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People have forgotten how to tell stories. Stories do not have a middle or an end any more. They usually have a beginning that never stops beginning. One simple thing that will happen in the future is that they will streamline the family. The typical pre-industrial family not only had a good many children, but numerous other dependent as well—grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins. Such “extended” families were well suited for survival in slow paced agricultural societies. However, such families are hard to transport or transplant. They are immobile. Industrialism demanded masses of workers ready and able to move off the land in pursuit of jobs, and to move again whenever necessary. Thus the extended family gradually shed its excess weight and the so-called “nuclear” family emerged—a stripped-down, portable family unit consisting only of parents and a small set of children. This new style family, far more mobile than the traditional extended family, became the standard model in all the industrial countries. Super-age of information, however, the next stage of ecotechnological development, requires even higher mobility. Thus we may expect many among the people of the future to carry the streamlining process a step further by remaining childless, cutting the family down to its most elemental components, two adults who are spouses. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
Adults will form relationships, two people, perhaps with matched careers, will prove more efficient at navigating through education and social shoals, through job changes and geographic relocations, than the ordinary child-cluttered family. Indeed, anthropologist Margaret Mead has pointed out that we may already be moving toward a system under which, as she puts it, “parenthood would be limited to a smaller number of families whose principal functions would be childrearing,” leaving the rest of the population “free to function—for the first time in history—as individuals.” A compromise may be the postponement of children, rather than childlessness. Men and women today are often torn in conflict between a commitment to career and a commitment to children. In the future, many couples will sidestep this problem by deferring the entire task of raising children until after retirement. This may strike people of the present as odd. Yet once childbearing is broken away from its biological base, nothing more than tradition suggests having children at an early age. Why not wait, and buy your embryos later, after your career is over? Thus childlessness is likely to spear among young and middle-aged couples; sexagenarians who raise infants may be far more common. The post-retirement family could become a recognized social institution. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
In Tokyo, Japan, for example, in 2017, the population fell by 300,000 people and there were fewer than 1 million births. The reason is because Japan’s young people are not focused on romance, they are more interested in their careers and becoming successful. Women and men are putting their careers before marriage. Experts also speculate that the birth rate could be falling because there are fewer good opportunities for young people. In a country where men are still widely expected to be the primary providers for the family, a lack of good jobs may be creating a class of men who do not marry and have children because they—and their potential partners—know they cannot afford to. The gender roles are pretty consistent with trends in all developed nations—men are having a harder time. The birth rate is down, even the coupling rate is decreasing. People say the number-one reason is economic insecurity. Economic insecurity may seem like a surprise in a country like Japan, with an unemployment rate below 3 percent. However, it may not just be the shrinking economic trends. Most developed nations have less land, so there is less room for people, and housing is more expensive. Because plots of land are growing smaller and more expensive, people may not have a desire to have children. If a smaller number of families raise children, however, why do the children have to be their own? Why not a system under which “professional parents” take on the childrearing function for others? Raising children, after all, requires skills that are by no means universal. We do not let “just anyone: perform brain surgery or, for that matter, sell stocks and bonds. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
Even civil servants with modest skill levels are required to pass tests proving competence. Yet we allow virtually anyone, almost without regard for mental or moral qualification, to try his or her hand at raising young human beings, so long as these humans are biological offspring. Despite the increasing complexity of the task, parenthood remains the greatest single preserve of the amateur. As the present system cracks and the super-age of informational revolution rolls over us, as the armies of juvenile delinquents swell, as hundreds of thousands of youngsters flee their homes, and students rampage at universities in all the techno-societies, we can expect vociferous demands for an end to parental dilettantism. There are far better ways to cope with the problems of youth, but professional parenthood is certain to be proposed, if only because it fits so perfectly with the society’s overall push toward specialization. Moreover, there is a powerful, pent-up demand for this social innovation. Even now millions of parents, given the opportunity, would happily relinquish their parental responsibilities—and not necessarily through irresponsibility or lack of love. Harried, frenzied, up against the wall, they have come to see themselves as inadequate to the tasks. The intuition must lead all the rest of human’s faculties. Even when they do not agree with its guidance, one must follow it. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
Intuition sees father than the individual ever can, being an efflux from the godlike part of oneself which is in its way a portion of the universal deity. If one can be sure that it is not pseudo-intuition truth in it will lead one to life’s best, whether spiritual or Worldly. Given affluence and the existence of specially-equipped and licensed professional parents, many of today’s biological parents would not only gladly surrender their children to them, but would look upon it as an act of live, rather than rejection. Parental professionals would not be therapists, but actual family units assigned to, and well paid for, rearing children. Such families might be multi-generational by design, offering children in them an opportunity to observe and learn from a variety of adult models, as was the case in the old farm homestead. With the adults paid to be professional parents, they would be free of the occupational necessity to relocate repeatedly. Such families would take in new children as old ones “graduate” so that age-segregation would be minimized. Thus newspapers of the future might well carry advertisements addressed to young married couples: “Why let parenthood tie you down? Let us raise your infant into a responsible, successful adult. Class A Pro-family offers: father age 39, mother, 36, grandmother, 67. Uncle and aunt, age 30, live in, hold part-time local employment. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
Four-child-unit has opening for one, age 6-8. Regulated diet exceeds government standards. All adults are certified in child development and management and pass federal background checks. Bio-parents permitted frequent visits. Telephone contact allow and Cisco Telepresence can be used daily. Child may spend summer vacation with bio-parents. Religion, art, music encouraged by special arrangement. Five-year contract, minimum. Write for further details.” The “real” or “bio-parents” could, as the advertisement suggests, fil the role presently played by interested godparents, namely that of friendly and helpful outsiders. In such a way, the society could continue to breed a wide diversity of genetic types, yet turn the care of children over to mother-father groups who are equipped, both intellectually and emotionally, for the task. Quite a different alternative lies in the communal family. As transience increases the loneliness and alienation in society, we can anticipate increasing experimentation with various forms of group marriage. The banding together of several adults and children into a single “family” provides kind of insurance against isolation. Even if one or two members of the household leave, the remaining members have one another. Communes are springing up modeled after those described by psychologist B.F. Skinner in Walden Two and novelist Robert Rimmer in The Harrad Experiment and Proposition 31. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
In the latter work, Rimmer seriously propose the legalization of a “corporate family” in which from three to six adults adopt a single name, live and raise children in common, and legally incorporate to obtain certain economic and tax advantages. According to some observers, there are already hundreds of open or covert communes dotting the American map. Not all, by any means, are composed of young people or hippies. Some are organized around specific goals—like the group, quietly financed by three East Coast colleges—which has taken as its function the task of counseling college freshmen, helping to orient them to campus life. The goals may be social, religious, political, even recreational. Thus, if they do not already, we shall before long begin to see communal families of surfers dotting the beaches of California and Southern France. We shall see the emergence of communes based on political doctrines and religious faiths. In Denmark, a bill to legalize group marriage has already been introduced in the Folketing (Parliament). While passage is not imminent, the act of introduction it itself a significant symbol of change. In Chicago, 250 adults and children already live together in “family-style monasticism” under the auspices of a new fast-growing religious organization, the Ecumenical Institute (EI). Members share the same quarters, cook and eat together, worship and tend children in common, and pool their incomes. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
At least 90,000 people have taken “EI” courses and similar communes have begun to spring up all over North America, and over 2,000 in various counties of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. There are at least 300 successful locally-managed initiatives in 53 countries. “A brand-new World is emerging,” says Professor Joseph W. Mathews, leader of the Ecumenical Institute, “But people are still operating in terms of the old one. We seek to re-educate people and give them the tools to build a new social context.” Still another type of family unit likely to win adherents in the future might be called the “geriatric commune”—a group of marriage of elderly people drawn together in a common search for companionship and assistance. Disengaged from the productive economy that makes mobility necessary, they will settle in a single place, band together, pool funds, collectively hire domestic or nursing help, and proceed—within limits—to have the “time of the lives.” Communalism runs counter to the pressure for ever greater geographical and social mobility generated by the thrust toward super-industrialism. It presupposed groups of people who “stay put.” For this reason, communal experiments will first proliferate among those in the society who are free from the industrial discipline—the retired population, the young, the dropouts, the students, as well as among self-employed professional and technical people. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
Later, when advanced technology and information systems make it possible for much of the work of society to be done at home via computer-telecommunication hookups, communalism will become feasible for larger numbers. We shall, however, also see many more “family” units consisting of a single unmarried adult and one or more children. Nor will all of these adults be women. It is already possible in some places for unmarried men to adopt children. In 1965 in Oregon, for example, a thirty-eight-year-old musician named Tony Piazza became the first unmarried man in that state, and perhaps in the United States of America, to be granted the right to adopt a baby. Courts are more readily granting custody to divorced fathers, too. In London, photographer Michael Cooper, married at twenty and divorced soon after, won the right to raise his infant son, and expressed an interest in adopting other children. Observing that he did not particularly wish to remarry, but that he liked children, Mr. Cooper mused aloud: “I wish you could just ask beautiful women to have babies for you. Or any woman you like, or who had something you admired. Ideally, I would like a big house full of children—all different colours, shapes and sizes.” Romantic? Unmanly? Perhaps. Yet attitudes like these will be widely held by men in the future. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
Two pressures are even now softening up the culture, preparing for acceptance of the idea of childrearing by men. First, adoptable children are in oversupply in some places. Thus, in California, disc jockeys blare commercials: “We have many wonderful babies of all races and nationalities waiting to bring love and happiness to the right families…Call the Los Angeles County Bureau of Adoption.” At the same time, the mass media, in a strange non-conspiratorial fashion, appear to have decided simultaneously that men who raise children hold special interest for public. Extremely popular television shows in recent seasons have glamorized womanless households in which men scrub floors, cook, and most significantly, raise children. My Three Son, The Rifleman, Bonanza, Bachelor Father, and Walker are five examples. As alternative family compositions become more socially acceptable, we see same gender couples having biological children and the partners adopting children. With the rapidity with which alternative families are winning respectability in the techno-societies distinctly points in this direction. In the 1960s, in Holland, a Catholic priest married two homosexuals, explaining to critics that “they are among the faithful to be helped.” And in the United States and in other countries around the World, homosexual marriages are now legal. The courts have decided that a couple of stable, well-educated homosexuals can make decent parents. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
In the future, however we might even see the gradual relations of bars against polygamy. Polygamous families exist even now, more widely than generally believed, in the midst of “normal” society. Writer Ben Merson, after visiting several such families in Utah where polygamy is still regarded as essential by certain Mormon fundamentalist, estimated that there are some 50,000 people living in underground family units of this type in the United States of America. As people become more accepting of other cultures, as property rights become less important because of rising affluence, the social repression of polygamy may come to be regarded as irrational. This shift may be facilitated by the very mobility that compels men to spend considerable time away from their present homes. The old male fantasy of the Captain’s Paradise may become a reality for some, although it is likely that, under such circumstances, the wives left behind will demand extramarital affair rights. Yesterday’s “captain” would hardly consider this possibility. Tomorrow’s may feel quite differently about it. Still another family form is even now springing up in our midst, a novel childrearing unit that I call the “aggregate family”—a family based on relationships between divorced and remarried couples, in which all the children become part of “one being family.” Though sociologist have paid little attention as yet to this phenomenon, it is already so prevalent that it formed the basis for a hilarious scene in an American movie entitled Divorce American Style. We may expect aggregate families to take on increasing importance in the decades ahead. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
Childless marriage, professional parenthood, post-retirement childrearing, corporate families, communes, geriatric group marriages, homosexual family units, polygamy—these, then, are a few of the family forms and practices with which innovative underrepresented groups will experiment in the decades ahead. Not all of us, however will be willing to participate in such experimentation. What of the majority? The pain which alone could rouse the bad human to acknowledge that all was not well, might also lead to a final and unrepented rebellion. And it has been admitted throughout that humans have free will and that all gifts t them are therefore two-edged. From these premises it follows directly that the Divine labour to redeem the World cannot be certain of succeeding as regards every individual soul. Some will not be redeemed. There is no doctrine which I would more willingly remove from Christianity than this, if it lay in my power. However, it has the full support of Scripture and, specially, of Our Lord’s own words; it has always been held by Christendom; and it has the support of reason. If a game is played, it must be possible to lose it. If the happiness of a creature lies in self-surrender, no one can make that surrender but oneself (though many can help one to make it) and one may refuse. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
I would pay any price to be able to say truthfully “All will be saved.” However, my reason retorts “Without their will, or with it?” If I say “Without their will” I at once perceive a contradiction; how can the supreme voluntary act of self-surrender be involuntary? If I say “With their will,” my reason replies “How if they will not give in?” The Dominical utterances about Hell, like all Dominical sayings, are addressed to the conscience and the will, not to our intellectual curiosity. When they have roused us into action by convincing us of a terrible possibility, they have done, probably, all they were intended to do; and if all the World were convinced Christians its would be unnecessary to say a word more on the subject. As things are, however, this doctrine is one of the chief grounds on which Christianity is attacked as barbarous, and the goodness of God impugned. We are told that it is a detestable doctrine—and indeed, I too detest it from the bottom of my heart—and are reminded of the tragedies in human life which have come from believing it. Of other tragedies which come from not believing it we are told less. For these reasons, and these alone, it becomes necessary to discuss the matter. The problem is not simply that of a God who consigns some of His creatures to final ruin. If we were Mahometans, that would be the problem. #RandlphHarris 13 of 21
Christianity, true, as always, to the complexity of the real, presents us with something knottier and more ambiguous—a God so full of mercy that He becomes man and dies by torture to avert that final ruin from His creatures, and who yet, where that heroic remedy fails, seems unwilling, or even unable, to arrest the ruin by an act of mere power. I said glibly a moment ago that I would pay “any price” to remove this doctrine. I lied. I could not pay one-thousandth part of the price that God has already paid to remove the fact. And here is the real problem: so much mercy, yet still there is Hell. I am not going to try to prove the doctrine tolerable. Let us make no mistake; it is not tolerable. However, I think the doctrine can be shown to be moral, by a critique of the objections ordinarily made, or felt, against it. First, there is an objection, in many minds, to the idea of retributive punishment as such. This has been partly dealt with before. It is, however, maintained that if the ideas of ill-desert and retribution were removed from it, all punishment became unjust; and a core of righteousness was discovered within the vindictive passion itself, in the demand that the evil human must not be left perfectly satisfied with one’s own evil, that it must be made to appear to one what it rightly appears to others—evil. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
Pains plant the flag of truth within a rebel fortress. However, what kind of pain might still lead to repentance? If no further conquest than the planting of the flag ever takes place, it does not. Let us try to be honest with ourselves. Picture to yourself a human who has risen to wealth or power by a continued course of treachery and cruelty, by exploiting for purely selfish ends the noble motions of one’s victims, laughing the while at their simplicity; who, having thus attained success, uses it for gratification of lust and hatred and finally parts with the last rag of honour among thieves by betraying one’s own accomplices and jeering at their last moments of bewildered disillusionment. Suppose, further, that one does all this, not (as we like to imagine) tormented by remorse or even misgiving, but eating like a schoolboy and sleeping like a healthy infant fat and butter and strong as an ox—a jolly, ruddy-cheeked man, without a care in the world, unshakably confident to the very end that one alone has fund the answer to the riddle of life, that God and humans are fools whom one has got the better of, that is one’s way of life is utterly successful satisfactory, unassailable. We must be careful at this point. The least indulgence of the passion for revenge is very deadly sin. Christian charity counsels us to make every effort for the conversion of such a human: to prefer one’s conversation, at the peril of our own lives, perhaps of our own souls, to one’s punishment; to prefer it infinitely. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
However, that is not the question. Supposing one will not be converted, what destiny in the eternal World can you regard as proper for one? Can you really desire that such a human being, remaining what one is (and if one has free will, one must be able to do that) should be confirmed forever in one’s present happiness—should continue, for all eternity, to be perfectly convinced that the laugh is on one’s side? And if you cannot regard this as tolerable, is it only your wickedness—only spite—that prevents you from doing so? Or do you find that conflict between Justice and Mercy, which has sometimes seemed to you such an outmoded piece of theology, now actually at work in your own mind, and feeling very much as if it came to you from above, not from below? You are moved not by a desire for the wretched creature’s pain as such, but by a truly ethical demand that, soon or late, the right should be asserted, the flag planted in this horribly rebellious soul, even if no fuller and better conquest is to follow. In a sense, it is better for the creature itself, even if it never becomes good, that it should know itself a failure, a mistake. Even mercy can hardly wish to such a human one’s eternal, contented continuance in such a ghastly illusion. Thomas Aquinas said suffering, as Aristotle had said of shame, that it was a thing not good in itself; but a thing which might have a certain goodness in particular circumstances. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
That is to say, if evil is present, pain at recognition of the evil being a kind of knowledge, is relatively good; for the alternative is that the soul should be ignorant of the evil, or ignorant that the evil is contrary to its nature, “either of which,” says the philosopher, “is manifestly bad.” And I think, though we tremble, we agree. The demand that God should forgive such a human while one remains what one is, is based on a confusion between condoning and forgiving. To condone an evil is simply to ignore it, to treat it as if it were good. However, if it is to be complete, forgiveness needs to be accepted as well as offered. A human who admits no guilt can accept no forgiveness. If Mind is to be regarded aright, we must put our thought even the notion of the cosmic Ever-Becoming. However, to do this is to enter a virtual Void? Precisely. When we take away all the forms of external physical existence and all the differences of internal mental existence, what we get is an utter emptiness of being which can hardly be differentiated after we have taken away its features and individualities, its finite times and finite distances. There is then nothing but a great void. What is the nature of this void? It is pure Thought. It is out of this empty Thought that the fullness of the Universe has paradoxically evolved. Hence it is said that the World’s reality is a secondary whereas Mind’s reality is primary. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
In the Void the hidden oneness of things is disengaged from the things themselves. Silence therefore is not merely the negation of sound but rather the element in which, as Carlyle said, great things fashion themselves. It is the supreme storehouse of power. There is here no form to be perceived, no image born of the senses to be worshipped, no oracular utterance to be listened for, and no emotional ecstasy to be reveled in. In eternal non-existence, one must look for the spirituality of things! The philosopher perceives that there is no such thing as creation out of nothing for the simple reason that Mind is eternally and universally present. “Nothing” is merely an appearance. Here indeed there is neither tie nor space. It is like a great silent boundless circle wherein no life seems to stir, no consciousness seems to be at work, and no activity is in sway. Yet the seer will know by a pure insight which will grip one’s consciousness as it has never been gripped before, that here indeed is the root of all life, all consciousness, and all activity. However, how it is so is as inexplicable intellectually as what its nature is. With the Mind the last word of human comprehension is uttered. With the Mind the last World of possible being is explored. However, whereas the utterance is comprehensible by one’s consciousness, the speaker is not. Silence which speaks but what it says is only that it IS; more than that none can hear. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
The Godhead is as void as though it were not. Pass from the station of “I” and “We” and choose for thy home Non-entity. For when thou hast done the like of this, thou shalt reach the supreme felicity. We may begin to grasp the meaning of such statements by grasping the conception that Infinite Mind is the formless, matterless, Void, Spirit. Mortal error is mistaking forms for final realities instead of penetrating to their essence, Mind. Whatever can be said about the unnameable “Void” will be not enough at least and merely symbolic at most. The mystic’s last Word is the Freemason’s lost Word. It can never be spoken for it can never be heard. It is the one idea which can never be transferred to another mind, the one meaning which can never get through any pen or any lip. Yet it is there—the supreme Fact behind all myriad facts of universal existence. To elevate any form by external worship or an internal meditation which should be given only to the formless Void is to elevate an idol in the place of God. Worship of any one other than the Great God, id est, the Beginningless, the Endless, is the first of major sins. Yet to honour the sublime No-thing by thought or rite is hard for the unmetaphysical. And it requires much metaphysical insight to perceive its truth. The cold impersonality of this idea is at first repelled by us with sometime like horror. A change in this attitude can come about only gradually at most. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
However, if we perseveringly pursue our quest of truth, we shall overcome our aversion in the end. If it be truth that Truth is not something we can utter, that the Nameless cannot fitly be represented by any name, we may however continue to use any word we like, provided we keep its limitations clearly in our understanding of it. After all, although the thinking intellect creates its own image of truth, it is the Overself that starts the creative process working. However, in the end, we shall have to reserve our best worship not for a particular manifestation in time but for the Timeless itself, not for a historical personage but for the impersonal Infinite. It would be completely false to regard the Void as being nothing and containing nothing. It is Being itself, and contains reality behind all things. Nor is it a kind of inertia, of paralysis. All action springs out of it, all the World-forces derive from it. The Void is not a nothing-at-all-ness in the absolute sense, or how could the whole cosmos come forth out of it, how could I myself be released by it, how could the very intellect which thinks this concept appear from it into activity and produce thoughts? Is this not the greatest of Paradoxes that the origin of all things is seeming Nothingness? Within that seeming Void lie the vanished planets of yesterday and the evolving Worlds of tomorrow. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Since all things are limited in some way or other, or conditioned by some circumstances or others, THAT which is unlimited and unconditioned, which does not exist as they do, cannot rightly be called a ting. It is no-thing, the Void. There is no other, no thing, no experience of an object for it. It is alone in the Void. IT is the Principle being both consciousness and unconsciousness, making the first possible and the second significant. Yet neither consciousness nor unconsciousness, as we humans know them, resembles it. There is a single Consciousness without beginning or end, ever the same in itself, beyond and behind which there is nothing else. God with your enfolding wings, please wrap them about me, Lord; please keep fear and danger at bay. May I mount your throne and rest there in peace. God, please wrap your wings about my family and me and bring us through danger in safety. Please remember us this day, O Lord our God for our good, and please be mindful of us for a life of blessing. With Thy promise of salvation and mercy, please deliver us and please be gracious unto us, please have compassion upon us and please save us. Unto Thee do we lift our eyes for Thou art a gracious and merciful God and King. O may our eyes witness Thy return to America. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who restorest Thy divine presence unto America. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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Rancho Cordova, CA |
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If truth is less shapely than fiction, still it is more honest. The most obviously upsetting force likely to strike the family in the decades immediately ahead will be the impact of new birth technology. The ability to pre-set the gender of one’s baby, or even to “program” its IQ, looks and personality traits, must now be regarded as a real possibility. Embryo implants, babies grown in vitro, gene editing, the ability to swallow a pill and guarantee oneself twins or triplets or, even more, the ability to walk into a “babytorium” and actually purchase embryos—all this reaches so far beyond any previous human experience that one need to look at the future through the eyes of the poet or painter, rather than those of the sociologist or conventional philosopher. It is regarded as somehow unscholarly, even frivolous, to discuss these matters. Yet advances in science and technology, or in reproductive biology alone, could with in a short time, smash all orthodox ideas about the family and its responsibilities. When babies can be grown in a laboratory jar what happens to the very notion of maternity? And what happens to the self-image of the female in societies which, since the very beginnings of humans, have taught one that one’s primary mission is the propagation of and nurture of the race? Few social scientists have begun as yet to concern themselves with such questions. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
One who has concerned oneself with birth technology and the woman’s role in the family and society is psychiatrist Hyman G. Weitzen, director of Neuropsychiatric Service at Polyclinic Hospital in New York. The cycle of birth, Dr. Weitzen suggests, “fulfills for most women a major creative need…Most women are proud of their ability to bear children…The special aura that glorifies the pregnant woman has figured largely in the art and literature of both East and West.” What happens to the cult of motherhood, Dr. Weitzen asks, if “her offspring might literally not be hers, but that of a genetically ‘superior’ ovum, implanted in her womb from another woman, or even grown in a Petri dish?” If women are to be important at all, he suggests, it will no longer be because they alone can bear children. If nothing else, we are about to end the mystique of motherhood. Not merely motherhood, but the concept of parenthood itself may be in for radical revision. Indeed, the day may soon dawn when it is possible for a child to have more than two biological parents. Dr. Beatrice Mintz, a developmental biologist at the Institute for Cancer Research in Philadelphia, has grown what are coming to be known as “multi-mice”—baby mice each of which has more than the usual number of parents. Embryos are placed in a laboratory dish and nurtured until they form a single growing mass. This is then implanted in the womb of a third female mouse. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Then, a baby is born that clearly shares the genetic characteristics of both sets of doners. Thus a typical multi-mouse, born of two pairs of parents, has white fur and whiskers on one side of its face, ark fur and dark hair covering the rest of the body. Some 700 multi-mice bred in this fashion have already produced more than 35,000 offspring themselves. If multi-mouse is here, can “multi-human” be far behind? Under such circumstances, what or who is the mother? And just exactly who is the father? If a couple can actually purchase an embryo, then parenthood becomes a legal, not a biological matter. Unless such transactions are tightly controlled, one can imagine such grotesqueries as a couple buying an embryo, raising it in vitro, then buying another in the name of the first, as though for a trust fund. In that case, they might be regarded as legal “grandparents” before their first child is out of infancy. We shall need a whole new vocabulary to describe kinship ties. Furthermore, if embryos are for sale, can a corporation buy one? Can it buy ten thousand? Can it resell them? And if not a corporation, how about a non-commercial research laboratory? If we buy and sell living embryos, are we back to a new form of slavery? Such are the nightmarish questions soon to be debated by us. To continue to think of the family therefore, in purely conventional terms is to defy all reason. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
Faced by rapid social change and the staggering implications of the scientific revolution, super-industrial humans may be forced to experiment with novel family forms. Innovative marginalized members of the community can be expected to try out a colourful variety of family arrangements. They will begin by tinkering with existing forms. We expect a well-ordered society, but we know that in reality some serious violations of justice nevertheless do occur. Conscientious refusal is noncompliance with a more or less direct legal injunction or administrative order. It is refusal since an order is addressed to us and, given the nature of the situation, whether we accede to it is known to the authorities. Typical examples are the refusal of the early Christians to preform certain acts of piety prescribed by the pagan state, and the refusal of the Jehovah’s Witnesses to salute the flag. Other examples are the unwillingness of a pacifist to serve in the armed forces, or of a soldier to obey an order that one thinks is manifestly contrary to the moral laws as it applies to war. Or gain, in Thoreau’s case, the refusal to pay a tax on the grounds that to do so would make one an agent of grace injustice to another. One’s action is assumed to be known to the authorities, however much one might wish, in some cases, to conceal it. Where it can be covert, one might speak of conscientious evasion rather than conscientious refusal. Covert infractions of a fugitive slave law are instances of conscientious evasion. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
There are several contrasts between conscientious refusal (or evasion) and civil disobedience. First of all, conscientious refusal is not a form of address appealing to the sense of justice of the majority. To be sure, such acts are not generally secretive or covert, as concealment is often impossible anyway. One simply refuses on conscientious grounds to obey a command or to comply with a legal injunction. One does not invoke the convictions of the community, and in this sense conscientious refusal is not an act in the public forum. Those ready to withhold obedience recognize that there may be no basis for mutual understanding; they do not seek out occasions for disobedience as a way to state their cause. Rather, they bide their time hoping that the necessity to disobey will not arise. They are less optimistic than those undertaking civil disobedience and they may entertain no expectation of changing laws or policies. The situation may allow no time for them to make their case, or again there may not be any chance that the majority will be receptive to their claims. Conscientious refusal is not necessarily based on political principles; it may be founded on religious or other principles at variance with the constitutional order. Civil disobedience is an appeal to a commonly shared conception of justice, whereas conscientious refusal may have other grounds. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
For example, assuming that early Christians would not justify their refusal to comply with the religious customs of the Empire by reasons of justice but simply as being contrary to their religious convictions, their argument would not be political; nor, with similar qualifications, are the views of a pacifist, assuming that wars of self-defense at least are recognized by the conception of justice that underlies a constitutional regime. Conscientious refusal may, however, be grounded on political principles. One many decline to go along with a law thinking that it is so unjust that complying with it is simply out of the question. This would be the case if, say, the law were to enjoin our being the agent of enslaving another, or to require us to submit to a similar fate. These are patent violations of recognized political principles. It is a difficult matter to find the right course when some humans appeal to religious principles in refusing to do actions which, it seems, are required by principle of political justice. Does the pacifist posses an immunity from military service in a just war, assuming that there are such wars? Or is the state permitted to impose certain hardships for noncompliance? There is a temptation to day that the law must always respect the dictates of conscience, but this cannot be right. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
As we have seen in the case of the intolerant, the legal order must regulate human’s pursuit of their religious interests so as to realize the principle of equal liberty; and it may certainly forbid religious practices such as human sacrifice, to take an extreme case. Neither religiosity nor conscientiousness suffices to protect this practice. A theory of justice must work out from its own point of view how to treat those who dissent from it. The aim of a well-ordered society, or one in a state of near justice, is to preserve and strengthen the institutions of justice. If a religion is denied its full expression, it is presumably because it is in violation of the equal liberties of others. In general, the degree of tolerance accorded opposing moral conceptions depends upon the extent to which they can be allowed an equal place within a just system of liberty. If pacifism is to be treated with respect and not merely tolerated, the explanation must be that it accords reasonably well with the principles of justice, the main exception arising from its attitude toward engaging in a just war (assuming here that in some situations wars of self-defense are justified). The political principles recognized by the community have a certain affinity with the doctrine the pacifist professes. There is a common abhorrence of war and the use of force, and a belief in the equal status of humans are moral persons. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
