No knowledge can have for its object the absurdity that the eternal is the historical. It is impossible for two persons to be constituted so much alike, but that one of them should have a more genuine and instantaneous relish for one sort of excellence, and another for another. It contributes greatly towards a person’s moral and intellectual health, to be brought into habits of companionship with individuals unlike themselves, who care little for one’s pursuits, and whose sphere and abilities one must go out of oneself to appreciate. I went out shopping today. Why did you not tell me about all of the book? While out walking, I turned a corner and was confronted with a street packed full of book shops. You may laugh, but even if I were to have let my imagination run loose, I never would have conjured up an image of an entire stored filled with nothing but books. What power is able to hold in chains a mind ardent and determined? What power can cause that individual to die, whose whole soul commands one to continue to live? I am afraid I looked quite the country yokel, standing in the doorway of the first establishment I entered, staring around me goggle-eye at the shelves upon shelves. #RandolphHarris 1 of 9

I was enthralled by all of the knowledge, purported proofs of the existence of God, metaphysical systems interpreting what is accepted on faith, and historical and psychological evidences about the nature of religion and its effects on believers, which offered rational explanations of even justifications of what has already been accepted on faith. It was some time before I remerged from the bookshop, blinking, into the sunlight that seemed to sting my eyes and cause them to become crimsoned. However, it was incomprehensible and contrary to reason for the rest of the day I traipsed from one end of the Castle’s bookshop to the other, ducking into every single room in the place that was filled with books, and not leaving without buying at least one thing. I became quite adept at saying, in an offhand sort of way, “Send the in my hotel” and was flabbergasted at the stack of parcels awaiting me at the hotel that evening. I puzzled over what to get for you, my dear, as I know that you have only limited amount of room in your kit bag. All a person really needs to get them through the vagaries of life are the Bible and William Shakespeare (both of them). Sometimes I forget that it modern times, we also require music to get by. #RandolphHarris 2 of 9

Music is a natural magic, as distinct from the demonic magic that all Christians must renounce. Music uses air in its physical medium, and it resembles spirits. Music bridges a gateway with the soul, as the strings of lyre are made to resonate with the cosmic tones of the planets, stars, and the heart and communicate with these higher powers through this magical realm where words are but pictures of our thoughts. You get a lovely sense of the artist’s superstitions and almost primitive lifestyle. In some cases, when magicians cause strange effect by calling on the assistance of non-human person, the magic is demonic; in others, when strange effects come from manipulating physical objects rather than conversing with persons, the magic is natural or spiritual. The musician who plays his or her lyre to a higher Heavenly power without singing could not be accused of invoking a demon. Invocation is inverted prayer; both require the sending of verbal messages between persons. We are regular savages, but do not always eat our own young. I love to listen to music while taking a long, luxurious bath; a bath where I do not have to draw and heat the water myself. Just to sink back in the steamy water and rose oil is Heaven itself. #RandolphHarris 3 of 9

When taking a bath, I like to listen to Aaliyah, Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Dj Testio, Paul Oakenfold, J.R. Castro, Tory Lanez, Giovannit Pico, Diacetto, and other figures and imagine I am in my dream mansion filled with light. However, some scholars seem to believe that this sort of meditation leaves physical channels open for not only imagination, but spirits and occult qualities that have magical effects and it replaces the stars with the God who created them. The stars project astral instruments in a way that allows their voice and music to grasp the whole World. An instrument of this sort is the spirit, which by the physician is defined as a certain vapour of the blood, pure, subtle, hot and lucid. And, formed from the subtler blood by the heat of the heart, it files to the brain, and there the soul assiduously employs it for the exercise of both the interior and exterior senses. Thus, the blood serves the spirit, the spirit the senses, and finally the senses reason. In this sense a corporeal vapour, centered in the brain also flows through the nervous system, and it is the first instrument of the incorporeal soul, an instrument for sense-perception, imagination and motor-activity—the link between body and soul. #RandolphHarris 4 of 9

The Christian Religion not only was the first attended with miracles, but even to this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without them. Mere reason is not sufficient to convince us of its veracity; and whoever is moved by Faith to assent to it, is conscious of a continued miracle in one’s own person, which subverts all the principals of one’s understanding, and gives one determination to believe what is most contrary to custom and experience. The spirit of the studios is especially likely to need care, because their constant use of it in thinking and imagining consumes it. It has to be replaces from the subtler part of the blood and this renders the remaining blood dense, dry, and dark. In consequences, such person are always of a melancholy temperament. The spirits which derive from a melancholy humour (dark blood) are exceptionally fine, hot, agile, and combustible like the Sun that warms Earth. They are, therefore, liable to ignite and produce a temporary state of mania or exaltation, followed by extreme depression and lethargy, caused by the dark matter left after being invoked. However, if properly tempered with a lot of life-force, then the spirits will glow and not burn, and make it possible continuous study of the highest order. #RandolphHarris 5 of 9

Christianity makes claims that are worthy of belief, and is only by total commitment, or the leap into faith that it can be accepted. I believe it because I want to believe it and have seen miracles in my life. The refusal to accept that 2+2 = 4 and the ability to believe that 2+2 = 5 are intimately connected with attaining religious truth. If you believe and draw near God, it will also draw near you and you will see that 2.35+ 2.65 makes 2+2 = 5. It all depend on how you look at the equation. This is just an example of the suprarational or extrarational ways, such as mystical or revelatory experiences that provide the knowledge of fundamental truths. One can train oneself to escape the confines of rationality in order to intensify religious experience and belief. This is a form of genuine thought commonly found in late antiquity and during the Renaissance. Back in those time people had time to become contemplative genius, and they saw the importance for scholars of attracting the influence of the planets like the Sun, Jupiter, Saturn, Jupiter, Mercury and others. Saturn’s rings actually give off a sound that has been picked up by NASA and is described as Melancholy. #RandolphHarris 6 of 7

To preserve the health of the spirit and to avoid the perils of being sad or depressed, one must nourish and purify the spirit with fresh water, aromatic foods, clean and pure scents, crisp air, light, and music. These are sometimes made to correspond to the division of the spirits into natural, vital, and primitive. If the vapours exhaled by merely vegetable life are greatly beneficial to your life, how beneficial do you think will be aerial songs to the spirit which is indeed entirely aerial, harmonic songs to the harmonic spirit, warm and thus living to the living, endowed with the sense to the sensitive, conceived by reason to the rational.  That is to say, the peculiar power of music is due to a similarity between the material medium in which it is transmitted, air, and the human spirit, to the fact that both are living with kinds of air, moving in an highly organized way, and that both, through the text of the son, can carry an intellectual content. Not surprising; for, since song and sound arise from the cogitation of the mind, the impetuous of the phantasy, and the feeling of the heart, and, together with the air they have broken up and tempered, strikes the aerial spirit of the hearer, which is the junction of the soul and body, they easily move the phantasy, affect the heart and penetrate into deep recesses of the mind. #RandolphHarris 7 of 9

