the country to so great a change.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
In All the American colonies during the seventeenth century there were fewer than fifty executions for witchcraft, and excluding Salem there were fewer than thirty. This is a genuinely exemplary record, considerably superior to Europe for intelligence and restraint. Before the Glover case a part of this restraint may have proceeded from the New Englander’s conviction that he belonged to a chosen people. God, many thought, would not permit Satan to afflict the elect. The Devil might appear among “the wigwams of Indians, where the pagan Powaws often raise their masters in the shapes of bear and snakes and fires,” but there would be a few demonic terrors in the New Jerusalem. This belief was shattered by the events of 1688. Goodwife Glover had demonstrated clearly that witchcraft did exist in Massachusetts, and witchcraft of the most serious and dangerous sort. The Devil was abroad in Zion, seeking whom he might devour. When the Devil broke forth again, at Salem Village in 1692, he was not immediately recognized. “When these calamities first began,” wrote the Reverend Samuel Parris, “which was in my own family, the affliction was several weeks before such hellish operations as witchcraft were suspected. A quack doctor, who called himself William Griggs, moved into my family home, and catastrophe ultimately befell it. He filled the parlour widow with bottle of indescribable horrors preserved in brandy, and the fairly new concept in the American colonies called the newspaper with the usual grandiloquent and mendacious mix of local social and culture news. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
“This gentleman among his virtues did not reckon sobriety, and one night, being overcome with much wine, he set fire to his bed curtains, partially burned himself, and totally consumed the hose. It was afterwards rebuilt, and for a time an undertaker established himself in the premises. I fear some young persons, through vain curiosity to know their future condition, have tampered with the Devil’s tools so far that hereby one door was opened to Satan to play those pranks, Anno 1692. I knew one of the afflicted persons who (as I was credibly informed) did try with an egg and a glass to find her future husband’s calling [id est, occupation], till there came up a coffin, that is, a specter in likeness of a coffin. And she was afterward followed with diabolical molestation to her death, and so died a single person—a just warning to others to take heed of handling the Devil’s weapons lest they get a wound thereby. Another, I was called to pray with, being under sore fits and vexations of Satan. And upon examination I found that she had tried the same charm, and after her confession of it and manifestation of repentance for it, and our praters to God for her, she was speedily released from those bonds of Satan.” As human beings, we interact with the environment around us and affect it through our bodies as extensions of our minds. However, the thing is, we are never satisfied with the simplistic nature of these interactions. We are aware of limitations of our human nature and that has always been a driving force for us as a race to look for other ways to affect our environment in a more impactful way. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
Witchcraft is another way, a “tool” if you will, to impact the environment in a way so unique that simple, everyday folk like us cannot wrap our minds around it. It surpasses the wonders of mechanics as there is no external connection, the power of witchcraft extends from an internal World, bypassing the need to learn complex machinery or spend years labouring over physics and math textbooks. Alongside the innovation we traditionally ascribe to the Victorian period, was an older, persistent belief in the supernatural. Although the laws against witchcraft had been repealed in 1736, folklore continued to be active and potent force in everyday life. Many people believe that supernatural forces are what compelled Mrs. Winchester, at a cost of $5,000,000.00 ($171, 188, 461.51 in 2021 dollars) alone spent on materials to build the Winchester mansion with 10,000 windows, nine kitchens, and 47 fireplaces built of rosewood, cherry, mahogany, Italian marble, oak, teak, and pipestone; all hand carved, and no two alike. Construction went on for 38 years. At one point the mansion was as high as nine stories, had 200 rooms, and was 50,000 square feet. Once an enterprising young realtor leaked the rumor to Mrs. Winchester’s servants that across the road (now Stevens Creek Chevrolet) an investor was planning to build an Inn. “Saloon” was the word in those says. Mrs. Winchester quickly purchased the property at an exorbitant figure. Of course this was a false alarm but it brought her holdings to 160 acres. In the book of life, blessing, peace, and ample sustenance, may we, together with all Thy people, the house of America, be remembered and inscribed before Thee for a happy life and for peace. Blessed art Thou, O Lord who establishest peace. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
A 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester Rifle 👻 🗝 winchestermysteryhouse.com
It is Difficult for an Education in Which the Hearts is Involved to Remain Forever Lost!
Trying to sneak a pitch past him is like trying to sneak the sunrise past a rooster. Three hundred and fifty years ago, give or take a half-century, an explosion was heard that sent concussive shock waves racing across the Earth, demolishing ancient societies and creating a wholly new civilization. This explosion was, of course, the industrial revolution. And the giant tidal force it set loose on the World—the Second Wave—collided with all the institutions of the past and changed the way of life of millions. During the long millennia when First Wave civilization reigned supreme, the planet’s population could have been divided into two categories—the “primitive” and the “civilized.” The so-called primitive peoples, living in small bands and tribes and subsisting by gathering, hunting, or fishing, were those who had been passed over by the agricultural revolution. The “civilized” World, by contrast, was precisely that part of the planet on which most people worked the soil. For wherever agriculture arose, civilization took root. From China and India to Benin and Mexico, in Greece and Rome, civilizations rose and fell, fought and fused in endless, colourful admixture. However, beneath their differences lay fundamental similarities. In all of them, land was the basis of economy, life, culture, family structure, and politics. In each community, life was organized around the village. Each of which, life was a simple division of labour prevailed and a few clearly defined castes and classes arose: a nobility, a priesthood, warriors, helots, slaves, or serfs. For all of these people, power was rigidly authoritarian. #RandolphHarris 1 of 28
In all of these cases, birth determined one’s position in life. And for any one of these people, the economy was decentralized, so that each community produced most of its own necessities. There were exceptions—nothing is simple in history There were commercial cultures whose sailors crossed the seas, and highly centralized kingdoms organized around giant irrigation systems. However, despite such differences, we are justified in seeing all these seemingly distinctive civilizations as special cases of a single phenomenon: agricultural civilization—the civilization spread by the First Wave. During is dominance there were occasional hints of things to come. There were embryonic mass-production factories in ancient Greece and Rome. Oil was drilled on one of the Greek islands in 400 B.C, and in Burma in A.D. 100. Vast bureaucracies flourished in Babylonia and Egypt. Great urban metropolises grew up in Asia and South America. There was money and exchange. Trade routes crisscrossed the deserts, ocean, and mountains from Cathy to Calais. Corporations and incipient nations existed. There was even, in ancient Alexandria, a startling forerunner of the steam engine. Yet nowhere was there anything that might remotely have been termed an industrial civilization. These glimpses of the future, so to speak, were mere oddities in history, scattered through different places and periods. They never were brought together into a coherent system, nor could they have been. Until 1650-1750, therefore, we can speak of a First Wave. #RandolphHarris 2 of 28
Despite patches of primitivism and hints of the industrial future, agricultural civilization dominated the planet and seemed destined to do so forever. This was the World in which the industrial revolution erupted, launching the Second Wave and creating a strange, powerful, feverishly energetic countercivilization. Industrialism was more than smokestacks and assembly lines. It was a rich, many-sided social system that touched every aspect of human life and attacked every feature of the First Wave past. It produced the great Willow Run factory outside Detroit, but it also put the tractor on the farm, the typewriter in the office, the refrigerator in the kitchen. It produced the daily newspaper and the cinema, the subway and the DC-3. It gave us cubism and twelve-tone music. It gave up Bauhaus buildings and Barcelona chairs, sit-down strikes, vitamin pills, and lengthened life spans. It universalized the wristwatch and the ballot box. More important, it linked all these things together—assembled them, like a machine—to form the most powerful, cohesive, and expansive social system the World had ever known: Second Wave civilization. As the Second Wave moved across various societies it touched off a bloody, protracted war between the defenders of the agricultural past and the partisans of the industrial future. The forces of First and Second Wave collided head-on, brushing aside, often decimating, the “primitive” peoples encountered along the way. #RandolphHarris 3 of 28
In the United States of America, this collision began with the arrival of the Europeans bent on establishing an agricultural, First Wave civilization. A white agricultural tide pushed relentlessly westward, dispossessing the Indian, depositing farms and agricultural villages father and father toward the Pacific. However, hard on the heels of the farmers came the earliest industrializers as well, agents of the second Wave future. Factories and cities began to spring up in New England and the mid-Atlantic states. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Northeast had a rapidly growing industrial sector producing firearms, watches, farm implements, textiles, sewing machines, and other goods, while the rest of the continent was still ruled by agricultural interests. Economic and social tensions between First Wave and Second Wave forces grew in intensity until 1861, when they broke into armed violence. The Civil War was not fought exclusively, as it seemed to many, over the moral issue of slavery or such narrow economic issues as tariffs. It was fought over a much larger question: would the rich new continent be ruled by farmers or industrializers, by the forces of the First Wave or the Second? Would the future American society be basically agricultural or industrial? When the Northern armies won, the die was cast. The industrialization of the United States of America was assured. From that time on, in economics, in politics, in social and culture life, agriculture was in retreat, industry ascendant. The First Wave ebbed as the Second came thundering in. #RandolphHarris 4 of 28
The same collision of civilizations erupted elsewhere as well. In Japan the Meiji Restoration, beginning in 1868, replayed in unmistakably Japanese terms the same struggle between agricultural past and industrial future. The abolition of feudalism by 1876, the rebellion of the Satasuma clan in 1877, the adoption of Western-style constitution in 1889, were all reflections of the collision of the First and Second Waves in Japan—steps on the road to Japan’s emergence as a premier industrial power. In Russia, too, the same collision between First and Second Wave forces erupted. The 1917 revolution was Russia’s version of the American Civil War. It was fought not primarily, as it seemed, over communism but once again over the issue of industrialization. When the Bolsheviks wiped out the last lingering vestiges of serfdom and feudal monarchy, they pushed agriculture into the background and consciously accelerated industrialism. They became the party of the Second Wave. In country after country, the same clash between First Wave and Second Wave interests broke out, leading to political crisis and upheavals, to strikes, uprisings, coup d’etat, and wars. By the mid-twentieth century, however, the forces of the First Wave were broken and the Second Wave civilization reigned over the Earth. #RandolphHarris 5 of 28
Today an industrial belt girdles the globe between the twenty-fifth and sixty-fifth parallels in the Northern Hemisphere. In North America, and much of the other developed nations, some 80 percent of the population lives an industrial way of life. Despite dizzying differences of language, culture, history, and politics—differences so deep that wars are fought over them—all these Second Wave societies share common features. Indeed, beneath the well-known differences lies a hidden bedrock of similarity. And to understand today’s colliding waves of change we must be able to identify clearly the parallel structures of all industrial nations—the hidden framework of Second Wave civilization. For it is this industrial framework itself that is not being shattered. And you, MAGNIFICENT AND MOST HONOURED LORDS, you upright and worthy magistrates of free people, permit me to offer you in particular my compliments and my respects. If there is a rank in the World suited to conferring honour on those who hold it, it is without doubt the one that is given by talents and virtue, that of which you have made yourselves worthy, and to which your fellow citizens have raised you. Their own merit adds still a new luster to yours. And I that find you, who were chosen by humans capable of governing others in order that they themselves may be governed, are as much above other magistrates as a free people; and above all that one which you have the honour of leading, is, by its enlightenment and reason, above the populace of other states. #RandolphHarris 6 of 28
