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Mighty—Choose a Mighty Theme and Architecture that Speaks to Your Heart and Soul!
Good writing is true. Writing is a suspension of life in order to re-create life. We are in the process of becoming a World in which marriage is temporary rather than permanent, in which family arrangements are diverse and colorful, in which same gender couples are acceptable parents and retirees are starting to raise children—such a World is vastly different from the traditional past. All youth were once expected to find life-long partners. In the World we are becoming, being single is no crime. No longer are couples forced to remain imprisoned, as many were in the past, in marriages that had turned rancid. Divorce has been made easier to arrange, so long as responsible provision is made for children. In fact, the very introduction of professional parenthood is making the possibilities of divorce more conducive to mental and physical health because adults can discharge their parental responsibilities without necessarily remaining in a cage of a hateful marriage. With this powerful external pressure removed, those who stay together are those who wish to stay together, those for whom marriage is actively fulfilling—those, in short, who are in love. The family cycle has been one of the sanity-preserving constants in human existence. However, this cycle is changing. #RandolphHarris 1 of 10
When the “mother” can compress the process of birth into a brief visit to an embryo emporium, when by transferring embryos from womb to womb we can destroy even the ancient certainty that childbearing took nine months, children will grow up into a World in which the family cycle, once so smooth and sure, will be jerkily arhythmic. Another crucial stabilizer will have been removed from the wreckage of the traditional order, another pillar of sanity broken. We have it in our power to shape change. We may choose one future over another. We cannot, however, maintain the past. In our family forms, as in our economics, science, technology and social relationships, we shall be forced to deal with the new. The Super-age of information Revolution will liberate humans from many of the barbarisms that grew out of the restrictive, relatively choiceless family patterns of the past and present. It will offer to each a degree of freedom hitherto unknow. However, it will exact a steep price for that freedom. As we hurtle into tomorrow, millions of ordinary men and women will face emotion-packed options so unfamiliar, so untested, that past experience will offer little clue to wisdom. In their family ties, as in all other aspects of their lives, they will be compelled to cope not merely with transience, but with the added problem of novelty as well. #RandolphHarris 2 of 10
In such an environment, fast-changing and unfamiliar, we are forced, as we wend our way through life, to make our personal choices from a diverse array of options. And it is to the third central characteristic of tomorrow, diversity, that we must now turn. For it is the final convergence of these three factors—transience, novelty and diversity—that sets the stage for the historic crisis of adaptation that is the subject of this paper: future shock. The Super-age of information Revolution will consign to the archives of ignorance most of what we now believe about democracy and the future of human choice. Today in techno-societies there is an almost ironclad consensus about of freedom. Maximum individual choice is regarded as the democratic ideal. Yet most writers predict that we shall move further and further from this ideal. They conjure up a dark vision of the future, in which people appear as mindless consumer-creatures, surrounded by standardized goods, educated in standardized schools, fed a diet of standardized mass culture, and forced to adopt standardized styles of life. Choice was a real possibility for humans. By contrast, today, the human being is not as much an agent of choice. And, hopefully in the future, humans will not be confined to the role of a recording device. #RandolphHarris 3 of 10
If people are robbed of their choice, they will be acted upon, not active. One will live, in a totalitarian state run by a velvet-gloved Gestapo and Sicherheitspolizei. This same theme—the loss of choice—is repeated by hippie gurus to Supreme Court justices, tabloid editorialists and existentialist philosophers. Put in its simplest form, this Theory of Vanishing Choice rests on a crude syllogism: Science and technology have fostered standardization. Science and technology will advance, making the future even more standardized than the present. Ergo: Humans will progressively lose their freedom of choice. If instead of blindly accepting this syllogism, we stop to analyze it, however, we make an extraordinary discovery. For not only is the logic itself faulty, the entire idea is premised on sheer factual ignorance about the nature, the meaning and the direction of the Super-age of information Revolution. Ironically, the people of the future may suffer not from an absence of choice, but from a paralyzing surfeit of it. They may turn out to be victims of that peculiarly super-industrial dilemma: overchoice. It is a lot like the Vanishing dimensions theory, which suggests that systems with higher energy (more choices) have smaller number of dimensions (choices). #RandolphHarris 4 of 10
There could have been fewer choices in the past, but the number of products has increased so vastly that more producers are having to pack a variety of similar products into smaller spaces that is in actually reducing the variety of their inventory, which is restricting the consumers freedom. So, the only way to accommodate all the products on the market is by making stores larger, but it also overwhelms the consumer and makes competition for brands so fierce that only the biggest and must successful brands will succeed, so it will actually end up restrict freedoms to only certain producers and brands, and we will see fewer independent and unique choices. No person traveling across Europe or the United States of America can fail to be impressed by the architectural similarity of one gas station or airport to another. Any one thirsting for a soft drink will find one bottle of Coca-Cola to be almost identical with the next. Clearly a consequence of mass production techniques, the uniformity of certain aspects of our physical environment has long outraged intellectuals. Some decry the Hiltonization of our hotels; others charge that we are homogenizing the entire human race. Certainly, it would be difficult to deny that industrialism has had a leveling effect. Our ability to produce millions of nearly identical units is the crowing achievement of the industrial age. #RandolphHarris 5 of 10
Thus, when intellectuals bewail the sameness of our material goods, they accurately reflected that state of affairs under industrialism. However, industrialism marked such a high period of success because it started when America will still a developing nation and people were escaping poverty. So, suburban communities were all the homes were nice, with well-manicured green lawns and everyone own a new Cadillac, Chevy, Buick of Ford sedan make people feel comfortable because it reflected the American Dream and an end of poverty. In the past, the American motorist took one’s pick of either “regular” or “premium.” Today one drives up to a gasoline station pump and is asked to choose from among eight different blends and mixes, but with more cars moving to electric technology, it will reduce the options and styles of car people will be able to buy. Notice most electric cars have fewer innovative changes in the body style over their lifetime? The number of different soaps and detergent on the American grocery shelf has increased from sixty-five to 200; frozen foods from 121 to 350; baking mixes and flours from eighty-four to 200. Even the variety of pet foods increased from fifty-eight to eighty-one. So we will see only the best selling items on the store shelf, which will actually decrease the variety, unless a certain market has a preference for a different product. #RandolphHarris 6 of 10
One major company, Corn Products, produces a pancake syrup called Karo. Instead of offering the same product nationally, however, it sells two different viscosities, having found that Pennsylvanians, for some regional reason, prefer their syrup thicker than other Americans. In the field of office décor and furniture, the same process is at work. There are ten times the new styles and colours there were a decade ago. Every architect wants one’s own shade of green. Companies, in other words, are discovering wide variations in consumer wants and are adapting their production lines to accommodate them. Two economic factors encourage this trend: first, consumers have more money to lavish on their specialized wants; second, and even more important, as technology becomes more sophisticated, the cost of introducing variations declines. However, people are noticing more and more people like the same things because they want to blend in and be accepted and they also want to appeal to the masses for resale value of their homes and cars, personalities and clothes, so they may avoid things the are unique and particular. Primitive technology, it seems, may have allowed for more variety, and modern technology, with transience is leading to more standardization because people know they may have to move at anytime for their career, so they want to make safe choices that others will also like. #RandolphHarris 7 of 10
It also many seem like in the past there was more variety, but in America, for example, we are looking at about 200 years of architectural manufacturing, and over certain eras, particular styles of architecture were mass produced, like during the 18th and 19th century, Queen Anne architecture was popular, then with the birth of the suburbs in the 1950s, ranch style homes and farm houses became more popular. So, we are looking at the past and seeing timelines of mass-produced items and believe there was more variety, and with the age of these style increasing, they become more unique and have a cult following. Automation, in a sense, is leading to a path of endless, blinding, mind-numbing diversity that we will only see when we look back. However, many engineers and business experts foresee the day when true diversity will cost no more than uniformity. Yet in the meanwhile, by wiping out thousands of little “mom and pop” businesses, we have without a doubt contributed to uniformity in the architectural environment. Still, the array of goods corporate stores provide for the consumer is incomparably more diverse than any corner store could afford to stock. Thus at the very moment that the economic conditions are encouraging architectural and product sameness they are also fostering gastronomic diversity. This lead many corporations and individuals to see that the future is truly a paradox. #RandolphHarris 8 of 10
However, one has to also keep into mind that architectural variety is also strangled by local building codes and conservative trade unions. With more advanced technology, the more cost effective it is to introduce variation in output. We can safely predict, therefore, that when the construction industry catches up with manufacture in technological sophistication gas stations, airports, houses, and hotels, as well as supermarkets, will stop looking as if they had been poured from the same mould. Uniformity will give way to diversity, and we are actually starting to see this in high end boutique housing developments. Certain neighbourhoods are going for more of a Victorian style, others are requesting communities with six different architectural styles, but we are seeing others were people like the predictability of all the houses being the same height and elevation. Because of the desire for diversity, Watergate East, in Washington, DC, which is a Midcentury Modern 14-story, 240-unit historic condominium building that is considered an architectural gem, was produced between 1964 and 1978 at a cost of $78,000,000.00 by Societa Generale Immobilare (SGI). It is a computer-designed apartment house by Italian architect Luigi Moretti. Of the 240 apartments, 167 have different floor pans. And there are no continuous straight lines in the building anywhere. #RandolphHarris 9 of 10
The building was modernized in 2019, and features large sunlit lobbies with full-height windows which reflects the architect’s vision of bring the outside inside. As with the lobbies, the recently renovated landscaped yards continue the original plan of noted landscape architect Boris Timchenko—offering views from ground-level walkways and cantilevered balconies looking down onto the green roof and open spaces, and there are flowering trees, and vibrant profusions of seasonal colour. The terraces are smoke free and some reach above the trees where residences can enjoy the foggy mornings. I raise my hands in prayer to God, to Him I pray, Lord of the Earth. He who was the first of any to die, the first of any to be reborn. He who raises with the Sun each day and sets with it each night. Out of my darkness and death, I call and pray to you, Lord of All. Out of my needs, I send my voice with honour and longing, in hope of intercession. Please grant me my prayer, Mighty One, you who know what it is to suffer. Please grant me my prayer, First Born Son of God, you who are the great giver. May it be Thy will, O Lord our God and God of our father, to grant our portion in Thy Holy Bible, and may the Temple be rebuilt in our day. There we will serve Thee with awe as in the days of old. O Lord, please open Thou my lips and my mouth shall declare Thy Praise. #RandolphHarris 10 of 10
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God Will Look to Every Soul Like its First Love Because He is its First Love!
Death is a metaphor; nobody dies to oneself. I believe that humans will not merely endure; they will prevail. My picture of the good sheepdog in the good homestead does not, of course, cover wild animals nor (a matter even more urgent) ill-treated domestic animals. However, it is intended only as an illustration drawn from one privileged instance—which is, also, in my view the only normal and unperverted instance—of the general principles to be observed in framing a theory of animal resurrection. I think Christians may justly hesitate to suppose any beasts immortal, for two reasons. Firstly because they fear, by attributing to beasts a “soul” in the full sense, to obscure that difference between beast and humans which is as sharp in the spiritual dimension as it is hazy and problematical in the biological. And secondly, a future happiness connected with the beast’s present life simply as a compensation for suffering—so many millenniums in the happy pastures paid down as “damages” for so many years of pulling carts—seems a clumsy assertion of Divine goodness. We, because we are fallible, often hurt a child or an animal unintentionally, and then the best we can do is to “make up for it” by some caress or tid-bit. However, it is hardly pious to imagine omniscience acting in that way—as though God trod on the animals’ tails in the dark and then did the best He could about it! #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
In such a botched adjustment I cannot recognize the master-touch; whatever the answer is, it must be something better than that. The theory I am suggesting tries to avoid both objections. It makes God the center of the Universe and humans the subordinate center of terrestrial nature: the beasts are not co-ordinate with humans, but subordinate to them, and their destiny is through and through related to ones. And the derivative immorality suggested for them is not a mere amende or compensation: it is part and parcel of the new Heaven and new Earth, organically related to the whole suffering process f the World’s fall and redemption. Supposing, as I do, that the personality of the tame animals is largely the gift of humans—that their mere sentience is reborn to soulhood in us as our mere soulhood is reborn to spirituality in Christ—I naturally suppose that very few animals indeed, in their wild state, attain to “self” or ego. However, if any do, and if it is agreeable to the goodness of God that they should live again, their immortality would also be related to humans—not, this time, to individual masters, but to humanity. That is to say, if in any instance the quasi-spiritual and emotional value which human tradition attributes to a beast (such as the “innocence” of the lamb or the heraldic royalty of the lion) has a real ground in the beast’s nature, and is not merely arbitrary or accidental, then it is that capacity, or principally in that, that the beast may be expected to attend on risen humans and make part of one’s “train.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Or if the traditional character is quite erroneous, then the beast’s Heavenly life would be in virtue of the real, but unknown, effect it has actually had on humans during their whole history: for if Christians cosmology is in any sense (I do not say, in a literal sense) true, then all that exists on our planet is related to humans, and even the creatures that were extinct before humans existed are then only seen in their true light when they are seen as the unconscious harbingers of humans. When we are speaking of creatures so remote from us as wild beasts, and prehistoric beasts, we hardly know what we are talking about. It may well be that they have no selves and no sufferings. It may even be that each species has a corporate self—that Lionhood, not lions, has shared in the travail of creation and will enter into the restoration of all things. And if we cannot imagine even our own eternal life, much less can we imagine the life the beasts may have as our “members.” If the Earthly lion could read the prophecy of that day when one shall eat hay like an ox, one would regard it as a description not of Heaven, but of hell. And if there is nothing in the lion but carnivorous sentience, then one is unconscious and one’s “survival” would have no meaning. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
However, if there is a rudimentary Leonine self, to that also God can give “body” as it pleases Him—a body no longer living by the destruction of the lamb, yet richly Leonine in the sense that is also expresses whatever energy and splendour and exulting power dwelled within the visible lion on this Earth. I think, under correction, that the prophet used an eastern hyperbole when he spoke of the lion on this Earth. I think, under correction, that the prophet used an eastern hyperbole when he spoke of the lion and the lamb lying down together. That would be rather impertinent of the lamb. To have lions and lambs that so consorted (except n some rare celestial Saturnalia of topsy-turvydom) would be the same as having neither lambs nor lions. I think the lion, when one has ceased to be dangerous, will still be awful: indeed, that we shall then first see that of which the present fangs and claws are a clumsy, and satanically perverted, imitation. There will still be something like the shaking of a golden mane: and often the good Duke will say, “Let him roar again.” It is required you do awake your faith. Then all stand still; or those that think it is unlawful business I am about, let them depart. Plunged in thy depth of mercy let me die the death that every soul that lives desires. “I reckon,” said St Paul, “that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that shall be revealed in us,” reports Romans 8.18. If this is so, a book on suffering which says nothing of Heaven, is leaving out almost the whole of one side of the account. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Scripture and tradition habitually put the joys of Heaven into the scale against the sufferings of Earth, and no solution of the problem of pain which does not do so can be called a Christian one. We are very sky nowadays of even mentioning Heaven. We are afraid of the jeer about “pie in the sky,” and of being told that we are trying to “escape” from the duty of making a happy World here and now into dreams of a happy World elsewhere. However, either there is “pie in the sky” or there is not. If there is not, then Christianity is false, for this doctrine is women into its whole fabric. If there is, then this truth, like any other, must be faced, whether it is useful at political meetings or no. Again, we are afraid that Heaven is a bribe, and that is we make it our goal we shall no longer be disinterested. It is not so. Heaven offers nothing that a mercenary soul can desire. It is safe to tell the pure in heart that they shall see God, for only the pure in Heart want to. There are rewards that do not sully motives. A human’s love for a woman is not mercenary because one wants to marry her, nor his love of exercise less disinterested because he wants to run and leap and walk. Love, by definition, seeks to enjoy its object. You may think that there is another reason for our silence about Heaven—namely, that we do not really desire it. However, that may be an illusion. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
What I am now going to say is merely an opinion of my own without the slightest authority, which I submit to the judgment of better Christians and better scholars than myself. There have been times when I think we do not desire Heaven; but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else. You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that. Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw—but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realize that this landscape means something totally different to one, that one is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you are transported. Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of—something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat’s side? #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
Are not all lifelong friendships born at them moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have every deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it—tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that dies away just as they caught your ear. However, if it should really become manifest—if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself—you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say “Here at last is the thing I was made for.” We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all. I am not, of course, suggesting that these immortal longings which we have from the Creator because we are humans, should be confused with the gifts of the Holy Spirit to those who are in Christ. We must not fancy we are holy because we are human. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
This signature on each soul may be a product of heredity and environment, but that only means that heredity and environment are among the instruments whereby God creates a soul. I am considering now how, but why, He makes each soul unique. If He had no use for all these differences, I do not see why He should have created more souls than one. Be sure that the ins and outs of your individuality are no mystery to God; and one day they will no longer be a mystery to you. If you never had a key, the mould in which a key is made would a strange thing. And if you have never seen a lock, the key itself would be a strange thing. Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the Divine substance, or a kay to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions. For it is not humanity in the abstract that is to be saved, but you—you, the individual reader, John Stubbs or Janet Smith. Blessed and fortunate creature, your eyes shall behold Him and not another’s. All that you are sins apart, is destined, if you will let God have His good way, to utter satisfaction. The Brocken spectre “looked to every man like his first love,” because she was a cheat. However, God will to every soul like its first love because He is its first love. Your place in Heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it—made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
It is from this point of view that we can understand hell in its aspect of privation. All your life an unattainable ecstasy has hovered just beyond the grasp of your consciousness. The say is coming when you will awake to find, beyond all hope, that you have attained it, or else, that it was within your reach and you have lost it forever. This may seem a perilously private and subjective notion of the pearl of great price, but it is not. The thing I am speaking of is not an experience. You have experienced only the want of it. The thing itself has never actually been embodied in any thought, or image, or emotion. Always it has summoned you our of yourself. And if you will not go out of yourself to follow it, if you sit down to brood on the desire and attempt to cherish it, the desire itself will evade you. The door into life generally opens behind us, and the only wisdom for one haunted with the scent of unseen roses, is work. This secret fire goes out when you use the bellows: bank it down with what seems unlikely fuel of dogma and ethics, turn your back on it and attend to your duties, and then it will blaze. The World is like a picture with a golden background, and we the figures in that picture. Until you step off the plane of the picture into the large dimensions of death you cannot see the gold. However, we have reminders of it. To change our metaphor, the blackout is not quite complete. There are errors. At times the daily scene looks big with its secret. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
Such is my opinion; and it may be erroneous. Perhaps this secret desire also is part of the Old Man and must be crucified before the end. However, this opinion has a curious trick of evading denial. The desire—much more the satisfaction—has always refused to be fully present in any experience. Whatever you try to identify with it, turns out to be not it but something else: so that hardly any degree of crucifixion or transformation could go beyond what the desire itself leads us to anticipate. Again, if this opinion is not true, something better is. However, “something better”—not this or that experience, but beyond it—is almost the definition of the thing I am trying to describe. The thing you long for summon you away from the self. Even the desire for the thing lives only if you abandon it. This is the ultimate law—the seed dies to live, the bread must be cast upon the waters, one that loses one’s soul will save it. However, the life of the seed, the finding of the bread, the recovery of the soul, are as real as the preliminary sacrifice. Hence it is truly said of Heaven, in Heaven there is no ownership. If any there took upon one to call anything one’s own, one would straightway be thrust out into hell and become an evil spirit. However, it is also said, “To one that overcometh I will give a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no human knoweth saving one that receiveth it,” reports Revelation 2.17. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
What can be more a human’s own than this new name which even in eternity remains a secret between God and one? And what shall we take this secrecy to mean? Surely, that each of the redeemed shall forever know and praise some one aspect of the Divine beauty better than any other creature can. Why else were individuals created, but that God, loving all infinitely, should love each differently? And this difference, so far from impairing, floods with meaning the love of all blessed creatures for one another, the communion of the saints. If all experienced God in the same way and returned Him an identical worship, the song of the Church triumphant would have no symphony, it would be like an orchestra in which all the instruments played the same note. Aristotle has told us that a city is a unity of unlikes, and St Paul that a body in a unity of different members. Heaven is a city, and a Body, because the blessed remain eternally different: a society, because each has something to tell all the others—fresh and ever fresh news of “My God” whom each finds in Him whom all praise as “Our God.” For doubtless the continually successful, yet never complete, attempt by each soul to communicate its unique vision to all others (and that by means whereof Earthly art and philosophy are but clumsy imitations) is also among the ends for which the individual was created. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
For union exists only between distincts; and, perhaps, from this point of view, we catch a momentary glimpse of the meaning of all things. Pantheism is a creed not so much false as hopelessly behind times. Once, before creation, it would have been true to say that everything was God. However, God created: He causes things to be other than Himself that, being distinct, they might learn to love Him, and achieve union instead of mere sameness. Thus He also cast His bread upon the waters. Even within the creation we might say that inanimate matter, which has no will, is one with God in a sense in which humans are not. However, it is no God’s purpose that we should go back into that old identity (as, perhaps, some Pagan mystics would have us do) but that we should go on to the maximum distinctness there to be reunited with Him in a higher fashion. Even within the Holy One Himself, it is not sufficient that the Word should be God, it must also be with God. The Father eternally begets the Son and the Holy Ghost proceeds: deity introduces distinction within itself so that the union of reciprocal loves may transcend mere arithmetical unity or self-identity. However, the eternal distinctness of each soul—the secret which makes of the union between each soul and God a species in itself—will never abrogate the law that forbids ownership in Heaven. As to its fellow-creatures, each soul, we suppose will be eternally engaged in giving away to all the rest that which it receives. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
And as to God, we must remember that the soul is but a hollow which God fills. Its union with God is, almost by definition, a continual self-abandonment—an opening, an unveiling, a surrender, of itself. A blessed spirit is a mould ever more and more patient of the bright metal poured into it, a body ever more completely uncovered to the meridian blaze of the spiritual sun. We need not suppose that the necessity for something analogous to self-conquest will ever be ended, or that eternal life will not also be eternal dying. It is in this sense that, as there may be pleasures in hell (God shield us from them), there may be something not unlike pains in Heaven (God grant us soon to taste them). For in self-giving, if anywhere, we touch a rhythm not only of all creation but of all being. For the Eternal Word also gives Himself in sacrifice; and that not only on Calvary. For when He was crucified He did that in the wild weather of His outlying provinces which He had done at home in glory and gladness. From before the foundation of the World He surrenders begotten Deity back to begetting Deity in obedience. And as the Son glorifies the Father, so also the Father glorifies the Son. And, with submission,, as become a layman, I think it was truly said “God loveth not Himself as Himself but as Goodness; and if there were aught better than God, He would love that and not Himself,” reports Theol. Germ., xxxii. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
From the highest to the lowest, self exists to be abdicated and, by that abdication, becomes the more truly self, to be thereupon yet the more abdicated, and so forever. This is not a Heavenly law which we can escape by remaining Earthly, nor an Earthly law which we can escape by being saved. What is outside the system of self-giving is not Earth, nor nature, nor “ordinary life,” but simply solely hell. Yet even hell derives from this law such as reality as it has. That fierce imprisonment in the self is but the obverse of the self-giving which is absolute reality; the negative shape which the outer darkness takes by surrounding and defining the shape of the real, or which the real imposes on the darkness by having a shape and positive nature of its own. The golden apple of selfhood, thrown among the false god, became an apple of discord because they scrambled for it. They did not know the first rule of the holy game, which is that every player must by all means touch the ball and then immediately pass it on. To be found with it in your hands is a fault: to cling to it, death. However, when it flies to and fro among the player too swift for eye to follow, and the great master Himself leads the revelry, giving Himself eternally to His creatures in the generation, and back to Himself in the sacrifice, of the Word, then indeed the eternal dance makes heaven drowsy with the harmony. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
All pains and pleasures we have known on Earth are early initiations in the movements of that dance: but the dance itself is strictly incomparable with the sufferings of this present time. As we draw nearer to its uncreated rhythm, pain, and pleasure sink almost out of sight. There is joy in the dance, but it does not exist for the sake of joy. It does not even exist for the sake of good, or of love. It is Love Himself, and Good Himself, and therefore happy. It does not exist for us, but we for it. The size and emptiness of the Universe which frightened us at the outset should awe us still, for though they may be no more than a subjective by-product of our three-dimensional imagining, yet they symbolize great truth. As our Earth is to all the stars, so doubtless are we humans and our concerns to all creation; as all the stars are so space itself, so are all creatures, all thrones and powers and mightiest of the created gods, to the abyss of the self-existing Being, who is to us Father and Redeemer and indwelling Comforter, but of whom no human nor angel can say nor conceive what He is in and for Himself, or what is the work that he maketh from the beginning to the end. For they are all derived and unsubstantial things. Their vision fails them and they cover their eyes from the intolerable light of utter actuality, which was and is and shall be, which never could have been otherwise, which has no opposite. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
Pain is a common and definite event which can easily be recognized: but the observation of character or behaviour is less easy, less complete, and less exact, especially in the transient, if intimate, relation of doctor and patient. In spite of this difficulty certain impressions gradually take form in the course of medical practice which are confirmed as experience grows. A short attack of severe physical pain is overwhelming while it lasts. The sufferer is not usually loud in one’s complaints. One will be for relief but does not waste one’s breath on elaborating one’s troubles. It is unusual for one to lose self-control and to become wild and irrational. It is rare for the severest physical pain to become in this sense unbearable. When short, severe, physical pain passes it leaves no obvious alteration in behaviour. Long-continued pain has more noticeable effect. It is often accepted with little or no complain and great strength and resignation are developed. Pride is humbled or, at times, results in a determination to conceal suffering. Women with rheumatoid arthritis show a cheerfulness which is so characteristic that it can be compared to the spes phthisica of the consumptive: and is perhaps due more to a slight intoxication of the patient by the infection than to an increased strength of character. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
Some victims of chronic pain deteriorate. They become querulous and exploit their privileged position as invalids to practice domestic tyranny. However, the wonder is that the failures are so few and the heroes so many; there is a challenge in physical pain which most can recognize and answer. One the other hand, a long illness, even without pain, exhausts the mind as well as the body. The invalid gives up the struggle and drifts helplessly and plaintively into a self-pitying despair. Even so, some, in a similar physical state, will preserve their serenity and selflessness to the end. To see it is a rare but moving experience. Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, to some, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say “My tooth is aching” than to say “My heart is broken.” Yet if the cause is accepted and faced, the conflict will strengthen and purify the character and in time the pain will usually pass. Sometimes, however, it persists and the effect is devastating; if the cause it not faced or not recognized, it produces the dreary state of the chronic neurotic. However, some by heroism overcome even chronic mental pain. They often produce brilliant work and strengthen, harden, and sharpen their character till they become like tempered steel. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
In actual insanity the picture is darker. In the whole realm of medicine there is nothing so terrible to contemplate as a human with chronic melancholia. However, most of the insane are not unhappy or, indeed, conscious of their condition. In either case, if they recover, they are surprisingly little changed. Often they remember nothing of their illness. Pain provides an opportunity of heroism; the opportunity is seized with surprising frequency. God walks at my side, armed with sword and staff, and in the darkest of nights, my fears fly before Him. He looks into my eyes, sitting with empty hands and in the brightest of days, my cares are as nothing. O Lord, please guard my tongue from evil and my lips from speaking guile, and to those who slander me, please let me give no heed. May my soul be humble and forgiving unto all. Please open Thou my heart, O Lord, unto Thy sacred Law, that Thy statutes I may know and all Thy truths pursue. Please bring to naught designs of those who seek to do me ill; please speedily defeat their aims and thwart their purposes for Thine own sake, for Thine own power, for Thy holiness and Law. That Thy loved ones be delivered, please answers us, O Lord, and save with Thy redeeming power. May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable unto Thee, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer. Thou who establishest peace in the Heavens, please grant peace unto us and unto all America. Amen. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
Cresleigh Homes
We’ll be honest: it’s hard to make it passed the impressive entry of this stunning home that is Residence 4 at #BrightonStation (Note: two-story ceiling height). One of the largest homes available on the market, we’re sure you’ll have room for the entire family (plus Scruffy, Stripey, and the goldfish too)! 🐕 🐈 🐟
Enjoy an open concept design with 4 bedrooms, 3.5 bathrooms AND a 3 car garage. Need we say more? Check out the video walkthrough on our website for more info! https://cresleigh.com/brighton-station/residence-4/
With Our Backs to the Wall We Must Believe in the Justice of Our Cause!