It is not in fact surprising that a song, being the product of mind, imagination, and feeling, should, if transmitted, react on these faculties, just as a picture book might. I have been busy, running from one end of Paris to the other, it seems, securing the necessary paperwork, buying my uniform and the last bits of equipment, taking my driving exam. Did I tell you that, when I was on the boat trip across the Atlantic, I had the childish urge to go to Paris first and then to London, so that I could greet you all kitted out in my uniform? I think I look quite well turned out. All dressed up, but nowhere to go! I have been enjoying what bit of time we have. Our uniforms (and some say our hair) gets us all sorts of boons—half-priced theater tickets, discounted meals. It has been fun, but it does not seem like the “Gay Paree” I remember. Many of the theaters and music halls are shut or operate on shorted hours. Cafés are closed early, lights are dimmed on the street at night. Once one has realized the human predicament—human’s fundamental requirement for ultimate truths and one’s inability to find them—then one is ready to hear God and to accept his revealed Word on faith alone. #RandolphHarris 8 of 9

 Once one has faith, one can see the force for the truth of the Christian religion. How often we look upon God as our last and feeblest resource! We go to God because we have nowhere else to go. Ans then we learn that the storms of life have driven us, not upon the rocks, but into the desire Heaven. Father in Heaven, You see the challenges in my life and where the odds are attacked high against me. There are giants in front of me, but I am not worried about them. I acknowledge that the battle will not be won by my own strength or by my own power. I will accomplish this because You hold my future in Your hands. You will go before me, fighting my battles and making the crooked places straight. I believe that You will have the final say, and You have promised You will cross over ahead of me and defeat my challenges for me. One on God’s side is a majority. Such evidence might then constitute good reasons for believing what one has already accepted fideistically, which means that truth in religion is ultimately based on faith rather than on reasoning and evidence because miracles are supernatural events and sometimes cannot be explained by science. #RandolphHarris 9 of 9

 CRESLEIGH HAVENWOOD

Lincoln, CA | from the low $700s

Now Selling!

No appointment needed! Cresleigh Havenwood features four distinct floor plans ranging from 2,293 – 3,377 square feet and offering up to five bedrooms.  Each plan has been thoughtfully designed and includes great features such as single story homes, guest suites, optional offices, garage workshops, and more! Get the most out of your new home with Cresleigh’s All Ready smart home featuring all the connectivity needed to keep your house running. Best of all, each Cresleigh home comes with owned solar included! 

Located off of Virginiatown Road and McCourtney Road, residents of the 83 homesites of Cresleigh Havenwood will benefit from a brand new neighborhood in the charming City of Lincoln. Palo Verde Park, is  just down the street and there’s plenty of recreation to take part in all around town. https://cresleigh.com/havenwood/

So today the stage is set once again for a diplomatic drama. We have been long expecting that you would tell us something about the family life of your citizens—how they will bring children into the World, and rear them when they have arrived, and, in general, what is the nature of this community of women and children-for we are of opinion that the right or wrong management of such matters will have a great and paramount influence on the State for good or evil. There is something wrong with everyone on this planet, none of us are perfect, we are all hear to learn. Some manage their imperfections better than others. Many choose to enjoy their deviance and try to make life hard on others, as mischievous behavior is fun for them. Some old wounds never truly heal, and bleed again at the slightest word. Keep your best wishes close to your heart and watch what happens. It is always a mystery what people see in each other. There are people from whom we secretly shrink, whom we would personally avoid, though reason confesses that they are good people: there are others with faults of temper, et cetera (and other things), evident enough, beside whom we live content, as if the air about them did us good.  A critic has raised he questions: What is God like if he is not a grand consciousness tied to a grand body, if he is so completely nonphysical as to make any results of telescopic exploration antecedently irrelevant? If the telescope is the wrong instrument, what is the right instrument? More specifically, what does it mean to speak of a pure spirit, a disembodied mind, as infinitely (or finitely) powerful, wise, good, just and all the rest? We can understand these words when they are applied to human beings who have bodies and whose behavior is publicly observable; we could undoubtedly understand these words when they are applied to a pure spirit? So they mean anything at all? In recent years, it has come to be widely questioned whether it makes any sense to talk about a disembodied spirit. This view, it should be pointed out, is not identical with reductive materialism. (Reductive materialism the view that only the material World is truly real, and that all processes and realities observed in the Universe can be explained by reducing them down to their most basic scientific components, exempli gratia, atoms, molecules, and everything else thought to make up what we know as matter.)

  Reductive materialism does not, or at least does not necessarily, imply that the person is just his body, that there are no private experiences, or that feelings are simply ways of behaving. It makes the milder claim that however much more than a body a human being may be, one cannot sensibly talk about this “more” without presupposing (as part of what one means, and not as a mere contingent fact) that he is a living organism. Anybody who has studied and felt the force of this thesis is not likely to dismiss as facetious or as “trite positivism” the question as to what words like “wise,” “just” and “powerful” can mean when they are applied to an entity that is supposedly devoid of a body. What would it be like, for example, just, without a body? To be just, a person has to act justly—he has to behave in certain ways. However, is it possible to perform these acts, to behave in the required ways, without a body? Similar remarks apply to the other divine attributes. It is a work whose substance and whose leading idea is simple and even ancient: that man created the Gods and that the Gods embody man’s own conception of his own humanity, his own wishes, fears, needs, and ideals. Xenophanes, Euhemeries, Lucretius, among others, had already grasped this idea clearly, in their own context, in ancient times. One nature which is the highest of existing things and which confers upon effects in all other beings, through its unlimited goodness, they very fact of their existence is good. Since Goodness is supremely good, it must exist through itself; but what exists through itself is Existence. Therefore, Existence and Goodness are one. This Supreme Being must be living, wise, powerful, true, just, blessed, and eternal, since, as the Supreme Good, it must be whatever it is absolutely better to be than not to be. The Divine Nature, however, does not have these characteristics, for that would imply that it has them through something other than, and therefore higher than, itself. The Divine Nature is these characteristics. It is the same thing to say of God that He exists and that he is Existence, to say that of him he is good and that he is Goodness.  A comfortable deism, compatible with the new spirit of mechanism in science, had banished God to the interstices between Worlds, and required His services only to provide the hypothetical first push for the World machines.