May I be permitted to cite an example of which better records ought to remain, and which will always be near to my heart. I never call to mind without the sweetest emotion the memory of the virtuous citizen to whom I owe my being, and who often spoke to me in my childhood of the respect that was owed you. I sill see him living from the work of his hands, and nourishing his soul on the most sublime truths. I see Tacitus, Plutarch and Grotius mingled with the instruments of his craft before him. I see at this side a beloved son receiving with too little profit the tender instruction of the best of fathers. However, if the aberrations of foolish youth made me forget such wise lessons for a time, I have the happiness to sense at last that whatever the inclination one may have toward vice, it is difficult for an education in which the heart is involved to remain forever lost. Such, MADNIFICENT AND MOST HONOURED LORDS, are the citizens and even the simple inhabitants born in the state you govern. Such are those educated and sensible human concerning whom, under than name of workers and people, such base and false ideas are entertained in other nations. My father, I gladly acknowledge, was in no way distinguished among his fellow citizens; he was only what they all are; and such as he was, there was no country where his company would not have been sought after, cultivated, and profitably too, by the most upright humans. It does not behoove me, nor, thank Heaven, is it necessary to speak to you oft the regard which humans of that stamp can expect from you: your equals by education as well as by the rights of the nature and of birth; your inferiors by their will and by the preference they owe your merit, which they have granted to it, and for which you in tern owe them some sort of gratitude. #RandolphHarris 7 of 28
It is with intense satisfaction that I learn how much, in your dealings with them, you temper with gentleness and cooperativeness the gravity suited to the ministers of law; how much you repay them in esteem and attention for the obedience and respect they owe you; conduct full of justice and wisdom, suited to putting at a greater and greater distance the memory of unhappy events which must be forgotten so as never to see them again; conduct all the more judicious because this equitable and generous people makes a pleasure out of its duty, because it naturally loves to honour you, and because those who are most zealous in upholding their rights are the ones who are most inclined to respect yours. It should not be surprising that the leaders of a civil society love its glory and happiness; but, unfortunately for the tranquility of humans, that those who consider themselves as the magistrates, or rather as the masters, of a more holy and more subline homeland manifest some love for the Earthly homeland which nourishes them. How sweet it is for me to be able to make such a rare exception in our favour, and to place in the rank of our best citizens those zealous trustees of the sacred dogmas authorized by the laws, those venerable pastors of souls, whose lively and sweet eloquence the better instills the maxims of the Gospel into people’s hearts as they themselves always begin by practicing them. Everyone knows the success with which the great art preaching is cultivated in Geneva. #RandolphHarris 8 of 28
However, since people are too accustomed to seeing things said in one way and done in another, few of them know the extent to which the spirit of Christianity, the saintliness of mores, severity to oneself and gentleness to others reign in the body of our ministers. Perhaps it behooves only the city of Geneva to provide the edifying example of such a perfect union between a society of theologians and men of letters. It is in large part upon their wisdom and their acknowledged moderation and upon their zeal for the prosperity of the state that I base my hopes for its eternal tranquility. And I note, with a pleasure mixed with amazement and respect, how much they abhour the atrocious maxims of those sacred and barbarous humans of whom history provides more than one example, and who, in order to uphold the alleged rights of God—that is to say, their own interests—were all the less sparing of human blood because they hoped their own would always be respected. Could I forget hat precious half of the republic which produces the happiness of the other and whose gentleness and wisdom maintain peace and good mores? Amiable and virtuous women and citizens, it will always be the fate of your gender o govern ours. Happy it is when your chase power, exercised only within the conjugal union, makes itself felt only for the glory of the state and the public happiness! Thus it was that in Sparta women were in command, and thus it is that you deserve to be in command in American. #RandolphHarris 9 of 28
What barbarous man could resist the voice of honour and reason in the mouth of an affectionate wife? And who would not despise vain luxury on seeing your simple and modest attire, which, from the luster it derives from you, seems the most favourable to beauty? It is for your to maintain always, by your amiable and innocent dominion and by your insinuating wit, the love of laws in the state and concord among the citizens to reunite, by happy marriages, divided families; and above all, to correct, by the persuasive sweetness of your lessons and by the modest graces of your conversation, those extravagances which our young people come to acquire in other countries, whence, instead of the many useful things they could profit from, they bring back, with a childish manner and ridiculous airs adopted among fallen women, nothing more than an admiration for who knows what pretended grandeurs, frivolous compensations for servitude, which will never be worth as much as august liberty. Therefore always be what you are, the chaste guardians of mores and the gentle bonds of peace; and continue to assert on every occasion the rights of the heart and of nature for the benefit of duty and virtue. I flatter myself that events will not prove me wrong in basing upon such guarantees hope for the general happiness of the citizens and for the glory of the republic. #RandolphHarris 10 of 28
I admit that with all these advantages it will not shine with brilliance which dazzles most eyes; and the childish and fatal taste for this is the deadliest enemy of happiness and liberty. Let a dissolute youth go elsewhere in search of easy pleasures and lengthy repentances. Let the alleged men of tastes admire someplace else the grandeur of palaces, the beauty of carriages, the sumptuous furnishings, he pomp of spectacles, and all the refinements of softness and luxury. In American we will find only men; but such a sight has a value of its own, and those who seek it are well worth the admirers of the rest. May you all, MAGNIFICENT, MOST HONOURED AND AOVEREIGN LORDS, deign to receive with the same goodness the respectful testimonies of the interest I take in your common prosperity. If I were unfortunate enough to be guilty of some indiscreet rapture in this lively effusion of my heart, I beg you to pardon it as the tender affection of a true patriot, and to the ardent and legitimate zeal of man who envisage no greater happiness for oneself than that of seeing all of you happy. With the most profound respect, I am MAGNIFICENT, MOST HONOURED AND SOVEREIGN LORDS, you most humble and most obedient servant and fellow citizen. The Angels had wondered at the glorious plan of redemption. They watched to see how the people of God would receive His Son, clothed in the garb of humanity. Angels came to the land of the chosen people. Other nations were dealing in fables and worshipping false gods. To the land where the glory of God had been revealed, and the light of prophecy had shone, the Angels came. #RandolphHarris 11 of 28
They came to unseen America, to the appointed expositor of the Sacred Oracles, and the ministers of God’s house. Christ’s arrival had been announced. Already the forerunner was born, His mission attested by miracle and prophecy. The tidings of His birth and the wonderful significance of His mission had been spread abroad. And American was preparing to welcome her Redeemer. With amazement the Heavenly messengers beheld the excitement that the people whom God had called to communicate to the World the light of sacred truth. The American nation had been preserved as a witness that Christ was to be born of the seed of Abraham and of David’s line. The priests and teacher rehearsed their sacred prayers, and performed important rites of worship to honour the Lord, and prepare for the revelation of the Messiah. Hearts were Heavenly enthralled and were blessed by the joy that thrilled all Heaven. Everyone has the experience of doing, few of being. Yet that is the most precious, most important of all life’s experiences. This is the experience which makes the fully mature human happiest. It is usually short but its next advent will always be eagerly awaited. It is often isolated by long intervals of prosaic commonplace living, but they only serve to give it even greater value by contrast. The inner need of humans is forever demanding this experience, for it is Heaven. Whether it is born out of appreciation of beauty or an infinite humiliation of the ego, or out of some totally difference occasion, this awareness of the Overself’s presence is essential to the completion and fulfilment of human life. #RandolphHarris 12 of 28
To enter Heaven is to enter into fulfilment of our Earthly life’s unearthly purpose. And that is, simply, to become aware of the Overself. This holy awareness brings such joy with it hat we then know why the true saints and the real ascetics were able to disdain all other joys. The contrast is too disproportionate. Nothing that the World offers to tempt us can be put on the same level. One will find that somewhere within there is a holy presence not oneself, a sublime power not one’s own. One will understand then that no one is truly alive who has not made this discovery. The glimpse of Heaven lies at the core of religion, the precious gem which each devotee must find for oneself underneath all the sermons, chantings, rituals, prayers, and observances of one’s creed. A stillness which is simply the absence of noise but which is rich, fruitful, and uplifting in beauty and refinement of its presence—this is the best. No good fortune that comes one’s way will ever after be counted so great as the good fortune which one now feels to be one’s in the realization of the Overself. Would but the desert of the Fountain yield One glimpse—if dimly, yet indeed revealed, to which the fainting traveler might spring. Another significance of the glimpse is that of initiation. We cannot know God in the fullness of His consciousness but we can know the link which we have with God. If you mist, call it the soul, or if you prefer the Overself, but catch a glimpse of this link to be reborn. #RandolphHarris 13 of 28
The glimpse gives one a journey to a land flowing not with milk and honey, but with goodness and beauty, with peace and wisdom. It is the best moment of one’s life. When a human’s consciousness is turned upside-down by a glimpse, when one thought most substantial is revealed as least so, when one’s values are reversed the Good takes on a new definition, one writes that day down as one’s spiritual birthday. What better thing can one find than the divine Overself! That would be the decisive moment of one’s entire bodily existence, as establishing oneself permanently in its fullness and finality would be the grandest sequel. There is no higher happiness than this discovery of the real human. Joseph Smith knew that if his important work of translating was to be finished, he must have a capable scribe who could spend hours at a time at the job of writing. As usual when he needed guidance, Joseph prayed that such a person might be found. Meanwhile, back in Palmyra, a schoolteacher named Oliver Cowdery had come to live in the Smith home. Oliver, who was about Joseph’s age, had not been in the family of Joseph’s parent long before they told him the strange story of the golden plates and the Angel visits. Oliver liked the Smiths and believed the story. Oliver also prayed. He wanted to help in great new work. In his heart he began to feel that his place was beside Joseph. Because he felt so strongly that he could be helpful, he went to Pennsylvania in April, 1829. Upon hi arrival at the home of Joseph and Emma, Oliver told them why he had come. Joseph was not surprised because he knew God had sent this young man in answer to his prayer for help. #RandolphHarris 14 of 28
Joseph and Oliver became friends immediately. They trusted each other because each felt that God had told him, even before they met, that they would work together. Joseph had not had much opportunity to go to school to learn from books, and he was to appreciate the help of schoolteacher Oliver, who had excellent schooling, was a great reader, and a fine writer. Soon after the meeting of these two young men, the Lord Jesus Christ, spoke to them saying: “A great and marvelous work is about to come forth unto the children of men: behold, I am God, and give heed unto my word. Keep my commandments, and seek to bring forth and establish the cause of America. Seek not for riches but for wisdom; and, behold, the mysteries of God shall be unfolded unto you, and then shall you be made rich. Behold, one that hath eternal life is rich. If you desire, you shall be the means of doing much good in this generation. Say nothing but repentance unto this generation: keep my commandments, and assist to bring forth my work…and you shall be blessed. Behold, thou knowest that that thou hast inquired of me, and I did enlighten thy mind; and now I tell thee these things, that thou mayest know that thou hast been enlightened by the spirit of truth. Yea, I tell thee, that thou mayest know that there is none else save God, that knowest thy thoughts and the intents of thy heart. I tell thee these things as a witness unto thee, that the words of the work which thou hast been writing is true. Treasure up these words in thy heart. Be faithful and diligent in keeping the commandments of God, and I will encircle thee in he arms of my love. #RandolphHarris 15 of 28
