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To be Sure, One Step is Less than Five, but it is Only a Quantitative Difference!
The majority of believers have belief without understanding. Faith is that quality or power by which the things desired become the things possessed. For centuries theologians have argued about the meaning of Jesus’ declaration that the kingdom of Heaven was at hand. Most of them have given it a historical interpretation. Only those who could approach the mind of Jesus have given it a mystical interpretation. For only they can see that He meant that the kingdom of the Overself is really close to us as is our own hand. When it starts from different planes of knowledge, all such argument is unless, and the arguers never really meet each other. Everywhere we see people in bondage to their egos. Everywhere, too, the self-actualized sees the Overself waiting, always present, for them to turn from themselves to It. The overlooked part is one’s consciousness; the forgotten self is one’s knowing power. These exist uninterruptedly, even in apparently subconscious forms like deep sleep and swoon. Yet one denies this share of one’s in the Real Being, identifies with the body instead of making it merely an object of awareness. The Overself is in the heart of every human but few care to seek it out until pressure of its grace from within, or fatigue with the World-life without, drives them to do so. The difference between the pessimist and the cynic is that the pessimist carries on the losing battle against life in one’s own soul, while the cynic tries to wage the battle in someone else’s soul. #RandolphHarris 1 of 25
The Overself exists in all of us—the bad as well as the good, the unenlightened as well as the clever. When the divinity in one’s own self is found at last, one will afterwards find its light reflected upon every other man and woman one encounters. Every human is sacred did one but know it. The fusion of technique and destructiveness was not yet visible in the first World War. There was little destruction by plans, and the tank was only a further evolution of traditional weapons. The second World War brought about a decisive change: the use of the airplane for mass killing. The Battle of Britain at the beginning of the war was still fought in the old-fashioned style; the British fighter pilots engaged their German adversaries; their plane was their individual vehicle; they were motivated by the passion to save their country from German invasion. It was their personal skill, courage, and determination that decided the outcome; in principle, their fighting was not different from that of the heroes of the Trojan war. The men dropping the bombs were hardly aware that they were killing and were hardly aware of an enemy. They were concerned with the proper handling of their complicated machine along the lines laid down in meticulously organized plans. That as a result of their acts many thousands, and sometimes over a hundred thousand people, would be killed, burnt, and maimed was of course known to them cerebrally, but hardly comprehended affectively; it was, paradoxical as this may sound, none of their concern. #RandolphHarris 2 of 25
Because it was their job and they believed the act to be righteous, it was probably for this reason that they—or at least most of them—did not feel guilty for acts that belong to the most horrible a human being can perform. However, I hope that the Lord’s people may be at peace one with another during times of trouble, regardless of what loyalties they may have to different governments or parties. The nations of the Earth have been divided. Feelings run strong. There are demonstrations for and against war. Our people have feelings. They have concerns. War, of course, is not new. The weapon change. The ability to kill and destroy is constantly refined. However, there has been conflict throughout the ages over essentially the same issues. The book of Revelation speaks briefly of what must have been a terrible conflict for the minds and loyalties of God’s children. “And there was war in Heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought his angels, and prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in Heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole World: he was cast out into Earth, and his angels were cast out with him,” reports Revelation 12.7-9. #RandolphHarris 3 of 25
Satan’s plan is to destroy the agency of humans. We sometimes are prone to glorify the great empires of the past, such as the Ottoman Empire, the Roman and Byzantine Empires, and in more recent times, the vast British Empire. However, there is a darker side to every one of them. There is a grim and tragic overly brutal conquest, of subjugation, or repression, and an astronomical cost in life and treasure. I think our Father in the shining Heaven must weep as He looks down upon His children throughout the centuries as they have squandered their divine bright right in ruthlessly destroying one another. In the course of history tyrants have arisen from time to time who have oppressed their own people and threatened the World. Such is adjudged to be the case presently, and consequently great and terrifying forces with sophisticated and fearsome armaments have been engaged in battle. In modern aerial warfare destruction has been transformed into an act of modern technical production, mechanically organized work and mechanically organized destruction, in which both the worker and the engineer are completely alienated from the product of their work. They perform technical tasks in accordance with the general plan of management, but often do not see the finished product; even if they do, it is none of their concern or responsibility. They are not supposed to ask themselves whether it is a useful or harmful product—this is a matter for management to decide; as far as the latter is concerned, however, “useful” simply means “profitable” and has no reference to the real use of the product. #RandolphHarris 4 of 25
In war “profitable” means all that serves the defeat of the enemy, and often the decision as to what is profitable in this sense is based on data as vague as those that led to the construction of Ford’s Edsel. For the engineer as well as for the pilot it is enough to know the decisions of management, and one is not supposed to question them, nor is one interested in doing so. Whether it is a matter of killing one hundred thousand people in Dresden or Hiroshima or devastating the land and people of Vietnam with Agent Orange which was produce by Dole, it is not up to one to worry about the military or moral justification of the orders; one’s only task is to serve one’s machine properly. One might object to this interpretation by stressing the fact that soldiers have always owed unquestioning obedience to orders. This is true enough, but the objection ignores the important difference between the ground soldiers and the bomber pilot. The former is close to the destruction caused by one’s weapon, and one does not, by a single act, cause the destruction of large masses of human beings whom one has never seen. The most one could say is that traditional army discipline and feelings of patriotic duty will also, in the case of pilots increase the readiness for unquestioning execution of orders; but this does not seem to be the main point, as it undoubtedly is for the average soldier who fights on the ground. These pilots are highly trained, technically minded people who hardly need this additional motivation to do their job properly and without hesitation. #RandolphHarris 5 of 25
Even the mass extermination of the Jews by the Nazis was organized like a production process, although the mass extermination in the gas chambers did not require a high degree of technical sophistication. At one end of the process the victims were selected in accordance with the criterion of the capability for doing useful work. Those who did not fall into this category were led into the chambers and told that it was for a hygienic purpose; the gas was let in; clothes and other useful objects such as hair, gold teeth, were removed from the bodies, sorted out and “recycled,” and the corpses were burned. The victims were “processed” methodically, efficiently; the executioners did not have to see the agony; they participated in the economic-political political program of the Fuhrer, but were one step removed from direct and immediate killing with their own hands. Today, people like Senator Bernie Sanders and the fallen Senator, now Mayor of Sacramento, California USA, Darrell Steinberg are still bitter and holding on to deeply rooted hostility about the holocaust. However, I should like to remind those who may say that this “one step” was too little to matter, that millions of otherwise decent people show no reaction when cruelties are committed many steps removed from them by their state or party. How many steps removed were the men and women who profited from the atrocities committed against the Blacks and Whites in Africa by the Belgian administration at the beginning of the twentieth century? To be sure, one step is less than five, but it is only a quantitative difference. #RandolphHarris 6 of 25
N doubt, to harden one’s heart against being touched by the fate of human beings whom one has seen and selected, and who are to be murdered only a few hundred yards away within hours requires a much more thorough hardening than is the case with the aircrews who drop bombs and Agent Orange. However, in spite of this difference the fact remains that the two situations have a very important element in common: the technicalization of destruction, and with it the removal of the full affective recognition of what one is doing. Once this process has been fully established there is no limit to destructiveness because nobody destroys; one only serves the machine for programmed—hence, apparently rational—purposes. Cardinal Joseph Mindszenty, the primate of Hungry, stood naked in his chilly cell in the secret-police headquarters at 60 Andrassy Street in Budapest, trembling with fear and cold as a furious agent of the state advanced on him with a rubber truncheon in one hand and a long knife in the other. “I’ll kill you,” the man snarled, lashing the truncheon across the cardinal’s back. “By morning I’ll tear you to pieces and throw the remains of your corpse into the canal. We are the masters now.” He prodded Cardinal Mindszenty with the knife. The cardinal moved away. And another prod. And another. The cardinal moved and moved again. Soon he was running in circles. For several hours the agent drove the naked, middle-aged prelate unrelentingly around the cell like a horse in training. #RandolphHarris 7 of 25
It was late January 1949. Cardinal Mindszenty had been enduring such tortures since his arrest the day after Christmas. Every night his Communist interrogators demanded that he confess to crimes against the state, including the preposterous charge that he had conspired with the American government to restore a Hapsburg king to the throne of Hungary. Every night Cardinal Mindszenty refused to sign the confession. During the day the cardinal sat on a filthy couch trying to recover from the night’s tortures. If he drifted into sleep, one of the jailers who sat in the room prodded him awake. At night the cycle began again. “I was being made to feel in my soul, my body, my nerves, and my bones the power of bolshevism which was taking over the country,” he later wrote. Although his jailers may not have known it, Cardinal Mindszenty embodied, in a sense, the sufferings of an entire nation. The events that led to his imprisonment paralleled the ideological imprisonment of the Hungarian churches. The Communists had consolidated their power the Summer before, in 1948, and their first target had been the churches. Two days after the new regime took control, they secularized the nation’s religious schools. Party boss Matyas ‘Rakosi pressed church leaders to submit to government control over church affairs, including requirements that priest and ministers publicly support government policies. #RandolphHarris 8 of 25
Bishop Lajos Ordass, the ablest leader of the Lutheran Church, refused to cooperate and was arrested and imprisoned. Bishop Laszlo Ravasz, the independent-minded head of the Hungarian Reformed Church, was forced out and replaced by a complaint theologian who thought support for Marxist Leninism was obligatory for Christians. The chief obstacle to the Communists’ plans, however, was Cardinal Mindszenty. As Catholic primate, he was the leader of the largest denomination in Hungary, a stubborn man with a record of fierce opposition to tyrants. The Nazis had jailed him during World War II. Later, as Communist powers grew in Hungary, he constantly protested their abuses of human rights. Cardinal Mindszenty was especially offended by the government’s demand that the church sign a formal treaty with the state. He had watched Lenin and Stalin subdue the Orthodox Church in the Soviet Union through a campaign of terrorism, judicial persecution, and subversion. He vowed that he would not allow the same thing to happen in Hungary. The church-state agreement in the Soviet Union gave the state control over religious instruction, seminary education, and appointment of bishops. Bishops were called upon to give public support to government policies when their Communist masters wanted it, and all priests had to swear allegiance to the Communist government. Significantly, the party ruthlessly forbade the church to evangelize or to provide services to the less affluent, elderly, sick, and disadvantaged. Thus, the church was barred from conducting any activities that would publicly testify to its members’ allegiance to another King, even of the King was God! #RandolphHarris 9 of 25
Party Chief Rakosi wanted to make the church in Hungary a puppet church like the one in the Soviet Union. Cardinal Mindszenty would have none of it. After months of bickering with the recalcitrant cardinal, Chief Rakosi and his henchmen moved against the church leader. The day after Christmas 1948, police occupied the cardinal’s offices in Esztergom. Officers carrying submachine guns led Cardinal Mindszenty to a car and drove him to secret-police headquarters in Budapest. There he was subjected to torture. Thirty-nine days after his arrest—beaten, confused, plagued with despair, and racked with fear and anxiety—the cardinal signed the confession the authorities wanted. Later he told the harrowing account of those wees of torture in his memoirs. The mental and psychological pain were far worse than the deprivations and beatings, he wrote, and he was certain that the police had used drugs on him. He candidly admitted that the Communist torturers had shattered his personality, reducing him to a state where even the regime’s most absurd charges began to seem plausible. Certainly the man whom the Communists put on public trial for treason in February 1949 looked like a drugged, programmed shell, reciting the lines of a memorized script. He was found guilty of treason and sentenced to life in prison. Soon after Cardinal Mindszenty’s trial, the government suppressed the Catholic Church in Hungary. Religion schools were abolished, religious instruction was outlawed, and religious orders were dissolved. Monks and nuns scattered into the population and were left to what work they could. #RandolphHarris 10 of 25
In their place the government organized “peace priests” composed of ambitious collaborators and cover Communist agents. Soon the priests, many of whom led dissolute lives, controlled all the higher posts in the church. Catholics who wanted authentic pastoral care had to seek out priests who carried on their ministry in secret. Eventually the regime got the agreement it wanted. The bishops agreed to support the government and its “peace priest” movement, and to tolerate state supervision of seminary training, clerical appointments, and other internal matters. In return, the government allowed the church to open eight schools and out the clergy on the state payroll. The Reformed Church submitted to a similar agreement. Thus the Communist rulers in Hungary have achieved what they consider “normal” relations with the church. Church authorities clear key appointments in advance with the government. Troublesome clerics are reassigned to the provinces. Bishops make regular expressions of support to the regime. When needed, priests and ministers read from their pulpits pastoral letters composed by the government Bureau of Religious Affairs. However, Christianity and Communism are irreconcilable in their basic premises. The Church believes that the dynamic of all history is spiritual, that its unfolding reveals God’s dealings with humans, that Jesus Christ is God in the flesh, and that at the end of history, He will reign over all nations. #RandolphHarris 11 of 25
For Marxists, the material realm is all there is. God and spiritual order are illusions. Humankind swims in the current of history, which progresses by economic forces from the decline of capitalism, through the dictatorship of the proletariat, to the Earthly paradise of the classless society. Communists are materialists and determinists; individuals count for nothing, the collective of the state for everything. Lenin thought that those who believed in God were worse than fools. “For he occupies himself not with activity, but with self-contemplation and self-reflection, and tries thereby to deify his most unclean, most stupid, and most servile features and pettinesses.” Consequently, anyone who believes in God is not simply in error; one is mentally deranged. This is why believers in God in the Soviet Union are frequently judged insane and committed to mental institutions. If these considerations regarding the technical-bureaucratic nature of modern large-scale destructiveness are correct, do they not lead to the repudiation of my central hypothesis concerning the necrophilous nature of the spirit of total technique? Do we not have to admit that contemporary technical humans are not motivated by a passion for destruction, but would be more properly described as a totally alienated human whose dominant orientation is cerebral, who feels little love but also little desire to destroy, who has become, in a characterological sense, an automaton, but not a destroyer? #RandolphHarris 12 of 25
This is not an easy question to answer. To be sure, in Marinetti, in Hitler, in thousands of members of the Nazi and Stalinist secret police, guards in concentration camps, members of execution commandos the passion to destroy is the dominant motivation. However, were they not perhaps “old-fashion” types? Are we justified in interpreting the spirit of the “technotronic” society as necrophilous? Sadism is often a by-product of the anal character. However, even the sadists are will with others; they want to control, but not to destroy them. Those in whom even this perverse kind of relatedness is lacking, who are still more narcissistic and more hostile, are the necrophiles. Their aim is to transform all that is alive int dead matter; they want to destroy everything and everybody, often even themselves; their enemy is life itself. While statistically speaking the phenomenon of total alienation probably does not exist in the majority of the American population, it is characteristic of the sector that is most indicative of the direction in which the whole society is moving. In fact, the character of the new type of human does not seem to fit into any of the older categories, such as the oral, anal, or genital character. I have tried to understand this new type as a “marketing character. #RandolphHarris 13 of 25
For the marketing character everything is transformed into a commodity—not only things, but the person oneself, one’s physical energy, one’s skills, one’s knowledge, one’s opinions, one’s feelings, even one’s smiles. This character type is a historically new phenomenon because it is the product of a fully developed capitalism that is centered around the market—the commodity market, the labour market, and the personality market—and whose principle it is to make a profit by favourable exchange. This market is by no means entirely free in contemporary capitalism. The labour market is determined to a large extent by social and political factors, and the commodity market is highly manipulated. Cybernetic humans are so alienated that they experience their bodies as an instrument for success. One’s body must look youthful and healthy; it is experienced narcissistically as a most precious asset on the personal market. This new type of person, after all, is not interested in feces or corpses; in fact, one is so phobic toward corpses that one makes them look more alive than the person was when living. (This does not seem to be a reaction formation, but rather a part of the whole orientation that denies natural, not human-made reality.) However, one does something much more drastic. One turns one’s interest away from life, persons, nature, ideas—in short from everything that is alive; one transforms all life into things, including oneself and the manifestations of one’s human faculties of reason, seeing, hearing, tasting, loving. #RandolphHarris 14 of 25
These people become a sum of lifeless artifacts; from synthetic food to synthetic organs, the whole human becomes part of the total machinery that one controls and is simultaneously controlled by. One has no plan, no goal for life, expect doing what the logic of technique determines one to do. One aspires to make robots as one of the greatest achievements of one’s technical mind, and some specialists assure us that the robot will hardly be distinguished from living humans. This achievement will not seem so astonishing when humans themselves are hardly distinguishable from a robot. The World of life has become a World of “no-life”; persons have become “nonpersons,” a World of death. Death is no longer symbolically expressed by unpleasant-smelling feces or corpses. Its symbols are now clean, shining machines; humans are not attracted to smelly toilets, but to structures of aluminum and glass However, the reality behind this antiseptic façade becomes increasingly visible. Humans, in the name of progress, are transforming the World into a stinking and poisonous place (and this is not symbolic). They pollute the air, the water, the soil, the animals—and themselves. They are doing this to a degree that has made it degree that has made it doubtful whether the Earth will be livable within a hundred years from now. One knows that facts, but in spite of many protesters, those in charge go on in the pursuit of technical “progress” and are willing to sacrifice all life in the worship of their idol. #RandolphHarris 15 of 25
In earlier times humans also sacrificed their children or war prisoners, but never before in history have humans been willing to sacrifice all life to the Moloch—one’s own and that of all their descendents. It makes little difference whether one does it intentionally or not. If one had no knowledge of the possible danger, one might be acquitted from responsibility. However, it is the necrophilous element in one’s character that prevents one from making use of the knowledge one has. The same is true for the preparation of nuclear war. The two superpowers are constantly increasing their capacities to destroy each other, as well as developing nations who are benefiting from the catch-up effect, and at least large parts of the human race with them. Yet they have not done anything serious to eliminate the danger—and the only serious things would be the destruction of all nuclear weapons. In fact, those in charge were already close to using nuclear weapons several times (some suspect that is how Obama got elected)—and gambled with the danger. Strategic reasoning—for instance, Herman Kahn’s On Thermonuclear War (1960)—calmly raises the question whether fifty million dead would still be “acceptable.” That this is the spirit of necrophilia can hardly be question. The phenomena about which there is so much indignation—drug addition, crime, the cultural and spiritual decay, contempt for genuine ethical values—are all related to the growing attraction to death and dirt. #RandolphHarris 16 of 25
When it is promoted by those who direct the course of modern society, such as the fake news media who profits off of death, destruction, pain, suffering, and chaos, how can one expect that the young, the less affluent, and those without hope would not be attracted to decay? Thus far we have considered the connection: mechanical—lifeless—anal. However, another connection can hardly fail to come to mind as we consider the character of the totally alienated, cybernetic human: one’s schizoid or schizophrenic qualities. Perhaps the most striking trait in one is the split between thought-affect-will. (It was this split that had prompted E. Bleuler to choose the name “schizophrenia”—from Greek schizo, to split; phren, psyche—for this type of illness.) In the description of the cybernetic human we have already seen some illustrations of this split, for instance in the bomber pilot’s absence of affect, combined with the clear knowledge that one is killing a hundred thousand people by pushing a button. The cybernetic human is almost exclusively cerebrally oriented: one is a monocerebral human. One’s approach to the whole World around one—and to oneself—is intellectual; one wants to know what things are, how they function and how they can be constructed or manipulated. This approach was fostered by science, and it has become dominant since the end of the Middle Ages. It is the very essence of modern progress, the basis of the technical domination of the World and of mass consumption. #RandolphHarris 17 of 25
Is there anything ominous about this orientation? Indeed it might seem that this aspect of “progress” is not ominous, were it not for some worrisome facts. In the first place this “monocerebral” orientation is by no means only to be found in those who are engaged in scientific work; it is common to a vast part of the population: clerical workers, reporters, sales people, engineers, lawyers, judges, physicians, managers, and especially many intellectuals and artists—in fact, one may surmise, to most of the urban population. (It is a remarkable fact that the most creative contemporary scientists, humans such as Einstein, Born, Schrodinger, have been among the least alienated and monocerebral individuals. Their scientific concern has had none of the schizoid quality of the majority. It is characteristic of them that their philosophical, moral, and spiritual concerns have pervaded their whole personality. They have demonstrated that the scientific approach as such does not have to lead to alienation; it is rather the social climate that deforms the scientific approach into a schizoid approach.) However, for most others who do display the schizoid character, they all approach the World as a conglomerate of things to be understood in order to be used effectively. #RandolphHarris 18 of 25
Second, and not less important, this cerebral-intellectual approach goes together with the absence of an affective response. One might say feelings have withered, rather than that they are repressed; inasmuch as they are alive they are not cultivated, and are relatively crude; they take the form of passions, such as the passion to win, to prove superior to others, to destroy, or the excitement in pleasures of the flesh, speed, and noise. The monocerebral human is s much part of the machinery that one has built, that one’s machines are just as much the object of narcissism as one is oneself; in fact, between the two exists a kind of symbiotic relationship: the union of one individual self with another self (or any other power outside of the own self) in such a way as to make each lose the integrity of its own self and to make them dependent on each other. In a symbolic sense it is not nature any more than is human’s mother but the “second nature” one has built, the machines that nourish and protect one. Another feature of the cybernetic human—one’s tendency to behave in a routinized, stereotyped, and unspontaneous manner—is to be found in a more drastic form in many schizophrenic obsessional stereotypes. There is a loss of that primordial differentiation between living and lifeless matter. An attachment to a lifeless object, such as a chair or a toy is combined with the inability to relate to a living person. #RandolphHarris 19 of 25