And given the tendency of nations, particularly great power, to engage in war unjustifiably and to set in motion the apparatus of the state to suppress dissent, the respect accorded to pacifism serves the purpose of altering citizens to the wrongs that governments are prone to commit in their name. Even though one’s views are not altogether sound, the warnings and protests that a pacifist is disposed to express may have the result that on balance the principles of justice are more rather than less secure. Pacifism as a natural departure from the correct doctrine conceivably compensates for the weakness of humans living up to their professions. It should be noted that there is, of course, in actual situations no sharp distinction between civil disobedience and conscientious refusal. Moreover the same action (or sequence of actions) may have strong elements of both. While there are clear cases of each, the contrast between them is intended as a way of elucidating the interpretation of civil disobedience and its role in a democratic society. Given the nature of this way of acting as a special kind of political appeal, it is not usually justified until other steps have been taken within the legal framework. By contrast this requirement often fails in the obvious case of legitimate conscientious refusal. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
In a free society no one may be compelled, as the early Christians were, to preform religious acts in violation of equal liberty, not must a soldier comply with inherently evil commands while awaiting an appeal to a higher authority. These remarks lead up to the question of justification. The reason people like to keep society busy with fake news and chaos is because as long as the people’s passions are spent on each other, they are not being vented on their conquerors. However, “The God of Heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed,” the prophecies said. God sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to release the oppressed. The true Kingdom of Heaven is already a present reality. However, the Kingdom of God is a rule, not realm. It is the declaration of God’s absolute sovereignty, of His total order of life in this World and the next. That this Kingdom is not of this World, as Jesus later explained, and that it is spiritual rather than temporal makes it no less authoritative; that it is a rule not a realm makes it no less an actual kingdom, its laws less binding than those of nations and states, any more than unseen physical laws are less binding than the laws of legislatures. Jesus is ushering in the Kingdom of God. Almost all of His parables focused on the Kingdom in one aspect or another, while His miracles authenticated His message. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
In converting water to wine, calming storms, multiplying loaves and fishes, healing the sick, and raising the dead, Jesus was not working magic to gather crowds; nor was He showing His power to gain credibility. He was demonstrating the reality of His rule. By exercising dominion over every phase of Earthly existence, He reveled that in fact the Kingdom of God had come. Many people miss Christ’s message because they, like many today, are conditioned to look for salvation in political solutions. People long for a military messiah who will stamp out their hated oppressors. Another reason that people miss the full significance of the message of the Kingdom of God is that Jesus speaks about a Kingdom that has come and a Kingdom that is still to come—one Kingdom in two stages. This still confused people today. A holy God would not take dominion over a sinful World. So He first sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to die on the cross to pay the debt for human’s sin and thereby provide for humans to be made holy and fit for God’s rule. Christ’s death and resurrection—the D-Day of human history—assure His ultimate victory. However, we are still on the beaches. The enemy has not yet been vanquished, and the fighting is still ugly. Christ’s invasion has assured the ultimate outcome, however—victory for God and His people at some future date. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
The second stage, which will take place when Christ returns, will assert God’s rule over all the Universe; His Kingdom will be visible without imperfection. At that time there will be a final judgment of all people, peace on Earth, and the restoration of harmony unknow since Eden. Many soldiers died to bring about the victory in Europe. However, in the Kingdom of God, it was the death of the king that assured the victory. And this leads to another reason that the Kingdom is often misunderstood: the nature of the King Himself. What king would ever sacrifice oneself for one’s people? Kings sacrifice their subjects, not themselves. What kind would wash one’s servants’ feet, as Jesus did, or freely befriend one’s lowest subjects? Potentates maintain the mystique of leadership by keeping a distance from those they rule. A certain grandeur seems to robe those who occupy high office. There is a certain aloofness, a power that is exuded by great humans that people feel and want to follow. Jesus Christ exhibited none of this self-conscious aloofness. He served other first; He spoke to those to whom no one spoke; He dined with the lowest members of society; He touched the untouchable. He had no throne, no crown, no bevy of servants or armoured guards. A borrowed manger and a borrowed tomb framed His Earthly life. Kings and presidents and governors and mayors and prime ministers surround themselves with minions who rush ahead, swing the doors wide, and stand at the attention as they wait for the great to pass. Jesus said that He Himself stands at the door and knocks, patiently waiting to enter our lives. Christ came as the Lamb of God. However, lambs were for sacrifice. Where was the mighty warrior who would tear Rome to shreds? #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
Because the nature of the King and the price He paid for His Kingdom, much is required of its citizens, and Jesus made these demands of the Kingdom clear. Through the centuries, however, many of His followers have watered down His teachings, stripped away His demands for the building of a righteous society, and preached an insipid religion concerned only with personal benefit. This distorted view portrays Christianity not as the powerful source of spiritual rebirth and the mediating force for justice, mercy, and love in the World, but as the ultimate self-fulfillment plan. The gospel is not a release for the captives, but confidence for the shy. It is the spiritual equivalent of racy sports cars, designer clothes—a commodity to help one get more out of life. Many humanists have failed to understand human nature. However, many Christians have failed also—failed to understand the utterly radical nature of the central message of Christianity. Other great leaders have expounded creeds, philosophies, and mystical visions. Many are wise and moral, but they are only belief systems: rules to live by, value codes. Humans require more than rules; they require what Jesus’ message of the Kingdom uniquely provides: answers to their most basic needs. What are these needs? To know God. The heat of humans is restless until it finds its rest in Thee. Humans most primal yearning—the need to know God. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
In announcing His messiahship Jesus was saying that God’s love and just rule has come to Earth—in Him. Humans would thereafter be able to find rest not in a law they could never hope to fulfill, but in the actual person of Jesus Christ. To find salvation. However, how does one come to a personal relationship with this Christ? That is the archetypal question asked by the apostle Paul’s jailer: “What must I do to be saved?” Because we interpret it from our perspective and not God’s, salvation has always been misunderstood. People want salvation from their oppressor. However, Christ same to save them from a much greater oppressor—the sin within one. Sin is essentially rebellion against the rule of God. This is why Jesus coupled the message of the Kingdom with the call to repent and believe. Faith and repentance, the opposite of rebellion, are necessary human responses to the divine initiative of spiritual rebirth, resulting in salvation. When Christ first used the term born again, it was not the evangelical cliché or secular slur it is today. He used it in late-night conversation with Nicodemus, a member of the Jewish religious community, telling him it was the key to entering into the Kingdom of God. Imagine the shock of the religious elite when they heard Jesus’ words: Salvation was not to be found in proud piety or scrupulous adherence to religious rules, but in turning from evil and humble faith in One greater the oneself. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Just as one is born physically in a particular nation, so one is born spiritually by submitting to God’s rule in His holy nation. To find meaning. This relationship with God meets human’s deepest psychological need. As we have already seen, human beings cannot live in a vacuum. We are not a chance collision of atoms in an indifferent Universe or islands amid cold currents of modern culture. We each have a personal purpose in history, which is to be found under the purposeful rule of God, as a beloved citizen of His Kingdom. To find authority. Christianity is more than simply a relationship between humans and God, however. The Kingdom of God embraces every aspect of life: ethical, spiritual, and temporal, and it determines the patter, purpose and dynamic by which God orders life of the Heavenly polis in this World. In announcing this all-encompassing Kingdom, Jesus was no using a clever metaphor; He was expressing the literal theme of history—that God was King and the people were His subjects. This tradition dated back to the days of Abraham and the patriarchs, when God made His original covenant with the Jews to be His “holy nation.” Americans, steeped in the tradition of democracy, find a monarchy, even with Christ on the throne, an alien concept. We think in terms of human rulers whose limitless lust for power is a constant peril to humankind. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
However, God is not a mirror reflection of human rulers. He is God—and as such, is entitled to rule over all things. His character, as revealed in the Bible and in the person of Christ, reveals absolute justice, mercy, and love. Prophets promised the coming of Messiah and the eventual establishment of the Kingdom of God. Christ was the fulfillment of the prophecy; He was the final king in David’s royal line. However, Jesus was not just a king for Israel; He was king for all people. His message, then, assumes the ultimate authority humans require: God rules every aspect of what He has made. Life, death, relationships, and Earthly kingdoms are all in His hands. When Christ commanded His followers to “seek first the kingdom of God,” He was exhorting them to seek to be ruled by God and gratefully acknowledge His power and authority over them. That means that the Christian’s goal is not to strive to rule, but to be ruled. While God’s rule is authoritarian, it is also voluntary. The Good News is that the price has been paid, and His Kingdom is open to all who desire admission. If the joyful news of the rule of God is proclaimed, if humans humble themselves and do justice to its claims, if evil is overcome and humans are made free for God, then the Rule of God has already become actual among them, then the Reign of God is in their midst. If every other entity in the Universe and the Universe itself disappeared, God would remain. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
That which always remains the same, never changes, that is reality. Reality is God. THAT is real being which is faultless and partless, and without a single one of the characteristic properties belonging to this physical World. It never varies whereas that World is constantly changing. Such everlasting being is incomparable, unique, and beyond human picturization. THAT is the essence of all things, the base whence, eventually, the Universe is projected. That is the Real which not only is not subject to any change but also would still abide even if the entire Universe vanished. Everything and everyone else must come out of some prior element which traces itself down even to the first and original element, but the Real alone is self-abiding and self-existing. It has its own independent Being. There is no period so far off in the future, no tie so distant in the past, no area anywhere in space, that will be or has been without Being. If humans can find it today, they will find it then as they found it in antiquity. If they commune with it on this Earth, or enter into some relationship with it here, they can do likewise on other planets. Moreover it remains ever the Same, the Unchanged and Unchangeable. Reality being what it is, a gigantic fact which is utterly impregnable against time and change, even the total disappearance of the exponents of that truth which points to it could not alter its own status. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
We must never forget that the entire dynamic movement occurs inseparably within a static blessed repose. Becoming is not apart from Being. Its kinetic movement takes pace in the eternal stillness. World-Mind is forever working in the Universe whereas Mind is forever at rest and its still motionlessness paradoxically makes all activity and motion possible. The infinite unconditioned Essence could never become confined within or subject to the finite limited World-form. The one dwells in a transcendental timelessness whereas the other exists in a continuous time. There cannot be two eternal principles, two ultimate realities, for each will limit the other’s existence and thus deprive it of its absolute character. There is only the One, which is beyond all phenomena and yet includes them. The manifestation of the cosmic order, filled with countless objects and entities though it be, does not in any way or to any extent alter the character of the absolute Reality in which it appears. That character is unvarying—is never reduced to a lower form, never confined in a limited one, never modified by conditions, never deprived of a single iota of its being, substance, amplitude, or quality. It always is what it was. It is the ultimate origin of everything and everyone in this Universe, yet it remains as unchanged by their death as by their birth, by their absence as by their presence. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Everything in the Universe is liable to changes, because it was born and must die. We venerate God because He is not liable to change, being ever-existent and self-subsisting, birthless and deathless. Considered from its own standpoint, the infinite can never manifest as the finite, the Real can never alter its nature and evolve into the unreal; hence the pictures of creation or evolution belong to the realm of dream and illusion. The gran verity is that the Universal self has never incarnated into matter, nor ever shall. It remains what it was, is, must forever be—the Unchanged and Unchangeable. The infinite has never, can never, become the finite. The Real is neither the Many nor the Changing but THAT from which these are both derived. Such a truth will never need to be replaced by a newer one: it will hold its place, and satisfy the searching mind, in a thousand years’ time as much as it does today. Bradley’s errors are: (a) to turn the Absolute into a system or a process, and (b) to identify the Absolute with its contents. God of Gentle hands, with arms held wide in benediction: please come between my enemies and me and join us together in peace. Our God and God of our fathers, may our remembrance and the remembrance of our forefathers come before Thee. Please Remember the Messiah of the house of David, thy servant, and America, Thy holy city, and all Thy people, the house of America. Please grant us deliverance and well being, loving kindness, life and peace on this day and forever. Please restore America back to a land of sanity, prosperity, law and order so we can earn the American Dream, which always includes freedom and homeownership. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
Cresleigh Homes
Whether you’re admiring the guest bedroom or getting ready for spa night in the Primary bedroom’s ensuite, living life at #MillsStation Residence 2 means enjoying clean, modern lines in a familiar family home layout. 😍
Residence Two at Mills Station is a two story home that has all the conveniences of a single story! At 2,317 square feet, this home features the Owner’s suite on the first floor with two secondary bedrooms on the “pop top” second story. Take advantage of the vaulted ceilings offered in this plan! The open floor plan includes three bedrooms, two and a half bathrooms, Home Hub, Loft and more! Walk into the great room and feel the height of the ceilings and all the light brought in from the high windows.
The kitchen opens directly to the dining room allowing for perfect flow. The large kitchen island makes food prep and entertaining easy while the walk in pantry provides ample storage. The kitchen comes fully equipped with a large eat-in island, stainless steel appliances, and quartz counters. The great room is spacious and full of natural light with a covered patio! The Owner’s suite is located on the first floor of this home providing easy access and eliminating the hassle of climbing stairs daily. The Owner’s bathroom is spacious and tranquil including a large free standing soaking tub, walk in shower and large walk-in closet.
This home is designed with Universal Design concepts meaning that its well equipped for life’s transitions and aging in place. Learn more about this unique feature by speaking with a sales associate today!
Check out the interactive floor plan on our website! Link in bio. https://cresleigh.com/mills-station/residence-2/
Sit Down and I Will Tell You a Story, Stand Up and We Will Play a Game!
Some people try to find things in this game that do not exist. Football is two things. It is blocking and tackling. One important class of experiential products will be based on simulated environments that offer the customer a taste of adventure, excitement, titillation or other pleasure without risk to one’s real life or reputation. Thus computer experts, roboteers, designers, historians, architects, automotive engineers, and museum specialists will join to create experiential enclaves that reproduce, as skillfully as sophisticated technology will permit, the splendor of ancient Rome, the pomp of Queen Elizabeth’s court, the traditional arts, ceremonies, calligraphy and flower arranging of Japan, the economic prosperity and rapid development and advancement of China, the rich culture and mysterious of Africa, the superior engineering of Germany, the liveness and flavour of Latin culture, the intelligence of the Middle East, and the hardworking and orderly conduct of America. Customers entering these pleasure domes will leave their everyday clothes (and cares) behind, don costumes, and run through a planned sequence of activities intended to provide them with a first-hand taste of what the original—id est, unstimulated—reality must have felt like. They will be invited, in effect, to live in the past or perhaps even in the future. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
Production of such experiences is closer than one might think. It is clearly foreshadowed in the participatory techniques now being pioneered in the arts. Thus “happenings” in which the members of the audience take part may be regarded as a first stumbling step toward these simulations of the future. The same is true of more formal works as well. When Dionysus in 69 was performed in New York, a critic summed up the theories of its playwright, Richard Schechner, in the following words. “Theater has traditionally said to an audience, ‘Sit down and I will tell you a story.’ Why cannot it also say, ‘Stand up and we will play a game?’” Mr. Schechner’s work, based loosely on Euripides, says precisely this, and that audience is literally invited to join in dancing to celebrate the rites of Dionysus. Artists also have begun to create whole “environments”—works of art into which the audience may actually walk, and inside which things happens. For instance, BMW believes that design should always be a reflection of your identity, and so they make cars with a strong personality. When designing the BMW Concept i4, the goal was to make it organic, and less industrial. In its captivating dynamic, engineers wanted to add more nature-inspired elements. More handworked wood, intelligent fabrics—designs for all the sense so one feels like the cabin of the car is a living room. The artists who produce these are really “experiential engineers.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
Knowledge gained for research on creating experiences will permit the construction of fantastic simulations. However, it will also lead to complex live environments that subject the customer to significant risks and rewards. The African safari today is a colourless example. Future experience designers will, for example, create gambling casinos in which the customer plays not for money, but for experiential payoffs. Certain American television programs, such as Survivor and The Bachelor, already pay players off in experiential rewards. In the future, simulated and non-simulated experiences will also be combined in ways that will sharply challenge human’s grasp of reality. In Ray Bradbury’s vivid novel, Fahrenheit 451, suburban couples desperately save their money to enable them to buy three-wall or four-wall video sets that permit them to enter into a kind of televised psycho-drama. They become actor-participants in soap operas that continue for weeks or months. Their participation in these stories is highly involving. We are, in fact, beginning to move toward the actual development of such “interactive” films with the help of advanced communications technology. The combination of simulation and “reals” will vastly multiply the number and variety of experiential products. However, the great psych-corps of tomorrow will not only sell individual, discrete experiences. They will offer sequences of experiences so organized that their very juxtaposition with other another will contribute colour, harmony or contrast to lives that lack these qualities. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
Beauty, excitement, suspense or delicious sensuality will be programmed to enhance one another. By offering such experiential chains or sequences, the psych-corps (working closely, no doubt, with community mental health centers) will provide partial frameworks for those whose lives are otherwise too chaotic and unstructured. In effect, they will say: “Let us plan (part of) your life for you.” In the transient, change-filled World of tomorrow, that proposition will find many eager takers. Many architects are now designing homes to feel like luxury hotels. These places are all about lifestyles—inviting the community to become part of the property. Adding unique vantage points, creating indoor/outdoor experiences, and making homes larger, function, bright and comfortable is what is making architecture exciting these days. People are always looking for a home that is special, affluent home buyers are seeking homes that are destinations with purpose and meaning, where lifelong memories can be created because luxury is the absence of worry. Home buyers want to know they are in good hands with gorgeous detail abound. Creative space segmentation is necessary, providing both intimae and social zones, as well as furniture delivering comfort and functionality. More extravagant entrance features are emerging, which include large green walls, indoor waterfalls, large chandeliers and multimedia stations. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
No longer is the classic bed-table-closet combo enough to make a guest bedroom or primary bedroom feel inviting. Home buyers are looking for creative offices for those who are business travelers, interesting looking TV panels and an extra sofa or accent chairs next to the king-sized bed are just some of the key ingredients for a trendy guest bedroom or primary bedroom. We have also seen colourful walls and eclectic décor mixes, which can definitely appeal to guests or the home’s primary occupant wanting to experience unique accommodation. Bathrooms stopped being perceived as auxiliary rooms, spaces to be minimized, in order to expand living areas. The modern individual expects more than one got in the past. A resort bathroom with spa-like features is an open invite to relaxation and a sure-proof method of alluring potential buyers through the promise of ephemeral luxury. Think en-suite bedrooms, water fall showers, over-sized bathtubs, dual sinks, giant towels, beauty items and plenty of space. Fewer home builder base the appeal of the kitchen strictly on practicability. Cooking is an art and so should be the exhibition space. We have seen more and more home builders come up with exciting designs and turn the kitchen design into a memorable space. Theme are highly recommended, pushing creativity to new heights. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
Sensory experiences go a log way. Beside open concept, the blurring of indoor-outdoor boundaries is well integrated in the array of services offered by modern homes builders, who strive to keep their indoor-outdoor transition as ethereal as possible. Not only are the offering more windows, larger windows, walls of glass, but also expanding the patio spaces so nature is brought inside in every possible way. Wood paneling, stone decorations, lush greenery, vibrant lawns, indoor waterfalls—these are just some of the elements employed to release the tension of residents. Sustainability is a delicate issue for home owners as they are doing their best to minimize short term costs. However, being ahead of the game is important, which leads to innovative ideas. Over-sized windows for natural lighting, solar panels to conserve electricity, luxury vinyl wood plank floors, and energy efficient appliances are just a few of the trends for staying green. It is a fact that a home will stay in a buyer’s mind for a long time if the accommodation is unique. With this in mind, home builders are offering individual personalized spaces as never before. With home hubs, butler’s pantries, build-in furniture, card rooms, super family rooms, and workspaces in the house. And more than anything, homes should provide comfort, that feeling of being home away from home, in your own home. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
No mater how luxurious, technology friendly and well-themed the home, coziness is a major factor to consider. Wood additions, inspired decorating items, carpets, a fireplace, build-in tables, uniquely shaped kitchen islands all add up to a memorable home. In the World outside of the home, agriculture and the manufacture of goods will become economic backwaters, employing fewer and fewer people. Highly automated, the making and growing of goods will be relatively simple. The design of new goods and the process of coating them with stronger, brighter, more emotion-packed psychological connotations, however, will challenge the ingenuity of tomorrow’s best and most resourceful entrepreneurs. The service sector, as defined today, will be vastly enlarged, and once more the design of psychological rewards will occupy a growing percentage of corporate time, energy, and money. Investment services, such as mutual funds, for example, may introduce elements of experiential gambling to provide both additional excitement and non-economic payoffs to their shareholders. Insurance companies may offer not merely to pay death benefits, but to care for the window or widower for several months after bereavement, providing nurses, psychological counseling and other assistance. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Based on banks of detail data about their customers, they may offer a computerized mating service to help the survivor locate a new life partner. Services, in short, will be greatly elaborated. Attention will be paid to the psychological overtones of every step or component of the product. Finally, we shall watch the irresistible growth of companies already in the experiential field, and the formation of entirely new enterprises, both profit and non-profit, to design, package and distribute planned or programmed experiences. The arts will expand, becoming as Ruskin or Morris might have said, the handmaiden of the industry. Psych-corps and other businesses will employ actors, directors, musicians, and designers in large numbers. Recreational industries will grow, as the whole nature of leisure is redefined in experimental terms. Education, already exploding in size, will become one of the key experiences industries as it is beginning to employ experiential techniques to convey both knowledge and values to the students. The communication and computer industries will find in experiential production a major market for their machines and for their software as well. With COVID-19 and more people working from home and going to school at home, I would expect Cisco TelePresence IX5000 Series to become more people. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
This system allows immersive collaboration beyond the boardroom. Cisco TelePresence IX5000 Series offers a triples screen, high-fidelity audio and video, and rich collaboration tools, and more bandwidth of existing products. The IX5000 Series brings people together to make decisions faster with high-definition video and theater-quality audio. The immersive, lifelike experience increases engagement, which helps teams build relationships and trust. Participants can share multiple content sources on three 70-inche LCD screens. The 4K cameras allow flexible whiteboard placement and the series features industry-first support for H.265 video on a triple-screen product. This product allows people to work from home, teach from home, attend class from home and interact with others as if they are in the same room. In short, those industries that in one way or another associate themselves with behavioural technology, those industries that transcend the production of tangible goods and traditional services, will expand most rapidly. Eventually, the experience-makers will form a basic—if not the basic—sector of the economy. The process of psychologization will be complete. With more people working from home, spending less on transportation, they will be able to afford larger homes with real offices or even classrooms. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
The essence of tomorrow’s economy is an emphasis upon the inner as well as the material need for individuals and groups. This new emphasis will arise not merely from the demands of the consumer, but from the very need of the economy to survive. In a nation where all essential material needs can be filled by perhaps no more than three-fourth or even half of the productive capacity, a basic adjustment is required to keep the economy healthy. It is this convergence of pressures—from the consumer and from those who wish to keep the economy growing—that will propel the techno-societies toward the experiential production of the future. The movement in this direction can be delayed. The poverty-stricken masses of the World may not stand idly by as the World’s favoured few traverse the path toward psychological self-indulgence. There is something morally repellent about one group seeking to gratify itself psychologically, pursuing novel and rarified pleasures, while the majority of humankind lives in wretchedness or starvation. The techno-societies could maintain a more conventional production, shifting resources to environmental quality control, and then launching absolutely massive anti-poverty and foreign assistance programs. By creaming off “excess” productivity and, in effect, giving it away, the factories can be kept running, the agricultural surpluses used up, and the society can continue to focus on the satisfaction of material wants. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
A fifty-year campaign to erase hunger from the World and family planning methods, for example, would not only make excellent moral sense, but would buy the techno-societies badly needed time for an easier transition to the economy of the future. Such a pause might give us tine to contemplate the philosophical and psychological impact of experiential production. If consumers can no longer distinguish clearly between the real and the simulated, if whole stretches of one’s life may be commercially programmed, we enter into a set of psycho-economic problems of breathtaking complexity. These problems challenge our most fundamental beliefs, not merely about democracy or economics, but about the very nature of rationality and sanity. One of the great unasked questions of our time has to do with the balance between vicarious and non-vicarious experience in our lives. No previous generation has been exposed to one-tenth the amount of vicarious experiences that we lavish on ourselves and our children today, and no one, anywhere, has any real idea about the impact of this monumental shift on personality. Our children mature physically more rapidly than we did. The age of first menstruation continues to drop four to six month every decade. The population grows taller sooner. It is clear that many of our young people, products of television and instance accesses to oceans of information, also become precocious intellectually. However, what happens to emotion development as the ratio of vicarious experience to “real” experience rises? Does the step-up of vicariousness contribute to emotional maturity? Or does it, in fact, make it as slow as molasses on a Winter’s day? #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
And what, then, happens when an economy in search of a new purpose, seriously begins to enter into the production of experience for their own sake, experience that blur the distinction between the vicarious and the non-vicarious, the simulated and the real? One of the definitions of sanity, itself, is the ability to tell real from unreal. Shall we need a new definition? We must begin to reflect on these problems, for unless we do—and perhaps even if we do—service will in the end triumph over manufacture, and experiential production over service. The growth of the experiential sector might just be an inevitable consequence of affluence. For the satisfaction of human’s elemental material needs opens the way for new, more sophisticated gratifications. We are moving from a “gut” economy to a “psyche” economy because there is only so much gut to be satisfied. Beyond this, we are also moving swiftly in the direction of a society in which objects, things, physical constructs, are increasingly transient. Not merely human’s relationships with them, but the very things themselves. It may be that experiences are the only products which, once brought by the consumer, cannot be taken away from one, cannot be disposed of like non-returnable soda pop bottles or nicked razor blades. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
For the ancient Japanese nobility every flower, every serving bowl or obi, was freighted with surplus meaning; each carried a heavy load of coded symbolism and ritual significance. The movement toward the psychologization of manufactured goods takes us in this direction; but it collides with the powerful thrust toward transience that makes the objects themselves so perishable. Thus we shall find it easier to adorn our services with symbolic significance than our products. And, in the end, we shall pass beyond the service economy, beyond the imagination of today’s economists; we shall become the first culture in history to employ high technology to manufacture than most transient, yet lasting of products: the human experience. The flood of novelty about to crash down upon us will spread from universities and research centers to factories and offices, from the marketplace and mass media into our social relationships, from the community into the home. Penetrating deep into our private lives, it will place absolutely unprecedented strains on the family itself. The family has been called the “giant shock absorber” of society—the place to which the bruised and battered individual returns after doing battle with the World, the one stable point in an increasingly flux-filled environment. As the super-age of information revolution unfolds, this “shock absorber” will come in for some of its own shocks. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
Social critics have a field day speculating about the family. The family is “near the point of complete extinction,” says Ferdinand Lundberg, author of The Coming World Transformation. “The family is dead except for the first year or two of child raising,” according to psychoanalyst William Wolf. “This will be its only function.” Pessimists tell us what will take place. Family optimists, in contrast, contend that the family, having existed all this time, will continue to exist. Some go so far as to argue that the family is in for a Golden Age. As leisure spreads, they theorize, families will spend more time together and will derive great satisfaction from joint activity. “The family that play together, stays together,” et cetera. A more sophisticated view hold that the very turbulence of tomorrow will drive people deeper into their families. “People will marry for stable structure,” says Dr. Irwin M. Greenberg, Professor of psychiatry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. According to this view, the family serves as one’s “portable root,” anchoring one against the storm of change. In short, the more transient and novel the environment, the more important the family will become. It may be that both ideas in this debate are wrong. For the future is more open than it might appear. #RandolphHrris 14 of 21
The family may neither vanish nor enter upon new Golden Age. It may—and this far more likely—break up, shatter, only to come together again in weird and novel ways. If tribulation is a necessary element in redemption, we must anticipate that it will never cease till Go sees the World to be either redeemed or no further redeemable. A Christian cannot, therefore, believe any of those who promise that if only some reform in our economic, political, or hygienic system were made, a Heaven on Earth would follow. This might seem to have a discouraging effect on the social worker, but it is not found in practice to discourage one. On the contrary, a strong sense of our common miseries, simply as humans, is at last as good a spur to the removal of all the miseries we can, as any of those wild hopes which tempt humans to seek their realization by breaking the moral law and prove such dust and ashes when they are realized. If applied to individual life, the doctrine that an imagined Heaven on Earth is necessary for vigorous attempts to remove present evil, would at once reveal is absurdity. Hungry human seeks food and sick humans healing none the less because they know that after the meal of the cure the ordinary ups and downs of life still await them. I am not, of course, discussing whether very drastic changes in our social system are, or are not, desirable; I am only reminder the reader that a particular medicine is not to be mistake for the elixir of life. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