There are only two kinds of politics…the politics of fear and the politics of trust. One says: you are encircled by monstrous dangers. The other says: the World is a baffling and hazardous place, but it can be shaped to the will of humans. We tend to experience ourselves, our identity, our soul, our ego, as located somewhere within the temple, also known as our body, that God has blessed us with. Our skin is a limiting membrane which covers our bodies all over. Some of us feel we live behind our eyes; others feel they live beyond their rib-cage, in the solar plexus, in their private regions, or just all over. Still each individual “I” is normally experienced inside while the rest of the World is felt to be outside. And the other way round also: what is inside my skin is me, what is outside is not me. The skin surface does help to establish a sense of where self ends and not-self begins, but it can lead to a dangerous metaphor, tempting us to use language which cannot accurately describe our experiences. The idea that our boundaries are experienced mainly when we encounter others has been in the background of the developing narrative of our discussion. It solves some theoretical problems, and, though it creates others, the new problems seem to me more manageable, more interesting, and more productive of further insights. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
We experience boundaries in so many different ways: with love, with frustration, with shock—as obstacles, as opportunities, as absences, as stone walls, as bridges. What an interesting difficulty to work with! It seems to suggest, for instance, that boundaries are kinds of relationships: that people are defined, enriched, frustrated, and delimited by their boundaries with others. The boundary between me and a person I love and trust is very different from the boundary between me and someone I experience as indifferent or intrusive. People who love and trust each other feel identified, so that the other person’s well-being feels almost like their own. People in such a relationship will think of themselves as “we.” Then, though you and I are individuals, the boundary between us is very different from the boundary between us and them. The boundary between me and you-who-are-one-of-us is very different from the boundary between me and those-people-over-there: their well-being is not identified with mine. They are different and the boundary is different because the relationship between them and us is different. In an intimate relation, the two concerned are each using the other’s public present in controlling their own irrational desires and fears. To lose a friend is to lose part of one’s public presence: to lose an intimate is to lose part of the bulwark that protects us from our own helplessness. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
Each cell we create with the people we are close to consists, then, of a unique combination of intimate relations. We are what we share with those close to us—our parents, our spouses, our children. Experience leave memory-traces—neural processes organized in structures which reflect the experience. Concepts form when similar patterns of experiences repeatedly leave similar structures of memory-traces. Each time a patterned stimuli reappear, the concept will be stronger and clearer. Repeated similar experiences develop simple concepts. Eventually further experiences develop these concepts into more complex organizations. These are to some extent records of the past: more central or higher order processes, and eventually maps. A time comes when these records of the past, built up from experiences, themselves affect new experiences, creating expectations, directing attention, and so on. Phantasies is the word used for such concepts in psycho-analytic circles. To find out what is natural, we must study specimens which retain their nature and not those which have been corrupted. Thus far of humans suffering; but all this time “a plaint of guiltless hurt doeth pierce the sky.” The problem of animal suffering is appalling; not because the animals are so numerous (for, as we have seen, no more pain is felt when a million suffer than when one suffers) but because the Christian explanation of human pain cannot be extended to animal pain. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
So far as we known beasts are incapable either of sin or virtue: therefore they can neither deserve pain nor be improved by it. At the same time we must never allow the problem of animal suffering to become the center of the problem of pain; not because it is unimportant—whatever furnishes plausible grounds for questioning the goodness of God is very important indeed—but because it is outside the range of our knowledge. God has given us data which enables us, in some degree, to understand out own suffering: He has given us no such data about beast. We know neither why they were made nor what they are and everything we say about them is speculative. From the doctrine that God is good we may confidently deduce that the appearance of reckless Divine cruelty in the animal kingdom is an illusion—and the fact that the only suffering we know at first hand (our own) turns out not to be a cruelty will make it easier to believe this. After that, everything is guesswork. We may begin by ruling out some of the pessimistic bluff that is common knowledge. The fact that vegetable lives “prey upon” one another and are in a state of “ruthless” competition is of no moral importance at ll. Life in the biological sense has nothing to do with good and evil until sentience appears. The very words “prey” and “ruthless” are mere metaphors. Wordsworth believed that every flower “enjoyed the air it breathes,” but there is no reason so suppose he was right. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
No doubt, living plants react to injuries differently from inorganic matter; but an anaesthetized human body reacts more differently still and such reactions do not prove sentience. We are, of course, justified in speaking of the death or thwarting of a plant as if it were a tragedy, provided that we know we are using a metaphor. To furnish symbols for spiritual experiences may be one of the functions of the mineral and vegetable Worlds. However, we must not become the victims of our metaphor. A forest in which half the trees are killing the other half may be a perfectly “good” forest: for its goodness consists in its utility and beauty and it does not feel. When we turn to the beasts, three questions arise. There is, first, the question of fact; what do animals suffer? There is, secondly, the question of origin; how did disease and pain enter the animal World? And, thirdly, there is the question of justice; how can animal suffering be reconciled with the justice of God? In the long run the answer to the first question is, We do not know; but some speculations may be worth setting down. We must begin by distinguishing among animals: for if the ape could understand us, he would take it very ill to be lumped along with the oyster and the earthworm in a single class of “animals” and contrasted to humans. Clearly in some ways the ape and humans are much more like each other than either is like a worm. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
At the lower end of the animal realm, we need not assume anything we could recognize as sentience. Biologists in distinguishing animal from vegetable do not make use of sentience or locomotion or other such characteristics as a layman would naturally fi upon. At some point, however (though where, we cannot say), sentience almost certainly comes in, for the higher animals have nervous systems very like our own. However, at this level we must still distinguish sentience from consciousness. If you happen never to have heard of this distinction before, I am afraid you will find it rather startling, but it has great authority and you would be ill-advised to dismiss it out of hand. Suppose that three sensations follow one another—first A, then B, then C. When this happens to you, you have the experience of passing through the process ABC. However, note what this implies. It implies that there is something in you which stands sufficiently outside A to notice A passing away, and sufficiently outside B to notice B now beginning and coming to fill the place which A has vacated; and something which recognizes itself as the same through the transition from A to B and B to C, so it can say, “I have had the experience ABC.” Now this something is what I call Consciousness or Soul and the process I have just described is one of the proofs that the soul, though experiencing time, is not itself completely “timeful.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
The simplest experience of ABC as succession demands a soul which is not itself a mere succession of states, but rather a permanent bed along which these different portions of the stream of sensation roll, and which recognizes itself as the same beneath them all. Now it is almost certain that the nervous system of the higher animals presents it with successive sensation. It does not follow that it has any “soul,” anything which recognizes itself as having had A, and now having B, and now marking how B glides away to make room for C. If it had no such “soul,” what we call the experience ABC would never occur. There would, in philosophic language, be “a succession of perceptions”; that is, the sensations would, in fact, occur in that order, and God would know that they were so occurring, but the animal would not know. There would not be “a perception of succession.” This would mean that if you give such a creature two blows with a whip, there are, indeed, two pains: but there is n co-ordinating self which can recognize that “I have had two pains.” Even in the single pain, there is no self to say “I am in pain”—for if it could distinguish itself from the sensation—the bed from the stream—sufficiently to say “I am in pain,” it would also be able to connect the two sensations as its experience. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
The correct description would be “Pain is taking place in this animal”; not, as we commonly, say, “This animal feel pain,” for the words “this” and “feels” really smuggle in the assumption that it is a “self” or “soul” or “consciousness” standing above the sensations and organizing them into an “experience” as we do. Such sentience without consciousness, I admit, we cannot imagine: not because it never occurs in us, but because, when it does, we describe ourselves as being “unconscious.” And rightly. The fact that animals react to pain much as we do is, of course, no proof that they are conscious; for we may also react under chloroform, and even answer questions while asleep. How far up the scale such unconscious sentience may extend, I will not even guess. It is certainly difficult to suppose that the apes, the elephant, and the higher domestic animals, have not, in some degree, a self or soul which connects experiences and gives rise to rudimentary individuality. However, at least a great deal of what appears to be animal suffering need not be suffering in any real sense. It may be we who have invented the “sufferers” by the “pathetic fallacy” of reading into the beasts a self for which there is no real evidence. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
The origin of animal suffering could be traced, by earlier generations, to the Fall of man—the whole World was infected by the uncreating rebellion of Adam. This is now impossible, for we have good reason to believe that animals existed long before humans. Carnivorousness, with all that it entails, is older than humanity. Now it is impossible at this point not to remember a certain sacred story which, though never included in the creeds, has been widely believed in the Church and seems to be implied in several Dominical, Pauline, and Johannie utterances—I mean the story that humans were not the first creature to rebel against the Creator, but that some older and mightier being long since because apostate and is now the emperor of darkness and (significantly) the Lord of this World. Some people would like t reject all such elements from Our Lord’s teaching: and it might be argued that when He emptied Himself of His glory He also humbled Himself to share, as humans, the current superstitions of His time. And I certainly think that Christ, in the flesh, was not omniscient—if only because a human brain could not, presumably, be the vehicle of omniscient consciousness, and to say that Our Lord’s thinking was not really conditioned by the size and shape of His brain might be to deny the real incarnation and become a Docetist. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
Thus, if Our Lord had committed Himself to any scientific or historical statement which we knew to be untrue, this would not disturb my faith in His deity. However, the doctrine of Satan’s existence and fall is not among the things we know to be untrue: it contradicts not the facts discovered by scientists but the mere, vague “climate of opinion” that we happen to be living in. Now I take a very low view of “climates of opinion.” In one’s own subject every human knows that all discoveries are made and all errors corrected by those who ignore the “climate of opinion.” It seems to me, therefore, a reasonable supposition, that some mighty created power had already been at work for ill on the material Universe, or the solar system, or, at least, the planet Earth, before ever humans came on the scene: and that when man fell, someone had, indeed, tempted him. This hypothesis is not introduced as a general “explanation of evil”: it only gives a wider application to the principle that evil comes from the abuse of free will. If there is such a power, as I myself believe, it may well have corrupted the animal creation before humans appeared. The intrinsic evil of the animal World lies in the fact that animals, or some animals, live by destroying each other. That plants do the same I will not admit to be an evil. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
The Satanic corruption of the beasts would therefore be analogous, in one respect, with the Satanic corruption of humans. For one result of man’s fall was that his animality fell back from the humanity into which it had been taken up but which could no longer rule it. In the same way, animality may have been encouraged to slip back into behaviour proper to vegetables. It is, of course, true that the immense morality occasioned by the fact that many beasts live on beasts is balanced, in nature, by an immense birthrate, and it might seem, that if all animals had been herbivorous and healthy, they would mostly starve as a result of their own multiplication. However, I take the fecundity and the death rate to be correlative phenomena. There was, perhaps, no necessity for such an excess of the sexual impulse: the Lord of this World thought of it as a response to carnivorousness—a double scheme for securing the maximum amount of torture. If it offends less, you may say that the “life-force” is corrupted where I say that living creatures were corrupted by an evil angelic being. We mean the same thing: but I find it easier to believe in a myth of gods and demons than in one of hypostatized abstract nouns. And after all, our mythology may be much nearer to literal truth than we suppose. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
Let us not forget that Our Lord, on one occasion, attributes human disease not to God’s wrath, not to nature, but quite explicitly to Satan. If this hypothesis is worth considering, it is also worth considering whether humans, at their first coming into the World, had not already a redemptive function to perform. Humans, even now, can do wonders to animals: my bird and dog live together in my house and seem to like it. It may have been one of human’s functions to restore peace to the animal World, and if one had not joined the enemy one might have succeeded in doing so to an extent now hardly imaginable. Finally, there is the question of justice. We have seen reason to believe that not all animals suffer as we think they do: but some, at least, look as if they had selves, and what shall be done for these innocents? And we have seen that it is possible to believe that animal pain is not God’s handiwork but begun by Satan’s malice and perpetuated by human’s desertion of one’s post: still, if God has not caused it, He has permitted it, and once again, what shall be done for these innocents? I have been warned not even to raise the question of animal immorality, least I find myself in company with nature lovers. However, I believe maybe that animals are reborn into human form, but then, they would be missed in Heaven. Only God knows. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Nonetheless, the complete silence of Scripture and Christian tradition on animal immortality is a more serious objection; but it would be fatal only if Christian revelation showed any signs of being intended as a systeme de la nature answering all questions. However, it is nothing of the sort: the curtain has been rent at one point only, to reveal our immediate practical necessities and not to satisfy our intellectual curiosity. If animals were, in fact, immortal, it is unlikely, from what we discern of God’s method in the revelation, that He would have revealed this truth. Even our own immortality is a doctrine that comes late in the history of Judaism. The argument from silence is therefore very weak. The real difficulty about supposing most animals to be immortal is that immortality has almost no meaning for a creature which is not “conscious” in the sense explained above. However, thinking animals are reborn as humans is, in a way, a belief that being human is a blessing, and an assumption that animals would like the freedom of being human. Yet, for all we know, they may consider their own forms a blessing and just mimic human traits because they are around humans and terrestrial beings also. If the life of a newt is merely a succession of sensations, what should we mean by saying that God may recall to life the newt that died today? #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
It would not recognize itself as the same newt; the pleasant sensation of any other newt that lived after its death would be just as much, or just as little, a recompense for its Earthly suffering (if any) as those of its resurrected—I was going to say “self,” but the whole point is that the newt probably has no self. The thing we have to try to say, on this hypothesis, will not even be said. There is, therefore, I take it, no question of immortality for creatures that are merely sentient. Nor do justice and mercy demand that there should be, for such creatures have no painful experience. Their nervous system delivers all the letters, A, P, N, I, but sine they cannot read they never build it up to the word PAIN. And all animals may be in that condition. If, nevertheless, the strong conviction which we have of a real, though doubtless rudimentary, selfhood in the higher animals, and specially in those we tame, is not an illusion, their destiny demands a somewhat deeper consideration. The error we must avoid is that of considering themselves. Humans are to be understood only in their relation to God. The beats are to be understood only in their relation to humans and, through humans, to God. Let us here guard against one of those untransmuted lumps of atheistical thought which often survive in the minds of modern believers. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
Atheists naturally regard the co-existence of humans and the animals as a mere contingent result of interacting biological facts; and the taming of an animal by a human as a purely arbitrary interference of one species with another. The “real” or “natural” animal to them is the wild one, and the tame animal is an artificial or unnatural thing. However, a Christian must not think so. Humans were appointed by God to have dominion over the beasts, and everything a human does to an animal is either a lawful exercise, or a sacrilegious abuse, of an authority by Divine right. The tame animal is therefore, in the deepest sense, the only “natural” animal—the only one we see occupying the place it was made to occupy, and it is on the tame animal that we must base all our doctrine of beasts. Now it will be seen that, in so far as the tame animal has a real self or personality, it owes this most entirely to its master. If a good sheepdog seems “almost human” that is because a good shepherd has made it so. I have already noted the mysterious force of the word “in.” I do not take all the sense of it in the New Testament to be identical, so that humans are in Christ and Christ in God and the Holy Spirit in the church and also in the individual believer in exactly the same sense. They may be sense that rhyme or correspond rather than a single sense. I am now going to suggest—though with great readiness to be set sight by real theologians—that there may be a sense, corresponding, though not identical, with these, in which those beasts that attain a real self are in their masters. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
That is to say, you must not think of a beast by itself, and call that a personality and then inquire whether God will raise and bless that. You must take the whole context in which the beast acquires its selfhood—namely “The-goodman—and—the—goodwife—ruiling—their—children—and—their—beasts—in—the—good—homestead.” That whole context may be regarded as a “body” in the Pauline (or a closely sub-Pauline) sense; and how much of that “body” may be raised along with the goodman and the goodwife, who can predict? So much, presumably, as is necessary for not only the glory of God and the beatitude of the human pair, but for that particular glory and that particular beatitude which is eternally coloured by that particular terrestrial experience. And in this way it seems to me possible that certain animals may have an immortality, not in themselves, but in the immortality of their masters. And the difficulty about personal identity in a creature barely personal disappears when the creature is thus kept in its proper context. If you ask, concerning an animal thus raised as a member of the whole Body of the homestead, where its personal identity resides, I answer “Where its identity always did reside even in the Earthly life—in its relation to the Body and, specially, to the master who is the dead of that Body.” In other words, the human will know one’s dog: the body will know its master and, in knowing one, will be itself. To ask that the dog should, in any other way, know itself, it probably to ask for what has no meaning. Animals are not like that, and do not want to be. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
The utter incomprehensibility of the ultimate Source makes it impossible for any religion to offer more than its own symbols to the human mind. From them humans create their own mental pictures. However, one does not and cannot touch the Untouchable. God is unpicturable by human imagination, truth is unattainable by human thinking. There is a grand mystery at the heart of things. Why then degrade the Unique by confounding its symbols or traditions (in all religions) with its reality? If, remembering the infinitude of the Ultimate Reality, we refuse to personify it and refuse to worship such a personification, we lift ourselves from the exclusively religious to the integrally religio-mystical-philosophic stand point. In ancient Mexico, the Highest Godhhead was the Idea that could not be reproduced and no personification or representation of it of any kind was allowed. However, this doctrine only for upper classes and he intellectually cultivated. The masses were given a God who was visible and comprehensible. The ultimate reality cannot be represented with any fidelity nor can the ultimate truth be communicated with any accuracy. Let no one confuse this grand concept of the Absolute, the Unbounded, the Timeless, with the lesser concept of a God made in a semi-human image. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
We may not personalize the Absolute except at the terrible cost of utterly deceiving ourselves. So philosophy holds that no words can ever describe, no concept ever express, no human leader ever incarnate the ineffable truth, and that all assertion to the contrary merely defile truth. IT cannot be confined. It is totally incommunicable, but thoughts about it can be communicated in words or formed into pictures. It is totally incommunicable, but thoughts about it can be communicated in words or formed into pictures. So far as truth can appear in words, this is so. However, on the ultimate level, that is but an echo of an echo infinitely multiplied. It is merely a statement about reality, but it is not reality itself. It is a sound in the air (if voiced) or a mark on paper (if printed) but not truth. Nothing that words could say could give any proper description of That Which Is, for it belongs to a totally different dimension. So this is God, or more correctly, as near as humans can get to Go. No one can describe the Absolute, or speak on its behalf, for that would impose one’s human consciousness upon it and merely create a private imagination about it. The Real cannot be put under any label or classification because it is what it is of itself. Yet it pervades all things. We must separate, in our human thought, Mind as passive reality (the void) from Mind as active being (World-Mind). #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
All our understanding and interpretation of such words as are affixed to this state, by they Overself, Divine Being, Absolute, or Reality, is inevitably drawn from, and associated with, our experience in the World of time-space and relativity. It is what these words mean for our minds, not what they mean in themselves, that constitutes our use of them. We easily fall into self-deception about them, for the meaning given them is what we imagine, not what we know. Being especially above all relationships and contrasts that the intellect can make or the imagination can create, it cannot be rightly called “The One” as it so often has been, for that implies that a second or a third entity of the same kind could be added to it, which is false. The intellect may attempt the task during its highest flights, but in the end what does it produce? Only more thoughts! This is the Godhead, of which, in nearly all the ancient religious Mysteries, lawfully humans may make no image and to which one may give no name. This is simply because all names attached to it and all descriptions made of it cannot help being incomplete. Each word which can be used for the first goal tells of some particular aspect, be it knowledge, awakening, or enlightenment. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
Beyond that incomplete description words cannot go, except negatively. The last thought that intelligence can make is about this divine mystery which lies beyond everything thinkable: but it will necessarily have to be a negative thought, that is, it can only say what the Godhead is not, deny any and every affirmation about it, unknow all that it has previously known about Go. Every attempt at understanding the Great Mystery, and very much more at representing it, merely leads to self-deception. It is not only the Uncontradictable, but also the Unapproachable. We may ascribe no attributes to Mind nor confine it within any limitations. The great mysterious emptiness—that is all humans can know of God. Although nothing can be written about IT that is truly descriptive, everything can be written about what leads up to the revelation of IT; that can be written with precision and luminosity. The inside must forever elude words, but the outside need not. The greatest of questions, “What is Truth?” is answered best by Silence; this answer is inherent in the question. Metaphysics and poetry may provide a medium for clues and hints, symbols and images. One will find, if one accepts this intuitive leading, that although the unfavourable circumstances may remain the same, unchanged, one’s attitude towards them does not. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Out of this inner change there will be given one the strength to deal with them, the calm t deal with them unmoved, and the wisdom to deal with them properly. There is no single pattern that an intuitively guided life must follow. Sometimes one will see in a flash of insight both course and destination, but at other times one will see only the next step ahead and will have to keep an open mind both as to the second step and as to the final destination. May I not forget in the midst of despair that all things are born from God, so that even the trials that come to afflict me are the children of those who are my blessed parents. Grant peace, well-being and blessings unto the Word, with grace, loving kindness and mercy for us and for all America, Thy people. Please bless us, O our Father, all of us together, with the light of Thy presence; for by that light Thou hast given us, O Lord our God, the Bible of life, loving kindness 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, who blesses Thy people America with peace. In the book of life, blessing, peace and ample sustenance, may we, together with all Thy people, the house of America, be remembered and inscribed before Thee for a happy life and for peace. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who establishest peace. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
Cresleigh Homes
At nearly 3,000 square feet, the largest home at #MillsStation is Residence 4, with 4 bedrooms, 3.5 bathrooms, and all that natural light. Family nights are even better with an open floor plan between the Kitchen and Great Room! 😍🙌
You can check out an interactive floor plan of this residence on our website. Link in bio. https://cresleigh.com/mills-station/residence-4/
Love, as Defined by the Lord, Elevates, Protects, Respects, and Enriches Another!