For the cybernetic human, the use of language (if they speak) is for manipulative purposes, but not as a means of interpersonal communication. If monocerebral cybernetic humans did not offer a picture of low-grade chronic schizophrenic process, it would be surprising. They live in an atmosphere that is only quantitatively less empty than a human being living alone in a cave because they do not relate to others and their presentation is schizogenetic (schizophrenia-producing) families. I believe that it is legitimate to speak of an “insane society” and of the problem of what happens to the sane human in such a society. If a society produced a majority of members who suffer from severe schizophrenia, it would undermine its own existence. The full-fledged schizophrenic person is characterized by the fact that one has cut off all relations with the World outside; one has withdrawn into one’s own private World, and the main reason one is considered severely sick is a social one: one does not function socially; one cannot take care of oneself properly; one needs in some way or other the help of others. (This is not entirely true, either, as experience has shown in all those places where chronic schizophrenics worked or took care of themselves, although with the help of certain people who arranged favourable conditions and at least some material contributions from the state.) A society, not to speak of a large and complex one, could not be run by schizophrenic persons. Yet it can be very well managed by persons suffering from low-grade schizophrenia, who are perfectly capable of managing the things to be managed if a society is to function. #RandolphHarris 20 of 25
People with low grade schizophrenia have not lost the capacity to look at the World “realistically,” provided we mean by this to conceive of things intellectually as they need to be considered of in order to deal with them effectively. They may have lost entirely the capacity to experience things personally, id east, subjectively, and with their hearts. The fully developed person can, for instance, see a rose and experience it as warming or even fiery (if one puts this experience into words we call one a poet), but one also knows that the rose—in the realm of physical reality—does not warm as fire does. Modern humans have lost the capacity for subjective experience, and experiences the World only in terms of practical ends. However, one’s defect is not small than that of the so-called sick person who cannot experience the World “objectively,” but who has retained the other human faculty of personal, subjective, symbolic experiences. Many people are seized by one and the same affect with great consistency. Even if it is not, all one’s senses are so strongly affected by one object to be present. If this happens while the person is awake, the person is believed to be insane. However, if the greedy person think thinks only of money and possessions, the ambitious one only of fame, one does not thin of them as being insane, but only as annoying; generally one has contempt for them. However, factually greediness, ambition, and so forth are forms of insanity, although usually one does not think of them as “illness.” #RandolphHarris 21 of 25
The pathology of normalcy rarely deteriorates to graver forms of mental illness because society produces the antidote against such deterioration. When pathological processes become socially patterned, they lose their individual character. On the contrary, the sick individual finds oneself at home with all other similarly sick individuals. The whole culture is geared to this kind of pathology and arranges the means to give satisfactions which fit the pathology. The result is that the average individual does not experience the separateness and isolation the fully schizophrenic person feels. One feels at ease among those who suffer from the same deformation; in fact, it is the fully same person who feels isolated in the insane society—one may suffer so much from the incapacity to communicate that it is one who may become psychotic. The most difficult problem with the schizophrenias offers in relation to necrophilia is that of destructiveness rooted in the schizophrenic aspect of the cybernetic human. One hundred fifty years ago, the answer would have seemed to be clear. It was generally assumed that schizophrenic patients are violent, and that for this reason they needed to be put in institutions from which they could not escape. The experiences with chronic schizophrenics working on farms or under their own management have demonstrated beyond any doubt that the schizophrenic person is rarely violent, when one is left in peace. #RandolphHarris 22 of 25
Trying to force people with mental illness into the game of normal life intrudes on their private World. And, if additional, if the individual is forced to keep one’s ties with one’s family and cannot ye afford, one may withdraw completely. This situation may produce intense hate and destructiveness and account for the relatively greater frequency of violent tendencies some adults with mental illness. These speculations are of course very hypothetical and will need to be confirmed or rejected by specialists in this field. To formulate these aims of a successful life, reason is required, and reason is more than mere intelligence; it develops only when the brain and the heart are united, when feeling and thinking are integrated, and when both are rational. There is, I believe, no other country where the chances for the reassertion of life are greater than in the technically most developed country, the United States of American, where the hope that more “progress” will bring happiness has been proved to be an illusion for the most of those who have already had a chance to het a taste of the new “paradise.” Whether such a fundamental change will happen, nobody knows. The forces working against it are formidable and there is no reason for optimism. However, I believe there is reason for hope. #RandolphHarris 23 of 25
A blessing expresses a wish that a deity look kindly on a person other than the one praying. It differs from the usual prayer in that pray-er offers themselves up as a link between the deity and the person blessed. They stand in, as it were, for the deity, serving as a mediator. God, please enter our home, and find your own, for the old ways are kept here and hospitality is a law all are proud to honour. Please be at my right hand, guiding my way. Please be at my left hand, guiding my way. God, please open my mind, and keep me safe, as I begin the great adventure of school. I stand here as your father, in the pace of the Father of All, as you prepare to move away and start your own household. Though you may live in another house, still God will protect you. Through you may join your life to another’s family, still will the Ancestors guide you. Though you may travel in strange lands, still will the spirits there welcome you. For my father’s blessings is not for your ears alone: the numinous beings hear, and they will honour it. Go on your way in safety, brining with you the blessings of my household God. As you have been with us, so will you stay a part of us. May they watch over you until we meet again. We stand in your place, Ancestors. We perform your deeds, Ancestors. Do not forget, let it be these words, Holy Ones, that my heart sings in my chest. Do not forget, do not forget, to walk in the sacred way. Do not forget, do not forget, that all I see is sacred. #RandolphHarri 24 of 25
Do not, forget, do not forget, my sacred duty to the World which surrounds me. Do not forget, do not forget. Please grant me this gift, you whom I worship, not to forget. Bring to naught designs of those who seek to do me ill; speedily defeat their aims and thwart their purposes for thine won sake, for Thine own power, for Thy holiness and Law. That Thy loved ones be delivered. Answer us, O Lord, and save with Thy redeeming power. May the words of my mouth and the prayer of my heart be acceptable unto Thee, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer. Thou wo establishes peace in the shining Heavens, please grant peace unto us and unto all America. Amen. May it be Thy will, O Lord our God and God of our fathers, to grant our portion in Thy Torah, and may the Temple be rebuilt in our day. There we will serve Thee with awe as in the days of old. I rise in reverence ready to fulfill the command of my Creator who hath enjoined upon us in His Torah: “And ye shall take for yourself on the first day the fruit of the goodly Hardar tree, branches of palm trees, a bough of the thick tree, and willows of the brook.” As I wave them, may the blessings of God be vouchsafed unto me and may I be imbued with holy thoughts reminding me that God is the supreme Lord, whose divine rule pervades the Earth below and the Heavens above, and whose kingdom has dominion over all. May my observance of this commandment be accounted as through I had fulfilled it with whole-hearted devotion. And let the graciousness of the Lord our God be upon us; establish Thou the work of our hands; yea, they work of our hands establish Thou it. Blessed be the Lord forever. Amen. #RandolphHarris 25 of 25
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Humans are Good and there is No Evil that the Mind Cannot Overcome!
There are only three sins—causing pain, causing fear, causing anguish. The rest is window dressing. A somewhat less drastic expression of necrophilia is a marked interest in sickness in all its forms, as well as in death. An example is the parent who is always interested in one’s child’s sicknesses, one’s failures, and makes dark prognoses for the future; and the same time one is unimpressed by a favourable change, one does not respond to the child’s joy or enthusiasm, and one will not notice anything new that is growing within the child. One does not harm the child in any obvious way, yet one may slowly strangle one’s joy of life, one’s faith in growth, and eventually one will infect the child with one’s own necrophilous orientation. Anyone who has occasion to listen to conversations of people of all social classes from middle age onward will be impressed by the extent of their talk about sickness and death of other people. To be sure, there are a number of factors responsible for this. For many people, especially those with no outside interest, sickness and death are the only the only dramatic elements in their lives; it is one of the few subjects about which they can talk, aside from events in the family. However, granting all this, there are many persons for whom these explanations do not suffice. They can usually be recognized by the animation and excitement that comes over them when they talk about sickness or other sad events like death, financial troubles, and so forth. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
The necrophilous person’s particular interest in the dead is often shown not only in one’s conversation but in the way one reads the newspapers. One is most interested—and hence reads first—the death notices and obituaries; one also like to talk about death from various aspects: what people died of, under what conditions, who died recently, who is likely to die, and so on. One likes to go to funeral parlors and cemeteries and usually does not miss an occasion to do so when it is socially opportune. It is easy to see that this affinity for burials and cemeteries is only a somewhat attenuated form of the more gross manifest interest in morgues and graves. A somewhat less easily identifiable trait of the necrophilous person is the particular kind of lifelessness in one’s conversation. This is not a matter of what the conversation is about. A very intelligent, erudite necrophilous person may talk about things that would be very interesting were it not for the way in which one presents one’s ideas. One remains stiff, cold, aloof; one’s presentation of the subject is pedantic and lifeless. One the other hand the opposite character type, the life loving-person, may talk of an experience that in itself is not particularly interesting, but there is life in the way one present it; one is stimulating; that is why one listens with interest and pleasure. The necrophilous person is a wet blanket and joy killer in a group; one is boring rather than animating; one deadens everything and makes people feel tired, in contrast to the biophilous person who makes people feel more alive. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
Interior Word—it speaks not through uttered words clairaudiently heard as in spiritistic phenomena but through the higher form of spontaneous intuitively formulated thoughts. A voice comes to one’s hearing but not with the ordinary kind of audibility. It is within one for it is only a mental voice yet it speaks with a strange authority. It says to one, “I am the Way, the Truth, the Life.” However, still another dimension of necrophilous character only the past is experienced as quite real, not the present or the future. What has been, id est, what is dead, rules one’s life: institutions, laws, property, traditions, and possessions. Briefly, things rule the human; having rules being; the dead rule the living. In the necrophile’s thinking—personal, philosophical, and political—the past is sacred, nothing new is valuable, drastic change is a crime agist the “natural” order. Another aspect of necrophilia is the relation to colour. The necrophilous person generally has a predilection for dark, light-absorbing colours, such as black or brown, and a dislike for bright, radiant colours. (This colour preference is similar to the one often found in depressed persons.) One can observe this preference in their dress or in the colours they choose if they pain. Of course, in cases when dark clothes are worn out of tradition, the colour has no significance in relation to character. As we have already seen in the clinical material above, the necrophilous person is characterized by a special affinity to bad odors—originally the odor of decaying or putrid flesh. They have a frank enjoyment of bad odors. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
That form of enjoyment leads to the repression of the desire to enjoy bad odor that in reality does not exist. (This is similar to the overcleanliness of the anal character.) Whether of the one form or the other the necrophilic person’s fascination with bad odors frequently gives such persons the appearance of being “sniffers.” Not infrequently this sniffing tendency even shows in their facial expression. Many necrophilous individuals give the impression of constantly smelling a bad odor. Anyone who studies the many pictures of Hitler, for instance, can easily discover this sniffing expression in his face. This expression is not always present in necrophiles, but when it is, it is one of the most reliable criteria of such a passion. Another characteristic element in the facial expression is the necrophile’s incapacity to laugh. One’s laughter is actually a kind of smirk; it is unalive and lacks the liberating and joyous quality of normal laughter. In fact it is not only the absence of the capacity for “free” laughter that is characteristic of the necrophile, but the general immobility and lack of expression in one’s face. One can observe that such people in reality never “laugh” but only “grin.” While watching television one can sometimes observe a speaker whose face remains completely unmoved while one is speaking; one grins only at the beginning or the end of one’s speech when, according to American custom, one knows that one is expected to smile. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
Such persons cannot talk and smile at the same time, because they can direct their attention only to the one or the other activity; their smile is not spontaneous but planned, like the unspontaneous gestures of the poor actor. The skin is often indicative of necrophiles: it gives the impression of being lifeless, “dry,” sallow; when we sense sometimes that a person has a “dirty” face, we are not claiming that the face is unwashed, but are responding to the particular quality of a necrophilous expression. The necrophilous person is characterized by the predominant use of words referring to destruction and to feces and toilets. They frequently use foul language, one word in particular. They live in a deadened, joyless atmosphere. Mussolini and Hitler were, perhaps, rebels (Hitler more than Mussolini), but they were not revolutionaries. They had no genuinely creative ideas, nor did they accomplish any significant changes that benefited humans. They lacked the essential criterion of the revolutionary spirit: love of life, the desire to serve its unfolding and growth, and a passion for independence. However, some people disagree with that. They believe that Hitler’s belief that blonde, blue eyed, Germans were God’s chosen people and a master race is what lead to genetic editing and the idea of the American dream. The American Dream is more than just owning a beautiful house in the suburbs, a college education, successful career, a married couple with two kids and a car. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
The American dream also includes being beautiful or handsome and having blonde hair and blue eyes, fairly tall, and thin. Also loving things like red meat, barbeque, apple pie, milk, baseball, church, and American cars. There is also a love for the colour blue because it signifies intelligence. America is supposed to be the baby of Germany. “For any government deliberately to deny to their people what must be their plainest and simplest right, to live in peace and happiness without the nightmare of war, would be to betray their trust, and to call down upon their heads the condemnation of all humankind. I do not believe that such a government anywhere exists among civilized peoples. I am convinced that the aim of every state’s person worthy of the name, to whatever country one belongs, must be the happiness of the people for whom and to whom one is responsible, and in that faith I am sure that a way can and will be found to free the World from the curse of armaments and the fears that give rise to them, and to open up a happier, and wiser future for humankind,” reports Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, November 1937. Interior Word: Something within begins to speak to one, some mind beings to find its own expression. It is one’s, and yet not one’s. Government is a natural vocation for those raised in Unitarian tradition, with its belief in the universal goodness of all humans, growing out of a sense of duty to humankind and a deep-seated belief that reasonable, fair-minded humans can work together to solve any difficulty. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
The Overself issues its commands and exacts its demands in the utter silence and privacy of a human’s heart. Yet they are more powerful and more imperious in the end than any which issue from the noisy bustling World. If one comes under the tutelage of the Interior Word, one may count oneself fortunate. However, one’s good fortune will last only as long as one faithfully obeys it. The failure to do so will bring painful but educative retribution. It is as if no one existed but these two—the listening mind and the soundless voice. This is real solitude; this is the true cloister to which a human may retire in order to find God; this is the desert, cave, or mountain where, mentally, one renounces the World’s business and abandons friends, family, and all humanity. The Germans believed themselves, on the whole, to be the most powerful humans of the most powerful empire in the history of the World. His Majesty’s Government could not take responsibility of advising the chancellor to take any course of action that might expose his country to dangers against which His Majesty’s Government was unable to guarantee protection. Nancy Astor, a devout Christian Scientist, always had Christian Science lectures at her weekend gatherings. Lord Astor and Lord Lothian were Christian Scientists too. Their sympathetic view of Germany was strengthened by the Christian Science doctrine that humans are good, that there is no evil that the mind cannot overcome. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
If human beings can sit down and reason together, it would be possible to ease tensions overnight. Yet some people are intent on singing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness. They glorify war as they believe in is the World’s only hygiene, and want to destroy museums, libraries, academies of every kind, and want to fight moralism, feminism, and every opportunistic individual. Nancy Astor said in one of her wild, stabbing protests, “It’s madness. War will destroy Western civilization. Europe will be destroyed. Then certainly Communism will spread, for it always feeds on death like a vulture.” Unquestionably! We would not be fighting to preserve something. Unless war is averted now there will be no one left who knows the meaning of the words right and wrong. This is no longer an affair of national pride and laws of right and wrong. It is a case of our whole civilization going under. A darkness hangs over America. Trenches are being dug in secret locations. Children are expected to be herded into trains, evacuating cities that everyone expects to be annihilated by COVID-19. Our first duty is not to avoid confrontations with evil but to restrain it. Place your faith in the innate goodness and reasonableness of humans. Christian Scientists believe that all evil is an illusion that can be eliminated by the exercise of the mind. We need an independent moral voice for the country. God Himself speaks exclusively through international gatherings. However, many people are putting more faith in progressive politics and economics and the fictional news media than in God. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
Many churches, representing the Kingdom of God, are caught up in the trendy issue of the time, surrendering its influence as an independent moral voice. This failure of both the state and the church contributed to the disaster that has befell the World. However, peace may be restored. It is my earnest hope and indeed the hope of all humankind that from this solemn occasion a better World shall emerge out of the blood and carnage of the past—a World founded upon faith and understanding—a World dedicated to the dignity of humans and the fulfillment of their most cherished wish—for freedom, tolerance, and justice. Nietzsche was not saying that God does not exist, but the God had become irrelevant to people because they are closing the church, partaking in evil, worshipping fictional news and political, not God. Men and women may assert that God’s exists or that He does not, but it makes littler difference either way. God is dead not because He does not exist, but because we live, play, procreate, govern, and die as though He does not. The effect of this widespread notion can be seen in the despair that followed the COVID-19 pandemic. Churches were forced to close, but you see people out in the streets eating expensive restaurant food, but no accommodations like that being made for people who want to worship God. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
This militant atheism that has claimed countless lives Worldwide and caused the death of God has had profound implications for individuals as well as for society and politics because it is the philosophic context in which modern governments operate. In the New World civilization, God has traditionally played the role of legitimizing government. In classical and Christian political philosophy He was the author of natural law—that body of just and reasonable standards that guided human rulers and by which the ruled were bound to respect and obey those given charge over them. Even atheistic political philosophy acknowledged that the idea of God was useful: a little dose of religion would keep the masses quiet. As Napoleon said, “Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.” Atheism has become militant…insisting it must be believed. Atheism has felt the need to impose its views, to forbid competing visions. Without Gd there will be wars of a kind that have never happened on the Earth, this is more serious the climate change. The devaluation of all values is what the death of God has meant to politics. Distinctions between right and wrong, justice and injustice have become meaningless. No objective guide is left o choose between “all men are created equal” and “the weak to the wall.” In Year Zero no one could have predicted the consequences that the void at the heart of nations would produce. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
However, this spiritual vacuum means that humans can only pursue two options: first to imagine that they are gods themselves, or second, to seek satisfaction in their senses. “If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God), you should pay your respects to Hitler and Stalin,” reports T.S. Eliot. God remains dead. How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves? Must not we ourselves become gods simply to seem worthy of it? Today, 33 percent of the World’s population and growing lives in the viselike grip of states that are the product of such gangster-state’s people who established governments that attempt to fill the vacuum of values with secular ideology or the cult of personality. The goal of these massive bureaucracies is to preside over the death of God; their system for achieving it is most often called Marxist Leninism. It carries out its policies with surgical efficiency, as millions of Christians and Jews who have passed through Communist gulgas would testify. If they could. However, sometimes the system performs with comic clumsiness. We live in a Cairo bazaar of competing models. In this psychological phantasmagoria we search for a style, a way of ordering our existence, that will fit our particular temperament and circumstances. We look for heroes or mini-heroes to emulate. The style-seeker is like the lady who flips through the pages of a fashion magazine to find a suitable dress pattern by Paris Hilton. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
She studies ne after another, settles on one that appeals to her, and decide to purchase that dress. Next she begin to collect the necessary materials, thinks about how many hours she will have to work to earn the dress, imagines the cloth, thread, piping, buttons, et cetera. In precisely the same way, the life style creator acquires the necessary props One lets one’s hair grow. One buys art nouveau paintings and hardcovers of Anne Rice’s novels. One learns to discuss Marcuse, Guevara, Edith Warton, and Frantz Fanon. One picks up a particular jargon, using words like “relevance” and “establishment.” None of this means that one’s political actions are insignificant, or that one’s opinions are unjust or foolish. One may (or may not) be accurate in one’s views of society. Yet the particular way in which one chooses to express them is inescapable part of one’s search for personal style. The lady, in constructing the work hours to pay for her dress, alters her habits here and there, deviating from the usual pattern in minor ways to make sure she has enough money saved up to buy that high quality dress. If she buys one a month, in a year she will have 12 fancy dresses that may last a lifetime. The end product is she has a truly custom-made wardrobe; enough dresses to wear a new one everyday for nearly two weeks. In quite the same way we individualize our style of living, yet usually winds up bearing a distinct resemblance to some life style model previously packaged and marketed by a subcult. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
People know how to make themselves look rich. They do not waste money, but they save up and buy the things they desire. Often we are unaware of the moment when we commit ourselves to one life style model over all others. The decision to “be” and Executive or Militant Atheists or a West Side Intellectual is seldom the result of purely logical analysis. Nor is the decision always made cleanly, all at once. The research scientist who switches from Ocean Spray Cranberry 100 percent juice to R. W. Knudsen 100 percent cranberry juice may do so for health reasons without recognizing that the trat taste of cranberry juice is part of a whole life style toward which one finds oneself drawn to. The couple who choose the Tiffany Magnolia Nouveau Floral 73” floor lamp think they are furnishing their Cresleigh Home; they do no necessarily see their actions as an attempt to flesh out an overall style. Most of us, in fact, do not think of our own lives in terms of life style, and we often have difficulty in talking about it objectively. We have even more trouble when we try to articular the structure of values implicit in our style. The task is doubly hard because many of us do not adopt a single integrated style, but a composite of elements drawn from several different models. We may emulate both Hippie and Surfer. We may choose a cross between West Side Intellectual and Executive—a fusion that is, in fact, chose by many publishing officials in Manhattan, New York USA. When one’s personal style is a hybrid, it is frequently difficult to disentangle the multiple models on which it is based. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