Since political issues have here crossed our path, it is clear that the Christian doctrine of self-surrender and obedience is a purely theological, and not in the least a political, doctrine. Of forms of government, of civil authority and civil obedience, I have nothing to say. The kind and degree of obedience which a creatures owes to its Creator is unique because the relation between creature and Creator is unique: no inference can be drawn from it to any political proposition whatsoever. The Christian doctrine of suffering explains, I believe, a very curious fact about the World we live in. The settled happiness and security which we all desire, God withholds from us by the very nature of the World: but joy, pleasure, and merriment, He has scattered broadcast. We are never safe, but we have plenty of fun, and some ecstasy. It is not hard to see why. The security we crave would teach us to rest our hearts in the World and oppose an obstacle to our return to God: a few moments of happy love, a landscape, a symphony, a merry meeting with out friends, a bathe or a football match, have no such tendency. Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home. We must never mistake the problem of pain worse than it is by vague talk about the “unimaginable sum of human misery.” When a human hesitates too long over taking a course which intuition tells one, he or she should take, and in which one’s higher life is concerned, it may be that destiny will intervene and make one suddenly realize that this is the way, and that all doubts should be thrown out. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
An intuition may be sudden and unexpected, quite contrary to the line of previous thought about the matter. This is certainly true of many appearances but it is not true of other ones. An intuition may come into the mind apparently by hazard, unsummoned, experience. Every thought which comes down to us from that serene height comes with a divine authority and penetrating force which are absent from all other thoughts. We receive the visitant with eagerness and obey it with confidence. There is no such thing as a sum of suffering, for no one suffers it. When we have reached he maximum that a single person can suffer, we have, no doubt, reached something horrible, but we have reached all the suffering there ever can be in the Universe. The addition of a million sufferers adds no more pain. Intuition is not the equal but rather the superior of all other human faculties. It delivers the gentlest of whispers, commands from the Overself, whereas the other faculties merely carry them out. It is the master, they are the servants. The intellect things, the will works, and the emotion drives towards the fulfilment of intuitively felt guidance in the properly developed spiritually erect human. Of all evils, pain only is sterilized or disinfected evil. Intellectual evil, or error, may recur because the cause of the first error (such as fatigue or bad handwriting) continues to operate; but quite apart from that, error in its own right breeds error—if the first step in an argument is wrong, everything that follows will be wrong. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
Sin may recur because the original temptation continues: but quite apart from that, sin of its very nature breeds sin by strengthening sinful habit and weakening the conscience. Now pain, like the other evils, may of course recur because the cause of the first pain (disease, or an enemy) is still operative: but pain has no tendency, in its own right, to proliferate. When it is over, it is over, and the natural sequel is joy. This distinction may be put the other way round. After an error you need not only to remove the causes (the fatigue or bad writing) but also to correct the error itself: after a sin you must not only, if possible, remove the temptation, you must also go back and repent the sin itself. In each case an “undoing” is required. Pain requires no such undoing. You may need to heal the disease which caused it, but the pain, once over is sterile—whereas every uncorrected error and unrepented sin is, in its own right, a fountain of fresh error and fresh sin flowing on to the end of time. Again, when I err, my error infects every one who believes me When I sin publicly, every spectator either condones it, thus sharing my guilt, or condemns it with imminent danger to one’s charity and humility. However, suffering naturally produces in the spectators (unless they are unusually depraved) no bad effect, but a good one—piety. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
Thus that evil which God chiefly uses to produce the “complex good” is most markedly disinfected, or deprived of that proliferous tendency which is the worst characteristic of evil in general. The Real is forever and unalterably the same, whether it be the unmanifest Void or the manifested World. It has never been born and consequently can never die. It cannot divide itself into different “realities” with different space-time levels or multiply itself beyond its own primal oneness. It cannot evolve or diminish, improve or deteriorate. Whereas everything else exists in dependence upon Mind and exists for a limited time, however prolonged, and therefore has only a relative existence, Mind is the absolute, the unique, the ultimate reality because with all its innumerable manifestations in the Universe it has never at any moment ceased to be itself. Only its appearances suffers change because they are in time and space, never itself, which is out of time and space. The divisions of time into past, present, and future are meaningless here; we may speak only of its “everness.” The truth about it is timeless, as no scientific truth could ever be, in the sense that whatever fate the Universe undergoes its own ultimate significance remains unchanged. If the Absolute appears to us as the first in the time-series, as the First Cause of the Universe, this is only true from our limited standpoint. It is in fact only our human idea. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
The human mind can take itself the truth of transcendental being only by taking out of itself the screens of time, space, and person. For being eternally self-existence, reality is utterly timeless. Space divisions are equally unmeaning in its “Be-ness.” The Absolute is both everywhere and nowhere. It cannot be considered in spatial terms. Even the word “infinite” is really such a term. If it is used here because no other is available, let me be clearly understood, then, that it is used merely as a suggestive metaphor. If the infinite did not include the finite then it would be less than infinite. It is erroneous to make them both mutually exclusive. The finite alone must exclude the infinite from its experience but not vice versa. In the same way the infinite Duration does not exclude finite time. Hence, corruption and defects in natural things are said to be contrary to some particular nature; yet they are in keeping with the plan of universal nature; inasmuch as the defect in one thing yields to the good of another, or even to the universal good: for the corruption of ne is the generation of another, and through this it is that a species is kept in existence. Since God, then, provides universally for all being, it belongs to His providence to permit certain defects in particular effects, that the perfect good of the Universe may not be hindered, for if all evil were prevented, much god would be absent from the Universe. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
A lion would cease to life, if there were no slaying of animals; and there would be no patience of martyrs if there were no tyrannical persecution. Thus Augustine says (Enchiridion 2): “Almighty God would in wo wise permit evil to exist in His works, unless He were so almighty and so good as to produce good even from evil.” It would appear that is was on account of these two arguments to which we have just replied, that some were persuaded to consider corruptible things—exempli gratia, casual evil things—as removed from the care of divine providence. Dear Lord in Heaven, your bow’s swift arrows: are they blessing or destruction? Please show your blasting face to those who need it. Please show your blessing face to those who deserve it. Whether beating down mercilessly or shining benevolently, please bring what is right to each, God. Whether by fighting off enemies or singing them to peace, please be my protector, and I will always speak sweety of You. Our God and God of our fathers, please accept our rest. Please Sanctify us through Thy commandments, and please grant our portion in Thy Torah. Please give us abundantly of Thy goodness and please make us rejoice in Thy salvation. Please purify our hearts to serve Thee in truth. In Thy loving favour, O Lord our God, please grant that Thy holy Sabbath be our joyous heritage, and may America who sanctifies Thy name, rest thereon. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who hallowest the Sabbath. O Lord our God, please be gracious unto Thy people of America and accept their prayer. Please restore the worship to Thy sanctuary and receive in love and favour the supplication of America. May the worships of Thy people be ever acceptable unto Thee. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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If You Do His Work, You Must Prepare for His Wages!
I must be getting absent-minded. Whenever I complain that things are not what they used to be, I always forget to include myself. The theory of civil disobedience is designed only for a special case of a nearly just society, one that is well-ordered for the most part but in which some serious violations of justice nevertheless do occur. A state of near justice requires a democratic regime, and the theory concerns the role and the appropriateness of civil disobedience to legitimately established democratic authority. It does not apply to the other forms of government nor, except incidentally, to other kinds of dissent or resistance. It is not necessary to discuss this mode of protect, along with militant action and resistance, as a tactic for transforming or even overturning an unjust and corrupt system. There is no difficulty about such action in this case. If any means to this end are justified, then surely nonviolent opposition is justified. The problem of civil disobedience, arises only within a more or less just democratic state for those citizens who recognize and accept the legitimacy of the constitution. The difficulty is one of a conflict of duties. At what point does the duty to comply with laws enacted by a legislative majority (or with executive acts supported by such a majority) cease to be binding in view of the right to defend one’s liberties and the duty to oppose injustice? This question involves the nature and limits of majority rule. For this reason the problem of civil disobedience is a crucial test case for any theory of the moral basis of democracy. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
A constitutional theory of civil disobedience has three parts. First, it defines this kind of dissent and separated it from other forms of opposition to democratic authority. These rand from legal demonstrations and infractions of law designed to raise test cases before the courts to militant action and organized resistance. A theory specifies the place of civil disobedience in this spectrum of possibilities. Next, it set out the grounds of civil disobedience and the conditions under which such action is justified in a (more or less) just democratic regime. And finally, a theory should explain the role of civil disobedience within a constitutional system and account for the appropriateness of this mode of protest within a free society. As a word of caution, we should not expect too much of a theory of civil disobedience, even one framed for special circumstances. Precise principles that straightway decide actual cases are clearly out of the question. Instead, a useful theory defines a perspective within which the problem of civil disobedience can be approached; it identifies the relevant considerations and helps us to assign them their correct weights in the more important instances. If a theory about these matters appears to us, on reflection, to have cleared our vision and to have made our considered judgments more coherent, then it has been worthwhile. The theory has done what, for the present, ne may reasonably expect it to do: namely, to narrow the disparity between the conscientious convictions of those who accept the basic principles of a democratic society. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
Civil disobedience as a public, nonviolent, conscientious yet political act contrary to law is usually done with the aims of being about change in the law or policies of the government. Civil disobedience can also be considered a deliberate, discriminate violations of the law for a vital social purpose. By acting in this way one addresses the sense of justice of the majority of the community and declares that in one’s considered opinion the principles of social cooperation among free and equal humans are not being respected. A preliminary gloss on this definition is that it does not require that the civilly disobedient act breach the same law that is being protested. It allows for what some have called indirect as well as direct civil disobedience. And this definition should do, as there are sometimes strong reasons for not infringing on the law or policy held to be unjust. Instead, one may disobey traffic ordinances or laws of trespass as a way of presenting one’s case. Thus, if the government enacts a vague and harsh statue against treason, it would not be appropriate to commit treason as a way of objecting to it, and in any event, the penalty might be far more than one should reasonably be ready to accept. In other cases there is no way to violate the government’s policy directly, as when it concerns foreign affairs, or affects another part of the country. A second gloss is that the civilly disobedient act is indeed thought to be contrary to law, at least in the sense that those engaged in it are not simply presenting a test case for a constitutional decision; they are prepared to oppose the statue if it should be upheld. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
To be sure in a constitutional regime, the courts may finally side with the dissenters and declare the law or policy objected to unconditional. It often happens, then, that there is some uncertainty as to whether the dissenters’ action will be held illegal or not. However, this is merely a complicating element. Those who use civil disobedience to protest unjust laws are not prepared to desist should the courts eventually disagree with them, however pleased they might have been with the opposite decision. It should also be noted that civil disobedience is a political act noted that civil disobedience is a political act not only in the sense that it is addressed to the majority that holds political power, but also because it is an act guided and justified by political principles, that is, by the principles of justice which regulate the constitution and social institutions generally. In justifying civil disobedience one does not appeal to principles of personal morality or to religious doctrines, though these may coincide with and support one’s claims; and it goes without saying that civil disobedience cannot be ground solely on group or self-interest. Instead one invokes the commonly shared conception of justice that underlies the political order. It is assumed that in a reasonably just democratic regime there is a public conception of justice by reference to which citizens regulate their political affairs and interpret the constitution. The persistent and deliberate violation of the basic principles of this conception over any extended period of time, especially the infringement of the fundamental equal liberties, invites either submission or resistance. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
By engaging in civil disobedience a minority forces the majority to consider whether it wishes to have its actions construed in this ways, or whether, in view of the common sense of justice, it wishes to acknowledge the legitimate claims of the minority. A further point is that civil disobedience is a public act. Not only is it addressed to public principles, it is done in public. It is engaged in openly with fair notice; it is not covert or secretive. One may compare it to public speech, and being a form of address, an expression of profound and conscientious political conviction, it takes place in the public forum. For this reason, among others, civil disobedience is nonviolent. It tries to avoid the use of violence, especially against persons, not from the abhorrence of the use of force in principle, but because it is a final expression of one’s case. To engage in violent acts likely to injure and to hurt is incompatible with civil disobedience as a mode of address. Indeed, any interference with the civil liberties of others tends to obscure the civilly disobedient quality of one’s act. Sometimes if the appeal fails in its purpose, forceful resistance may later be entertained. Yet civil disobedience is giving voice to conscientious and deeply held convictions; while it may warn and admonish, it is not itself a threat. Civil disobedience is nonviolent for another reason. It expresses disobedience to law within the limits of fidelity to law, although it is at the outer edge of theory. The law is broken, but fidelity to law is expressed by the public and nonviolent nature of the act, by the willingness to accept the legal consequences of one’s conduct. One should be willing to undergo the legal consequences for the sake of fidelity to law. The charge may be contested in court, should this prove appropriate. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
This fidelity to law helps to establish to the majority that the act is indeed politically conscientious and sincere, and that it is intended to address the public’s sense of justice. To be completely open and nonviolent is to give bond of one’s sincerity, for it is not easy to convince another that one’s acts are conscientious, or even to be sure of this before oneself. No doubt it is possible to imagine a legal system in which conscientious belief that the law is unjust is accepted as a defense for noncompliance. Humans of great honesty with full confidence in one another might make such a system work. However, as things are, such a scheme would presumably be unstable even in a state of near justice. We must pay a certain prince to convince others that our actions have, in our carefully considered view, a sufficient moral basis in the political convictions of the community. Civil disobedience has been defined so that it falls between legal protest and the raising of test cases on the one side, and conscientious refusal and the various forms of resistance on the other. In this range of possibilities it stands for that form of dissent at the boundary of fidelity to law. Civil disobedience, so understood, is clearly distinct from militant actions and obstruction; it is far removed from organized forcible resistance. The militant, for example, is much more deeply opposed to the existing political system. One does not accept it as one which is nearly just or reasonable so; one believes either that it departs widely from its professed principles or that it pursues a mistake conception altogether. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
While one’s action is conscientious in its own terms, one does not appeal to the sense of justice of the majority (or those having effective political power), since one thinks that their sense of justice is erroneous, or else without effect. Instead, one seeks by well-framed militant acts of disruption and resistance, and the like, to attack the prevalent view of justice or to force a movement in the desired direction. Thus the militant may try to evade the penalty, since one is not prepare to accept the legal consequences of one’s violation of the law; this would not only be to play into the hands of forces that one believes cannot be trusted, but also to express a recognition of the legitimacy of the constitution to which one is opposed. In this sense militant action is not within the bounds of fidelity to law, but represents a more profound opposition to the legal order. The basic structure is thought to be so unjust or else to depart so widely from its own professed ideals that one must try to prepare the way for radical or even revolution change. And this is to be done by trying to arouse the public to an awareness of the fundamental reforms that need to be made. Now in certain circumstances militant action and other kinds of resistance are surely justified. The year 2100 A.D. is closer to us in time than the great depression, yet the World’s economists, traumatized by it, 9/11, the recession of 2008, and the COVID-19 crisis, remain frozen in their attitudes of the past. Economist, even those who talk the language of revolution, are peculiarly conservative creatures. If it were possible to pry from their brains their collective image of the economy of, say, the year 2125, it would look very much like that of 2010—only more so. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
Conditioned to think in straight lines, economists have great difficulty imagining alternatives to communism and capitalism. They see in the growth of large-scale organizations nothing more than a linear expansion of old-fashion bureaucracy. They see technological advance as a simple, non-revolutionary extension of the known. Born of scarcity, trained to think in terms of limited resources, they can hardly conceive of a society in which human’s basic material wants have been satisfied. One reason for their lack of imagination is that when they think about technological advance, they concentrate solely on the means of economic activity. Yet the super-age of information revolution challenges the ends as well. It threatens to alter not merely the “how” of production but they “why.” It will, in short, transform the very purposes of economic activity. Before such an upheaval, even the most sophisticated tools of today’s economists are helpless. Input-output tables, econometric models—the whole paraphernalia of analysis that economists employ simply do not come to grips with the external forces—political, social and ethical—that will transform economic life in the decades before us. What does “productivity” or “efficiency” mean in a society that places a high value on psychic fulfillment? What happens to an economy, when, as is likely, the entire concept of property is reduced to meaninglessness? #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
How economies likely to be affected by the rise of supra-national planning, taxing, and regulatory agencies or by a kind of dialectical return to “cottage industry” based on the most advanced cybernetic technologies? Most important, what happens when “no growth” replaces “growth” as an economic objective, When Gross National Product (GNP) ceases to be the holy grail? Only by stepping outside the framework of orthodox economic thought and examining these possibilities can we begin to prepare for tomorrow. And among these, none is more central than the shift in values that is likely to accompany the super-industrial revolution. Under conditions of scarcity, humans struggle to meet their immediate material needs. Today under more affluent conditions, we are reorganizing the economy to deal with a new level of human needs. From a system designed to provide material satisfaction, we are rapidly creating an economy geared to the provision of psychic gratification. This process of “psychologization,” one of the central themes of the super-age of information revolution, has been all but overlooked by the economists. Yet it will result in a novel, surprise-filled economy unlike any human has ever experienced. The issues raised by it will reduce the great conflict of the twenty-first century, the conflict between capitalism and communism, to comparative insignificance. For these issues sweep far beyond economic or political dogma. They involve, as we shall see, nothing less than sanity, the human organism’s ability to distinguish illusion from reality. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
Much excitement has accompanied the discovery that once a techno-society reaches a certain stage of informational development, it begins to shift energies into automation and autonomy. Many experts see in the services the wave of the future. They suggest the many retail, jobs, food service jobs and manual labor jobs, even news broadcasting, teaching, many aspects of medical care, and law enforcement will be handled by androids and other machines—a prophecy already on its way toward fulfillment. Actors and musicians are expected to be replaced by holograms. What the economists, however, have not done, is ask the obvious question. Where does the economy go next? After the services, what? The high technology nations must, in coming years, direct vast resources to rehabilitating their physical environment and improving what has come to be called “the quality of life.” The fight against air and noise pollution, aesthetic blight, crowding, noise and dirt will clearly absorb tremendous energies. However, in addition to the provision of these public goods, we can also anticipate a subtle change in the character of production for private use. They very excitement aroused by the mushrooming growth of the service sector has diverted professional attention from another shift that will deeply affect both goods and services in the future. It is this shift that will lead to the net forward movement of the economy, the growth of a strange new sector based on what can only be called the “experience industries.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
For the key to post-service economies lies in the psychologization of all production, beginning with manufacture. One of the curious facts about the production in all the techno-societies today, and especially the United States of America, is that goods are increasingly designed to yield psychological “extras” for the consumer. Technology becomes a Veblen good. As the demand of technology increases, which is a luxury good and also a necessity with new products, the price also increases. The future will be packed with positional good, which are goods valued only by how they are distributed among the population, not by how many of them there are available in total (as would be the case with other consumer goods). The source of greater worth of positional goods is their desirability as a status symbol, which usually results in them greatly exceeding the value of comparable good. Various goods have been described as positional in a given capitalist society, such as gold, real estate, diamonds, and luxury goods. More formally in economics, positional goods are a subset of economic goods whose consumption (and subsequent utility), also conditioned by Veblen-like pricing, depends negatively on consumption of those same goods by others. In particular, for these goods the value is at least in part (if not exclusively) a function of its ranking in desirability by others, in comparison to substitutes. Therefore, new is not always better. It depends on the status and ranking of an item you possess. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
The term-Veblen good is sometimes extended to include services and non-material possession that may alter one’s social status and that are deemed highly desirable when enjoyed by a relatively few in a community, such as college degrees, Cresleigh Homes, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, big trucks, college degrees, achievements, awards, memberships to exclusive clubs, et cetera. The manufacturer adds a “psychic load” to one’s basic product, and the consumer gladly pays for this intangible benefit. A classic example is the case of the appliance or auto manufacturer who adds buttons, knobs, touch screens, dials to the control panel or dashboard, to replace basic tools that are slightly out of fashion. Or home builders who add luxury features to their new homes like butler’s panties, California rooms, coded entry doors, surveillance systems and other luxury features like stained glass, floor to ceiling windows, and so forth. The manufacturer has learned that increasing the number of gadgets and features, up to a point, gives the operator of the machine or home the sense of controlling a more complex device, and hence a feeling of increased mastery. This psychological payoff is designed into the product. Conversely, pains are taken not to deprive the consumer of an existing psychological benefit. Thus a large American food company proudly launched a labour-saving, add-water-only cake mix. The company was amazed when women rejected the product in favour of mixes that require extra labour—the addition of an egg along with the water. By inserting powered egg in the factory, the company had oversimplified the task of the housewife, depriving her of the sense of creatively participating in the cake-baking process. The powered egg was hastily eliminated, and women went happily back to cracking their own eggs. Once again a product was modified to provide a psychic benefit. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
Examples like these can be multiplied endlessly in almost any major industry, from soap and clothing stores to dishwashers and diet colas. According to Dr. Emanuel Demby, president of Motivational Programmers, Incorporated, a research firm employed in the United States of America and Europe by such blue-chip corporations as General Electric, Caltex, and IBM, “The engineering of psychological factors into manufactured goods will be a hallmark of production in the future—not only in consumer goods, but in industrial hardware. “Even the big cranes and derricks built today embody this principle. Their cabs are streamlined, slick like something out of the twenty-first century. Cater-pillar, International Harvester, Ferguson—all of them. Why? These mechanical monsters do not dig better or hoist better because the cab is aesthetically improved. However, the contractor who buys them likes it better. The men who work on them like it better. The contractor’s customers like it better. So even the manufacturers of earthmoving equipment begin to pay attention to non-utilitarian—id est, psychological—factors.” Beyond this, Dr. Demby asserts, manufacturers are devoting more attention to reducing tensions that accompany the use of certain products. Manufacturers of sanitary napkins, for example, know that women have a fear of stopping up the toilet when disposing of them. “A new product ha been developed,” he says, “that instantly dissolves on contact with water. It does not perform its basic function any better. However, it relieves some of the anxiety that went with it. This is psychological engineering if ever there was any!” #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
Affluent consumers are willing and able to pay for such niceties. As disposable income rises, they become progressively less concerned with price, progressively more insistent on what they call “quality.” For many products quality can still be measured in the traditional terms of workmanship, durability and materials. However, for a fast-growing class of products, such differences are virtually undetectable. Blindfolded, the consumer cannot distinguish Brand A from Brand B. Nevertheless, she often argues fiercely that one is superior to another. This paradox vanishes once the psychic component of production is taken int account. For even when they are otherwise identical, there are likely to be marked psychological differences between one product and another. Advertisers strive to stamp each product with its own distinct image. These images are functional: they fill a need on the part of the consumer. The need is psychological, however, rather than utilitarian in ordinary sense. Thus we find that the term “quality” increasingly refers to the ambience, the status associations—in effect, the psychological connotations of the product. As more and more of the basic material needs of the consumer are met, it is strongly predictable that even more economic energy will be directed at meeting the consumer’s subtle, varied and quite personal needs for beauty, prestige, individuation, and sensory delight. The manufacturing sector will channel ever greater resources into the conscious design of psychological distinctions and gratifications. They psychic component of goods production will assume increasing importance. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
A merciful human aims at one’s neighbour’s good and so does “God’s will,” consciously co-operating with “the simple good.” A cruel human oppresses one’s neighbour, and so does simple evil. However, in doing such evil, one is used by God, without one’s own knowledge or consent, to produce the complex good—so that the first human serves God as a son (or child), and the second as a tool. For you will certainly carry out God’s purpose, however you act, but it makes a difference to you whether you serve like Judas or like John. The whole system is, so to speak, calculated for the clash between good humans and bad humans, and the good fruits of fortitude, patience, pity and forgiveness for which the cruel human is permitted to be cruel, presuppose that the good human ordinarily continues to seek simple good. I say “ordinarily” because a human is sometimes entitled to hurt (or even, in my opinion, to kill) one’s fellow, but only where the necessity is urgent and the good to be attained obvious, and usually (though not always) when one who inflicts the pain has a definite authority to do so—a parent’s authority derived from nature, a magistrate’s or soldier’s derived from civil society, or a surgeon’s derived, most often, from the patient. To turn this into a general charter for afflicting humanity because the affliction is good for them is not indeed to break the Divine scheme but to volunteer for the post of Satan within that scheme. If you do his work, you must prepare for his wages. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
The problem about avoiding our own pain admis a similar solution. Some ascetics have used self-torture. As a layman, I offer no opinion on the prudence of such a regimen; but I insist that, whatever its merits, self-torture is quite a different thing from tribulation sent by God. Everyone knows that fasting is a different experience from missing your dinner by accident or through poverty. Fasting asserts the will against the appetite—the reward being self-mastery and the danger pride: involuntary hunger subjects appetite and will together to the Divine will, furnishing an occasion for submission and exposing us to the danger or rebellion. However, the redemptive effect of suffering lies chiefly in its tendency to reduce the rebel will. Ascetic practices, which in themselves strengthen the will, are only useful in so far as they enable the will to put its own house (the passions) in order, as a preparation for offering the whole human to God. They are necessary as a means; as an end, they would be abominable, for in substituting will for appetite and there stopping, they would merely exchange the animal self for the diabolical self. It was, therefore, truly said that only God can mortify. Tribulation does its work in a World where human beings are ordinarily seeking, by lawful means, to avoid their own natural evil and to attain their natural god, and presuppose such a World. In order to submit the will to God, we must have a will and that will must have objects. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Christian renunciation does not mean stoic “Apathy,” but a readiness to prefer God to inferior ends which are in themselves lawful. Hence the Perfect Man brought to Gethsemane a will, and a strong will, to escape suffering and death is such escape were compatible with the Father’s will, combined with a perfect readiness for obedience if it were not. Some of the saints recommend a total renunciation at the very threshold of our discipleship; but I think this can mean only a total readiness for every particular renunciation that may be demanded, for it would not be possible to live from moment to moment willing nothing but submission to God as such. What would be the material for the submission? It would seem self-contradictory to say “What I will is to subject what I will to God’s will,” for the second what has no content. Doubtless we all spend too much care in the avoidance of our own pain: but a duly subordinated intention to avoid it, using lawful means, is in accordance with nature—that is, with the whole working system of creaturely life for which the redemptive work of tribulation is calculated. It would be quite false, therefore, to suppose that the Christian view of suffering is incompatible with the strongest emphasis on our duty to leave the World, even in a temporal sense, better than we found it. In the fullest parabolic picture which He gave to the Judgment, Our Lord seems to reduce all virtue to active beneficence: and though it would be misleading to take that one picture in isolation from the Gospel as a whole, it is sufficient to place beyond doubt the basic principles of the social ethics of Christianity. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
Before Abraham was God. God is a higher mentalism. “I am” points to the eternal One where no individual entity ever was, is, or shall be. Philosophy raises the questions of Reality and pursues it until an answer can be found. That answer assets there is something unique which alone can be the Real, which ever was, is, and shall be. Philosophy’s fundamental postulate is that there is but one ultimate Power, one sublime Reality, one transcendent Being. It is invisible to all, since it is the power that makes the World visible. It is without form, since it is the Substance out of which all forms are made. The Real is unique—the only undivided, unsplit being beyond which there is nothing else. There is nothing else either beyond it or besides it. It is the unique not only because of what IT is but also because two statements concerning IT can be quite contradictory, yet each can still be correct! Ne transcends all categories. Since the Real is unique, the One without a second and not the One which is related to the Many that spring out of it, it cannot correctly be set up in opposition to the Unreal, the Illusory, the Appearance. They are not on the same level. That which both Greek Plato and Indian Vedantin called “the One” did not refer to the beginning figure of a series, but to “One-without-a-Second.” It is unique. There is nothing to which it can be justly likened, or with which it can be compared. This must be so since it goes beyond and transcends all things without any exception. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
Whatever is said of it will only succeed in describing an idea in the mind of the sayer, and this goes beyond and transcends all ideas, again without any exception. You can compare one being or one thing with another but not This, not This! There is a Mind which is self-existent, unique, unlike anything else, unbegotten. The Universal Mind is also unique in that, while comprehending all things, it is itself incomprehensible. It stands alone, unique, unseen and untouchable. Yet from it emerge all the gods of all the planets which they govern, all the ethical injunctions which humans need and must in the end. Please stand about me, your protective spirits, on all six sides, please establish your guards. From all dangers, no matter from what quarter, whether from above or below, please keep me safe. My Lord at my right hand, and my Lord at my left: please be with me throughout my life, watching over me by night and by day. Thy dwelling there forever. Mayest Thou be exalted and sanctified in Jerusalem, Thy city, throughout all generations and to all eternity. O please let our eyes behold the establishment of Thy kingdom, according to the word that was spoken in the inspired Psalms of David, Thy righteous anointed: The Lord shall reign forever. Thy God, O American, 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. Your arms are strong, Father; they can hug a child or restrain one from harm. Please Wrap them about me: I trust You to know which is needed. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, the holy King. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
CRESLEIGH RANCH: BRIGHTON STATION– Rancho Cordova, CA
3-5 Beds 3-3.5 Bath 2,054-3,634 Square Feet
Brighton Station at Cresleigh Ranch is Rancho Cordova’s newest home community! This charming neighborhood offers an array of home types with eye catching architecture styles such as Mid-Century Modern, California Modern, Prairie, and Contemporary Farmhouse.