The trouble with the essence of Christianity is not that it does not hold one’s attention or that its revelations seem old hat (not new or modern anymore).  Warmth and tenderness of heart, with an affectionate, open manner, will beat all the clearness of head in the World, for attraction. The divine philosophy becomes the basis for a critique of metaphysics. One may term this the semantic challenge to anthropomorphic theology, as distinct, for example, from arguments like the one from eternity of matter, which assume the meaningfulness of the position attacked. Some anthropomorphic deities represent specific human concepts, such as love, war, fertility, beauty, or the seasons. Anthropomorphic deities exhibited human qualities such as beauty, wisdom, and power, and sometimes human weaknesses such as greed, hatred, jealousy, and uncontrollable anger. A proponent of this challenge does not flatly maintain that anthropomorphic theology is unintelligible. The predicates in question lose their meaning when applied to a supposedly disembodied entity—would be accompanied by the observations that in fact most anthropomorphic believers do, in an important sense of the word believe in a god with a body, whatever they may say or agree to in certain theoretical moments. If we judge the content of their belief not by what they say during these theoretical moments but by the images in terms of which their thinking is conducted, then it seems clear that in this sense or to this extent they believe in a god with a body. It is true that the images of most Western adults are not those of a big king on his Heavenly throne, but it nevertheless seems to be the case that, when they think about God unself-consciously (and this is, incidentally, true of most unbelievers also), they vaguely think of him as possessing some kind of rather large body. The moment they assert or deny or question such statements as “God created the Universe” or “God will be a just judge when we come before him,” they introduce a body into the background, if not into the foreground, or their mental pictures.

The difference between children and adults, according to this account, is that children have more vivid and definite images than adults. Maybe their God possess the Amulet of Zohar which transfers a ghost into a new body? And perhaps, then, it is also true that there is a golden ritual dagger that allows one to summon a demon? This entire point may perhaps be brought out clearly by comparing it with a similar semantic criticism of belief in human survival after death. The semantic critic would maintain that while a believer in reincarnation or the resurrection of the body may be immune from this objection, those who claim that human beings will continue to exist as disembodies minds are really using words without meaning. They do not see this because of the mental pictures accompanying or (partly) constituting their thoughts on the subject. For some, it is no different than saying there is a 16-millimeter movie print that releases a character for the duration of a film, and absorbing live people to take their place and become unwilling players, in the deadly action, of his cursed film reel. Or, alternatively, they do not see this because, in spite of what they say in certain theoretical contexts, in practice they believe in the survival of the familiar embodied minds whom they know in this life. When they wonder whether their friends, enemies, certain historical personages, or, for that matter, anybody did or will of on existing after death, they think of them automatically in their familiar bodily guises or in some ghostly disguises, but still as bodily beings of some kind. Perhaps these individuals have the mirror that belonged to Louis XIV, which acts are a portal between Earth and the Realms of Darkness, which allows people to return to the living World?  

If these images are eliminated on the ground that they are irrelevant or inappropriate because the subject of survival is a disembodied mine, it is not clear that an intelligible statement remains. What is stopping someone from using the silver Thule Amulet, which allows a Nazi criminal to resurrect a dead warrior and communicate telepathically with him. Or how about we use Adolf Hilter’s pink silk boutonniere that brings a ventriloquist’s dummy to life and compels it to become the grim reaper. What, for example, do words like “love” and “hate” or “happiness” and “misery” mean when they are predicated of a disembodied mind? One may incorporate what is of value in their discussion into the following challenge to anthropomorphic theology: Insofar as the believers believe in a god with a body, what he says is intelligible; but in that case the available evidence indicates that there is no such body. If or insofar as God is cleared to be a purely spiritual entity, the predicates applied to God have lost their meaning, and, hence, we no longer have an intelligible assertion. It is no different than saying the Coin of Ziocles kills one person and then brings a dead person back to life, and the victim is branded with the mark of the beast to summon Satan himself, and to rule the Word in His name.  Therefore, it seems to some that metaphysical theology is incoherent or unintelligible, and an atheist believe they have grounds for rejecting belief in God because he sounds more like the leader of a Satanic cult, and can at times be cunning and ruthless, killing during his reign, but then able to restore people to life by cunning trickery. What next? Where do the myths stop? Is there also a pocket watch that stops time for an hour at 1 am (the 13^th hour), allowing the user to plunder the motionless World? Is this how God is able to be a purely spiritual being? Furthermore, the existence of a finite anthropomorphic God to be an intelligible hypothesis, should be rejected because it is not needed to account for any phenomena and, further, because it is too vague to be of any explanatory value. As thoughts are frozen and utterance benumbed unless the speaker stand in some true relation with his audience, it may be pardonable to imagine that a friend, a kind and apprehensive, though not the closet friend, is listening to our talk; and then, a native reserve being thawed by this genial consciousness, we may prate of the circumstances that lie around us, and even of ourselves, but still keep the inmost Me behind its veil.   

The Winchester Mystery House

Ghostly tales of The Winchester Mystery House will change the way you see this haunted mansion forever, and have you sleeping with the lights on. https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/

There is a German superstition that a knife must not be left lying with the edge pointing upward because God and the angels might injure themselves with it. If the physical Universe had been created by God, it would follow that there was time when the quantity of matter was less than it is now, when it was in fact zero.  However, physics proves or presupposed that the quantity of matter has always been the same. Since most ordinary people include the creator of the material Universe in their concept of God, and since they mean by “creation” a temporal act of making something out of nothing, the appeal to the eternity of the matter is effective as a popular argument for atheism. Among the traditional atheistic arguments, some point to imperfection or defect in the Universe and argue that the defect is incompatible with the existence of God insofar as God is defined as a perfect being. Among the imperfections or alleged imperfections emphasis has frequently been placed on the enormous waste in nature, especially in matters of reproduction, and on the trial-and-error method of evolution.  

 Nothing could be more unworthy of a supreme intelligence than this inability to construct an organism at once, without making several tentative efforts, undoing today what was so carefully done yesterday, and repeating for centuries the same tentative and the same correction in the same succession. And in the end, if this entire process of repetition is man, it has been questioned whether it was worth all the pain and tribulations that precede it. If I were granted omnipotence, and millions of years to experiment in it, I should not think Man much to boast of as the final results of my efforts. It has also been suggested by several writers, and not all facetiously, that if there were a God, then surely he would have provided human beings with clearer evidence of his own existence. If an omniscient and omnipotent God did not take care that his intentions should be understood by his creatures, could he be a God of goodness? Would he not, rather, be a cruel god if, being himself in possession of the truth, he could calmly contemplate mankind, in a state of miserable torment, worrying its mind as to what was truth? 

 If God exists, then, he could have so convinced all men and women of the fact of his existence that doubt, disagreement, or disbelief would be impossible.  We are told that with God all things are possible. If so, it was possible for him to create a World in which the vast mass of suffering that is morally pointless—the pain and misery of animals, the cancer and blindness of little children, the humiliations of senility and insanity—were avoided. These are apparently inflictions of the Creator himself. If you admit that, you deny his goodness; if you say he could not have done otherwise, you deny that with him all things are possible. The Design Argument cannot succeed in establishing a maker of the Universe who is both omnipotent and perfectly good. It argues from the nature of the World to the nature of its cause, and since the World is a mixture of good and evil, it cannot be established in this way that its creator is perfectly good. If the theory that the Universe is the work if an all-powerful and all-good being were true, then the Universe would not exhibit certain features; experience shows that it does exhibit these features, and hence the theory is false.  