Once we commit ourselves to a particular model, however, we fight energetically to build it, and perhaps even more so to preserve it against challenge. For the style becomes extremely important to us. This is doubly true of the people of the future, among whom concern for style is downright passionate. This intense concern for style is not, however, what literary critics means by formalism. It is not simply an interest in outward appearances. For style of life involves not merely the external forms of behaviour, but the values implicit in that behaviour, and one cannot change one’s life style without working some change in one’s self-image. The people of the future are not “style conscious” but “life style conscious.” This is why little things often assume great significance for them. If it challenges a hard-worn life style, if it threatens to break up the integrity of the style, a single small detail of one’s life may be charged with emotional power. Aunt Wendy gives us a wedding present. We are embarrassed by it, for it in in a style alien to our own. It irritates and upsets us, even the we know that “Aunt Wendy does not know any better.” We banish the Sophia 35-Light Candle Style Tiered Chandelier with Crystal Accents by Schonbek to the attic of the house. Aunt Wendy’s Amana MXP22TLT Menumaster Higher Speed Combination Oven – WiFi ready or the set of eight Prestige Gala Charger Dinner Plates is not important in and of itself. However, it is a message from a different subcultural World, and unless we are weak in commitment to our own style, unless we happen to be in transition between styles, it represents a potential threat. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
The psychologist Leon Festinger coined the term “cognitive dissonance” to mean the tendency of a person to reject or deny information that challenges one’s preconceptions. We do not want to hear things that may upset our carefully worked out structure of beliefs. Similarly, Aunt Wendy’s gift represents an element of “stylistic dissonance.” It threatens to undermine our carefully worked out style of life. Why does the life style have this power to preserve itself? What is the source of our commitment to it? A life style is a vehicle through which we express ourselves. It is a way of telling the World which particular subcult or subcults we belong to. Yet this hardly accounts for its enormous importance to us. The real reason why life styles are so significant—and increasingly so as the society diversifies—is that, above all else, the choice of a life style model to emulate is a crucial strategy in our private war against crowing pressures of overchoice. Deciding, whether consciously or not to be “like” William Buckley or Joan Baez, Lionel Trilling, Paris Hilton, Jet Li, Aaliyah Haughton, E40, or his surfer equivalent, J. J. Moon, rescues us from need to make millions of minute life-decisions. Once a commitment to a style is made, we are able to rule out many forms of dress and behaviour, many ideas and attitudes, as inappropriate to our adopted style. The college boy who chooses to give it the Ole American try wastes little energy agonizing over whether who to vote for in the presidential election, carry an attache case, or invest in mutual funds. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
By zeroing in on a particular life style we exclude a vast number of alternatives from further consideration. The fellow who opts for a BMW M8 need no longer concern oneself with the hundreds of types of automobiles available to one on the open market, but which violate the spirit of one’s style. One need only choose among the far smaller repertoire of M8 Competition Ultimate Driving Machines from Niello BMW in Sacramento, California that fit within the limits set by one’s model. And what is said of BMW M8 Competition Ultimate Driving Machines is equally applicable to one’s ideas and social relationships as well. The commitment to one style of life over another is thus a super-decision. It is a decision of a higher order than the general run of everyday life-decisions. It is a decision to narrow the range of alternatives that will concern us in the future. So long as we operate within the confines of the style we have chosen, our choices are relatively simple. It is painful because, freed of our commitment to any given style, cut adrift from the subcult that gave rise to it, we no longer “belong.” Worse yet, our basic principles are called into question and we must face each new life-decision afresh, alone, without security of a definite, fixed policy. We are, in short, confront with the full, crushing burden of overchoice again. The Interior Word: When another personality speaks from the entranced or semi-entranced body, be the latter a spiritualist medium, a hypnotized person, or a psychologically auto-suggested one, we have a phenomenon in which no true mystic would take part. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
When this same personality announces itself to be Jesus, Krishna, Saint Francis, Mrs. Eddy, or Mme. Blavatsky, it may immediately be labelled as spurious. Whether the phenomenon be produced by actual spirit-possession (when usually a lying spirit is the operating agent) or by psychological self-obsession, with the wakeful personality unconscious of what the other has said, in both cases it is one which ought to be avoided. The Catholic Church, with its very wide experience in such matters, has cautioned its adherents against being seduced either into allowing the thing to happen or into believing the teaching given by the mysterious visitor. Pope Benedict XIV went so far as to ascribe a diabolic origin in the voice. From the standpoint of philosophy it may be said that the Inner Word speaks only to a human, never through one to others. Nor is it heard clairaudiently and therefore psycho-physically; it is heard only mentally and inwardly. The phenomenon of the Interior Word does not ordinarily appear before one is able to carry the mind to a certain depth or intensity of concentration, and to hold it there continuously for not less than about a half hour. In that state of inspired communion when the Interior Word is heard, thoughts keep coming into consciousness from a source deeper than the personal mind. The ego is not directly thinking them but instead experiences them as being impressed upon it or released into it. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
The utterance of the Interior Word can be heard only in Heaven, only in a state detached from the animality and triviality of the common state. It is as if another being spoke inside me—not with audible voice but with mental voice—and imposed itself strongly on my own mind. Interior Word: Out of this blankness something will begin to speak to one. It will not be a sound heard with the body’s ears. If it happened, that would be a low psychic manifestation which must be stopped at once. Until the internal Word speaks in one one is really incapable of helping others spiritually. One may be able to do so intellectually or to comfort them emotionally but that is a different and inferior thing. If the Interior Word bids one move in any direction which seems encompassed by difficulties or blocked by obstacles so that one can see no way before one, let one not doubt or fear. A way will be made by the power of the Overself. One need only obey, relax, and trust the guidance. When the Inner Word begins to speak to one, one may begin to speak to others—not before. For only then will what one says bear any creative power, spiritual inspiration, enlightenment, or healing in it. The Interior Word carries an authoritative and commanding tone. Adults have some control over their environment, but children depend on adults to provide a home for them. In addition to love, security, understanding, and encouragement, reverence plays an important part in a safe and happy home. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
Reverence is respect, honour, and love for our Heavenly Father, for His Son, Jesus Christ, and for all of His creations. It is more than just holding bodies still and being quiet during meetings; it is an attitude. It can become a way of life for each of us as members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Reverent habits often precede reverent feelings. Prayer is a source of great peace for all of us. Habits of reverence can begin early in our home when we help children learn to pray. The way we pray with our children can be a teaching and building experience. In general, the divine beings like us. That is one of the reasons they want our prayers and offerings; if they did not care about us, they would not care about our prayers. That is why they respond well to petitionary prayers; they want to help us. They really do. Some of them are ambivalent, however. Why should the Land Spirits feel warmly toward us when we cut down their forests and pave over their meadows? Do not feel too smug because you have protested against logging in old growth forest or rain forest. Where do you think the land your house is built on came from? What kind of land was there before it was plowed under to grow your food? There used to be rain forests in the Bay Area. Dealing with Land Spirits can be difficult. We have to show them we are grateful for their sacrifice. We do this by giving something back. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
Dear Lord in the shining Heaven, I offer you my thanks and condolences for your sacrifices. I know you are here, and I wish for your friendship, for me and my people. Please accept what I give you, and please do not forget me. The Interior Word is not heard with the reasoning mind, even though its statements may be very reasonable. It is not connected with the intellect at all, as are all our ordinary words. It is received in the heart, felt intensively and deeply. Now that one has developed the capacity to hear, there are sounds forth out of the obscure recesses of one’s being a silent voice, a messenger without name or form. It is the Word. The Interior Word is never enigmatic and puzzling but always direct and simple. Only the revelations of occultism are obscure, never the revelations of truth itself. What the German mystics called “the Interior Word” is precisely the same as what two thousand years earlier the Mandarin Chinese mystics called the “Voice of Heaven.” The Interior Word cannot speak frequently until there is complete silence within the human’s being. The ideas which come to one’s mind through the Interior Word come stamped with the certitude of truth. Internal Word: In the New Testament, John introduces the idea of the logo, the Word which speaks in every human who comes into the Word. Every human is not able to hear it although it is always there, always immanent. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
The Interior Word is referred to in the Bible: “I will hear what the Lord God will speak to me,” reports Psalms 84.9. To corrupt nature is not the work of providence. However, it is the nature of some things to be contingent. Divine providence does not therefore impose any necessity upon things so as to destroy their contingency. Divine providence imposes necessity upon some things; not upon all, as some formerly believed. For to providence it belongs to order things towards an end. Now after the divine goodness, which is an extrinsic end to all things, the principal good in things themselves is the perfection of the Universe; which would not be, were not all grades of being found in things. Whence it pertains to divine providence to produce every grade of being. And thus it has prepared for something necessary causes, so that they happened of necessity; for others contingent causes, that they may happen by contingency, according to the nature of their proximate cause. The effect of divine providence is not only that things should happen somehow; but that they should happen either by necessity or by contingency. Therefore whatsoever divine providence ordains to happen infallibly and of necessity happens infallibly and of necessity; and that happens from contingency, which the plan of divine providence conceives to happen from contingency. The order of divine providence is unchangeable and certain, so far as all things foreseen happen as they have been foreseen, whether from necessity or from contingency. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
That indissolubility and unchaneableness of which Boethius speaks, pertain to the certainty of providence, which fails not to produce its effect, and that in the way foreseen; but they do not pertain to the necessity of the effects. We must remember that properly speaking “necessary” and “contingent” are consequent upon being, as such. Hence the mode both of necessity and of contingency falls under the foresight of God, who provides universally for all being; not under the foresight of causes that provide only for some particular order of things. Our God and God of our fathers, please bless us with the threefold blessing written in the Torah of Moses, Thy servant, and spoken by Aaron and his sons, Thy consecrated priests: May the Lord bless thee and keep thee; so may it be His will. May the Lord make His countenance to shine upon thee and be gracious unto thee; so may it be His will. May the Lord turn His countenance unto thee and give thee peace. So may it be His will. Please grant peace, well-being and blessing unto the World, with grace, lovingkindness and mercy for us and for all America, Thy people. Bless us, O Father, all of us together, with the light of Thy presence; for by that light Thou hast given us, O Lord our God, the Torah of life, lovingkindness and righteousness, blessing and mercy, life and peace. O may it be good in Thy sight at all times to bless Thy people America with Thy peace. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, wo blesses Thy people American with peace. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
Cresleigh Homes
If prayer means communication with the divinity, we can open doors to the vision of a World of Nietzsche superhumans; together with Picasso and Apollinaire, he was one of the most important forces in modern art.
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Papa—or—His Educational Surrogate—Knows Best!
All illness comes from sin. This everyone must take, whether they like it or not; it comes from sin—where it be of the body, of mind, or of soul. However, it may not be caused by the individual’s sin, but it comes from sin. While certain part of Europe and Japan are still building their first all-purpose supermarkets, the United State of America has already leaped to the next stage—the creation of specialized super-stores that widen still further (indeed, almost beyond belief) the variety of goods available to the consumer. In Washington, D.C., one such store specializes in foreign foods, offering such delicacies as hippopotamus steak, alligator meat, wild snow hare, and thirty-five different kinds of honey. The idea that primitive industrial techniques foster uniformity, while advanced automated techniques favour diversity, is dramatized by recent changes in the automobile industry. The widespread introduction of European, Japanese, and Korean cars into the American market has opened many new options for the buyer—increasing one’s choice from a dozen to nearly 300 car models in 2021. Today even this wide range of choice seems narrow and constricted. Faced with foreign competition, Detroit had to shutdown during the economic crises of 2008. However, Detroit is back to producing General Motors, Ford Motors, and Fiat Chrysler. To increase demand, General Motors, Ford Motors, and Fiat Chrysler are offer 0 percent financing of up to 84 months as well as big discounts on vehicles. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
While United States retail sales were down by about 41 percent during March and April, they have been more resilient than expected during the coronavirus pandemic, according to J.D. Power. When the “stay at home” or “shelter-in-place” orders were initially enacted some expected United States sales to fall by up to 80 percent. “We continue to see evidence that we are over the worst and we are firmly in recover,” reports Thomas Kind, J.D. Power president of data and analytics. They found that customers want cars that will give them the illusion of having-one-of-a-kind. For instance, BMW has an E26 M1 vehicle and only 453 M1 models were manufacture, approximately 54 vehicles are used for the Group 4 Pro Cars series, so they are highly coveted and desirable. BMW also only manufactured 20 examples of the “Frozen Black” E92 M3. These came standard with the Competition Package, DCT transmission, red brake calipers and red contrast stitching among other cosmetic updates. To provide that illusion for the mass consumer, the computerized assembly systems make possible not merely the illusion, but the reality. Thus the beautiful and spectacularly successful Mustang is promoted by Ford as “the one you design yourself,” because, as critic Reyner Banham explains, there “is not a dung-regular Mustang any more,” just a stockpile of options to meld in combinations of 3 (bodies) X 4 (engines) X 3 (transmissions) X 4 (basic sets of high-performance engine modifications) – 1 (rock-bottom six cylinder car to which these modification do not apply) + 2 (Shelby grand-touring and racing set-ups applying to only one body shell and not all engine/transmission combinations).” #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
This does not even take into account the possible variations in colour, upholstery and optional equipment. Both car buyers and auto sales representatives are increasingly disconcerted by the sheer multiplicity of options. The buy’s problem of choice has become far more complicated, the addition of each option creating the need for more information, more decisions and sub-decisions. Thus, anyone who has attempted to buy a car lately, as I have, soon finds that the task of learning about the various brands, lines, models and options (even within a fixed price range) requires days of shopping and reading. The auto industry may soon reach the point at which its technology can economically produce more diversity than the consumer needs or wants. BMW has already started accommodating this trend by alternating production of two of their high-end, large, luxury coupes. Both are very nice and expensive, but experts notice that when the economy is under preforming, BMW tends to produce the 6 Series and cancels the 8 Series, but when the market is doing really well, BMW cancels the 6 Series and produces the slightly more expensive 8 Series. The benefit of this kind of marketing makes these two cars hard to find and highly desirable, and buyers may hold on to their model as they anticipate the release of the next generation. It is also good for the pre-owned market because some buyers fall in love with a body style and do not care if it is not brand it. That is the car they want, no matter the year or cost, they buyer must have that car. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
Marshall McLuhan has noted that, “Even today, most United States automobiles are, in a sense, custom-produced. Figuring all possible combinations of styles, options and colours available on a certain new family sports car, for example, a computer expert came up with 25,000,000 different versions of it for a buyer. When automated electronic production reaches full potential, it will be just about as inexpensive to turn out a million differing objects as a million exact duplicates. The only limits on production and consumption will be the human imagination.” We are, in fact, racing toward “over-choice”—the point at which the advantages of diversity and individualization are cancelled by the complexity of the buyer’s decision-making process. Does any of this matter? Some people argue that diversity in the material environment is insignificant so long as we are racing toward cultural or spiritual homogeneity. “It is what is inside that counts,” they say, paraphrasing a well-known burrito commercial. This view gravely underestimates the importance of material goods as symbolic expressions of human personality differences, and it glibly denies a connection between the inner and outer environment. Those who fear the standardization of human beings should warmly welcome the destandardization of goods. For by increasing the diversity of good available to a human we increase the mathematical probability of differences in the way humans actually live. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
More important, however, is the very premise that we are racing toward cultural homogeneity, since a close look at this also suggests that just the opposite is true. It is unpopular to say this, but we are moving swiftly toward fragmentation and diversity not only in material production, but in art education and mass culture as well. One highly revealing test of cultural diversity in any literate society has to do with the number of different books published per million; the more diverse these tastes, the greater the number of titles. The increase or decrease of this figure over time is a significant clue to the direction of cultural change in the society. The more advanced the technology in a country, the greater the likelihood that it would be moving in the direction of literary diversity and away from uniformity. The same push toward pluralism is evident in painting, too, where we find an almost incredibly wide spectrum of production. Representationalism, expressionism, surrealism, abstract expressionism, hardedge, pop, kinetic, and a hundred other styles are pumped into the society at the same time. One or another may dominate the galleries temporarily, but there are no universal standards or styles. It is a pluralistic market. When art was a tribal-religious activity, the painter worked for the whole community. Later one worked for a single small aristocratic elite. Still later the audience appeared as a single undifferentiated mass. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
Today one faces a large audience split into a milling mass of sub-groups. According to John McHale: “The most uniform cultural contexts are typically primitive enclaves. The most striking feature of our contemporary ‘mass’ culture is the vast range and diversity of its alternative cultural choices. The ‘mass,’ on even cursory examination, breaks down into many different ‘audiences.’” Indeed, artists no longer attempt to work for a universal public. Even when they think they are doing so, they are usually responding to the tastes and styles preferred by one or another sub-group in the society. Like the manufacturers of pancake syrup and automobiles, artists, too, produce for “mini-markets.” And as these markets multiply, artists output diversifies. The push for diversity, meanwhile, is igniting bitter conflict in education. Every since the rise of industrialism, education in the New World, and particularly in the United States of America, has been organized for the mass production of basically standardized educational packages. It is not accidental that at the precise moment when the consumer has begun to demand and obtain greater diversity, the same moment when new technology promises to make destandardization possible, a wave of revolt has begun to sweep the college campus. Though the connection is seldom noticed, events on the campus and events in the consumer market are intimately connected. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
Ne basic complaint of the student is that one is not treated as an individual, that one is served up an undifferentiated gruel, rather than a personalized product. Like the BMW E26 M1 and Mustang buyer, the student wants to design one’s own education. The difference is that while industry is highly responsive to consumer demand, education typically has been indifferent to student wants. (In one case we say, “the customer knows best”; in the other, we insist that “Papa—or his educational surrogate—knows best.”) Thus the student-consumer is forced to fight to make the education industry responsive to one’s demand for diversity. While most colleges and universities have greatly broadened the variety of their course offerings, they are still wedded to complex standardizing systems based on degrees, majors and the like. These systems lay down basic tracks along which all students must progress. While educators are rapidly multiplying the number of alternative path, the pace of diversification is by no means swift enough for the students. This explains why young people have set up “para—universities”—experimental colleges and so-called free universities—in which each student is free to choose what one wishes from a mind-shattering smorgasbord of courses that range from guerrilla tactics and stock market techniques to Christian ethics, morals and values, and “underground theater.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
Long before the year 2040 A.D., the entire antiquated structure of degrees, majors, and credits will be a shambles. No two students will move along exactly the same educational track. For the students now pressuring higher education to destandardize, to move toward the super-age of informational diversity, will win their battle. Perhaps corporations will for their own universities and start recruiting kids out of high school, who score well on their standardized test. Perhaps public schools will be divided and sponsored by corporations, which will allow children to choose the type of enrichment material they want to learn, then the corporations will pick the brightest minds, the ones that show the most creativity to educate in their universities, and more than grades will matter. They will truly see who is excelling and genuinely cares about what they learn, even if they do not preform well on tests. That will be a way to diversify education and train people from crib to coffin to be the kind of employee you want. It is significant, for example, that one of the chief results of the student strikes in France was a massive decentralization of the university system. Decentralization makes possible greater regional diversity, local authority to alter curriculum, student regulations and administrative practices. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
Many people in America are already demanding that the entire school system be cut up into smaller “community-run” school systems. Some African Americans and other ethnic groups are requesting that their kids are allowed to take history from their culture’s perspective in grade school. Some religious groups want religious based public schools. They want greater parental involvement with the schools than is possible in the present large, bureaucratic and ossified system. It claims, in short, the right to be different. And these might be viable choices. For instance, in the state of Utah, the cities Salt Lake City and Highland may have a large number of Mormons and a public school based on Mormon values may be something that the community wants for their children. Or in Sacramento, California in the Pocket/Greenhaven neighbourhood, history from an Asian American’s perspective might be something that that community desires. Other schools in the Sacramento area may want English classes that have books from African American authors. These types of programs could be a way to build the community, teach the children to appreciate their heritage, increase tax revenue and attendance in certain communities, and improve academic performance. Or children in Rancho Cordova, California may want to attend an architectural high school where the curriculum focuses more calculus and analytic geometry, architectonics, history of architecture, and environments. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
Different types of educational and community-based education, in short, claims the right to be different. Of it will require families to be more stable and have an attachment to their community. If they is not always possible for parents, that is were professional parenting may come into play, where people are willing to foster children so they can remain in the community and attend school. Or we may need for organizations in communities like the Ecumenical Institute. Perhaps a corporation can purchase a block of McMansions and they can have professional parents raise children and have the educated and these specialized schools in the community. The essential issue is allowing children to have a safe place, where they can learn, be safe, and have a fair chance at life. Because as it stands, by fixing city-wide standards and curricula, by choosing texts and personnel on a city-wide basis, leaders have imposed considerable uniformity on the schools and if America is going to stay a World Super Power, we need to get each and every student to tune in and work hard. The days of being spoiled and living a leisure life are over. We need students to be interested in their education and they need the help to be successful. We need to generate local variety in public education by turning over control of the schools to community authorities. Otherwise, failure to diversify education within the system will simply lead to the growth of alternative educational opportunities outside the system. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