“I say unto you, as I said unto my disciples, Where two or three are gathered together in my name, as touching one thing, behold, there will I be in the midst of them; even so am I in the midst of you. Fear not to do good, my sons, for whatsoever ye sow, that shall ye also reap: therefore, if ye sow good, ye shall also reap good for your reward. Therefore fear not, little flock, do good. Look unto me in every thought, doubt not, fear not. Be faithful; keep my commandments, and ye shall inherit the Kingdom of Heaven. Amen.” Two days after their meeting, Oliver began to write as Joseph translated. They worked hour after hour, day after day, happy in their new-found friendship and the work which bound them together. Oliver describes this work in these words: “These were days never to be forgotten—to sit under the sound of a vice dictated by the inspiration of Heaven. Day after day I continued to write as he translated with the Urim and Thummim.” Sometimes as they worked, on the translation they came to things they did not understand. They prayed for explanations. It was on such an occasion that the Lord explained to them how they might know the answers to many of their problems and receive the knowledge by the Holy Spirit. The Lord said: “Verily I say unto you, that assuredly as the Lord liveth, who is your God and your Redeemer, even so sure shall you receive a knowledge of whatsoever things you shall ask in faith, with an honest heart, believing that you shall receive. Yea, behold, I will tell you in your mind and in your heart by Holy Ghost, which shall come upon you, and which shall dwell in your heart. Now, behold, this is the spirit of revelation. #RandolphHarris 16 of 28
“Behold, you have not understood; you have supposed that I would give it unto you, wen you took no thoughts, save it was to ask me; but, behold, I say unto you, that you mut study it out in your mind. Then you must ask me if it be right, and if it is right, I will cause that your bosom shall burn within you; therefore, you shall fell that it is right. However, if it be not right, you shall have no such feelings, but you shall have a stupor of thought, that shall cause you to forget the thing which is wrong.” The Lord provided this means whereby Joseph and Oliver, and all the people, might know by His Holy Spirit the truth of all things. We must look upon these glimpses as sacred one. And this is so even if they rise of themselves in our best moments. For in these times we, and especially the younger ones among us, need wider definitions of such matters. These moments, when spiritual presence is distinctly felt, may be rare or frequent, misunderstood or recognized, but they are moments of blessing. And this is true even if they open the door only slightly and let in merely a ray of light. In these moments of a glimpse, one discovers the very real presence of the Overself. They provide one with a joy, an amiability, which disarms the negative side of one’s character and brings forward the beneficial side. These are precious moments; they cannot be too highly valued. And though they must pass, some communication with them is always possible through memory. #RandolphHarris 17 of 28
Remember this truth: The Old Testament is God’s will concealed, and the New Testament is God’s will revealed—every word is equally anointed, relevant, and eternally true. The glimpse is of supreme worth morally, helping to free one, bestowing goodwill and humility, uplifting one’s ideals however fleetingly. Instead of being an escape from life, as some sceptics unwisely think, they are its fulfilment. Although life is really like a dream, some phases of the dream are more worthwhile than others—those which bring the Glimpse, for instance. It is far better than being ignorant to know what is read in books or heard at lectures on this topic, but far better than both of these is to feel vividly the Overself’s presence and reality, to know the truth of It with complete certainty. No better fortune can come to a human than one’s serene inward well-being and this certitude of universal truth. We must have Good Conscience and live a Virtuous Life! Why? Because a lot of us spend more time studying hard than living well. That is such a mistake! All that does is produce a tree that bears in fruit, except perhaps the odd pear or single peace. Plowing vices under and planting virtues in their place—that is hard work. Harder even than the grunt and the grind of the great philosophical issues. However, if the priestly scholar had already done that hard and serious work in one’s own life, one would find it easier now dealing with those Devouts traipsing about in sandals and self-actualizes processing around in ermines. #RandolphHarris 18 of 28
With the certain advent of that Final Event, the question o be posed is not whether we read the right books, but whether we did the good deeds; not whether we said the right things, but whether we made the right choices. Tell me now, where are those celebrity professors who taught you when they were at the height of their careers and you were starting out? They are dead and gone. You occupy their chairs of learning now, and now you are spending their stipends. Doctors they once were; now they are only dodoes, and you can hardly remember their names. How soon the glory of the Worlds set, wrote John in his first letter to an early group of Christians (2.17)! Would that the professors’ lives had matched their doctrinal teachings! Yet they fell short. If they had it to do over again, I suppose they would have studied longer and read till their eyes turned red. However, that would have done the little good. That is what Paul had in mind when he wrote to the Romans (1.21). How many of the professors have perished because they followed the unreliable wisdom of the World! Because they gave scant attention to the service of God. They had their choices, though. They picked greatness rather than humility, and as a result logicked themselves right out of their own holy syllogisms. However, when the sun finally sets, there will be other, happier people. The truly great? Those who did not make a lot of themselves; they gathered honours as their due, but they did not display their trophies in the window. The truly prudent? If it is what would keep them on the path to God, those who gave the World its due; they would not mind sweeping up after elephants, as St. Paul put it so Earthily to the Philippians (3.8). #RandolphHarris 19 of 28
The truly educated? Those who engaged God’s will and disengaged their own in one and the same transaction. Does no death mean that the body comes to exist by itself, separated from the soul, and that the soul exists by herself, separated from the body? What is death but that? For the Hebrew, a human is a unity, and that unity is the body as a complex of parts, drawing their life and activity from a breath-soul, which has no existence apart from the body. What is our essential nature? Are we a dualism of body and soul, as Socrates and Plato believed, or a psychophysical unity, as H. Wheeler Robinson suggests is the Old Testament view? Take a little survey of Christian laypeople, and you will surely find most people agreeing with Plato: we are made up of two realities, body and soul. Or so most of us have been taught since childhood. One book of Christian doctrine for children explains: Maybe you have been to a funeral. You have seen the dead body. That is buried in the ground. However, the inside part of you, the part that thinks and feels, that is the part that lives forever. This is the part of us that would go to hell. Christians talk and sing a lot about souls. It has seemed natural to appear to our possession of a soul as “proof” that we are alive. The belief that we possess a soul has been the foundation of our dignity and out view of the sacredness of human life. For many, talk about the soul has been a way of thinking about our “divine image.” #RandolphHarris 20 of 28
Not surprisingly, anyone who seems to question one of our most treasured beliefs will face strong challenges, and quite properly be put under close scrutiny. That has happened in the past, of course, with other Christian beliefs. We all remember the sustained action to the views of Copernicus and Galileo, which displaced our Earth from the center of the Universe. How much more of a reaction, then, might we expect to anyone seeming to question our possession of a soul as the hallmark of our being made “in the image of God”? If, as the Old Testament scholar Derek Kidner suggests, “the telescope of Galileo did more to interpret Psalm 96 verse 10 than the pen of the theologian,” we need to pause and ask in what way today might the discoveries of the neuropsychologists and evolutionary psychologists do more to interpret biblical references to the soul than the comments of philosophical theologians? The distinguished Nobel laureate Francis Crick wrote, “In spite of differences among religions, there is broad agreement on at least one point: People have soul, in the literal and not merely the metaphorical sense.” Keith Ward, Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, begs to differ: “In the Christian tradition, like the Jewish and Muslim, the soul is not a substantial entity which exists without and before the body, and is better off without the body.” Instead, Dr. Ward contends, the Christian tradition proclaims an essential unity of body and soul. Indeed, as Socrates’ discourse on death hints, the idea of an immortal soul separable from the body arises not from the Christian Bible but from Greek thought. #RandolphHarris 21 of 28
In the end, Plato records that Socrates lived his own teaching by drinking the poison hemlock in the serene conviction that his immortal soul would now find release from its bodily prison. For Socrates and Plato, bodily death was a welcome liberation. Indeed, it was actually not dying. This Greek belief of separate body and soul has permeated Christian tradition quite thoroughly. When Origen, a third-century platonic philosopher, became the father of theology, he built into Christian doctrine Plato’s idea of the soul. In the early fifth century, Augustine thought Plato’s to be the most brilliant of all philosophers. And in the sixteenth century, John Calvin, who was heavily influenced by both Plato and Augustine, declared that Plato alone “rightly affirmed” the immortal soul that “lies hidden in humans separate from the body.” It has been one of the tasks of twenty-first century biblical scholarship to disentangle the biblical images of human nature from those of Greek philosophy. Discerning the biblical picture of the person is no simple matter, for the Bible is actually not one book but a library of sixty-six books, written over some fifteen hundred years, in three languages, and under varying historical circumstances. Not surprisingly, then, the meanings of the same words within the Hebrew Old Testament and within the Greek New Testament may shift. Fresh scholarship has modified earlier views. Today we recognize that the long-standing and pervasive view that presented a dichotomy between Hebrew thought (affirming some form of monism) and Greek thought (affirming some dualism) is a caricature. #RandolphHarris 22 of 28
Greek thought was more caried on the nature of the soul than a reading focused solely on Plato would suggest. There was no single concept of the soul among the Greeks, and the body-soul relationship was described variously among philosophers and physicians in the Hellenistic period. It was a belief cluster, not a single view. Recognizing these varied views within Hellenistic Judaism is not seen by biblical scholars as being directly relevant to understanding the cultural narrative within which anthropology is described in the New Testament. It is increasingly recognized that it was Israel’s Scriptures that were the most potent influence on New Testament writers. Thus readings of New Testament anthropology must take Old Testament monism as their point of departure. One mistake is to interpret the everyday language of the Christian Bible and The Book of Mormon and The Doctrine and Covenants as modern, scientific statements. When the writer of Ecclesiastes (1.5) noted, “The sun rises and the sun goes down,” the church of Galileo’s day understood this to be a scriptural proclamation of a stationary Earth encircled by the sun. Because the writers of Genesis (1.16) described the moon as a “light to rule the night,” the church also could not accept Galileo’s conclusion that the moon shone by reflected light; when Galileo invited them to look through his telescope and see the shadows of the craters for themselves, they declined and dismissed his observations as delusions of the devil. It is similarly possible to misinterpret the Bible’s human images. It is important to remember the Bible is written for all people all times. #RandolphHarris 23 of 28
As such, the Bible does not intend to offer a precise psychology, and certainly not one in the language of the early twenty-first century. Moreover, the Christian Holy Bible(s) is a book for living, not a book of science. It is not biographical. It is about the acts of God in the lives of people throughout history. Bearing these cautions in mind, what general understand of human nature emerge from the library of Scriptures? Let us consider some conclusions reached by scholars who have devoted their lives to exploring the whole of Scripture, in more depth during our next few lectures. Predestination presupposes election in the order of reason; and election presupposes love. The reason of this is that predestination is a part of providence. Now providence, as also prudence, is the plan existing in the intellect directing the orderings of some things towards an end. However, nothing is direct towards an end unless the will for that end already exists. Whence the predestination of some to eternal salvation presupposes, in the order of reason, that God wills their salvation; and to this belong both election and love:–love, inasmuch as He wills them this particular god of eternal salvation; since to love is to wish well to anyone:—election, inasmuch as He wills this good to some in preference to others; since He reprobates some. Election and love, however, are differently ordered in God, and in ourselves: because in us the will in loving does not cause good, but we are incited to love by the goo which already exits; and therefore we choose someone to love, and so election in us precedes love. #RandolphHarris 24 of 28