Good-bye, good night. Merry Christmas. God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth. What seems to be reasonable conditions for engaging in civil disobedience, and can we connect these conditions more systematically with the place of civil disobedience in a state of near justice? Of course, the conditions enumerated should be taken as presumptions; no doubt there will be situations when they do not hold, and other arguments could be given for civil disobedience. The first point concerns the kinds of wrongs that are appropriate objects of civil disobedience. Now if one views such disobedience as a political act addressed to the sense of justice of the community, then it seems reasonable, other things equal, to limit it to instances of substantial and clear injustice, and preferably to those which obstruct the path to removing other injustices. For this reason there is a presumption in favour of restricting civil disobedience to serious infringements of the first principle of justice, the principle of equal liberty, and to blatant violations of the second part of second principle, the principle of fair equality of opportunity. Of course, it is not always easy to tell whether these principles are satisfied. Still, if we think of them as guaranteeing the basic liberties, it is often clear that these freedoms are not being honoured. After all, they impose certain strict requirements that must be visibly expressed in institutions. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
Thus when certain marginalized members of the population are denied the right to vote or to hold office, or to own property and to move from place to place, or when certain religious groups are repressed and others denied various opportunities, these injustices may be obvious to all. They are publicly incorporated into the recognized practice if not the letter, of social arrangements. The establishment of these wrongs does not presuppose an informed examination of institutional effects. By contrast infractions of the difference principle are more difficult to ascertain. There is usually a wide range of conflicting yet rational opinion as to whether this principle is satisfied. The reason for this is that is applied primarily to economic and social institutions and policies. A choice among these depends upon theoretical and speculative beliefs as well as upon a wealth of statistical and other information, all of this seasoned with shrewd judgement and speculative beliefs as well as upon a wealth of statistical and other information, all of this seasoned with shrewd judgment and plain hunch. In view of the complexities of these questions, it is difficult to check the influence of self-interest and prejudice; and even if we can do this in our own case, it is another matter to convince others of our good faith. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
Thus unless tax laws, for example, are clearly designed to attack or to abridge a basic equal liberty, they should not normally be protested by civil disobedience. The appeal to the public’s conception of justice is not sufficiently clear. The resolution of these issues is best left to the political process provided that the requisite equal liberties are secure. In this case a reasonable compromise can presumably be reached. The violation of the principle of equal liberty is, then, the more appropriate object of civil disobedience. This principle defines the common status of equal citizenship in a constitutional regime and lies at the basis of the political order. When it is fully honoured the presumption is that other injustices, while possibly persistent and significant, will not get out of hand. A further condition for civil disobedience is the following. We may suppose that the normal appeals to the political majority have already been made in good faith and that they have failed. The legal means of redress have proved of no avail. Thus, for example, the existing political parties have shown themselves indifferent to the claims of the minority or have proved unwilling to accommodate them. Attempts to have the laws repealed have been ignored and legal protests and demonstrations have had no success. Since civil disobedience is a last resort, we should be sure that it is necessary. Note that it has been said, however, tat legal means have been exhausted. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
At any rate, further normal appeals can be repeated; free speech is always possible. However, if past actions have shown the majority immovable or apathetic, further attempts may reasonably be thought fruitless, and a second condition for justified civil disobedience is met. This condition is, however, a presumption. Some cases may be so extreme tat there may be no duty to use first only legal means of political opposition. If, for example, the legislature were to enact some outrageous violations of equal liberty, say by forbidding the religion of a weak and defenseless minority, we surely could not expect that sect to oppose the law by normal political procedures. Indeed, even civil disobedience might be much too mild, the majority having already convicted itself of wantonly unjust and overtly hostile aims. The third and last condition being considered is rather complicated. It arises from the fact that while the two preceding conditions are often sufficient to justify civil disobedience, this is not always the case. In certain circumstances the natural duty of justice may require a certain restraint. We can see this as follows. If a certain minority is justified in engaging in civil disobedience, then any other minority is relevantly similar circumstances is likewise justified. Using the two previous conditions as the criteria of relevantly similar circumstances, we can say that, other things equal, two minorities are similarly justified in resorting to civil disobedience if they have suffered for the same length of time for the same degree of injustice and if their equally sincere and normal political appeals have likewise been to no avail. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
It is conceivable, however, even if it is unlikely, that there should be many groups with an equally sound case (in the sense just defined) for being civilly disobedient; but that, if they were all to act in this way, serious disorder would follow which might well undermine the efficacy of the just constitution. I assume here that there is a limit in the extent to which civil disobedience can be engaged in without leading to a breakdown in the respect for law and the constitution, thereby setting in motion consequences unfortunate for all. There is also an upper bound on the ability of the public forum to handle such forms of dissent; the appeal that civilly disobedient groups wish to make can be distorted and their intention to appeal to the sense of justice of the majority lost sight of. For one or both of these reasons, the effectiveness of civil disobedience as a form of protest declines beyond a certain point; and those contemplating it must consider these constraints. The ideal solution from a theoretical point of view calls for cooperative political alliance of the minorities to regulate the overall level of dissent. For consider the nature of the situation: there are many groups each equally entitled to engage in civil disobedience. Moreover they all wish to exercise this right, equally strong in each case; but if they all do so, lasting injury may result to the just constitution to which they each recognize a natural duty of justice. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
Now when there are many equally strong claims which if taken together exceed what can be granted, some fair plan should be adopted so that all are equitably considered. In simple cases of claims to goods that are indivisible and fixed in number, some rotation or lottery scheme may be the fair solution when the number of equally valid claims is too great. However, this sort of device is completely unrealistic here. What seems called for is a political understanding among the minorities suffering from injustice. They can meet their duty to democratic institutions by coordinating their actions so that while each has an opportunity to exercise its right, the limits on the degree of civil disobedience are not exceeded. To be sure, an alliance of this sort is difficult to arrange; but with perceptive leadership, it does not appeal impossible. Certainly the situation envisaged is a special one, and it is quite possible that these sorts of consideration will not be a bar to justified civil disobedience. There are not likely to be many groups similarly entitled to engage in this form of dissent while at the same time recognizing a duty to a just constitution. One should not, however, that an injured minority is tempted to believe its claims as strong as those of any other; and therefore even if the reasons that different groups have for engaging in civil disobedience are not equally compelling, it is often wise to presume that their claims are indistinguishable. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
Adopting this maxim, the circumstances imagined seems more likely to happen. This kind of case is also instructive in showing that the exercise of the right to dissent, like the exercise of rights generally, is sometimes limited by others having the very same right. Everyone’s exercising this right would have deleterious consequences for all, and se equitable plan is called for. Suppose that in the light of the three conditions, one has a right to appeal one’s case by civil disobedience. Thus injustice one protests is a clear violation of the liberties of equal citizenship, or of equality of opportunity, this violation having been more or less deliberate over an extended period of time in the face of normal political opposition, and any complications raised by the question of fairness are met. These conditions are not exhaustive; some allowance still has to be made for the possibility of injury to third parties, to the innocent, so to speak. However, I assume that they cover the main points. There is still, of course, the question whether it is wise or prudent to exercise this right. Having established the right, one is now free, as one is not before, to let these matters decide the issue. If our conduct only serves to provoke the harsh retaliation of the majority, we may be acting within our rights but nevertheless unwisely. To be sure, in a state of near justice, vindictive repression of legitimate dissent is unlikely, but it is important that the action be properly designed to make an effective appeal to the wider community. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
Since civil disobedience is a mode of address taking place in the public forum, care must be taken to see that it is understood. Thus the exercise of the right to civil disobedience should, like any other right, be rationally framed to advance one’s ends or the ends of those one wishes to assist. The theory of justice has nothing specific to say about these practical considerations. In any event questions of strategy and tactics depend upon the circumstances of each case. However, the theory of justice should say at what point these matters are properly raised. Now in this account of the justification of civil disobedience I have not mentioned the principle of fairness. The natural duty of justice is the primary basis of our political ties to a constitutional regime. As we noted before only the more favoured members of society are likely to have a clear political obligation as opposed to a political duty. They are better situated to win public office and find it easier to take advantage of the political system. And having done so, they have acquired an obligation owed to citizens generally to uphold the just constitution. However, members of subjected minorities, say, who have a strong case for civil disobedience will not generally have a political obligation of this sort. This does not mean, however, that the principle of fairness will not give rise to important obligations in their case. For not only do many of the requirements of private life derive from this principle, but it comes into force wen persons or groups come together for common political purposes. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
Just as we acquire obligations to others with whom we have joined in various private associations, those who engage in political action assume obligatory ties to one another. Thus while the political obligation of dissenters to citizens generally is problematical, bonds of loyalty and fidelity still develop between them as they seek to advance their cause. In general, free association under a just constitution give rise to obligations provided that the ends of the group are legitimate and its arrangements fair. This is as true of political as it is of other associations. These obligations are of immense significance and they constrain in many ways what individuals can do. However, they are distinct from an obligation to comply with a just constitution. My discussion of civil disobedience is in terms of the duty of justice alone; a fuller view would note the place of these other requirements. When religion is allowed to invade public life, things have come to a pretty pass when. Slavery, for instance, was a very unjust institution. People were packed into a dark bottom of a ship, barely able to breathe because of the stench of human waste and vomit, as they lay chest to back, legs drawn into a fetal position, feet resting on the heads of those in the next row. Some were taken prisoner during tribal wars. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
Others were jailed as petty criminals; and many had been unsuspecting dinner guests of Englishmen visiting their country. However, all had been forcibly enslaved and held in a stockade on the African coast until sold to the highest bidder. That bidder was the captain in the cabin above. Once purchased they had been branded and rowed to the schooner waiting offshore, their screams and cries ignored by the seamen who hoisted them abroad and chained them in the stinking hold. For the women, however, there was a further torture. The crew, diseases and ill-treated themselves, claimed the one sordid privilege of their trade—the pick of the slave women. Once under way, the ship had become half bedlam, half brothel. Now, several weeks into the voyage, sixty slaves had already died. Fever had taken some. Others, driven insane by the horror of their lot, had been killed by the crew. Each morning when the lower decks were opened, several dead or near-dead bodies were thrown to the sharks trailing the ship. The captain cursed as the bodies hit the choppy water. Each body overboard meant lost profits. For those who survived the hellish three-month journey, an equally gruesome future awaited. They would be auctioned naked in the marketplace to planter who would work them to death on their Caribbean plantations. Never again would these African men and women see their homeland. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
Thousands of miles to the north, in a country that profited richly from this human misery, another man sat at his desk. He too gazed into darkness still filled his second-floor library at Number 4 Old Palace Yard, London. Only his piercing blue eyes reflected the turmoil of his thoughts as he eyed the jumble of pamphlets on his cluttered desk. He ran his hand through his wavy hair and opened his Bible to begin the day, as was his custom, with Scripture reading and prayer. However, his thoughts kept returning to the pamphlets, grisly accounts of human flesh sold like mutton for the profit of his countrymen. No matter how be tried, William Wilberforce could not wipe these scenes from his mind. William Wilberforce was the only son of prosperous merchant parents. High society revolved around romantic intrigue and adulterous affairs. An upper-class couple might not be seen together in public for weeks during the social season, for no popular hostess would invite a husband and wife to the same event. The poor, of course, had no such opportunity to escape from one another. Crammed together in shabby dwellings, they were cogs grinding out a living in the Empire’s emerging industrial machines. Pale children worked eighteen hours a day in cotton mills or coal mines to bring homes a few shillings a month to parents who often wasted in on inexpensive gin. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
London was a city where unchecked passions and desires ran their course. Few raised their voice in opposition. So it is not surprising that few argued against one of the nation’s most bountiful sources of wealth—the slave trade. In fact, the trade was both a successful business and a national policy. Political alliances revolved around commitments to it. It became known euphemistically as “the institution,” the “pillar and support of British plantation industry in the West Indies.” In a celebrated case in England’s high court only four years earlier, slaves had been seemed “goods and chattels.” Corruption in government was so widespread that few members of Parliament thought twice about accepting bribes for their votes. Planters and other gentlemen involved in the slave trade paid three to five thousand pounds to “buy” boroughs, which sent their representatives to the House of Commons. The same attitude reigned in the House of Lords. Their political influence in Parliament grew until a large bloc was controlled by the vested influence of the slave trade. The horrors of the trade were remote and unseen, the cotton and sugar profits they yielded very tangible. So most consciences were not troubled about the Black men and women suffering far away on the high sea or on remote plantations. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
Many people say that some used Christianity and the Bible to incorrectly justify slavery, but that was not always the case. John Newton, son of a sailor, had been impressed into the Royal Navy when he was eleven. He deserted, was caught in West Africa, flogged, and placed into service on a slave ship. Eventually he became involved in the slave trade and in 1750 was given command of his own ship. On one especially stormy passage to West Indies, however, Mr. Newton was converted to faith in Jesus Christ. He renounced slaving and expressed his wonder at the gift of salvation in his famous hymn, “Amazing Grace.” Some people become so absorbed in politics that they never give themselves time for due reflection on religion. God wants to being compassion to the oppressed as well as oppose the oppressors. Almighty God has set before His people even today, two great objectives. The abolition of the slave trade and the reformation of manners. Slaver is so enormous, so dreadful, so irremediable, and an iniquity such as this, because it still happens today, must be abolished. We still live in a time, even in American, where the country’s economic strength depends on slavery at home and abroad. There are different forms from forced labour to human trafficking. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
An estimated 25 million victims are trapped in modern-day slavery. Of these, 16 million (64 percent) were exploited for labour, and approximately 5 million (19 percent) were exploited for pleasures of the flesh, 4 million (17 percent) were exploited in state-imposed forced labour. Forced labour takes place in many different industries. Therefore, private faith that does not act in the face of oppression is no faith at all. Slavery is a subject, in which the interest, not of this country, nor of Europe alone, but of the whole World, and of posterity, are involved. It is impossible for me not to feel both terrified and concerned at our leader’s inadequacy to abolish slavery in their communities before taking hold of state, nation, or international positions. However, as a race—the human race—as a nation, and as citizens of God’s Kingdom, we must fight for the total abolition of the slave trade. This is bigger than climate change, bigger than COVID-19, and much bigger than any jobs report because without human life, we have nothing. I mean not to accuse anyone for having suffered this horrid trade to be carried on under their authority. We are all guilty—we ought all to plead guilty, and not to exculpate ourselves by throwing the blame on others. This evidence cannot be ignored. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
Never, never will we desist till we extinguish every trace of this bloody traffic, which our posterity, looking back to the history of these enlightened ties, will scarce believe that it has been suffered to exist so long a disgrace and dishonour to this country. The courts, law enforcement, and your employers have a duty to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America! For instance Amendment IV of the Constitution states people have a right to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probably cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the person or things to be seized. Our sister, Breonna Taylor, an innocent young lady in the prime of her life was murdered in her own home, on 13 March 2020, while she lay in bed resting, so she could return to her job as a nurse in the morning, and because the police killed her by accident, no one is being held responsible for the crime, but so many are fighting to keep our boarders open and floor the streets with illegal immigrants, when we will not even protect our own citizens. How humane is that? Amendment VIII states the excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishment inflicted. However, our brother George Perry Floyd was killed by the police on 25 March 2020, while telling the officer he could not breath because the officer had his knee on the man’s neck. How cruel and unusual is that! #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
Amendment XVI states that all persons born or naturalized in the United States of America, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, but innocent 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was gunned down after buying some candy because someone did not like the way he looked. There are just a few laws that ought to be observed and we must never take our freedom for granted, nor allow criminals to roam the streets without answering for their crimes. That is why Amendment VI of the United States Constitution states in all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against one; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in one’s favour, and to have the assistance of counsel for one’s defense. We do not want chaos on our streets, we do not want people becoming law enforcement agents to get away with murder, and we do not want people taken into custody without being read their Miranda rights or being allowed to have a trial. It should not be easier for those in public office or law enforcement to break the laws than it is to enforce it. The laws and law enforcement are there to protect us, not facilitate and help crime to fester. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
Just remember, slavery is still a reality and in was not long ago, in the year 1788 in a ship destined for the slave trade, out of 650 persons on board, 155 died. In another, 405 were on board, out of whom were lost 200. In another there were on board 402, out of whom 73 died. When Captain Charles Wilson was asked the causes of this mortality, he replied that the slaves had a fixed melancholy and dejection; that they wished to die; that they refused sustenance, till they were beaten in order to compel them to eat; and that when they had been so beaten, they looked in the faces of their captures and said, piteously, “Soon we will be no more.” Now, I am sure you know someone who was happy and full of life who has suffered some adverse circumstances and is emotionally, physically, or born so worn down that they no longer want to live, and you know that is not them talking, but the endless pain and torment they so badly want to escape from and cannot. Often times, it is much harder for victims to get help than people know. It is not that they do not want to be saved, it is however, that the system is set up to make victims of those they want to harm. How else did Larry Nassar go on abusing hundreds of girls from 1992 until 2015? How did Jerry Sandusky go on abusing young boys from 1994 until 2011? Because people in positions of authority liked him and protected him, until they could not. Nonetheless, countless lives were ruined while these innocent children were enslaved. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
Even the vested economic interests of the West Indian bloc could not gloss over the appalling facts nor ignore the public support the abolitionists were gaining. However, in modern times, the force of the people has to be involved in stopping slavery. We cannot allow radicals to continue to fan the flames of this reign of terror. 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 of well-doing. Go on in the name of God, and in the power of His might, till even modern American slavery, the vilest thing currently under the Sun, shall vanish away before it. That God that has guided you from your youth up may continue to strengthen in this and all things, is my prayer. Be not weary of well-doing. We must issue a proclamation at the deluge of every kind of vice which, to the scandal of our holy religion, and to the evil example of our loving subject, have broken upon this nation. The only wat to reform morals is to ruin purses. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
Make them pay. How can you sleep while the fate of men, women, and children are in the hand of abusers should be rushing to your minds, and the guilt of our wicked land. If one really loves another, one would rather die for that person than to injure the individual. “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? Nor height, nor depth, not any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord,” reports Romans 8.35, 39. If we would truly seek to be more like our Saviour and Master, learning to love as He loves should be our highest goal. Love is the foundation of marriage, but love itself is a product of law and lives by law. True love is law-abiding, for the highest satisfaction come to a law-abiding life. To those who are sealed to each other for all existence, love is ever warm, more hopeful, believing, courageous, and fearless. Such people live the richer, more joyful life. To them happiness and the making of it have no end. Above physical charm, love is begotten by qualities, often subtle, of mind and spirit. The beautiful face may hide an empty mind; the sweet voice may utter coarse words; the lovely form may be ill-mannered; the person of radiant beauty and the ne of kingly form may be intolerable bores on nearer acquaintanceship. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
The person who looks attractive may really have no faults, may excel us in knowledge and courtesy, yet one is not of our kind, one’s ways are not ours. Under either condition, love wilts in its first stage. “Falling in love” is always from within, rather than from without. That is, if true love is to be born and have long life, physical attractiveness must be reinforced with mental and spiritual harmony. There must be common ideals and standards. There must be a great devotion and companionship. Love is cleanliness and progress and sacrifice and selflessness. This kind of love never tires nor wanes, but lives through sickness and sorrow, poverty and privation, accomplishment and disappointment, time and eternity. Love cannot be forced, it comes out of Heaven, unasked and unsought. This respect comes of recognition that each of us is a son or daughter of God, endowed with something of one’s divine nature that each is an individual entitled to expression and cultivation of individual talents and deserving of forbearance, of patience, of understanding, of courtesy, of thoughtful consideration. True love is not so much a matter of romance as it is a matter of anxious concern for the well being of one’s companion. The World is filled with too many of us who are inclined to indicate our love with an announcement or declaration. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
True love is a process. True love requires personal action. Love must be continuing to be real. Love takes time. Too often expediency, infatuation, simulation, persuasion, or lust are mistaken for love. If our love is no deeper than the arousal of momentary feeling or the expression in words of what is more lasting than the time it takes to speak them, how hollow, how empty. We must at regular and appropriate intervals speak and reassure others of our love and the long time it takes to prove it by our actions. Real love does take time. The Great Shepherd had the same thoughts in mind when he taught, “If ye love me, keep my commandments,” reports Jon 14.15. If you love me, feed my sheep,” reports John 21.16. If it is to be continuing, love demands action. Love is a process, not a declaration. Love is not an announcement. Love is not a passing fancy. Love is not an expediency. Love is not convenience. God-given proclamations should remind us we can often best show our love through the process of feeling and keeping. Love of God takes time. Love of family takes time. Love of country takes tie. Love of neighbour takes time. Love of companion takes time. Love in courtship takes time. Love of self takes time. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
One who loves has and feels responsibility. If we look at love between two who are preparing for a temple marriage, we see the elements of sacrifice and of serving each other’s best interest, not a shortsighted “me” interest. True love and happiness in courtship and marriage are based upon honesty, self-respect, sacrifice, consideration, courtesy, kindness, and placing “we” ahead of “me.” Perfect love is perfectly patient. Unlike our love, Jesus’ love consists of active restraint as well as pressing encouragement. His perfect love of each and all spares Him the need to accept us as we now are for He knows perfectly what we have the possibility to become. Love, as defined by the Lord, elevates, protect, respects, and enriches another. It motivates one to make sacrifices for another. At the hour of sin, pure love is pushed out of one door while lust sneaks in the other. Affection has then been replaced with desire of the flesh and uncontrolled passion. Accepted has been the doctrine which the devil is so eager to establish, that illicit relations in pleasures of the flesh that are justified. Dear Lord in Heaven, with your quick-sent lightning and penetrating rain, please make the Earth fertile, storm-rider, hammer-wielder. Please wield the lightening on my side, Thunderer, and I will ensure that my cause is just. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
Wilder of the hammer, red-bearded one, God, protector, to you I call. I stand in the midst of a storm, and ask your protection. You who bear the flaming hammer, to you I pray: please fight on my side against all my opponents. For with you on my side, who can stand before me? Please remember my devotion to you, Lord of Thunder. As I work to your honour, may you work also to mine. Thou didst thus make Thy greatness and holiness known in Thy World, and didst bring great deliverance to America. Then Thy children came into Thy dwelling place, cleansed the Temple, purified the Sanctuary, kindled lights in Thy sacred courts, and they designated these days for giving thanks and praise unto Thy great name. For all this, Thy name, O our King, shall be blessed and exalted for ever and ever. O, please inscribe all the children of Thy covenant for a happy life. May all the living do home unto Thee forever and praise Thy name in truth, O God, who art our salvation and our help. Please blessed be Thou, O Lord, Beneficent One, unto whom our thanks are due. Our God and God of our fathers, please bless us with 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. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
MILLS STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH
Rancho Cordova, CA |
Now Selling!
Mills Station at Cresleigh Ranch is Rancho Cordova’s newest home community! This charming neighborhood offers an array of home types with eye catching architecture styles such as Mission, Mid-Century Modern, California Modern, and Contemporary Farmhouse. Homes range in size from approximately 2,000 to 3,000 square feet.
Located off Douglas Road and Rancho Cordova Parkway, the residents of Cresleigh Ranch will enjoy, being just minutes from shopping, dining, and entertainment, and quick access to Highway 50 and Grant Line Road providing a direct route into Folsom. Residents here also benefit from no HOA fees, two community parks and the benefits of being a part of the highly-rated Elk Grove Unified School District.
The Act of Creation is a Miracle of Which One Hears, but in Which One Does Not Believe!