Thus we have today the suggestions of prominent educators and sociologist, including Kenneth B. Clark and Christopher Jencks, for the creatin of new schools outside of, and competitive with, the official public school systems. Mr. Clark has called for regional and state schools, federal schools, schools run by colleges, trade unions, corporations and even military units. Such competing schools would, he contends, help create the diversity that education desperately needs. Simultaneously, in a less formal way, a variety of “para-schools” are already being established by young, successful parents and other groups who find the mainstream educational system too homogenous. We see here, therefore, a major cultural force in the society—education—being pushed to diversify its output, exactly as the economy is doing. And here, exactly as in the realm of material production, the new technology, rather than fostering standardization, carries us toward super-industrial diversity. Computers, for example, make it easier for large school to schedule more flexibly. They make it easier for the school to cope with independent study, with a wider range of course offerings and more varied extracurricular activities. More important, computer-assisted education, programmed instruction and other such techniques, despite popular misconceptions, radically enhance the possibility of diversity in the classroom. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
Computer-assisted education techniques permit each student to advance at one’s own purely personal pace. They permit one to follow a custom-cut path toward knowledge, rather than a rigid syllabus as in the traditional industrial era classroom. Aaliyah Haughton, for instance, went to a performing arts high school, scored well and became a successful actor, model, and singer. Moreover, in the educational World of tomorrow, that relic of mass production, the centralized work place, will also become less important. Just as economic mass production required large numbers of students to be assembled in factories, educational mass production required large numbers of students to be assembled in schools. This itself, with its demands for uniform discipline, regular hours, attendance checks and the like, was a standardizing force. Advanced technology will, in the future, make much of this unnecessary. A good deal of education will take place in the student’s own room at home or in a dorm, at hours of one’s own choosing. With vast libraries of data available to one via computerized information retrieval systems, with one’s own tapes and video units, one’s own language laboratory and one’s own electronically equipped study carrel, one will be freed, for much of the time, of the restrictions and unpleasantness that dogged one in the lockstep classrooms. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
The technology upon which these new freedoms will be based will inevitably spread through the schools in the years ahead—aggressively pushed, no doubt, my major corporations like Cisco, Microsoft, IBM, and Xerox. Within the next 30 years, the educational systems of the United States of America, and several Western European countries as well, will have broken decisively with the mass production pedagogy of the past, and will have advanced into an era of educational diversity based on the liberating power of the new machines. In education, therefore, as in the production of material goods, the society is shifting irresistibly away from, rather than toward, standardization. It is not simply a matter of varies automobiles, detergents, and syrup. The social thrust toward diversity and increased individual choice affects our mental, as well as our material surroundings. One of the functions of intuition is to protect the body against unnecessary sickness by warning the human in it when one is transgressing the laws of its hygiene, or by showing the right road. In this, intuition is pitted against the body’s past habits and animal appetites, the emotional nature’s desires, as well as the mind’s ignorance immaturity and inexperience—a combination of enemies which usually triumphs over it. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
Another of its functions is to protect the human against avoidable calamity or preventable loss, by consciously moving one out of its reach. However, here it has opposed to it the egoistic desires and habits or the emotional impulses and negative feelings which perceive only the immediate and not the impending, the semblance of things and not the actuality. The intuitive life does not always know how or why it acts, for it is often spontaneous and unconscious. However, when it does become at times intellectually self-conscious, its power in the World to affect humans is heightened, not lessened. Like Socrates we possess an inner warning voice which forbids certain course of action but does not recommend better ones. It is negative and not positive. Intuition—which is called the surest road to truth—eradicates hesitancies. When you are in contact with God in solving a problem, you receive a direct command what to do and you then know it is right. The clouds and hesitancies and vacillations which arise when struggling between contrary points of view, melt. Whereas, if you are not in contact with God, but only being carried along through universal law, then you swing back and forth with emotion or opinion. One is indeed fortunate whose intuition shows itself in one impelling thought strong enough to outclass all other conflicting thoughts. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
The uncomfortable feeling that something is wrong may combat the smooth plausible appearance of everything being right. One can depend on one thing alone to show one the right roads and the right master. It is intuition. If one’s reason governs one’s body and one’s intuition governs one’s reason, a human’s life will be less troubled and one’s happiness more secured. If a human acts according to intuitive wisdom, all will go well with one. This is not to say that one will be free from external misfortunes. However, if they come, they will be of the unavoidable kind and therefore less in number than if they included those of one’s own direct making. And even the others will be turned to profit in some way by the search for their underlying meanings, so that although humanity calls them evil, one will nevertheless gain some inner good from them. If one is sensitive enough and can touch the intuitive element within oneself, either deliberately by sheer power of deeply introspective concentration or spontaneously by immediate acceptance of its suggestive messages, one’s decisions will be filled with utter conviction and followed with resolute determination. One may be sure of this, that whatever action God’s leading causes one to take will always be for one’s ultimate good even thought it may be to one’s immediate and apparent detriment. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
There is the feeling of being led, but not the ability to see where, and to what, one is being led. To the degree that the intuitive element can displace all others for the rulership of one’s inner life, to that degree can a healing and guiding calm displace the emotion of moods and commotion of thought. To say what the Absolute is not, to describe it in negatives, is correct so far as it goes but is not so satisfactory. The terms Void or Space, being more positive, are even better. Space is a good metaphor of Mind. In one aspect it is bounded, in another it is infinite. Mind also is static and dynamic, still active, within Universes yet transcending them all. Where is the being who has ever known the unknowable and indescribable Supreme Godhead? For all humans came into existence after it already was there. However, whoever receives knowledge by tradition, investigation, or intuition, by meditation, revelation or even by science leading into metaphysics, by art or poetry or literature, may acquire the tremendous certitude that it is there. More—it must always have been there. That which transcends even the high Worldly authorities, even World-Mind, is unthinkable and unimaginable. Therefore it is without name or form, beyond all contact with the senses, beginningless and endless, neither growing nor diminishing, indestructible, free from any relations or comparisons—this Undefinable Mystery of Mysteries. Let no one seek it, for one cannot find IT. However, one can know that it is there and, through its manifestations, the God, worship IT. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
All human explanation of the nature of Mind, as all human expositions of the working of the World-Mind, are limited forms of language. This cannot be helped. It is outside time in a Now beyond the successive character of human thinking and incomprehensible to it. Yet intellect, though it cannot enter this Grand Mystery, can at its most brilliant perception infer that it is. Try as it might, the finite thinking mind cannot break through this sound-barrier of mystery which surrounds the Unique Being, That which is ever the same. All thoughts simply pile up, leaving the last one unanswered, if not unanswerable, or else ending in an involved labyrinth from which there is no outlet. IT cannot be investigated, but the fact of its necessary existence can be stated more emphatically than any other of the innumerable or observable facts. Both church and state assert standards and values in society; both seek authority; both compete for allegiance. As members of both the religious and the political spheres, the Christian is bound to face conflict. The conflict is particularly apparent in the Judeo-Christian tradition because of the assertion that the God of both the Old and New Testament Scriptures is King. That has been an offense to some of the proud and powerful since the beginning—and the reason many Jewish and Christians alike have been systematically persecuted. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
The tensions between the Kingdom of God and the kingdoms of humans runs like an unbroken thread through the history of the past two thousand years. It began not long after Christ’s birth. In the end one will have to confess, as the English hermit Richard Rolle confessed over six hundred years ago, despite one’s deep mystical experiences, that it is not possible to know what God is but only that He is. When the last words have been uttered, the final sentences written down; when the sermons, books, and articles have exhausted all that human intellect and human intuition can explain, suggest, or hint; when the profoundest mystical experience has yielded all that it could reveal, there will still remain an awed feeling before the Grand Mystery that is God, a tremendous humility before Its unknowableness. Because there is nothing quite like it in human experience and because there is no opposite in the entire cosmos from which it can be differentiated, the Absolute Being remains utterly incomprehensible to human intellect. The mystery of That Which Is baffles not only the comprehension of the ordinary mind but also that of the philosophic mind. There is an abyss which no human can cross, a mystery which remains utterly impenetrable to one. This is the transcendent Godhead. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
We can know as much, and as little, of God as the wave dashing against the Californian coastline can know of the immense ocean stretching so many thousand miles to the Australian shore: such is human insignificance in relation to that activity of God which is directed to thus Universe. However, in relation to that non-activity which is God-in-itself, at rest, we can know absolutely nothing. For here is Being without end, Mind without individualization of any kind, and Life without any bottom or top to it. The Unfathomable Mystery of Mind will always remain. Despite all the absurd claims to the contrary, no one has ever interpreted to us the great Mystery of mysteries, the Godhead behind the God active in the Universe. The more righteous a people become the more they are qualified for loving others and rendering them happy. A wicked human can have but little love for one’s wife; while a righteous human, being filled with the love of God, is sure to manifest this Heavenly attribute in every thought and feeling of one’s heart, and in every word and deed. Love, joy, and innocence will radiate from one’s very countenance, and be expressed in every look. This will beget confidence in the love of one’s heart; for love beget love; happiness imparts happiness; and these Heaven born emotions will continue to increase more and more, until they are perfected and glorified in all the fulness of eternal love itself. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
True love of one human for another always includes the love of God from whom all good things issue. Without a strong commitment to the Lord, an individual is more prone to have a low level of commitment to a spouse. Weak commitments to eternal covenants lead to losses of eternal consequence. If two people are earnestly and faithfully observing all the ordinances and principles of the gospels, there could not arise any cause for divorce. The joy and happiness pertaining to the marriage relationship will grow sweeter, and spouses will become more and more attached to each other as the days go by. Not only will the husband love the wife and the wide the husband, but children born to them will live in an atmosphere of love and harmony. The love of each for the others will not be impaired, and moreover the love of all towards our Eternal Father and His Son Jesus Christ will be more firmly rooted in their soul. The Lord said, “Thou shalt love thy wife with all thy heart, and shalt cleave unto her and none else,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 42.22. This kind of love can be shown for your wives in so many ways. First and foremost, nothing except God Himself takes priority over your wife in your life—not work, not recreation, not hobbies. What does it mean to love someone with all you heart? #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
To love someone with all of your heart means to love that individual with all your emotional feelings and with all your devotion. You cannot demean her, criticize her, find fault with her. What does it mean to cleave unto her? It means to stay close to her, to be loyal and faith to her, to communicate with her, and to express your love for her. It does not mean be like Evan Chambers, a young heir to a media conglomerate, from Greek thr TV show. His mother gave him a multi-million dollar trust fund in college, and a $100,000.00 German sports car, but he had to sign a contract stating he could only drive his car on approved trips and could not marry until he was 25. So, Evan took this as a sign that meant he was not supposed to genuinely love anyone, spend lavishly on his friends, and be a suave playboy. However, love means being sensitive to the feelings of the person you are with. Husbands, recognize your wife’s intelligence and her ability to counsel with you. Give her the opportunity to grow intellectually, emotionally, and socially as well as spiritually. Remember, brethren, love can be nurtured and nourished by little tokens. Flowers on special occasions are wonderful, but so is your willingness to help with the dishes, vacuum the carpet, get up with a crying child in the night, or leave the television or the newspaper to help with dinner. Those are the quiet ways we say, “I love you,” with our actions. They bring rich dividends for such little effort. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
If two people love the Lord more than their own lives and then love each other more than their own lives, working together in total harmony with the gospel program as their basic structure, they are sure to have this great happiness. When a husband and wife go together frequently to the holy temple, kneel in prayer together in their home with their family, go hand and hand to their religious meetings, keep their religious meetings, keep their lives wholly chaste—mentally and physically—so that their whole thoughts and desires and loves are all centered in the one being, their companion and both work together for the upbuilding of the kingdom of God then happiness is at its pinnacle. Moroni tells us that this highest of Christian virtues is more accurately labeled, “The pure love of Christ.” And it endures forever; and whoso is found possessed of it at the last day, it shall be well him [and her]. “Wherefore, pray unto the Father with all the energy of heart, that ye may be filled with this love, which he has bestowed upon all who are true followers of his Son, Jesus Christ; that ye may become the sons [and daughters] of God; that when he shall appear we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is; that we may be purified even as he is pure,” reports Moroni 7.47-48. True charity, the absolutely pure, perfect love of Christ, has really been known only once in this World—in the form of Christ Himself, the living Son of the living God. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
As in everything, Christ is the only one who got it all right, did it all perfectly, loved the way we are all to try to love. However, even though we fall short, that divine standard is there for us. It is a goal toward which we are to keep reaching, keep striving—and, certainly, a goal to keep appreciating. God of justice, may I not complain at what fate has brought to me. Please cleave my night with your lightning-axe, dividing my troubles into ones I can bear. O Lord, please open my lips and my mouth shall declare Thy praise. May my words of you be as sweet and beautiful as honey and more precious than silver and gold, diamonds and rubies. Praised art Thou, O Lord our God and God of our fathers, God of Abraham, God of Isaac, and God of Jacob, mighty, revered and exalted God. Thou bestowest lovingkindness and possesses all things. Mindful of the patriarchs’ love for Thee, Thou wilt in Thy love bring a redeemer to their children’s children, and their children’s children for the sake of Thy name. O King, Thou Helper, Redeemer and Shield, be Thou praised, O Lord, Shield of America. Thou, O Lord art mighty forever. Thou callest the dead to immortal life for Thou art mighty in deliverance. Our solutions to life’s problems are always gospel solutions. Not only are answers found in Christ, but so is the power, the gift, the bestowal, the miracle of giving and receiving those answers. In this matter of love no doctrine could be mor encouraging to us than that. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
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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
Cresleigh Homes
Don’t mind us, we’re just admiring the view from the backyard of this #BrightonStation Residence 3 home. Not only does it look great, it’s also shaped like the perfect place to make memories.
View a video walkthrough of this residence on our website. Link in bio. https://youtu.be/yQTnZ0oO2OE
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. There are enhanced included features, smart open floor plans, ample storage, nature views, and the quality you expect from Cresleigh.
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
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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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Human History Becomes More and More a Race Between Education and Catastrophe!
The Christian life is not a way “out” but a way “through” life. Americans are so tense and keyed up that it is impossible even to put them to sleep with a sermon. However, it is easy to sell anti-rationalism, because junk thought always involves a shortcut—whether a diet requiring no reduction in calorie intake; a responsibility-evading bogus apology for bad behaviour (“I am sorry that you were hurt” instead of “I am sorry that I hurt you”); or a cure that depends largely on whether a sick patient has an optimistic attitude. The virulent outbreak of anti-rationalism in America is also rooted in a much older, nonpolitical tendency in American thought—a chronic suspicion of experts that dovetails with the folk belief in the superior wisdom f ordinary people. Ironically but perhaps predictably, the upsurge in mistrust of expert authority followed several decades in which public deference to scientific and technological authority, a deference so great that is was sometimes exaggerated and misplaced, stood at an all-time high. The inseparability of junk science from junk thought is evinced by the telltale marks of endemic illogic coupled, in many instances, with deliberate manipulativeness. The first and most fundamental warning sign is an inability to distinguish between coincidence and causation—a basic requirement for scientific literacy. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
The anti-vaccination movement is rife with conspiracy theories tied both to the right wing’s distrust of government and the left’s distrust of traditional medicine—the latter a heritage of the extreme wings of the holistic healing ad New Age movements of the late sixties and seventies. Currently, 50 percent of Americans and 49 percent of people in Japan report they are unwilling to get a COVID-19 vaccine when it is produced because they are fearful of adverse side effects from a procedure that has never been tried on large numbers of people. Opponents of compulsory immunization believe, with a near-religious fervor, that no child should ever be subjected by government fiat to the slightest risk—and all drugs, as is well known, have some risk of negative side effects. A decline in population, however, may actually be good for some countries. China’s economic development, for example, could not have taken place had population growth not been checked by measures, including a mandatory limit of one child per family, that are draconian and anti-democratic from a New World point of view. Social scientists, including demographers, use many of the tools of the physical sciences (including measurement and mathematics), but when they draw conclusions about future behaviour of the human species on the basis of past behaviour, their reasoning is often highly unscientific. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
A psychologist studying reactions to “interpersonal problems,” like a demographer studying lifestyles choices, can only tell us how human beings have behaved in the past—not how they might behave under radically altered future conditions. Predictions should be made, and received, in the same spirit as the warning from the Ghost of Christmas Present, who told Scrooge that he foresaw the death of Tiny Tim if the shadow of the future remained unaltered. The show of the future predicted by many psychologists is often altered—by a person’s religious beliefs, work history, medical conditions, delays in starting a family, and the recognition that drug, alcohol use, pleasures of the flesh, and too many children are a burden rather than an asset in postindustrial economies. In the United States of America is not among the worst-performing countries but is merely mediocre, fourteenth among twenty-five nations studied. This is not to suggest that Americans are unique in their mathematical and scientific illiteracy but that there is a unique gap between America’s image of itself as the World’s leader in science and technology and the reality of a nation in which more students are spending more years in school while falling behind the most developed nations of Europe and Asia. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
In Turkey and Mexico, people are not constantly told that they are, or ought to be, “number one.” Moreover, public ignorance in large and powerful counties is particularly dangerous to the rest of the World precisely because of the capacity of powerful states to inflict damage on the weak. Parents often believe deep in their hearts, that if they did their job well enough all of their children would be creative, intelligent, kind, generous, happy, brave, spontaneous, and good—each, of course, in one’s own special way. At a study by the Urban Institute reported that in Boston schools, 104 European American girls finished high school for every 100 boys—a gap but hardly a crisis. Among African Americans, the gap is 139 to 100. That is a real calamity, but it seems preposterous to attribute the gap to a “biologically disrespectful” school system that works quite well for upper-middle-class European Americas of both genders. Nationwide, more than half of American-American boys drop out of high school—a statistic with deeply rooted social causes that have been explored by a host of African American writers and scholars of varying political persuasions, including National Public Radio’s Juan Williams, Newsday’s Les Payne, New York Times op-ed columnist Bob Herbert, the conservative author Shebly Steele, the sociologist Orlando Patterson, and the historian Henry Louis Gates. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
Unlike the European Americans enamored of the “boy crisis,” none of these American-American commentators focused on genetics or the supposedly different learning styles of girls and boys. Instead they examine a street culture that glorifies violence as proof of manhood and denigrates learning, as well as the absence of a father in so many less affluent African-American homes. A similar pattern is evident in less affluent Hispanic neighbourhoods and less affluent European American homes, for whom the divorce rate is also much higher than it is among more affluent European-Americans. Nonetheless, some African Americans and Hispanics do excel, and they know who they are is better than a negative stereotype. The reason why girls do better than boys, even in the subcultures permeated by violence and poverty, surely have something to do with the greater susceptibility of boys to malign influences—including drug, gangs, and probably poor parenting skills because in many single family homes with one parent, or a step-father, boy are looked at as expendable because they are male and someone else’s heir. Therefore, there is a lack of a beneficial, disciplined adult male role model in their lives. While girls hold more value because they are female and can also be used for pleasures of the flesh. A man does not want to help someone else’s son become better than he is, and therefore he is deemed a threat. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
Yet (go figure!) American academics and members of the media are more interested in looking at the way boys brains and girls brains differ in “verbal processing.” The simplistic slogans of junk though are perfectly suited to modern mass media, which must fixate on novelty in order to catch the eyes and ears of public with an increasingly short attention span. It seems that the portion of the brain, the amygdala, where emotions are processed is poorly connected in boys to the part of the brain that expresses emotions in words; ergo, boys need to be taught to read and write in different ways from girls. According to this logic, the amygdalas of women before the eighteenth century must also have had a screw loose, given that nearly all great writers were men. Or could it be that women in pre-Enlightenment societies were rarely taught to read and write and systematically discouraged from intellectual pursuits? Because of the distress, both physical and psychologically that arises from an overload of the human organism’s physical adaptive systems and its decision-making processes, some people believe that government allowances for a parent otherwise compelled to work is a good idea, on the grounds that it would save money in the end—thus implying that only a full-time parent can avoid bringing up a child who is a social problem. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
If at least one parent realizes clearly how vital this kind of care is to a child, it may make it easier for one to decide that the extra money one might earn, or the satisfaction one might receive from an outside job, is not so important after all. You have the capacity to rear a genius, a masterpiece. Such an activity is the most important thing you can do and should therefore rightfully absorb all of your time and energy. Given such an attitude it is relatively easy to expand child-rearing into a full-time job. However, some parents like to be friends with their children and share their problems with their children, but since a parent is supposed to be molding them into superior beings one cannot lean too heavily upon them for one’s own needs, although one is sorely tempted to do so because a child may not be able to tolerate such massive inputs of one person’s personality. The mission in middle-class America is to create a near-perfect being. This means that every parental quirk, every parental hang-up, and ever parental deprivation will be experienced by the child as heavily amplified noise from which there is no respite. Our society is presently founded on overstimulation—on the generation of needs and desires which cannot be directly gratified, but which ensure a great deal of striving and buying in an effort to gratify them. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