In God, however, it is the reverse. For His will, by which in loving He wishes good to someone, is the cause of that good possessed by some in preferences to others. Thus it is clear that love precedes election in the order of reason, and election precedes predestination. Whence all the predestinate are objects of election and love. If the communication of the divine goodness in general be considered, God communicates His goodness without election; inasmuch as there is nothing which does not in some way share in His goodness. However, if we consider the communication of this or that particular good, He does not allow it without election; since He gives certain goods to some humans, which He does not give to others. Thus in the conferring of grace and glory election is implied. When the will of the person choosing is incited to make a choice by the good already pre-existing in the object chosen, the choice must needs be of those things which already exist, as happens in our choice. In God it is otherwise. This, as St. Augustin says (De Verb. Ap. Serm. 11): “Those are chosen by God, who do not exist; yet He does not err in His choice.” God wills all humans to be saved by His antecedent will, which is to will not simply but relatively; and not by His consequent will which is to will simply. I part out thrusting branches and come in beneath the blessed and the blessing trees. Though I am silent, there is singing around me. Though my vision is clouded, there is clarity around me. Though I am heavy, there is the flight of Angels around me. #RandolphHarris 25 of 28
It is a mistake to believe that because any art of healing—whether it be a material or a spiritual one—is able to heal a particular kind of sickness once, it is consequently able to heal all similar cases of sickness by its own merits. Forces outside it have something to do with the matter. There are some cases where failure by material methods is preordained by the higher power of destiny. There are others where failure by spiritual methods is also inevitable, because the heart of the sick human being has not been touched. As elsewhere, there are limits to human effort set here by certain laws. O inscribe all the children of Thy covenant of a happy life. May all the living do homage unto Thee forever and praise Thy name in truth, O God, who art our salvation and our helps. Blessed by Thou, O Lord, Beneficent One, unto whom our thanks are due. Our God and God of our fathers, bless us with the threefold blessings written in the Torah of Moses, Thy servant, and spoken by Aaron and his sons, Thy consecrated priests: May the Lord bless thee and keep thee; so may it be His will. May the Lord make His countenance to shine upon thee and be gracious unto thee: so may it be His will. May the Lord turn His countenance unto thee and give thee peace. So may it be His will. May our voids and blanks be filled with creations of intense significance, aesthetic, spiritual, and practical. Here with the Lord may we find the roots of much imaginative endeavour. May a space feel like an invitation to bridge it. #RandolphHarris 26 of 28
May we be confident people, who can draw on a sense of competence (“I am grand—I can do it”), may find a void pleasurable and attractive: it can become filled with all kinds of Christian efforts. The gap, the emptiness, the interval, the space, seem inviting to creative Christians. We see faces in the clouds. On a larger scale, people with lonely moors, with isolated lives, who have lost their parents or have empty parents, may God fill their World with vivid people and events. Painters need their empty canvasses. Dr. Barnardo, Albert Schweitzer, and others who are creative people, see what is missing and what is needed, and set about putting it there. Two people who encounter one another may create a relationship where there has been nothing This is he more fascinating because, if the creation is to endure, here has to be an element of truth, which makes the encounter one of exploration and discover. Who can tell how much invention-creation there is in such a relationship and how much discovery-creation? It must vary from person to person. Indeed, who can insist on the difference between invention and discovery in our love and hate of each other? We are so varied in our potential qualities, and so prone to have them called into being by other people’s love and hope, or hate and coldness. Do not the old stories of cruelty and redemption tell us so? #RandolphHarris 27 of 28
Scientific invention is also a matter of filling a blank. This kind of creativity seems to some in two forms: interpolation and extrapolation. Interpolation is closest to the process of “discovering the object”: the scientist has a set of starting-points, which seem connected with a phantasied endpoint or outcome which one wishes to reach. At first tis gap can conceivably be filled wit a shifting multitude of possibly useful concepts. Some of these are eliminated when we cannot get evidence, cannot get the facts to coincide with out phantasies. Eventually, if we work hard enough and are blessed enough, the pieces fall into place and bridge the gap from phantasy to outcome in a way which can be tested further. The process of extrapolation is of a more space-loving kind—discovery rather than invention. “Surely if we sail west we will come to the Indies,” said Christopher Columbus—and landed in America! Starting from the known, the discoverer takes the next step (perhaps the next logical step) and then the next and then the next. All kinds of good things can happen when conceptual activity does not eventuate in the anticipated outcome. Creative processes happen, imaginative play, artistic endeavour, invention, discovery. They all start with the kind of mental processes called phantasy (that is, untested unconfirmed concepts). In this state of mind there are (at least during the “period of hesitation”) no clear concepts, no clear contours. Bits of “self” and of “not self” are available for potential concept-formation. #RandolphHarris 28 of 28
CRESLEIGH RANCH
Rancho Cordova, CA |
Now Selling!
These charming neighborhoods 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
Residence Four at Mills Station boasts approximately 2,700 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.
The Home Hub, located off the entry, can be used as a study, office, or kids play room. The kitchen comes fully equipped with a large eat-in island, stainless steel appliances, and quartz counters and opens onto the spacious great room. Upstairs you’ll find the Owner’s retreat, two bedrooms, and the loft perfect for a game room or TV lounge. The Owner’s retreat is spacious and inviting with a large bedroom and spa like bathroom featuring a free-standing soaking tub, walk-in shower, dual vanities, and large walk-in closet.
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 Ranch offers expansive, award-winning luxury home designs. There are single-level and two-story, open-concept floor plans, on nicely appointed home sites, and range size from approximately 2,000 to 4,000 square feet. Flex rooms allow for added bedrooms, multigenerational suites or office space to fit your family’s lifestyle requirements. Come and get your glimpse of Heaven and see why Cresleigh is America’s Favourite!
And Now We Must Preserve What it Means to be American!
I have a sixth sense, not the other five. If I was not making money, they would put me away. The conflict between Second and Third Wave groupings is, in fact, the central political tension cutting through our society today. Despite what today’s parties and candidates may preach, the infighting among them amounts to little more than a dispute over who will squeeze the most advantage from what reminds of the declining industrial system. Put differently, they are engaged in a squabble for the proverbial deck chairs on a sinking Titanic. The more basic political question is who controls the age of information. While short-range political skirmishes exhaust our energy and attention, a far more profound battle is already taking place beneath the surface. On one side are the partisans of the industrial past; on the other, growing millions who recognize that the most urgent problems of the World—food, energy, arms control, population, poverty, resources, ecology, climate, the problems of the aged, the breakdown of urban community, the need for productive, rewarding work—can no longer be resolved within the framework of the current order. This conflict is the “super-struggle” for tomorrow. This confrontation between the vested interests of the Second Wave and the people of the Third Wave already runs like an electric current through the political life of every nation. Even in the undeveloped countries of the World, all the old battle lines have been forcibly redrawn by the arrival of the Third Wave. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
The old war of agricultural, often feudal, interest against industrializing elites, either capitalists or socialist, takes on a new dimension in light of the coming development of the age of information. Now that Third Wave civilization has made it appearance, does the digital age imply liberation from neocolonialism and poverty—or does it, in fact, guarantee permanent dependency? It is only against this wide-screen background that we can begin to make sense of the headlines, to sort out our priorities, to frame sensible strategies for the control of change in our lives. As I write this, the front pages report hysteria and hostages in Mexico. In addition to being one of America’s largest trading partners, Mexico is the biggest foreign source of heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine trafficking into the United States of America. Currently there are assassinations in America, runaway speculation in gold and stocks, friction between underrepresented groups, big increases in China’s defense budget to around $200 billion U.S dollars, which is up 6.8 percent from last year. Crosses brining in Knoxville, Tennessee by members wearing white robes to symbolize “purity” and the burning crosses to signify “the light of Christ.” There is also expected to be fuel shortages this summer because more people are expected to travel by vehicles after a year of lockdown, but 25 percent of truck drivers had to park their big rigs, and an estimated 40,000 to 60,000 were put out of the national employment pool because of prior drug or alcohol violations or failed drug tests. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
Furthermore, as racism seems to be on a rise, more and more people are having the biggest antiracism rally in history. There is also a battle between the rich nations and the developing nations over manufacturing and trade. Waves of religious revivalism crash through Africa, Israel, Libya, Syria, and the United States of America; neofacist fanatics claim “credit” for the 2020 American Presidential election. And in a safety report filed to U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, BMW laid out the broad strokes of its plan to introduce what could become the first system on American roads to qualify as “Level 3” by Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) standards for automated driving features. These news clips, while some are good, and others are tragic, call out for integration or synthesis. Once we realize that a biter struggle is now raging between those who seek to preserve their traditional values and those who seek to supplant it, we have a powerful new key to understanding the World. More important—whether we are setting policies for a nation, strategies for a corporation, or goals for one’s own personal life—we have a new tool for changing that World. To use this tool, however, we must be able to distinguish clearly those changes that extend the old Americana from those which facilitate the arrival of the new. We must, in short, understand both the old and the new, the Second Wave industrial system into which so many Americans were born and the Third Wave civilization that many of us and our children are inhabiting. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
The Second Wave civilization was not an accidental jumble of components, but a system with parts that interacted with each other in more or less predictable ways—and the fundamental patterns of industrial life were the same in country after country, regardless of cultural heritage or political difference. This is the civilization that today’s “reactionaries”—both “left- “and “right-wing”—are fighting to preserve. It is this World that is threatened by history’s Third Wave of civilizational change. Also, with the 100 year anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre just passing, which lead to the death of as many as 300 people, nearly 1,000 injured, leaving 35 city blocks in charred ruins—many people are demanding that something be done to repair race relations in 2021 because some people in the media and positions of authority seem intend on bringing back Jim Crow racism. Because there are so many mixed-race families and people are more accepting of other cultures, the reality of racism is sacring many people. They fear moving to new communities because they do not know if their family with become a target and be assassinated because of their colour of their skin, and they are concerned about the integrity of law enforcement to uphold the laws because there seems to be a breakdown of law and order in 2021, and many do not know where the community and those in positions of authority stand on law and order. The community does not know if they uphold the constitutional oath, or want to threaten, intimidate them or use them for target practice. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