The argument from evil has no logical force against belief in a finite God. The evil in the World is perfectly compatible with the existence of a God who is lacking either omnipotence or perfect goodness, or both. In fact, there is no obvious incompatibility between the existence of the metaphysical God and evil in the World, since it is not claimed for the metaphysical God either that he is all-powerful or that he is perfectly hood in the ordinary senses of these words. In the light of the injustice and suffering we find in the World, the moral character of God cannot be represented after the model of the highest human morality which we are capable of conceiving. God is good in the very same sense in which human beings are sometimes good. The ultimate reality is good and just in the sense or one of the senses in which we use these terms when we praise good and just human beings. It might be more reasonable to consider that evil is of a privative rather than a positive character. Because evil is real and positive, it is the consequence of man’s abuse of his gift of free will and that a Universe without evil and without free will would be one worse than with both.  

The existence of evil does not seem to be of considerable value in showing that this argument does not by itself justify rejection of belief in an infinite anthropomorphic God. It has been argued that although the existence of evil cannot be reconciled with the existence of an infinite anthropomorphic God, this is not too serious a problem in view of the powerful affirmative evidence for this position. We do not abandon a well-supported theory just because we meet with some counterevidence. The fact that divine science, like natural science, brings us face to face with apparently insoluble contradictions. The moral for our discussion is that an atheist cannot afford to neglect the arguments for the existence of God. Unless one can demolish them, the arguments from evil will not by itself establish the atheist’s case. If one has faith, proofs and reasoning are not needed; if one lacks faith, they are of no avail.  

A person who has faith is not shaken by absence of evidence or by counterevidence; a person who has no faith will never become a true believe even if one is intellectually convinced by the argument of rationalistic theology. We that fight the living World must have the Universal for succor of the truth in it. Cast forth the soul in prayer, you meet the effluence of the outer truth, you join with the creative elements giving breath to you. The idea of God transcends both mysticism and the person-to-person encounter. The nature of man and a World with dependable sequences (or causal laws), evil of certain kinds is unavoidable and, furthermore, that (though they do not, of course claim to be able to prove this) in the next life there will be appropriate reward and compensations. Some admit that their faith would be logically weakened, perhaps fatally so, if it could be shown that there is no afterlife or that in the afterlife injustice and misery, far from vanishing, will be even more oppressive than in the present life, or that the evils which, given the nature of man and a World of dependable consequences, they thought to be unavoidable, could in fact have been prevented by an omnipotent Creator.  

The Winchester Mystery House

  Haunted by a ghost warning her of deaths about to come, and ghost haunting her dreams night after night, Mrs. Winchester builds one of the most bizarre mansions in the World. https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/

 

 

Concealed pleasures are the greatest. The main conception of the World is that of three divine hypostases, or natures, which are, in descending order, the One Intellect, the Soul, and Time. The One is that from which all else depends, and toward which all aspires to return. It is above the realm of Being, lying beyond the possibilities of thought and discourse, and is to be attained only by a rare ascent of mystical exaltation. The realm of Intellect is the realm of Being, and Intellect contains the system of Ineligibles within itself. Intellect turns its back on the One in contemplation and derives thence its own productive power, while the intelligible World itself is seen not as static but as instinct with life. Soul derives from Intellect and looks toward it, and itself in turn gives rise to the World of nature; it is (importantly for Plotinus’ psychology) at the level of the Soul that we encounter time, which is the life of the soul in movement. God is not working toward a particular finish—His purpose is the process itself. It is the process, not the outcome, that is glorifying God.  

Dark matter makes up about 27 percent of the Universe and is some strange kind of energy-fluid that filled space, unknowable in itself, represents the farthest limit to which the process of descent points; utterly negative, it is for Plotinus the source of evil.  The other 68 percent of the Universe is dark energy. The Universe is thought to be 13.8-billion-years-old. Dark matter is an invisible substance that can only be seen through the effects of its gravity, while dark energy is pushing the Universe apart. The nature of both remains mysterious. Yet it is through these very clouds that the Spirit of God is teaching us how to walk by faith and not by sight. The Greek influence of the Platonic theory is shown to have a tendency to correspond with the Bible narrative of the divine Logos by means of which God formed the World: the intelligible World, subsisting in the Divine Mind, served as a pattern for the production of the material Universe. What is my vision of God’s purpose for me? Platonic tradition believes that the soul has a pre-existence, of a cosmic Fall, and that reincarnation is possible. If I can stay calm, faithful, and unconfused while in the middle of the turmoil of life, the goal of the purpose of God is being accomplished in me.

No civilized person ever regrets a pleasure, and no uncivilized individual ever knows what a pleasure is. If you do it too often, anything becomes a pleasure. The concept of pleasure has always bulked large in thought about human motivation and human values and standards. It seems clear to most people that pleasure and enjoyment are pre-eminent among the things worth having and that when someone gets pleasure out of something, one develops a desire for it. Moreover, from the time of Plato much of the discussion of the topics of motivation and value has consisted in arguments for and against the doctrines of psychological hedonism (only pleasure is desired for its own sake) and ethical hedonism (only pleasure is desirable for its own sake). One can make an intelligent judgment on these doctrines only to the extent that one has a well-worked-out view as to the nature of pleasure. Otherwise one will be unable to settle such questions as whether a putative counterexample, for instance, a desire for the welfare of one’s children, is or is not a genuine example of desiring something other than pleasure for its own sake.  

The love of pleasure and the fear of pain are the ruling principles of the human heart, in which they maintain an uninterrupted struggle for superiority. Pleasure and pain have usually been regarded as opposite parts of a single continuum. As pain diminishes, it tends toward a neutral point; by continuing in the same “direction” we move toward increasing intensities of pleasure. Amounts of pain are negative quantities to be algebraically summated with amounts of pleasure in computing the total hedonic consequences of an action or a piece of legislation. This was in accordance with the utilitarian principle that an action is justified to the extent that it tends to produce pleasure and the diminution of pain. Since “pain” is most commonly used as a term for a kind of bodily sensation, it is natural to think of pleasure as having the same status. And indeed there are uses of the term “pleasure” in which it seems to stand for a kind of bodily sensation. Thus we speak of “pleasures of the stomach” and thrills of pleasure. However, as hedonists have often insisted, in any sense of the term in which psychological or ethical hedonism is at all plausible, the term “pleasure” must be sued so as to embrace more than certain kinds of localized bodily sensations.   