Located off Douglas Road and Rancho Cordova Parkway, the residents of Cresleigh Ranch will enjoy, being just minutes from shopping, dining, and entertainment, and quick access to Highway 50 and Grant Line Road providing a direct route into Folsom. Residents here also benefit from no HOA fees, two community parks and the benefits of being a part of the highly-rated Elk Grove Unified School District.
Best of all, each Cresleigh home comes fully equipped with an All Ready connected home! This smart home package comes included with your home and features great tools including: video door bell and digital deadbolt for the front door, connect home hub so you can set scenes and routines to make life just a little easier. Two smart switches and USB outlets are also included, plus we’ll gift you a Google Home Hub and Google Mini to help connect everything together!
My God Sits in the Back of the Limousine, My God Has the House on the Cover of the Magazine!
When choosing between two evils, I always like to take the one I have never tried before. The justification for majority rule rests squarely on the political ends that the constitution is designed to achieve, and therefore on the two principles of justice. As a reminder, the first principle of justice states that each person has the same indefeasible claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme of liberties for all. The second principle of justice states that social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: They are to be attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; they are to be to the greatest benefit of the least-advantaged members of society (the difference principle). The first principle of equal basic liberties is to be embodied in the political constitution, while the second principle applies primarily to economic institutions. Fulfillment of the first principle takes priority over fulfillment of the second principle, and within the second principle fair equality of opportunity takes priority over the difference principle. The first principle affirms that all citizens should have the familiar basic rights and liberties: liberty of conscience and freedom of association, freedom of speech and liberty of the person, the rights to vote, to hold public office, to be treated in accordance with the rule of law, and so on. The first principle accords these rights and liberties to all citizens equally. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
Unequal rights would not benefit those who would get a lesser share of the rights, so justice requires equal rights for all, in all normal circumstances. The second distinctive feature of the first principle is that it requires fair value of the political liberties. The political liberties, concerned with the right to hold public office, the right to affect the outcome of national elections and so on. For these liberties, citizens who are similarly endowed and motivated should have similar opportunities to hold office, to influence elections, and so on regardless of how rich or poor they are. This fair value proviso has major implications for how elections should be funded and run. The second principle of justice has two parts. The first part, fair equality of opportunity, requires that citizens with the same talents and willingness to use them have the same educational and economic opportunities regardless of whether they were born rich or poor. In all parts of society there are to be roughly the same prospects of culture and achievement for those similarly motivated and endowed. So, for example, if we assume that natural endowments and the willingness to use them are evenly distributed across children born into different social classes, then within any type of occupation (generally specified) we should find that roughly one quarter of people in that occupation were born into the top 25 percent of the income distribution, one quarter were born into the second-highest 25 percent of the income distribution, one quarter were born into the lowest 25 percent. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
Since class of origin is a morally arbitrary fact about citizens, justice does not allow class origin to turn into unequal opportunities for education or meaningful work. The second part of the second principle is the difference principle, which regulates the distribution of wealth and income. Allowing inequalities of wealth and income can lead to a larger social product: higher wages can cover the costs of training and education, for example, and can provide incentives to fill jobs that are more in demand. The difference principle allows inequalities of wealth and income, so long as these will be to everyone’s advantage, and specifically to advantage of those who will be worst off. The difference principle requires, that is, that any economic inequalities be to the greatest advantage of those who are advantaged least. The difference principle is partly based on the negative thesis that the distribution of natural assets is undeserved. A citizen does not merit more of the social product simply because one was lucky enough to be born with the potential to develop skills that are currently in high demand. Yet this does not mean that everyone must get the same shares. The fact that citizens have different talents and abilities can be used to make everyone better office. In a society governed by the difference principle, citizens regard the distribution of natural endowments as a common asset that can benefit all. Those better endowed are welcome to use their gifts to make themselves better off, so long as their doing so also contributes to the good of those less well endowed. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
The difference principle this expresses a positive ideal, an ideal of deep social unity. In a society that satisfies the difference principle, citizens know that their economy works to everyone’s benefit, and that those who were lucky enough to be born with greater natural potentials are not getting richer at the expense of those who were less fortunate. In justice as fairness, humans agree to share one another’s fate. I have assumed that some form of majority rule is justified as the best available way of insuring just and effective legislation. It is compatible with equal liberty and possesses a certain naturalness; for if minority rule is allowed, there is no obvious criterion to select which one is decide and equality is violated. A fundamental part of the majority principle is that the procedure should satisfy the conditions of background justice. In this case these conditions are those of political liberty—freedom of speech and assembly, freedom to take part in public affairs and to influence by constitutional means the course of legislation—and the guarantee of the fair value of these freedoms. When this background is absent, the first principle of justice is not satisfied; yet even when it is present, there is no assurance that legislation with be enacted. One problem with this procedure of majority rule is that it may allow cyclical majorities. However, the primary defect from the point of view of justice is that it permits the violation of liberty. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
There is nothing to the view, then, that what the majority wills is right. In fact, none of the traditional conceptions of justice have held this doctrine, maintaining always that the outcome of the voting is subject to political principles. Although in given circumstances it is justified that the majority (suitably defined and circumscribed) has the constitutional right to make law, this does not imply that the laws enacted are just. The dispute of substances about majority rule concerns how it is best defined and whether constitutional constraints are effective and reasonable devices for strengthening the overall balance of justice. These limitations may often be used by entrenched minorities to preserve their illicit advantages. This question is one of political judgment and does not belong to the theory of justice. It suffices to note that while citizens normally submit their conduct to democratic authority, that is, recognized the outcome of a vote as establishing a binding rule, other things equal, they do not submit their judgment to it. A justice constitution is defined as a constitution that would be agreed upon by rational delegates in a constitutional convention who are guided by the two principles of justice. When we justify a constitution, we present considerations to show that it would be adopted under these conditions. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
Similarly, just laws and policies are those that would be enacted by rational legislators at the legislative stage who are constrained by a justice constitution and who are conscientiously trying to follow the principles of justice as their standard. When we criticize laws and policies, we try to show that they would not be chosen under this ideal procedure. Now since even rational legislators would often reach different conclusions, there is a necessity for a vote under ideal conditions. The restrictions on information will not guarantee agreement, since the tendencies of the general social facts will often be ambiguous and difficult to assess. The Lord has said that “there is a law, irrevocably decreed in Heaven before the foundations of this World, upon which all blessings are predicated—and when we obtain any blessing from God, it is by obedience to that law upon which it is predicated,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 130.20-21. It would seem from this declaration that there is no permanent progress made in any field or in any place except it be through obedience to the governing law. We know this is true in the Heavens, because the Lord said: “That which is governed by law is also preserved by law and perfected and sanctified by the same. That which breaketh a law, and abideth not by law, but seeketh to become a law unto itself, and willeth to abide in sin [sin, being the breaking of the law], and altogether abideth in sin, cannot be sanctified by law, neither by mercy, justice, nor judgment. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
“For judgement goeth before the face of one who sitteth upon the throne and governeth and executeth all things. And one hath given a law unto all things, by which they move in their times and their seasons; and their courses are fixed, even the courses of the Heavens and the Earth, which comprehend the Earth and all the planets,” Doctrine and Covenants 88.34-35, 40, 42-43. This scripture tells us that all things in God’s economy, even those which to us seem inanimate, obey the laws by which they are governed. “The Earth [for example] abideh the law of a celestial kingdom, for it filleth the measure of its creation, and transgresseth not the law,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 88.25. Therefore, it shall be crowned with glory, even with the presence of God the Father; that bodies who are of the celestial kingdom may possess it forever and ever; and they who are not sanctified through the law which I have given unto you, even the law of Christ [which is His gospel—the perfect law of liberty] must inherit another kingdom, for one who is not able to abide the law of the celestial kingdom cannot abide a celestial glory. And one who cannot abide the law of a terrestrial kingdom cannot abide a terrestrial glory. And one who cannot abide the law of a telestial kingdom cannot abide a telestial glory,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 88.19-24. How blessed are Latter-day Saint to be assured by the revealed word of God that there will be no capriciousness in the World to come. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
We are so blessed that every soul will be rewarded according to the law that one has obeyed; all divine law is as immutable as the law of gravity; it is the same yesterday, today, and forever; judgment will be mercifully administered, but it will be administered pursuant to law, and it will not rob justice. Not only are we blessed by having this knowledge concerning the rule of law; we are twice blessed by having both a knowledge and an understanding of the laws by which we are to be judged. If we were to fail to obey the law, in our light of our knowledge of the perfect law of liberty, how shortsighted, how foolish, how tragic that would be. Latter-day Saints should strictly obey the laws of the government in which they live. By our own declaration of faith we are committed to do so, for we declare to the World that “we believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in obeying, honouring, and sustaining the law,” reports Articles of Faith 1.12. This we do in harmony with the Lord’s command: “Let no human break the laws of the land, for one that keepeth the laws of God hath no need to break the laws of the land. Wherefore, be subject to the powers that be, until one reigns whose right it is to reign, and subdues all enemies under one’s feet,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 58.21-22. Civil authority is of divine origin. It may be more or less adapted to the needs of humans; more or less just and benevolent, but, even at its worst, it is better than anarchy. Revolutionary movements that aim at the abolition of government itself are contrary to the law of God. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
When the rule of law breaks down in a family, a community, a state, or a nation, chaos reigns. The kingdoms of Heaven are to be free from chaos, because no one will be in any one of them who does not by one’s own free will obey the laws thereof. Here on Earth, some people steadfastly refuse to face such facts. We avoid them by stubbornly refusing to recognize the speed of change. It makes us feel better to defer the future. Even those closet to the cutting edge of technology and scientific research can scarcely believe the reality. Even they routinely underestimate the speed at which the future is breaking on our shores. Thus Dr. Richard J. Cleveland, speaking before a conference of organ transplant specialists, announced in January, 1967, that the first human heart transplant operation will occur “within five years.” Yet before the same year was our Dr. Christiaan Barnard had operated on a fifty-five-year-old grocer named Louis Washkansky, and a staccato sequence of heart transplant operation exploded like a string of firecrackers into the World’s awareness. In the meantime, success rates are rising steadily in kidney transplants to 97 percent. Successful liver, pancreas, and ovary transplants are also reported. Scientists and doctors are getting so good that they even have the ability to do face transplants now. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
Such accelerating medical advances must compel profound changes in our ways of thinking, as well as our way of caring for the sick. Startling new legal, ethical and philosophical issues arise. What, for instance, is death? Does death occur when the heart stops beating, as we have traditionally believed? Or does it occur when the brain stops functioning? Hospitals are becoming more and more familiar with cases of patients kept alive through advanced medical techniques, but doomed to exist as unconscious vegetables. What are the ethics of condemning such a person to death to obtain a healthy organ needed for transplant to save the life of a person with a better prognosis? Lacking guidelines or precedents, we flounder over the moral and legal questions. Ghoulish rumors race through the medical community. There has been speculation about the possibility of future murder rings supplying healthy organs for unofficial surgeons whose patients are unwilling to wait until natural sources have supplied the heart or liver or pancreas they need. In Trenton, New Jersey USA—an Israeli citizen living in Brooklyn, New York USA, admitted to brokering three illegal kidney transplants for payments of $120,000.00 UDS or more before he was caught conspiring to organize another illegal sale. Levy Izhak Rosenbaum also known as Isaac Rosenbaum, age 60 at the time he brought to trial in 2011 (now age 70), plead guilty to an information charging him with three counts of acquiring, receiving, and otherwise transferring human organs for valuable consideration for use in human transplantation; and one count of conspiracy to do the same. Mr. Rosenbaum was originally charged with the conspiracy by Complain in July 2009. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
The defendant entered his guilty plea before U.S. District Judge Anne E. Thompson in Trenton federal court. Mr. Rosenbaum’s convictions were the first under the federal statue involving illegal market sales of kidneys from paid donors. “Mr. Rosenbaum admitted he was not new to the human kidney business when he was caught brokering what he thought was an organ trafficking,” U.S. Attorney Fishman said. “Trafficking in human organs is not only a grave threat to public health, it reserves lifesaving treatment for those who can best afford it at the expense of those who cannot. We will not tolerate such an affront to human dignity.” According to documents filed in this case and statements made in court: Mr. Rosenbaum admitted that from January 2006 through February 2009, he conspired with other to provide a service, in exchange for large payments, to individuals seeking kidney transplants by obtaining kidneys from paid donors. Specifically, Mr. Rosenbaum admitted to arranging three transplants on behalf of New Jersey residents that took place in December 2006, September 2008, and February 2009. Mr. Rosenbaum admitted that he was paid approximately $120, 000.00 USA, $150,000.00 USA, and $140,000.00 USD, respectively on behalf of these three recipients. Mr. Rosenbaum’s kidney business was exposed through the use of cooperating criminal defendant Solomon Dwek and an undercover FBI agent (the “UC”) who was posing as an employee of Dwek and who represented to Mr. Rosenbaum that her uncle was in need of a kidney transplant. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
Dwek and the UC first met with Mr. Rosenbaum in mid-February 2008 at which time Mr. Rosenbaum informed them that “it’s illegal to buy and sell organs,” but assured them that “I’m doing this a long time.” Mr. Rosenbaum explained to Dwek and the UC that he would help the recipient and the donor concoct a fictitious story to make it appear that the transplant was the product of a genuine donation and that he would be in charge of babysitting the donor upon the donor’s arrival from overseas. In Washington, the National Academy of Science, backed by a grant from the Russell Sage Foundation, has been studying social policy issues springing from advances in the life sciences. At Stanford, a symposium, also funded by Russell Sage, examines methods for setting up transplant organ banks, the economics of an organ market, and evidence of the economics of an organ market, and evidences of class or racial discrimination in organ availability. The possibility of cannibalizing bodies or corpses for usable transplant organs, grisly as it is, will serve to accelerate further the pace of change by lending urgency to research in the field of artificial organs—plastic or electronic substitutes for the heart or liver or spleen. (Eventually, even these may be made unnecessary when we learn how to regenerate damaged organs or severed limbs, growing new ones as the lizard now grows a tail.) #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
And it is totally possible that the human body could be advanced to regrow limbs, organs, and other healthy tissues as it already replaces blood, hair, teeth, nail, skin and you see how can manifest and growth tumors and cancer. So if scientists are able to unlock the secrets of the human body, stopping death and loss of organs and life is totally possible. The drive to develop spare parts for failing human bodies will be stepped up as demand intensified. The development of an economical artificial heart, Professor Lederberg says, “is only a few transient failures away.” Professors R. M. Kenedi of the bio-engineering group at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow believes that “artificial replacements for tissues and organs may well have become commonplace.” For some organs, this is in fact, a reality. Already more than 3 million cardiac patients Worldwide—including a former Supreme Court justice—are alive because they carry, stitched into their chest cavity, a tiny pacemaker—a device that sends pulses of electricity to activate the hearts. Each year 600,000 pacemakers are implanted. Approximal 90,000 heart valve substitutes are now implanted in the United States of America and 280,000 Worldwide each year; it is estimated that nearly half are mechanical valves and half are bioprosthetic valves. Implanting hearing aids, artificial kidneys, arteries, hip joints, lungs, eye sockets and other parts are all in various stages of early development. We shall, before many decades are past, implant tiny, aspirin-sized sensors in the body to monitor blood pressures, pulse, respiration and other functions, and tiny transmitters to emit a signal when something goes wrong. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
Such signals will feed into giant diagnostic computer centers upon which the medicine of the future will be based. Some of us will carry a tiny platinum plate and a dime-sized “stimulator” attached to the spine. By turning a midget “radio” on and off we will be able to activate the stimulator and kill the pain. Initial work on these pain-control mechanisms is already under way at the Case Institute of Technology. Push button pain killers are already being used by certain cardiac patients. Such developments will lead to vast new bio-engineering industries, chains of medical-electronic repair stations, new technical professions and a reorganization of the entire health system. They will change life expectancy, shatter insurance company life tables, and bring about important shifts in the human outlook. Surgery will be less frightening to the average individual; implantation routine. The human body will come to be seen as modular. Through application of the modular principle—preservation of the whole through systematic replacement of transient components—we may add two or three decades to the average life span of the entire population. Imagine that, people living to be an average of 100 to 120 and strong and healthy. Unless, however, we develop far more advanced understanding of the brain than we now have, this could lead to one of the greatest ironies in history. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
Sir George Pickering Regius professor of medicine at Oxford, has waned that unless we watch out, “those with senile brains will form an ever increasing fraction of the inhabitants of the Earth. I find this,” he added unnecessarily, “a terrifying prospect. With President Joe Biden being the 46th President of the United States and the oldest President so far, being 78 years of age, many feel this is why Speaker on the United States House, Nancy Pelosi fought to remind the people about the 25th Amendment to the United States Constitution. The 25th Amendment deals with Presidential Disability and Succession, which says that is a President becomes unable to do his or her job, the Vice President shall become President. This amendment was passed by Congress 6 July 1965, and ratified 10 February 1967. Such terrifying prospects will drive us toward more accelerated research into the brain—which, in turn, will generate still further radical changes in the society. Today we strive to make heart valves or artificial plumbing that imitate the original they are designed to place. We have even been able to use valves from the hearts of pigs into human beings. We strive for functional equivalence. Once we have mastered the basic problems, however, we shall not merely install plastic aortas in people because their original aorta is about to fail. We shall install specially-designed parts that are better than the original, and then we shall move on to install parts that provide the user with capabilities that were absent in the first place. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
Just as genetic engineering holds out the promise of producing “super-people,” so, too, does organ technology suggest the possibility of track stars with extra-capacity lungs or hearts; sculptors with a neural device that intensifies sensitivity to texture; students with super computer brains. We will no longer implant merely to save a life, but to enhance it—to make possible the achievement of moods, states, conditions or ecstasies that are presently beyond us. Under these circumstances, what happens to our ago-old definitions of “human-ness?” How will it feel to be part protoplasm and part transistor? Exactly what possibilities will it open? What limitations will it place on work, play, socialism, intellectual or aesthetic responses? What happens to the mind when they body is changed? Questions like these cannot be long deferred, for advanced fusions of human and machine—called “Cyborgs”—are closer than more people suspect. We are constantly faced by the hoariest of all problems, which is “Why did the Universe arise out of the depth and darkness of the Absolute Spirit?” The Seer can offer us a picture of the way in which this Spirit has involved itself into matter and is evolving itself back to self-knowledge. That is only the How and not the Why of the World. The truth is not only that nobody has ever known, that nobody knows, and that nobody will ever know the final and fundamental purpose of creation, but that God Himself does not even know—for God too has arisen out of the Absolute no less than the Universe, has found Himself emanated from the primeval darkness and utter silence. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Even God must be content to watch the flow and not wonder why, for both God and humans must merge and be absorbed when they face the Absolute for the last time. (In the symbolic language of the Bible, “For humans cannot meet God face to face and live.”) That which IS can be none other than Final Being itself, not dependent on anything or anyone, mysteriously self-sufficient without a shape, yet all shaped things and creature have emerged from elements which trace back to it. Forever alone, there was none to witness the Beginning. As Mind the Real is static, as World-Mind it is dynamic. As Godhead It alone is in the stillness of being; but as God it is the source, substance, and power of the Universe. As Mind there is no second thing, no second intelligence to ask the question why it stirred and breathed forth World-Mind, hence why the whole World-process exists. Only humans ask this question and it returns unanswered. For all of us, for the witless and for the wise, there are unanswerable questions in life and we must learn to live with them. None of us is a full and finalized encyclopedia, for however, far we may penetrate into the meaning of things we are always confronted in the end by the Unknowable Mystery. We do not know why the whole process of involution and evolution ever started at all: because we find that there is in the deepest metaphysical sense no becoming and process at all, there is only the Real. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
At the ultimate level there is neither purpose nor plan because there is no creation. Mind, which forever is, can undergo n change in itself and no multiplication of itself. If it could, it would not be what it is—the Ultimate, the Unconditioned, and the Unique. Nor, being perfect, complete, could it have desire, purpose, aim, or motive for itself. Therefore it could not have projected the Universe on account of any benefit sought or gain needed. There is no answer to the question why the Universe was sent forth. It is to impose human limitation upon the transcendental Godhead to say that It has any eternal purpose to fulfill for Itself in the cosmos, whether that purpose be the establishment of a perfect society on Earth or the training of individuals to enter into fellowship with It and participate in Its creative work. Purpose implies a movement in times whereas the Godhead is also the Timeless. Neither this Earth nor the societies upon it can be necessary to God’s serenely self-sufficient being. Yet these fallacies are still taught by the theology of theistic orthodox. We know as much, and as little, about the Primal Mind as we know why there was a beginning of the Universe—that is, precisely nothing. If being asked how to prevent oneself from being deceived by these pseudo-intuitions, it can be said that a useful rule is to check them against other sources on the same subject and see if they all harmonize. If, for example, fifty inspired humans who have written on the subject teach what contradictions the alleged intuition, then there is something wrong on one side or the other and careful investigation is called for. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
It is always safer to ascertain what the great scriptural texts or the classic mystical testaments have to tell on the matter and not depend solely on what one’s intuition tells. We need more. And most of us—deep down—cannot deny it. There is a core of truth buried in every heart, a truth that we cannot escape. All-Father God, protector of travelers, please guards us, please guide us, please bring us through in safety and ease on our journey today. As I enter your realm, spirits of the air, as I mount to the clouds in this airplane, I place myself in your hands. There, among the vagaries of the winds, I will not be afraid, because I know you are my allies. As I fly today, please be at my side. Please protect me until I land again safely. Who is like unto Thee, O Lord, among the mighty? Who is like unto Thee, glorious in holiness, revered in praises, doing wonders? At the shore of the Red Sea, the redeemed offered praise unto Thy name. Singing a new song, they proclaimed Thy sovereignty: “The Lord shall reign for ever and ever.” O Rock of America, arise to help Thy scattered folk; deliver all who are crushed beneath oppression’s heel. Thou art our Saviour: the Lord of Hosts is Thy name; blessed art Thou, O Lord, Redeemer of America. O Lord, please open Thou my lips and my mouth shall declare Thy praise. Expand your faith so you can access everything God has in store. Allow God to be present in your life and have faith in Him, and you will see God make miracles and blessings that you can only imagine in your best dreams! #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
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The Last Infirmity of Noble Mind–To Scorn Delights and Live Labourious Day!