The first man who enclosed a plot of ground and thought of saying, “This is mine,” and found others to believe him, was the true founder of society. Having the good fortune to be born among you, how could I meditate on the equality which nature has established among people and upon the inequality they have instituted without thinking of the profound wisdom with which both, felicitously combined in this state, cooperate in the manner that most closely approximates the natural law and that is most favourable to society, to the maintenance of public order and to the happiness of private individuals? In searching for the best maxims that good sense could dictate concerning the constitution of government, I have been so struck on seeing the all in operation in your own, that even if I had not been born within your walls, I would have believed myself incapable of dispensing with offering this picture of human society to that people which, of all peoples, seems to me to be in possession of the greatest advantages, and to have best prevented its abuses. If I had had to choose my birthplace, I would have chosen a society of a size limited by the extent of human faculties, that is to say, limited by the possibility of being well governed, and where, with each being sufficient to one’s task, no one would have been forced to relegate to others the functions with which one was charged; a state where, with all private individuals being known to one another, neither the obscure maneuvers of vice nor the modesty of virtue could be hidden from the notice and the judgment of the public, and where that pleasant habit of seeing and knowing one another turned love of homeland into love of the citizens rather than into love of the land. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
I would have wanted to be born in a country where the sovereign and the people could have but one and the same interest, so that all the movements of the machine always tended only to the common happiness. Since this could not have taken place unless the people and the sovereign were one and the same person, it follows that I would have wished to be born under a democratic government, wisely tempered. I would have wanted to live and die free, that is to say, subject to the laws in such wise that neither I nor anyone else could shake off their honourable yoke: that pleasant and salutary yoke, which the most arrogant heads bear with all the greater docility, since they are made to bear no other. I would therefore have wanted it to be impossible for anyone in the state to say that one was above the law and for anyone outside to demand that the state was obliged to give one recognition. If a single person is found who is not subject to the law, for whatever the constitution of a government may be, all the others are necessarily at one’s discretion. And if there is a national leader and a foreign leader as well, whatever the division of authority they may make, it is impossible for both of them to be strictly obeyed and for the states to be well governed. I would not have wanted to dwell in a newly constituted republic, however good its laws may be, out of fear that, with the government perhaps constituted otherwise than would be required for the moment and being unsuited to the new citizens or the citizens to the new government, the state would be subject to being overthrown and destroyed almost from is inception. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
For liberty is like those solid and tasty foods or those full-bodied wines which are appropriate for nourishing and strengthening robust constitutions that are used to them, but which overpower, ruin, and intoxicate the weak and delicate who are not suited for them. Once peoples are accustomed to masters, they are no longer in a position to get along without them. If they try to sake off the yoke, they put all the more distance between themselves and liberty, because, in mistaking for liberty an unbridled license which is its opposite, their revolutions nearly always deliver them over to seducers who simply make their chains heavier. The Roman people itself—that model of all free peoples—was in no position to govern itself when it emerged from the oppression of the Tarquins. Debased by slavery and the ignominious labours the Tarquins had imposed on it, at first it was but a stupid rabble that needed to be managed and governed with the greatest wisdom, so that, as it gradually became accustomed to breathe the salutary air of liberty, these souls, enervated or rather brutalized under tyranny, acquired by degrees that severity of mores and that high-spirited courage which eventually made them, of all the peoples, most worthy of respect. I would therefore have sought for my homeland a happy and tranquil republic, whose antiquity was somehow lost in the dark recesses of time, which has experienced only such attacks as served to manifest and strengthen in its inhabitants courage and love of homeland, and where the citizens, long accustomed to a wise independence, were not only free but worthy of being so. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
I would have searched for a country where the right of legislation was common to all citizens, for who can know better than they the conditions under which it suits them to live together in a single society? However, I would not have approved of plebiscities like those of the Romans where the state’s leaders and those most interested in its preservation were excluded from the deliberations on which its safety often depended, and where, by an absurd inconsistency, the magistrate were deprived of the rights enjoyed by ordinary citizens. On the contrary, I would have desired that, in order to stop he self-centered and ill-conceived projects and the dangerous innovations that finally ruined Athens, no one would have the power to propose new laws according to one’s fancy; that this right belonged exclusively to the magistrates; that even they used it with such caution that the populace, for is part, was so hesitant about giving its consent to these laws, and that their promulgation could only be done with such solemnity that before the constitution was overturned one had time to be convinced that it is above all the great antiquity of the laws that makes them holy and venerable; that the populace soon holds in contempt those laws that it sees change daily; and that in becoming accustomed to neglect old usages on the pretext of making improvements, great evils are often introduced in order to correct lesser ones. “God is wise in heart and mighty in strength. Who has hardened oneself against God and prospered?” declares Job 9.4. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
Above all, I would have fled, as necessarily ill-governed, a republic where the people, believing it could get along without its magistrates or permit them but a precarious authority, would imprudently have held on to the administration of civil affairs and the execution of its laws. Such must have been the rude constitution of the first governments immediately emerging form the state of nature, and such too was one of the vices which ruined the republic of Athens. However, I would have chosen that republic where private individuals, being content to give sanction to the laws and to decide as a body and upon the recommendation of their leaders the most important public affairs, would establish respect tribunals, distinguish with care their various departments, annually elect the most capable and most upright of their fellow citizens to administer justice and to govern the state; and where, with the virtue of the magistrates thus bearing witness to the wisdom of the people, they would mutually honour one another. Thus if some fatal misunderstandings were ever to disturb public concord, even those periods of blindness and errors were marked by indications of moderation, reciprocal esteem, and a common respect for the laws: presages and guarantees of a sincere and perpetual reconciliation. Such, MAGNIFICENT, MOST HONOURED, AND SOVEREIGN LORDS, are the advantages that I would have sought in the homeland that I would have chosen for myself. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
And if in addition providence had joined to it a charming location, a temperate climate, a fertile country and the most delightful appearance there is under the Heavens, to complete my happiness I would have desired only to enjoy all these goods in the bosom of that happy homeland, living peacefully in sweet society with my fellow citizens, and practicing toward them (following their own example), humanity, friendship, and all the virtues; and leaving behind me the honourable memory of a good human and a decent and virtuous patriot. If, less happy or too late grown wise, I had seen myself reduced to end an infirm and languishing career in other climates, pointlessly regretting the repose and peace of which an imprudent youth deprived me, I would at least have nourished in my soul those same sentiments I could not have used in my native country; and penetrated by a tender and disinterested affection for my distant fellow citizens, I would have addressed them from the bottom of my heart more or less along the following lines: My dear fellow citizens, or rather my brother, since the bonds of blood as well as the laws unite almost all of us, it gives me pleasure to be incapable of thinking of you without a the same time thinking of all the god things you enjoy, and of which perhaps none of you appreciates the value more deeply than I who have lost them. The more I reflect upon your political and civil situation, the less I am capable of imagining that the nature of human affairs could admit of better one. In all other governments, when it is a question of assuring the greatest good of the state, everything is always limited to imaginary projects, and at most to simple possibilities. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
As for you, your happiness is complete; it remains merely to enjoy it. And to become perfectly happy you are in need of nothing more than to know how to be satisfied with being so. Your sovereignty, acquired or recovered at the point of a sword, and preserved for over two centuries by dint of valour and wisdom, is at last fully and universally recognized. Honourable treaties fix your boundaries, secure your rights and strengthen your repose. Your constitution is excellent, since it is dictated by the most sublime reason and is guaranteed by friendly powers deserving of respect. Your state is tranquil; you have neither wards nor conquerors to fear. You have no other masters but the wise laws you have made, administered by upright magistrates of your own choosing. You are neither rich enough to enervate yourself with softness and to lose in vain delights the tastes for true happiness and solid virtues, nor poor enough to need more foreign assistance than your industry procures for you. And this precious liberty, which in large nations is maintained only by exorbitant taxes, costs you almost nothing. For the happiness of is citizens and the examples of the peoples, may a republic so wisely and so happily constituted last forever! This is the only wish left for you to make, and the only precaution left for you to take. From here on, it is for you alone, not to bring about your own happiness, your ancestors having saved you the trouble, but to render I lasting by the wisdom of using it well. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
It is upon your perpetual union, your obedience to the laws, your respect for the ministers that your preservation depends. If there remains among you the slightest germ of bitterness or distrust, hasten to destroy it as a ruinous leaven that sooner or later results in your misfortunes and the ruin of the state. I beg you all to look deep inside your hearts and to heed the secret voice of your conscience. Is there anyone among you who knows of a body that is more upright, more enlightened, more worthy of respect than that of your magistracy? Do not all its members give you the example of moderation, of simplicity of mores, of respect for the laws, and of the most sincere reconciliation? Then freely give such wise chiefs that salutary confidence that reason owes to virtue. Bear in mind that they are of your choice, that they justify it, and that the honours due to those whom you have established in dignity necessarily reflect back upon yourselves. None of you is so unenlightened as to be ignorant of the fact that where the vigour of laws and the authority of their defenders cease, there can be neither security nor freedom for anyone. What then is the point at issues among you except to do wholeheartedly and with just confidence what you should always be obliged to do by a true self-interest, by duty and for the sake of reason? May a sinful and ruinous indifference to the maintenance of the constitution never make you neglect in time of need the wise teachings of the most enlightened and most zealous among you. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
However, may equity, moderation, and the most respectful firmness continue to regulate all your activities and display in you, to the entire Universe, the example of a proud and modest people, as jealous of its glory as of its liberty. Above all, beware (and this will be my last counsel) of ever listening to sinister interpretations and venomous speeches, whose secret motives are often more dangerous than the actions that are their object. An entire household awakens and takes warning at the first cries of a good and faithful watchdog who never barks expect at the approach of burglars. However, people hate the nuisance caused by those noisy animals that continually disturb the public repose and whose continual and ill-timed warnings are not heeded even at the moment when they are necessary. The distinction between diseases of “brain” and “mind,” between “neurological” problems and “psychological” or “psychiatric” ones, is an unfortunate cultural inheritance that permeates society and medicine. It reflects a basic ignorance of the relation between brain and mind. On 17 June 1783, the famous English author Dr. Samuel Johnson awoke around 3 A.M. and to his surprise and horror found he could not speak. To test his mind, he attempted to compose a prayer in Latin verse and succeeded. Thus reassured, he next tried to loosen his powers of speech by drinking spirits, but this only put him back to sleep. When he awoke the next morning he found that he still could not speak, yet he could write and could understand what others said. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