 The pleasure which attends noble aims remunerates not the pains they bring with them. When someone maintains that pleasure is the only thing which is desirable for its own sake, one certainly means to include states of the following sort: Enjoying taking pleasure in doing something, such as playing tennis. Getting satisfaction out of something, such as seeing an enemy humiliated. Having a pleasant evening; hearing pleasant sounds. Feeling good, having a sense of well-being. Feeling contented. It seems clear that phenomena of these sorts do not consist in localized bodily sensation of the same type as headaches, except for being an opposite quality. When someone has enjoyed playing tennis, it makes no sense to ask where (in one’s body) did one enjoy it. Nor does it make sense to wonder whether the pleasure one got from the tennis came and went in brief flashes, or whether it was steady and continuous; but theses would be sensible questions if getting pleasure from playing tennis were a localized bodily sensation like a headache.  

Choosing to suffer means that there must be something wrong with you, but choosing God’s will—even if it means you will suffer—is something very different. No normal, healthy saint ever chooses suffering; one simply chooses God’s will, just as Christ did, whether it means suffering or not. God places His saints where they will bring the most glory to Him, and we are totally incapable of judging where that may be. The questions about the experience of playing tennis would not deny that various localized sensations might be involved in one’s enjoyment of the game, such as a swelling in one’s chest after making a good shot, or a sinking sensation in one’s stomach after muffing a shot. The point is that one’s enjoyment of the game cannot be identified with such sensations, for one could be enjoying the game throughout its duration, even though such sensations cropped up only from time to time. My vision of God is dependent upon the condition of my character. My character determines whether or not truth can even be revealed to me. There must be something in my character that conforms to the likeness of God. What I need is God’s surgical procedure—His use of external circumstances to being about internal purification.

Pleasure is a quality that can attach itself to any state of consciousness. In the state of future perfection, there will be pleasure without danger and security without restraint. Enjoying listening to music and feeling good on arising in the morning are special forms of “getting pleasure.” Getting pleasure can, then, be thought of as a good feeling. However, we have various degrees of getting pleasure. To be deprived of one pleasure is no very good reason for rejection of the rest. One can enjoy oneself more or less and be displeased at something more or less. Moreover, it would seem that there is an intermediate neutral point at which one is neither pleased nor displeased at what is happening, neither enjoying oneself nor feeling miserable, and so on. Nonetheless, the near approach of pleasure frequently awakens the heart to emotions which would fail to be excited by a more remote and abstracted observance. I have never had more pleasure in my contrivances then in the end of them. Keep paying the price. Let God see that you are willing to live up to the vision.  

The Winchester Mystery House

Discover the tales of the ghosts and specters that linger in The Winchester Mystery House. https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/

 

 

 

 

Granted the existence of evil, the obvious expedient is to improve out World rather than to make it even worse by adding to the sufferings. Desires springs from a lack and consists in a dissatisfaction. When it meets with hindrances, it produces noting but frustration, because it cannot attain its object; when it does attain its object, it produces nothing but boredom, because desire ceases with fulfillment and leaves one with an undesired object. Since desire necessarily involves dissatisfaction, frustration, and boredom, the only escape is by annihilation of all desire in order to achieve liberation from this World of pain. If we escae were desirable, there is no guarantee that the ascetic life would actually lead to freedom. A good example to illustrate this is the story told of a wealthy but elderly gentleman who showed his devotion to a young actress by many lavish gifts. Being a respectable girl, she took the first opportunity to discourage his attentions by telling him that her heart was already given to another man. “I never aspired as high as that,” was his polite answer. His actions were a desire for the sexual sense which could easily escape the unsuspecting person. It was a double meaning with illusion.  

Asceticism is the doctrine that one ought to deny one’s desires. In practice, denial means refraining from the fulfillment of desires and sometimes mortifying the desire by inflicting upon oneself the very opposite of what is desired. This involves abstinence from genuine goods, the frustration of unfulfilled desires, and even self-inflicted pain (sometimes it can be emotional as in the case above). If ascetic practices are to be recommended, the must be a necessary evil to something better. One might regard the ascetic life as a means to something better. One might regard the ascetic life as a means to liberation from this World of suffering. It would be unrealistic to deny that we all suffer from time to time and there are those for whom life is mostly suffering. It would be equally unrealistic, however, to deny that for most of us the evils we experience are more than balanced by the genuine values we enjoy. Is there an immortal soul to be rewarded or a God to do the rewarding? Even the believer may reject asceticism on religious grounds. However, some may seem to have no choice, but to accept it.  

Nonetheless, a benevolent deity would hardly have created us with natural desires and then commanded us to deny these very desires and to suffer the consequent evils of frustration and pain. Unless reason is thought of as a disembodied spirit—in which case it is hard to see how the body hinders reason in the first place—it would seem that ascetic practices make one less, rather than more, capable of the clear and sustained reasoning that is required for obtaining knowledge. The ascetic life might be advances means to virtue. It must be admitted that desire sometimes cause one to act wickedly, but these same desires also cause one to act virtuously. The sexual desire that can lead to adultery more often leads to conjugal fidelity. Hence there is a double error in regarding sexual desire as evil. It does not always, or even usually, expresses itself in sinful actions; and if adultery is a sin, that is because it does violence to the institution of marriage, which is itself an expression of the pleasures of the flesh. 

 There is a morbid fascination in any survey of the ascetic practices of humans. Fasting, the virgin priestess, and the mutilation of the body are common features of ancient religions. In monastic Christianity the austere ideals of celibacy, obedience, and poverty have been both practiced and admired. The most accomplished ascetics have been the wanderes (sunnyasins) of ancient India and the anchorites of fourth-century Egypt. One sunnyasian held his arms above his head with fists clenched until the muscles in his arms atrophied and the nails grew through his palms. It is said that the anchorite St. Simeon Stylites tied a rope tightly around himself until it ate into his body and his flesh became infested with worms. As the worms fell from his body he replaced them in his putrefied flesh, saying, “Eat what God has given you.” Asceticism is a sort of unnatural moral discipline and the principle idea is to deny one’s desires. Asceticism may be partial or complete. Partial asceticism is the theory that one ought to deny one’s lower desires, which are usually identified as sensuous, bodily, or Worldly and are contrasted with more virtuous or spiritual desires. 

Complete asceticism is the theory that one ought to deny all desires without exception. Moderate asceticism is the theory that one ought to repress one’s desires as far as is compatible with the necessities of this life. Extreme asceticism is the theory that one ought to annihilate one’s desires totally. The belief that austerities (tapas) burn away sin was a product of the non-Ayran tradition of the ancient Greeks. Although Greek ethics were predominantly naturalistic, Plato sometimes argued that one ought to repress the bodily desires in order to free the soul in its search for knowledge. They believed that the desire of the flesh should be repressed in order to achieve moral virtue and the contemplation of God. We know that by some authority that one ought to deny one’s lower desires. One authority is the Bible, in which we find both express ascetic commandments and examples like those of the Virgin Mary and the celibate Christ. By undergoing the suffering of self-denial, one is taking up the cross of Christ. Since Christ came into this World as a model for all of humanity, all of humanity ought to share in his redemptive suffering.