We all suffer from the preoccupation that there exists in the loved one, perfection. A false enchantment can all too easily last a lifetime. The types of skills which an anxious child develops are characteristic of one’s situation. Children with a sense of security and competence, and an interest in the World of challenging unyielding things, are likely to look for new things and enjoy the challenge. Children with a more insecurely-based self will feel more dependent on others, unsure whether they will be given good things and unsure whether they are allowed to get good things for themselves; they will therefore have less practice in developing the skills which lead to control over the environment in any direct way. The skills they develop are more likely to be in the area of getting others to comfort or approve or achieve for them. They may be a good deal more perceptive than their mores secure friends, their sensitivity to others developing from the time when voice and body-language might yield clues on what others were good for and how they could be got to be kind, pleased, not offended. Other people’s expectations can become of overriding importance, overlaying or contradicting the original sense of self, the one connected to the very roots of one’s being, the homunculi and the very earliest memory-traced. This kind of development, a compensatory structure, is called the False Self. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
In fact, all of us have a collection of overlapping selves or roles, some of us more so, some of us less. Some of these selves are falser than others: more strongly linked with being acceptable, less strongly linked with our deeper feelings. One of my friends has “George,” a robot bit of her very nice personality, whom she switches on at formal do’s and occasions when genuineness and spontaneity are very much not called for! It makes it pleasant for the rest of her to have her around, false self or not. In any case, the False Self is not a structure that should be unthinkingly denigrated. All of us need protective defences and devices against hurt. Some developments of the self are primarily defensive, deriving from the need to carry on when life no longer feels like a continuous stream of satisfying (or at least manageable) experiences. In the analysis of a False Personality the fact must be recognized that the analyst can only talk to the False Self of the patient about the patient’s True Self. It is as if a nurse brings a child, and at first the analyst discusses the child’s problem, and the child is not directly contacted. Analysis does not start until the nurse has left the child with the analyst, and the child has become able to remain with the analyst and has started to play. Normal healthy development starts with a strong biologically determined attachment to a mother figure, while exploration of the environment comes naturally at a later stage, exactly because the growing young individual feels secure and safe, not terrified, starving or desperate. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
Lack of secure attachment forces the immature organism into action, but the action is accompanied by terror and stereotyping. Real understanding is lack when the infant has had no opportunity for a leisurely and secure playful exploratory phase, during which it has a chance to familiarize itself gradually with the fascinating World of other people and things. Mental representations of the self-in-the-World will have had to form prematurely for the sake of avoiding distress; because of this, a lot of enriching connections which might otherwise have been linked to these representations, will be missing. If the baby has been too worried to linger and enjoy, the adult will think, “Never mind the sunset, let’s go home before something goes wrong.” We ding either that individuals live creatively and feel that life is worth living, or else that they cannot live creatively and are doubtful about the value of living. This variable in human beings is directly related to the quality and quantity of environmental provision at the beginning of each baby’s living experience. Some unfortunate people have almost no complex ego-functioning, they just react. As soon as a need appears or an alarm is signalled, the instant any meaning or pattern begins to emerge, they respond with scarcely a moment of reflection. Premature development of the ego-functions means doing too much, being too little. Premature ego-development is experiences as a continual pressure to respond and react, a sense of straining. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
In many ways similar to ecstatic destructiveness is the chronic dedication of a person’s whole life to hate and destructiveness. Not a momentary state as in ecstasies, it has nevertheless the function of taking hold of the whole person, of unifying one in the worship of one goal: to destroy. This state is a permanent idolatry of the god of destruction; one’s devotee has, as it were, given over one’s life to him. Some people have a special pleasures in destruction, thus they can feel in the midst of the daily pain an absorbing pleasure in seeing how the baggage of ideas and values has diminished, how the arsenal of idealisms has been ground piece by piece until nothing remains but a bundle of flesh with raw nerves; nerves that like taut strings renders each tune vibrantly and doubly so in the thin air of isolation. These people want power. They want an aim that fills their day, they want life with all the sweetness of this World, they want t know that the sacrifices are worth while. People who find pleasure in destructiveness do not fight so that the nation is happy, they fight to force it into its line of fate. Their intense masochism by which they make themselves a willing subject of a higher power is fueled by a unifying force of hate and the wish for destruction that they worship something they are willing to give their lives for. These types of individuals do not want to forget the pain they suffered for they believe forgetting will damn them. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
By visualizing hurt and pain from the past every day and every hour, it creates a potent hate destructive people thrive on. They do not want to forget any humiliation, and slighting, any arrogant gesture, they want to think of every meanness done to them, every word that caused them pain and was meant to cause pain. They want to remember every face and every experience and every enemy. They want to load their whole life with the whole disgusting dirt, with this a piled-up mass of disgusting memories. They do not want to forget; but the little good that happened to them, that they want to forget. They hate not only their enemies, but they hate life itself. This is very clear from their disposition and how they feel about others, the environment, and animals. These types of individuals feel utterly unrelated and unresponsive to anybody or anything alive. One condition of their worship of hate is because their whole World had been broken down, morally and socially. Their thirst for revenge, the meaninglessness of their present existence, their social uprootedness, goes far to explain their worship of hate. What triggers the effect of their destructive behaviour? A person may first react with defensive aggression against a threat; by this behaviour one has shed some of the conventional inhibitions to aggressive behaviour. This makes it easier for others kinds of aggressiveness, such as destruction and cruelty, to be unleashed. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
Once this aggressive destruction is unleashed, it may lead to a kind of chain reaction in which destructiveness becomes so intense that when a critical mass is reached, the result is a state of ecstasis in a person, and particularly in a group. There is so much more to psychology than most people realize. And while it is important to be kind and show respect to others, there are just some people we should stay away from. People also have to realize that they cannot fix others and it is not always a great idea to reach out to others it pain, they may be baiting you into a situation that allow them to attach their pain and darkness to you and they may never want to let go. Therefore, follow the usual rules. Do not talk to strangers, and if someone makes you uncomfortable, stay away from them. We are creating and using up ideas and images at a faster and faster pace. Knowledge, like people, places, things, and organizational forms, is becoming disposable. If our inner images of reality appear to be turning over more and more rapidly, one reason may well be an increase in the rate at which image-laden messages are being hurled at our senses. Little effort has been made to investigate this scientifically, but there is evidence that we are increasing the exposure of the individual to image-bearing stimuli. The external environment showers stimuli upon us. Signals originating outside ourselves—sound waves, light, et cetera—strike our sensory organs. Once perceived, these signals are converted, through a still mysterious process, into symbols of reality, into images. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
The waves of coded information turn into violent breakers and come at a faster and faster clip, pounding at us, seeking entry, as it were, to our nervous system. Many schools of thought encourage us to shift the responsibility for our behaviour from our own shoulders to some inherent necessity in the nature of human life, and thus, indirectly, to the Creator. Popular forms of this view are the evolutionary doctrine that what we call badness is an unavoidable legacy from our animal ancestors, or the idealistic doctrine that it is merely a result of our being finite. Now Christianity, if I have understood the Pauline epistles, does admit that perfect obedience to the moral law, which we find written in our hearts and perceive to be necessary even on the biological level, is not in fact possible to humans. This would raise a real difficulty about our responsibility if perfect obedience had any practical relation at all to the lives of most of us. Some degree of obedience which you and I have failed to attain in the last twenty-four hours is certainly possible. The ultimate problem must not be used as one more means of evasion. Most of us are less urgently concerned with the Pauline question than with William Law’s simple statement: “If you will here stop and ask yourselves why you are not as pious as the primitive Christians were, your own heart will tell you, that it is neither through ignorance nor inability, but purely because you never thoroughly intended it.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
If our depravity were total, we should not know ourselves to be depraved, and partly because experience shows us so much goodness in human nature. Nor is there a universal gloom. The emotion of shame has been valued not as an emotion but because of the insight to which it leads. I think that insight should be permanent in each human’s mind: but whether the painful emotions that attend it should be encouraged, is a technical problem of spiritual direction on which I have little cause to speak. My own idea, for what it is worth, is that all sadness which is not either arising from the repentance of a concrete sin and hastening towards concrete amendment or restitution, or else arising from pity and hastening to active assistance, is simply bad; and I think we all sin by needlessly disobeying he apostolic injunction to “rejoice” as much as by anything else. Humility, after the first shock, is a cheerful virtue: it is the high minded unbeliever, desperately trying in the teeth of repeated disillusions to retain one’s faith in human nature, who is really sad. I have been aiming at an intellectual, not an emotional, effect: I have been trying to make the reader believe that we actually are, at present, creatures whose character must be, in some respects, a horror to God, as it is, when we really see it, a horror to ourselves. This I believe to be a fact: and I notice that the holier a human is, the more fully one is aware of that fact. Perhaps you have imagined that his humility in the saints is a pious illusion at which God smile. That is a most dangerous error. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
It is theoretically dangerous, because it makes you identify a virtue (id est, a perfection) with an illusion (id est, an imperfection), which must be nonsense. It is practically dangerous because in encourages a human to mistake one’s first insights into one’s own corruption for the first beginnings of a halo round one’s own silly head. No, depend upon it; when the saints say that they—even they—are vile, they are recording truth with scientific accuracy. The principle of perfection is a fascinating concept. There are two variants: in the first it is the sole principle of a teleological theory directing society to arrange institutions and to define the duties and obligations of individuals so as to maximize the achievement of human excellence in art, science, and culture. The principle obviously is more demanding the high the relevant ideal is pitched. Humankind must continually strive to produce great individuals. We give values to our lives by working for the good of highest specimens. For the questions is this: how can your life, the individual life, retain the highest value, the deepest significance? Only by your living for the good of the rarest and most valuable specimens. The second variant is a more moderate doctrine in which perfection is accepted as but one standard among several in n intuitionist theory. The principle is to be balanced against others by intuition. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
The extent to which such a view is perfectionist depends, then, upon the weight given to the claims of excellence and culture. If for example it is maintained that in themselves the achievements of the Greeks in philosophy, science, and art justified the ancient practice of slavery (assuming that this practice was necessary for these achievement), surely the conception is highly perfectionist. Th requirements of perfection override the strong claims of liberty. On the other hand, one may use the criterion simply to limit the redistribution of wealth and income under a constitutional regime. In this case it serves as a counterpoise to egalitarian ideas. Thus it may be said that distribution should indeed be more equal if this is essential for meeting the basic needs of those less favoured and only diminishes the enjoyments and pleasures of those better off. However, the greater happiness of the less fortunate does not in general justify curtailing the expenditures required to preserve cultural values. These forms of life have greater intrinsic worth than the lesser pleasures, however widely the latter are enjoyed. Under normal conditions a certain minimum of social resources must be kept aside to advance the ends of perfection. The only exception is when these claims clash with the demands of the basic needs. Thus given improving circumstances, the principle of perfection acquires an increasing weight relative to a greater satisfaction of desire. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
No doubt many have accepted perfectionism in this intuitionist form. It allows for a range of interpretations and seems to express a far more reasonable view than the strict perfectionist theory. Persons in the original position are asked to consider which principles one would select for the basic structure of society, but one must select as if one had no knowledge ahead of time what position one would end up having in that society. This choice is made from behind a “veil of ignorance,” which prevents one from knowing the individual’s ethnicity, social status, gender, and crucially, the individual’s idea of how to lead a god life. Ideally, this would force participants to select principles impartially and rationally. Individuals in the original position take no interest in one another’s interests, they know that they have (or may have) certain moral and religious interests and other cultural ends which they cannot put in jeopardy. Moreover, they are assumed to be committed to different conceptions of the good and they think that they are entitled to press their claims on one another to further their separate aims. The parties do not share a conception of the good by reference to which the fruition of their powers or even the satisfaction of their desires can be evaluated. They do not have an agreed criterion of perfection that can be used as a principle for choosing between institutions. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
If it did not lead to a loss of freedom altogether to advance many of one’s spiritual ends, to acknowledge any such standard would be, in effect, to accept a principle that might lead to a lesser religious or other liberty. If the standard of excellence is reasonably clear, the parties have no way of knowing that their claims may not fall before the higher social goal of maximizing perfect. Thus is seems that the only understanding that the persons in the original position can reach is that everyone should have the greatest equal liberty consistent with a similar liberty for others. They cannot risk their freedom by authorizing a standard of value to define what is to be maximized by teleological principle of justice. Very often it is beyond question that the work of one person is superior to that of another. Indeed, the freedom and well-being of individuals, when measured by the excellence of their activities and works, is vastly different in value. This is true not only of actual performance but of potential performance as well. Comparison of intrinsic value can obviously be made; and although the standard of perfection is not a principle of justice, judgments of value have an important place in human affairs. They are not necessarily so vague that they must fail as a workable basis for assigning rights. The argument is rather that in view of their disparate aims the parties have no reason to adopt the principle of perfection given the conditions of the original position. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
In order to arrive at the ethic of perfectionism, we should have to attribute to the parties a prior acceptance of some natural duty, say the duty to develop human persons of a certain style and aesthetic grace, and to advance the pursuit of knowledge and the cultivation of the arts. However, this assumption would drastically alter the interpretation of the original position. While justice as fairness allows that in a well-ordered society the values of excellence are recognized, the human perfections are to be pursed within the limits of the principle of free associations. Persons join together to further their cultural and artistic interests in the same way that they form religious communities. They do not use coercive apparatus of the state to win for themselves a greater liberty or larger distributive shares on the grounds that their activities are of more intrinsic value. Perfectionism is denied as a political principle. Thus the social resources necessary to support associations dedicated to advancing the arts and sciences and culture generally are to be won as a fair return for services rendered, or from such voluntary contributions as citizens wish to make, all within a regime regulated by the two principle of justice. On the contract doctrines, then, equal liberty of citizens does not presuppose that the ends of different persons have the same intrinsic value, nor that their freedom and well-being is of the same worth. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
It is postulated though that the parties are moral persons, rational individuals with a coherent system of ends and a capacity for a sense of justice. Since they have the requisite defining properties, it would be superfluous to add that the parties are equally moral persons. We can say if we wish that humans have equal dignity, meaning by this simply that they all satisfy the conditions of moral personality expressed by the interpretation of the initial contractual situation. And being alike in this respect, they are to be treated as the principles of justice require. Each person has the same indefeasible claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme of liberties for all; social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: they are to be attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity; they are to be to the greatest benefit of the least-advantaged members of society. However, none of this implies that their activities and accomplishments are of equal excellence. To think this is to conflate the notion of moral personality with the various perfections that fall under the concept of value. Persons’ being of equal value is not necessary for equal liberty. Their being of equal value is not sufficient either. Sometimes it is said that equality of basic rights follows from the equal capacity of individuals for the higher forms of life; but it is not clear why this should be so. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
Intrinsic worth is a notion falling under the concept of value, and whether equal liberty or some other principle is appropriate depends upon the conception of right. Now the criterion of perfection insists that rights in basic structure be assigned so as to maximize the total of intrinsic value. Presumably the configuration of rights and opportunities enjoyed by individuals affects the degree to which they bring to fruition their latest powers and excellences. However, it does not follow that an equal distribution of basic freedom is the best solution. The situation resembles that of classical utilitarianism: we require postulates parallel to the standard assumptions. Thus even if the latent abilities of individuals were similar, unless the assignment of right is governed by a principle of diminishing marginal value (estimated in this case by the criteria for excellence), equal rights would not be insured. Indeed, unless there are bountiful resources, the sum of value might be best increased by very unequal rights and opportunities favouring a few. Doing this is not unjust n the perfectionist view provided that it is necessary to produce a greater sum of human excellence. Now a principle of diminishing marginal value is certainly questionable, although perhaps not so much as that of equal value. There is little reason to suppose that, in general, rights and resources allocated to encourage and to cultivate highly talented persons contribute less and less to the total beyond some point in the relevant range. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
To the contrary, this contribution may grow (or stay consistent) indefinitely. The principle of perfection provides, then, an insecure foundation for the equal liberty and it would presumably depart widely from the difference principle. The assumptions required for equality seem extremely implausible. To find a firm basis for equal liberty, it seems that we must reject the traditional teleological principles, both perfectionism and utilitarian. Justice as fairness requires us to show that modes of conduct interfere with the basic liberties of others or else violate some obligation or natural duty before they can be restricted. For it is when arguments to this conclusion fail that individuals are tempted to appeal to perfectionist criteria in an ad hoc manner. When it is said, for example, that certain kinds of relations involving pleasures of the flesh are degrading and shameful, and should be prohibited on this basis, if only for the sake of the individuals in question irrespective of their wishes, it is often because a reasonable case cannot be made in terms of the principle of justice. Instead we fall back on notions of excellence. However, in these matters we are likely to be influenced by subtle aesthetic preferences and personal feelings of propriety; and individual, class, and group differences are often sharp and irreconcilable. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
Since these uncertainties plague perfectionist criteria and jeopardize individual liberty, it seems best to rely entirely on the principles of justice which have a more definite structure. Thus even in its intuitionistic form, perfectionism would be rejected as not defining a feasible basis of social justice. Eventually of course we would have to check whether the consequences of doing without a standard of perfection are acceptable, since offhand it may seem as if justice as fairness does not allow enough scope for ideal-regarding considerations. Yet, public funds for the arts and sciences may be provided through the exchange branch. In this instance there are no restrictions on the reasons, citizens may have for imposing upon themselves the requisite taxes. They may assess the merits of these public goods on perfectionist principles, since the coercive machinery of government is used in this case only to overcome the problems of isolation and assurance, and no one is taxed without one’s consent. The criterion of excellence does not sere here as a political principle; and so, if it wishes, a well-ordered society can devote a sizable fraction of its resources to expenditures of this kind. However, while the claims of culture can be met in this way, the principles of justice do not permit subsidizing universities and institutes, or opera and the theater, on the grounds that these institutions are intrinsically valuable, and that those who engage in them are to be supported even at some significant expense to others who do not receive compensating benefits. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
Taxation for these purposes can be justified only as promoting directly or indirectly the social conditions that secure the equal liberties and as advancing in the appropriate way the long-term interests of the least advantaged. This seems to authorize those subsidies the justice of which is least in dispute, and so in these cases anyway there is no evident need for a principle of perfection. The contract doctrine may serve well enough as an alternative moral conception. When we check its consequences for institutions, it appears to match our common sense convictions more accurate than its traditional rivals, and to extrapolate to preciously unsettled cases in a reasonable way. Outreach is one essential task of Christ’s people, and among them there will always be those especially gifted for evangelism. However, the most successful work of outreach would be the work of inreach that that turns people, wherever they are, into lights in the darkened World. A simple goal for the leaders of a particular group would be to bring all those in attendance to understand clearly what it means to be a disciple of Jesus and to be solidly committed to discipleship in their whole life. That is, when asked who they are, they first words out of their mouth would be, “I am an apprentice of Jesus Christ.” This goal would have to be approached very gently and lovingly and patiently with existing groups, where the people involved have not understood this to be part of their membership commitment. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
We are not talking about purifying the church, by getting all the “tares” or (Matthew 13). Even tares, real or apparent, are to be loved and served—and called to apprenticeship to Jesus. “Purifying” the church, on the other hand, has always been part of the illusion of being perfectly “right.” Instead of pursing that illusion, we are trying to clarify the local congregation itself in the light of Christ’s call to it. We are trying to make clear what it is that even a false professor must profess in order to participate fully in the congregation. They would, namely have to profess to be disciples or apprentices of Jesus. However, the Lord is the only purifier of groups, and one has one’s own schedule for it. Our task is to be fruitful wheat and to cultivate others to be so. Who we are in our inmost depths is the most basic issue. God’s first concern is not what the church does, it is what the church is. Being must always precede doing, for what we do will be according to what we are. To understand the moral character of God’s people is a primary essential in understanding the nature of the church. As Christians we are to be a moral example to the World, reflecting the character of Jesus Christ. In our present context, to be sure, serious work will have to be done, and there is a strong likelihood of failure. The genuine intuition gets mixed up with guesses and speculations about the matter, with reasonings and ruminations about it. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
One’s intuition is unavoidably condition by one’s own personality, inevitably shaped as it is because one is the kind of human one is. It is not only one’s wishes and hopes which interfere with correct receptivity to intuition but also one’s fears and suspicions. One’s normal everyday mind is slow to heed the Higher Power of God and confused in interpretation of the prompting received. One whose mind is too sharply critical to be sensitive to finer mental radiations may fail to recognize the inner happening. This may be because one oneself is not sufficiently in tune with the high frequency represented by God, or it may be because one is too impatient and wants something which in one’s case can only be had with sufficient time. When intuition points to something unwelcome to the ego, the intellect looks for and usually finds an excuse to reject it. A human who really and sincerely wants to find the Truth should be on the lookout for hints, clues, and signs which would be useful to one’s Quest, for they constitute the response from God to one’s aspiration. God can furnish one with the Truth and puts these signals in one’s way. Manifestation implies the necessity of manifesting. However, it might be objected that any sort of necessity existing in the divine equally implies its insufficiency. The answer is that the number One may become aware of itself as being one only be becoming aware of the presence of Two—itself and another. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
However, the figure Nought is under no compulsion. Here we have a mathematical hint towards understanding the riddle of manifestation. Mind as Void is the supreme inconceivable unmanifesting ultimate whereas the World-Mind is forever throwing forth the Universe-series as a second, an “other” wherein it becomes self-aware. God-active, the Unseen Power, is (for us humans) the World-Mind. God-in-repose is Mind. The creative power or energy which comes from World-Mind is not the ultimate essence-consciousness which is God. It is needful to point out the difference between the divine essence and the divine energies. The latter may be several and varied, but the former is always single. It is the difference between Mind as it is in itself, and Mind as it expresses through the cosmos. It would, however, be a mistake to consider the World-Mind as one entity and Mind as another separate from it. It would be truer to consider World-Mind as the active function of Mind. Mind cannot be separated from its powers. The two are one. In its quiescent state it is simply Mind. In its active state it is World-Mind. Mind is in it inmost transcendent nature is the inscrutable mystery of Mysteries but when expressing itself in act and immanent in the Universe, it is the World Mind. We may find in the attributes of the manifested God—that is, the World-Mind—the only indications of the quality, existence, and character of the unmanifest Godhead that it is possible for human to comprehend all. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
All this is a mystery which is perhaps forever will remain an incomprehensible paradox. Mind is active and mind is quiescence are not two separate beings, but two aspects of one and the same being as they appear to human inquiry. Mind active expressed itself in the heart of humans as one’s higher self and in the Universe as the World-Mind. The World-Mind is a radiation of the forever incomprehensible Mind. It is the essence of all things and all beings, from the smallest to the largest. Mind id the Real; matter is the appearance it takes on. The Universe comes by degrees out of the ultimate Being, beyond which nothing is or could possibly be. It is Mind, measureless, with a Power equally measureless. World-Mind is this power in operation, creating, maintaining, and in the end destroying what it has brought forth. If it be true that absolute divine Mind knows nothing of the Universe, nothing of mortal humans, then it is also true that the World-Mind, which is its other aspect, does know them. May God of my people hear my prayers; as we go to the polls to choose our leaders, may it be with wisdom. Lord, please bless my country. Please guide its governors, show them the path to take, make their actions conform to the way of nature. Please knit together the many peoples into one tribe; unite us, make us a family, as indeed we are under your loving gaze. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
God’s chief hosts are holy beings that exalt the Almighty and continually declare God’s glory and holiness. Be Thou praised, O Lord our God, for the excellence of Thy handiwork and for the luminaries which Thou hast made and which render Thee glory. The Heavens are envisioned as the scene of a symphony of worship and song in which all the celestial beings, obedient servants of the divine will, join in a harmonious melody of praise to the Creator. Be Thou blessed, O our Rock, our King and Redeemer; praised by Thy name forever, Creator of ministering beings who stand in the heights of the Universe and with awe proclaim in unison the words of the living God and everlasting King. All of them act with harmonious accord, with purity of purpose and with united strength to perform reverently the will of their Creator. They all break forth into song of pure and holy praise, while they bless, glorify, and proclaim the sovereignty of the name of God, the great, mighty, awe-inspiring King; holy is He. They all pledge before one another to accept willingly the rule of the Kingdom of God. Each grants leave to the other to join in hallowing their Creator. In tranquil spirit with pure speech and sacred melody, they all exclaim in unison and reverently declare: Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole Earth is full of His glory. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
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It Aims to Get People into Heaven Rather than Get Heaven into People!