The individual choice of garnishment of a burger can be an important point to the consumer in this day when individualism, in my mind, is an increasingly important thing to people. You may give us your symptoms. We will make the diagnosis. And we, the Establishment—for which I make no apologies for being part of—will implement the solution. Not only is darkness known through light, but conversely, light is known through darkness. As only that which works is real, so only good is real in the sense of exiting. Good is tantamount to convenient, sufficient, appropriate, suitable. One ought therefore to translate “omne agens agit propter bonum” as: “Every agent works for the sake of what suits it.” That is what the devil does too, as we all know. He too has an “appetite” and strives after perfection—not in good but in evil. Even so, one could hardly conclude from this that his striving is “essentially good.” However, not every situation where a person or a group has uncontrolled power over another generates sadism. Many—perhaps most—parents, prison guards, school teachers, and bureaucrats are not sadistic. For any number of reasons, the character structure of many individuals is not conducive to the development of sadism even under circumstances that offer an opportunity for it. Persons who have a dominantly life-furthering character, will not easily be seduced by power. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
What matters is the intensity of the sadistic passion within the character structure of a given person. There are many in whose characters sadistic elements can be found, but balanced by such strong life-furthering trends that they cannot be classified as sadistic characters. Not rarely in such individuals the internal conflict between the two orientations results in an enhanced sensitivity toward sadism and in the reactive formation of allergic reactions against all its forms. (Traces of their sadistic tendences may still show up in unimportant, marginal behaviour, slight enough to escape awareness.) There are others with a sadistic character in whim sadism is at least balanced by countervailing forces (not merely repressed), and while they may feel a certain amount of enjoyment in the control of helpless people, they would not participate in or get pleasure from actual torture and similar atrocities (except under extraordinary circumstances, such as mass frenzy). This can be demonstrated by the attitude of the Hitler regime toward the sadistic atrocities it ordered. It had to keep the extermination of Jews and Polish and Russians civilians a close secret known only to a small group of the SS elite, but kept from the vast majority of the German population. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
In many speeches by Himmler and other executors of atrocities, it was stressed that the killings must be done in a “humane” way, without sadistic excesses, sine otherwise it would be too repugnant even to the SS men. In some instances orders were given that Russian and Polish civilians who were to be killed had to be put through a short, formal trial in order to give their executors the feeling that the shooting was “legal.” While all this sounds absurd in its hypocrisy, it is nevertheless a proof that the Nazi leaders believed that large-scale sadistic acts would be revolting to most otherwise loyal adherents of the regime. A great deal of material has come to light since 1945, but a systematic investigation of the degree to which the majority of Germans were attracted by sadistic acts—even though they avoided knowing about them—has not yet been made. If one isolates them from the whole character structure, sadistic character traits can never be understood. They are part of a syndrome that has to be understood as a whole. For the sadistic character everything living is to be controllable; living beings become things. Or, still, more accurately, living beings are transformed into living, quivering, pulsating objects of control. Their responses are forced by the one who controls them. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
The sadist wants to become the master of life, and hence the quality of life should be maintained in one’s victim. This is, in fact, what distinguishes one from the destroying persons. The destroyer wants to do away with a person, to eliminate one, to destroy life itself; the sadist wants the sensation of controlling and choking life. Another trait of the sadist is that one is stimulated only by the helpless, never by those who are strong. It does not cause any sadistic pleasure, for instance, to inflict a wound on an enemy in a fight between equals, because in this situation the infliction of the wound is not an expression of control. For the sadistic character there is only one admirable quality, and that is power. One admires, loves, and submits to those who have power, and one despises and wants to control those who are powerless and cannot fight back. The sadistic character is afraid of everything that is not certain and predictable, that offers surprises which would force one to spontaneous and original reactions. For this reason, one is afraid of life. Life frightens one precisely because it is by its very nature unpredictable and uncertain. It is structured but it is not orderly; there is only one certainty in life: that all humans die. Love is equally uncertain. To be loved requires a capacity to be loving oneself, to arouse love, and it implies always a risk of rejection and failure. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Because love and unpredictable and may be unrequited, this is why the sadistic character can “love” only when one controls, id est, when ne has power over the object of one’s love. The sadistic character is usually xenophobic and neophobic—one who is strange constitutes newness, and what is new arouses fear, suspicion, and dislike, because a spontaneous, alive, and not-routinized response would be required. Another element is the syndrome is the submissiveness and cowardice of the sadist. It may sound like a contradiction that the sadist is a submissive person, and yet not only is it not a contradiction—it is, dynamically speaking, a necessity. One tries to compensate for this lack by having power over others, by transforming the worm one feels oneself to be into a god. However, even the sadist who has power suffers from one’s human impotence. One may kill and torture, but one remains loveless, isolated, frightened person in need of a higher power to whom one can submit. For those one step below Hitler, the Fuhrer was this highest power; for Hitler himself, it was Fate, the laws of Evolution. This need to submit is rooted in masochism. Sadism and masochism, which are invariably linked together, are opposites in behavioristic terms, but they are actually two different facets of one fundamental situation: the sense of vital impotence. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
Both the sadist and the masochist need another being to “complete” them, as it were. The sadist makes another being an extension of oneself; the masochist makes oneself the extension of another being. Both seek a symbiotic relationship because neither has one’s center in oneself. While it appears that the sadist is free of one’s victim, one needs the victim in a perverse way. Because of the close connection between sadism and masochism it is more correct to speak of a sadomasochistic character, even though the one or the other aspect will be more dominant in a particular person. The sadomasochist has also been called the “authoritarian character,” translating the psychological aspect of one’s character structure into terms of a political attitude. This concept finds its justification in the fact that persons whose political attitude is generally described as authoritarian (active and passive) usually exhibit (in our society) the traits of the sadomasochistic character: control of those below and submission to those above. The sadomasochistic character cannot be fully understood without reference to Dr. Freud’s concept of the “anal character,” enlarged by one’s disciples, especially by K. Abraham and Ernest Jones. Dr. Freud (1908) believed that the anal character manifested itself in a syndrome of character traits: stubbornness, orderliness, and parsimony, to which punctuality and cleanliness were added later. He assumed that this syndrome was rooted in the “anal libido” that has its sources in the anal erogenous zone. The character traits of the syndrome were explained as reaction formations or sublimation of the aims of this anal libido. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
Various traits of the syndrome are manifestations of the distance-keeping, controlling, rejecting, and hoarding mode of relatedness (“hoarding character”). This does not imply that Dr. Freud’s clinical observations with respect to the particular role of everything pertaining to feces and bowel movement was not correct. On the contrary, in decades of psychoanalytic observation of individuals, I have found Dr. Freud’s observations full confirmed. The difference lies, however, in the answer to the following: Is the anal libido the source of the preoccupation with feces and, indirectly, of the anal character syndrome, or is the syndrome the manifestation of a special mode of relatedness? In the latter case, the anal interest has to be understood as another, but symbolic expression of the anal character, not as its cause. Feces are, indeed, a very fitting symbol: they represent that which is eliminate from the human life process and which no longer serves human’s life. Those wishing to speculate might consider that the fascination with feces and smells constitutes a kind of neurophysiological regression to an evolutionary stage in which the animal was oriented more by smell than by sight. The hoarding character is orderly with things, thoughts and feelings, but one’s orderliness is sterile and rigid. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
The hoarder cannot endure things to be out of place and has to put them in order; in this way one controls space; by irrational punctuality one controls time; by compulsive cleanliness one undoes the contact one had with the World which is considered dirty and hostile. (Sometimes, however, when no reaction-formation or sublimation has developed, one is not overclean but tends to be dirty.) The hoarding character experiences oneself like a beleaguered fortress; one must present anything from going out and save what is inside the fortress. One’s stubbornness and obstinacy is a quasi-automatic defense against intrusion. The hoarder tends to feel that one possesses only a fixed quantity of strength, energy, or mental capacity, and that this stock is diminished or exhausted by use and can never be replenished. One cannot understand the self-replenishing function of all living substance, and that activity and the use of our powers increases our strength while stagnation weakens it; to one, death and destruction have more reality than life and growth. The act of creation is a miracle of which one hears, but in which one does not believe. One’s highest values are order and security; one’s motto: “There is nothing new under the sun.” In one’s relationship to others intimacy is a threat; either remoteness or possession of a person means security. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
The hoarder tends to be suspicious and to have a special sense of justice that in essence says: “Mine is mine and yours is yours.” The anal-hoarding character has only one way to feel safe in one’s relatedness to the World: by possessing and controlling it, since one is incapable of relating oneself by love and productivity. That the anal-hoarding character has the close relationship to sadism described by classic psychoanalysts is amply borne out by the clinical data, and it makes little difference whether one interprets this connection in terms of the libido theory or in terms of the relatedness of humans to the Word. It is also evidenced by the fact that social groups with an anal-hoarding character tend to exhibit a marked degree of sadism. Roughly equivalent to the sadomasochistic character, in a social rather than a political sense, is the bureaucratic character. In speaking here of bureaucrats, I refer to the old-fashioned, cold, authoritarian bureaucrats as they are still found in many old-fashioned schools, hospitals, prisons, railroads, and post offices. Big industry, which is also a highly bureaucratic organization, has developed an entirely different character-type—the friendly, smiling, “understanding” bureaucrat who has perhaps taken a course in “human relations.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
The reasons for this change lie in the nature of modern industry, its need for teamwork, for avoiding friction, for better labour relations, and a number of other factors. It is not as if the new friendly bureaucrats were insincere, as if they were really sadist who smile instead of showing their real faces; in fact, the old-fashioned sadist is not very suited to be a modern bureaucrat, for the reasons just mentioned. The modern bureaucrat is not a sadist turned friendly, but one is a thing to oneself, just as other people are things for one. One feels little, either for them or for oneself, and one’s friendly treatment, while not false, is so superficial and thin as to become false. However, even this is not quite fair, because nobody really expects it to be more than superficial and thin, except perhaps for the short moment when they both smile and indulge in the delusion that this is human contact. Two extended and thorough studies of the character of the modern manager will confirm or correct these impressions. In the bureaucratic system every person controls the one below one and is controlled by the one above. Both sadistic and masochistic impulses can be fulfilled in such a system. Those below, the bureaucratic character will hold in contempt, those above, one will admire and fear. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
One only has to look at the facial expression and the voice of a certain type of bureaucrat criticizing one’s subordinate, or frowning when one is a minute late, or insisting on behaviour that at least symbolically expresses that during office hours one “belongs” to the superior. Or one might think of the bureaucrat being the post office window and watch one’s hardly noticeable thin little smile as one shuts one’s widow at 5.30 P.M. sharp, while the last two people who have already been waiting for half an hour have to leave and come back the next day. The point is not that one stops selling stamps at 5.30 P.M. sharp: the important aspect of one’s behaviour is the fact that one enjoys frustrating people, showing them that one controls them, a satisfaction that is expressed in one’s facial expression. Needless to say, not all old-fashioned bureaucrats are sadistic. Only a depth psychological study could show what the incidence of sadism among this group is compared with nonbureaucrats or modern bureaucrats. To mention only some outstanding examples, General Marshall and General Eisenhower, both among the highest ranking members of the military bureaucracy during the second World War, were conspicuous of their lack of sadism and their genuine humane concern for the life of heir soldiers. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
On the other hand, a number of both German and French generals in the first World War were conspicuous for the ruthlessness and brutality with which they sacrificed the lives of their soldiers for no adequate strategic purpose. In many cases the sadism is camouflaged by kindness and what looks like benevolence toward certain people in certain circumstances. However, it would be erroneous to think that the kindness is simply intended to deceive, or even that it is only a gesture, not based on any genuine feeling. To understand this phenomenon better, it is necessary to consider that most sane people wish to preserve a self-image that makes them out to be human in at least some respects. To be completely inhuman means to be completely isolated, to lose any sense of being part of humanity. Hence it is not surprising that there are many data which makes one assume that the complete absence of any kindness, friendliness, or tenderness to any human being creates, in the long run, intolerable anxiety. There are reports of cases of insanity and psychic disorders, for instance, among humans who were in the Nazi special formations and who had to kill thousands of people. Under the Nazi regime a number of the functionaries who had to carry out the orders for the mass killings suffered nervous breakdowns that were called Funktinarskrankheit (“functionaries’ disease”). #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
I have used the words “control” and “power” in reference to sadism, but one must be clearly aware of their ambiguity. Power can mean power over people, or it can mean power to do things. What the sadist is striving for is power over people, precisely because one lacks the power to be. Many writers, unfortunately, make use of this ambiguous meaning of the words “power” and “control,” and in order to smuggle in the praise of “power over” they identify it with “power to.” Moreover, lack of control does not mean lack of any kind of organization, but only of those kinds in which the control is exploitative and the controlled cannot control the controllers. There are many examples from primitive societies and contemporary intentional communities in which there is rational authority based on rea—not manipulated—consent of all, and where relations of “power over” do not develop. To be sure, the one who has no power to defend oneself also suffers characterologically. One may become submissive and masochistic instead of sadistic. However, one’s realistic powerlessness may also be conducive to the development of virtues like solidarity and compassion, as well as to creativity. Being powerless and hence in danger of being enslaved, or having power and hence being in danger of becoming dehumanized, are two evils. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
Which is to be shunned the most is a matter of religious and moral or political convictions. Buddhism, the Jewish tradition starting with the Prophets, and the Christian Gospels makes a clear decision, contrary to contemporary thinking. It is quite legitimate to make subtle differences between power and nonpower, but one danger is to be avoided: that of using the ambiguous meaning of certain words to recommend serving God and Caesar simultaneously, or still worse to identify them. Obviously evil can be represented as a diminution of good, but with this kind of logic one should just as well say: The temperature of the Arctic winter, which freezes our noses and ears, is relatively speaking only a little below the eat prevailing at the equator. For the Arctic temperature seldom falls much lower than 230 degrees Celsius above absolute zero. All things on Earth are “warm” in the sense that nowhere is absolute zero even approximately reached. Similarly, all things are more or less “good,” and just as cold is nothing a diminution of warmth, so evil is nothing but a diminution of good. The privatio boni argument remains a euphemistic petitio princippii no matter whether evil is regarded as a lesser good or as an effect of the finiteness and limitedness of created things. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
The false conclusion necessarily follows from the premise “Deus = Summum Bonum,” since it is unthinkable that the perfect food could ever have created evil. It merely created the good and the less good (which last is simply called “worse” by laymen). Just as we freeze miserably despite a temperature of 230 degrees Celsius above absolute zero, so there are people and things that, although created by God, are good only to the minimal and bad to the maximal degree. It is probably from this tendency to deny any reality to evil that we get the axiom “Omne bonum a Deo, omne malum ab homine.” This is a contradiction of the truth that one who crated the heat is also responsible for the cold (“the goodness of the less good”). We can certainly hand it to Augustine that all natures are good, yet just not good enough to prevent their badness from being equally obvious. One could hardly call the things that have happened, and still happen, in the concentration camps of the dictator states an “accidental lack of perfection”—it would sound like mockery. Psychology does not know what good and evil are in themselves; it knows them only as judgments about relationships. “Good” is what seems suitable, acceptable, or valuable from a certain point of view; evil is its opposite. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
If the things we call good are “really” good, then there must be evil things that are “real” too. It is evident that psychology is concerned with a more or less subjective judgment, id est, with a psychic antithesis that cannot be avoided in naming value relationships: “good” denotes something that is not bad, and “bad” something that is not good. There are things which from a certain point of view are extremely evil, that is to say dangerous. There are also things in human nature which are very dangerous and which therefore seem proportionately evil to anyone standing in their line of fire. It is pointless to gloss over these evil things, because that only lulls ne into a sense of false security. Human nature is capable of an infinite amount of evil, and the evil deeds are as real as the good ones so far as human experience goes and so far as the psyche judges and differentiates between them. Only unconsciousness makes no difference between good and evil. Inside the psychological realm one honestly does not know which of them predominates in the World. We hope, merely, that good does—id est, what seems suitable to us. No one could possibly say what the general good might be. No amount of insight into the relativity and fallibility of our moral judgment can deliver us from these defects, and those who deem themselves beyond good and evil are usually the worst tormentors of humankind, because they are twisted with pain and fear of their own sickness. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
Today as never before it is important that human beings should not overlook the danger of the evil lurking within them. It is unfortunately only too real, which is why psychology must insist on the reality of evil and must reject any definition that regards it as insignificant or actually non-existent. Psychology is an empirical science and deals wit realities. As a psychologist, therefore, I have neither the inclination nor the competence to mix myself up with metaphysics. Only, I have to get polemical when metaphysics encroaches on experience and interprets it in a way that is not justified empirically. My criticism of the privatio boni holds only so far as psychological experience goes. From the scientific point of view the privatio boni, as must be apparent to everyone, is founded on a petitio principii, where what invariably comes out at the end is what you put in at the beginning. Arguments of this kind have no power of conviction. However, the fact that such arguments are not only used but are undoubtedly believed is something that cannot be disposed of so easily. It proves that there is a tendency, existing right from the start, to give priority to “good,” and to do so with all the means in our power, whether suitable or unsuitable. So if Christian metaphysics clings to the privatio boni, it is giving expression to the tendency always to increase the good and diminish the bad. The privatio boni may therefore be a metaphysical truth. I presume to no judgment on this matter. I must only insist that in our field of experience white and black, light and dark, good and bad, are equivalent opposites which always predicate one another. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
The Infinite Reality cannot be reasoned with, but only reasoned about. It cannot even be adequately symbolized, for regarding it as a mental image, a pictured thought, is only a more refined form of idol-worship. It can only be designated. The true Godhead is unconditioned, formless, not picturable. No individual worship can reach what is utterly beyond all individual existence. No name can be given that will properly stand for what is without attributes and without limitations. In the ultimate reality there are and can be no distinctions and no differences no grades and no change. Striker, axe-bearer, splitter, hammerer: please protect me. Bolt-caster, cleaver, smasher, way-clearer: please protect me. Warrior, victor, overcomer, protector: please protect me. Please break their shields, hammerer: please dissolve their defenses, stormer; please remove their courage, thunderer. Please fight beside me as my comrade, please win through with me to victory. Tyrannical power rose up against Thy people America to compel them to forsake Thy Word, and to force them to transgress Thy commandments. In Thine abundant mercy Thou didst stand by them in time of distress. Thou didst rise to their defense and didst vindicate their cause. Thou didst bring retribution upon the evil doers, delivering the strong into the hands of the weak, the many into the hands of the few, the wicked into the hands of the just, and the arrogant into the hands of those devoted to Thy Scripture. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
Believe it or not the key to the massive front door was made of solid gold and the keys for the other 2,000 doors of the Eighth Wonder of the World fill two water buckets. We hear stories about dark things creeping out of the shadows, about people being possessed and doing unnatural, evil things to each other. If you are like me, you have tried to see inside yourself, to find in you what you see in others. If you are like me, you have only ever seen darkness where others have light. You believe you have no soul. You believe you have no goodness in you. However, you are made of God like everyone else. I was told I have no further permission from them to make use of any records I compiled while I was in the dead center of the 160-room catacomb—spellbound by the perplexity leavened by extravagant Victorian beauty scattered along each crooked path of exploration. However, I think it is important to share these srories. There is a dim-lit storeroom stacked entirely with never-used furnishings, displays rare hand-wrought elegance from another era, finest productions of forgotten craftsmen. Here are specially designed priceless stained-glass doors and windows, some set with jewel stones; concave-convex Belgium optical cut-glass panels furnished by Tiffany; a delicate inlaid spiderweb window designed personally by the Mystery Lady of the House. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
One sees exquisite sets of daisy pattern windows from Austria and rolls of quarter-inch thick, embossed French wall-paper. No causal visitor can see it all. Palatial elegance unfolds with each turn. One gazes through oval lens windows now only magnifying the pandemonium of Winchester Boulevard. But God, I swear it, in my soul of soul, it is not greed to live again, it is that the tale is unfinished, the demon continues, and I die. I would help, I would be an angel of the Lord somehow. It was a terrifying display of power. And I realized I felt possessed. I felt she was my Queen. I was displaying possession! The Queen had the Mind Gift and opened the many doors for me that lay between us. There was something so remarkable that it was painful for me to reveal it. No one human ever knows what lies beyond true death. Sarah Winchester admired her quiet gardens, sprouting fountains and blossoming orchards. The massive, flawless mirror still stands in the reception room, now counting expressions of a million perplexed faces. Spirits can come very close to knowing; they can see bright stairways to Heaven, they can see the fruit trees of paradise, they can talk to the dead in various forms, they can glimpse the light of God, on, that is forever happening, these glimpses and glimpses of light, but they cannot really know what lies beyond true death! No one who really escapes the Earth and its Earthbound spirits ever comes back. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
They may appear to you. They may talk to you. However, you cannot make them come from beyond death. Once they are dead, it is in their hands or God’s hands whether they appear here or not. So do not ever believe anyone who tells you one knows all about Heaven. All of the realms of the spirits and angels that will ever be known to you or to me are of the Earth, not beyond Death. You understand? People are fascinated by the ghost of a man said to have broken his neck while attempting to flee the mansion. There is sometimes a big shadow in the darkness, smelling of the winter cold, and then his warm trembling hands will wrap around your neck. There is a ghost dressed in armor who walks around the house at night. There are cold spots and objects that move from room to room of their own volition. Marvelous parqueted floors are everywhere, their intricate designs highlight optical illusion patterns assembled from as many as six different rare hardwoods, their tiny, apparently jointless segments forming polished mirror sweep of elegant harmony. Once seen it is easy to believe such a floor required the work of one man for a solid year. Connecting hallways of inlaid linoleum, trod by two million shuffling feet, show little wear. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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Laws of Nature and Nature’s God—A Great City is that Which Has the Greatest Men and Women!