What sort of disorder would disrupt speech yet allow one to think, read, write, and listen? Mr. Johnson summoned his physicians, who diagnosed a disturbance of the vocal apparatus and prescribed a treatment of blisters on each side of the throat. Sure enough, within a few days his speech began to return, leaving only a slight impediment at the time of his death late the following year. The misdiagnosis of Mr. Johnson’s doctors regarding the localization of different aspects of language in the brain was mild compared with that of their predecessors. Down the centuries philosophers and physicians have talked about the mind, the soul, and the heart and how they are related, and have produced a vast literature from which can be distilled several different pictures. Down the centuries philosophers and physicians have talked about the mind, the soul, and the heart and how they are related, and have produced a vast literature from which can be distilled several different pictures. For many centuries people debated whether the mind was located in the heart, as Aristotle argued in the fourth century B.C., or in the brain, as Hippocrates had guessed. The second-century anatomist Galen, whose views prevailed until the sixteenth century, favoured Hippocrates’ view, although he mislocated the mind in the brain’s fluid-filled ventricles. The early-nineteenth-century German physician Franz Gall recognized that various brain regions have specific functions, but he guessed wrongly what they were. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
By 1865 a French physician, Paul Broca, reported that damage to a specific area on the left side of the brain would produce the speech difficulty that Samuel Johnson suffered (apparently as a result of a mild stroke). What is true of our understanding of the relation between brain activity and language is true of the brain-mind relation in general: every new advance in the flourishing field of neuropsychology tightens the apparent links between brain and mind. Even so specific a mental function as the ability to recognize a face has been localized to specific brain regions (principally the lower right side of the brain). In work with monkeys, neuropsychologists have detected specific cells that buzz with activity in response to a specific face or to a specific type of perceived body movement. In humans, detectable brain activity is now known to coincide with and even preceded by a fraction of a second the instant at which a person consciously decides to perform an action, such as lifting a finger. As research accumulates, the link also tightens between brain and personality. Another well-documented episode of the mid-nineteenth century further illustrates the tightness of the mind-brain link, but his time with a dramatic change in general behaviour. In 1848 a New England railroad worker, Phineas Gage, accidentally set off an explosion that sent a tamping iron through the front of his brain. Before the accident he was a reliable, upright member of society. After it, his behaviour, aspirations, ethics, and morals had all changed dramatically for the worse. And what happens in isolated cases such as Gage’s may, at times, happen to large numbers of people. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
In the late 1800s considerable numbers of previously sane people in Edinburgh threw themselves out of windows after suffering from epidemic encephalitis or inflammation of the brain, probably due to invasion by bacteria or viruses. The Austrian physician Constantin von Economo likened the Scottish illness and a similar one in Italy to the epidemic of encephalitis lethargica or sleeping sickness that spread across the World from 1917 to 1927. Changes to the brain by damage or disease result in changes in thinking, feeling, and behaving. We now know that particular types of brain damage have predictable effects on thoughts and emotions, and that manipulating a person’s brain can manipulate the person’s mind, moods, and motives. And we are learning how abnormalities in the brain’s chemical messengers—its neurotransmitters—are involved in psychological disorders such as depression and schizophrenia. With such findings comes hope that alterations in brain chemistry (through drugs, transplants of brain tissue, or dietary changes) may alleviate emotional suffering. With everyone being required to wear a mask now in public places of business, even though stay at home orders have been lifted, many people may still be feeling disconnected with the human population. Something that Dr. Charles Darwin emphasized, and Dr. Antonio Damasio reminds us that if it is separated from its emotional foundation, “mind talk” alone can be misleading because much of recognition and communication takes pace through expression of the face. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
If someone cannot show the feelings of the mind in the face, communication becomes extremely difficult. This happens, for example, in Moebius syndrome, in which all control of the muscle of both sides of the face and also eye movement are lost. Cognitive neuroscientists fill out the picture. They have shown that semantic jokes that make us smile are processed in centers in the brain concerned wit meanings of words. Hearing a pun of seeing someone slip on a banana peel engages different brain regions. Feelings matter, and feelings are embodied. There is certainly evidence to indicate that humans are dependent on their physical nature. There is also metaphysical evidence which reveals that the body is strongly influenced by the psyche. All diseases are not caused by soul illness. Destiny looms more largely in this matter than any physician is likely to admit, although it is equally true in the long run that humans are the arbiter of their own fate, that the real self bestows every boon or ill upon its fragmentary expression, the personality, and bestows them with a just impersonal hand. However, I must be content to leave the explanation of such a seeming paradox for another place and another time. Suffice it to hint that the past of individual humans are infinitely more extended than is apparent at first glance. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
As one penetrates deeper and deeper into that subtle World of one’s inner being, one finds that thought, feeling, and even speech affects its condition as powerfully as outer conditions affect one’s physical being. A complete falsehood or a gross exaggeration, when conscious and deliberate, stuns or inflames the delicate psyche. A complete falsehood or a gross exaggeration, when conscious and deliberate, stuns or inflames the delicate psyche. If persisted in and made habitual, the psyche becomes diseased and falls sick. This may be followed, soon or late according to the sensitive of the human, by physical sickness. If sickness does not come, then one will be exposed to it in the form of a universal shadowing some future incarnation. Where there is no obvious transgression of the laws of bodily hygiene to account for a case of ill health, there may still be a hidden one not yet uncovered. Where there is no hidden one, the line of connection from a physical effect may be traced to a mental cause—that is, the sickness may be a psychosomatic one. Where this in turn is also not obvious, there may still be a hidden mental one. Where all these classes of cause do not exist, then the origin of the sickness must necessarily be derive from the karma of the previous reincarnation—sometimes even for a still earlier one, although that is less likely. Under the law of recompense, the very type of body with which the patient was born contains latently, and was predisposed to revel eventually, the sickness itself. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
The cause may be any one of widely varying kinds, may even be a moral transgression in the earlier life which could not find any other way of expiation and so hard to be expiated in this way. Therefore it would be an error to believe that all cases of ill health directly arise from the transgression of physical hygienic laws. It is possible to be quite enlightened without being quite free from physical maladies. For the body’s karma does not end until the body’s life ends. Only a heroic and determined few can suddenly reverse the habits of a lifetime and adopt new ones with full benefit. For most people it is more prudent and beneficial to make change by degrees. The foods that best suit one, one alone can find out. However, one should select them from the restricted list with which philosophy will gladly provide one. Body and mind are intertwined. By experiment one may discover what agrees with one’s stomach and what not. If one notices disagreeable symptoms mentally or physically, such as dull headaches or stomach heaviness, then one should drop this item of food and observe whether there is any difference in one’s condition. If not, then it is not the food but something else that lies behind the distress. Our appetites have become perverted, our cravings for food have become morbid. We eat quantities for which the body has no actual need. The conventional dietary habits are false standards by which to live. We could quite well maintain ourselves by eating smaller amounts of rich, concentrated, and stimulating proteins, as well as of clogging starches. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
If we forfeit our free will, are we still human? Unhappy are you who have heard about Truth only through riddles, that is to say, the figures of speech and the literary genres of the day, as the Authors of Numbers suggested so felicitously (12.8). However happy are you to whom Truth has revealed herself in all her glory. Lone, Sound Rason and Common Sense often fail us, preventing us from seeing any father than our nose. What good is a lot of piffling and trifling about the great unknows? We will never be convicted at the Final Bar because we did not solve all the mysteries of the World. Is it not great folly, then, for your to send so little time on the practical and necessary things of the soul, and yet so much time on the intellectual curiosities and travesties of our time? We do not have eyes, the dolorous Jeremiah once observed, but sometimes we just do not see (5.21). Why do the School-humans go on, so haggling about what is a species, what is a genus? And yet, when the Eternal Word whispers—and this may be Theology—you should stop and listen. That is what John says in the beginning of his Gospel (1.3). From the One Word all words flow, as the same John reminds us (8.25), and all words bespeak the One Word. Without this concept of the Eternal Word, the pupil can neither understand one entity nor distinguish among the many. All are one. All in one. When you realize all this, you can forget about Philosophy and Theology as they are taught in the University; you are already at home with God. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
O God, as John embraced Jesus as Truth (14.6), so I embrace You as the Truth the University’s seeking! My You in turn, as You embraced the prophetic Jeremiah (31.3), embrace me as a seeker of the Truth! Endless lectures, pointless tomes, majuscule, minuscule, my poor head splits, and yet in all the babel Yours is the only voice I hear. A man harnesses the unruly affections of one’s heart and trains them to trot as one. The surer one does that, the quicker one come to understand the great and the deep. That is because they receive strong direction from the Powerful Hand above. The impure, complex, unstable spirit is pulled in a variety of directions at once and never gets any work done; but the docile, willing, and powerful spirit puts all its efforts into pulling for the honour of God, even to the degradation of blinders. How is this possible? It is the great drays of your unmortified hear that causes all the delays. Ah, to be alive on an early-June morn fording a stream barefoot, pants rolled up holding boots, pack on, sunshine, ice in the shallows, northern Rockies. Rustle and shimmer of icy creek waters stones turn underfoot, small and hard on toes, cold nose dripping, singing inside creek music, heart music, smell of sun on gravel. I pledge allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the soil of the United States of America, one ecosystem in diversity, under the Sun—with joyful interpenetration for all. Mozart died in his thirty-sixth year but he had glimpses long before. So did many other historically known humans in the Old World. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
We shall never know how many mystical experiences took place within those medieval cloisters of those Old World ashrams but were lost to human record because those to whom they happened lacked the foresight to write them down or the will to dictate them. There are individuals scattered hither and tither who have found God. It is certain that they are types as well as individuals—therefore, it is certain that the whole race will also one day find God. Even one who is active, efficient, practical, and Worldly may also be touched by this Heavenly light: it is not reserved for the dreamers and poets, the artists and saints alone. I have known humans who have blue-printed public buildings, engineered factories, managed office personnel, filled the lowest and highest positions in a nation, who themselves had known ITS visitations, who recognize and revered it. I like to see a person proud of the place in which one lives. I like to see one live so that one’s place will be proud of one. Many people have had a mystical glimpse before the age of ten, more have done so during adolescence, still more during their mature years. Be proud to be an American and proud that the U.S Constitution is at the core of our country and its citizen. We thankfully acknowledge that Thou art the Lord our God and God of our Fathers, the God of all that lives, our Creator and Creator of the Universe. We offer blessings and thanksgiving to Thy great and holy name because Thou hast kept us in life and sustained us; so mayest Thou continue to keep us in life and sustain us. O gather our exiles into the courts of Thy holy sanctuary to observe Thy statutes, to do Thy will, and to serve Thee with a perfect heart. We give thanks unto Thee. Blessed be God to whom we are ever grateful. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
Cresleigh Homes
You’re home. 😍 The Mills Station Res 4 model hallway leads to four bedrooms and 3.5 baths in the largest home in the community. 🏠 It’s exceptional!
Cresleigh Ranch features spacious single-family homes on larger home sites, with unique architectural appointments, Sophisticated features, and several options that give you the freedom to personalize your dream home.
A Shower of Glitter Does Not Slake the Thirst of a Soul!