Every person carries within one’s head a mental model of the World—a subjective representation of external reality. This model consists of tens upon tends of thousands of images. These may be as simple as a mental picture of clouds scudding across the sky, or big red and pink hearts. We many think of this mental model as a fantastic internal warehouse, an image emporium in which we store our inner portraits. People say Valentine’s Day is just a capitalistic holiday to make money, but I think Valentine’s Day is important. It gives people an excuse to be happy and express their love for others, a reason to buy gifts for someone else, and an occasion to get dressed up and feel young again. We have some much to grieve, and Valentine’s Day, much like other holidays, gives us a reason to come together, thank God we are alive, unite with others, and express love. The news, on the other hand, wants to make us sad, scared and fear for our safety. The government got something right. Regardless of if it is a federal holiday, or just a symbolic one, it is important to slow down, celebrate, and appreciate the beauty in our lives. Valentine’s Day also teaches children to share and it makes them happy by giving them art projects to work on. It is nice for everyone to take a break from doom and gloom and express love for one another. This is, after all, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
Any person’s mental model will contain some images that approximate reality closely, along with others that are distorted or inaccurate. However, for the person to function, even to survive, the model must bear some overall resemblance to reality. Every reproduction of the external World, constructed and used as a guide to actions by an historical society, must in some degree correspond to that reality. Otherwise the society could no have maintained itself; its members if acting in accordance with totally untrue propositions, would not have succeeded in making even the simplest tools and in securing therewith food and shelter from the external World. No human’s model of reality is a purely personal product. While some of one’s images are based on firsthand observation, an increasing proportion of them today are based on messages beamed to us by the mass media and people around us. Thus the degree of accuracy in one’s model to some extent reflects the general knowledge in society. And as experience and scientific research pump more refined and accurate knowledge into society, new concepts, new ways of thinking, supersede, contradict, and render obsolete ideas and World views. If society itself were standing still, there might be little pressure on the individual to update one’s own supply of images, to bring them in line with the latest knowledge available in the society. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
So long as the society in which one is embedded is stable or slowly changing, the images on which one bases one’s behaviour can also change slowly. However, to function in a fast-changing society, to cope with swift and complex change, the individua must turn over one’s own stock of images at a rate that in some way correlates with the pace of change. One’s model must be updated. To the degree that it lags, one’s responses to change become inappropriate; one becomes increasingly thwarted, ineffective. Thus there is intense pressure on the individual to keep up with the generalized pace. Today change is so swift and relentless in the techno-societies that yesterday’s truths suddenly become today’s fictions, and the most highly skilled and intelligent members of society admit difficulty in keeping up with the deluge of new knowledge—even in extremely narrow fields. You cannot possibly keep in touch with all you want to. I spend 25 percent to 50 percent of my working time trying to keep up with what is going. With all the information and technology coming out, it is hard for almost anyone to wade through the ocean of information. In fact, with all the high technology cars coming out, I wonder how auto science engineers are able to keep up-to-date with how to repair them? #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
New knowledge either extends or outmodes the old. In either case it compels those for whom it is relevant to reorganize their store of images. It forces them to relearn today what they thought they knew yesterday. Thus Lord James, vice-chancellor of the University of York, says, “I took my first degree in chemistry at Oxford.” Looking at the questions asked in chemistry exams at Oxford today, he continues, “I realized that not only an I not do them, but that I never could have done them, since at least two-thirds of the questions involved knowledge that simply did not exist when I graduated.” And Dr. Robert Hilliard, once the top educational broadcasting specialist for the Federal Communications Commission, presses the point further: “At the rate which knowledge is growing, by the time the child born today graduates from college, the amount of knowledge in the World will be four times as great. By the time that same child is fifty years old, it will be thirty-two times as great, and 97 percent of everything known in the World will have been learned since the time one was born.” Granting that definitions of “knowledge” are vague and that such statistics are necessarily hazardous, there still can be no question that the rising tide of new knowledge forces us into ever-narrower specialization and drives us to revise our inner images of reality at ever-faster rates. Nor does this refer merely to abstruse scientific information about physical particles or genetic structure. It applies with equal force to various categories of knowledge that closely affect the everyday life of millions. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
There is a tendency for common sense to suppose that income and wealth, and the good things in life generally, should be distributed accord to moral desert. Justice is happiness according to virtue. While it is recognized that this ideal can never be fully carried out, it is the appropriate conception of distributive justice, at least as a prime facie principle, and society should try to realize it as circumstances permit. Now justice as fairness rejects this conception. Such a principle would not be chosen in the original position. There seems to be no way of defining the requisite criterion in that situation. Moreover, the notion of distribution according to virtues fails to distinguish between moral desert and legitimate expectations. Thus it is true that as persons and groups take part in just arrangements, they acquire claims on one another defined by the publicly recognized rules. Having done various things encouraged by the existing arrangements, they now have certain rights, and just distributive shares honor these claims. A just scheme, then, answers to what humans are entitled to; it satisfies their legitimate expectations as founded upon social institutions. However, what they are entitled to is not proportional to nor dependent upon their intrinsic worth. The principles of justice that regulate the basic structure and specify the duties and obligations of individuals do not mention moral desert, and there is no tendency for distributive shares to correspond to it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
This contention is borne out by the preceding account of common-sense precepts and their role in pure procedural justice. For example, in determining wages a competitive economy gives weight to the precept of contribution. However, as we have seen, the extent of one’ s contribution (estimated by one’s marginal productivity) depends upon supply and demand. Surely a person’s moral worth does not vary according to how many offer similar skills, or happen to want what one can produce. No one supposes that when someone’s abilities are less in demand or have deteriorated (as in the case of singers) one’s moral deservingness undergoes a similar shift. All of this is perfectly obvious and has long been agree to. It simply reflects the fact noted before that it is one of the fixed points of our moral judgments that no one deserves one’s place in the distribution of natural assets any more than one deserves one’s initial starting place in society. Moreover, none of the precepts of justice aims at rewarding virtue. The premiums earned by scarce natural talents, for example, are to cover the costs of training and to encourage the efforts of learning, as well as to direct ability to where it best furthers the common interest. The distributive shares that result do not correlate with moral worth, since the initial endowment of natural assets and the contingences of their growth and nature in early life are arbitrary from a moral point of view. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
The precept which seems intuitively to come closet to rewarding moral desert is that of distribution according to effort, or perhaps better, conscientious effort. Once again, however, it seems clear that the effort a person is willing to make is influenced by one’s natural abilities and skills and the alternatives open to one. The better endowed are more likely, others things equal, to strive conscientiously, and there seems to be no way to discount for their greater good fortune. The idea of rewarding desert is impracticable. And certainly to the extent that the precept of need is emphasized, moral worth is ignored. Nor does the basic structure tend to balance the precepts of justice so as to achieve the requisite correspondence behind the scenes. It is regulated by the two principles of justice which define other aims entirely. The same conclusion may be reached in another way. In the preceding remarks the notion of moral worthy as distinct from a person’s claims based upon one’s legitimate expectations has not been explained. Suppose, then, that we define this notion and show that it has no correlation with distributive shares. We have only to consider a well-ordered society, that is, a society in which institutions are just and this fact is publicly recognized. Its members also have a strong sense of justice, an effective desire to comply with the existing rules and to give one another that to which they are entitled. In this case we may assume that everyone is of equal moral worth. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
However, the equal moral worth of persons does not entail that distributive shares are equal. Each is to receive what the principles of justice say one is entitled to, and these do not require equality. The essential point is that the concept of moral worth does not provide a first principle of distributive justice. This is because it cannot be introduced until after the principles of justice and of natural duty and obligation have been acknowledged. Once these principles are on and, moral worth can be defined as having a sense of justice; the virtues can be characterized as desires or tendencies to act upon the corresponding principles. Thus the concept of moral worth is secondary to those of right and justice, and it plays no role in substantive definition of distributive shares. For a society to organize itself with the aim of rewarding moral desert as a first principle would be like having the institution of property in order to punish thieves. The criterion to each according to one’s virtue would not, then, be chosen in the original position. Since the parties desire to advance their conceptions of the good, they have no reason for arranging their institutions so that distributive shares are determined by moral desert, even if they could find an antecedent standard for its definition. In a well-ordered society individuals acquire claims to share of the social product by doing certain things encouraged by the existing arrangements. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
The legitimate expectations that arise are the other side, so to speak, of the principle of fairness and the natural duty of justice. For in the way that one has a duty to uphold just arrangements, and an obligation to do one’s part when one has accepted a position in them, so a person who has complied with the scheme and done one’s share has a right to be treated accordingly by others. They are bound to meet one’s legitimate expectations. Thus when just economic arrangements exist, the claims of individuals are properly settled by reference t the rules and precepts (with their respective weights) which these practices take as relevant. It is incorrect to say that just distributive shares reward individuals according to their moral worth. However, what we can say is that, in the traditional phrase, a just scheme gives each person one’s due: that is, it allots to each what one is entitled to as defined by the scheme itself. The principles of justice for institutions and individuals establish that doing this is fair. Even though a person’s claims are regulated by the existing rules, we can still make a distinction between being entitled to something and deserving it in a familiar although nonmoral sense. To illustrate, after a game one often says that the losing side deserved to win. Here one does not mean that the victors are not entitled to claim the championship, or whatever spoils go to the winner. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
Like the controversy Kanye West created when he interrupted the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards (VMAs), by cutting off Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech for winning the award for Best Female Video category, when he thought that Beyonce should have won because, “Beyonce had one of the best videos of all time!” one is not saying the other team or individual should not have won. One is, however saying that the losing entity displayed to a higher degree that skills and qualities that the game or industry calls forth, and the exercise of which gives the sport or industry its appeal. Therefore the losers truly deserved to win but lost out as a result of bad luck, or from other contingencies that caused the contest to miscarry. Similarly even the best economic arrangements will not always lead to the more preferred outcomes. The claims that individuals actually acquire inevitably deviate more or less widely in favoured positions, for example, may not have to a higher degree than others the desired qualities and abilities. All this is evident enough. Its bearing here is that although we can indeed distinguish between the claims that existing arrangements required us to honor, given what individuals have done and how things have turned out, and the claims that would have resulted under more ideal circumstances, none of this implies that distributive shares should be in accordance with moral worth. Even when things happen in the best way, there is still no tendency for distribution and virtue to coincide. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
No doubt some may still contend that distributive shares should match moral worth at least to the extent that this is feasible. They may believe that unless those who are better off have superior moral character, their having greater advantages is an affront to our sense of justice. Now this opinion may arise from thinking of distributive justice as somehow the opposite of retributive justice. It is true that in a reasonably well-ordered society those who are punished for violating just laws have normally done something wrong. This is because the purpose of the criminal law is to uphold basic natural duties, those which forbid us to injure other persons in their life and limb, or to deprive them of their liberty and property, and punishments are to serve this end. They are not simply a scheme of taxes and burdens designed to put a price on certain forms of conducts and in this way to guide human’s conduct for mutual advantage. If the acts proscribed by penal statues were never done, it would be far better. Thus a propensity to commit such acts is a mark of bad character, and in a just society legal punishments will only fall upon those who display these faults. It is clear that the distribution of economic and social advantages is entirely different. These arrangements are not the converse, so to speak, of the criminal law, so that just as the one punishes certain offenses, the other rewards moral worth. The function of unequal distributive shares is to cover the costs of training and education to attract individuals to places and associations where they are most needed from a social point of view, and so on. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
Assuming that everyone accept the propriety of self—or group-interested motivation duly regulated by a sense of justice, each decides to do those things that best accord with one’s aims. Variations in wages and income and the perquisites of position are simply to influence these choices so that the end results accords with efficiency and justice. In a well-ordered society there would be no need for the penal law expect insofar as the assurance problem made in necessary. The question of criminal justice belongs for the most part to partial compliance theory, whereas the account of distributive shares belongs to strict compliance theory and so to the consideration of the ideal scheme. To think of distributive and retributive justice as converses of one another is completely misleading and suggests a different justification for distributive shares than then one they in fact have. When we fail to center everything on becoming people who have the character of Christ, then we become means and angry Christians. As a leader of a Christian organization, I often feel the burn of the meanness within the Christian community, a mean-spirited suspicion and judgment that mirrors the broader culture. Every Christian leader I know feels it. It is difficult to be Christian in a secular World. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
However, you know, it is sometimes more difficult to be a leader in Christian circles. There too you can be vilified for just the slightest move that is displeasing to someone. This is one of the most common points of commiseration among our leaders. We must realize there is an answer as to why some Christians are so man. And we must face this answer and effectively deal with it or Satan will sustain his stranglehold on spiritual transformation in local congregations. Some Christians are routinely taught by example and word that it is more important to be right (always in terms of their beloved vessel, or tradition) than it is to be Christlike. In fact, being right licenses many people to be mean, and, indeed, requires one to be mean—righteously mean, of course. It is believed that one must be hard on people who are wrong, and especially if they are in positions of Christian leadership. They deserve nothing better. This is part of what I call the practice of “condemnation engineering.” A fundamental mistake of the conservative side of the American church today, and much of the churches in the New World, is that it takes as its basic goal to get as many people as possible ready to die and go to Heaven. It aims to get people into Heaven rather than to get Heaven into people. This of course requires that these people, who are going to be “in,” must be right on what is basic. You cannot really quarrel with that. However, it turns out that to be right on “what is basic” is to be right in terms of the particular church vessel or tradition in question, not in terms of Christlikeness. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
Now, the project thus understood and practiced is self-defeating. It implodes upon itself because it creates groups of people who may be ready to die, but clearly are not ready to live. They rarely can get along with another, much less those “outside.” Often this most intimate relations are tangles of reciprocal harm, coldness, and resentment. They have found ways of being “Christian” without being Christlike. As a result they actually fall short of getting as many people are possible ready to go to Heaven, because the lives of the “converted” testify against the reality of “the life that is life indeed,” reports 1 Timothy 6.19. The way to get as many people into Heaven as you can is to get Heaven into as many people are you can—that is, to follow the path of genuine spiritual transformation of full-throttled discipleship to Jesus Christ. When we are counting up results we also need to keep in mind the multitudes of people (surrounded by churches) who will not be in Heaven because they have never, to their knowledge, seen the reality of Christ in a living human being. The Christian minister is frequently in the position of a lawyer who states to the court the case one intends to prove (that would be the biblical picture of life from above), and then calls one’s witnesses (professing Christians), who contradict their testimony (their life) every point one said one would prove. One can have no greater sign of confirmed pride than when one thinks one is humble enough. Love may cause pain to its object, but only on the supposition that that object needs alteration to become fully lovable. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
Now why do we humans need to much alteration? The Christian answer—that we have used our free will to become very bad—is so well known that it hardly needs to be stated. However, to bring this doctrine into real life in the minds of modern humans, and even of modern Christians, is very hard. The consciousness is supposed to deliver humans from the fear of eternal punishment. It was against this background that the Gospel appeared as good news. It brought news of possible healing to humans who knew that they were morally ill. However, all this has changed. Christianity now has to preach the diagnosis—in itself very bad news—before it can win a hearing for the cure. There are two principle causes. One is the fact that for about a hundred and fifty years we have so concentrated on one of the virtues— “kindness” or mercy—that most of us do not feel anything except kindness to be really good or anything but cruelty to be really bad. Such disequilibrium of ethical developments are not uncommon, and other ages too have had their pet virtues and curious insensibilities. And if one virtue must be cultivated at the expense of all the rest, none has a higher claim than mercy—for every Christian must reject with detestation that covert propaganda for cruelty which tries to derive mercy out of the World by calling it names such as “Humanitarianism” and “Sentimentality.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
The real trouble is that “kindness” is a quality fatally easy to attribute to ourselves on quite inadequate grounds. If nothing happens to be annoying an individual in the moment, everyone feels benevolent. Thus a human easily comes to console oneself for all one’s other vices by a conviction that one’s heart is in the right place and that one would not hurt a fly nor take candy from a baby, though in fact one has never made the slightest sacrifice for a fellow creature. We thin we are kind when we are only happy: it is not so easy, on the same grounds, to imagine oneself temperate, chaste, or humble. The second cause is the effect of Psychoanalysis on the public mind, and, in particular, the doctrine of repressions and inhibition. Whatever these doctrines really mean, the impression they have actually left on most people is that the sense of Shame is a dangerous and mischievous thing. We have laboured to overcome that sense of shrinking, that desire to conceal, which either Nature herself or the tradition of almost all humankind has attached to cowardice, unchastity, falsehood, and envy. We are told to “get things out in the open,” not for the sake of self-humiliation, but on the grounds that these “things” are very natural and we need not be ashamed of them. However, unless Christianity is wholly false, the perception of ourselves which we have in moments of shame must be the only true one; and even the Worldly society has usually recognized “shamelessness” as the nadir of the soul. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
In trying to extirpate shame we have broken down one of the ramparts of the human spirit, madly exulting in the work as the Trojans exulted when they broke their walls and pulled the Horse into Troy. I do not know that there is anything to be done but to set about the rebuilding as soon as we can. It is mad work remove hypocrisy by removing the temptation to hypocrisy: the ”frankness” of people sunk below shame is a very cheap forthrightness. However, if one’s own scepticism, sensualism, or materialism does not offer too hard a resistance, the intuition which is working its way to formulation, expression, and understanding may finally gain acceptance. This opens a new cycle for one. If only one heeds its intuitive message, the higher self will not fail one. One will make one’s way to true balance sanity and deep inner calm. Without searching for others, knowing that in oneself God’s representative resides and that this can give the right kind of help, one will depend for self-reliance on an ever-presence. If one cultivates sufficient faith, out of the cosmic mind will come the response to one’s aspirations and, eventually, the answers to one’s questions. To receive this, one must learn to keep a constant vigil for intuitive feelings and messages of the delicate nature, and to trust one’s inner promptings. One’s attention should always have God at its center. By constant prayer and aspiration to one’s higher self, the student will get intuitive promptings from time to time. One should catch them when they appear and yield oneself to them: in this way one will get the necessary guidance from within. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
Once one learns to recognize the intuitive voice, follow its dictates; do not hesitate to conform with them to try to make up an excuse for failing to do so it the guidance is unpalatable. If the seeker will heed this intuitive feeling it may lead one to a clue, a thread by holding which one may grope one’s way to clearer and stronger feeling until it becomes a certainty. If reason, experience, and authority can solve it, whatever be the problem, carry it inwards to the deep still center. However, one must learn to wait in patience for the answer, for the blockage is in you, not in it. A day or a month may pass until the response is felt, thought, or materialized. There is a feeling of scaredness, of holy peace at such moments, and they should be cherished for the precious moment that they are. They contain hints of the communion with the Higher Self, elements of something beyond the ordinary self, and possibilities of transcending the past with its debris of memories and mistakes. In every important move one will seek guidance from the intuitive levels of being as well as from the intellectual. These messages are all formulated by the faculty of intuition. Hence their lofty tone. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
However, the emotions, desires, and intellect—being on a lower level—ignore the message in practice and action. Hence, disobeyed, they bring suffering or disappointment. Sometimes the intuitive bidding of God will be in favour of one’s own private interests but sometimes it will be at variance with them. Where the wakeful consciousness is not easily reached owing to its preoccupations, then the dream consciousness will be more receptive to the message. Sometimes an intuition does not stay behind. It flashes through consciousness for a small fraction of a second and is gone. Unless it is detected and recognized during this quick passage while it is still fresh, we are hardly likely to do so afterwards. Amid the toils and agitations of everyday living, through all the boiler pressures of crisis events, such intuitions can gain entry only with difficulty. Yet we need their help and solace more than we know: we need their stimulus to enkindle fresh hope and more faith. Either a human possesses this intuitive sense or one does not. It cannot be created by argument or analysis. They betray the higher part of themselves every time they resist, reject, or merely ignore the intuitive feelings which come so delicately into consciousness. In the seeming self’s activity, personal willpower is used and personal effort is made. In God’s activity, both these signs are absent. Instead there is a passive receptivity to its voice—intuitions—and obedience to its guidance. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
The self-sufficing World-Mind has nothing to gain for itself by the Universal activity. What could the Supreme Power gain by bringing the World into existence? It is not like the humans who have desires to be satisfied or limitations to be removed. Those who point to the marvellous pattern of the Universe as proof of the existence of Deity, do well; but when they begin to render account of the reasons which induced Deity to turn Himself into myriad souls and to blind their divine sight by involving them into this material Universe, it is time to put on our shoes and walk away. For no philosopher and no theologian, no occultist and no mystic has yet solved this supreme riddle in a truly satisfying manner. World-Mind imagines and objectifies thing and happenings, and humans are within this space-time net. God is within the Universe but unbound by its limitations. God is free in a sense in which no human being is free. For the conflict of motives which precedes every act of human freedom is entirely absent from the acts of God, which are truly spontaneous. No one knows why the Infinite Power must go on incarnating something of Itself in the Universe; everyone can in the end only accept the fact, for the question is answerless. “Hallelujah! Salvation and glory and power belong to our God, for true and just are His judgments,” reports Revelations 19.1. Mothers and Fathers who went before, please watch over my words as I tell the old stories, that they may be passed on rightly. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Please make me today’s link in the chain that reaches on, from nights around the fire beneath American sikes to the end of humanity and beyond. Endowed with might, endowed with everlasting power, they govern all the World. In splendor, lustrously their brightness radiates, their brilliance beautiful throughout the Universe. In rising they rejoice, in setting they exult, awesomely fulfilling their Creator’s will. Glory and honor do they give unto His name; in joyous songs of praise His kingdom they acclaim. God called unto the Sun and it shone forth in light, He looked, and then He formed the figure of the Moon. The Heavenly host, the constellations gave Him praise, and all celestial beings of the Heavenly throne attribute honor, greatness, glory—unto God who rested from all His work, and on the seventh day exalted Himself and ascended the throne of His glory. Adorned in majesty for the day of rest, God called the Sabbath a delight. This is the praise offered by the Sabbath day, the day itself rendered praise saying: A psalm, a song of Sabbath Day. It is good to give thanks unto the Lord. Therefore, let all of God’s creatures glorify and bless Him. Let them all render praise, distinction and greatness unto God, the King and Creator of all, who in His holiness bestoweth rest upon His people of American on the sacred Sabbath day. May Thy name, O Lord our God, be sanctified, and Thy fame, O our King, glorified in Heaven above and on Earth beneath. Be Thou praised, O our Deliverer, for the excellency of Thy handiwork and for the luminaries which Thou hast made and which render Thee glory. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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Any Hypnotist May Invent a Seeming World for You but it Will be Gone in a Few Minutes or Hours!
You can say this for these ready-mixes—the next generation is not going to have any trouble making pies exactly like mother makes. In a society in which instant food, instant education and even instant cities are everyday phenomena, no product is more swiftly fabricated or more ruthlessly destroyed than the instant celebrity. Nations advancing toward super-industrialism sharply step up their output of these “psycho-economic” products. Instant celebrities burst upon the consciousness of millions like an image-bomb—which is exactly what they are. Within less than one year from the time a graceful girl named Paris Hilton took her first walk down the red carpet, millions of human beings around the globe stored mental images of her in their brain. A platinum blonde with dripping wet blue eyes that look like the Arctic Ocean, soft pillow lips, amazing cheek bones, and legs longer than your marriage, exploded into instant celebrityhood circa 2001. Her winsome face and beautiful malnourished figure suddenly appeared on covers of magazines in Britain, American, France, Italy, Japan, China, Africa and other countries. Overnight, Paris eyelashes, mannikins, perfumes, clothes, jewelry, movies, music, real estate and her custom Barbie BMW began to gush from the fad mills. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
Critics pontificated about her social significance. News anchors accorded her the kind of coverage normally reserved for a peace treaty or a papal election. By now, however, many would expect our stored mental images of Paris to have been largely erased. Yet, she has not vanished from public view. She defines reality where celebrity status only lasts for six months nowadays. Her images still grace the New York Times, she has even been featured in Ebony and Vibe, Paris is breaking records and shattering boundaries, she may even take over the World! Not long ago I asked a highly intelligent teenager whether she and her classmates had any heroes. I said, “Do you regard Justin Timberlake, for example, as a hero? (Justin being a singer and actor and a former boyfriend of Britney Spears, I was sure she had heard of him.) The child’s response was revealing. “No,” she said, “he’s too old.” At friend I thought she regarded a man in his forties as being too old to be a hero. Soon I realized this was mistaken. What she meant was that Justin Timberlake’s career had peaked too long ago to be of interest. He has no new exploits. Today Justin Timberlake has receded from the foreground of public attention. In effect, his image has decayed. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
Celebrityhood is a transient state. To be relevant, one has to become a mega star like Reese Witherspoon, Tom Brady, Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Sean Mendez, Beyonce, Meghan Markle, Prince Harry and even Aaliyah is still trending on Twitter and remember in countless new songs. Thousands of “personalities” parade across the stage of contemporary history. Real people, magnified and projected by the mass media, they are stored as images in the millions of peoples or billions of people who have never met them, never spoken to them, never seen them “in person.” They take on a reality almost as (and sometimes even more) intense than that of many people with whom we do have “in-person” relationships. We form relationships with these “vicarious people,” just as we do with friends, neighbours and colleagues. And just as the through-put of real, in-person people in our lives is increasing, and the duration of our average relationship with them decreasing, the same is true of our ties with the vicarious people who populate our mines, but have not become mega celebrities. Their rate of flow-through is influenced by the real rate of change in the World, we find that the British prime ministership has been turning over since 1922 at a rate some 13 percent faster than in the base period of 1721-1922. In sports, the heavyweight boxing championship now changes hands twice as fast as it did during our father’s youth. Events, moving faster, constantly throw new personalities into the charmed circle of celebrityhood, and old images in the mind decay to make way for the new. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
The same might be said for the fictional characters spewed out from the pages of books, from television screens, from digital streaming, theaters, movies, and magazines. No previous generation in history has had so many fictional characters flung at it. We may not even get used to Super-Hero, Captain Nice and Mr. Terrific before they fly off our television screens forever. These vicarious people, both live and fictional, play a significant role in our lives, providing models for behaviour, acting out of us various roles and situations from which we draw conclusions about our own lives. We deduce lessons from their activities, consciously or not. We learn from their triumphs and tribulations. They make it possible for us to “try on” various roles or life styles without suffering the consequences that might attend such experiments in real life. The accelerated flow-through various people cannot contribute to the instability of personality patterns among many real people who have difficulty in finding a suitable life style. These vicarious people, however, are not independent of one another. They preform their roles in a vast, complexly organized “public drama” which is largely a product of the new communications technology. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
This public drama, in which celebrities upstage and replace celebrities at an accelerating rate, has the effect of making leadership more unstable than it would be otherwise. Contretemps, upsets, follies, contests, scandals, make a feast of entertainment or a spinning political roulette wheel. Fads come and go at a dizzying pace. A country like the United States of America has an open public drama, in which new faces appear daily, there is always a contest to steal the show, and almost anything can happen and often does. What we are observing is a rapid turnover of symbolic leaders, which may make incumbent leaders less attractive, especially if the people are not happy with public policy, the jobs report, the economy, housing costs, health care cost, the price of food, utilities, insurances, tax rates, transportation costs, and performance in the stock market. This can be extended, however, into a far more powerful statement: what is happening is not merely a turnover of real people or even fictional characters, but a more rapid turnover of the images and image-structures in our brains. Our relationships with these images of reality, upon which we base our behaviour, are growing, on average, more and more transient. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
If we do not wish to lose it, the intuition first presents itself to us as a fine delicate filament which we must treat tenderly. The entire knowledge system in society is undergoing violent upheaval. The very concepts and codes in terms of which we think are turning over at a furious and accelerating pace. We are increasing the rate at which we must form and forget our images of reality. The fact is that with the knowledge and actual experience of these inner images a way is opened for reason and feeling to gain access to those other images which the teachings of religion offer humankind. Psychology thus does just the opposite of what it is accused of: it provides possible approaches to a better understanding of these things, it open people’s eyes to the real meaning of strict doctrines, and, far from destroying, it throws open an empty house to new inhabitants. I can corroborate this from countless experiences: people belong to creeds of all imaginable kinds, who had played the apostate or cooled off in their faith, have found a new approach to their old truths, not a few Catholics among them. Even a Parsee found the way back to the Zoroastrian fire-temple, which should bear witness to the objectivity of my point of view. However, this objectivity is just what my psychology is most blamed for: it is said not to decide in favour of this or that religious doctrine. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
Without prejudice to my own subjective convictions I should like to raise the question: Is it not thinkable that when one refrains from setting oneself up as an arbiter mundi and, deliberately renouncing all subjectivism, cherishes on the contrary the belief, for instance, that God has expressed Himself in many languages and appeared in divers forms and that all these statements are true—is it not thinkable, I say, that this too is a decision? The objection raised, more particularly by Christians that it is impossible for contradictory statements to be true, must permit itself to be politely asked: Does one equal three? How can three be one? Can a mother be a virgin? And so on. Has it not yet been observed that all religious statements contain logical contradictions and assertions that are impossible in principle, that this is in fact the very essence of religious assertion? As witness to this we have Tertullian’s avowal: “And the Son of God is dead, which is worthy of belief because it is absurd. And when buried He rose again, which is certain because it is impossible.” If Christianity demands faith in such contradictions it does not seem to me that it can very well condemn those who asset a few paradoxes more. Oddly enough the paradox is one of the most valuable spiritual possessions, while uniformity of meaning is a sign of weakness. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Hence when it losses or waters down its paradoxes, a religion becomes inwardly impoverished; but their multiplication enriches because only the paradox comes anywhere near to comprehending the fulness of life. Non-ambiguity and non-contradiction are one-sided and thus unsuited to express the incomprehensible. Not everyone possesses the spiritual strength of a Tertullian. It is evident not only that one had the strength to sustain paradoxes but that they actually afforded one the highest degree of religious certainty. The inordinate number of spiritual weakliness makes paradoxes dangerous. So long as the paradox remains unexamined and is taken for granted as a customary part of life, it is harmless enough. However, when it occurs to an insufficiently cultivated mind (always, as we know, the most sure of itself) to make the paradoxical nature of some tent of faith the object of its lucubrations, as earnest as they are impotent, it is not long before such a one will break out into iconoclastic and scornful laughter, pointing to the manifest absurdity of the mystery. Things have gone rapidly downhill since the Age of Enlightenment, for, once this petty reasoning mind, which cannot endure any paradoxes, is awakened, no sermon on Earth can keep in down. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
A new task then arises: to lift this still undeveloped mind step by step to a higher level and to increase the number of persons who have at least some inkling of the scope of paradoxical truth. If this is not possible, then it must be admitted that the spiritual approaches to Christianity are as good as blocked. We simply do not understand any more what is meant by the paradoxes contained in the strict doctrines; and the more external our understanding of them becomes the more we are affronted by their irrationality, until finally they become completely obsolete, curious relics of the past. The human who is stricken in this way cannot estimate the extent of one’s spiritual loss, because one has never experienced the sacred images as one’s inmost possession and has never realized their kindship with one’s own psychic structure. However, it is just this indispensable knowledge that the psychology of the unconscious can give one, and its scientific objectivity is of the greatest value here. Were psychology bound to creed it would not and could not allow the unconscious of the individual that free play which is the basic condition for the production of archetypes. It is precisely the spontaneity of archetypal contents that convinces, whereas any prejudiced intervention is a bar to genuine experience. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
If the theologian really believes in the almighty power of God on the one hand and in the validity of strict doctrines in the other, why then does one not trust God to speak in the soul? Why this fear of psychology? Or is, in complete contradiction to strict doctrines, the soul itself is hell from which only demons gibber? Even if this ere really so it would not be any the less convincing; for as we all know the horrified perception of the reality of evil has led to at least as many conversations as the experience of good. The archetypes of the unconscious can be shown empirically to be the equivalents of strict religious doctrines. In the hermeneutic language of the Fathers the Church possesses a rich store of analogies with the individual and spontaneous products to be found in psychology. What the unconscious expresses is far from being merely arbitrary or opinionated; it is something that happens to be “just-so,” as is the case with every other natural being. It stands to reason that the expressions of the unconscious are natural and not formulated dogmatically; they are exactly like the patristic allegories which draw the whole of nature into the orbit of their amplificants. If these present us with some astonishing allegoriae Christi, we find much the same sort of thing in the psychology of the unconscious. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