Your cravings as a terrestrial being do not become a prayer just because it is God who you ask for them. Underrepresented groups experiment; majorities cling to the forms of the past. It is safe to say that large numbers of people will refuse to jettison the conventional idea of marriage or the familiar family forms. They will, no doubt, continue searching for happiness within the orthodox format. Yet, even they will be forced to innovate in the end, for the odds against success may prove overwhelming. The orthodox format presupposed that two young people will “find” one another and marry. It presupposed that the two will fulfill certain psychological needs in one another, and that the two personalities will develop over the years, more or less in tandem, so that they continue to fulfill each other’s needs. It further presupposes that this process will last “until death do us part.” These expectations are built deeply into our culture. It is no longer respectable, as it once was, to marry for anything but love. Love has changed from a peripheral concern of the family into its primary justification. Indeed, the pursuit of love through family life has become, for many, the very purpose of life itself. Love, however, is defined in terms of this notion of shared growth. It is seen as a beautiful mesh of complementary needs, flowing into and out of one another, fulfilling the loved ones, and producing feelings of warmth, tenderness and devotion. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
Unhappy husbands often complain that they have “left their wives behind” in terms of social, educational or intellectual growth. Partners in successful marriages are said to “grow together.” This parallel development theory of love carries endorsement from marriage counsellors, psychologists, and sociologist. Thus, says sociologist Nelson Foote, a specialist on the family, the quality of the relationship between husband and wife is dependent upon “the degree of matching in their phases of distinction but comparable development.” If love is a product of shared growth, however, and we are to measure success in marriage by the degree to which matched development actually occurs, it becomes possible to make a strong and ominous prediction about the future. It is possible to demonstrate that, even in a relatively stagnant society, the mathematical odds are heavily stacked against any couple achieving this ideal of parallel growth. The odds for success positively plummet, however, when the rate of change in society accelerates, as it now is doing. In a fast-moving society, in which many things change, not once, but repeatedly, in which the husband moves up and down a variety of economic and social scales, in which the family is again and again torn loose from home and community, in which individuals move further from their parents, further from the religion of origin, and further from traditional values, it is almost miraculous if two people develop at anything like comparable rates. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
If, at the same time, average life expectancy rises from, say eighty to one hundred years, thereby lengthening the term during which this acrobatic feat of matched development is supposed to be maintained, the odds against success become absolutely astronomical. Thus, Nelson Foote writes with wry understatement: “To expect a marriage to last indefinitely under modern conditions is to expect a lot.” To ask love to last indefinitely is to expect even more. Transience and novelty are both in league against it. It is this change in the statistical odds against love that accounts for the high divorce and separation rates in most of the techno-societies. The faster the rate of change and the longer the life span, the worse these odds grow. Something has to crack. In point of fact, of course, something has already cracked—and it is the old insistence on permanence. Millions of men and women now adopt what appears to them to be a sensible and conservative strategy. Rather than opting for some offbeat variety of the family, they marry conventionally, they attempt to make it “work,” and then, wen the paths of the partners diverge beyond an acceptable point, they divorce or depart. Most of them go on to search for a new partner whose developmental stage, at that moment, matches their own. As human relationships grow more transient and modular, the pursuit of love becomes, if anything more frenzied. However, the temporal expectations change. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
As conventional marriage proves itself less and less capable of delivering on its promise of lifelong love, therefore, we can anticipate open public acceptance of temporary marriages. Instead of wedding “until death us do part,” couples will enter into matrimony knowing from the first that the relationship is likely to be short-lived. They will know, too, that when the paths of husband and wife diverge, when there is too great a discrepancy in developmental stages, they may call it quits—without shock or embarrassment, perhaps even without some of the pain that goes with divorce today. And when the opportunity presents itself, they will marry again…and again…and again. Serial marriage—a pattern of successive temporary marriages—is cut to order for the Age of Transience in which all human’s relationships, all one’s ties with the environment, shrinks in duration. It is the natural, the inevitable outgrowth of a social order in which automobiles are rented, dolls traded in, and dresses discarded after one-time use. It is the mainstream marriage pattern of tomorrow. In one sense, serial marriage is already the best kept family secret of the techno-societies. According to Professor Jessie Bernard, a World-prominent family sociologist, “Plural marriage is more extensive in our society today than it is in societies that permit polygamy—the chief difference being that we have institutionalized plural marriage serially or sequentially rather than contemporaneously.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
Remarriage is already so prevalent a practice that nearly one out of every four bridegrooms in America has been to the altar before. It is so prevalent that one IBM personnel man reports a poignant incident involving a divorced woman, who, in filling out a job application, paused when she came to the question of marital status. She put her pencil in her mouth pondered for a moment, then wrote: “Unremarried.” Transience necessarily affects the durational expectancies with which persons approach new situations. While they may yearn for a permanent relationship, something inside whispers to them that it is an increasingly improbably luxury. Even young people who most passionately seek commitment, profound involvement with people and causes, recognize the power of the thrust toward transience. Listen, for example, to a young American, a civil-right worker, as she describes her attitude toward time and marriage: “In this World, marriage is always billed as ‘the end’—like in a Hollywood movie. I do not for that. I cannot imagine myself promising my whole lifetime away. I might want to get married now, but how about next year? That is not disrespect for the institution [of marriage], but the deepest respect. In The [civil rights] Movement, you need to have a feeling for the temporary—of making something as good as you can, while it lasts. In conventional relationships, time is a prison.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
Such attitudes will not be confined to the young, the few, or the politically active. They will whip across nations as novelty floods into the society and catch fire as the level of transience rises still higher. And along with them will come a sharp increase in the number of temporary—then serial—marriages. The idea is summed up vividly by a Swedish magazine, Svensk Damtidning, which interviewed a number of leading Swedish sociologist, legal experts, and others about the future of man-woman relationship. It presented its findings in five photographs. They showed the same beautiful bride being carried across the threshold five times—by five different bridegrooms. Though Our Lord often speaks of Hell as a sentence inflicted by a tribunal, He also says elsewhere that the judgment consists in the very fact that humans prefer darkness to light, and that not He, but His “word,” judges humans. We are therefore at liberty—since the two conceptions, in the long run, mean the same thing—to think of this bad human’s perdition not as a sentence imposed on one but as the mere fact of being what one is. The characteristic of lost souls is their rejection of everything that is not simply themselves. Our imaginary egoist has tried to turn everything one meets into a province or appendage of the self. The taste for the other, that is, the very capacity for enjoying good, is quenched in one except in so far as one’s body still draws one into some rudimentary contact with an outer World. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
Death removes this last contact. One has one’s wish—to lie wholly in the self and to make the best of what one finds there. And what one finds there is Hell. Another objection turns on the apparent disproportion between eternal damnation and transitory sin. And if we think of eternity as a mere prolongation of time, it is disproportionate. However, many would reject this idea of eternity. If we think of time as a line—which is a good image, because the parts of time are successive and no two of them can co-exist; id est, there is no width in time, only length—we probably ought to think of eternity as a plane or even a solid. Thus the whole reality of a human being would be mainly the work of God, acting through grace and nature, but human free will would have contributed the base-line which we call Earthly life: and if you draw your base-line askew, the whole solid will be in the wrong place. The fact that life is short, or, in the symbol, that we contribute only one little line to the whole complex figure, might be regarded as a Divine mercy. For if even the drawing of that little line, left to our free will, is somethings so badly done as to spoil the whole, how much worse a mess might we have made of the figure if more had been entrusted to us? A simpler form of the same objection consists in saying that death ought not to be final, that there ought to be a second change. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
The second chance must not be confused either with that of Purgatory (for souls already saved) of Limbo (for souls already lost). I believe that if a million chances were likely to do good, they would be given. However, a master often knows, when boys and parents do not, that it is really useless to send a boy in for a certain examination again. Finality must come some time, and it does not require a very robust faith to believe that omniscience knows when. Another objection turns on the frightful intensity of the pains of Hell as suggested by medieval art and, indeed, by certain passages in Scripture. Von Hugel here warns us not to confuse the doctrine itself with the imagery by which it may be conveyed. Our Lord speaks of Hell under three symbols: first, that of punishment (“everlasting punishment,” Matthew 25.46); second, that of destruction (“fear Him who is able to destroy both body and soul in Hell,” Matthew 10.28); and thirdly, that of privation, exclusion, or banishment into “the darkness outside,” as in the parables of the man without a wedding garment or the wise and foolish virgins. The prevalent image of fire is significant because it combines the ideas of torment and destruction. Now it is quite certain that all these expressions are intended to suggest something unspeakably horrible, and any interpretation which does not face that fact is, I am afraid, out of court from the beginning. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
However, it is not necessary to concentrate on the images of torture to the exclusion of those suggesting destruction and privation. What can that be whereof all three images are equally proper symbols? Destruction, we should naturally assume, means the unmaking, or cessation, of the destroyed. And people often talk as if the “annihilation” of a soul were intrinsically possible. In all our experience, however, the destruction of one thing means the emergence of something else. Burn a log, and you have gases, heat, and ash. To have been a log means now being those three things. If souls can be destroyed, mist there not be a state of having been a human soul? And is not that, perhaps, the state which is equally well described as torment, destruction, and privation? You will remember that in the parable, the saved go to a place prepared for them, while the damned go to a place never made for humans at all. “Then the king will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepare for you since the creation of the World.’ Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels,” reports Matthew 25.34, 41. To enter Heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being on Earth; to enter hell, is to be banished from humanity. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
What is cast (or casts itself) into hell is not a human: it is “remains.” To be a complete human means to have the passions obedient to the will and the will offered to God: to have been a human—to be an ex-human or damned ghost—would presumably mean to consist of a will utterly centered in its self and passions utterly uncontrolled by the will. It is, of course, impossible to imagine what the consciousness of such a creature—already a loose congeries of mutually antagonistic sins rather than a sinner—would be like. There may be a truth in the saying that “hell is hell, not from its own point of view, but from the Heavenly point of view.” I do not think this belies the severity of Our Lord’s words. It is only to be damned that their fate could ever seem less than unendurable. And it must be admitted that we think of eternity, the categories of pain and pleasure, which have engaged us so long, begin to recede, as vaster good and evil loom in sight. Neither pain nor pleasure as such had the last word. Even if it were possible that the experience (if it can be called experience) of the lost contained no pain and much pleasure, still that black pleasure would be such as to send any soul, not already damned, flying to its prayers in nightmare terror: even if there were pains in Heaven, a who understand would desire them. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
Exception must be taken to the light of their Father, because it could not illuminate and fill even those things which were within it, namely the shadow and the void. It seems scandalous and reprehensible to suppose that within the pleroma of light there could be a dark and formless void. For the Christian neither God nor Christ could be a paradox; they have to have a single meaning. However, no one knew, and apparently (with a few commendable exceptions) no one knows even now, that the hybris of the speculative intellect had already emboldened the ancients to propound a philosophical definition of God that more or less obliged one to be the Summum Bonum (the highest good). A Protestant theologian has even had the temerity to assert that “God can only be good.” Yahweh could certainly have taught him a thing or two in this respect, if he himself is unable to see his intellectual trespass against God’s freedom and omnipotence. This forcible usurpation of the Summum Bonum naturally has its reasons, the origins of which lie far back in the past (though I cannot enter into this here). Nevertheless, it is the effective source of the concept of privatio boni, which nullifies the reality of evil and can be found as early as Basil the Great (330-79) and Dionysius the Areopagite (2nd half of the 4th century), and is fully developed in Augustine. The earliest authority of all for the later axiom “Omne bonum a Deo, omne malum ab homine” is Tatian (2nd century), who says: “Nothing evil was created by God; we ourselves have produced all wickedness.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
You must not look upon God as the author of the existence of evil, not consider that evil has any subsistence in itself. For evil does not subsist as a living being does, nor can we set before our eyes any substantial essence thereof. For evil is the privation of good. And thus evil does not inhere in its own substance, but arises from the mutilation of the soul. The darkness of the World comes from the shadow cast by the body of Heaven. Neither is evil uncreated, as the wicked say who set up evil for the equal of good…nor is it created. For if all things are of God, how can evil arise from good? It is equally impious to say that evil has its origin from God, because the contrary cannot proceed from the contrary. Life does not engender death, darkness is not the origin of light, sickness is not the maker of health…Now if evil is neither uncreated nor created by God, whence comes its nature? That evil exists no one living in the World will deny. What shall we say, then? That evil is not a living and animated entity, but a condition of the soul opposed to virtue, proceeding from light-minded persons on account of their falling away from good. Each of us should acknowledge that one is the first author of the wickedness in one. The perfectly natural fact that when you say “high” you immediately postulate “low” is here twisted into a causal relationship and reduced to absurdity, since it is sufficiently obvious that darkness produces no light and light produces no darkness. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
The idea of good and evil, however, is the premise for any moral judgment. They are a logically equivalent pair of opposites and, as such, the sine qua non of al acts of cognition. From the empirical standpoint we cannot say more than this. And from this standpoint we would have to assert that good and evil, being coexistent halves of moral judgment, do not derive from one another but are always together. Evil, like good, belongs to the category of human values, and we are the authors of the facts submitted to our moral judgment. These facts are called by one person good and by another evil. Only in capital cases is there anything like a consensus generalis. If we hold that humans are the authors of evil, we are saying in the same breath that they are also the author of good. However, humans are first and foremost the author merely of judgments; in relation to the facts judged, one’s responsibility is not so easy to determine. In order to do this, we would have to give a clear definition of the extent of one’s free will. The psychiatrist knows what a desperately difficult task this is. Perhaps evil has no substance of its own but arises from a mutilation of the soul, and if we are convinced that evil really exists, then the relative reality of evil is grounded on a real mutilation of the soul which must have an equally real cause. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
If the soul was originally created good, then it has really been corrupted and by something that is real, even if tis is nothing more than carelessness, indifference, and frivolity. When something—I must stress this with all possible emphasis—is traced back to a psychic condition or fact, it is very definitely not reduced to nothing and thereby nullified, but is shifted on to the plane of psychic reality, which is very much easier to establish empirically than, say, the reality of the devil in dogma, who according to the authentic sources was not invented by humans at all but existed long before they did. If the devil fell away from God of one’s own free will, this proves firstly that evil was in the World before humans, and therefore that humans cannot be the sole author of it, and secondly that the devil already had a mutilated soul for which we must hold a real cause responsible. However, this argument produces some insoluble contradictions: it is laid down from the start that the independent existence of evil must be denied even in the face of the eternity of the devil as asserted by dogma. The historical reason for this was the threat presented by Manichaean dualism. This is especially clear in the treatise of Titus of Bostra (d.c. 3700, entitled Adversus Manichaeos, where he states in refutation of Manichaeans that, so far as substance is concerned, there is no such thing as evil. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
Jesus Christ teaches us that we should love our enemies, return good for evil. However, is this realistic in a World in which evil so often triumphs? Can one forgive seventy times seven and still restrain wrongdoers? Turn the other cheek to terrorism? These dilemmas lead many to conclude that either Jesus was not speaking literally or if He was, one must live a monastic life to be a Christian. We reach such conclusion, however, because we misunderstand Jesus’ teachings about the Kingdom. When Jesus announced the Kingdom, He did indeed set forth radical standards by which its citizens are to live. He knew such a lifestyle would be both costly and complex, but it would witness the values of God’s Kingdom even in the midst of the evil of this World. Christ was not suggesting, however, that the obedient Christian would be able to usher in the Kingdom of God on Earth. Only Christ Himself would do that when He returns. However, for this period between the two stages—the announcement of the Kingdom and its final consummation—God has provided structures to restrain evil of the World. The state is even ordained to wield the sword when necessary; and the Christian is commanded to obey the state and to respect its authority as God’s instruments. One will have to maintain one’s loyalty to the intuition against the cautions, the excessive prudence, of frightened intellect. The intuition is to collate all these different functions of the personality, and direct them towards its truest welfare. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
The Christian, therefore, follows two commandments: to live by Christ’s teachings in the Sermon on the Mount, modeling the values of God’s Kingdom—the one yet to come in its fullness—and at the same time to support government’s rile in preserving order as a witness to God’s authority over the present kingdoms of this World. A human is really free when one’s intuition directs one’s intellect and rules one’s energies. The verdict of intuition may be vindicated by time but one cannot always afford to wait for it. So while the Christian is not to return evil for evil (one must instead exercise forgiveness, breaking the cycle of evil), one may participate in the God-ordained structure that restrains the evil and chaos of the fallen World by the use of force. The family is the most basic unit of government. As the first community to which a person is attached and the first authority under which a person learns to live, the family establishes society’s most basic values. The family is an alternative to the states as a focus of loyalty and thus a humanizing force in society. Unlike the state, it upholds nonmaterial values—makes them paramount indeed. In most Eastern cultures the family remains the fundamental unit of society. In the West, however, relativism has encouraged the belief that family is a matter of convenience rather than convention. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
The traditional family has all but disintegrated in many communities, where more than 50 percent of children are born out of wedlock. And in the nation as a whole more than half the children are raised in one-parent families where the parent works. Some school textbooks even describe the family as any voluntary grouping of people living together. This attitude is reflected in out laws, our court decisions, our public mores—and in our crime rates. Typically, crime is not the result of environment or poverty, but of wrong moral choices. Generally, such moral choices are determined by moral conscience, which is shaped early in life and most profoundly by the family. Without the lessons the family alone can teach, commitment to God and duty to fellow humans becomes alien concepts. Little wonder that many of today’s youth have been lost to the streets. Though it is not my purpose here to examine the issue of the modern family, the situation today merits a word of warning. The widespread loss of the God-ordained role of the family leads to the deterioration of society and [the] eventual collapse of the nation. The humanizing force of the family can never be replaced by political or bureaucratic means. Consciousness-in-itself, its own pure formless being, is incorruptible; but viewed from our side, our relation to it, universal and collective, we, individual entities, emerge from it and eventually fall back into it. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
This applies to all who take on an existence, however tiny it be in dimension or however immense in time, however feeble in power or however majestic in rulership. Although the Absolute is the Unknowable to us, it must be able to know and understand its own being and its own nature. Consciousness untouched by any thought, picture, or name—this has yet to be studied by our Western psychologist. Ultimate reality does not lie in this World, nor in that which perceives it, but in that which perceives the perceiver. Consciousness can exist apart from the World, from the things and creatures in it, and even from the ego, but the World exists only as a projection of consciousness. In this sense the World has no lasting reality but, by contrast, the consciousness has. What is Spirit? It is that which is the essence of mind and therefore mind in its pure state divested of all thoughts, all personal emotions, and all personal egoism. Therefore, it transcends the human concept of individual being. To ascribe human qualities to it is to falsify it and yet, because it is the essence of the mind, it is the essence of every human being. The intellect can never understand this point until it understands that the conception of individuality and the conception of existence are separate and different from each other. Individuality may go but existence may remain. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
Beyond all forms which consciousness can take is its very essence, consciousness in itself, alone and unique. It can never be transformed or changed and it can never disintegrate. Pure consciousness is not a mental state, but Mind-in-itself, the Mind when gathered entirely into itself. The mental states are brought about by some kind of mental activity, but not here. Consciousness-in-itself is something apart from its objects, which are thoughts, feelings, imaginations, things, bodies—in short experience. Consciousness stripped of thoughts and pictures become bare Being. Consciousness-in-itself does not vary, but its phases and states do. It is Mind which not only lights up its own existence but also all other existence. There are various kinds of consciousness but there is only a single pure Consciousness, one where nothing is put into it—no thoughts, emotions, or objects, even no ego. Dear Lord in Heaven, you move among the stars as a shepherd among His sheep, guiding them, keeping them from straying. Father Moon, please softly light my way, keeping me from real danger as well. We thankfully acknowledge Thee, O Lord our God, our fathers’ God to al eternity. Our Rock art Thou, our Shield that saves through every generation. We give Thee thanks and we declare Thy praise for all Thy tender care. Our lives we trust into Thy loving hand. Our souls are ever in Thy charge; Thy wonders and Thy miracles are daily with us, evening, morn and noon. O Thou who art all-good, whose mercies never fail us, Compassionate One, whose loving kindness never cease, we ever hope in Thee. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
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People have forgotten how to tell stories. Stories do not have a middle or an end any more. They usually have a beginning that never stops beginning. One simple thing that will happen in the future is that they will streamline the family. The typical pre-industrial family not only had a good many children, but numerous other dependent as well—grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins. Such “extended” families were well suited for survival in slow paced agricultural societies. However, such families are hard to transport or transplant. They are immobile. Industrialism demanded masses of workers ready and able to move off the land in pursuit of jobs, and to move again whenever necessary. Thus the extended family gradually shed its excess weight and the so-called “nuclear” family emerged—a stripped-down, portable family unit consisting only of parents and a small set of children. This new style family, far more mobile than the traditional extended family, became the standard model in all the industrial countries. Super-age of information, however, the next stage of ecotechnological development, requires even higher mobility. Thus we may expect many among the people of the future to carry the streamlining process a step further by remaining childless, cutting the family down to its most elemental components, two adults who are spouses. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
Adults will form relationships, two people, perhaps with matched careers, will prove more efficient at navigating through education and social shoals, through job changes and geographic relocations, than the ordinary child-cluttered family. Indeed, anthropologist Margaret Mead has pointed out that we may already be moving toward a system under which, as she puts it, “parenthood would be limited to a smaller number of families whose principal functions would be childrearing,” leaving the rest of the population “free to function—for the first time in history—as individuals.” A compromise may be the postponement of children, rather than childlessness. Men and women today are often torn in conflict between a commitment to career and a commitment to children. In the future, many couples will sidestep this problem by deferring the entire task of raising children until after retirement. This may strike people of the present as odd. Yet once childbearing is broken away from its biological base, nothing more than tradition suggests having children at an early age. Why not wait, and buy your embryos later, after your career is over? Thus childlessness is likely to spear among young and middle-aged couples; sexagenarians who raise infants may be far more common. The post-retirement family could become a recognized social institution. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
In Tokyo, Japan, for example, in 2017, the population fell by 300,000 people and there were fewer than 1 million births. The reason is because Japan’s young people are not focused on romance, they are more interested in their careers and becoming successful. Women and men are putting their careers before marriage. Experts also speculate that the birth rate could be falling because there are fewer good opportunities for young people. In a country where men are still widely expected to be the primary providers for the family, a lack of good jobs may be creating a class of men who do not marry and have children because they—and their potential partners—know they cannot afford to. The gender roles are pretty consistent with trends in all developed nations—men are having a harder time. The birth rate is down, even the coupling rate is decreasing. People say the number-one reason is economic insecurity. Economic insecurity may seem like a surprise in a country like Japan, with an unemployment rate below 3 percent. However, it may not just be the shrinking economic trends. Most developed nations have less land, so there is less room for people, and housing is more expensive. Because plots of land are growing smaller and more expensive, people may not have a desire to have children. If a smaller number of families raise children, however, why do the children have to be their own? Why not a system under which “professional parents” take on the childrearing function for others? Raising children, after all, requires skills that are by no means universal. We do not let “just anyone: perform brain surgery or, for that matter, sell stocks and bonds. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
Even civil servants with modest skill levels are required to pass tests proving competence. Yet we allow virtually anyone, almost without regard for mental or moral qualification, to try his or her hand at raising young human beings, so long as these humans are biological offspring. Despite the increasing complexity of the task, parenthood remains the greatest single preserve of the amateur. As the present system cracks and the super-age of informational revolution rolls over us, as the armies of juvenile delinquents swell, as hundreds of thousands of youngsters flee their homes, and students rampage at universities in all the techno-societies, we can expect vociferous demands for an end to parental dilettantism. There are far better ways to cope with the problems of youth, but professional parenthood is certain to be proposed, if only because it fits so perfectly with the society’s overall push toward specialization. Moreover, there is a powerful, pent-up demand for this social innovation. Even now millions of parents, given the opportunity, would happily relinquish their parental responsibilities—and not necessarily through irresponsibility or lack of love. Harried, frenzied, up against the wall, they have come to see themselves as inadequate to the tasks. The intuition must lead all the rest of human’s faculties. Even when they do not agree with its guidance, one must follow it. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
Intuition sees father than the individual ever can, being an efflux from the godlike part of oneself which is in its way a portion of the universal deity. If one can be sure that it is not pseudo-intuition truth in it will lead one to life’s best, whether spiritual or Worldly. Given affluence and the existence of specially-equipped and licensed professional parents, many of today’s biological parents would not only gladly surrender their children to them, but would look upon it as an act of live, rather than rejection. Parental professionals would not be therapists, but actual family units assigned to, and well paid for, rearing children. Such families might be multi-generational by design, offering children in them an opportunity to observe and learn from a variety of adult models, as was the case in the old farm homestead. With the adults paid to be professional parents, they would be free of the occupational necessity to relocate repeatedly. Such families would take in new children as old ones “graduate” so that age-segregation would be minimized. Thus newspapers of the future might well carry advertisements addressed to young married couples: “Why let parenthood tie you down? Let us raise your infant into a responsible, successful adult. Class A Pro-family offers: father age 39, mother, 36, grandmother, 67. Uncle and aunt, age 30, live in, hold part-time local employment. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
Four-child-unit has opening for one, age 6-8. Regulated diet exceeds government standards. All adults are certified in child development and management and pass federal background checks. Bio-parents permitted frequent visits. Telephone contact allow and Cisco Telepresence can be used daily. Child may spend summer vacation with bio-parents. Religion, art, music encouraged by special arrangement. Five-year contract, minimum. Write for further details.” The “real” or “bio-parents” could, as the advertisement suggests, fil the role presently played by interested godparents, namely that of friendly and helpful outsiders. In such a way, the society could continue to breed a wide diversity of genetic types, yet turn the care of children over to mother-father groups who are equipped, both intellectually and emotionally, for the task. Quite a different alternative lies in the communal family. As transience increases the loneliness and alienation in society, we can anticipate increasing experimentation with various forms of group marriage. The banding together of several adults and children into a single “family” provides kind of insurance against isolation. Even if one or two members of the household leave, the remaining members have one another. Communes are springing up modeled after those described by psychologist B.F. Skinner in Walden Two and novelist Robert Rimmer in The Harrad Experiment and Proposition 31. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
In the latter work, Rimmer seriously propose the legalization of a “corporate family” in which from three to six adults adopt a single name, live and raise children in common, and legally incorporate to obtain certain economic and tax advantages. According to some observers, there are already hundreds of open or covert communes dotting the American map. Not all, by any means, are composed of young people or hippies. Some are organized around specific goals—like the group, quietly financed by three East Coast colleges—which has taken as its function the task of counseling college freshmen, helping to orient them to campus life. The goals may be social, religious, political, even recreational. Thus, if they do not already, we shall before long begin to see communal families of surfers dotting the beaches of California and Southern France. We shall see the emergence of communes based on political doctrines and religious faiths. In Denmark, a bill to legalize group marriage has already been introduced in the Folketing (Parliament). While passage is not imminent, the act of introduction it itself a significant symbol of change. In Chicago, 250 adults and children already live together in “family-style monasticism” under the auspices of a new fast-growing religious organization, the Ecumenical Institute (EI). Members share the same quarters, cook and eat together, worship and tend children in common, and pool their incomes. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
At least 90,000 people have taken “EI” courses and similar communes have begun to spring up all over North America, and over 2,000 in various counties of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. There are at least 300 successful locally-managed initiatives in 53 countries. “A brand-new World is emerging,” says Professor Joseph W. Mathews, leader of the Ecumenical Institute, “But people are still operating in terms of the old one. We seek to re-educate people and give them the tools to build a new social context.” Still another type of family unit likely to win adherents in the future might be called the “geriatric commune”—a group of marriage of elderly people drawn together in a common search for companionship and assistance. Disengaged from the productive economy that makes mobility necessary, they will settle in a single place, band together, pool funds, collectively hire domestic or nursing help, and proceed—within limits—to have the “time of the lives.” Communalism runs counter to the pressure for ever greater geographical and social mobility generated by the thrust toward super-industrialism. It presupposed groups of people who “stay put.” For this reason, communal experiments will first proliferate among those in the society who are free from the industrial discipline—the retired population, the young, the dropouts, the students, as well as among self-employed professional and technical people. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
Later, when advanced technology and information systems make it possible for much of the work of society to be done at home via computer-telecommunication hookups, communalism will become feasible for larger numbers. We shall, however, also see many more “family” units consisting of a single unmarried adult and one or more children. Nor will all of these adults be women. It is already possible in some places for unmarried men to adopt children. In 1965 in Oregon, for example, a thirty-eight-year-old musician named Tony Piazza became the first unmarried man in that state, and perhaps in the United States of America, to be granted the right to adopt a baby. Courts are more readily granting custody to divorced fathers, too. In London, photographer Michael Cooper, married at twenty and divorced soon after, won the right to raise his infant son, and expressed an interest in adopting other children. Observing that he did not particularly wish to remarry, but that he liked children, Mr. Cooper mused aloud: “I wish you could just ask beautiful women to have babies for you. Or any woman you like, or who had something you admired. Ideally, I would like a big house full of children—all different colours, shapes and sizes.” Romantic? Unmanly? Perhaps. Yet attitudes like these will be widely held by men in the future. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
Two pressures are even now softening up the culture, preparing for acceptance of the idea of childrearing by men. First, adoptable children are in oversupply in some places. Thus, in California, disc jockeys blare commercials: “We have many wonderful babies of all races and nationalities waiting to bring love and happiness to the right families…Call the Los Angeles County Bureau of Adoption.” At the same time, the mass media, in a strange non-conspiratorial fashion, appear to have decided simultaneously that men who raise children hold special interest for public. Extremely popular television shows in recent seasons have glamorized womanless households in which men scrub floors, cook, and most significantly, raise children. My Three Son, The Rifleman, Bonanza, Bachelor Father, and Walker are five examples. As alternative family compositions become more socially acceptable, we see same gender couples having biological children and the partners adopting children. With the rapidity with which alternative families are winning respectability in the techno-societies distinctly points in this direction. In the 1960s, in Holland, a Catholic priest married two homosexuals, explaining to critics that “they are among the faithful to be helped.” And in the United States and in other countries around the World, homosexual marriages are now legal. The courts have decided that a couple of stable, well-educated homosexuals can make decent parents. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