Humans ought to deny their lower desires to prove their virtue, for the ascetic life is a test of devotion to God, and those who pass the test will win a Heavenly reward. By denying the pleasure of the flesh, one balances the scales of justice and lifts the guilt from one’s soul, as all humans are viewed as sinners and this is a retributive theory. Self-denial is valuable because it develops in individuals certain character traits like persistence and self-discipline, which are essential to living well. The lower desires cost too much to satisfy. Gratification must be purchased with great effort, and perhaps these desires are insatiable, so than no expenditure of effort will gratify them. The lower desires are misguided, for their objects are really evils or, as best, indifferent things. In either case, no genuine value is realized by fulfilling one’s desires. Although the objects of the lower desire are good, they are much less good than higher values like virtue, knowledge, or Heaven. Since an individual’s time and energy are limited, one ought not to allow these lower desires to distract from the pursuit of what really matters.  

The lower desires are intrinsically evil. Since they turn humans away from God and his commands toward Earthly objects, they are infected with the sin of pride. Although not sinful in themselves, the lower desires do motivate sinful actions. You might wonder why people who have status and seem to be doing well and have greater careers are jealous of someone who has so much less than them and it is because when people are infected with pride, it makes them angry that someone with so little could possess more knowledge, love, and happiness. The lower desires interfere with the pursuit of knowledge, which is essential for the good life. They interfere either by causing an agitation that destroys one’s own power of reasoning or by fixing one’s attention on sensory objects that distract from the transcendent reality. Education that is lifelong and drawn from many sources, travel, private lives, public association, mentors, all the pleasures and pains of real life, revelations, flubs are raw ingredients of leadership. However, even if one has all that, only he or she can put it all together and make it work, which is just as well, or we would end up with robots or, worse, beings from some artificial reality. 

Why are we playing games at all? Why are we not acting to better the human condition? Do you not what to look at someone’s life and know that you contributed to their happiness and not their suffer and pain? It is out of the broad, deep kind of life, this profound sort of experience and education that one develops taste, judgement, curiosity, energy and wit, along with virtue and passion. Wit is the third rail of the intellect, enabling us to be simultaneously rational and intuitive, setting off that spark we usually call inspiration. Eros ad Logos in perfect balance result in a healthy balance of faith and doubt, too—faith in oneself and abilities and in the World’s possibilities, along with sufficient doubt to question, challenge, and probe, and thereby improve the World and oneself. A leader does not just practice one’s profession or vocation, one masters it. A leader adapts, imagines, reverses, connects, compares, rejects, incubates, plays, and then surrenders—in the way that an Aristotle, having mastered the work, surrendered to it, became one with it, so that we could not tell where Aristotle stopped and the knowledge and philosophy started. One might advocate the ascetic life as a means of pleasing God and winning the eternal bliss of Heaven.  

Instead of being a virtue, self-denial is actually a vice. Virtue requires at least prudence and benevolence, but the ascetic is imprudent in abstaining from available goods and in even inflicting harm upon himself. By concentrating on the cultivation of his own soul through suffering of others and to ignore his obligation to work for their welfare. The ascetic life is not good in itself because it some argue that it runs counter to the basic motives in human nature. However, I think there is a balance. While we should not suffer, we should learn to control ourselves. Those who are incapable of living well disguise their impotence and fear by inverting morality in order to excuse their own moral sickness and to restrain the strong men who appear dangerous. Self-discipline is a genuine virtue, but it denies desires only when it is necessary to achieve an inclusive and harmonious satisfaction.  This is basically an ascetic principal in which one maintains his own power over the sick heard. Obviously, leaders must be both competent and possess ambition.  

 

 

Art should never be a vehicle for propaganda. Life and death together make sad work for us all. Greek and Egyptian and Japanese art are some of the best examples I have ever seen. I am not really into modern graffiti art. The needs of our actual life are so imperative, that sense of vision becomes highly specialized in their service. When I hoped I feared, since I hoped I dared; everywhere alone as a church remains; spectre cannot harm, serpent cannot charm; he deposes doom, who hath suffered him. With an admirable economy we learn to see only so much as is needful for our purposes; but this is in fact very little, just enough to recognize and identify each object or person; that done, they go into an entry in our mental catalogue and are no more really seen. In actual life the normal person really only read the labels as it were on the objects around him and troubles no further. Almost all the things which are useful in any way put on more or less this cap of invisibility. It is only when an object exists in our lives for no other purpose than to be seen that we really look at it, for instance at a China ornament or a precious stone, and towards such even the most normal person adopts to some extent the artistic attitude of pure vision abstract from necessity. 

Aesthetics is the philosophy of art and beauty that is concerned with analysis of concepts and the solution of problems that arise when one contemplates objects of subjective attractiveness. Aesthetic value, experience, as well as the entire battery of concepts occurring specifically in the philosophy of art, are examined in the discipline known as aesthetics, and questions such as “What feature make objects beautiful?” and “Are these aesthetic standards?” –as well as all questions occurring specifically in the philosophy of art—are aesthetic questions. Nevertheless, most of the interesting and perplexing aesthetic questions through the ages have been concerned specifically with art: “What is artistic expression? Is there truth in works of art? What is an artistic symbol? What do works of art mean? Is there a general definition of art? What makes a work of art good?” Although all these questions are questions of aesthetics, they have their locus in art and do not arise in the consideration of aesthetic objects other than works of art.

Because of the differences among the media of the various arts, there are concepts which apply in a straightforward manner to one or more of the arts but not all, or in a different sense, to other arts. The emphasis in Venetian art is on the sensuousness of light and color and the pleasures of the senses. The closet we have some to it so far is in the mysterious glow that infuses Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, but is only hinted at in Leonardo’s work explodes in Venetian paintings as full-blown theatrical effect. Partly under the influence of Leonardo, who has visited Venice after leaving Milan in 1499, Giorgione developed a painting style of blurred edges and softened forms. After his teacher’s death in the great plague of 1510, Giorgione’s student, Titian, took on this style even further, developing a technique that employed a painterly brushstroke to new, sensuously expressive ends. Two paintings of Venus, the first by Giorgione, probably completed by Titian himself, demonstrate the sensuality of the Venetian style. Giorgione’s life-size figure, bathed in luminous light, is frankly erotic, but Titian’s is even more so. Positioned on the crumpled sheets of a bed, rather than in a pastoral landscape, she is not innocently sleeping but gazes directly at us, engaging us in her sexuality. 

Raphael learned much from both Leonardo and Michelangelo, and, in 1508, he was awarded the largest commission of the day, the decoration of the papal apartments at the Vatican in Rome. One the four walls of the first room, the Stanza della Segnatura, he painted frescos representing the four domains of knowledge—Theology, Law, Poetry, and Philosophy. The most famous of these is the last, The School of Athens. Raphael’s paintings depicts a gathering of the greatest philosophers and scientists of the ancient World. The centering of the composition is reminiscent of Leonardo’s Last Supper, but the perspectival renderings of space is much deeper. Where, in Leonardo’s masterpiece, Christ is situated at the vanishing point, in Raphael’s work, Plato and Aristotle occupy the position. These two figures represent the two great, opposing schools of philosophy, the Platonists, who were concerned with the spiritual Work of ideas (thus Plato points upwards), and the Aristotelians, who were concerned with the matter-of-factness of material reality (thus Aristotle points over the ground upon which he walks). 