The only difference is that the patristic allegory as Christum spectat—refers to Christ—whereas the psychic archetype is simply itself and can therefore be interpreted according to time, place, and milieu. In the New World the archetype is filled out with the dogmatic figure of Christ; in the Old World, with Purusha, the Atman, Hiranyagarbha, the Buddha, and so on. The religious point of view, understandably enough, put the accept on the imprinter, whereas scientific psychology emphasizes the typos, the imprint—the only thing it can understand. The religious point of view understands the imprint as the working of an imprinter; the scientific point of view understands it as the symbol of an unknown and incomprehensible content. Since the typos is less definite and more variegated than any of the figures postulated by religion, psychology is compelled by its empirical material to express the typos by means of terminology not bound by time, pace, or milieu. If, for example, the typos agreed in every detail with the dogmatic figure of Christ, and if it contained no determinant that went beyond that figure, we would be bound to regard the typos as at least a faithful copy of the dogmatic figure, and to name it accordingly. The typos would coincide with Christ. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
However, as experience shows, this is not the case, seeing that the unconscious, like the allegories employed by the Church Fathers, produces countless other determinants that are not explicitly contained in the dogmatic formula: that is to say, non-Christian figures such as those mentioned above are included in the typos. However, neither do these figures comply with the indeterminate nature of the archetype. It is altogether inconceivable there could be any definite figure capable of expressing archetypal indefiniteness. For this reason I have found myself obliged to give the corresponding archetype the psychological name of the “self” – a terms on the one hand definite enough to convey the essence of human wholeness and on the other hand indefinite enough to express the indescribable and indeterminable nature of this wholeness. The paradoxical qualities of the term are a reflection of the fac that wholeness consist partly of the conscious human and partly of the unconscious human. However, we cannot define the latter or indicate one’s boundaries. Hence in its scientific usage the term “self” refers neither to Christ not to the Buddha but to the totality of the figures that are its equivalent, and each of these figures is a symbol of the self. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
This mode of expression is an intellectual necessity in scientific psychology and in no sense denotes a transcendental prejudice. On the contrary, as we have said before, this objective attitude enables one human to decide in favour of the determinant Christ, another in favour of the Buddha, and so on. Those who are irritated by this objectivity should reflect that science is quite impossible without it. Consequently by denying psychology the right to objectivity they are making an untimely attempted to extinguish the life-light of a science. Even if such a preposterous attempt were to succeed, it would only widen the already catastrophic gulf between the secular mind on the one hand and Church and religion on the other. One’s need is to recognize these half-formed intuitions for what they are, to rescue them from their vagueness, develop, nurture, and formulate them. When this first faint intrusion is sensed, the need is for utter relaxation, for becoming passive and yielding. Only so can the aspirant follow intuitive prompting more and more inwards until it becomes stronger and stronger, clearer and clearer. One’s early development of intuition is largely a matter of confused and uncertain impressions. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
When seeking intuitional light upon a subject, the aspirant is advised to put one’s body in a recumbent position. This, passive as it is, will correlate with the passivity of the mind that one should cultivate at such a time. Because an intuitive feeling is usually soft and delicate where egoistic ones are often strong and passionate, it is too many times not recognized for what it is, until someone else formulates it and offers it from outside, as a statement of truth or a suggestion for action. If allowed to grow, an intuition which is vague and weak in the beginning may become clear and certain in the end. With this beginning of the momentary “catch” in attention, one must follow by waiting with much patience, listening inwardly all the while. Have faith in your inner promptings and accept their guidance. When you are uncertain about them, wait and they will gradually clarify themselves. One is to defend oneself against false intuitions, not only by silencing wishful thoughts, but also by purifying the personal emotions. They are messages brought from the infinite for the blessing and guidance of finite humans. However, one must recognize their value and esteem their source. What we see here is not an impossible dream, a hopeless idealization. If we turn our efforts under God in the right direction, it can be done and has been done. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
And that direction would be one that makes spiritual formation in Christlikeness the exclusive primary goal of the local congregation. That is what one would natural expect after having read what Saint Paul says—and, indeed, after having read what Jesus sent his World revolutionaries out to do. “And Jesus came and said to them, ‘All authority in Heaven and on Earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you,” reports Matthew 28.18-20. Pay attention to the “principle and absolutes” of the New Testament church and, one might suppose, everything else will fall into place—in large part because “everything else” really does not matter much one way or the other. To fail to put the focus on those principles and absolutes, on the other hand, is to wander off into a state of distraction, which is where most of our local congregations actually are. They wind up majoring on minors and allowing the majors, from the New Testament point of view, to disappears. “For God said, ‘Light shall shine out of darkness,’ is the One who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. However, we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the surpassing greatness of the power may be of God and not from ourselves,” reports 2 Corinthians 4.6-7. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
Some people feel like they are lost to the World, hidden from sight and memory. However, the love of Jesus Christ is unconditional, caring love. Humans are not separate from their Creator, nor can God misunderstand them. The place for which He designs them in His scheme of things is the place they are made for. When they reach it their nature is fulfilled and their happiness attained: a broken bone in the Universe has been set, the anguish is over. When we want to be something other than the thing God wants us to be, we must be wanting what, in fact, will not make us happy. Those Divine demands which sound to our natural ears most like those of a despot and least like those of a lover, in fact marshal us where we should want to go if we knew what we wanted. God demands our worship, our obedience, our prostration. Do we suppose that they can do Him any good, or fear, like the chorus in Milton, that human irreverence can bring about “His glory’s diminution”? A human can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word “darkness” on the walls of one’s cell. However, God wills our good, and our good is to love Him (wit that responsive love proper to creatures) and to love Him we must know Him: and if we know Him, we shall in fact fall on our faces. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
If we do not fall on our faces, that only shows that what we are trying to love is not yet God—though it may be the nearest approximation to God which our thought and fantasy can attain. Yet the call is not only to prostration and awe; it is to a reflection of the Divine life, a creaturely participation in the Divine attributes which is far beyond our present desires. We are bidden to “put on Christ,” to become like God. That is, whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want. Once more, we are embarrassed by the intolerable compliment, by too much love, not too little. Yet perhaps even this view falls short of the truth. It is not simply that God has arbitrarily made us such that He is our only good. Rather God is the only good of all creatures: and by necessity, each must find its good in that kind and degree of the fruition of God which is proper to its nature. The kind and degree may very with the creature’s nature: but that there ever could be any other good, is an atheistic dream. You must be strong with God’s strength and blessed with God’s blessedness, for He has no other to give us. God gives what He has, not what He has not: He gives the happiness that there is, not the happiness that is not. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
To be God—to be like God and to share His goodness is humanly response—to be miserable—these are the only three alternatives. If we will not learn to eat the only food that the Universe grows—the only food that any possible Universe ever can grow—then we must starve eternally. Mercy is especially to be attributed to God, as seen in its effect, but not as an affection of passion. In proof of which it must be considered that a person is said to be merciful, as being, so to speak, sorrowful at heart; being affected with sorrow at the misery of another as though it were one’s own. Hence it follows that one endeavours to dispel that misery, whatever be the defect we call by that name. Now defects are not removed, except by the perfection of some kind of goodness; and the primary source of goodness is God. It must, however, be considered that to bestow perfection appertains not only to the divine goodness, but also to His justice, liberality, and mercy; yet under different aspects. The communicating of perfections, absolutely considered, appertains to goodness; in so far as perfections are given to things in proportion, the bestowal of them belongs to justice, as has already been said; in so far God does not bestow them for His own use, but only on account of His goodness, it belongs to liberality; in so far as perfections given to things by God expels defects, it belongs to mercy. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
Mercy is regarded as an affection of passion. God acts mercifully, not indeed by going against His justice, but by doing something more than justice; thus a human who pays another two hundred pieces of money, though owing one only one hundred, des nothing against justice, but acts liberally or mercifully. The case is the same with one who pardons an offence committed against one, for in remitting it one may be said to bestow a gift. Hence the Apostle calls remission a forgiving: “Forgive one another, as Christ has forgiven you,” report Ephesians 4.32. Hence it is clear that mercy does not destroy justice, but in a sense is the fulness thereof. And thus it is said: “Mercy exalteth itself above judgement,” reports James 2.13. Since in the beginning God alone is, there is no second substance that can be used for such “creation.” God is forced to use His own substance for the purpose. God is Infinite Mind, so he uses mental power—Imagination—working on mental substances—Thought—to produce the result which appears to us as the Universe. Therefore existence cannot be derived from non-existence. If the Universe exists today, then its essence must have existed when the Universe itself had not been formed. This essence needed no “creation” for it was God, World-Mind, Itself. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
The Universe is the World-Mind coming out of itself and therefore making its manifestation out of its own substance—that is, Mind—just as the spider spins out a web from itself. The visible cosmos has come into being out of the invisible absolute by a process of emanation. That is why the relation between them is not only pantheistic but also transcendent. The creation is inseparable from its creator; indeed, they are but two names for one and the same thing, for God has objectified part of His own being as the Universe which we see. The World-Mind, limiting itself, shutting down its cous, produces what we know as the physical Universe. The fact that the cosmic existence is a beginningless and endless one eliminates the need of finding a Creator. It is itself a manifestation of an eternal principle, which is its own divine soul and not a second and separate thing Prospero says, in Shakespeare’s play, “We are such stuff as dreams are made on” he implies the existence of some greater Mind in which we are the dreams. Any hypnotist may invent a seeming Word for you but it will be gone in a few minutes or hours. Only the World-Mind can invent one that will last and outlast the whole human race. When will the cosmic dream come to an end? If one’s personal life is a dream for humans, is the Universe a dream for God? The answer is that the World-Mind controls its dream, humans do not. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Mind is the first and last Real, the Doer Maker and Destroyer. It imagines the World even as it creates it. The Universe is the imaginative construction of the World-Mind. The core and the surface of life are essentially the same. Every form of existence can be reduced to a form of consciousness. The final essence of all these consciousnesses is God. The tree of mental ideas raise from a common but unknow root—God. One who knows God as the root and the Universe as the branch of the tree of life fears not. As spears, as swords, as arrows, the Sun sends out its rays, as weapons from the hands of a mighty warrior, to strike down falsehood and untrue ways. As spears, as swords, as arrows, send out your rays, as weapons from the hands of a might warrior, to strike down falsehood and untrue ways. In mercy God gives light to the Earth and to those who dwell thereon. In His goodness, God renewest each day the work of creation. O King, God alone is exalted of yore, glorified and extolled from the days of old. O everlasting God, in Thine abundant mercy, have compassion upon us. Lord of our strength, Rock of our stronghold, please Shield our salvation, Thou art a stronghold unto us. There is none to be compared to Thee, neither is there any besides Thee; there is none but Thee. Who is like unto Thee? There is none like unto Thee, O Lord our God, in this World, neither is there any besides Thee, O our King in the World to come. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
MILLS STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH
Rancho Cordova, CA |
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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.
Cresleigh offers charming architecture with generous home sites at Mills Station. Enjoy a prime location with access to amenities, award-winning schools, and easy commuter routes. This luxury community offers modern single-family homes in a truly picturesque location.
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The Secret to Happiness is Beauty—Beauty Cold and Austere!
Outside the kingdom of the Lord there is no nation which is greater than any other. God and history will remember your judgment. Many writers hold that fair equality of opportunity would have grave consequences. They believe that some sort of hierarchical social structure and a governing class with pervasive hereditary features are essential for public good. Political power should be exercised by humans experienced in, and educated from childhood to assume, the constitutional traditions of their society, humans whose ambitions are moderated by the privileges and amenities of their assured position. Otherwise the stakes become too high and those lacking in culture and conviction contend with one another to control the power of the states for their narrow ends. Thus it is believed that the great families of the ruling stratum contribute by the wisdom of their political rule to the general welfare from generation to generation. And restrictions on equality of opportunity such as primogeniture are essential to insure a landed class especially suited to political rule in virtue of its independence from the state, the quest for profit, and manifold contingencies of civil society. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
Privileged family and property arrangements prepare those favoured by them to take a clearer view of the universal interest for the benefit of the whole society. Of course, one need not favour anything like a rigidly stratified system; one may maintain to the contrary that it is essential for the vigour of the governing class that persons of unusual talents should be able to make their way into it and be fully accepted. However, this proviso is compatible with denying the principle of fair opportunity. Now to be consistent with the priority of fair opportunity over the difference principle, it is not enough to argue that the whole of society including the least favoured benefit from certain restrictions on equality of opportunity. We must also clam that the attempt to eliminate these inequalities would so interfere wit the social system and the operations of the economy that in the long run anyway the opportunities of the disadvantaged would be even more limited. The priority of fair opportunity, as in the parallel case of the priority of liberty, means that we must appeal to the chances given to those with the lesser opportunity. We must hold that a wider range of more desirable alternatives is open to them than otherwise would be the case. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
The less definite claim that all of society benefits suffices only when circumstances justify giving up the lexical ordering and moving to an intuitive balancing of fair opportunity against social and economic benefits. These circumstances may or may not require us to abandon the lexical ordering of the principles of justice as well. The two orderings may come into play at different times. I shall not pursue these complications further. We should however note that although the internal life and culture of the culture of the family influence, perhaps as much as anything else, a child’s motivation and one’s capacity to gain from education, and so in turn one’s life prospects, these effects are not necessarily inconsistent with fair equality opportunity. Even in a well-ordered society that satisfies the two principles of justice, the family may be a barrier to equal chances between individuals. For as I have defined it, the second principle only requires equal life prospects in all sectors of society for those similarly endowed and motivated. If there are variations among families in the same sector in how they shape the child’s aspirations, then while fair equality of opportunity may obtain between sectors, equal chances between individuals will not. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
This possibility raises the questions as to how far the notion of equality of opportunity can be carried out; but I defer comment on this until later. I shall only remark here that following the difference principle and the priority rules it suggests reduces the urgency to achieve perfect equality of opportunity. I shall not examine whether there are sound arguments overriding the principle of fair equality of opportunity in favour of a hierarchical class structure. These matters are not part of the theory of justice. The relevant point is that while such contentions may sometimes appear self-serving and hypocritical, they have the right form when they exemplify the general conception of justice as it is to be interpreted in the light of the difference principle and the lexical ordering to which it tends. Infringements of fair equality of opportunity are not justified by a greater sum of advantages enjoyed by others or by society as a whole. If these inequalities were removed, the claim (whether correct or not) must be that the opportunities of the least favoured sectors of the community would be still more limited. One is to hold that they are not unjust, since the conditions for achieving the full realization of the principles of justice do not exist. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
Having noted these cases of priority, each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive total system of equal basic liberties compatible with a similar system of liberty for all. Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both: to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged, consistent with the just saving principle, and attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair and equality of opportunity. Frist Priority Rule (The Priority of Liberty)—the principles of justice are to be ranked in lexical order and therefore liberty can be restricted only for the sake of liberty. There are two cases: a less extensive liberty must strengthen the total system of liberty shared by all; a less than equal liberty must be acceptable to those with lesser liberty. Second Priority Rule (The Priority of Justice over Efficiency and Welfare)—the second principle of justice is lexically prior to the principle of efficiency and to that of maximizing the sum of advantages; and fair opportunity is prior to the difference principle. There are two cases: an inequality of opportunity must enhance the opportunity of those with the lesser opportunity; and excessive rate of saving must on balance mitigate the burden of those bearing this hardship. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
General Conception: All primary goods—liberty and opportunity, income and wealth, and the bases of self-respect are to be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution of any or all of these goods is to the advantage of the least favoured. By way of comment, these principles and priority rules are no doubt incomplete. Other modifications will surely have to be made, but I shall not further complicate the statement of the principles. It suffices to observe that when we come to nonideal theory, we do not fall back straightway upon the general conception of justice. The lexical ordering of the two principles, and the valuations that this ordering implies, suggest priority rules which seem to be reasonable enough in many cases. By various examples I have tried to illustrate how these rules can be used and to indicate their plausibility. Thus the ranking of the principles of justice in ideal theory reflects back and guides the application of these principles to nonideal situations. It identifies with limitations need to be dealt with first. The drawback of the general conception of justice is that it lacks the definite structure of the two principles in serial order. In more extreme and tangled instances of nonideal theory there may be no alternative to it. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
At some point the priority of rules for nonideal cases will fail; and indeed, we may be able to find no satisfactory answer at all. However, we must try to postpone the day of reckoning as long as possible, and try to arrange society so that it never comes. Sometimes old political cronies have the hardest time, for they cannot figure out why a conservative Republican would go against President Donald Trump. “Trump,” once officer hold shrugs, sighing in resignation, “well, he has just gone radical, that is all.” Gone radical. What a great term for it. Unfortunately, “radical” has taken on unpleasant, even nasty connotations in modern times. It suggests something un-American, like the violent protesters in 2020 who had riots all over America, for months on end, leading to the loss of many lives and hundreds of millions of dollars in destruction. These fiery-eyed extremists were upset and wanted their voices to be heard. However, the word “radical” comes from the Latin radix meaning “the root” or “the fundamental.” So it simply means going back to the original source or “getting to the root of things.” Indeed, in a World where values are being shaped by the fleeting fantasies of secular humanism, it is radical to stand for the fundamental truth of God, to go to the “root,” the Word of God. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
Love can forbear, and Love can forgive…but Love can never be reconciled to an unlovely object…He can never therefore be reconciled to your sin, because sin itself is incapable of being altered; but He may be reconciled to your person, because that may be restored. Believers today have many ancestral radicals in their family tree. In fact, the kingdom of God is full of them. John Wesley passionately argued that there could be “no holiness but social holiness….[and] to turn [Christianity] into a solitary religion is to destroy it.” Dr. Wesley was branded a radical for his famed St. Mary’s speech, an angry, but accurate denunciation of one’s fellow Oxford faculty members for their weak-kneed faith (he was never invited to speak there again). Later he captured the essence of radical holiness when he wrote: “Making an open stand against all the ungodliness and unrighteousness, which overspreads our land as a flood, is one of the noblest ways of confessing Christ in the face of His enemies.” Also, Dr. William Wilberforce has had a profound impact on my Christian life. That is why I refer so consistently to his radical stand for Christ in his culture and why I quote so often from a letter written by John Wesley to Wilberforce—then a recent convert. Dr. Wesley, who was to die only days later, commissioned Dr. Wilberforce to lead the radical campaign against slavery. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
I have carried this excerpt from Dr. Wesley’s letter in my Bible for the past seven years: “Unless the Divine Power has raised you up to be as Athanasius, contra mundum, I see not how you can go through your glorious enterprise in opposing that execrable villainy which is the scandal of religion, of England, and of human nature. Unless God has raised you up for this very thing, you will be worn out by the opposition of humans and devils, but if God be for you, who can be against you? Are all of them together stronger than God? Oh, be not weary in well doing. Go on, in the name of God and in the power of His might, till even American slavery, the vilest that ever saw the sun, shall vanish away before it.” Dr. Wilberforce took his stand, at first but a single, lonely voice against a business that was the mainstay of the lucrative West Indies trade, employing some 5,500 sailors and 160 ships worth 6,000,000 pounds sterling a year. For twenty years the radical Dr. Wilberforce, later joined by a small group of Christian friends known as the Clapham Sect, fought the economic and political might of the British Empire. In the end, righteousness prevailed, and for the next half century a mighty revival swept across England and the New World. Contra mundum. Against the World. Radicals. Radical stands do, however, lead us into the briar patch of thorny questions about the Christian’s role in government and politics. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
First comes the issue of evil disobedience. When it directs them contrary to God’s law, many Christians must disobey their government. Yet Scripture plainly commands us to obey civil laws and to be in subjection to governing authorities. Is not this a clear conflict? No. However, to resolve it requires understanding a major biblical purpose of government. The origin of government goes back to humanity’s first sin, when to keep rebellions Adam and Eve away from the Tree of Life, Gd stationed an angel with flaming sword at the entrance to the Garden; this was, so to speak, the first officer on the beat. Thereafter the Bible makes clear that government was established as God’s means for restraining human’s sin. Avaricious as it is by nature, government has today strayed far from its biblical purposes; it is hard to imagine how subsidizing college professors or controlling tobacco crops, laudable though such ventures may seem, can be considered as necessary for preserving order and maintaining justice. So the Christian, when weighing one’s biblical responsibility toward governments, may draw ethical distinctions between a government’s exercise of a clear biblical mandate and the exercise of some illegitimate function. God’s people are enjoined to submit to those in authority not because governments are inherently sanctified, but because the alterative is anarchy. In its sinfulness, humanity would quickly destroy itself. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
Government, then, is biblically ordained for the purpose of preserving order, but, as Francis Schaeffer writes, “God has ordained that State as a delegated authority; it is not autonomous.” So when government violates what God clearly commands, it exceeds its authority. At that point, the Christian is no longer bound to be in submission, but can be compelled to open and active disobedience. Dr. Carl Henry sums up the Christian duty: “If a government puts itself above the norms of civilized society, it can be disobeyed and challenged in view of the revealed will of God; if it otherwise requires what conscience disallows, one should inform government and be ready to take the consequences.” John Knox, the great Scottish lawyer and theologian, advocated Christian revolution under such circumstances—to the shock of the Christian World of the sixteenth century. Furthermore, the Bible provides clear precedence for civil disobediences. Moses’ parents are cited approvingly for their decision to hide their child from Egyptian officials, as are Daniel and his friends for their refusal to bow before the statue of Nebuchadnezzar. In the days following Pentecost, Peter and John defied the orders of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish governing body, who ordered the disciples to stop speaking of Jesus. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
Most cases are not this clear-cut; of course, and therefore the Christian response can never be made lightly or automatically. Only after seeking every other remedy, after prayer, consultation with Christian brothers and sisters, and a thorough search of Scripture should civil disobedience be employed. The second thorny question is whether man and women who seek to be faithful to Christ can serve in public office. My answer is yes. For if Christ is not only truth, but the truth of life and all creation, then Christians belong in the political arena, just as they belong in all legitimate fields and activities, that “the blessings of God might show forth in every area of life,” to quote the great Puritan pastor Dr. Cotton Mather. Indeed, it is the Christian’s duty to see that God’s standards of righteousness are upheld in the governing process. This may be accomplished from within the structures themselves or from the outside by organizing public pressure to influence the system. Or, it may have to be done as President Trump did by taking a stand in open defiance of the system. This, then, leads us to the third and perhaps the thorniest questions: can Christians be vigorous advocates for justice and morality without destroying the separation of church and state? The New Testament is clear: there is to be no merger of church and state until Christ returns and the kingdoms of this World become “the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
However, we can make our country the Kingdom of God and wrap Christianity in our national flag. This is one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Yet, keep in mind that Christianity’s goal is not power, but justice. We are to seek to make the institutions of power just, without being corrupted by the process necessary to do this. It requires a delicate balance, and Deity is our role model: God in His sheer power could have crushed Satan in his revolt by the use of that sufficient power. However, because of God’s character, justice came before the use of power alone. Therefore Christ died that justice, rooted in what God is, would be the solution…Christ’s example, because of who He is, is our standard, our rule, or measure. Therefore power is not first, but justice is first in society and law. All my life I sought money, power, success because they were the keys to life—or so I thought—to security. I was influenced, like most people of the 2020 pandemic and those of the Great Depression, by memories of breadlines and parents worrying whether there would be enough money for food, mortgage, rent, transportation, medical bills, water and electricity. The vision of the American dream drove this immigrant’s great, great grandson and I believed with determination, education, and hard work I could become successful. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
Money and property were the keys to the kingdom where I could lock the door against poverty, want, fear, and insecurity. Law school only deepened my convictions about the importance of private property. (In the post-war era, property courses in law school outnumbered courses about individual rights by at least 4 to 1; there were, incidentally, no courses on ethics. Then, I discovered that practicing law like most businesses: the most desirable clients were those able to play the most. So I began to spend my time almost exclusively with corporate executives or individuals with resources. I became convinced that law—justice, that is—functioned to protect the individual’s property and to act as the ultimate arbitrator in a mercantile society. Thus I saw my mission to be one of using my persuasive abilities in Congress or in the courts on behalf of those whose economic interests I represented (and by whom, not incidentally, I was very well paid). Justice was, in short, the sum of the riles and policies I tried to shape. When I moved into politics, my task was not really any different, expect my clients became the politicians I served, the political convictions I had formed, the party platform, and those whose campaign contributions or influence could get them through the most imposing security of the White House gates. I guess 6 January 2021 changed all that. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
I used to scoff at the protestors who could not get through those gates. “Law is not made in the street but in the halls of government,” was a favourite expression of President Trump. A nice way of saying that justice was determined by those of us who controlled the levers of political power. Ultimately, of course, I saw justice as the instrument for removing from society, and punishing, those who refused or were unable to live by the rules people like myself made. To be sure I had fundamental convictions about individual liberty and, as a student of Dr. Locke and Dr. Jefferson, believed deeply in human’s inalienable rights and the preservation of individual freedoms. However, my basis for judgment (as well as the causes and individuals I fought for) was almost entirely subjective, hence dangerously vulnerable to every whim and passion. The brighter I became, the more dangerous I was; the more power I acquired, the more power, or as some might say witchcraft, acquired me. For me, my view of life was through such narrow openings as the elegantly draped windows of McMansions, and my vistas were of lush green laws, a forest of trees, manicured bushes, beautiful roses and flowers and proud edifices housing the corridors of power. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
However, I started to see a breakdown of power when the media and social media was able to censor the president, but no one sensors the reporters spewing lies like an erupting volcano in Hawaii. Yet, it is in the breakdown of power rather than in its triumph that humans may discern its true nature and in awareness of their own inadequacy when confronted with such a breakdown that they can best understand who and what they are. I met a man, a former small-town bank president doing three years for a first offense conviction of $3,000.00 tax fraud. So deep were the wounds of years of fruitless appeals that his face was drawn and gaunt. He was the first flesh-and-blood casualty I met of the great economic wars targeting the wealth, rich, famous, and up-and-coming. I thought, he must have ran afoul of one of those quirks or loopholes engineered in the Internal Revenue Code. I also met a filling station owner, he was doing six months for having cashed a customer’s $84 check which was later proved to be stolen. First offense, too. His harsh sentence was the result of some ambitious prosecutor making a name for himself and a judge with a mean streak and a reputation for impulsiveness and senility. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
A moon-faced African American bloke with doleful eyes came to talk with me, insisting he did not know what his sentence was. Certainly he was playing dumb to win my sympathy and legal assistance, I brushed him aside. Some days later, to my astonishment, I discovered he was sincere. A court-appointed lawyer had given him twenty minutes, persuaded him to plead guilty to a charge of knowingly purchasing stolen property, and marched him terrified and handcuffed before a judge who mumbled something about not knowing anything about the case, four years to life and cracked the gavel with that sound no defendant ever forgets, then laughed about winning. This young man, who had never been in jail before, had spent the next thirty days fending for his life, crouched in the corner of a holding cell jail. For weeks after arriving at the prison, he cowered like a dog who had been beaten. These men were not exceptions. Most of those in the prison were poor; of if they had had any money, it had been wiped out by their enormous trial costs. I had seen such despair and suffering, that I began to see through the eyes of the powerless. A young blonde mother, and her two platinum blonde boys had their mansion foreclosed on because their father never returned from work. Aaliyah’s plane crashed killing her and nine others, and just days later the Twin Towers in New York were knocked down, killings over 3,300 people. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
I began to understand why God views society not through the princes of power, but through the eyes of the sick and needy, the oppressed and downtrodden. I began to realize why in demanding justice God spoke not through the easily corrupted kings, but through peasant prophets who in their own powerlessness could see and communicate God’s perspective. As a result, I learned to thank the Lord for letting me see how hard some people have it so I would never become one who abused power to make others suffer and die needlessly. I learned that power does not equal justice. However, the Christian who breaks radically with the power of the World is far from powerless—another kingdom of paradox. For example, some might think that in surrendering the power of his presidency, Dr. Donald Trump forfeited any chance to influence the justice system in this country and the greater World. However, the verdict on that is not in yet, and reform efforts are actively underway in America to ensure the American Dream, protect private property, corporations, the border, and the less affluent all because of President Trump. At the very least, his move exposed the fake news media and revealed a system of injustice to eyes that might never otherwise have seen it. In my own life it is certainly clear that my powerlessness has been used by God to influence the World. More than anything I could ever do in an office of Worldly power. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
If we would love God, we must love His justice and act upon it. Then, taking a holy, radical stand—contra mundum if need be—we surrender the illusion of power and find it replaced by True Power. We have to end the pattern of backbreaking labour and slow starvation. One day the hopelessness becomes too much to bear. However, never give up. You never know how much your testimony, writings on truth and freedom may one day enflame the whole World. Such is the power of God’s truth affords one person willing to stand against seemingly hopeless odds. Such is the power of the cross. Americans love one another. They never fail to help widows; they save orphans from those who would hurt them. If they have something they give freely to the person who has nothing; if they see a stranger, they take that person home, and are happy, as though one were a real brother or sister. They do not consider themselves siblings in the usual sense, but siblings instead through the Spirit, in God. If God is wiser than we, His judgment must differ from ours on many things, and not least on good and evil. What seems to us good may therefore not be good in His eyes, and what seems to us evil may not be evil. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
However, the doctrine of Total Depravity—when the consequence is drawn that, since we are totally depraved, our idea of good is worth simply nothing—may this turn Christianity into a form of devil-worship. The escape from this dilemma depends on observing what happens, in human relations, when the human of inferior moral standards enters the society of those who are better and wiser than one and gradually learns to accept their standards—a process which, as it happens, I can describe fairly accurately, since I have undergone it. The spiritual hospital leaves room for some pretty weak and needy people and some distressing events in the process, but no room for doubt concerning where it all is to come out. The local groups of disciples, in the usual case, will certainly have people at all stages of the journey. They can be compared to the hospitals, with people at various stages of recovery and progress toward healthy. Some will be undergoing radical surgery or other strong treatments. Some will be in the Intensive Care Unit. Others will be taking their first wobbly steps after a lengthy time bed-ridden. And others will be showing the flus of health and steady strength as they get ready to resume their ordinary life. Parallels to these stages should be found in every church, and explicitly recognized and treated as such. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
And in addition, there would be those who are stepping out strongly in a strength of life that far exceeds just not being “sick” (sin-ridden), and there would be old warriors with many battle scares and many victories, with the steady gleam of “a better country” (Hebrews 11.16) in their eyes. What these local congregations look like is spelled out in more detail in the rest of Ephesians (4.17-6.24). It would be worth the reader’s time at this point to step aside and review this brilliant passage. However, here, given all the foregoing, we can perhaps just say that those local congregations are made up of the children of light who light up their World. The Ephesians passage makes it starkly clear that the ones described are the ones in whom spiritual formation in Christlikeness has done and is doing its steady, ongoing work. They are the emerging and the mature children of light, and they “shine like lights” in a darkened World, “blameless and innocent, children of God above reproach innocent, children of God above reproach in the midst of a crooked and perverse population,” reports Philippians 2.15. God of eloquence, please teach me to pray. Open my moth that the words might come forth. Please open my heart that the words might ring true. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
May I be filled with the fire of God, the threefold king who inspires the artist, writer, craftsman, healer and everyone else. Lord God, opener of the door, please guide to the ways between, gatekeepers of the Heavens, please open the pathway, that all I wish for might be accomplished. Who is like unto Thee, who is equal to Thee, who can be compared to Thee, O great, mighty, revered and supreme God, Possessor of Heaven and Earth? We will praise, laud and glorify Thee; we will bless Thy holy name in the words of the Psalm of David: Bless the Lord, O my soul; and all that is within me, bless His holy name. Thou art God by the power of Thy might; Thou art great by the glory of Thy name, mighty unto everlasting and revered by Thy name, mighty unto everlasting and revered by Thy awe-inspiring deeds; Thou, O King, sittest upon a throne high and exalted. Thou who inhabitest eternity, Thy name is Exalted and Holy and it is written: Rejoice in the Lord, O ye righteous; it is befitting for the upright to praise Him. By the words of the righteous, Thou shalt be blessed; by the tongue of the faithful, Thou shalt be extolled; and in the midst of the holy, Thou shalt be sanctified. In the assemblies of the multitudes of Thy people, the House of America, The name, O our King, shall be glorified with song in every generation. “This calls for wisdom. If anyone has insight, let one calculate the number of the beast, for it is man’s number. His number is 666,” reports Revelation 13.18. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
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Whether they are Driven by Hate or by Love, the Power of the Human Passion is the Same!