In the future, however we might even see the gradual relations of bars against polygamy. Polygamous families exist even now, more widely than generally believed, in the midst of “normal” society. Writer Ben Merson, after visiting several such families in Utah where polygamy is still regarded as essential by certain Mormon fundamentalist, estimated that there are some 50,000 people living in underground family units of this type in the United States of America. As people become more accepting of other cultures, as property rights become less important because of rising affluence, the social repression of polygamy may come to be regarded as irrational. This shift may be facilitated by the very mobility that compels men to spend considerable time away from their present homes. The old male fantasy of the Captain’s Paradise may become a reality for some, although it is likely that, under such circumstances, the wives left behind will demand extramarital affair rights. Yesterday’s “captain” would hardly consider this possibility. Tomorrow’s may feel quite differently about it. Still another family form is even now springing up in our midst, a novel childrearing unit that I call the “aggregate family”—a family based on relationships between divorced and remarried couples, in which all the children become part of “one being family.” Though sociologist have paid little attention as yet to this phenomenon, it is already so prevalent that it formed the basis for a hilarious scene in an American movie entitled Divorce American Style. We may expect aggregate families to take on increasing importance in the decades ahead. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
Childless marriage, professional parenthood, post-retirement childrearing, corporate families, communes, geriatric group marriages, homosexual family units, polygamy—these, then, are a few of the family forms and practices with which innovative underrepresented groups will experiment in the decades ahead. Not all of us, however will be willing to participate in such experimentation. What of the majority? The pain which alone could rouse the bad human to acknowledge that all was not well, might also lead to a final and unrepented rebellion. And it has been admitted throughout that humans have free will and that all gifts t them are therefore two-edged. From these premises it follows directly that the Divine labour to redeem the World cannot be certain of succeeding as regards every individual soul. Some will not be redeemed. There is no doctrine which I would more willingly remove from Christianity than this, if it lay in my power. However, it has the full support of Scripture and, specially, of Our Lord’s own words; it has always been held by Christendom; and it has the support of reason. If a game is played, it must be possible to lose it. If the happiness of a creature lies in self-surrender, no one can make that surrender but oneself (though many can help one to make it) and one may refuse. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
I would pay any price to be able to say truthfully “All will be saved.” However, my reason retorts “Without their will, or with it?” If I say “Without their will” I at once perceive a contradiction; how can the supreme voluntary act of self-surrender be involuntary? If I say “With their will,” my reason replies “How if they will not give in?” The Dominical utterances about Hell, like all Dominical sayings, are addressed to the conscience and the will, not to our intellectual curiosity. When they have roused us into action by convincing us of a terrible possibility, they have done, probably, all they were intended to do; and if all the World were convinced Christians its would be unnecessary to say a word more on the subject. As things are, however, this doctrine is one of the chief grounds on which Christianity is attacked as barbarous, and the goodness of God impugned. We are told that it is a detestable doctrine—and indeed, I too detest it from the bottom of my heart—and are reminded of the tragedies in human life which have come from believing it. Of other tragedies which come from not believing it we are told less. For these reasons, and these alone, it becomes necessary to discuss the matter. The problem is not simply that of a God who consigns some of His creatures to final ruin. If we were Mahometans, that would be the problem. #RandlphHarris 13 of 21
Christianity, true, as always, to the complexity of the real, presents us with something knottier and more ambiguous—a God so full of mercy that He becomes man and dies by torture to avert that final ruin from His creatures, and who yet, where that heroic remedy fails, seems unwilling, or even unable, to arrest the ruin by an act of mere power. I said glibly a moment ago that I would pay “any price” to remove this doctrine. I lied. I could not pay one-thousandth part of the price that God has already paid to remove the fact. And here is the real problem: so much mercy, yet still there is Hell. I am not going to try to prove the doctrine tolerable. Let us make no mistake; it is not tolerable. However, I think the doctrine can be shown to be moral, by a critique of the objections ordinarily made, or felt, against it. First, there is an objection, in many minds, to the idea of retributive punishment as such. This has been partly dealt with before. It is, however, maintained that if the ideas of ill-desert and retribution were removed from it, all punishment became unjust; and a core of righteousness was discovered within the vindictive passion itself, in the demand that the evil human must not be left perfectly satisfied with one’s own evil, that it must be made to appear to one what it rightly appears to others—evil. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
Pains plant the flag of truth within a rebel fortress. However, what kind of pain might still lead to repentance? If no further conquest than the planting of the flag ever takes place, it does not. Let us try to be honest with ourselves. Picture to yourself a human who has risen to wealth or power by a continued course of treachery and cruelty, by exploiting for purely selfish ends the noble motions of one’s victims, laughing the while at their simplicity; who, having thus attained success, uses it for gratification of lust and hatred and finally parts with the last rag of honour among thieves by betraying one’s own accomplices and jeering at their last moments of bewildered disillusionment. Suppose, further, that one does all this, not (as we like to imagine) tormented by remorse or even misgiving, but eating like a schoolboy and sleeping like a healthy infant fat and butter and strong as an ox—a jolly, ruddy-cheeked man, without a care in the world, unshakably confident to the very end that one alone has fund the answer to the riddle of life, that God and humans are fools whom one has got the better of, that is one’s way of life is utterly successful satisfactory, unassailable. We must be careful at this point. The least indulgence of the passion for revenge is very deadly sin. Christian charity counsels us to make every effort for the conversion of such a human: to prefer one’s conversation, at the peril of our own lives, perhaps of our own souls, to one’s punishment; to prefer it infinitely. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
However, that is not the question. Supposing one will not be converted, what destiny in the eternal World can you regard as proper for one? Can you really desire that such a human being, remaining what one is (and if one has free will, one must be able to do that) should be confirmed forever in one’s present happiness—should continue, for all eternity, to be perfectly convinced that the laugh is on one’s side? And if you cannot regard this as tolerable, is it only your wickedness—only spite—that prevents you from doing so? Or do you find that conflict between Justice and Mercy, which has sometimes seemed to you such an outmoded piece of theology, now actually at work in your own mind, and feeling very much as if it came to you from above, not from below? You are moved not by a desire for the wretched creature’s pain as such, but by a truly ethical demand that, soon or late, the right should be asserted, the flag planted in this horribly rebellious soul, even if no fuller and better conquest is to follow. In a sense, it is better for the creature itself, even if it never becomes good, that it should know itself a failure, a mistake. Even mercy can hardly wish to such a human one’s eternal, contented continuance in such a ghastly illusion. Thomas Aquinas said suffering, as Aristotle had said of shame, that it was a thing not good in itself; but a thing which might have a certain goodness in particular circumstances. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
That is to say, if evil is present, pain at recognition of the evil being a kind of knowledge, is relatively good; for the alternative is that the soul should be ignorant of the evil, or ignorant that the evil is contrary to its nature, “either of which,” says the philosopher, “is manifestly bad.” And I think, though we tremble, we agree. The demand that God should forgive such a human while one remains what one is, is based on a confusion between condoning and forgiving. To condone an evil is simply to ignore it, to treat it as if it were good. However, if it is to be complete, forgiveness needs to be accepted as well as offered. A human who admits no guilt can accept no forgiveness. If Mind is to be regarded aright, we must put our thought even the notion of the cosmic Ever-Becoming. However, to do this is to enter a virtual Void? Precisely. When we take away all the forms of external physical existence and all the differences of internal mental existence, what we get is an utter emptiness of being which can hardly be differentiated after we have taken away its features and individualities, its finite times and finite distances. There is then nothing but a great void. What is the nature of this void? It is pure Thought. It is out of this empty Thought that the fullness of the Universe has paradoxically evolved. Hence it is said that the World’s reality is a secondary whereas Mind’s reality is primary. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
In the Void the hidden oneness of things is disengaged from the things themselves. Silence therefore is not merely the negation of sound but rather the element in which, as Carlyle said, great things fashion themselves. It is the supreme storehouse of power. There is here no form to be perceived, no image born of the senses to be worshipped, no oracular utterance to be listened for, and no emotional ecstasy to be reveled in. In eternal non-existence, one must look for the spirituality of things! The philosopher perceives that there is no such thing as creation out of nothing for the simple reason that Mind is eternally and universally present. “Nothing” is merely an appearance. Here indeed there is neither tie nor space. It is like a great silent boundless circle wherein no life seems to stir, no consciousness seems to be at work, and no activity is in sway. Yet the seer will know by a pure insight which will grip one’s consciousness as it has never been gripped before, that here indeed is the root of all life, all consciousness, and all activity. However, how it is so is as inexplicable intellectually as what its nature is. With the Mind the last word of human comprehension is uttered. With the Mind the last World of possible being is explored. However, whereas the utterance is comprehensible by one’s consciousness, the speaker is not. Silence which speaks but what it says is only that it IS; more than that none can hear. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
The Godhead is as void as though it were not. Pass from the station of “I” and “We” and choose for thy home Non-entity. For when thou hast done the like of this, thou shalt reach the supreme felicity. We may begin to grasp the meaning of such statements by grasping the conception that Infinite Mind is the formless, matterless, Void, Spirit. Mortal error is mistaking forms for final realities instead of penetrating to their essence, Mind. Whatever can be said about the unnameable “Void” will be not enough at least and merely symbolic at most. The mystic’s last Word is the Freemason’s lost Word. It can never be spoken for it can never be heard. It is the one idea which can never be transferred to another mind, the one meaning which can never get through any pen or any lip. Yet it is there—the supreme Fact behind all myriad facts of universal existence. To elevate any form by external worship or an internal meditation which should be given only to the formless Void is to elevate an idol in the place of God. Worship of any one other than the Great God, id est, the Beginningless, the Endless, is the first of major sins. Yet to honour the sublime No-thing by thought or rite is hard for the unmetaphysical. And it requires much metaphysical insight to perceive its truth. The cold impersonality of this idea is at first repelled by us with sometime like horror. A change in this attitude can come about only gradually at most. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
However, if we perseveringly pursue our quest of truth, we shall overcome our aversion in the end. If it be truth that Truth is not something we can utter, that the Nameless cannot fitly be represented by any name, we may however continue to use any word we like, provided we keep its limitations clearly in our understanding of it. After all, although the thinking intellect creates its own image of truth, it is the Overself that starts the creative process working. However, in the end, we shall have to reserve our best worship not for a particular manifestation in time but for the Timeless itself, not for a historical personage but for the impersonal Infinite. It would be completely false to regard the Void as being nothing and containing nothing. It is Being itself, and contains reality behind all things. Nor is it a kind of inertia, of paralysis. All action springs out of it, all the World-forces derive from it. The Void is not a nothing-at-all-ness in the absolute sense, or how could the whole cosmos come forth out of it, how could I myself be released by it, how could the very intellect which thinks this concept appear from it into activity and produce thoughts? Is this not the greatest of Paradoxes that the origin of all things is seeming Nothingness? Within that seeming Void lie the vanished planets of yesterday and the evolving Worlds of tomorrow. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Since all things are limited in some way or other, or conditioned by some circumstances or others, THAT which is unlimited and unconditioned, which does not exist as they do, cannot rightly be called a ting. It is no-thing, the Void. There is no other, no thing, no experience of an object for it. It is alone in the Void. IT is the Principle being both consciousness and unconsciousness, making the first possible and the second significant. Yet neither consciousness nor unconsciousness, as we humans know them, resembles it. There is a single Consciousness without beginning or end, ever the same in itself, beyond and behind which there is nothing else. God with your enfolding wings, please wrap them about me, Lord; please keep fear and danger at bay. May I mount your throne and rest there in peace. God, please wrap your wings about my family and me and bring us through danger in safety. Please remember us this day, O Lord our God for our good, and please be mindful of us for a life of blessing. With Thy promise of salvation and mercy, please deliver us and please be gracious unto us, please have compassion upon us and please save us. Unto Thee do we lift our eyes for Thou art a gracious and merciful God and King. O may our eyes witness Thy return to America. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who restorest Thy divine presence unto America. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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If truth is less shapely than fiction, still it is more honest. The most obviously upsetting force likely to strike the family in the decades immediately ahead will be the impact of new birth technology. The ability to pre-set the gender of one’s baby, or even to “program” its IQ, looks and personality traits, must now be regarded as a real possibility. Embryo implants, babies grown in vitro, gene editing, the ability to swallow a pill and guarantee oneself twins or triplets or, even more, the ability to walk into a “babytorium” and actually purchase embryos—all this reaches so far beyond any previous human experience that one need to look at the future through the eyes of the poet or painter, rather than those of the sociologist or conventional philosopher. It is regarded as somehow unscholarly, even frivolous, to discuss these matters. Yet advances in science and technology, or in reproductive biology alone, could with in a short time, smash all orthodox ideas about the family and its responsibilities. When babies can be grown in a laboratory jar what happens to the very notion of maternity? And what happens to the self-image of the female in societies which, since the very beginnings of humans, have taught one that one’s primary mission is the propagation of and nurture of the race? Few social scientists have begun as yet to concern themselves with such questions. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
One who has concerned oneself with birth technology and the woman’s role in the family and society is psychiatrist Hyman G. Weitzen, director of Neuropsychiatric Service at Polyclinic Hospital in New York. The cycle of birth, Dr. Weitzen suggests, “fulfills for most women a major creative need…Most women are proud of their ability to bear children…The special aura that glorifies the pregnant woman has figured largely in the art and literature of both East and West.” What happens to the cult of motherhood, Dr. Weitzen asks, if “her offspring might literally not be hers, but that of a genetically ‘superior’ ovum, implanted in her womb from another woman, or even grown in a Petri dish?” If women are to be important at all, he suggests, it will no longer be because they alone can bear children. If nothing else, we are about to end the mystique of motherhood. Not merely motherhood, but the concept of parenthood itself may be in for radical revision. Indeed, the day may soon dawn when it is possible for a child to have more than two biological parents. Dr. Beatrice Mintz, a developmental biologist at the Institute for Cancer Research in Philadelphia, has grown what are coming to be known as “multi-mice”—baby mice each of which has more than the usual number of parents. Embryos are placed in a laboratory dish and nurtured until they form a single growing mass. This is then implanted in the womb of a third female mouse. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Then, a baby is born that clearly shares the genetic characteristics of both sets of doners. Thus a typical multi-mouse, born of two pairs of parents, has white fur and whiskers on one side of its face, ark fur and dark hair covering the rest of the body. Some 700 multi-mice bred in this fashion have already produced more than 35,000 offspring themselves. If multi-mouse is here, can “multi-human” be far behind? Under such circumstances, what or who is the mother? And just exactly who is the father? If a couple can actually purchase an embryo, then parenthood becomes a legal, not a biological matter. Unless such transactions are tightly controlled, one can imagine such grotesqueries as a couple buying an embryo, raising it in vitro, then buying another in the name of the first, as though for a trust fund. In that case, they might be regarded as legal “grandparents” before their first child is out of infancy. We shall need a whole new vocabulary to describe kinship ties. Furthermore, if embryos are for sale, can a corporation buy one? Can it buy ten thousand? Can it resell them? And if not a corporation, how about a non-commercial research laboratory? If we buy and sell living embryos, are we back to a new form of slavery? Such are the nightmarish questions soon to be debated by us. To continue to think of the family therefore, in purely conventional terms is to defy all reason. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
Faced by rapid social change and the staggering implications of the scientific revolution, super-industrial humans may be forced to experiment with novel family forms. Innovative marginalized members of the community can be expected to try out a colourful variety of family arrangements. They will begin by tinkering with existing forms. We expect a well-ordered society, but we know that in reality some serious violations of justice nevertheless do occur. Conscientious refusal is noncompliance with a more or less direct legal injunction or administrative order. It is refusal since an order is addressed to us and, given the nature of the situation, whether we accede to it is known to the authorities. Typical examples are the refusal of the early Christians to preform certain acts of piety prescribed by the pagan state, and the refusal of the Jehovah’s Witnesses to salute the flag. Other examples are the unwillingness of a pacifist to serve in the armed forces, or of a soldier to obey an order that one thinks is manifestly contrary to the moral laws as it applies to war. Or gain, in Thoreau’s case, the refusal to pay a tax on the grounds that to do so would make one an agent of grace injustice to another. One’s action is assumed to be known to the authorities, however much one might wish, in some cases, to conceal it. Where it can be covert, one might speak of conscientious evasion rather than conscientious refusal. Covert infractions of a fugitive slave law are instances of conscientious evasion. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
There are several contrasts between conscientious refusal (or evasion) and civil disobedience. First of all, conscientious refusal is not a form of address appealing to the sense of justice of the majority. To be sure, such acts are not generally secretive or covert, as concealment is often impossible anyway. One simply refuses on conscientious grounds to obey a command or to comply with a legal injunction. One does not invoke the convictions of the community, and in this sense conscientious refusal is not an act in the public forum. Those ready to withhold obedience recognize that there may be no basis for mutual understanding; they do not seek out occasions for disobedience as a way to state their cause. Rather, they bide their time hoping that the necessity to disobey will not arise. They are less optimistic than those undertaking civil disobedience and they may entertain no expectation of changing laws or policies. The situation may allow no time for them to make their case, or again there may not be any chance that the majority will be receptive to their claims. Conscientious refusal is not necessarily based on political principles; it may be founded on religious or other principles at variance with the constitutional order. Civil disobedience is an appeal to a commonly shared conception of justice, whereas conscientious refusal may have other grounds. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
For example, assuming that early Christians would not justify their refusal to comply with the religious customs of the Empire by reasons of justice but simply as being contrary to their religious convictions, their argument would not be political; nor, with similar qualifications, are the views of a pacifist, assuming that wars of self-defense at least are recognized by the conception of justice that underlies a constitutional regime. Conscientious refusal may, however, be grounded on political principles. One many decline to go along with a law thinking that it is so unjust that complying with it is simply out of the question. This would be the case if, say, the law were to enjoin our being the agent of enslaving another, or to require us to submit to a similar fate. These are patent violations of recognized political principles. It is a difficult matter to find the right course when some humans appeal to religious principles in refusing to do actions which, it seems, are required by principle of political justice. Does the pacifist posses an immunity from military service in a just war, assuming that there are such wars? Or is the state permitted to impose certain hardships for noncompliance? There is a temptation to day that the law must always respect the dictates of conscience, but this cannot be right. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
As we have seen in the case of the intolerant, the legal order must regulate human’s pursuit of their religious interests so as to realize the principle of equal liberty; and it may certainly forbid religious practices such as human sacrifice, to take an extreme case. Neither religiosity nor conscientiousness suffices to protect this practice. A theory of justice must work out from its own point of view how to treat those who dissent from it. The aim of a well-ordered society, or one in a state of near justice, is to preserve and strengthen the institutions of justice. If a religion is denied its full expression, it is presumably because it is in violation of the equal liberties of others. In general, the degree of tolerance accorded opposing moral conceptions depends upon the extent to which they can be allowed an equal place within a just system of liberty. If pacifism is to be treated with respect and not merely tolerated, the explanation must be that it accords reasonably well with the principles of justice, the main exception arising from its attitude toward engaging in a just war (assuming here that in some situations wars of self-defense are justified). The political principles recognized by the community have a certain affinity with the doctrine the pacifist professes. There is a common abhorrence of war and the use of force, and a belief in the equal status of humans are moral persons. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
And given the tendency of nations, particularly great power, to engage in war unjustifiably and to set in motion the apparatus of the state to suppress dissent, the respect accorded to pacifism serves the purpose of altering citizens to the wrongs that governments are prone to commit in their name. Even though one’s views are not altogether sound, the warnings and protests that a pacifist is disposed to express may have the result that on balance the principles of justice are more rather than less secure. Pacifism as a natural departure from the correct doctrine conceivably compensates for the weakness of humans living up to their professions. It should be noted that there is, of course, in actual situations no sharp distinction between civil disobedience and conscientious refusal. Moreover the same action (or sequence of actions) may have strong elements of both. While there are clear cases of each, the contrast between them is intended as a way of elucidating the interpretation of civil disobedience and its role in a democratic society. Given the nature of this way of acting as a special kind of political appeal, it is not usually justified until other steps have been taken within the legal framework. By contrast this requirement often fails in the obvious case of legitimate conscientious refusal. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
In a free society no one may be compelled, as the early Christians were, to preform religious acts in violation of equal liberty, not must a soldier comply with inherently evil commands while awaiting an appeal to a higher authority. These remarks lead up to the question of justification. The reason people like to keep society busy with fake news and chaos is because as long as the people’s passions are spent on each other, they are not being vented on their conquerors. However, “The God of Heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed,” the prophecies said. God sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to release the oppressed. The true Kingdom of Heaven is already a present reality. However, the Kingdom of God is a rule, not realm. It is the declaration of God’s absolute sovereignty, of His total order of life in this World and the next. That this Kingdom is not of this World, as Jesus later explained, and that it is spiritual rather than temporal makes it no less authoritative; that it is a rule not a realm makes it no less an actual kingdom, its laws less binding than those of nations and states, any more than unseen physical laws are less binding than the laws of legislatures. Jesus is ushering in the Kingdom of God. Almost all of His parables focused on the Kingdom in one aspect or another, while His miracles authenticated His message. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
In converting water to wine, calming storms, multiplying loaves and fishes, healing the sick, and raising the dead, Jesus was not working magic to gather crowds; nor was He showing His power to gain credibility. He was demonstrating the reality of His rule. By exercising dominion over every phase of Earthly existence, He reveled that in fact the Kingdom of God had come. Many people miss Christ’s message because they, like many today, are conditioned to look for salvation in political solutions. People long for a military messiah who will stamp out their hated oppressors. Another reason that people miss the full significance of the message of the Kingdom of God is that Jesus speaks about a Kingdom that has come and a Kingdom that is still to come—one Kingdom in two stages. This still confused people today. A holy God would not take dominion over a sinful World. So He first sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to die on the cross to pay the debt for human’s sin and thereby provide for humans to be made holy and fit for God’s rule. Christ’s death and resurrection—the D-Day of human history—assure His ultimate victory. However, we are still on the beaches. The enemy has not yet been vanquished, and the fighting is still ugly. Christ’s invasion has assured the ultimate outcome, however—victory for God and His people at some future date. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
The second stage, which will take place when Christ returns, will assert God’s rule over all the Universe; His Kingdom will be visible without imperfection. At that time there will be a final judgment of all people, peace on Earth, and the restoration of harmony unknow since Eden. Many soldiers died to bring about the victory in Europe. However, in the Kingdom of God, it was the death of the king that assured the victory. And this leads to another reason that the Kingdom is often misunderstood: the nature of the King Himself. What king would ever sacrifice oneself for one’s people? Kings sacrifice their subjects, not themselves. What kind would wash one’s servants’ feet, as Jesus did, or freely befriend one’s lowest subjects? Potentates maintain the mystique of leadership by keeping a distance from those they rule. A certain grandeur seems to robe those who occupy high office. There is a certain aloofness, a power that is exuded by great humans that people feel and want to follow. Jesus Christ exhibited none of this self-conscious aloofness. He served other first; He spoke to those to whom no one spoke; He dined with the lowest members of society; He touched the untouchable. He had no throne, no crown, no bevy of servants or armoured guards. A borrowed manger and a borrowed tomb framed His Earthly life. Kings and presidents and governors and mayors and prime ministers surround themselves with minions who rush ahead, swing the doors wide, and stand at the attention as they wait for the great to pass. Jesus said that He Himself stands at the door and knocks, patiently waiting to enter our lives. Christ came as the Lamb of God. However, lambs were for sacrifice. Where was the mighty warrior who would tear Rome to shreds? #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
Because the nature of the King and the price He paid for His Kingdom, much is required of its citizens, and Jesus made these demands of the Kingdom clear. Through the centuries, however, many of His followers have watered down His teachings, stripped away His demands for the building of a righteous society, and preached an insipid religion concerned only with personal benefit. This distorted view portrays Christianity not as the powerful source of spiritual rebirth and the mediating force for justice, mercy, and love in the World, but as the ultimate self-fulfillment plan. The gospel is not a release for the captives, but confidence for the shy. It is the spiritual equivalent of racy sports cars, designer clothes—a commodity to help one get more out of life. Many humanists have failed to understand human nature. However, many Christians have failed also—failed to understand the utterly radical nature of the central message of Christianity. Other great leaders have expounded creeds, philosophies, and mystical visions. Many are wise and moral, but they are only belief systems: rules to live by, value codes. Humans require more than rules; they require what Jesus’ message of the Kingdom uniquely provides: answers to their most basic needs. What are these needs? To know God. The heat of humans is restless until it finds its rest in Thee. Humans most primal yearning—the need to know God. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
In announcing His messiahship Jesus was saying that God’s love and just rule has come to Earth—in Him. Humans would thereafter be able to find rest not in a law they could never hope to fulfill, but in the actual person of Jesus Christ. To find salvation. However, how does one come to a personal relationship with this Christ? That is the archetypal question asked by the apostle Paul’s jailer: “What must I do to be saved?” Because we interpret it from our perspective and not God’s, salvation has always been misunderstood. People want salvation from their oppressor. However, Christ same to save them from a much greater oppressor—the sin within one. Sin is essentially rebellion against the rule of God. This is why Jesus coupled the message of the Kingdom with the call to repent and believe. Faith and repentance, the opposite of rebellion, are necessary human responses to the divine initiative of spiritual rebirth, resulting in salvation. When Christ first used the term born again, it was not the evangelical cliché or secular slur it is today. He used it in late-night conversation with Nicodemus, a member of the Jewish religious community, telling him it was the key to entering into the Kingdom of God. Imagine the shock of the religious elite when they heard Jesus’ words: Salvation was not to be found in proud piety or scrupulous adherence to religious rules, but in turning from evil and humble faith in One greater the oneself. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Just as one is born physically in a particular nation, so one is born spiritually by submitting to God’s rule in His holy nation. To find meaning. This relationship with God meets human’s deepest psychological need. As we have already seen, human beings cannot live in a vacuum. We are not a chance collision of atoms in an indifferent Universe or islands amid cold currents of modern culture. We each have a personal purpose in history, which is to be found under the purposeful rule of God, as a beloved citizen of His Kingdom. To find authority. Christianity is more than simply a relationship between humans and God, however. The Kingdom of God embraces every aspect of life: ethical, spiritual, and temporal, and it determines the patter, purpose and dynamic by which God orders life of the Heavenly polis in this World. In announcing this all-encompassing Kingdom, Jesus was no using a clever metaphor; He was expressing the literal theme of history—that God was King and the people were His subjects. This tradition dated back to the days of Abraham and the patriarchs, when God made His original covenant with the Jews to be His “holy nation.” Americans, steeped in the tradition of democracy, find a monarchy, even with Christ on the throne, an alien concept. We think in terms of human rulers whose limitless lust for power is a constant peril to humankind. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
However, God is not a mirror reflection of human rulers. He is God—and as such, is entitled to rule over all things. His character, as revealed in the Bible and in the person of Christ, reveals absolute justice, mercy, and love. Prophets promised the coming of Messiah and the eventual establishment of the Kingdom of God. Christ was the fulfillment of the prophecy; He was the final king in David’s royal line. However, Jesus was not just a king for Israel; He was king for all people. His message, then, assumes the ultimate authority humans require: God rules every aspect of what He has made. Life, death, relationships, and Earthly kingdoms are all in His hands. When Christ commanded His followers to “seek first the kingdom of God,” He was exhorting them to seek to be ruled by God and gratefully acknowledge His power and authority over them. That means that the Christian’s goal is not to strive to rule, but to be ruled. While God’s rule is authoritarian, it is also voluntary. The Good News is that the price has been paid, and His Kingdom is open to all who desire admission. If the joyful news of the rule of God is proclaimed, if humans humble themselves and do justice to its claims, if evil is overcome and humans are made free for God, then the Rule of God has already become actual among them, then the Reign of God is in their midst. If every other entity in the Universe and the Universe itself disappeared, God would remain. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
That which always remains the same, never changes, that is reality. Reality is God. THAT is real being which is faultless and partless, and without a single one of the characteristic properties belonging to this physical World. It never varies whereas that World is constantly changing. Such everlasting being is incomparable, unique, and beyond human picturization. THAT is the essence of all things, the base whence, eventually, the Universe is projected. That is the Real which not only is not subject to any change but also would still abide even if the entire Universe vanished. Everything and everyone else must come out of some prior element which traces itself down even to the first and original element, but the Real alone is self-abiding and self-existing. It has its own independent Being. There is no period so far off in the future, no tie so distant in the past, no area anywhere in space, that will be or has been without Being. If humans can find it today, they will find it then as they found it in antiquity. If they commune with it on this Earth, or enter into some relationship with it here, they can do likewise on other planets. Moreover it remains ever the Same, the Unchanged and Unchangeable. Reality being what it is, a gigantic fact which is utterly impregnable against time and change, even the total disappearance of the exponents of that truth which points to it could not alter its own status. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
We must never forget that the entire dynamic movement occurs inseparably within a static blessed repose. Becoming is not apart from Being. Its kinetic movement takes pace in the eternal stillness. World-Mind is forever working in the Universe whereas Mind is forever at rest and its still motionlessness paradoxically makes all activity and motion possible. The infinite unconditioned Essence could never become confined within or subject to the finite limited World-form. The one dwells in a transcendental timelessness whereas the other exists in a continuous time. There cannot be two eternal principles, two ultimate realities, for each will limit the other’s existence and thus deprive it of its absolute character. There is only the One, which is beyond all phenomena and yet includes them. The manifestation of the cosmic order, filled with countless objects and entities though it be, does not in any way or to any extent alter the character of the absolute Reality in which it appears. That character is unvarying—is never reduced to a lower form, never confined in a limited one, never modified by conditions, never deprived of a single iota of its being, substance, amplitude, or quality. It always is what it was. It is the ultimate origin of everything and everyone in this Universe, yet it remains as unchanged by their death as by their birth, by their absence as by their presence. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Everything in the Universe is liable to changes, because it was born and must die. We venerate God because He is not liable to change, being ever-existent and self-subsisting, birthless and deathless. Considered from its own standpoint, the infinite can never manifest as the finite, the Real can never alter its nature and evolve into the unreal; hence the pictures of creation or evolution belong to the realm of dream and illusion. The gran verity is that the Universal self has never incarnated into matter, nor ever shall. It remains what it was, is, must forever be—the Unchanged and Unchangeable. The infinite has never, can never, become the finite. The Real is neither the Many nor the Changing but THAT from which these are both derived. Such a truth will never need to be replaced by a newer one: it will hold its place, and satisfy the searching mind, in a thousand years’ time as much as it does today. Bradley’s errors are: (a) to turn the Absolute into a system or a process, and (b) to identify the Absolute with its contents. God of Gentle hands, with arms held wide in benediction: please come between my enemies and me and join us together in peace. Our God and God of our fathers, may our remembrance and the remembrance of our forefathers come before Thee. Please Remember the Messiah of the house of David, thy servant, and America, Thy holy city, and all Thy people, the house of America. Please grant us deliverance and well being, loving kindness, life and peace on this day and forever. Please restore America back to a land of sanity, prosperity, law and order so we can earn the American Dream, which always includes freedom and homeownership. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
Cresleigh Homes
Whether you’re admiring the guest bedroom or getting ready for spa night in the Primary bedroom’s ensuite, living life at #MillsStation Residence 2 means enjoying clean, modern lines in a familiar family home layout. 😍
Residence Two at Mills Station is a two story home that has all the conveniences of a single story! At 2,317 square feet, this home features the Owner’s suite on the first floor with two secondary bedrooms on the “pop top” second story. Take advantage of the vaulted ceilings offered in this plan! The open floor plan includes three bedrooms, two and a half bathrooms, Home Hub, Loft and more! Walk into the great room and feel the height of the ceilings and all the light brought in from the high windows.