The expressive power of the figures owes much to Michelangelo, who, it is generally believed, Raphael portrayed as the philosopher Heraclitus, the brooding, self-absorbed figure in the foreground. Raphael’s commission in Rome is typical of the rapid spread of the ideals of the Italian renaissance culture to the rest of Italy and Europe. The aesthetic attitude is also distinguished from the cognitive. Students who are familiar with the history of architecture are able to identify quickly a building or a ruin, in regard to its time and place of construction, by means of its style and other visual aspects. They look at the building primarily to increase their knowledge and not to enrich their perceptual experience. This kind of ability may be important and helpful (in passing examinations, for example), but it is not necessarily correlated with the ability to enjoy the experience of simply viewing the building itself. The analytical ability may eventually enhance the aesthetic experience, but it may also stifle it. People who are interested in the arts from a professional or technical aspect are particularly liable to be diverted from the aesthetic way of looking to the cognitive. 

The aesthetic way of looking is also antipathetic to the person, in which the viewer, instead of regarding to the personal, in which the viewer, instead of regarding the aesthetic object so as to absorb what it has to offer him, considers its relation to himself. Those who did not listen to music but use it as a springboard for their own personal reveries provide an example of this nonaesthetic hearing that often passes for listening. For instance, the man who does to see a performance of Othello and instead of concentrating on the play thinks only of the similarity of Othello’s situation to his own real life situation with his wife, is not viewing the play aesthetically. His attitude is one of personal involvement; it is a personalized attitude, and the personalization inhibits whatever aesthetic response the viewer may otherwise have had. In viewing something aesthetically we respond to the aesthetic object and what it has to offer us, not to its relation to our own lives. (The latter has to offer us, and it is not necessarily undesirable, but it should be sharply distinguished from the aesthetic response.) 

The formula “we should not get personally involved” is sometimes used to describe this criterion, but this too is misleading. It does not mean that a playgoer may not identify with the characters in the play or be vitally interested in what happens to them; it only means that he must not make any personal involvement he may have with the character or the problems in the play substitute for careful viewing of the play itself. We can see the difference clearly if we contrast the situation of being involved in a shipwreck with viewing a newsreel of it or a movie about it. In the first case we would do what we could save our own lives and assist other. In the second case, however, we know that whatever disastrous events occurred have already happened and there is nothing we can do about it now, and realizing this, our tendency to respond to the situation with action is automatically cut off. However, much we identify with the sufferers, we are not personally involved in any sense that is geared to action. Pride of ownership may interfere with the aesthetic response. The person who responds enthusiastically to playing of a symphony before guests on one’s own stereo set, but fails to respond to the playing of the same symphony on an identical recording set in one’s neighbor’s house, is not responding aesthetically

The antiquarian or the museum directors who, in choosing a work of art, must attend to historical value, prestige, age, and so on, may be partly influenced by an estimate of its aesthetic value, but one’s attention is necessarily diverted to noneaesthetic factors. Similarly, if a person values a play or novel because one can glean from it items of information concerning the time and place about which it was written, one is substituting an interest in acquiring knowledge for an interesting in aesthetic experience. If a person favors a work of art because it offers more edification or supports the right cause, one is confusing a moral attitude with the aesthetic, which is also true if one condemns it on moral grounds and fails to separate this condemnation from one’s aesthetic evaluation of it. (This is particularly likely to occur with persons who never really view an object aesthetically at all, but simply as a vehicle for propaganda, whether moral, political, or otherwise.) We care about art, drama, and plays, but are able to detach from them, admit we care, but also know it is not a reflection of the World around us. So we can identify, but not get totally absorbed. Strange life mind—rather curious history—not extraordinary, but singular. 

The Winchester Mystery House

The heartfelt tale of Sarah Winchester is both an exciting suspense story and a deeply moving story determination. https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/

 

Most of us know how to distinguish moral right and wrong. The moral sense also enables us to account for our approval and condemnation of actions and characters as following from our being pleased or pained by them. I am sick of being around a lot of old, mentally immature adults, who think life is a game and money and status is all that matters. Their motives are not clear nor assignable. When someone slips to the street and falls, instead of offering assistance or asking is the individual is okay, these people laugh because they think the calamity of others is a comical situation. The infantile corresponding displays an inferior mental and moral development, and perhaps even childish pain. However, these mentally immature people, many of them have adult children and grandchildren, who tend to be more mature than they are. Nevertheless, I think children find their behavior amusing because few things can afford the child greater pleasure than when the grown-up lowers himself to his level, disregards his superiority, and plays with the child as its equal. The alleviation which furnishes the child pure pleasure is a debasement used by the adult as a means of making things comic and as a source of comic pleasure. As for unmasking, we know that it is based on degradation. 

We have heard that the release of painful emotions is the strongest hindrance to the comic effect. Just as aimless motion causes harm, stupidity mischief, and disappoint pain; –the possibility of a comic effect ends, at least for one who cannot defend oneself against such pain, who is oneself affected by it or must participate in it, whereas one who is unconcerned shows by one’s behavior that the situation of the case in question contains everything necessary to produce a comic effect. Humor is this a means to gain pleasure despite the painful affects which disturb it; it acts as a substitute for this affective development, and takes its place. If we are in a situation which tempts us to liberate painful affects according to our habits, and motives then urge us to suppress these affects in statu nascendi (in the case of being formed or developed), we have the conditions for humor. The person affected by misfortune, pain, excreta, could obtain humoristic pleasure, to ease the hardships he suffers from, while the disinterested party laughs over the comic pleasure.  The deliverances of this faculty are feelings or sentiments; hence, it is counted as a sense. If people do not mature by the time they are 50, it is likely they never will.  

It is disheartening to be stuck in a place with a lot of adults who are more immature than teenagers. It could be because of the political atmosphere. When we have leaders than are immature, show a lack of restraint and family values, it spills into the community. However, instead of firing immature adults who are ruining a business and harassing and annoying others, many employers choose to ignore the mentally unwell behavior, and when they see a decrease in revenue, instead of firing the older person(s), who often has seniority and is the reason for the decline in business, they law off younger, more talented individuals and reduce everyone’s work hours to make up for the loss of revenue. And even though management is aware that senior employees are engaging in hostile and often illegal behavior, they tend to ignore it. For instance, the superintendent of Yosemite National Park, Don Neubacher, age 63, announced, on 29 September 2016, he is stepping down amid an ongoing federal investigation into allegations of a hostile work environment in which employees, particularly women, are bullied, sexually harassed, intimidated, and belittled. 