The goal is commercialize America, make everyone and everything into a brand or a product in an infinite number of ways to create and endless demand for goods and services. However, there is a limit, in any case, to the amount of emotional crippling that can be borne. When we realize that horrors of turning a child into a product, we begin to see why this child will encounter some resentment when one grows up. The child is not really responsible for the bad bargain the parents have made with each other (and with themselves), but one lends moral credit to it. Indeed, “for the children” is a kind of priest’s blessing or notary seal given to all bad marital bargains. And since the child is the sanction for the parents’ neurotic division of labour, they cannot help but blame the child when they begin to suffer from it. Furthermore, as the suffering increases, this sanction tends more and more to be the only force holding them to it. The husband’s ambition and the wife’s domesticity originally promised their own rewards and did not need to be buttressed by thoughts of the child’s future—just as a voluntary and mutually profitable deal between two business people does not initially require a written contract. However, such a contract binds them if there is a change of heart, at which point one of them might say, “if it were not for the contract, I would not go on with this.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
Similarly, as ambition and domesticity fail to bring happiness to husband and wife, respectively, both begin to say, “if it were not for the children, I might chuck this and do something more interesting (enjoyable, fulfilling, exciting, relaxing).” One can admit wanting to tear up a contract, however, and one cannot admit wanting to tear up a child. Nor is it easy for parents to admit their initial error (if needed they can even comprehend it). This means that the child is not only a scapegoat but a scapegoat that cannot be attacked. The result is a free-floating resentment with a vague tropism toward youth—a resentment with roots in the parents’ discontent with their own lives. This condition would seem ideally suited to product anger toward young people who show tendencies to live differently and more pleasurably than did the parental generation. This is not to say that parents do not in fact make sacrifices for their children—in a child-oriented society like ours such sacrifices are resented. Parents in many societies make severe sacrifices for their children which never cause any hostile reaction later on, largely because the sacrifices “pay off” in some way, or lead to some predictable outcome. In our society parents never know exactly what their sacrifices will lead to, although they have many fantasies about it. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
In the recent past, for example, and in working-class families today, parents sacrificed in order to prepare their children to be economically and socially better off than the parents were, and often hated them for fulfilling this goal and leaving the parents behind. Now middle-class parents sacrifice in order to prepare their children to be emotionally better off—more loving, expressive, creative, cooperative, honest—and once again, resent being outdistanced. In both cases the parents feel left out of the triumphs they made possible; and the children feel ashamed of the parents who wanted them to be superior. The parents want their fantasies of vicarious success fulfilled but never seem to recognize that both kinds of success involve a change to a new milieu from which the parents are automatically excluded. The earlier group of parents wanted their children to become rich and respectable and still remain somehow part of the working-class milieu. The later group want their children to be more cultures, less money-grubbing, more spontaneous and creative, yet still somehow willing to remain on the same treadmill with the parents. And this is why some children will do things like pay to have a parents fence repaired. Also, most parents do not want to be in a nursing home when they get old and realize rich kids can pay for their homecare. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
Furthermore, while raising children, parents do not reveal pleasures of the flesh to children because their primary function is to control such impulses. Still many people spend a great deal of trying not to “cop out” in a society whose corruption generates moral dilemmas that compel a hundred cop-outs a day even for the most obsessionally pure radical. And all of this, of course, makes them extremely vulnerable to moral contamination: when confronted with situations in which they took the easy way out they are usually demoralized. God ministers His grace to us through the ministry of other believers. This truly is a primary means God uses, because He has ordained that in the Body of Christ all the members “should have equal concern for each other,” reports 1 Corinthians 12.25. Of course, this is to be a reciprocal ministry. We should be channels of grace to one another. Let me deliberately misuse a statement of Scripture to make a point: this is one area where most of us feel it is indeed “more blessed to give than to receive,” reports Acts 20.35. That is, we are more inclined to be minister of grace to others than to allow others to be ministers of grace to us. Our problem is we are reluctant to be transparent and vulnerable to each other. We humans do not like to admit we have problems. This is perceived as a sign of weakness. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
We want to appear that we have life under control. We want to appear that we are successfully dealing with temptations to sin, and that we are successfully dealing with the difficult circumstances of life. We are just as unwilling to let others know how we have been passed over for promotion at work as to admit we are having lustful thoughts about the legal secretary in the next office. The times when we need an extra measure of God’s grace are often the times when we are most reluctant to let other people know we need it. This leads to an important principle regarding the ministry of grace. Each of us needs to cultivate a small group of friends with whom we can be transparent and vulnerable. This might be on an individual or small group basis. However, we need a few people—including our spouse, if we have one—with whom we feel free to share our failures, hurts, and sorrows. The Puritans used to ask God for one “bosom friend” with whom they could share absolutely everything. That is a good goal for us today. We should store up God’s word in our heart against a time of future need. We also should “store up” a few bosom friends against the day when we need them to be God’s ministers of grace to us. Usually when we think of the ministry of grace to one another, we think of the initiative being with the person who will be the minister. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
However, the initiative is often with the one who has a need. We have to admit our need and give the other person “permission” to minister to us. We have to, in some way, communicate that we are not only willing to share our needs but are willing to be ministered to. What are some ways in which we can asked others to be ministers of grace to us? In answering, we need to keep in mind that we are asking the person to be an avenue for God’s Spirit to pour out His grace to us. We are asking the person, or persons, to help strengthen our contact with the Holy Spirit so that we can better receive the divine assistance He has promised to give. We are not asking, at this point, for practical assistance or human counsel. That may be appropriate at the right time. However, for now, we are thinking of our need for grace, for God’s divine power to come to help us in our time of need. That being true, the first thing we need from others is prayer support. It is instructive how often Paul asked the recipients of his letters to pray for him, even when he did not seem to have extremely pressing needs. So certainly, in our times of need we should ask others to pray for us. However, if they are to pray effectively for us, we must be willing to share what our real needs are. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
The second thing we need is their help in accepting and applying Scripture to our specific needs. We might say, “Here is my problem. What Scriptures do you think might help me?” I realize this is a radical suggestion, because so often, when we are experiencing adversity, the last thing we want is for someone to give us a pat answer in the form of a Scripture verse. However, if we have developed the kind of friendship where we can be transparent and vulnerable with one another, then we are no going to be giving each other pat answer type responses. Third, we can ask the other person to be a minister of grace to us by helping us see our situation with a better, more objective, perspective. We all know our tendency to magnify problems, or perhaps put the worst construction on events affecting us. The other person can be the Holy’s Spirit’s agent to help us see our circumstances more objectively. That better perspective may help us to more readily humble ourselves under God’s hand. You will recognize that, all another person can do is facilitate our own contact with the Holy Spirit. All another can be is an avenue of God’s grace. We have nothing to offer each other just from ourselves. We cannot deprive Christ of his finite freedom; for a transmuted being does not have the freedom to be other than divine. Let Christ work through you and keep your faith. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
Faith in the Resurrection of Christ has traditionally been a touchstone of orthodox Christology. Christ resurrected himself because, being God, he could do it; and he had occasion to rise from the dead only because, being fully man, he had died. The Resurrection is thus the biblical ground of the dogma of Chalcedon. Whatever disturbs that Chalcedonian balance must necessarily alter the scriptural data on the Resurrection. Faith is only committed to the Resurrection itself, as symbol and as event. If Christ has not risen from the dead, vain is our faith. The Resurrection is a mysterious experience. Christ rose form the tomb on the third day. This can obviously only mean that he rose with his own body. The disciple realized the Jesus was dead, and yet they knew that, being the Christ, the New Being, he must have power beyond death. If God had not been incarnated in the flesh, there would be little basic for a resurrection of Christ in the flesh. Resurrection is not something added to the death of him who is the Christ; but it is implied in his death. No longer is the Universe subjected to a higher law, to the law of life out of death by the death of one who represents eternal life. The tombs were opened and bodies were raised when one man in whom God was present without limits committed his spirit into his Father’s hands. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
“And now behold, it came to pass in the commencement of the fortieth year of the reign of the judges over the people of Nephi, there began to be a serious difficulty among the people of the Nephites. For behold, Pahoran had died, and gone they way of all the Earth; therefore there began to be a serious contention concerning who should have the judgment-seat among the brethren, who were the sons f Pahoran. Now these are their names who did contend for the judgment-seat, who did also cause the people to contend: Pahoran, Paanchi, and Pacumenia. Now these are not all the sons of Pahoran (for he had many), but these are they who did contend for the judgment-seat; therefore, they did cause three divisions among the people. Nevertheless, it came to pass that Pahoran was appointed by the voice of the people to be chief judge and a governor over the people of Nephi. And it came to pass that Pacumeni, when he saw that he could not obtain the judgment-seat, he did unite with the voice of the people. However, behold, Pannchi, and that part of the people that were desirous that he should be their governor, was exceedingly wroth; therefore, he was about to flatter away those people to rise up in rebellion against their brethren. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
“And it came to pass as he was about to do this, behold, he was taken, and was tried according to the voice of the people, and condemned unto death; for he had risen up in rebellion and sought to destroy the liberty of the people. Now when these people who were desirous that he should be their governor saw that he was condemned unto death, therefore they were angry, and behold, they sent forth one Kishkumen, even to the judgment-seat of Pahoran, and murdered Pahoran as he sat upon the judgment-seat. And he was pursued by the servants of Pahoran; but behold, so speedy was the flight of Kishkumen that no human could overtake him. And he went unto those that sent him, and they all entered int a covenant, yea, swearing by their everlasting Maker, that they would tell no human that Kishkumen had murdered Pahoran. Therefore, Kishkumen was not known among the people of Nephi, for he was in disguise at the time that he murdered Pahoran. And Kishkumen and his band, who had covenanted with him, did mingle themselves among the people, in a manner that they all could not be found; but as many as were found were condemned unto death. And now behold, Pacumeni was appointed, according to the voice of the people, to be a chief judge and a governor over the people, to reign in the stead of his brother Pahoran; and it was according to his right. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
“And all this was done in the fortieth year of the reign of the judges; and it had an end. And it came to pass in the forty and first year of the reign of the judges, that the Lamanites had gathered together an innumerable army of humans, and armed them with swords, and with cimeters and with bows, and with arrows, and with head-plates, and with breastplates, and with all manner of shields of every kind. And they came down again that they might pitch battle against the Nephites. And they were led by a man whose name was Coriantumr; and he was a descendant of Zarahemla; and he was a dissenter from among the Nephites; and he was a large and a might man. Therefore, the king of the Lamanites, whose name was Tubaloth, who was the son of Ammoron, supposing that Coriantumr, being a mighty man, could stand against the Nephites, with his strength and also with his great wisdom, insomuch that by sending him forth he should gain power over the Nephites—therefore, he did stir them up to anger, and he did gather together his armies, and he did appoint Coriantumr to their leader, and did cause that they should march down to the land of Zarahemla to battle against the Nephites. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
And it came to pass that because of so much contention and so much difficulty in the government, that they had not kept sufficient guards in the land of Zarahemla; for they had supposed that the Lamanites durst not come into the heart of their lands to attack that great city Zarahemla. However, it came to pass that Coriantumr did march forth at the head of his numerous host, and came upon the inhabitants of the city, and their march was with such exceedingly great speed that there was no time for the Nephites to gather together their armies. Therefore Coriantumr did cut down the watch by the entrance of the city, and did march forth with his whole army into the city, and they did slay every one who did oppose them, insomuch that they did take possession of the whole city. And it came to pass that Pacumeni, who was the chief judge, did flee before Coriantumr, even to the walls of the city. And it came t pass that Coriantumr did smite him against the wall, insomuch that he died. And thus ended the days of Pacumeni. And now when Coriantumr saw that he was in possession of the city of Zarahemla, and were marching through the most capital parts of the land, slaying the people with great slaughter, both men, women, and children, taking possession of many cities and of many strongholds. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
“However, when Moronihah had discovered this, he immediately sent forth Lehi with an army round about to head them before they should come to the land Bountiful. And thus he did; and he did head them before they came to the land of Bountiful, and gave unto them battle, insomuch that they began to retreat back towards the land of Zarahemla. And it came to pass that Moronihah did head them in their retreat, and did give unto them battle, insomuch that it became an exceedingly bloody battle; yea, many were slain, and among the number who were slain Coriantumr was also found. And now, behold, the Lamanites could not retreat either way, neither on the north, nor on the south, nor on the east, nor on the west, for they were surrounded on every hand by the Nephites. And thus had Coriantumr plunged the Lamanites into the midst of the Nephites, insomuch that they were in the power f the Nephites, and he himself was slain, and the Lamanites did yield themselves into the hands of Nephites. And it came to pass that Moronihah took possession of the city of Zarahemla again, and caused that the Lamanites who had bee taken prisoner should depart out of the mand in peace. And thus ended the forty and first year of the reign of the judges,” reports Helaman 1.1-34. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Father of all, we praise you, we praise you. Earth beneath us, we praise you, we praise you. King of kings, we praise you, we praise you. Love of our Lord, we praise you, we praise you. Shining Father, we praise you, we praise you. Giver of wisdom, we praise you, we praise you. Open0handed one, we praise you, we praise you. May Your great name be blessed forever and ever. Exalted and honoured be the name of the Holy One, blessed be He, whose glory transcends, yea, is beyond all praises, hymns and blessings that humans can render unto Him. O Lord, open Thou my lips and my mouth shall declare Thy praise. Praised art Thou, O Lord our God and God of our fathers, God of Abraham, God of Isaac, and God of Jacob, mighty, revered and exalted God. Thou bestowest loving-kindness and possesses all things. Mindful of the patriarchs’ love for Thee, Thou wilt in Thy love bring a redeemer to their children’s children for the sake of Thy name. Remember us unto life, O King who delightest in life, and inscribe us in the Book of Life so that we may live worthily for Thy sake, O Lord of life. O King, Thou Helper, Redeemer and Shield, be Thou praised, O Lord, Shield of Abraham. Thou, O Lord, art mighty forever. Thou callest the dead to immortal life for Thou art mighty in deliverance. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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So the Heart be Right, it is No Matter which Way the Head Lieth!
Every day you do one of two things: build health or produce disease in yourself. The obvious question of why a guiding intelligence would want to make things so difficult for its creations is never asked because it cannot be answered. Community, engagement, dependency—can all trace their suppression in American society to our commitment to individualism. The belief that everyone should purse autonomously one’s own destiny has forced us to maintain an emotional detachment (for which no amount of superficial gregariousness can compensate) from our social and physical environment, and aroused a vague guilt about our competitiveness and indifference to others; for, after all, our earliest training in childhood does not stress competitiveness, but cooperation, sharing, and thoughtfulness—it is only later that we learn to reverse these priorities. Radical challenges to our society, then always tap a confused responsive chord within us that is far more disturbing than anything going on outside. They threaten to reconnect us with each other, with nature, and with ourselves, a possibility that is thrilling but terrifying—as if we had grown a shell-like epidermis and someone was threatening to rip it off. Individualism finds its roots in the attempt to deny the reality and importance of human interdependence. #RandolphHarris 1 of 28
One of the major goals of technology in America is to “free” us from the necessity of relating to, submitting to, depending upon, or controlling other people. The peculiar germ-phobia that pervaded American Life (and several industries), prior to COVD-19, owes much to this insulation machinery. So far have we carried that fantasy of individual autonomy that we imagine each person to have one’s own unique species of germs, which must therefore not be mixed and confused with someone else’s. We are even disturbed at the presence of the germs themselves: despite the fact that many millions of them inhabit every healthy human body from the cradle to the grave we regard them as trespassers. We feel that nature has no business claiming a connection with us, and perhaps one day we will prove ourselves correct. Unfortunately, the more we have succeeded in doing this the more we have felt disconnected, bored, lonely, unprotected, unnecessary, and unsafe. Individualism has many expressions: free enterprise, self-service, academic freedom, suburbia, permissive gun-laws, civil liberties, do-it-yourself, oil-depletion allowances. Everyone values some of these expressions and condemns others, but the principle is widely shared. #RandolphHarris 2 of 28
Criticism of our society since World War II have almost all embraced this value and expressed fears for its demise—the organization person, the other-directed person, conformity, “group-think,” and so on. In general these critics have failed to see the role of the value they embrace so fervently in generating the phenomena they so detest. The most sophisticated apologist for individualism is David Riesman, who recognizes at least that uniformity and community are not the same thing, and does not shrink from the insoluble dilemmas that these issues create. Perhaps the definitive and revealing statement of what individualism is all about is his: “I am insisting that no ideology, however noble, can justify the sacrifice of an individual to the needs of the group.” Whatever I hear such sentiments I recall Jay Haley’s discussion of the kind of communication that characterizes the families of schizophrenics. He points out that people who communicate with one another necessarily govern each other’s behaviour—set rules for each other. However, an individual may attempt to avoid this human fate—to become independent, uninvolved: “One may choose the schizophrenic way and indicate that nothing one does is done in relationship to other people.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 28
The family of the schizophrenic establishes a system of rules like all families, but also has “a prohibition on any acknowledgement that a family member is setting the rules. Each refuses to concede that one is circumscribing the behaviour of others, and each refuses to concede that any other family member if governing one.” The attempt, of course, fails. “The more a person tries to avoid being governed or governing others, the more helpless one becomes and so governs others by forcing them to take care of one.” In our society as a whole this caretaking role is assigned to technology, like so much else. Riesman overlooks the fact that the individual is sacrificed either way. If one is never sacrificed to the group the group will collapse and the individual with it. Part of the individual is, after all, committed to the group. Part of one wants what “the group” wants, part does not. No matter what is done some aspect of the individual—id, ego, or whatever—will be sacrificed. An individual, like a group, is a motley collection of ambivalent feelings, contradictory needs and values, and antithetical ideas. One is not, and cannot be, a monolithic totality, and the modern effort to bring this myth to life is not only delusional and ridiculous, but also acutely destructive, both to the individual and to one’s society. #RandolphHarris 4 of 28
Recognition of this internal complexity would go a long way toward resolving the dilemma Riesman implicitly poses. For the reason a group needs to sacrifice one: the failure of the group members to recognize the complexity and diversity and ambivalence within themselves. Since they have oversimplified and rejected parts of themselves, they not only lack certain resources but also are unable to tolerate their unveiled exposure by others. The deviant is a compensatory mechanism to mitigate this condition. One comes along and tries to provide what is “lacking” in the group (that is, what is present but denied, suppressed). One’s role is like that of the mutant—most are sacrificed but a few survive to save the group from itself in times of change. Individualism is a king of desperate plea to save all mutants, on the grounds that we do not know what we are or what we need. As such it is horribly expensive—a little like setting a million chimps to banging on a typewriter on the grounds that eventually one will produce a masterpiece. However, if we abandon the monolithic pretense and recognize that any group sentiment, and its opposite, represents a part of everyone but only a part, then the prophet is unnecessary since one exists in all of us. #RandolphHarris 5 of 28
And should one appear it will be unnecessary to sacrifice one since we already admitted that what one is saying is true. And in the meantime we would be able to exercise our humanity, governing each other and being governed, instead of encasing ourselves in the leaden armour of our technological schizophrenia. At the beginning of our period we decided freedom. It was a right decision; it created something new and great in history. However, in that decision we excluded the security, social and spiritual, without which humans cannot live and grow. And now, in the old age of our period, the quest to sacrifice freedom for security splits every nation and the whole World with really daemonic power. We have decided for means to control nature and society. We have created them, and we have brought about something new and great in the history of all humankind. However, we have excluded ends. We have never been ready to answer the question, “For what?” And now, when we approach old age, the means claim to be the ends; our tools have become our masters, and the most powerful of them have become a threat to our very existence. Most Americans would certainly like to return to the safety—or the perceived safety—of the World before September 11, 2001, but the rise of ideological anti-rationalism in American life and much of the World. #RandolphHarris 6 of 28
Because of the manipulation by the media, the United States of America and other nations around the World have become susceptible to a toxic combination of forces that are the enemies of the intellect, learning, and reason. Because so many had decided against reason and outgrown traditions and honoured superstitions, some feel like they have made a great and courageous decision, and have been given a new dignity to humanity. However, we have, in that decision, excluded the soul, the ground and power of life. We have cut off our mind from our soul; we have suppressed and mistreated the soul within us, in other humans, and in nature. And now, when we are old, the forces of the soul break destructively into our minds, driving us to mental disease and insanity, and effecting the disintegration of the souls of uncounted millions, especially in this country, but also all over the World. From the beginning of our period we have decided for the nation, as the expression of our special way of life and of our unique contribution to history. The decision was great and creative, and for centuries it was effective. However, in that decision we excluded humankind and all symbols expressing the unity of all humans. The former unity was broken, and no international group has been able to re-establish it. #RandolphHarris 7 of 28