The kitchen opens directly to the dining room allowing for perfect flow. The large kitchen island makes food prep and entertaining easy while the walk in pantry provides ample storage. The kitchen comes fully equipped with a large eat-in island, stainless steel appliances, and quartz counters. The great room is spacious and full of natural light with a covered patio! The Owner’s suite is located on the first floor of this home providing easy access and eliminating the hassle of climbing stairs daily. The Owner’s bathroom is spacious and tranquil including a large free standing soaking tub, walk in shower and large walk-in closet.
This home is designed with Universal Design concepts meaning that its well equipped for life’s transitions and aging in place. Learn more about this unique feature by speaking with a sales associate today!
Check out the interactive floor plan on our website! Link in bio. https://cresleigh.com/mills-station/residence-2/
Sit Down and I Will Tell You a Story, Stand Up and We Will Play a Game!
Some people try to find things in this game that do not exist. Football is two things. It is blocking and tackling. One important class of experiential products will be based on simulated environments that offer the customer a taste of adventure, excitement, titillation or other pleasure without risk to one’s real life or reputation. Thus computer experts, roboteers, designers, historians, architects, automotive engineers, and museum specialists will join to create experiential enclaves that reproduce, as skillfully as sophisticated technology will permit, the splendor of ancient Rome, the pomp of Queen Elizabeth’s court, the traditional arts, ceremonies, calligraphy and flower arranging of Japan, the economic prosperity and rapid development and advancement of China, the rich culture and mysterious of Africa, the superior engineering of Germany, the liveness and flavour of Latin culture, the intelligence of the Middle East, and the hardworking and orderly conduct of America. Customers entering these pleasure domes will leave their everyday clothes (and cares) behind, don costumes, and run through a planned sequence of activities intended to provide them with a first-hand taste of what the original—id est, unstimulated—reality must have felt like. They will be invited, in effect, to live in the past or perhaps even in the future. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
Production of such experiences is closer than one might think. It is clearly foreshadowed in the participatory techniques now being pioneered in the arts. Thus “happenings” in which the members of the audience take part may be regarded as a first stumbling step toward these simulations of the future. The same is true of more formal works as well. When Dionysus in 69 was performed in New York, a critic summed up the theories of its playwright, Richard Schechner, in the following words. “Theater has traditionally said to an audience, ‘Sit down and I will tell you a story.’ Why cannot it also say, ‘Stand up and we will play a game?’” Mr. Schechner’s work, based loosely on Euripides, says precisely this, and that audience is literally invited to join in dancing to celebrate the rites of Dionysus. Artists also have begun to create whole “environments”—works of art into which the audience may actually walk, and inside which things happens. For instance, BMW believes that design should always be a reflection of your identity, and so they make cars with a strong personality. When designing the BMW Concept i4, the goal was to make it organic, and less industrial. In its captivating dynamic, engineers wanted to add more nature-inspired elements. More handworked wood, intelligent fabrics—designs for all the sense so one feels like the cabin of the car is a living room. The artists who produce these are really “experiential engineers.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
Knowledge gained for research on creating experiences will permit the construction of fantastic simulations. However, it will also lead to complex live environments that subject the customer to significant risks and rewards. The African safari today is a colourless example. Future experience designers will, for example, create gambling casinos in which the customer plays not for money, but for experiential payoffs. Certain American television programs, such as Survivor and The Bachelor, already pay players off in experiential rewards. In the future, simulated and non-simulated experiences will also be combined in ways that will sharply challenge human’s grasp of reality. In Ray Bradbury’s vivid novel, Fahrenheit 451, suburban couples desperately save their money to enable them to buy three-wall or four-wall video sets that permit them to enter into a kind of televised psycho-drama. They become actor-participants in soap operas that continue for weeks or months. Their participation in these stories is highly involving. We are, in fact, beginning to move toward the actual development of such “interactive” films with the help of advanced communications technology. The combination of simulation and “reals” will vastly multiply the number and variety of experiential products. However, the great psych-corps of tomorrow will not only sell individual, discrete experiences. They will offer sequences of experiences so organized that their very juxtaposition with other another will contribute colour, harmony or contrast to lives that lack these qualities. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
Beauty, excitement, suspense or delicious sensuality will be programmed to enhance one another. By offering such experiential chains or sequences, the psych-corps (working closely, no doubt, with community mental health centers) will provide partial frameworks for those whose lives are otherwise too chaotic and unstructured. In effect, they will say: “Let us plan (part of) your life for you.” In the transient, change-filled World of tomorrow, that proposition will find many eager takers. Many architects are now designing homes to feel like luxury hotels. These places are all about lifestyles—inviting the community to become part of the property. Adding unique vantage points, creating indoor/outdoor experiences, and making homes larger, function, bright and comfortable is what is making architecture exciting these days. People are always looking for a home that is special, affluent home buyers are seeking homes that are destinations with purpose and meaning, where lifelong memories can be created because luxury is the absence of worry. Home buyers want to know they are in good hands with gorgeous detail abound. Creative space segmentation is necessary, providing both intimae and social zones, as well as furniture delivering comfort and functionality. More extravagant entrance features are emerging, which include large green walls, indoor waterfalls, large chandeliers and multimedia stations. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
No longer is the classic bed-table-closet combo enough to make a guest bedroom or primary bedroom feel inviting. Home buyers are looking for creative offices for those who are business travelers, interesting looking TV panels and an extra sofa or accent chairs next to the king-sized bed are just some of the key ingredients for a trendy guest bedroom or primary bedroom. We have also seen colourful walls and eclectic décor mixes, which can definitely appeal to guests or the home’s primary occupant wanting to experience unique accommodation. Bathrooms stopped being perceived as auxiliary rooms, spaces to be minimized, in order to expand living areas. The modern individual expects more than one got in the past. A resort bathroom with spa-like features is an open invite to relaxation and a sure-proof method of alluring potential buyers through the promise of ephemeral luxury. Think en-suite bedrooms, water fall showers, over-sized bathtubs, dual sinks, giant towels, beauty items and plenty of space. Fewer home builder base the appeal of the kitchen strictly on practicability. Cooking is an art and so should be the exhibition space. We have seen more and more home builders come up with exciting designs and turn the kitchen design into a memorable space. Theme are highly recommended, pushing creativity to new heights. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
Sensory experiences go a log way. Beside open concept, the blurring of indoor-outdoor boundaries is well integrated in the array of services offered by modern homes builders, who strive to keep their indoor-outdoor transition as ethereal as possible. Not only are the offering more windows, larger windows, walls of glass, but also expanding the patio spaces so nature is brought inside in every possible way. Wood paneling, stone decorations, lush greenery, vibrant lawns, indoor waterfalls—these are just some of the elements employed to release the tension of residents. Sustainability is a delicate issue for home owners as they are doing their best to minimize short term costs. However, being ahead of the game is important, which leads to innovative ideas. Over-sized windows for natural lighting, solar panels to conserve electricity, luxury vinyl wood plank floors, and energy efficient appliances are just a few of the trends for staying green. It is a fact that a home will stay in a buyer’s mind for a long time if the accommodation is unique. With this in mind, home builders are offering individual personalized spaces as never before. With home hubs, butler’s pantries, build-in furniture, card rooms, super family rooms, and workspaces in the house. And more than anything, homes should provide comfort, that feeling of being home away from home, in your own home. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
No mater how luxurious, technology friendly and well-themed the home, coziness is a major factor to consider. Wood additions, inspired decorating items, carpets, a fireplace, build-in tables, uniquely shaped kitchen islands all add up to a memorable home. In the World outside of the home, agriculture and the manufacture of goods will become economic backwaters, employing fewer and fewer people. Highly automated, the making and growing of goods will be relatively simple. The design of new goods and the process of coating them with stronger, brighter, more emotion-packed psychological connotations, however, will challenge the ingenuity of tomorrow’s best and most resourceful entrepreneurs. The service sector, as defined today, will be vastly enlarged, and once more the design of psychological rewards will occupy a growing percentage of corporate time, energy, and money. Investment services, such as mutual funds, for example, may introduce elements of experiential gambling to provide both additional excitement and non-economic payoffs to their shareholders. Insurance companies may offer not merely to pay death benefits, but to care for the window or widower for several months after bereavement, providing nurses, psychological counseling and other assistance. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Based on banks of detail data about their customers, they may offer a computerized mating service to help the survivor locate a new life partner. Services, in short, will be greatly elaborated. Attention will be paid to the psychological overtones of every step or component of the product. Finally, we shall watch the irresistible growth of companies already in the experiential field, and the formation of entirely new enterprises, both profit and non-profit, to design, package and distribute planned or programmed experiences. The arts will expand, becoming as Ruskin or Morris might have said, the handmaiden of the industry. Psych-corps and other businesses will employ actors, directors, musicians, and designers in large numbers. Recreational industries will grow, as the whole nature of leisure is redefined in experimental terms. Education, already exploding in size, will become one of the key experiences industries as it is beginning to employ experiential techniques to convey both knowledge and values to the students. The communication and computer industries will find in experiential production a major market for their machines and for their software as well. With COVID-19 and more people working from home and going to school at home, I would expect Cisco TelePresence IX5000 Series to become more people. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
This system allows immersive collaboration beyond the boardroom. Cisco TelePresence IX5000 Series offers a triples screen, high-fidelity audio and video, and rich collaboration tools, and more bandwidth of existing products. The IX5000 Series brings people together to make decisions faster with high-definition video and theater-quality audio. The immersive, lifelike experience increases engagement, which helps teams build relationships and trust. Participants can share multiple content sources on three 70-inche LCD screens. The 4K cameras allow flexible whiteboard placement and the series features industry-first support for H.265 video on a triple-screen product. This product allows people to work from home, teach from home, attend class from home and interact with others as if they are in the same room. In short, those industries that in one way or another associate themselves with behavioural technology, those industries that transcend the production of tangible goods and traditional services, will expand most rapidly. Eventually, the experience-makers will form a basic—if not the basic—sector of the economy. The process of psychologization will be complete. With more people working from home, spending less on transportation, they will be able to afford larger homes with real offices or even classrooms. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
The essence of tomorrow’s economy is an emphasis upon the inner as well as the material need for individuals and groups. This new emphasis will arise not merely from the demands of the consumer, but from the very need of the economy to survive. In a nation where all essential material needs can be filled by perhaps no more than three-fourth or even half of the productive capacity, a basic adjustment is required to keep the economy healthy. It is this convergence of pressures—from the consumer and from those who wish to keep the economy growing—that will propel the techno-societies toward the experiential production of the future. The movement in this direction can be delayed. The poverty-stricken masses of the World may not stand idly by as the World’s favoured few traverse the path toward psychological self-indulgence. There is something morally repellent about one group seeking to gratify itself psychologically, pursuing novel and rarified pleasures, while the majority of humankind lives in wretchedness or starvation. The techno-societies could maintain a more conventional production, shifting resources to environmental quality control, and then launching absolutely massive anti-poverty and foreign assistance programs. By creaming off “excess” productivity and, in effect, giving it away, the factories can be kept running, the agricultural surpluses used up, and the society can continue to focus on the satisfaction of material wants. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
A fifty-year campaign to erase hunger from the World and family planning methods, for example, would not only make excellent moral sense, but would buy the techno-societies badly needed time for an easier transition to the economy of the future. Such a pause might give us tine to contemplate the philosophical and psychological impact of experiential production. If consumers can no longer distinguish clearly between the real and the simulated, if whole stretches of one’s life may be commercially programmed, we enter into a set of psycho-economic problems of breathtaking complexity. These problems challenge our most fundamental beliefs, not merely about democracy or economics, but about the very nature of rationality and sanity. One of the great unasked questions of our time has to do with the balance between vicarious and non-vicarious experience in our lives. No previous generation has been exposed to one-tenth the amount of vicarious experiences that we lavish on ourselves and our children today, and no one, anywhere, has any real idea about the impact of this monumental shift on personality. Our children mature physically more rapidly than we did. The age of first menstruation continues to drop four to six month every decade. The population grows taller sooner. It is clear that many of our young people, products of television and instance accesses to oceans of information, also become precocious intellectually. However, what happens to emotion development as the ratio of vicarious experience to “real” experience rises? Does the step-up of vicariousness contribute to emotional maturity? Or does it, in fact, make it as slow as molasses on a Winter’s day? #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
And what, then, happens when an economy in search of a new purpose, seriously begins to enter into the production of experience for their own sake, experience that blur the distinction between the vicarious and the non-vicarious, the simulated and the real? One of the definitions of sanity, itself, is the ability to tell real from unreal. Shall we need a new definition? We must begin to reflect on these problems, for unless we do—and perhaps even if we do—service will in the end triumph over manufacture, and experiential production over service. The growth of the experiential sector might just be an inevitable consequence of affluence. For the satisfaction of human’s elemental material needs opens the way for new, more sophisticated gratifications. We are moving from a “gut” economy to a “psyche” economy because there is only so much gut to be satisfied. Beyond this, we are also moving swiftly in the direction of a society in which objects, things, physical constructs, are increasingly transient. Not merely human’s relationships with them, but the very things themselves. It may be that experiences are the only products which, once brought by the consumer, cannot be taken away from one, cannot be disposed of like non-returnable soda pop bottles or nicked razor blades. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
For the ancient Japanese nobility every flower, every serving bowl or obi, was freighted with surplus meaning; each carried a heavy load of coded symbolism and ritual significance. The movement toward the psychologization of manufactured goods takes us in this direction; but it collides with the powerful thrust toward transience that makes the objects themselves so perishable. Thus we shall find it easier to adorn our services with symbolic significance than our products. And, in the end, we shall pass beyond the service economy, beyond the imagination of today’s economists; we shall become the first culture in history to employ high technology to manufacture than most transient, yet lasting of products: the human experience. The flood of novelty about to crash down upon us will spread from universities and research centers to factories and offices, from the marketplace and mass media into our social relationships, from the community into the home. Penetrating deep into our private lives, it will place absolutely unprecedented strains on the family itself. The family has been called the “giant shock absorber” of society—the place to which the bruised and battered individual returns after doing battle with the World, the one stable point in an increasingly flux-filled environment. As the super-age of information revolution unfolds, this “shock absorber” will come in for some of its own shocks. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
Social critics have a field day speculating about the family. The family is “near the point of complete extinction,” says Ferdinand Lundberg, author of The Coming World Transformation. “The family is dead except for the first year or two of child raising,” according to psychoanalyst William Wolf. “This will be its only function.” Pessimists tell us what will take place. Family optimists, in contrast, contend that the family, having existed all this time, will continue to exist. Some go so far as to argue that the family is in for a Golden Age. As leisure spreads, they theorize, families will spend more time together and will derive great satisfaction from joint activity. “The family that play together, stays together,” et cetera. A more sophisticated view hold that the very turbulence of tomorrow will drive people deeper into their families. “People will marry for stable structure,” says Dr. Irwin M. Greenberg, Professor of psychiatry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. According to this view, the family serves as one’s “portable root,” anchoring one against the storm of change. In short, the more transient and novel the environment, the more important the family will become. It may be that both ideas in this debate are wrong. For the future is more open than it might appear. #RandolphHrris 14 of 21
The family may neither vanish nor enter upon new Golden Age. It may—and this far more likely—break up, shatter, only to come together again in weird and novel ways. If tribulation is a necessary element in redemption, we must anticipate that it will never cease till Go sees the World to be either redeemed or no further redeemable. A Christian cannot, therefore, believe any of those who promise that if only some reform in our economic, political, or hygienic system were made, a Heaven on Earth would follow. This might seem to have a discouraging effect on the social worker, but it is not found in practice to discourage one. On the contrary, a strong sense of our common miseries, simply as humans, is at last as good a spur to the removal of all the miseries we can, as any of those wild hopes which tempt humans to seek their realization by breaking the moral law and prove such dust and ashes when they are realized. If applied to individual life, the doctrine that an imagined Heaven on Earth is necessary for vigorous attempts to remove present evil, would at once reveal is absurdity. Hungry human seeks food and sick humans healing none the less because they know that after the meal of the cure the ordinary ups and downs of life still await them. I am not, of course, discussing whether very drastic changes in our social system are, or are not, desirable; I am only reminder the reader that a particular medicine is not to be mistake for the elixir of life. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
Since political issues have here crossed our path, it is clear that the Christian doctrine of self-surrender and obedience is a purely theological, and not in the least a political, doctrine. Of forms of government, of civil authority and civil obedience, I have nothing to say. The kind and degree of obedience which a creatures owes to its Creator is unique because the relation between creature and Creator is unique: no inference can be drawn from it to any political proposition whatsoever. The Christian doctrine of suffering explains, I believe, a very curious fact about the World we live in. The settled happiness and security which we all desire, God withholds from us by the very nature of the World: but joy, pleasure, and merriment, He has scattered broadcast. We are never safe, but we have plenty of fun, and some ecstasy. It is not hard to see why. The security we crave would teach us to rest our hearts in the World and oppose an obstacle to our return to God: a few moments of happy love, a landscape, a symphony, a merry meeting with out friends, a bathe or a football match, have no such tendency. Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home. We must never mistake the problem of pain worse than it is by vague talk about the “unimaginable sum of human misery.” When a human hesitates too long over taking a course which intuition tells one, he or she should take, and in which one’s higher life is concerned, it may be that destiny will intervene and make one suddenly realize that this is the way, and that all doubts should be thrown out. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
An intuition may be sudden and unexpected, quite contrary to the line of previous thought about the matter. This is certainly true of many appearances but it is not true of other ones. An intuition may come into the mind apparently by hazard, unsummoned, experience. Every thought which comes down to us from that serene height comes with a divine authority and penetrating force which are absent from all other thoughts. We receive the visitant with eagerness and obey it with confidence. There is no such thing as a sum of suffering, for no one suffers it. When we have reached he maximum that a single person can suffer, we have, no doubt, reached something horrible, but we have reached all the suffering there ever can be in the Universe. The addition of a million sufferers adds no more pain. Intuition is not the equal but rather the superior of all other human faculties. It delivers the gentlest of whispers, commands from the Overself, whereas the other faculties merely carry them out. It is the master, they are the servants. The intellect things, the will works, and the emotion drives towards the fulfilment of intuitively felt guidance in the properly developed spiritually erect human. Of all evils, pain only is sterilized or disinfected evil. Intellectual evil, or error, may recur because the cause of the first error (such as fatigue or bad handwriting) continues to operate; but quite apart from that, error in its own right breeds error—if the first step in an argument is wrong, everything that follows will be wrong. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
Sin may recur because the original temptation continues: but quite apart from that, sin of its very nature breeds sin by strengthening sinful habit and weakening the conscience. Now pain, like the other evils, may of course recur because the cause of the first pain (disease, or an enemy) is still operative: but pain has no tendency, in its own right, to proliferate. When it is over, it is over, and the natural sequel is joy. This distinction may be put the other way round. After an error you need not only to remove the causes (the fatigue or bad writing) but also to correct the error itself: after a sin you must not only, if possible, remove the temptation, you must also go back and repent the sin itself. In each case an “undoing” is required. Pain requires no such undoing. You may need to heal the disease which caused it, but the pain, once over is sterile—whereas every uncorrected error and unrepented sin is, in its own right, a fountain of fresh error and fresh sin flowing on to the end of time. Again, when I err, my error infects every one who believes me When I sin publicly, every spectator either condones it, thus sharing my guilt, or condemns it with imminent danger to one’s charity and humility. However, suffering naturally produces in the spectators (unless they are unusually depraved) no bad effect, but a good one—piety. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
Thus that evil which God chiefly uses to produce the “complex good” is most markedly disinfected, or deprived of that proliferous tendency which is the worst characteristic of evil in general. The Real is forever and unalterably the same, whether it be the unmanifest Void or the manifested World. It has never been born and consequently can never die. It cannot divide itself into different “realities” with different space-time levels or multiply itself beyond its own primal oneness. It cannot evolve or diminish, improve or deteriorate. Whereas everything else exists in dependence upon Mind and exists for a limited time, however prolonged, and therefore has only a relative existence, Mind is the absolute, the unique, the ultimate reality because with all its innumerable manifestations in the Universe it has never at any moment ceased to be itself. Only its appearances suffers change because they are in time and space, never itself, which is out of time and space. The divisions of time into past, present, and future are meaningless here; we may speak only of its “everness.” The truth about it is timeless, as no scientific truth could ever be, in the sense that whatever fate the Universe undergoes its own ultimate significance remains unchanged. If the Absolute appears to us as the first in the time-series, as the First Cause of the Universe, this is only true from our limited standpoint. It is in fact only our human idea. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
The human mind can take itself the truth of transcendental being only by taking out of itself the screens of time, space, and person. For being eternally self-existence, reality is utterly timeless. Space divisions are equally unmeaning in its “Be-ness.” The Absolute is both everywhere and nowhere. It cannot be considered in spatial terms. Even the word “infinite” is really such a term. If it is used here because no other is available, let me be clearly understood, then, that it is used merely as a suggestive metaphor. If the infinite did not include the finite then it would be less than infinite. It is erroneous to make them both mutually exclusive. The finite alone must exclude the infinite from its experience but not vice versa. In the same way the infinite Duration does not exclude finite time. Hence, corruption and defects in natural things are said to be contrary to some particular nature; yet they are in keeping with the plan of universal nature; inasmuch as the defect in one thing yields to the good of another, or even to the universal good: for the corruption of ne is the generation of another, and through this it is that a species is kept in existence. Since God, then, provides universally for all being, it belongs to His providence to permit certain defects in particular effects, that the perfect good of the Universe may not be hindered, for if all evil were prevented, much god would be absent from the Universe. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
A lion would cease to life, if there were no slaying of animals; and there would be no patience of martyrs if there were no tyrannical persecution. Thus Augustine says (Enchiridion 2): “Almighty God would in wo wise permit evil to exist in His works, unless He were so almighty and so good as to produce good even from evil.” It would appear that is was on account of these two arguments to which we have just replied, that some were persuaded to consider corruptible things—exempli gratia, casual evil things—as removed from the care of divine providence. Dear Lord in Heaven, your bow’s swift arrows: are they blessing or destruction? Please show your blasting face to those who need it. Please show your blessing face to those who deserve it. Whether beating down mercilessly or shining benevolently, please bring what is right to each, God. Whether by fighting off enemies or singing them to peace, please be my protector, and I will always speak sweety of You. Our God and God of our fathers, please accept our rest. Please Sanctify us through Thy commandments, and please grant our portion in Thy Torah. Please give us abundantly of Thy goodness and please make us rejoice in Thy salvation. Please purify our hearts to serve Thee in truth. In Thy loving favour, O Lord our God, please grant that Thy holy Sabbath be our joyous heritage, and may America who sanctifies Thy name, rest thereon. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who hallowest the Sabbath. O Lord our God, please be gracious unto Thy people of America and accept their prayer. Please restore the worship to Thy sanctuary and receive in love and favour the supplication of America. May the worships of Thy people be ever acceptable unto Thee. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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If You Do His Work, You Must Prepare for His Wages!