The most persistent threat to freedom, to the rights of Americans, is fear. What would become of the arts without the luxury that feeds them? If there were no tyrants, no wars, no conspirators, what would history become? If each person, consulting only the duties of the human and the needs of nature, had times for nothing but the homeland, the unfortunate, and one’s friends, who would want to spend one’s life in fruitless speculations? Are we destined then to die fastened to the edge of the pit where truth has retreated? In order to be a realist, you must believe in miracles. The misuse of time is a great evil. Other evils that are worse follow after letters and the arts. Luxury, born like them of idleness and human’s vanity, is one such. Luxury seldom thrives without the sciences and the arts, and they never thrive without it. Two famous republics competed for World domination. One was very rich and the other had nothing, and it was the latter which destroyed the former. The Roman Empire, in turn, after having swallowed up all the wealth of the Universe, fell prey to humans who did not even know what wealth was. Every artist wants to be applauded. The praises of one’s contemporaries are the most precious part of one’s reward. What hen will one do to obtain praise, if one has the misfortune to be born among a people and at a time when learned humans, having become fashionable, have placed a frivolous youth in a position to set the tone; when humans have sacrificed their taste to the tyrants of liberty; when because one of the genders dares approve only what is a match for the other’s pusillanimity, masterpieces of dramatic poetry are dropped and harmonic prodigies rejected? #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
What will one do, people? One will lower one’s genius to the level of one’s century and will prefer to compose popular works which are admired during one’s lifetime instead of marvels which would not be admired until long after one’s death. How many manly and strong beauties have been sacrificed to our false delicacy, and how many great things has the spirit if gallantry, so fertile in small things, cost society? In this way the dissolution of mores, a necessary consequence of luxury, leads in turn to the corruption of taste. If perchance there is, among humans of extraordinary talents, someone who has firmness of soul and who refuses to yield to the genius of one’s century and to degrade oneself by childish productions, woe to on! One cannot reflect on mores without taking delight in recalling the image of the simplicity of the earliest times. It is a beautiful shore, adored by the hands of nature alone, toward which one continually turns one’s eyes, and from which one regretfully feels oneself moving away. When innocent and virtuous humans have wanted to the gods as witnesses of their actions, they lived together in hunts. However, having soon become wicked, they wearied of those inconvenient spectators and banished them to magnificent temples. Finally, they chased them from the temples in order to take up residence in themselves, or at least the temples of the gods were no longer distinguishable from the homes of citizens. That period was the height of depravity, and vices were never impelled further than when they were, so to speak, seen propped up on columns of marble and carved on Corinthian capitals at the entrance to the palaces of the great. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
While the conveniences of life increase, the arts are perfected and luxury spreads, true courage is enervated, military virtue disappears, and this too is the work of the sciences and of all those arts which are practiced in the darkness of the study. People brad to me of their bravery on a day of battle, but they do not tell me how they handle overwork, how they withstand the harshness of the seasons and the inclemency of the weather. All that is needed is a bit of sunshine or snow, a lack of a few superfluities, to melt and destroy the best of our armies in a few days. Intrepid warriors, suffer for once the truth you so rarely hear: you are brave, I know. Battles do not always make for success in war, and for generals there is an art superior to that of wining battle. Everywhere I see immense establishments where youths are brough up at great expense to learn everything but their duties. Your children will not know their own language, but will speak others which re nowhere in use. They will know how to compose verses they will scarcely be capable of comprehending. Without knowing how to separate error from truth, they will possess the art of making them unrecognizable to others by means of specious arguments. However, they will not know the meaning of the words magnanimity, fair-mindedness, temperance, humanity, courage. That sweet name homeland will never strike their ear; and if they hear God spoken of at all, it will be less to be in awe of him than to be in fear of him. I know that children need to be kept occupied and that, for them, idleness is the greatest danger to fear. What then should they learn? That is certainly a fine question! Let them learn what they ought to do when they adults, and not what they ought to forget. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
If not from the fatal inequality introduced among humans by the distinction of talents and the degradation of virtues, where do all the abuses in society come from? That is the most evident effect of our studies, and the most dangerous of all their consequences. One no longer asks whether a human has integrity, but whether one has talents; not whether a book is useful, but whether it is well written. Rewards are showered upon the wit, and virtue is left without honour. There are a thousand prizes for fine discourses, none for fine actions. Meanwhile, would someone tell me whether the glory attached to the best discourses that will be crowned in this Academy is comparable to the merit of having established the prize? The wise human does not chase after fortune, but one is not insensitive to glory; and one sees it so ill distributed, that one’s virtue, which a little emulation would have enlivened and made advantageous to society, languishes and dies out in misery and oblivion. This is what, in the long run, the preference for congenial talents over useful ones must everywhere produce, and what experience since the revival of the sciences and the arts has only too well confirmed. We have physicists, geometers, chemists, astronomers, poets, musicians, painters; we no longer have citizens. Or if there still are some left to us, dispersed in our abandoned countryside, they perish there indigent and despised. Such is the state to which those who give us bread and our children milk are reduced; such are the sentiments they get from us. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
Considering the frightful disorders that the fake news media has already causes in the World, and judging by the progress that the evil makes from one day to the nest, it is easy to foresee that sovereigns will not delay in taking as many pains to banish this terrible art from their states as they took to establish it in them. The fake news media is the height o absurdity. Obstacles teach people to work hard and to exert themselves to cover the immense area they traversed. If a few humans must be permitted to devote themselves to the study of the sciences and the arts, it should only be those who feel the strength to venture forth alone in their footsteps and to overtake them. It is for this small number to raise monuments to the glory of the human mind. However, if we want nothing to be beyond their genius, nothing must be beyond their hopes. That is the only encouragement they need. The soul imperceptibly proportions itself to the objects that occupy it, and it is great events that make great humans. May the obtain the only recompense worth them: that of contributing by their influence to the happiness of the peoples to whom they have taught wisdom. Only then will we see what can be done by virtue, science, and authority, enlivened by a noble emulation and working in concert for the felicity of humankind. However, as long as power is alone on one side, with enlightenment and wisdom alone on the other, learned humans will rarely think about great things, princes will more rarely perform noble deeds, and peoples will continue to be vile, corrupt, and unhappy. For us—ordinary humans to whom Heaven has not distributed such great talents and whom it does not destine for so much glory—let us remain in our obscurity. Even if we had all the qualifications to, let us not chase after a reputation that would escape us and which, in the present state of things, would never return to us what it would have cost us. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
If we can find it in ourselves, what good is it to seek our happiness in the opinion of another? Let us leave to others the cares of instructing peoples in their duties, and confine ourselves to fulfilling our own duties well. We have no need to know more than this. O virtue! Sublime science of simple souls, are there so many difficulties and so much preparation necessary in order to know you? Are your principles not engraved in all hearts, and is it not enough, in order to learn your laws, to commune with oneself and, in the silence of the passions, to listen to the voice of one’s conscience? That is the true philosophy; let us know how to be satisfied with it. And without envying the glory of those famous humans who are immortalized in the republic of letters, let us try to place between them and ourselves that glorious distinction observed long ago between two great peoples: that the one knew how to speak well, he other how to act well. It is doubtless impossible to approach any human problem with a mind free from bias. Psychology is morally and ethically neutral. Psychologists hold a wide variety of different moral and ethical views. These widely varying outlooks are often called Worldviews. Science involves more than impersonal, objective, pure facts. We organize observations based on our experience and interests. We decide what to attend to and what to ignore. This subjective element of scientific exploration is even larger in the human sciences, such as sociology, anthropology, and parts of psychology, than in the physical sciences, such as physics and chemistry. Thus psychologists’ Worldviews, which include their personal values, penetrate their work in several subtle and not-so-subtle ways. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
Worldviews also influence psychologists’ choice of research topics and their ethical standards in conducting research. Our interest in topics such as aggression, gender, and smoking prevention are motivated by our personal concerns. Worldviews further influence our conceptions of mental and social hygiene, of self-actualization and fulfillment. Is it better to express and act on one’s feelings, or to exhibit self-control? To seek joy in the here and now, or to endure stress now for the sake of future achievement? Little wonder that in one survey, 425 mental-health professionals were almost equally divided on whether it was desirable for people to “become self-sacrificing and unselfish.” Psychologists also are subtly affected by their philosophical and cultural assumptions. Morality is a matter of thinking, and the humanistic individualism of one’s assumption about the “highest” or most mature moral stage is exhibited by those who make moral judgments in accord with their self-chosen convictions. Sometimes people’s moral ideals, for example, can be an articulate liberal secular humanist masquerading as psychological truth. Moral maturity is not so much a matter of abstract ethical principles as of responsible, committed relationships. So Worldviews including hidden values and assumptions do penetrate psychology. They influence psychologists to construct, confirm, and label concepts that support their presuppositions. The Christian psychologist’s obligation is to tell it like it is, knowing that the Author is at our elbow, a silent judge of the accuracy with which we claim to describe the World He has created. In this sense our goal is objective, value free. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
If our limitations, both intellectual and moral, predictably limit our achievement of this ideal, this is something not to be glorified in but in to acknowledged in a spirit of repentance. Any idea that it could justify a dismissal of the ideal of value free knowledge as a “myth” would be as irrational—and as irreligious—as to dismiss the idea of righteousness as a “myth” on the grounds that we can never perfectly attain that. A Christian psychology is one that is faithful to reality. If God has written the book of nature, it becomes our calling to read it as clearly as we can, remembering that we are humble stewards of the creation, answerable to the giver of all data for the accuracy of our observations. Indeed, it is precisely because all our ideas are vulnerable to error and bias—including our biblical and theological interpretations as well as our scientific concepts—that we must be wary of absolutizing any of our theological or scientific ideas. Our religious and scientific ideas are mere approximations of truth that always are subject to test, challenge, and revision. Believing that both the natural and biblical data reveal God’s truth, we can allow scientific and theological perspectives to challenge and inform each other. However, we do so remembering that science and theology operate at different levels of explanation and mindful of the tentative nature of any scientific or theological theory. There is an additional reason why the Christian Bible does not give us completed psychology and why we therefore need psychological science. The Scriptures must embody truth not just for us in our twenty-first-century age but for all the people past, present, and future. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
Christianity was never intended to replace or supersede the ordinary human arts and sciences: it is rather a director which will set them all to the right jobs, and a source of energy which will give the all new life, if only they will put themselves at its disposal. The less we know, the more scrupulous and careful we should be in applying and monitoring what we think we do know. Having lost sight of scientific skepticism and the need for careful research, the “professionals view” has become highly compatible with the New Age view without adherence to the scientific standard of “show me,” professional psychology and psychotherapy become a matter of “views” and “schools,” with the result that they are highly influenced by cultural beliefs and fads: currently the obsession is with “me.” We agree that our values and assumptions cloud the spectacles through careful scientific and biblical scholarship. Christianizers psychology never approach their subject completely free of prior beliefs and prejudices. Thus if Christian psychologists are to be fully serious both as scholars and Christians, they must not wall off their scientific and religious levels of understanding from each other. Instead, they should allow the content of their faith to inform their psychology (and vice versa), much as they also allow their faith to inform their social awareness, politics, and personal relationships. Christian developmental psychologists might want to construct a theory that is rooted in an explicitly Christian understanding of morality. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