Now, in the old age of our period, the most powerful nations themselves claim to represent humankind, and try to impose their ways of life upon all humanity, producing, therefore, wars of destruction, which will perhaps unite all humankind in the peace of the grave. Our period has decided for a secular World. That was a great and much-needed decision. It threw a church from her throne, a church which had become a power of suppression and superstition. It gave consecration and holiness to our daily life and work. Yet it excluded those deep things for which religion stands: the feeling for the inexhaustible mystery of life, the grip of an ultimate meaning of existence, and the invincible power of an unconditional devotion. These things cannot be excluded. If we try to expel them in their divine images, they re-emerge in daemonic images. Now, in the old age of our secular World, we have seen the most horrible manifestation of these daemonic images; we have looked more deeply into the mystery of evil than most generations before us; we have seen the unconditional devotions of millions to a satanic image; we feel our period’s sickness until death. This is the situation of our World. Each of us should realize that one participates in it, and that the forces in one’s own soul which makes one old, often in early years, are part of the forces which make our period old. #RandolphHarris 8 of 28
Each of us strengthens these forces, and each of us is a victim of them at the same time. We are in the desert of which the prophet speaks, and none among us knows the way out. Certainly there is no way out in what some idealists tell us: “Make decisions, but do not exclude anything! Take the best in all possibilities. Combine them. Then will our period become young again!” No person and no nation will become young again that way. The new does not appear from a collection of the elements of the old which are still alive. When the new comes the old must disappear. “Remember not the former things, neither consider the things of old,” says the prophet. “Behold, all things are become new,” says the apostle. Out of the death of the old the new arises. The new is created not out of the old, not out of the best of the old, but out of the death of the old. It is not the old which creates the new. That which creates the new is that which is beyond old and beyond new, the Eternal. “Behold, I am doing a new thing, even now it is springing to light. Do you not perceive it? If the new were a part of the old, the prophet would not ask, “Do you perceive it?” for everybody would see it already. However, it is hard to perceive. It is hidden in the profound mystery which veils every creation, birth as well as rebirth. It springs to light—which is to say that it comes out of the morbidity of that mystery. #RandolphHarris 9 of 28
Nothing is more surprising than the rise of the new within ourselves. We do not foresee or observe its growth. We do not try to produce it by the strength of our will, by the power of our emotion, or by the clarity of our intellect. On the contrary, we feel that by trying to produce it we prevent its coming. By trying, we would produce the old in the power of the old, but not the new in the power of the new. The new being is born in us, just when we least believe in it. It appears in remote corners of our souls which we have neglected for a long time. It opens up deep levels of our personality which had been shut out by old decisions and old exclusions. It shows a way where there was no way before. It liberates us from the tragedy of having to decide and having to exclude, because it is given before any decision. Suddenly we notice it within us! The new which we sought and longed for comes to us in the moment in which we lose hope of ever finding it. That is the first thing we must say about the new: it appears when and where it chooses. We cannot force it, and we cannot calculate it. Readiness is the only condition for it; and readiness means that the former things have become old and that they are driving us into the destruction of our souls just when we are trying most to save what we thing can be saved of the old. #RandolphHarris 10 of 28
It is the same in our historical situation. The birth of the new is just as surprising in history. It may appear in some dark corner of our World. It may appear in a social group where it was least expected. It may appear in the pursuit of activities which seem utterly insignificant. If there be in such a situation people who are able to perceive the new of which the prophet speaks, it may appear in the depth of a national catastrophe. When people least believe in it, the new in history always comes. However, certainly, it comes only in the moment when the old becomes visible as old and tragic and dying, and when no way out is seen. We live in such a moment; such a moment is our situation. We realize this situation in its depth only if we do not continue to say, “We know where the new will come from. It will cone from this intuition or this movement, or the special class, or this nation, or the philosophy, or this church.” None of these, of course, is excluded from being the place where the new will appear. However, none of these can guarantee its appearance. All of us who have looked at one of these things as the chosen place of the new have been disappointed. The supposedly new always proves to be the continuation of the old, deepening its destructive conflicts. #RandolphHarris 11 of 28
And so I repeat: the firs ting about the new is that we cannot force it and cannot calculate it. We must realize as profoundly as possible that the former things have become old, that they destroy our period just when we try most courageously to preserve the best of it. And we must attempt this realization in our social as well as in our personal life. In no way but the most passionate striving for the new shall we become aware that the old is old and dying. The prophets who looked for the new thing One is doing were most passionately and most actively involved in the historical situation of their nation. However, they knew that neither they themselves nor any of the old things would bring the new. “Remember not the former things, neither consider the things of old,” says the prophet. That is the second thing we must say about the new: it must break the power of the old, not only in reality, but also in our memory; and one is not possible without the other. Let me say a few words about this mist sublime point in the prophetic text and in the experience of every religion. If the power of the old is not broken within us, we cannot be born anew; and it is not broken so long as it puts the burden of guilt upon us. Therefore religion, prophetic as well as apostolic, pronounces, above all, forgiveness. #RandolphHarris 12 of 28
Forgiveness means that the old is thrown into the past because the new has come. “Remember not” in the prophetic words does not mean to forget easily. If it meant that, forgiveness would not be necessary. Forgiveness means a throwing out of the old, as remembered and real at the same time, by the strength of the new which could never be the saving new if it did not carry with it the authority of forgiveness. I believe that the situation is the same in our social and historical existence. A new which is not able to throw the old into the past, in remembrance as well as in reality, is not the really anew. The really new is able to break the power of old conflicts between human and humans, between group and group, in memory and reality. It is able to break the old curses, the results of former guilt, inherited by one generation from another, the guilt between nations, between races, between classes, on old and new continents, these curses by which the guilt of one group, in reality and memory, permanently produces guilt in another group. What power of the new will be great and saving enough to break the curses which has laid waste half of our World? What new thing will have the saving power to break the curse brought by the German nation upon herself because our eyes? “Remember not the former things,” says the prophet. That is the second thing which must be said about the new. #RandolphHarris 13 of 28
“Behold, I am doing a new thing.” “I” points to the source of the really new, to that which is always old and always new, the Eternal. That is the third thing which must be said about the new: it bears the mark of its eternal origin in its face, as it did when Moses came from the mountain with the tablets of the law, opening a new period in history. The really new is that which has in itself eternal power and eternal light. New things arise in every moment, as every place. Nothing is today as it was yesterday. However, this kind of new is old almost as soon as it appears. It falls under the judgment of the Preacher: “There is no new thing under the Sun.” Yet sometimes a new thing appears which does not age so easily which makes life possible again, in both our personal and our historical existence, a saving new, which has the power to throw into the past what is old and burdened with guilt and curse. Its saving power is the power of the Eternal within it. It is new, really new, in the degree to which it is beyond old and new, in the degree to which it is beyond old and new, in the degree to which it is eternal. And it remains new so long as the eternal power of the Eternal is manifest within it, so long as the light of the Eternal shines through it. For that power may become weaker; that light may become more morbid; and that which was truly a new thing may become old itself. That is the tragedy of human greatness in which something eternal appears. #RandolphHarris 14 of 28
When the apostles say that Jesus is the Christ, they mean that in Him the new eon which cannot become old is present. Christianity lives through the faith that within it there is the new which is not just another new thing but rather the principle and representation of all the really new in human and history. However, it can affirm this only because the Christ deprived Himself of everything which can become old, of all individual and social standing and greatness, experience and power. He surrendered all these things in His death and showed in His self-surrender the only new thing which is eternally new: love. “Love never ends,” says His great apostle. Love is the power of the new in every human and in all history. It cannot age; it removes guilt and curse. It is working even today toward new creation. It is hidden in the morbidity of our souls and of our history. However, it is not completely hidden to those who are grasped by its reality. “Do you not perceive it?” asks the prophet. Do we not perceive it? The grace we receive from God, then, is the assistance of the Holy Spirit. We do not understand just how the Holy Spirit interacts with our human spirit, but we do know He most often uses His word. That is, He brings our mind some Scripture or Scriptures, particularly appropriate to the situation. #RandolphHarris 15 of 28
God may bring us His word through one of our pastor’s sermons, through a Christian book we are reading, through the encouraging words of a friend, or though our own reading of study of Scripture. In my case, since I have memorized so many Scripture over the years, He often brings to my mind a memorized verse. This is that He did when through John 12.21, “Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. However, if it dies, it produces many seeds.” I realized that only through “dying” to my own plans and desires would I be fruitful. Having called our attention to the right Scripture, He then enables us to apply it to our situation, as He did for me with John 12.24. In Acts 20.32, Paul said to the Ephesian elders, “Now I commit you to God and to the word of his grace, which can build you up and give you an inheritance among all those who are sanctified.” Earlier in verse 24, Paul had referred to the gospel of God’s grace, the good news of salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. In verse 32, however, he referred to “the word of his grace, which can build you up.” The reference here is to the ongoing use of Scripture in our daily lives to build us up in the Christian faith. However, Paul specifically called it “the word of his grace,” the word through which we come to understand and appropriate God’s grace in our daily lives. #RandolphHarris 16 of 28
The Bible is not merely a book about God; it is a book from God. “All Scripture is God-breathed,” said Paul (2 Timothy 3.16). The Bible is God’s self-revelation to us all He wants us to know about Himself and His provision for our salvation and our spiritual growth. It is God’s only objective, authoritative communication to us. If we are to appropriate the grace of God, then we must become intimate friends with the Bible. We must seek to know and understand the great truths of Scripture: truths about God and His character, and truths about humans and their desperate need of God’s grace. We need to get beyond the “how-tos” of Scripture—how to raise children, how to manage finances, how to witness to unbelievers—and all other such utilitarian approaches to Scripture. Such practical instruction from the Bible regarding our daily lives is indeed valuable, but we need to go beyond that. Our practical age has come to disparage from a firm doctrinal understanding of Scripture as being of no practical value. However, there is nothing more practical for our daily lives than the knowledge of God. David’s chief desire was to gaze upon the beauty of God. “One thing I ask from the Lord, this only do I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze on the beauty of the Lord and to seek him in his temple,” reports Psalm 27.4. #RandolphHarris 17 of 28
God’s holiness and sovereignty, His wisdom and power, and His faithfulness and unfailing—only in Scripture has God revealed to us the truths about His person and His character. However, the Bible is more than merely objective truth; it is actually life-giving and life-sustaining. The words of Scripture are “not just idle words for you—they are life,” reports Deuteronomy 32.47. Growth in the grace of God—whether that be His divine favour to the unworthy, or Hid divine enabling to the needy—requires growth in our assimilation of the word of God. In the biological realm, assimilation is the process by which nourishment is changed into living tissue. In the spiritual realm, it is the process by which the written word of God is absorbed int our hearts and becomes, figuratively speaking, living tissue. How do we know God’s grace is sufficient for our particular “thorns”? How do we come to a proper understanding of what it means to live or minister “by the grace of God”? How do we learn about the “throne of grace” where we receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need? Where do we learn that God is the gracious landowner who gives us far, far more than we deserve? The answers to all these questions is in the Scriptures, but it is also on display in our daily lives for all the blessings we receive every moment of the day, even when we do not realize it. #RandolphHarris 18 of 28
That is why Scripture is called the word of God’s grace. God uses Scripture to mediate His grace to us. God and the Word of his grace always go together; God lets his grace flow out through that Word. I was watching I believe season 5, episode 13 of Suits, when Donna was having a flash back to when she was a little girl, and her family had this huge 1920s mansion, and she had a room in the mansion to play her grand piano. However, her father lost the family’s money and she found out they would be moving to an apartment, in a new city, and there was no room for her piano. As a child, to lose your home and all your belong and to have to leave your friends and school must have been very devastating for a child. Fortunately, that is a reality some children do not have to face, but by the grace of God Donna and her family did not end up homeless. God is always blessing us, and some of his blessings counteract bad decisions made by humans. Donna may have not seen the blessing in the situation at the time because she lost so much through no fault of her own, but God did provide for her. How do we know God’s grace is sufficient for our particular “thorns”? How do we come to a proper understanding of what it means to live or minister “by the grace of God”? How do we learn about the “throne of grace” where we receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need? #RandolphHarris 19 of 28
Where do we learn that God is the gracious landowner who gives us far, far more than we deserve? The answer to all these questions is in the Scriptures. That is why Scripture is called the word of His grace. God uses Scripture to mediate His grace to us. God and the Word of His grace always go together; God lets His grace flow out through that Word. “For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope. May the God who gives endurance and encouragement give you the spirit of unity among yourselves as you follow Christ Jesus,” reports Romans 15.4-5. Verse 4 tells us that we receive endurance and encouragement from Scripture. Yet verse 5 says God gives endurance and encouragement. Endurance and encouragement are provisions of God’s grace “to help us in our time of need.” As we go to the throne of grace asking for it, God does provide. However, He usually provides through Scripture, but He also manifests blessings in our lives. If we are appropriate to the grace of God, then, we must regularly expose ourselves directly to the word of God. It is not enough to only hear it preached or taught in our churches on Saturdays or Sundays, as important as those avenues are. We need a regular plan of reading, study, and yes, even memorization. #RandolphHarris 20 of 28
Bible study and Scripture memorization earn no merit with God. We never earn God’s blessing by doing these things, anymore than we earn His blessing by eating nutritious foods. However, as the eating of proper food is necessary to sustain a healthy physical life, so the regular intake of God’s word is necessary to sustain a healthy spiritual life and to regularly appropriate His grace. I strongly advocate Scripture memorization. In our warfare against Satan and his emissaries, we are told to take “the sword of the Spirit,” which is the word of God,” reports Ephesians 6.17. In opposition to all the suggestions of the devil, the sole, simple, and sufficient answer is the word of God. This puts flight all the powers of darkness. The Christian finds this to be true in one’s individual experience. It dissipates his doubts; it drives away one’s fears; it delivers one from the power of Satan. We might say, in the language of our present study, it provides the believer grace to help in time of need. “And now it came to pass that I received an epistle from Ammoron, the king, stating that if I would deliver up those prisoners of war whom we had taken that he would deliver up the city of Antiparah unto us. However, I sent an epistle unto the king, that we were sure our forces were sufficient to take the city of Antiparah by force; and by delivering up the prisoners for that city we should suppose ourselves unwise, and that we would only deliver up our prisoners on exchange. #RandolphHarris 21 of 28
“And Ammoron refused mine epistle, for he would not exchange prisoners; therefore we began to make preparations to go against the city of Antiparah. However, the people of Antiparah did leave the city, and fled to the other cities, which they had possession of, to fortify them; and thus the city of Antiparah fell into our hands. And thus ended the twenty and eight year of the reign of the judges. And it came to pass that in the commencement of the twenty and ninth year, we received a supply of provisions, and also an addition to our army, from the land of Zarahemla, and from the land round about, to the number of six thousand humans, besides sixty of the sons of the Ammonites who had come to join their brethren, my little band of two thousand. And now behold, we were strong, yea, and we had also plenty of provisions brought unto us. And it came to pass that it was our desire to wage a battle with the army which was placed to protect the city Cumeni. And now behold, I will show unto you that we soon accomplish our desire; yea, with our strong force, we did surround, by night, the city Cumeni, a little before they were to receive a supply of provisions. And it came to pass that we did camp round about the city for many nights; but we did sleep upon our swords, and keep guards, that the Lamanites could not come upon us by night and slay us, which they attempted many times; but as many times as they attempted this their blood was spilt. #RandolphHarris 22 of 28
“At length their provision did arrive, and they were about to enter the city by night. And we, instead of being Lamanites, were Nephites; therefore, we did take them and their provisions. And notwithstanding the Lamanites being cut off from their support after this manner, they were still determined to maintain the city; therefore it become expedient that we should take those provisions and send them to Judea, and our prisoners to the land of Zarahemla. And it came to pass that not many days had passed away before the Lamanites began to lose all hopes of succor; therefore they yielded up the city unto our hands; and thus we had accomplished our designs in obtaining the city Cumeni. However, it came to pass that our prisoners were so numerous that, notwithstanding the enormity of our numbers, we were obliged to employ all our force to keep them, or to put them to death. For behold, they would break out in great numbers, and would fight with stones, and with clubs, or whatsoever thing they could get into their hands, insomuch that we did slay upwards of two thousand of them after they had surrendered themselves prisoners of war. Therefore it become expedient for us, that we should put an end to their lives, or guard them, sword in hand, down to the land of Zarahemla; and also our provisions were not any more than sufficient for our own people, notwithstanding that which we had taken from the Lamanites. #RandolphHarris 23 of 28
“And now, in those critical circumstances, it became a very serious matter to determine concerning these prisoners of war; nevertheless, we did resolve to send them down to the land of Zarahemla; therefore we selected a part of our humans, and gave them charge over our prisoners to go down to the land of Zarahemla. However, it came to pass that on the morrow they did return. And now behold, we did not inquire of them concerning the prisoners; for behold, the Lamanites were upon us, and they returned in season to save us from falling into their hands. For behold, Ammoron had sent to their support a new supply of provisions and also a numerous army of humans. And it came to pass that those humans who we sent with the prisoners did arrive in season to check them, as they were about to overpower us. However, behold, my little band of two thousand and sixty fought most desperately; yea, they were firm before the Lamanites, and did administer death unto all those who opposed them. And as the remainder of our army were about t give way before the Lamanites, behold, those two thousand and sixty were firm and undaunted. Yea, and they did obey and observe to perform every word of command with exactness; yea, and even according to their faith it was done unto them; and I did remember the words which they said unto me that their mothers had taught them. #RandolphHarris 24 of 28
“And now behold, it was these my sons, and those men who had been selected to convey the prisoners, to whom we owe this great victory; for it was they who did beat the Lamanites; therefore they were driven back to the city of Manti. And we retained our city Cumeni, and were not all destroyed by the sword; nevertheless, we had suffered great loss. And it came to pass that after the Lamanites had fled, I immediately gave orders that my humans who had been wounded should be taken from among the dead, and causes that their wounds should be dressed. And it came to pass that there were two hundred, out of my two thousand and sixty, who had fainted because of the loss of blood; nevertheless, according to the goodness of God, and to our great astonishment, and also the joy of our whole army, there was not one soul of them who did perish; yea, and neither was there one soul among them who had not received many wounds. And now, their preservation was astonishing to our whole army, yea, that they should be spared while there was a thousand of our brethren who were slain. And we do justly ascribe it to the miraculous power of God, because of their exceeding faith in that which they had been taught to believe—that there was a just God, and whosoever did not doubt, that they should be preserved by his marvelous power. #RandolphHarris 25 of 28
“Now this was the faith of these whom I have spoken; they are young, and their minds are firm, and they do put their trust in God continually. And now it came to pass that after we had thus taken care of our wounded humans, and had buried our dead and also the dead of the Lamanites, who were many, behold, we did inquire of Gid (Gid is a Nephite military officer) concerning the prisoners whom they had started to go down to the land of Zarahemla with. Now Gid was the chief captain over the band who was appointed to guard them down to the land. And now, these are the words which Gid said unto me: Behold, we did start to go down to the land of Zarahemla with our prisoners. And it came to pass that we did meet the spies of our armies, who had been sent out to watch the camp of the Lamanites. And the cried unto us, saying—Behold, the armies of the Lamanites are marching towards that city of Cumeni; and behold, they will fall upon them, yea, and will destroy our people. And it came to pass that our prisoners did head their cries, which caused them to take courage; and they did rise up in rebellion against us. And it came to pass because of their rebellion we did cause that our swords should come upon them. And it came to pass that they did in a body run upon the swords, in the which, the greater number of them were slain; and the remainder of them broke through and fled from us. #RandolphHarris 26 of 28
“And behold, when they had fled and we could not overtake them, we took our march with speed towards the city of Cumeni; and behold, we did arrive in time that we might assist our brethren in preserving the city. And behold, we are again delivered out of the hands of our enemies. And blessed is the name of our God; for behold, it is he that has delivered us; yea, that has done this great thing for us. Now it came to pass that when I, Helaman, had heard these words of Gid, I was filled with exceeding joy because of the goodness of God in preserving us, that we might not all perish; yea, and I trust that the souls of them who have been slain have entered into the rest of their God,” reports Alma 57.1-36. He who puts the prayers in my mouth, and He to whom I speak them comprehends all the spiritual needs of every living being with a matchless profundity. We are indebted to God’s compositions. They come from Him, arise in me, and return again to Him, so that my praying is a part of His eternal cycle; and when I pray, I take the part He has laid out for me. When I pray, it is His words I pray; when I sing, it is His song; when I act, it is His deeds I do. I cannot step outside the ways God has laid out, for there is nowhere outside to step. Ground of Being, you contain all within you, both that which acts and that which is acted upon. Nowhere is there anything that does not arise in You. #RandolphHarris 27 of 28
Nothing is there that does not praise You by its existence. Thou createst day and night, rolling away the light before the darkness and the darkness before the light. By Thy will the day passes into night; the Lord of Heavenly host is Thy name. O ever-living God, mayest Thou rule overs us forever. Blessed be Thou, O Lord, who bringest on the evening twilight. With everlasting love hast Thou loved the house of Israel, teaching us Thy Torah and commandments, Thy statutes and judgments. Therefore, O Lord our God, when we lie down and when we rise up, we will meditate on Thy teachings and rejoice forever in the words of Thy Torah and in its commandments, for they are our life and the length of our days. Day and night will we meditate upon them. O my Thy love never depart from us. Blessed be Thou, O Lord, who lovest Thy people of the World. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy might. And these words which I command thee this day shall be in thy Heart. Thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, speaking of the them when thou sittest in thy house, when thou walkest by the way, when thou liest down and wen thou risest up. And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be for frontlets between thines eyes. And thou shalt write them upon the door post of thy house and upon thy gates. #RandolphHarris 28 of 28
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You Always Hold Your Loved One in Your Heart, but You Must Let Go of Your Grief!