One who does not enjoy one’s own company is usually right. Cooperation, faith, mutual trust, and altruism are built into the fabric of the nervous system and propelled by internal satisfactions attached to them. Mammals and many other forms of life could not survive a single generation without built-in cooperative behaviour. Gratifications also relate to positive satisfactions springing from buoyant health, vigorous and rested; delight accompanying both genetically endowed and socially acquired values; joys, solitary and shared feelings of pleasant excitement, engendered by exposure to novelty and during the quest for novelty. Gratifications result from satisfaction of curiosity and the pleasure of inquiry, from the acquisition of widening degrees of individual and collective freedom. Positive features of satisfaction enable humans to sustain unbelievable privations and yet to cling to life and, beyond that, to attach importance to beliefs that may surpass the values of life itself. That is why so many people find it off that in forty thousand years since their final birth, some humans have failed to develop higher strivings more fully but seem to be governed principally by their greed and destructiveness. Why did the biologically built-in strivings not remain—or become—predominant? #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
There are specific environmental conditions conducive to the optimal growth of humans and, if our precious assumptions are correct, to the development of the life-furthering syndrome. On the other hand, to the extent these conditions are lacking, one will become a crippled, stunted human, characterized by the presence of the life-thwarting syndrome. One must not overlook the fact that people’s desires are often harmful for them, and that the desires themselves can be symptoms of dysfunctioning, or of suggestion, or of both. Everybody today knows, for instance, that drug additions is not desirable, even if many people desire the use of drugs. Since our whole economic system rests on generating desires that the commodities can profitably satisfy, it is hardly to be expected that a critical analysis of the irrationality of desires would be popular. In the attempt to change and improve social conditions humans are constantly limited by the material factors of their environment, such as ecological conditions, climate, technique, geographical situation, and cultural traditions. As we have seen, primitive hunter-gatherers and early agriculturalists lived in a relatively well0balanced environment that was conducive to generating constructive rather than destructive passions. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
As we have seen, primitive hunter-gatherers and early agriculturalists lived in a relatively well-balanced environment that was conducive to generating constructive rather than destructive passions. However, in the process of growth, humans change, and they change their environment. One progresses intellectually and technologically; this progress, however, creates situations that are conducive to the development of the life-thwarting character syndrome. The material conditions have their own laws and wish to change the is of itself not enough. Indeed, if the Earth had been created as a paradise where humans would not be bound by the stubbornness of material reality, one’s reason might have been a sufficient condition to create the proper environment for one’s unimpeded growth, with enough for all to eat and, simultaneously, the possibility of freedom. However, to speak in terms of the biblical myth, humans were expelled from Paradise and cannot return. One was saddled with the curse of the conflict between oneself and nature. The World was not made for humans; one is thrown into it, and only by one’s own activity and reason can one creates a World which is conducive to one’s full development, which is one’s home. One’s rulers themselves were executors of historical necessity, even through they were often evil humans who followed their whims and failed to execute their historical task. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
Irrationality and personal evil became decisive factors only in those periods when the external conditions were such that they would have permitted human progress and when this progress was impeded by the character deformation of the rulers—and the ruled. Nevertheless, there have always been visionaries who clearly recognize the goals for human’s social and individual evolution. Rational is any thought, feeling or act that promotes the adequate functioning and growth of the whole of which it is a part, and irrational that which tends to weaken or destroy the whole. Environmental factors further or hinder the development of certain traits and set the limits within which humans act. Nevertheless, human’s reason and will are powerful factors in the process of one’s development, individually and socially. It is not history that makes humans; humans create themselves in the process of history. Only strict and rigid thinking, the result of the laziness of the mind and heart, tries to construct simplistic schemes of the either-or type that block any real understanding. Humans must satisfy their bodily needs in order to survive, and one’s instincts motivate one to act in favour of one’s survival. If one’s instincts determined most of one’s behaviour, one would have no special problems in living and would be “a contented cow” provided one had ample food. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
However, for humans the satisfaction of one’s organize drives alone does not make one happy, nor does it guarantee one’s sanity. Nor is one’s problem that of first satisfying one’s physical needs and then, as a kind of luxury, developing one’s character-rooted passions. The latter are present from the very beginning of one’s existence, and often have even greater strength than one’s organic drives. When we look at individual and mass behaviour we find that the desire to satisfy hunger and pleasures of the flesh constitutes only a minor part of human motivation. The major motivation of humans are one’s rational and irrational passions; but they do not commit suicide for the lack of satisfaction involving pleasures of the flesh, and not even because they are starving. However, whether they are driven by hate or by love, the power of the human passion is the same. That this is so can hardly be doubted. Human’s instinctual drives are necessary but trivial; human’s passions that unify one’s energy in the search of their goal belong to the real of the devotional or sacred. The system of the trivial is that of making a living; the sphere of the sacred is that of living beyond physical survival—it is the sphere in which humans stake their fate, often one’s life, the sphere in which one’s deepest motivations, these that make life worth living, are rooted. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
In order to appreciate this distinction properly one must remember that what a person calls sacred is not necessarily so. Today for instance, the concepts and symbols of Christianity are held to be sacred, although they no longer elicit a passionate involvement for most church-goers; on the other hand, the striving for the conquest of nature, for fame, power, and money, which are the real objects of devotion, are not called sacred because they have not been integrated into an explicit religious system. Only exceptionally, when one has spoken of “sacred egoism” (in a national sense), or “sacred revenge” has this been different in modern times. In one’s attempts to transcend the triviality of one’s life humans are driven to seek adventure, to look beyond and even to cross the limiting frontier of human existence. This is what makes great virtues and great vices, creation as well as destruction, so exciting and attractive. The hero is the one who has the courage to go to the frontier without succumbing to fear and doubt. The average human is a hero even in one’s unsuccessful attempt to be a hero; one is motivated by the desire to make some sense of one’s life and by the passion to talk as far as one can to its frontiers. Individuals live in a society that provides them with ready-made patterns that pretend to give meaning to their lives. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
In our society, for instance, they are told that to be successful, to be a “bread winner,” to raise a family, to be a good citizen, to consume goods and pleasures gives meaning to life. However, while for most people this suggestion works on the conscious level, they do not acquire a genuine sense of meaningfulness, nor do they have a center within themselves. The suggested patterns wear thin and with increasing frequency fail. That this is happening today on a large scale is evidenced by the increase of drug addition, by the lack of genuine interest in anything, in the decline of intellectual and artistic creativity, and in the increase of violence and destructiveness. Socioemotional development may be seen as a series of stages that occur around certain ages. The successful completion of each stage is important for healthy childhood development. During their youth, children have a surplus of energy and try to learn and master tasks that will bring a sense of competence and connection to their World. The concept of the transmuting internalization (nine alien syllables). It is the process we have in mind when we say we have really learnt something. What is learnt concerns our place in the World: the infant moves from a state in which something food that felt like part of “self” (in a self-object way) turns out to be “not self.” If we do not learn this, we can never feel confident that we can work to make good things happen in fact and not just in phantasy. It is only when we recognize a good thing as not (yet) ours, that we can set about making it ours. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Imagine a process in which, for instance, milk and biscuits arrive so soon after the child begins to form an expectation of milk and biscuits, that to the child it appears that they arrived because it thought of them, the parent’s prompt reaction having accustomed the child to this. This child is in a self-object state of mind. Later, on some occasions, the biscuits do not arrive soon enough for the child to believe it has omnipotently created them. It then begins to learn that the arrival of milk and biscuits is not completely under the control of its thoughts. However, it may have come to associate milk and biscuits with hearing someone say “bikky” and this lays the foundation for shouting “bikky,” whenever the child has a wish for milk and biscuits, and thereby getting them. The milk and biscuits now arrive not by being merely thought of. The child has to do something to make them arrive: shout, and they come. The child is learning a skill. Later still, it may learn that they now no longer arrive unfailingly when one shouts, but that one can make one’s way to the kitchen and find them, or one can ask, “Please may I have a biscuit.” More skills, more autonomy. We have come a long way. And so the child, and the patient, come to be able to do something for themselves which previously had to be left to parent or therapist. It is like an extended weaning process. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
The parent’s responsiveness to the child’s needs prevents traumatic delays before the narcissistic equilibrium is established after it has been disturbed, and if the shortcomings of the parent are of tolerable proportions, the infant will gradually modify the original boundlessness and blind confidence of one’s expectations of absolute perfection. With each of the parent’s minor empathic failures, misunderstandings and delays, the infant withdraws narcissistic libido from the archaic imago of unconditional perfection (primary narcissism) and acquires in its stead a particle of inner psychological structure which takes over the parent’s functions in the service of the maintenance of narcissistic equilibrium. If all goes well, the acquisition of more autonomy and skill is matched and supported by the natural development of the child’s (or the patient’s) growing interest in the World of other people and things, in exploration, in play. This is a very different process from the enforced instinctual renunciation and a major chase of the self-regulation and the internalization of parental advice. Although most children are probably still subject to a very great deal of instinctual renunciation, it is pleasant to know that there are cheerier developmental possibilities. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
Interestingly, these possibilities are created by the failure of the parent to mirror the child’s needs in every particular. It is the experience of this sequence of psychological events via the merger with the empathic omnipotent self-objects that sets up the base-line from which optimum (non-traumatic, phase-appropriate) failures of the self-object lead, under normal circumstances, to structure-building via transmuting internalisations. These “optimal failures” come about because of a longer than hitherto normal but still manageable delay before gratification, or because of a misunderstanding of what the infant wanted, so that it did not get what it wanted on that occasion, but still felt generally loved and understood. A comforting thought for fallible parents and psychotherapists. Of course, if the parent’s support is withdrawn too abruptly, that deprivation, though harmful, is nowhere near as damaging as a constant lack of empathy would be. Therefore, it is important to make sure your baby is loved or has someone that will be loving to your baby. Yet, if the psychological environment response to the child with a full range of undistorted empathic responses, even seriously realistic deprivation are not psychologically harmful. Humans do not live by bread alone. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
In due course, the merged state comes to an end, as the parents make time for their own needs. In this one serves one’s child better than an obsessively devoted one might do, who might fail to give the child a chance to grow up. There have to be appropriate preconditions for development, in child-growth as in therapy. What the child needs is neither continuous perfect empathic responses from the self-object nor unrealistic admiration. What creates the matrix for the development of a healthy self in the child, is the self-object’s capacity to respond with proper mirroring at least some of the time what is pathogenic is not the occasional failure of the self-object but one’s chronic incapacity to respond appropriately. “In case I am delayed, I write that you may know how people ought to conduct themselves in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, the support structure and foundation of the truth,” reports 1 Timothy 3.15. “Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her; that He might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that He might present to Himself the church radiant, having no stain or wrinkle or any other blemish; but that she would be holy and blameless,” reports Ephesians 5.25-27. If what is said about the spiritual formation of the children of light is true, what would we expect to find in those gatherings of disciples of Jesus into local congregations, which we call “churches”? Of the actual churches around us, what would they do better to omit, and what do they need more of? #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
A reasonable response might be that these local congregations would be entirely devoted to the spiritual formation of those in attendance—to the “renovation of the heart,” as we have explained it here. This seems to have been Saint Paul’s idea, and he, more than any other, was given the role of defining the church, this new thing on Earth, the non-ethnic people of God. Identification with Christ and the emerging community of Christ obliterated all other identities, not by negation, but by its new and positive reality. Thus we have Saint Paul’s magnificent statement to the Ephesians that Christ in his triumphant capacity as risen Lord of all (Ephesians 4.10), has given certain people to the “called out ones” or ecclesia (that is, the church) “apostles, prophets evangelists, pastors, and teachers” Ephesians 4.11). And these special, supernatural functions are solely for the purpose of “equipping the holy ones (‘saints’) for the work of service, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us arrive at a coherent faith and the full knowledge of the Son of God—at a completed human being, as measured in terms of the stature of the fullness of Christ,” reports Ephesians 4.12-13. As a result of this “building up” we will no longer be like children, swept up in every current of teaching that comes by, or taken in by human trickery and deceitful schemes. (Does not that sound all too familiar?) #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Instead, “speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every respect into him who is the head, Christ, from who the whole body, being adapted and held together by what is supplied through every part functioning properly, grows and builds itself up in love,” reports Ephesians 4.14-16. However, one can regard the moral law as an illusion, and so cut oneself off from the common ground of humanity. One can refuse to identify the Numinous (having a strong religious or spiritual quality; indicating or suggesting the presence of a divinity) with the righteous, and remain a barbarian, worshipping pleasures of the flesh, or the dead, or the lifeforce, or the future. However, the cost is heavy. And when we come to the last step of all, the historical Incarnation, the assurance is strongest of all. The story is strangely like many myths which have haunted religion from the first, and yet it is not like them. It is not transparent to the reason: we could not have invented it ourselves. It has not the suspicious a priori lucidity of Pantheism or of Newtonian physics. It has the seemingly arbitrary and idiosyncratic character which modern science is slowly teaching us to put up with in this willful Universe, where energy is made up in little parcels of a quantity no one could predict, where speed is not limited, where irreversible entropy gives time a real direction and the cosmos, no longer static or cyclic, moves like a drama from a real beginning to a real end. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
If any message from the core of reality ever were to each us, we should expect to find in it just that unexpectedness, that willful, dramatic anfractuosity which we find in the Christian faith. It has the master touch—the rough, masculine taste of reality, not made by us, or, indeed, for us, but hitting us in the face. If, on such ground, or on better ones, we follow the course on which humanity has been led, and become Christians, we then have the “problem” of pain. Being Christians, we learn from the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity that something analogous to “society” exists within the Divine being from all eternity—that God is Love, not merely in the sense of being the Platonic form of love, but because, within Him, the concrete reciprocities of love exist before all World and are thence derived to the creatures. Again, the freedom of a creature must mean freedom to choose: and choice implies the existence of things to choose between. A creature with no environment would have no choices to make: so that freedom, like self-consciousness (if they are not, indeed, the same thing), again demands the presence to the self of something other than the self. The minimum condition of the self-consciousness and freedom, then, would be that the creature should apprehend God and, therefore, itself as distinct from God. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
It is possible that such creatures exist, aware of God and themselves, but of no fellow-creatures. If so their freedom is simply that of making a single naked choice—of loving God more than the self or the self more than God. However, a life so reduced to essentials is not imaginable to us. As soon as we attempt to introduce the mutual knowledge of fellow-creatures we run up against the necessity of “Nature.” However, if you were introduced into a World which thus varied at my every whim, you would be quite unable to act in it and would thus lose the exercise of your free will. Nor is it clear that you could make your presence known to me—all the matter by which you attempted to make signs to e being already in my control and therefore not capable of being manipulated by you. That God can and does, on occasions, modify the behaviour of matter and produce what we call miracles, is part of Christian faith; but the very conception of these occasions should be extremely rare. However, try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself. Whatever human freedom means, Divine freedom cannot mean indeterminacy between alternatives and choice of one of them. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Perfect goodness can never debate about the end to be attained, and perfect wisdom cannot debate about the means most suited to achieve it. The freedom of God consists in the fact that no cause other than Himself produces His acts and no external obstacle impedes them—that His own goodness is the root from which they all grow and His own omnipotence the air in which they all flower. God is great, we and we are to conceive that greatness and that suffering without contradiction. Morality is an absolute and not situational; humans must be true to God, the Creator; and rules we must live by can be found only in the Christian Bible; have the courage to tactfully speak your convictions no matter the personal costs. God who made the Heavens and the Earth is an all-powerful God and has given an exacting standard of justice for humans to live by. That is why we need more than iron principles. We need Jesus Christ. We must open our hearts to the Son of God and will discover remarkable joy and peace will flood over us. No longer will you want to partake in gossip or be pictured as a troublemaker, a person with an unquenchable thirst for drama, a maverick who loves to make waves and tilt with windmills. This discovery will drain us of everything rotten and fills us with the Spirit of God. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
To each one is due what is one’s own. Now that which is directed to a human is said to be one’s own. Thus the master owns the servant, and not conversely, for that is free which is its own cause. In the word debt, therefore, is implied a certain exigence or necessity of the thing to which it is directed. Now a twofold order has to be considered in things: the one, whereby one created thing is directed to another, as the parts of the whole, accident to substance, and all things whatsoever to their end; the other, whereby all created things are ordered to God. Thus in the divine operations debt may be regarded in two ways, as due either to Gd, or to creatures, and in either way God pays what is due. It is due to God that there should be fulfilled in creates what His will and wisdom require, and what manifests His goodness. In this respect, God’s justice regard what befits Him; inasmuch as He renders to Himself what is due to Himself. It is also due to a created thing that it should possess what is ordered to it; thus it is due to humans to have hands, and that other animals should serve them. Thus also God exercises justice, when He gives to each thing what is due to it by its nature and condition. This debt however is derived from the former; since what is due to each thing is due to it as ordered to it according to the divine wisdom. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
And although God in this way pays each thing its due, yet He Himself is not the debtor, since He is not directed to other things, but rather other things to Him. Justice, therefore, in God is sometimes spoken of as the fitting accompaniment of His goodness; sometimes as the reward of merit. When God does punish the ricked, it is just since it agrees with their deserts; and when God does spare the wicked, it is also just; since it befits His goodness. Although justice regards act, this does not prevent its being the essence of God; since even that which is of the essence of a thing may be the principle of action. However, good does not always regard act; since a thing is called good not merely with respect to the act, but also as regards perfection in its essence. For this reason, the good is related to the just, as the general to the special. When one as reviewed a problem from all its angles, and has done this not only with the keenest powers of the mind but also with the finest qualities of the heart, it should be turned over at the end to God and dismissed. The technique of doing so is simple. It consists of being still. In the moment of letting the problem fall away, one triumphs over the ego. This is a form of meditation. In the earlier stage it is an acknowledgment of helplessness and weakness in handling the problem, of personal limitations, followed by a surrender of it (and of oneself) to God in the last resort. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
One can do more. Further thought would be futile. At this point Grace may enter and do what the ego cannot do. It may present guidance either than, or at some later date, in the form of a self-evident idea. The commonest error is to try to produce and manufacture intuition. That cannot be done. It is something which comes to you. Hence do not expect it to appear when concentrating on a problem, but if at all after you have dismissed the problem. Even then it is a matter of grace—it may or may not come. One must watch vigilantly for the impulses of self-interest which interfere with the truth of intuitions or reflections. If our inner mentor so bids it, we must be ready to fly in the face of Worldly wisdom. We shall not rue he day we acted so. The giving up of all Earthly desires, the liberation of the heart from all animal passions, the letting go of all egoistic grasping—these attitudes will arise spontaneously and grow naturally if a human is truly quest-minded, so that one’s intuition will assert itself little by little. Often intuition does not advise one until the time for an action or a decision or a move is nearly at hand. So one must wait patiently until it does and not let intellect or imagination construct fanciful plans which may be cancelled by intuition’s arisal. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
There is an aspect of the World-Mind which, manifesting as protons and electrons, expresses its energies, forces, and powers. The atom is made from divine stuff. The World, which is made from atoms, is divine. The same energy which is behind the Universe is converted into the “matter” of the Universe. However, it remains unexhausted and unconsumed. God is its source, and is inexhaustible. Lord of undying fire that burns within us all, my prayer is sent to you, from my heart to yours. As you are enflamed, so may I be also; filled with the fire that rolls out from your hidden home, that golden-walled palace enclosed by living water. Burn away my weakness. Light within me a raging fire of strength. Cause me to burn with zeal to perform the acts you desire. Yea, every mouth shall give Thee praise, every tongue shall vow loyalty to Thee, every knee shall bend before Thee, every head shall bow down to Thee. All hearts shall revere Thee and unto Thy name all our inmost being shall sing praises, as it is written in holy Scripture: All my bones shall proclaim, “O Lord, who is like unto Thee? Thou deliverest the weak from one that is stronger, the poor and the needy from one’s despoiler.” #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
Cresleigh Homes
You may call it a closet, but we call it the pillow room. Keep pillows for any time of the year ready to go in this large #MillsStation Residence 2 closet! And your clothes, too. Clothes are always a good idea. 👗👚👔
One of the most popular features of the Victorian house was its covered porches. Cresleigh designed Mills Station Residence 2 is 2,317 square feet with out door entertainment in mind. These finely detailed outdoor living spaces may be found on the front, in the rear center of the house, allow access from two different parts of home. In addition to being an appealing design feature, covered porches have their practical side, too. They provide wonderful indoor/outdoor living relationships.
This home has a myriad of features to cater to the living requirements of the growing, active family. The modern kitchen features a center island, with lots of light, and is open to the living room. There is in close proximity a home hub with a desk, a dining room with lots of natural light and access to the private backyard. The luxurious first floor master bedroom has a double vanity, a soaker tub, and a walk-in closet, which will be greatly appreciated. Upstairs, there are two additional bedrooms and a loft area. There is also a two bay car garage.
Take a closer look at this residence on our website. Link in bio. https://youtu.be/1Rpm_C0hXkY
Mills Station features the most current architectural designs including Mission, Mid-Century Modern, California Modern, and Contemporary Farmhouse.
Randolph Harris II International Institute 