I must be getting absent-minded. Whenever I complain that things are not what they used to be, I always forget to include myself. The theory of civil disobedience is designed only for a special case of a nearly just society, one that is well-ordered for the most part but in which some serious violations of justice nevertheless do occur. A state of near justice requires a democratic regime, and the theory concerns the role and the appropriateness of civil disobedience to legitimately established democratic authority. It does not apply to the other forms of government nor, except incidentally, to other kinds of dissent or resistance. It is not necessary to discuss this mode of protect, along with militant action and resistance, as a tactic for transforming or even overturning an unjust and corrupt system. There is no difficulty about such action in this case. If any means to this end are justified, then surely nonviolent opposition is justified. The problem of civil disobedience, arises only within a more or less just democratic state for those citizens who recognize and accept the legitimacy of the constitution. The difficulty is one of a conflict of duties. At what point does the duty to comply with laws enacted by a legislative majority (or with executive acts supported by such a majority) cease to be binding in view of the right to defend one’s liberties and the duty to oppose injustice? This question involves the nature and limits of majority rule. For this reason the problem of civil disobedience is a crucial test case for any theory of the moral basis of democracy. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
A constitutional theory of civil disobedience has three parts. First, it defines this kind of dissent and separated it from other forms of opposition to democratic authority. These rand from legal demonstrations and infractions of law designed to raise test cases before the courts to militant action and organized resistance. A theory specifies the place of civil disobedience in this spectrum of possibilities. Next, it set out the grounds of civil disobedience and the conditions under which such action is justified in a (more or less) just democratic regime. And finally, a theory should explain the role of civil disobedience within a constitutional system and account for the appropriateness of this mode of protest within a free society. As a word of caution, we should not expect too much of a theory of civil disobedience, even one framed for special circumstances. Precise principles that straightway decide actual cases are clearly out of the question. Instead, a useful theory defines a perspective within which the problem of civil disobedience can be approached; it identifies the relevant considerations and helps us to assign them their correct weights in the more important instances. If a theory about these matters appears to us, on reflection, to have cleared our vision and to have made our considered judgments more coherent, then it has been worthwhile. The theory has done what, for the present, ne may reasonably expect it to do: namely, to narrow the disparity between the conscientious convictions of those who accept the basic principles of a democratic society. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
Civil disobedience as a public, nonviolent, conscientious yet political act contrary to law is usually done with the aims of being about change in the law or policies of the government. Civil disobedience can also be considered a deliberate, discriminate violations of the law for a vital social purpose. By acting in this way one addresses the sense of justice of the majority of the community and declares that in one’s considered opinion the principles of social cooperation among free and equal humans are not being respected. A preliminary gloss on this definition is that it does not require that the civilly disobedient act breach the same law that is being protested. It allows for what some have called indirect as well as direct civil disobedience. And this definition should do, as there are sometimes strong reasons for not infringing on the law or policy held to be unjust. Instead, one may disobey traffic ordinances or laws of trespass as a way of presenting one’s case. Thus, if the government enacts a vague and harsh statue against treason, it would not be appropriate to commit treason as a way of objecting to it, and in any event, the penalty might be far more than one should reasonably be ready to accept. In other cases there is no way to violate the government’s policy directly, as when it concerns foreign affairs, or affects another part of the country. A second gloss is that the civilly disobedient act is indeed thought to be contrary to law, at least in the sense that those engaged in it are not simply presenting a test case for a constitutional decision; they are prepared to oppose the statue if it should be upheld. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
To be sure in a constitutional regime, the courts may finally side with the dissenters and declare the law or policy objected to unconditional. It often happens, then, that there is some uncertainty as to whether the dissenters’ action will be held illegal or not. However, this is merely a complicating element. Those who use civil disobedience to protest unjust laws are not prepared to desist should the courts eventually disagree with them, however pleased they might have been with the opposite decision. It should also be noted that civil disobedience is a political act noted that civil disobedience is a political act not only in the sense that it is addressed to the majority that holds political power, but also because it is an act guided and justified by political principles, that is, by the principles of justice which regulate the constitution and social institutions generally. In justifying civil disobedience one does not appeal to principles of personal morality or to religious doctrines, though these may coincide with and support one’s claims; and it goes without saying that civil disobedience cannot be ground solely on group or self-interest. Instead one invokes the commonly shared conception of justice that underlies the political order. It is assumed that in a reasonably just democratic regime there is a public conception of justice by reference to which citizens regulate their political affairs and interpret the constitution. The persistent and deliberate violation of the basic principles of this conception over any extended period of time, especially the infringement of the fundamental equal liberties, invites either submission or resistance. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
By engaging in civil disobedience a minority forces the majority to consider whether it wishes to have its actions construed in this ways, or whether, in view of the common sense of justice, it wishes to acknowledge the legitimate claims of the minority. A further point is that civil disobedience is a public act. Not only is it addressed to public principles, it is done in public. It is engaged in openly with fair notice; it is not covert or secretive. One may compare it to public speech, and being a form of address, an expression of profound and conscientious political conviction, it takes place in the public forum. For this reason, among others, civil disobedience is nonviolent. It tries to avoid the use of violence, especially against persons, not from the abhorrence of the use of force in principle, but because it is a final expression of one’s case. To engage in violent acts likely to injure and to hurt is incompatible with civil disobedience as a mode of address. Indeed, any interference with the civil liberties of others tends to obscure the civilly disobedient quality of one’s act. Sometimes if the appeal fails in its purpose, forceful resistance may later be entertained. Yet civil disobedience is giving voice to conscientious and deeply held convictions; while it may warn and admonish, it is not itself a threat. Civil disobedience is nonviolent for another reason. It expresses disobedience to law within the limits of fidelity to law, although it is at the outer edge of theory. The law is broken, but fidelity to law is expressed by the public and nonviolent nature of the act, by the willingness to accept the legal consequences of one’s conduct. One should be willing to undergo the legal consequences for the sake of fidelity to law. The charge may be contested in court, should this prove appropriate. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
This fidelity to law helps to establish to the majority that the act is indeed politically conscientious and sincere, and that it is intended to address the public’s sense of justice. To be completely open and nonviolent is to give bond of one’s sincerity, for it is not easy to convince another that one’s acts are conscientious, or even to be sure of this before oneself. No doubt it is possible to imagine a legal system in which conscientious belief that the law is unjust is accepted as a defense for noncompliance. Humans of great honesty with full confidence in one another might make such a system work. However, as things are, such a scheme would presumably be unstable even in a state of near justice. We must pay a certain prince to convince others that our actions have, in our carefully considered view, a sufficient moral basis in the political convictions of the community. Civil disobedience has been defined so that it falls between legal protest and the raising of test cases on the one side, and conscientious refusal and the various forms of resistance on the other. In this range of possibilities it stands for that form of dissent at the boundary of fidelity to law. Civil disobedience, so understood, is clearly distinct from militant actions and obstruction; it is far removed from organized forcible resistance. The militant, for example, is much more deeply opposed to the existing political system. One does not accept it as one which is nearly just or reasonable so; one believes either that it departs widely from its professed principles or that it pursues a mistake conception altogether. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
While one’s action is conscientious in its own terms, one does not appeal to the sense of justice of the majority (or those having effective political power), since one thinks that their sense of justice is erroneous, or else without effect. Instead, one seeks by well-framed militant acts of disruption and resistance, and the like, to attack the prevalent view of justice or to force a movement in the desired direction. Thus the militant may try to evade the penalty, since one is not prepare to accept the legal consequences of one’s violation of the law; this would not only be to play into the hands of forces that one believes cannot be trusted, but also to express a recognition of the legitimacy of the constitution to which one is opposed. In this sense militant action is not within the bounds of fidelity to law, but represents a more profound opposition to the legal order. The basic structure is thought to be so unjust or else to depart so widely from its own professed ideals that one must try to prepare the way for radical or even revolution change. And this is to be done by trying to arouse the public to an awareness of the fundamental reforms that need to be made. Now in certain circumstances militant action and other kinds of resistance are surely justified. The year 2100 A.D. is closer to us in time than the great depression, yet the World’s economists, traumatized by it, 9/11, the recession of 2008, and the COVID-19 crisis, remain frozen in their attitudes of the past. Economist, even those who talk the language of revolution, are peculiarly conservative creatures. If it were possible to pry from their brains their collective image of the economy of, say, the year 2125, it would look very much like that of 2010—only more so. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
Conditioned to think in straight lines, economists have great difficulty imagining alternatives to communism and capitalism. They see in the growth of large-scale organizations nothing more than a linear expansion of old-fashion bureaucracy. They see technological advance as a simple, non-revolutionary extension of the known. Born of scarcity, trained to think in terms of limited resources, they can hardly conceive of a society in which human’s basic material wants have been satisfied. One reason for their lack of imagination is that when they think about technological advance, they concentrate solely on the means of economic activity. Yet the super-age of information revolution challenges the ends as well. It threatens to alter not merely the “how” of production but they “why.” It will, in short, transform the very purposes of economic activity. Before such an upheaval, even the most sophisticated tools of today’s economists are helpless. Input-output tables, econometric models—the whole paraphernalia of analysis that economists employ simply do not come to grips with the external forces—political, social and ethical—that will transform economic life in the decades before us. What does “productivity” or “efficiency” mean in a society that places a high value on psychic fulfillment? What happens to an economy, when, as is likely, the entire concept of property is reduced to meaninglessness? #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
How economies likely to be affected by the rise of supra-national planning, taxing, and regulatory agencies or by a kind of dialectical return to “cottage industry” based on the most advanced cybernetic technologies? Most important, what happens when “no growth” replaces “growth” as an economic objective, When Gross National Product (GNP) ceases to be the holy grail? Only by stepping outside the framework of orthodox economic thought and examining these possibilities can we begin to prepare for tomorrow. And among these, none is more central than the shift in values that is likely to accompany the super-industrial revolution. Under conditions of scarcity, humans struggle to meet their immediate material needs. Today under more affluent conditions, we are reorganizing the economy to deal with a new level of human needs. From a system designed to provide material satisfaction, we are rapidly creating an economy geared to the provision of psychic gratification. This process of “psychologization,” one of the central themes of the super-age of information revolution, has been all but overlooked by the economists. Yet it will result in a novel, surprise-filled economy unlike any human has ever experienced. The issues raised by it will reduce the great conflict of the twenty-first century, the conflict between capitalism and communism, to comparative insignificance. For these issues sweep far beyond economic or political dogma. They involve, as we shall see, nothing less than sanity, the human organism’s ability to distinguish illusion from reality. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
Much excitement has accompanied the discovery that once a techno-society reaches a certain stage of informational development, it begins to shift energies into automation and autonomy. Many experts see in the services the wave of the future. They suggest the many retail, jobs, food service jobs and manual labor jobs, even news broadcasting, teaching, many aspects of medical care, and law enforcement will be handled by androids and other machines—a prophecy already on its way toward fulfillment. Actors and musicians are expected to be replaced by holograms. What the economists, however, have not done, is ask the obvious question. Where does the economy go next? After the services, what? The high technology nations must, in coming years, direct vast resources to rehabilitating their physical environment and improving what has come to be called “the quality of life.” The fight against air and noise pollution, aesthetic blight, crowding, noise and dirt will clearly absorb tremendous energies. However, in addition to the provision of these public goods, we can also anticipate a subtle change in the character of production for private use. They very excitement aroused by the mushrooming growth of the service sector has diverted professional attention from another shift that will deeply affect both goods and services in the future. It is this shift that will lead to the net forward movement of the economy, the growth of a strange new sector based on what can only be called the “experience industries.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
For the key to post-service economies lies in the psychologization of all production, beginning with manufacture. One of the curious facts about the production in all the techno-societies today, and especially the United States of America, is that goods are increasingly designed to yield psychological “extras” for the consumer. Technology becomes a Veblen good. As the demand of technology increases, which is a luxury good and also a necessity with new products, the price also increases. The future will be packed with positional good, which are goods valued only by how they are distributed among the population, not by how many of them there are available in total (as would be the case with other consumer goods). The source of greater worth of positional goods is their desirability as a status symbol, which usually results in them greatly exceeding the value of comparable good. Various goods have been described as positional in a given capitalist society, such as gold, real estate, diamonds, and luxury goods. More formally in economics, positional goods are a subset of economic goods whose consumption (and subsequent utility), also conditioned by Veblen-like pricing, depends negatively on consumption of those same goods by others. In particular, for these goods the value is at least in part (if not exclusively) a function of its ranking in desirability by others, in comparison to substitutes. Therefore, new is not always better. It depends on the status and ranking of an item you possess. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
The term-Veblen good is sometimes extended to include services and non-material possession that may alter one’s social status and that are deemed highly desirable when enjoyed by a relatively few in a community, such as college degrees, Cresleigh Homes, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, big trucks, college degrees, achievements, awards, memberships to exclusive clubs, et cetera. The manufacturer adds a “psychic load” to one’s basic product, and the consumer gladly pays for this intangible benefit. A classic example is the case of the appliance or auto manufacturer who adds buttons, knobs, touch screens, dials to the control panel or dashboard, to replace basic tools that are slightly out of fashion. Or home builders who add luxury features to their new homes like butler’s panties, California rooms, coded entry doors, surveillance systems and other luxury features like stained glass, floor to ceiling windows, and so forth. The manufacturer has learned that increasing the number of gadgets and features, up to a point, gives the operator of the machine or home the sense of controlling a more complex device, and hence a feeling of increased mastery. This psychological payoff is designed into the product. Conversely, pains are taken not to deprive the consumer of an existing psychological benefit. Thus a large American food company proudly launched a labour-saving, add-water-only cake mix. The company was amazed when women rejected the product in favour of mixes that require extra labour—the addition of an egg along with the water. By inserting powered egg in the factory, the company had oversimplified the task of the housewife, depriving her of the sense of creatively participating in the cake-baking process. The powered egg was hastily eliminated, and women went happily back to cracking their own eggs. Once again a product was modified to provide a psychic benefit. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
Examples like these can be multiplied endlessly in almost any major industry, from soap and clothing stores to dishwashers and diet colas. According to Dr. Emanuel Demby, president of Motivational Programmers, Incorporated, a research firm employed in the United States of America and Europe by such blue-chip corporations as General Electric, Caltex, and IBM, “The engineering of psychological factors into manufactured goods will be a hallmark of production in the future—not only in consumer goods, but in industrial hardware. “Even the big cranes and derricks built today embody this principle. Their cabs are streamlined, slick like something out of the twenty-first century. Cater-pillar, International Harvester, Ferguson—all of them. Why? These mechanical monsters do not dig better or hoist better because the cab is aesthetically improved. However, the contractor who buys them likes it better. The men who work on them like it better. The contractor’s customers like it better. So even the manufacturers of earthmoving equipment begin to pay attention to non-utilitarian—id est, psychological—factors.” Beyond this, Dr. Demby asserts, manufacturers are devoting more attention to reducing tensions that accompany the use of certain products. Manufacturers of sanitary napkins, for example, know that women have a fear of stopping up the toilet when disposing of them. “A new product ha been developed,” he says, “that instantly dissolves on contact with water. It does not perform its basic function any better. However, it relieves some of the anxiety that went with it. This is psychological engineering if ever there was any!” #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
Affluent consumers are willing and able to pay for such niceties. As disposable income rises, they become progressively less concerned with price, progressively more insistent on what they call “quality.” For many products quality can still be measured in the traditional terms of workmanship, durability and materials. However, for a fast-growing class of products, such differences are virtually undetectable. Blindfolded, the consumer cannot distinguish Brand A from Brand B. Nevertheless, she often argues fiercely that one is superior to another. This paradox vanishes once the psychic component of production is taken int account. For even when they are otherwise identical, there are likely to be marked psychological differences between one product and another. Advertisers strive to stamp each product with its own distinct image. These images are functional: they fill a need on the part of the consumer. The need is psychological, however, rather than utilitarian in ordinary sense. Thus we find that the term “quality” increasingly refers to the ambience, the status associations—in effect, the psychological connotations of the product. As more and more of the basic material needs of the consumer are met, it is strongly predictable that even more economic energy will be directed at meeting the consumer’s subtle, varied and quite personal needs for beauty, prestige, individuation, and sensory delight. The manufacturing sector will channel ever greater resources into the conscious design of psychological distinctions and gratifications. They psychic component of goods production will assume increasing importance. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
A merciful human aims at one’s neighbour’s good and so does “God’s will,” consciously co-operating with “the simple good.” A cruel human oppresses one’s neighbour, and so does simple evil. However, in doing such evil, one is used by God, without one’s own knowledge or consent, to produce the complex good—so that the first human serves God as a son (or child), and the second as a tool. For you will certainly carry out God’s purpose, however you act, but it makes a difference to you whether you serve like Judas or like John. The whole system is, so to speak, calculated for the clash between good humans and bad humans, and the good fruits of fortitude, patience, pity and forgiveness for which the cruel human is permitted to be cruel, presuppose that the good human ordinarily continues to seek simple good. I say “ordinarily” because a human is sometimes entitled to hurt (or even, in my opinion, to kill) one’s fellow, but only where the necessity is urgent and the good to be attained obvious, and usually (though not always) when one who inflicts the pain has a definite authority to do so—a parent’s authority derived from nature, a magistrate’s or soldier’s derived from civil society, or a surgeon’s derived, most often, from the patient. To turn this into a general charter for afflicting humanity because the affliction is good for them is not indeed to break the Divine scheme but to volunteer for the post of Satan within that scheme. If you do his work, you must prepare for his wages. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
The problem about avoiding our own pain admis a similar solution. Some ascetics have used self-torture. As a layman, I offer no opinion on the prudence of such a regimen; but I insist that, whatever its merits, self-torture is quite a different thing from tribulation sent by God. Everyone knows that fasting is a different experience from missing your dinner by accident or through poverty. Fasting asserts the will against the appetite—the reward being self-mastery and the danger pride: involuntary hunger subjects appetite and will together to the Divine will, furnishing an occasion for submission and exposing us to the danger or rebellion. However, the redemptive effect of suffering lies chiefly in its tendency to reduce the rebel will. Ascetic practices, which in themselves strengthen the will, are only useful in so far as they enable the will to put its own house (the passions) in order, as a preparation for offering the whole human to God. They are necessary as a means; as an end, they would be abominable, for in substituting will for appetite and there stopping, they would merely exchange the animal self for the diabolical self. It was, therefore, truly said that only God can mortify. Tribulation does its work in a World where human beings are ordinarily seeking, by lawful means, to avoid their own natural evil and to attain their natural god, and presuppose such a World. In order to submit the will to God, we must have a will and that will must have objects. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Christian renunciation does not mean stoic “Apathy,” but a readiness to prefer God to inferior ends which are in themselves lawful. Hence the Perfect Man brought to Gethsemane a will, and a strong will, to escape suffering and death is such escape were compatible with the Father’s will, combined with a perfect readiness for obedience if it were not. Some of the saints recommend a total renunciation at the very threshold of our discipleship; but I think this can mean only a total readiness for every particular renunciation that may be demanded, for it would not be possible to live from moment to moment willing nothing but submission to God as such. What would be the material for the submission? It would seem self-contradictory to say “What I will is to subject what I will to God’s will,” for the second what has no content. Doubtless we all spend too much care in the avoidance of our own pain: but a duly subordinated intention to avoid it, using lawful means, is in accordance with nature—that is, with the whole working system of creaturely life for which the redemptive work of tribulation is calculated. It would be quite false, therefore, to suppose that the Christian view of suffering is incompatible with the strongest emphasis on our duty to leave the World, even in a temporal sense, better than we found it. In the fullest parabolic picture which He gave to the Judgment, Our Lord seems to reduce all virtue to active beneficence: and though it would be misleading to take that one picture in isolation from the Gospel as a whole, it is sufficient to place beyond doubt the basic principles of the social ethics of Christianity. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
Before Abraham was God. God is a higher mentalism. “I am” points to the eternal One where no individual entity ever was, is, or shall be. Philosophy raises the questions of Reality and pursues it until an answer can be found. That answer assets there is something unique which alone can be the Real, which ever was, is, and shall be. Philosophy’s fundamental postulate is that there is but one ultimate Power, one sublime Reality, one transcendent Being. It is invisible to all, since it is the power that makes the World visible. It is without form, since it is the Substance out of which all forms are made. The Real is unique—the only undivided, unsplit being beyond which there is nothing else. There is nothing else either beyond it or besides it. It is the unique not only because of what IT is but also because two statements concerning IT can be quite contradictory, yet each can still be correct! Ne transcends all categories. Since the Real is unique, the One without a second and not the One which is related to the Many that spring out of it, it cannot correctly be set up in opposition to the Unreal, the Illusory, the Appearance. They are not on the same level. That which both Greek Plato and Indian Vedantin called “the One” did not refer to the beginning figure of a series, but to “One-without-a-Second.” It is unique. There is nothing to which it can be justly likened, or with which it can be compared. This must be so since it goes beyond and transcends all things without any exception. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
Whatever is said of it will only succeed in describing an idea in the mind of the sayer, and this goes beyond and transcends all ideas, again without any exception. You can compare one being or one thing with another but not This, not This! There is a Mind which is self-existent, unique, unlike anything else, unbegotten. The Universal Mind is also unique in that, while comprehending all things, it is itself incomprehensible. It stands alone, unique, unseen and untouchable. Yet from it emerge all the gods of all the planets which they govern, all the ethical injunctions which humans need and must in the end. Please stand about me, your protective spirits, on all six sides, please establish your guards. From all dangers, no matter from what quarter, whether from above or below, please keep me safe. My Lord at my right hand, and my Lord at my left: please be with me throughout my life, watching over me by night and by day. Thy dwelling there forever. Mayest Thou be exalted and sanctified in Jerusalem, Thy city, throughout all generations and to all eternity. O please let our eyes behold the establishment of Thy kingdom, according to the word that was spoken in the inspired Psalms of David, Thy righteous anointed: The Lord shall reign forever. Thy God, O American, shall be Sovereign unto all generations. Hallelujah! Unto all generations we will declare Thy greatness and to all eternity we will proclaim Thy holiness. Our mouth shall ever speak Thy praise, O our God, for Thou art a great and holy God and King. Your arms are strong, Father; they can hug a child or restrain one from harm. Please Wrap them about me: I trust You to know which is needed. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, the holy King. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
CRESLEIGH RANCH: BRIGHTON STATION– Rancho Cordova, CA
3-5 Beds 3-3.5 Bath 2,054-3,634 Square Feet
Brighton Station at Cresleigh Ranch is Rancho Cordova’s newest home community! This charming neighborhood offers an array of home types with eye catching architecture styles such as Mid-Century Modern, California Modern, Prairie, and Contemporary Farmhouse.
Located off Douglas Road and Rancho Cordova Parkway, the residents of Cresleigh Ranch will enjoy, being just minutes from shopping, dining, and entertainment, and quick access to Highway 50 and Grant Line Road providing a direct route into Folsom. Residents here also benefit from no HOA fees, two community parks and the benefits of being a part of the highly-rated Elk Grove Unified School District.
Best of all, each Cresleigh home comes fully equipped with an All Ready connected home! This smart home package comes included with your home and features great tools including: video door bell and digital deadbolt for the front door, connect home hub so you can set scenes and routines to make life just a little easier. Two smart switches and USB outlets are also included, plus we’ll gift you a Google Home Hub and Google Mini to help connect everything together!
Randolph Harris II International Institute 