We have probed the Earth, excavated it, burned it, ripped things from it, buried things in it….That does not fit my definition of a good tenant. If we were here on a month-to-moth bases, we would have been evicted long ago, and perhaps that is what is going on with COVID-19. Perhaps the Earth is tired of being abused. After 96 percent of wildfires are caused by humans. Reentering America, one is struck first of all by the grim monotony of American facial expressions—hard, surly, and bitter—and by the aura of deprivation that informs them. One goes abroad forewarned against exploitation by grasping foreigners, but nothing is done to prepare the returning traveler for the fanatical acquisitiveness of one’s compatriots. It is difficult to become reaccustomed to seeing people already weighted down with possession acting as if every object they did not own were bread withheld from a hungry mouth. These perceptions are heightened by the contrast between the sullen faces of real people and the vision of happiness television offers: men and women ecstatically engaged in stereotyped symbols of fun—running through fields, strolling on beaches, dancing and singing. Smiling faces with chronically open mouths express their gratification with the manifold bounties offered by the culture. #RandolphHarris 1 of 24
One begins to feel there is a sever gap between the fantasies Americans life by and the realities they live in. Americans know from an early age how they are supposed to look when happy and what they are supposed to do or buy to be happy. However, for some reason their fantasies are unrealizable and leave them disappointed and embittered. The traveler’s antennae disappear after a time. These impressions fade, and reentry process is gradually effected. American once again seem familiar, comfortable, ordinary. Yet some uneasiness lingers on, for the society seems troubled and self-preoccupied—as if suddenly large numbers of America were scrutinizing their own society with the doubtful eyes of a traveler. One of the functions of a society is to make its inhabitants feel safe, and American devote more of their collective resources to security than to any other need. They build McMansions in gated communities, have cameras inside and outside the home, every member of the family has a mobile phone and every kind of insure you can dream of. Some people even go as far as buying armored (bullet proof) Ultimate Driving Machines. Yet American still think they need more safety because of shotguns in the close, nuclear bombers patrolling overhead, and the fiction the passes as news. #RandolphHarris 2 of 24
With each decade we seem to accumulate more fears, and most of these fears seem to be about each other. In the fifties we were afraid of native Communists, and although we now feel sheepish about that moment of panic, today we express the same kind of fears about the mainstream media and the political party; and in our reactions to all of these fears we have created some very real dangers. Our intense fears make many people believe their race, way of life, religion, wealth, family, home and country are in danger of total extinction. During this COVID-19 crisis, many people have seriously become fearful of a World War III. Given this lack of concern for an overwhelming threat, how can we account for the exaggerated fear of climate change? From Dr. Freud we learned long ago to suspect, when a fear seems out of proportion, that is has been bloated by a wish; and this seems particularly likely when the danger is defined as a psychological one—an evil influence. The truth about climate change is if we want to save the World, we need to stop destroying forests and rain forests. We fear storms and wild beasts, but we do not censor them. If we must guard ourselves against evil influences we there by admit to their seductive appeal. #RandolphHarris 3 of 24
Thus the McCarthy era reached its peak after the discovery that a few Americans has responded to “brainwashing” efforts, and the fear of conversion to Communism was quite explicit in public statements and popular surveys. One survey respondent, for example, made the revealing statement that “so many people in America are eager like those soldiers of ours in Korea to fall into the traps set by Communist propaganda.” The anticommunism of that period and its institutional residues have served as a kind of political fig leaf. The same emphasis surrounds of fears of radicalism today. The political party, peace demonstrations, militance, dens, and student protests are disturbing not only because they provide a serious physical danger (say the equivalent of walking through a street gang wearing the wrong colour), but also because we fear having our secret doubts about the viability of our social system voiced aloud. It is not what happens abroad that generates hysteria, but rather what appears to be happening within ourselves. This is why force must be used against the expression of certain ideas—if the ideas pluck a responsive chord counterarguments are difficult to remember, and one must fall back on clubs and tear gas. However, what is the nature of the attraction exerted by radical ideas on unwilling conservatives? #RandolphHarris 4 of 24
We know something about the hopes that tige the old maid’s search for a ravisher under her bed, but we need to understand better the seductive impact that informs our enraged fascination with the revolutionary currents of American society. Since the very form of this question rests on certain assumptions about culture and personality, however, let me first makes these explicit. The emotional repertory of human beings is limited and standard. When caressed, we are built to feel warm, happy, and content, when frustrated feel angry, when attacked feel frightened, when insulted feel offended, when excluded jealous, and so on. However, every culture holds some of these human reactions to be unacceptable and attempts to warp its participants int some peculiar specialization. Since human beings are malleable within limits, the warping is for the most part successfully achieved, so that some learn not to laugh, some not to cry, some not to love, and some not to hate in situations in which these reactions might appropriately be expressed. This cultural warping of human emotionality is eased by compartmentalization: there are special times and places and situations where the disparaged responses are permitted, or classes of people who can provide vicarious satisfaction through conspicuous performance of some kind. #RandolphHarris 5 of 24
Yet there are always a few of these responses with which every society and every individual has trouble. They must be shouted down continually, although they are usually visible to the outsider. Thus although the Germans, for example, have always placed great stress on order, precision, and obedience to authority, they periodically explode into revolutionary chaos and are driven by romantic Gotterdammerung fantasies. In the same way there is a cooperative underside to competitive America, a rich spoofing tradition in ceremonious England, an elaborate pornography in all prudish societies, and so on. Rather than saying Germans are obedient or Anglo-Saxon societies stuffy or puritanical, it is more correct to day that Germans are preoccupied with issues of authority, Anglo-Saxons with the control of emotional and pleasures of the flesh expression, and so forth. Those issues about which members of a given society seem to feel strongly all reveal a conflict one side of which is strongly emphasized, the other side as strongly (but not quite successfully) suppressed. These opposing forces are much more equally balanced than the society’s participants like to recognize—were this not true there would be no need for suppression. #RandolphHarris 6 of 24
Life would indeed be much less frantic if we were all able to recognize the diversity of responses and feelings within ourselves, and could abandon our somewhat futile efforts to present a monolithic self-portrait to the World. Probably some exaggeration of uniformity is necessary, however, in order for us to act at all, or at least with enough consistency to permit smooth social functioning. On the individual level the delicate balance reveals itself though conversion. An individual who “converts” from one orientation to its exact opposite appears to oneself and others to have made a gross change, but actually it involves only a very small shift in the balance of a focal and persistent conflict. Just as only one percent of the voting population is needed to reserves the results of an American election, so only one percent of an individual’s internal “constituencies” need shift in order to transform one from voluptuary to ascetic, from police officer to criminal, from Communist to anticommunist, or whatever. The opposite sides are as evenly matched before, and the apparent change merely represents the desperate efforts made by the internal “majority” to consolidate its shaky position of dominance. The individual must expend just as much energy shouting down the new “minority” as one did the old; some of the most dedicated witch hunters of the 1950’s, for example, were ex-Communist. #RandolphHarris 7 of 24
So the reason there is so much division in America right now is because the majority is now becoming the minority, as the demographics change. On the society levels there are more outlets from the expression of “minority” themes and sentiments, and reversals of emphasis involve more overlap between the opposing trends. The United States of America, for example, traditionally one of the most prudish societies in the World, has long displayed, in a somewhat warped and mechanical way, the greatest profusion of stimuli involving pleasures of the flesh. These considerations suggest that the fear of radical movements in America derives much of its intensity from the attraction that such movements have for their opponents—an attraction that must be stifled. However, what is it? What is so severely lacking in our society that the assertion of an alternative life style throws so many Americans into panic and rage? I would like to suggest three human desires that are deeply and uniquely frustrated by American culture: The desire for community—the wish to live in trust and fraternal cooperation with one’s fellows in a total and visible collective eternity. The desire for engagement—the wish to come directly to grips with social and interpersonal problems and to confront on equal terms an environment which is not composed of ego extensions is another human desire that is deeply and uniquely frustrated by American culture. #RandolphHarris 8 of 24
The third is the desire for dependence—the wish to share responsibility for the control of one’s impulses and the direction of one’s life. When I say that these three desires are frustrated by American culture, this need not conjure up romantic images of individual struggling against society. In every case it is fair to say that we participate eagerly in producing the frustration we endure—it is not something merely done t us. For these desires are in each case subordinate to their opposites in that vague entity called the American Character. Americans have voluntarily created and voluntarily maintained a society which increasingly frustrates and aggravate these secondary yearnings, to the point where they threaten to become primary. Groups that in any way personify this threat are therefore feared in an exaggerated way, and will be until Americans as a group are able to recognize and accept those needs within themselves. “Thus says the Lord Who made a way through the sea, a path through the mighty waters. Remember not the former things, neither consider the things of old. Behold, I am doing a new thing, even now it is springing to light. Do you not perceive it? A way will I make in the wilderness and rivers in the desert!” (Isaiah 43.16, 18-19.) #RandolphHarris 9 of 24
Most of the conditions we commonly speak of as feelings are really not feelings at all; but the feeling tones or sensations that accompany those conditions are so powerful that the conditions themselves become identified with the associated sensations. This is true love and hatred or contempt, for example, but also with hurry and peace and with self-esteem and discouragement. Now, there are some extremely serious dangers here. When we confuse the condition with the accompanying feeling—peace, for example, with the feeling of peacefulness—we very likely will try to manage the feelings and disregard or deny the reality of the conditions. That way lie such things as “falling in love with love” and most of all the well-known addictions. The person who primarily wants the feeling of being loved or being “in love” will be incapable of sustaining loving relationships, whether with God or with other humans. And the person who wants the feeling of peacefulness will be unable to do the things that make for peace—especially, doing what is right and confronting evil. So, as far as our planning for spiritual formation is concerned, we must choose and act with regard to the condition, good or bad, and allow the feelings to take care of themselves, as they certainly will. #RandolphHarris 10 of 24
In particular, we must never directly cherish, protect, or manipulate feelings, whether in ourselves or others. When negative feelings have themselves become so overwhelming that they threaten to take over our lives, this is the only exception to this rule. Then we must take steps to remove the negative feeling (grief or pain, for example). Prayer or even medication for such feelings is then wise. However, even so, the focus on the feeling must not be allowed to prevent our dealing, when and as we can, with the conditions from which that feelings arises. A well-known minister, after his wife passed away, said he had learned that there is a difference between turning loose your loved one and turning loose your grief. You always hold your loved one in your heart, but you must let go of your grief. So far as possible, we must always away from painful and destructive feelings. Simply that. Walk away. “Behold the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. Not like the covenant which I made with their fathers. On the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt; which my covenant they brake, so that I had to reject them. #RandolphHarris 11 of 24
However, this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them and write it in their hearts; and I will be their God and they shall be my people for I will forgive their guilt and I will remember their sins no more,” reports Jeremiah 31.31-34. Charles Darwin. Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) has offered a model of emotion for various other theorists and researchers. Darwin focuses on emotive expressions—that is, on visible gestures—and not on the subjective meanings associated with them. These gestures, he posits, were acquired during a prehistoric period and have survived as “serviceable associated habits.” Originally linked to actions these emotive gestures become actions manque. The emotion of love, for example, is the vestige of what was once a direct act of copulation. The baring of teeth in rage is a vestige of the once immediate act of biting. The expression of disgust is the vestige of what was once the immediate act of regurgitating a noxious thing. For Darwin, there is no emotion without gesture although there may be gesture without action. (The says the Lord God: ) “I will give them a new heart, and I will put a new spirit within them. I will remove their heart of stone and will give them a heart of flesh,” reports Ezekiel 11.19. #RandolphHarris 12 of 24
Darwin’s theory of emotion, then, is a theory of gesture. The question for later students thus became: are emotive gestures universal or are they culturally specific? Darwin’s own general conclusion was that they were universal. Darwin distinguished between facial expressions of emotion that are innate and universal and facial gestures (not necessarily of emotion) that are learned and thus culturally variable. He devised a sixteen-item questionnaire and sent it to thirty-six missionaries and others who had lived in non-Western societies. One question was: “Can a dogged or obstinate expression be recognized, which is chiefly shown by the mouth being firmly closed, a lowering brow, and a slight frown?” Based on his returned questionnaires, Darwin concluded that “the chief expressive actions” of human beings were innate and therefore universal. Despite his generally universalist interpretations, however, Darwin concluded that some nonverbal behaviours (such as weeping, kissing, nodding, and shaking the head in affirmation and negation) were not universal but culture-specific and “learned like the words of a language.” However, the debate has been carried forward by those who argue that emotional expressions are probably innate, and those who argue that they are modeled on language and therefore culturally variable. #RandolphHarris 13 of 24
What is missing from both sides of this debate is what was missing in Darwin’s theory from the beginning: a conception of emotion as subjective experience and a more subtle and complex notion of how social factor impinge. Humans compete with each other for control of the ritual apparatus, which is a powerful tool for commanding people by controlling their emotions. The ego is a mediator between the id (drive) and conscious expression. Affects are seen as signals of impending danger (from inside or outside) and as an impetus to action. The ego is assigned the capacity to postpone id drives, to neutralize or bind them. One emotion—anxiety—is the model for all others because it is more important due to the unpleasantness of anxiety which leads to the development of various ego defenses against unpleasantness. As analysts we recognize that anxiety occupies a special position in mental life. It is the motive for defense. Defenses serve the purpose of minimizing, or, if possible, preventing the development of anxiety. Anxiety was initially defined in a way that bypasses the ego: anxiety is the reaction to an influx of stimuli which is too great for the mental apparatus to master or discharge. (Thus says the Lord God: ) “I ignore the troubles of the past. I shut mine eyes to them. For, behold, I create new Heavens and a new Earth. The past shall be forgotten and never come to mind. Humans shall rejoice forever in what I now create,” reports Isaiah 65.16, 17. #RandolphHarris 14 of 24
So we see that God is a worker and that humans, created in God’s image, is a worker and that work is good. However, then come the Fall and the Curse. “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return,” Genesis 3.17-19. The Curse made nature uncooperative, so that work became painful toil and humans had to sweat for a living. Today our working conditions vary. Some sweat more than others. We may be in a better position than some. However, the norm for the World is “painful toil.” Even more, the normal experience of humankind is one’s labour is a malaise of futility. The writer of Ecclesiastes gave this universal expression as he bemoaned his plight from the perspective of one who leaves God out of his life. In 2.4-10 he describes his professional success in acquiring vineyards and gardens and parks and enslaved humans and flocks and treasures. He was greater than all his contemporaries. He was denied nothing his eyes desired. However, he concluded in verse 11, “Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing gained under the Sun.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 24
And he reiterates in verse 17, “So I hated life, because the work that is done under the Sun was grievous to me. All of it is meaningless, a chasing after the win.” Humans and others, this is as far as work will take you apart from God. You will engaged in it because, though fallen, you are in the image of God and because work is part of the natural order, and it will produce its benefits and satisfactions—but it will also be toil, and its joys will be ephemeral. Studs Terkel has revealed what has always been true under the Sun when God is left out. “And now it came to pass that Moroni did not stop making preparations for war, or to defend his people against the Lamanites; for he caused that his armies should commence in the commencement of the twentieth year of the reign of the judges, that they should commence in digging up heaps of Earth round about all the cities, throughout all the land which was possessed by the Nephites. And upon the top of these ridges of Earth he caused that there should be timers, yea, works of timbers built up to the height of a human, round about the cities. And he caused that upon those works of timbers there should be a frame of pickets built upon the timbers round about; and they were strong and high. And he caused towers to be erected that overlooked those works of pickets, and he caused places of security to be built upon those towers, that the stones and the arrows of the Lamanites could not hurt them. #RandolphHarris 16 of 24
“And they were prepared that they could cast stones from the top thereof, according to their pleasure and their strength, and slay one who should attempt to approach near he walls of the city. Thus Moroni did prepare strongholds against the coming of their enemies, round about every city in all the land. And it came to pass that Moroni caused that his armies should go forth into the east wilderness; yea, and they went forth and drove all he Lamanites who were in the east wilderness into their own lands, which were south of the land of Zarahemla. And the land of Nephi did run in a straight course from the east sea to the west. And it came to pass that when Moroni had driven all the Lamanites out of the east wilderness which was north of the lands of their own possessions, he caused that the inhabitants who were in the land of Zarahemla and in the land round about should go forth into the east wilderness, even to the borders by the seashore, and possess the land. And he also placed armies on the south, in the borders of their possessions, and caused them to erect fortifications that they might secure their armies and their people from the hands of their enemies. And thus he cut off all the strongholds of the Lamanites in the East wilderness, yea, and also on the west, fortifying the line between the land of Zarahemla and the land of Nephi, from the west sea, running by the head of the river of Sidon—the Nephites possessing all the land northward, yea, even all the land which was northward of the land Bountiful according to their pleasure. #RandolphHarris 17 of 24
“Thus Moroni, with his armies, which did increase daily because of the assurance of protection which his works did bring forth unto them, did seek to cut off the strength and the power of the Lamanites from off the lands of their possession, that they should have no power upon the lands of their possession. And it came to pass that the Nephites began the foundation of a city, and they called the nae of the city Moroni; and it was by the east sea; and it was on the south by the line of the possessions of the Lamanites. And they also began a foundation for a city between the city of Moroni and the city of Aaron, joining he borders of Aaron and Moroni; and they called the name of the city, or the land, Nephihah. And they also began in that same year to build many cities on the north, one in a particular manner which they called Lehi, which was in the north by the borders of the seashore. And thus ended the twentieth year. And in these prosperous circumstances were the people of Nephi in the commencement of the twenty and first year of the reign of the judges over the people of Nephi. And they did prosper exceedingly, and they became exceedingly rich; yea, and they did multiply and wax strong in the land. And thus we see how merciful and jus are all the dealings of the Lord, to the fulfilling of all his words unto the children of humans; yea, we can behold that his words are verified, even at this time, which he spake unto Lehi, saying: #RandolphHarris 18 of 24
“Blessed art thou and thy children; and they shall be blessed, inasmuch as they shall keep my commandments they shall prosper in the land. However, remember, inasmuch as they will not keep my commandments they shall prosper in the land. However, remember, inasmuch as they will not keep my commandments they shall be cut off from the presence of the Lord. And we see that these promises have been verified to the people of Nephi; for it has been their quarrelings and their contentions, yea, their murderings, and their plunderings, their idolatry, their whoredoms, and their abominations, which were among themselves, which brought them their wars and their destructions. And those who were faithful in keeping the commandments of the Lord were delivered at all times, whilst thousands of their wicked brethren have been consigned to bondage, or to perish by the sword, or to dwindle in unbelief, and mingle with the Lamanites. However, behold, there was never a happier time among the people of Nephi, since the days of Nephi, than in the days of Moroni, yea, even at this time, in the twenty and first year of the reign of the judges. And it came to pass that the twenty and second year of the reign of the judges also ended in peace; yea, and also the twenty and third year. #RandolphHarris 19 of 24
“And it came to pass that in the commencement of the twenty and fourth year of the reign of the judges, there would also have been peace among the people of Nephi had it not been for a contention which took place among them concerning the land of Lehi, and the land of Morianton, which joined upon the borders of Lehi; both of which were on the borders by the seashore. For behold, the people who possessed the land of Morianton did claim a part of the land of Lehi; therefore there began to be a warm contention between them, insomuch that the people of Morianton took up arms against their brethren, and they were determined by the sword to slay them. However, behold, the people who possessed the land of Lehi fled to the camp of Moroni, and appealed unto him for assistance; for behold they were not in the wrong. And it came to pass that when the people of Morianton, who were led by a man whose name was Morianton, found that the people of Lehi had fled to the camp of Moroni they were exceedingly fearful lest the army of Moroni should come upon them and destroy them. Therefore, Morianton put it into their hearts that they should flee to the land which was northward, which was covered with large bodies of water, and take possession of the land which was northward. #RandolphHarris 20 of 24
“And behold, they would have carried this plan into effect, (which would have been a cause to have been lamented) but behold, Morianton being a man of much passion, therefore he was angry with one of his maid servants, and he fell upon her and beat her much. And it came to pass that she fled, and came over to the camp of Moroni, and told Moroni all things concerning the matter, and also concerning their intentions to flee into the land northward. Now behold, the people who were in the land Bountiful, or rather Moroni, feared that they would hearken to the words of Morianton and unite with his people, and thus he would obtain possession of those parts of the land, which would lay a foundation for serious consequences among the people of Nephi, yea, which consequences would lead to the overthrow of their liberty. Therefore Moroni sent an army, with their camp, to head the people of Morianton, to stop their flight into the land northward. And it came to pass that they did not head them until they had come to the borders of the land Desolation; and there they did head them, by the narrow pass which led by the sea into the land northward, yea, by the sea, on the west and on the east. And it came to pass that the army which was sent by Moroni, which was led by a man whose name was Teancum did meet the people of Morianton. #RandolphHarris 21 of 24
And when Teancu met the people of Morianton, so stubborn were the people of Morianton, (being inspired by wickedness and his flattering words) that a battle commenced between them, in which Teancum did slay Morianton and defeat his army, and took them prisoners, and returned to the camp of Moroni. And thus ended the twenty and fourth year of the reign of the judges over the people of Nephi. And thus were the people of Morianton brought back. And upon their covenanting to keep the peace they were restored to the land of Morianton, and a union took place between them and the people of Lehi; and they were also restored to their lands. And it came to pass that in the same year that the people of Nephi had peace restored unto them, that Nephihah, the second chief judge, died, having filled the judgment seat with perfect uprightness before God. Nevertheless, he had refused Alma to take possession of those records and those things which were esteemed by Alma and his fathers to be most sacred; therefore Alma had conferred them upon his son, Helaman. Behold, it came to pass that the son of Nephihah, Pahoran, was appointed to fill the judgment-seat, in the stead of his father; yea, he was appointed chief judge and governor over the people, with an oath and sacred ordinance to judge righteously, and to keep the peace and the freedom of the people. #RandolphHarris 22 of 24
Pahoran also had the power to grant unto them their sacred privileges to worship the Lord their God, yea, to support and maintain the cause of God all his days, and to bring the wicked to justice according to their crime. And Pahoran did fill the seat of his father, and did commence his reign in the end of the twenty and fourth year, over the people of Nephi,” Alma 50.1-40. Wonder and awe, as I sit in your presence, you who sit in the gateway, in this World and in the other, mediating the power that shines through, letting pass what I need, and what I can use, holding back in mercy what I cannot. Seen against the brightness, your dark silhouette is still and sharp and clear. Sitting fiercely, with perfect intent, pure in your purpose, source of terror and comfort. A roaring fire, you sit in my heart’s center. A rampaging bull, you tear through my soul. A searing bolt, you cut through my life. A skirring arrow, you slice me in two. A standing stone, you are my anchor. The Lord reigneth while the people stand in awe; He is enthroned upon His judgment seat, while the Earth trembles. The Lord is mighty in Zion; He is exalted over all peoples. They praise His name: “God is great and revered, is holy.” Mighty King who loveth justice, Thou hast established equity; Justice and righteousness hast Thou wrought in Jacob. #RandolphHarris 23 of 24
A tall-standing cypress tree is our God, supporting the Worlds on his limbs, each World ordered according to the spreading of His branches. Into each World, His twigs extend, bearing the leaves and birds that are our lives. From what source is the tree nourished? Where do its roots extend? Deep within the void they reach and are fed there from the substance of the Goddess. He makes known her will, giving it form, from which we might know it and live according to its pattern. Shaper and essence, open my eyes, open my ears, open my heart, that I might perceive the sacred pattern and conform my life to it. The goddess is the one who is Lady of all, and she is the one of whom I would speak, the one who gives birth and the one who brings death, beginning and end of the course of our lives. God is the Lord Almighty. Exalt the Lord our God, and worship at His footstool, declaring: “Holy is He!” Moses and Aaron were among His priests; Samuel was among those that called upon His name, calling upon the Lord and being answered. He would speak unto them out of a pillar of cloud; they kept His testimonies and the laws He gave them. Thou, O Lord, didst answer them; Thou wast a forgiving God unto them, through punishing them for their evil. Exalt the Lord our God, and worship at His holy mountain; for the Lord our God is holy. #RandolphHarris 24 of 24
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Lives Have Been Elevated and Lives Have Been Cast Down by Human Speech!