The Christian response to psychology is that it offers the psychological science a limited but useful perspective on human nature that complements the perspective of faith. The issues for the Christian is not some doctrinaire desire to defend the status of psychology as a science but rather to adhere to the commitment to report the way the World is, no the way we would like it to be. Science is, above all else, a reality-driven enterprise. Every active investigator is inescapably aware of this. It creates the pain as well as much of the delight of research. Reality is the overseer at one’s shoulder, ready to rap one’s knuckles or to spring the trap into which one had been led by over confidence, or by too-complacent reliance on mere surmise. Science succeeds precisely because it has accepted a bargain in which even the boldest imagination stands hostage to reality. Reality is the unrelenting angels with whom scientists have agreed to wrestle. This image should be familiar to those who recall Jacob’s encounter with the living God. Whenever a single wave of change predominates in any given society, the pattern of future development is relatively easy to discern. Writers, artists, journalists, and others discover the “wave of the future.” Thus in nineteenth-century Europe many thinkers, business leaders, politicians, and ordinary people held a clear, basically correct image of the future. They sensed that history was moving toward the ultimate triumph of industrialism over premecanized agriculture, and they foresaw with considerable accuracy many of the changes that the Second Wave would bring with it: more powerful technologies, bigger cities, faster transport, mass education, and the like. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
This clarity of vision had direct political effects. Parties and political movements were able to triangulate with respect to the future. Preindustrial agricultural interests organized a rearguard action against encroaching industrialism against “big business,” against “union bosses,” against “sinful cities.” Labour and management grappled for control of the main levers of the emergent industrial society. Marginalized because of their race, gender, religion, or ethnicity, people began defining their rights in terms of an improved role in the industrial World, demanded access to jobs, corporate positions, urban housing, better wages, mass public education, and so forth. This industrial vision of the future had important psychological effects as well. People might disagree; they might engage in sharp, occasionally even bloody, conflict. Depression and boom times might disrupt their lives. Nevertheless, in general, the shared image of an industrial future tended to define options, to give individuals a sense not merely of who or what they were, but of what they were likely to become. It provided a degree of stability and a sense of self, even in the midst of extreme social change. In contrast, when a society is struck by two or more giant waves of change, and none is yet clearly dominant, the image of the future is fractured. It becomes extremely difficult to sort out the meaning of the changes and conflicts that arise. The collision of wave fronts creates a raging ocean, full of clashing currents, eddies, and maelstroms which conceal the deeper, more important historic tides. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
In the United States of America today—as in many other countries—the collision of Second and Third Waves creates social tensions, dangerous conflicts, and strange new political wave fronts that cut across the usual divisions of class, race, gender, or party. This collision makes a shambles of traditional political vocabularies and makes it very difficult to separate the progressive from the reactionaries, friends from enemies. All the old polarizations and coalitions break up. Unions and employers, despite their differences, join to fight environmentalist. Groups, once untied in battle against discrimination, become adversaries. In many nations, labour, which has traditionally favoured “progressive” policies such as income redistribution, now holds “reactionary” positions with respect to women’s rights, family codes, immigration, traffic, or regionalism. The traditional “left” is often pro-centralization, highly nationalistic, and antienvironmentalist. At the same time we see politicians espousing “conservative” attitudes towards economic and “liberal” attitudes toward art, morality dealing with pleasures of the flesh, women’s rights, or ecological controls. No wonder people are confused and give up trying to make sense of their World. The media, meanwhile, report a seemingly endless succession of innovations, reversals, bizarre events, assassinations, kidnappings, space shots, governmental breakdown, commando raids, and scandals, all seemingly unrelated. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
The apparent incoherence of political life is mirrored in personality disintegration. Psychotherapists and self-actualize do a land-office business; people wander aimlessly amid competing therapies, from primal scream to electroconvulsive shock therapy (EST). They slip into cults and covens or, alternatively, into a pathology privatism, convinced that reality is absurd, insane, or meaningless. Life may indeed be absurd in some large, cosmic sense. However, this hardly proves that there is no pattern in today’s events. In fact, there is a distinct, hidden order the becomes detectable as soon as we learn to distinguish Third Wave changes from those associated with the diminishing Second Wave. An understanding of the conflicts produced by these colliding wave fronts gives us not only a clearer image of alternative futures but an X ray of the political and social forces acting on us. It also offers insight into our own private roles in history. For each of us, no matter how seemingly unimportant, is a living piece of history. The crosscurrents created by these waves of change are reflected in our work, our family life, our attitudes towards pleasures of the flesh and personal morality. They show up in our lifestyle and voting behaviour. For in our personal lives and in our political acts, whether we know it or now, most of us in the rich countries are essentially either Second Wave people committed to maintaining the dying order, Third Wave people constructing a radically different tomorrow, or a confused, self-canceling mixture of the two. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
Everyone has natural desire to know things. That is what Aristotle said a long time go in his Metaphysics. I say to you now, what good is all that knowledge unless it is accompanied by fear of God? Certainly better is the humble farmer who serves God than the proud Philosopher who entertains though about the Heavens. At least that is what Augustine noted in his Confessions. The Devout who knows oneself well has proper self-esteem, one that is not swept away by the blustering winds of human praise. If one’s head contained all the knowledge in the World and yet one’s soul was “empty of all charity”—the words of Pal in his First to the Corinthians (13.2)—what leg would he have left to stand on in front of his judge, the Lord God; all He want to know are the facts. Hunt for knowledge, yes, but do not let the hunter become the hunted. That way lies the wrong end of a blunderbuss. Often the studious want not so much to know everything as to be seen swanning about as authority figures. However, many areas oof knowledge have little or nothing to offer to the soul. Yet these are the very ones the harebrained often turn to instead of the topics that truly serve their own spiritual well-being. A shower of glitter does not slake the thirst of the soul. A life well lived, on the other hand, refreshes the mind, and a conscience well formed develops the confidence once needs when it comes to dealing with God. Antsy? Do not get antsy. Stay in line. Do not push others aside just to get ahead. If you do, you will get slapped with a fine by the Final Judge. That is to say, unless you have lived a holy life. Therefore, do not, every time you learn something new about art or science, break into a trompette volontaire! Rather, have some respect for the knowledge you already have. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
You may know a lot, yes, but there is also a lot you do not know. “Do not be wiseacre,” wrote Paul to the Romans (11.20) Admit you re not omniscient. And when it comes to standing in line, what about the people ahead of you? Apparently, they know more than you do. Get used to knowing less than God. Get used to the middle of the line. That is where you belong. What is the most profound, and yet the most practical, lesson you can learn? That you look like an ant! What is the deepest wisdom and yet the highest perfection? That you are an ant! Have no illusions about yourself—that is what Paul laid upon the Romans (11.20). Hold high opinions only about others. If you come upon a couple in flagrante delicito, do not think for a moment that you are better than they. Why? No one is perfect, said the Great Bernard somewhere in his Third Sermon on Christmas Day. We are all crockery. We all break when we hit the floor. And what is more, no one is more of a crock than you! Life consciousness above the plane of the physical World. Immerse thought in the concept of the higher self alone, forgetting its projected personal self. Next, empty the mind as far as possible of all thoughts and seek inward sacred stillness. When in prayer, picture an ethereal aura of pure, white, electrifying Light all around you. Then, imagine this magnificent Light is actually pulling you upright by the top of your head. Its compelling force should, as a result, automatically straighten the spine, and the back of your trunk, neck, and head from a perfectly erect line. Finally, imagine the Light is pervading inside the whole of your body. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
This should give you a feeling of physical refreshment and complete physical relaxation. Try to see and feel that the aura of Lit has an actual substance and that It is becoming part of you, that you are melting into It, becoming one with It. Next, think of it as being the pure essence of Love, especially in the region of the heart. When this Love has been experienced as a sensation of heart-melting happiness, let it then extend outwards to embrace all the World. This should give one a feeling of being in harmony with Nature, the Universe, with all living beings, and with humanity as a part of Nature. Thinking of the white Light as being Nature’s intelligent and recuperative Life-Force is essential to healing. Let it pour in, through the top of your head, passing directly to the solar plexus center, which is the region which must first be worked on and affected if he healing force is to become efficacious. Thence send it to any afflicted area, remaining there. Feel Its benevolent, restorative, and healing presence working upon it. In order to be fully effective, this exercise must be accompanied by intense faith in the recuperative powers of this Light. Astonishing proof of its effectiveness in relieving a troubles organ or curing a diseased part of the body, when preserved in for a sufficient period of weeks or months, has been clearly shown by results. In some cases, paralytics have regained full use of their disabled limbs by having faith in God and prayer. We are often times, so much the victims of custom and usage, of habit and convention, that even where we at once perceive this weakness in other persons, we fail to entirely perceive it in ourselves. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
We hear often of those who live to a ripe old age in health and in strength, but who eat whatever they fancy and drink what they like; they sin against the laws of health and live without any health regimes or disciplinary controls. This is used as an argument against the latter. However, it is a poor argument. For anyone who follows their example takes risks and runs hazards with one’s health, since theirs is a way based on mere chance and complete uncertainty. They were lucky enough to be blessed by nature with bodies strong enough to resist the ill-treatment thus received or favoured by destiny with recuperative powers to ward off its bad effect. If anyone could collect the statistics, they would unquestionably show that for each person who escaped infirmities and lived long in this way, a hundred filed to do so. Whatever humans harm or hurt, one will have to live with for a time until one learns to refrain, until one’s reverence for life is as active here as anywhere else. This is why the horrors of destruction will have to be expiated by the human who caused them. Those who have followed the Quest in previous lives will generally receive a glimpse a least twice during the present one. They will receive it in early life during their teens or around the threshold of adult life. This will inspire them to seek anew. Let the White Light enter the region of the heart reaming there. Form a mental image of the life you would like to lead. Endeavour actually to see the life there in your heart. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
This will bestow a Grace of God. Those aspirants who bemoan the loss of their early glimpse should remind themselves, in hours of depression, that it will recur before they leave the body. In addition to those glimpses which attend the opening and closing years of a lifetime, a number of others may be had during the intervening period as a dirt consequence and reward of the efforts, disciplines, and aspirations, and self-denials practised in the tame. We ought not to mistake this for the exception; it is really the type. Most aspirants have experienced this mystical glimpse, brief and unexpected perhaps, which has started or kept them on this quest. Even those people who assert or lament that they have never had a single glimpse during their whole lifetime will get it at the end. For it is a divinely ordained part of life. When the genuine mystical experiences comes, it present the student with the rare chance to know for oneself a state in the evolution of consciousness which still lies far ahead of humankind generally. Such memorable glimpses of higher state of being, which encourage and reassure one, may occur not only at the beginning of one’s spiritual career but also at the beginning of each new cycle within it. A glimpse is apparently something that humans rarely experience or something most of them never experience. However, the fact is that more people have had it than have recognized it for what it really is. And this has happened through their admiration of Nature or art, through failing in love, through sudden news. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
At present this mystic experience is a fugitive one in the human species. However, because it is also the ultimate experience of that species, there is no reason why it should not become a common one in the course of evolutionary development. The beauty of the trees, the softness of the air, the fragrance of the grass speaks to me. The summit of the mountain, the thunder of the sky, the rhythm of the sea, speaks to me. The faintness of the stars, the freshness of the morning, the dewdrop on the flower, speaks to me. The strength of fire, the taste of salmon, the trail of the sun, and the life that never goes away, they speak to me, and my heart soars. O Lord our God, please be gracious unto Thy people America and accept their prayer. Please restore the worship to Thy sanctuary and receive in love and favour the supplication of America. May the worship of Thy people be ever acceptable unto Thee. O may our eyes witness Thy return to America. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who restorest Thy divine presence unto America. We thankfully acknowledge Thee, O Lord our God, our father’s God to all eternity. Our Rock art Thou, our Shield that saves through every generation. We give thee thanks and we declare Thy praise for all Thy tender care. Our lives we trust into Thy loving hand. Our souls are ever in Thy charge; Thy wonders and Thy miracles are daily with us, evening, morn and noon. O Thou who art all-good, whose mercies never fail us, Compassionate One, whose lovingkindnesses never cease, we ever hope in Thee. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
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.
Enjoy luxury living at its finest in Cresleigh Ranch. Featured are sophisticated single-family homes with 3-car garages, outdoor fireplaces, workshops, and many other custom options to create the home of your dreams.
Randolph Harris II International 