Life is an answered question, but let us believe in the dignity and importance of the question. All laws being founded on rewards and punishments, it is supposed as a fundamental principle, that these motives have a regular and uniform influence on the mind, and both produce the god and prevent the evil actions. We may give to this influence what name we please; but, as it is usually conjoined with the action, it must be esteemed a cause, and be looked upon as an instance of that necessity, which we would here establish. The only proper object of hatred or vengeance, is a person or creature, endowed with thought and consciousness; and when any criminal or injurious actions excite that passion, it is only by their relation to the person, or connexion with one. Actions are, by their very nature, temporary and perishing; and where they proceed not from some case in the character and disposition of the person who performed them, they can neither redound to one’s honour, if good; nor infamy, if evil. The actions themselves may be blameable; they may be contrary to all the rules of morality and religion: However, the person is not answerable for them; and as they proceeded from nothing in one, that is durable and constant, and leave nothing of that nature behind them, it is impossible one can, upon their account, become the object of punishment or vengeance. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
According to the principle, therefore, which denies necessity, and consequently causes, a human is as pure and untainted, after having committed the most horrid crime, as at the first moment of one’s birth, nor is one’s character any wise concerned in one’s actions; since they are not derived from it, and the wickedness of the one can never be used as a proof of the depravity of the other. Humans are not blamed for such actions, as they perform ignorantly and casually, whatever may be the consequences. Why? but because the principles of these actions are only momentary, and terminate in them alone. Humans are less blamed for such actions as they perform hastily and unpremeditatly, than for such as proceed from deliberation. For what reason? but because a hasty temper, though a constant cause of principle in the mind, operates only by intervals, and infects not the whole character. Again, repentance wipes off every crime, if attended with a reformation of life and manners. How is this to be accounted for? but by asserting, that actions render a person criminal, merely as they are proofs of criminal principles in the mind; and when, by an alteration of these principles, they cease to be just proofs, they likewise cease to be criminal. However, expect upon the doctrine of necessity, they never were just proofs, and consequently never were criminal. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
When any opinion leads to absurdities, it is certainly false; but it is not certain than an opinion is false, because it is of dangerous consequence. By liberty, then, we can only mean a power of acting or not acting, according to the determinations of the will; that is, if we choose to remain at rest, we may; if we choose to move, we also may. We believe that our actions are subject to our own will, on most occasions; and imagine we believe, that the will itself is subject to nothing, because, when by a denial of it we are provoked to try, we believe, that it moves easily every way, and produces an image of itself, even on that side, on which it did not settle. This image, or faint motion, we persuade ourselves, could, at that time, have been completed into the thing itself; because, should that be denied, we find, upon a second trial, that, at present, it can. We consider not, that the fantastical desire of showing liberty, is here the motive of our actions. And it seems certain, that, however we may imagine we feel a liberty within ourselves, a spectator can commonly infer our actions from our motives and character; and even where one cannot, one concludes in general, that one might, were one perfectly acquainted with every circumstance of our situation and temper, and the most secret springs of our complexion and disposition. Now this is the very essence of necessity, according to the foregoing doctrine. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
It seems a proposition, which will not admit of much dispute, that all our ideas are nothing but copies of our impressions, or, in other words, that it is impossible for us to think of anything, which we have not antecedently felt, either by our external or internal senses. I have endeavoured to explain and prove this proposition, and have expressed my hopes, that, by a proper application of it, humans many reach a greater clearness and precision in philosophical reasoning, than that they have hitherto been able to attain. Complex ideas may, perhaps, be well known by definition, which is nothing but an enumeration of those parts or simple ideas, that compose them. However, when we have pushed up definitions to the most simple ideas, and find still some ambiguity and obscurity; what resources are we then possessed of? By what invention can we throw light upon these ideas, and render them altogether precise and determinate to our intellectual view? Procedure the impressions or original, sentiments, from which these ideas are copied. These impressions are all strong and sensible. They admit not of ambiguity. They are not only places in a full light themselves, but many throws light on their correspondent ideas, which lie in obscurity. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
And by this means, we may, perhaps, attain a new microscope or species of optics, by which, in the moral sciences, the most minute, and most simple ideas may be so enlarged as to fall readily under our apprehension, and be equally known with the grossest and most sensible ideas, that can be the object of our enquiry. To be fully acquainted, therefore, with the idea of power of necessary connexion, let us examine its impression; and in order to find the impression with greater certainty, let us search for it in all the courses, from which it may possible be derived. It may be said, that we are every moment conscious of internal power; while we feel, that, by the simple command of our will, we can move the organs of our body, or direct the faculties of our mind. An act of volition produces motion in our limbs, or raises a new idea in our imagination. This influence of the will we know by consciousness. Hence we acquire the idea of power or energy; and are certain, that we ourselves and all other intelligent beings are possessed of power. This idea, then, is an idea of reflection, since it arises from reflecting on the operations of our own mind, and on the command which is exercised by will, both over the organs of the body and faculties of the soul. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
This influence, we may observe, is a fact, which, like all other natural events, can be known only by experience, and can never be foreseen from any apparent energy or power in the cause, which connects it with the effect, and renders the one an infallible consequence of the other. The motion f our body follows upon the command of our will. Of this we are every moment conscious. However, the means, by which this effected; the energy, by which the will performs so extraordinary an operation; of this we are so far from being immediately conscious, that it must for ever escape our most diligent enquiry. For first; is there any principle in all nature more mysterious than the union of soul with body; by which a supposed spiritual substance acquires such an influence over a material one, that the most refined thought is able to actuate the grossest matter? Were we empowered, by a secret wish, to remove mountains, or control the planets in their orbit; this extensive authority would not be more extraordinary, nor more beyond our comprehension. However, if by conscious we perceived any power or energy in the will, we must know the secret union of the soul and body, and the nature of both these substances; by which the one is able to operate, in so many instances, upon the other. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
However, consciousness never deceives. Consequently, we are ever conscious any power. We learn the influence of our will from experience alone. And experience only teaches us, how one event constantly follows another; without instructing us in the secret connexion, which binds them together, and renders them inseparable. Interest in the truth is at the heart of our conversation. Our word “conversation” derives from the same Latin root as “conversion” does, and the possibility of a conversation, of a “turning around,” is always inherent in any true conversation, for when we converse we take part in a game in which exchange, not victory, is the goal, an intellectual game in which no one stars and everyone wins. So much for the preliminaries. We are witnessing the quiet demise of the art of letter writing. Can we still rescue the art of conversation? I fear we cannot, and I find that—to put it mildly—a great pity. I would even go a step further and call it a dreadful shame, for it is symptomatic of a defect in our culture that is no only regrettable but may also prove lethal. Perhaps I can put what I mean this way: We find ourselves giving more and more of our time and energy to things that have a point, that produce results. And when all is said and done, what are those results? Money, perhaps, or fame or a promotion. We hardly ever consider doing something any more that has no purpose. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
We have forgotten that it is possible, even desirable and, above all, pleasurable to do something without a specific goal in mind. One of life’s greatest pleasures is to make use of our powers not to attain a goal but for the sake of an activity itself. Take love, for example. Love has no purpose, though many people might say: Of course it does! It is love, they say, that enables us to satisfy our pleasures of the flesh, marry, have children, and live a normal, middle-class or upper middle-class life. That is the purpose of love. And that is why love is so rare these days, love without goals, love in which the only thing of importance is that act of loving itself. In this kind of love it is being and not consuming that plays the key role. It is human self-expression, the full play of our human capacities. However, in a culture like ours, which is exclusively oriented to external goals like success, production, and consumption, we can easily lose sight of that kind of love. It fades so far into the distance that we can hardly even imagine it as a reality any more. Conversation has become either a commodity or a way of doing battle If the conversational battle takes place in the presence of a large audience, then it assumes the quality of a gladiatorial contest. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
The participants go for each other’s throats, and each one tries to destroy the other. Or they converse merely to show how clever or superior they are. Or they converse to prove to themselves that they are in the right once again. Conversation is a way of demonstrating to themselves that what they happen to think is indeed correct. They go into conversation determined not to admit any new thoughts into their minds. They have their opinion. Each knows what the other will say. Let me give you a little example of what I mean. Suppose two people are on their way home together, two colleagues of mine, two psychoanalysts, and one of them says, “I am kind of tired.” And the other replies, “Me, too.” Now that many sound like a rather banal exchange, but it is not necessarily, for if these two people do the same kind of work, then they know just what the other’s tiredness is like, and so they have engaged in genuine, human communication: “We are both tired, and we have each let the other know how tired we are.” That is much more of a conversation than when two intellectuals start throwing big words around in a discussion of the latest theory about this or that. They are simply holding two separate monologues and do not touch each other at all. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
The art of conversation and joy in conversation (conversation in the sense of being open, being together, usually takes verbal form, but it can also take the form of movement in dancing; there are many ways to converse)—these things will become possible again only if major changes take place in our culture, that is, only if we can rid ourselves of our monomaniacal, goal-oriented way of life. We need to cultivate attitudes that recognize the expression and full realization of human potential as the only worthwhile goals in life. To put it in the simplest possible terms: What matters is being as opposed to having, to just using and consuming and getting ahead. We have much more free time than we used to have (in many cases, as a society people have more leisure time, but a minority of the people have no free time at all), and therefore more opportunity for conversation. However, the more the external circumstances of our lives encourage it, the less internal inclination toward it we seem to have. There is too much that interferes with that being together that keeps a community sane and healthy; there are too many gadgets and Facebook and machines that get in our way. It seems that a very specific and pervasive attitude prevents us from engaging in what we have been calling “conversation” here. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
And now with COVID-19, people are afraid to talk to each other, they will not hug each other nor shake hands, they are prohibited by law from going to church or the hair salon, and schools. Many people can no longer gather in large groups, even in their own homes, so society is becoming anti-social out of fear and the fear is being enforced by state and local governments in the forms of fines, jail time, and other penalties. However, even before COVID-19 was instilling fear in society, I think we could even say that many people (probably the great majority) are afraid of being left alone with each other without some plan of action, without a radio, or Smart TV, without a subject to discuss, without an agenda. They are afraid and feel totally lost. They have no idea what to say to each other. I do not know if this is holds true in Germany or Japan or China, but in the United States of America it is customary never to invite a single individual or just one other couple to your home. You always have to have more guests, because it can be embarrassing if you are only four. In a small company you have to work hard to keep things from being boring, unless you plan to play all your old Motown records. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
If you have a party of six, you still will not have any real conversation, but you will at least avoid painful lulls in the chatter. Somebody will always have something to say. When one person runs out of subjects, someone else can step in. It is a kind of double concert. The music never stops, but no real conversation takes. Place. Victorian times where different, houses were sectioned off into many rooms and often times had a front parlor, near the foyer, to great guest, and another parlor in the back of the house for family. People also had intimate and meaning conversations because traveling was more complicated and communication in general was. So the Victorians enjoyed their intimate gathers and their conversations were as deep as diary entries. In modern times, homes are built for entertainment. The many of the homes have an open concept, which allows for connection of the main living areas and there is even an upstairs lobby in many of the new homes where people can gather out in the open. Many of the new homes made by Cresleigh are designed for entertainment, multi-generational living, spaces where people can come together and communicate in groups. However, in modern times, I suspect a lot of people think that if a form of entertainment does not cost anything it cannot be very satisfying. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Industry propaganda has trained us all to think that happiness comes from objects that we can buy, and very few of us are ready to believe any more that we can live and live very happily without all that stuff. That is a great change from the last, as we have discussed. One hundred and fifty years ago people bought very few things for their entertainment, even people with comfortable middle-class incomes. There was no radio, or Smart TV; there were no cars and no Facebook. However, there was conversation. People even built séance rooms to converse with “spirits.” Of course, if you look upon conversation as a means of “diversion,” hen your conversation will be mere twaddle. Real conversation does not “divert.” It requires concentration, a gather of our powers, not a scattering of them. If a person is not alive within oneself, then one’s conversation cannot be very lively either. However, if they were not afraid to step out of themselves, to show who they really are, to cast off the crutches they think they need to keep from tumbling down to nothingness, if they were not afraid to be alone with themselves and others, there are many people who could be much livelier. The power or energy by which this is effected, like that in other natural events, is unknown and inconceivable. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
We are conscious of a power or energy in our own minds, when, by an act or command of our will, we raise up a new idea, fix the mind to the contemplation of it, turn it on all sides, and at last dismiss I for some other idea, when we think that we have surveyed it with sufficient accuracy. When we know a power, we know that very circumstance in the cause, by which it is enabled to produce the effect: For these are supposed to be synonymous. We must, therefore, know both the cause and effect, and the relation between them. However, we do not pretend to be acquitted with the nature of the human soul and the nature of an idea, or the aptitude of the one to produce the other. This is a real creation; a production of something out of nothing; Which implies a power so great, that may seem, at first sight, beyond the reach of any being, less than infinite. At least it must be owned, that such a power is not felt, nor known, nor even conceivable by the mind. We only feel the event, namely, the existence of an idea, consequent to a command of the will: But the manner, in which this operation is performed; the power, by which it is produced; is entirely beyond our comprehension. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
The command of the mind over itself is limited, as well as its command over the body; and these limits are not known by reason, or any acquaintance with the nature of cause and effect; but only experience and observation, as in all other natural events and in the operation of external objects. Our authority over our sentiments and passions is much weaker than that over our ideas; and even the latter authority is circumscribed within very narrow boundaries. Will any one pretend to assign the ultimate reason of these boundaries, or show why the power is deficient in one case not in another. This self-command is very different at different ties. A human in health possesses more of it, than one languishing with sickness. We are more master of our thought in the morning than in the evening: Fasting, than after a full meal. Can we give any reason for these variations, except experience? Where then is the power, of which we pretend to be conscious? Is there not here, either in a spiritual or material substance, or both, some secret mechanism or structure of parts, upon which the effect depends, and which, being entirely unknown to us, renders the power or energy of the will equally unknown and incomprehensible? #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
Volition is surely an act of the mind, with which we are sufficiently acquainted. Reflect upon it. Consider it on all sides. Do you find anything in it like this creative power, by which it raises from nothing a new idea, and with a kind of FIAT, imitates the omnipotence of its Maker, if I may be allowed so to speak, who called forth into existence all the various scenes of nature? So far from being conscious of this energy in the will, it requires as certain experience, as that of which we are possessed, to convince us, that such extraordinary effects do ever result from a simple act of volition. The tongue, so tiny, is immensely powerful. Four reporters, good old body, having a few beers in a Denver bar in 1899, provided the specious spark that ignited the infamous Boxer Rebellion. The tongue is indeed mightier than generals and their armies. It can fuel our lives so they become fiery furnaces, or it can cool our lives with the soothing wind of the Spirit. It can be forged by Hell, or it can be a tool of Heaven. Offered to God on the altar, the tongue has awesome power for god. It can proclaim the life-changing message of salvation: “And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? And how can they preach unless they are sent? As it is written, ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who good news!’” reports Romans 10.14-15. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
The tongue has power for sanctification as we share God’s Word: “Sanctify them by the truth; your word is truth,” reports John 17.17. It has power for healing: “For when we came into Macedonia, this body of ours had no rest, but we were harassed at every turn—conflict on the outside, fears within. However, God, who comforts the downcast, comforts us by the coming of Titus, and not only by his coming but also by the comfort you had given him. He told us about your longing for me, your deep sorrow, your ardent concern for me, so that my joy was greater than ever,” reports 2 Corinthians 7.5-7. The tongue has power for worship: “Though Jesus, therefore, let us continually offer to God a sacrifice of praise—the fruit of lips that confess his name,” reports Hebrews 13.15. Humans, it is up to us. No sweat, no sanctification! First, we must ask God t cauterize our lips, confessing as Isaiah did, “Woe to me! I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty” reports Isaiah 6.5. Then we need to submit to the cleansing touch: “Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘who shall I send? And who will go for us?’ And I said, ‘Here am I. Send me,’” reports Isaiah 6.8. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
Isaiah’s outline as a spiritual exercise, performed with all one’s heart, will work wonders in our lives. Let us all do this today! In conjunction, there must also be an ongoing prayerfulness regarding the use of our tongues—regular, detailed prayer. This, coupled with the first step, will work a spiritual miracle. We must also resolve to discipline ourselves regarding the use of the tongue, making solemn resolutions such as the following: to perpetually and loving speak the truth in love (Ephesians 4.15). To refrain from being party to or a conduit for gossip (Proverbs 16.28; 17.9; 26.20). To refrain from insincere flatter (Proverbs 26.28). To refrain from running down another (James 4.11). To refrain from degrading humour (Ephesians 5.4). To refrain from sarcasm (Proverbs 26.24-25). To memorize Scriptures which teacher the proper use of the tongue (speech). Human, discipline your tongue for the purpose of Godliness! “Who keeps the tongue doth keep one’s soul.” A flaming spear out of the chaos Dear Lord in Heaven, come to your people and be a skillful hand against the chaos. God, please come to your people and be a mind keenly ordered amidst the chaos. God, please come to your people as a faithful protector through all the chaos. God, please come to your people as we are lost in the expanse of limitless space containing infinite numbers of stars but filled with emptiness. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
We cast ourselves into your measureless darkness, confident that you will come if only we wait. Though the night may be long, we will still wait for you, God, offering our patience in sacrifice to win your presence. “And now, my son, I have somewhat to say concerning the restoration of which has been spoken; for behold, some have wrestled the scriptures, and have gone far astray because of this thing. And I perceive that thy mind has been worried also concerning this thing. However, behold, I will explain it unto thee. I say unto thee, my son, that the plan of restoration is requisite with the justice of God; for it is requisite that all things should be restored to their proper order. Behold, it is requisite and just, according to the power and resurrection of Christ, that the soul of humans should be restored to its body, and that every part of the body should be restored to itself. And it is requisite with the justice of God that humans should be judged according to their works; and if their works were good in this life, and the desires of their hearts were good, that they should also, at the last day, be restored unto that which is good. And if their works are evil they shall be restored unto them for evil. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
Therefore, all things shall be restored to their proper order, every thing to its natural frame—mortality raised to immortality, corruption to incorruption—raised to endless happiness to inherit the kingdom of God, or to endless misery to inherit the kingdom of the devil, the one on one hand, the other on the other—the one raised to happiness according to one’s desires of happiness, or good according to one’s desires of good; and the other to evil according to one’s desires of evil; for as one has desired to do evil all the day long even so shall one have one’s reward of evil when the night cometh. And so it is on the other hand. If one hath repented of one’s sins, and desired righteousness until the end of one’s days, even so one shall be rewarded unto righteousness. These are they that are redeemed of the Lord; yea, these are they that are taken out, that are delivered from that endless night of darkness; and thus they stand or fall; for behold, they are their own judges, whether to do good or do evil. Now, the decrees of God are unalterable; therefore, the way is prepared that whosoever will may walk therein and be saved. And now behold, my son, do not risk one more offense against your God upon those points of doctrine, which ye have hitherto risked to commit sin. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
“Do not suppose, because it has been spoken concerning restoration, that ye shall be restored from sin to happiness. Behold, I say unto you, wickedness never was happiness. And now, my son, all humans that are, in a carnal state, are in he gall of bitterness and in the bonds of iniquity; they are without God in the World, and they have gone contrary to the nature of God; therefore, they are in a state contrary to the nature of happiness. And now behold, is the meaning of the word restoration to take a thing of a natural state and place it in an unnatural state, or to place it in a state opposite to its nature? O, my son, this is not the case; but the meaning of the word restoration is to bring back again evil for evil, or carnal for carnal, or devilish for devilish—good for that which is righteous; just for that which is just; merciful for that which is merciful. Therefore, my son, see that you are merciful unto your brethren; deal justly, judge righteously, and do good continually; and if ye do all these things then shall ye receive your reward; yea, ye shall have mercy restored unto you again; ye shall have justice restored unto you again; ye shall have a righteous judgment restored unto you again; and you shall have good rewarded unto you again. For that which ye do send out shall return unto you again, and be restored; therefore, the word restoration more fully condemneth the sinner, and justifieth one not at all,” reports Alma 41.1-15. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
Cresleigh Homes
Time to explore more #CresleighHomes! Our blog today takes a look at #Bluffs, the cul-de-sac community located at #PlumasRanch! Click the link in our bio to give it a read. 👍 https://cresleigh.com/blog/
On the edge of sight I can see a wonder: The Lord in all His glory. If I send swift thoughts racing after Him, I cannot overtake Him; His careful steps keep ahead of my impetuous racing. I call out to God: “Father, for the sake of the one who loves you, I beg you to stop.” He comes to a halt and I can approach. God says, “If you had done that first, it would have been better.” I remember, and call to God in love, and wait for Him to stop for me. May God, who pressed out, is life, is power, may God whose roaring calls us to the ritual, to drink, may God, granting gifts, filling us with immortality, may God, King of the Universe, be praised in His prayer. May God, hear me, come to join me in this rite. May my words draw God hither.
Randolph Harris II International 