Our observation of an instance of virtuous action is the occasion for a feeling of pleasure or satisfaction, which enables us to distinguishing that action as honorable. Similarly, our observation of an instance of vicious action is the occasion for a feeling of pain or uneasiness, which enables us to distinguish that actions as malicious. It took a federal investigation by a House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform examination of misconduct and mismanagement at the National Park Service to get Don Neubacher to step down, so it is likely that this unethical and possibly illegal behavior had been going on unpunished for many, many years. The moral sense is generally an influencing motive in our pursuit of virtue and our avoidance of vicious behavior, and it plays a part in our bestowal of praise and blame. Sometimes as people age, they experience a haunting fear and it turns into a full-blown nightmare in senility. On occasions around the age of 50, 60, or 70, a few people experience a mental decline and in their pathetic condition they have lost their centeredness, and they realize they are not oneself.  

Senility is a reality that comes to some. It symbolized the most exaggerated pain of the oldness that can come with aging. It is all too obvious, all too limiting, all too tragically pathetic. And to age is to have to face the prospect of possibly being senile. Age now divides people into good versus bad. When people become senile, their abilities go away; memory decays, and instead of being on the saddle, the saddle is on them.  Many can recognize their proneness to pain by looking at the kind of reactions they are hoping to elicit from others by choices and behavior. By constantly letting go of our negative feelings about someone who is going senile and annoy us, we thus cure present pain and prophylactically prevent the occurrence of future pain. People who have a mind that is deteriorating often get confused and say and do unusual things, so if it is bothering you so much just avoid them. The many faces of fear are familiar to us all. We have felt free-floating anxiety and panic. We have been paralyzed and frozen by fear. When it is more severe, we become scared, cautious, blocked, tense, shy, speechless, superstitious, defense, and distrustful. We have all been there and can turn it off, but a senile person cannot. 

Good and evil are relative to the person who uses these words; and when people are joined together in a commonwealth, then good and evil are subject to the determinations of the commonwealth. As for our motives for pursuing good and avoiding evil, they may be summed up as self-interest. Were it to our own interest to pursue what others, or the commonwealth have designated as evil, we certainly would; but, for the most part, our appreciation of the convenience which follows from everyone’s following the same rules and, at the worst, our fear of punishment on being caught deter us from the practice of evil. Knowledge consists of perceptions, which must arrive in the mind by one of two routes, either sensation or reflection. Whatever can be known must be accounted for in the way is not knowledge. The proponents of the moral sense accounted for our knowledge of moral right and wrong as reflexive perceptions. When someone observes a given action or considers a certain character trait, these first perceptions are immediately followed by a secondary set of feelings either pleasure or uneasiness, according to whether the action or character is virtuous or vicious.  

By consulting these secondary perceptions, we can make our moral judgments. The proponents of the moral sense make it clear and are careful to point out that actions are not virtuous because we are pleased in a certain manner. Thus, moral pleasures and pains are distinctive feelings. And always distinguish different kinds of pleasure, for example, some may be pleased both by a good musical composition and by a good bottle of wine, and their goodness is determined merely by the pleasure they give; but we do not say on that account that the wine is harmonious or the music is a good flavor. Besides accounting for our knowledge of right and wrong, the moral sense closes the gap between moral knowledge and moral behavior by providing motive for moral behavior. Since moral knowledge consists of feeling of pleasure and uneasiness, the prospect of enjoying or avoiding these feelings is a sufficient motive for pursuing virtue and avoiding vice. If moral knowledge were not ultimately a matter of feelings, it would be possible for someone to know that a certain kind of action is virtuous but still have no motive for doing it.  

Economy of sympathy is one of the most frequent sources of humoristic. People talk about moral sense as talking about an extra organ of sense, a moral nose or a moral ear. How acute they were to have discovered a new human organ which no one had noticed until they came along! Merely to mention the possibility was enough to show the nonexistence of such an organ and to render the doctrine of a moral sense laughable. However, God determined us to be pleased by benevolent actions; and when nothing interferes with the moral sense, we count benevolence a virtue and malevolence a vice. We do have a good reason for preferring one sort of action to another, namely the action’s tendency to maintain society. Should someone ask, “And why should I prefer the maintenance of society to its destruction? Society exists because, as a matter of fact, by far the greater number of people have the kind of feelings to make it possible. Our moral knowledge comes from reason; reason alone can never be an exciting motive of action. A person may know that a certain way of acting may have a certain result, but in order for him to act to achieve that result, he must first find it pleasing.  

CRESLEIGH HAVENWOOD

Lincoln, CA | from the low $700s

Now Selling!

No appointment needed! Cresleigh Havenwood features four distinct floor plans ranging from 2,293 – 3,377 square feet and offering up to five bedrooms.  Each plan has been thoughtfully designed and includes great features such as single-story homes, guest suites, optional offices, garage workshops, and more! Get the most out of your new home with Cresleigh’s All Ready smart home featuring all the connectivity needed to keep your house running. Best of all, each Cresleigh home comes with owned solar included! 

Located off of Virginiatown Road and McCourtney Road, residents of the 83 homesites of Cresleigh Havenwood will benefit from a brand-new neighborhood in the charming City of Lincoln. Palo Verde Park is just down the street and there’s plenty of recreation to take part in all around town. https://cresleigh.com/havenwood/

To the hands I cannot see, for the love of America, judge me tenderly. Through austerity and self-control, one can attain a realization of one’s eternal self. Inner mystical knowledge brings a union with the Divine. God and the Devils do not dwell in mythical Heaven or Hell, but in our daily actions. Mysticism was practiced in the second millennium B.C. or earlier, and it is considered a ritual religion, which is surrounded by the idea that knowledge gives one a quasi-magical power over aspects of reality and allows on to identify with things in a whole new way. Mysticism centers on the pacifying of the mind and of attaining interior insight, it is an awe-inspiring and fascinating mystery. It is a timeless experience, that involved an apprehension of the transcendent (of something, state, or person lying beyond the realm of things), that gives an individual serenity, and normally accrues upon a course of self-mastery and contemplation. One gains a kind of rapport with the World or panenhenic feeling. Various abnormal mental states, such as those induced by mescalin, lysergic acid, and alcohol are sometimes considered mystical, but they are far enough removed from mainstream mysticism for it to be reasonable to neglect them here. 

 Mystical consciousness is also said to be like a state beyond dreamless sleep, it goes beyond ordinary perceptions, mental images, and thoughts. It is thus not describable by the ordinary expressions for mental states.  Also, such paranormal phenomena as levitation are sometimes ascribed to mystics, although they are usually regarded as a secondary significance.  An infinity of eternal life or souls brings about an isolation of the soul from the material environment, and it is a final deliverance from suffering. Mysticism is supposed to allows one to develop a Heavenly eye, which enables him to view the entire World and attain supreme insight and supreme peace. The achievement of inner harmony and insight where your body is fresh; you are vigorous and fit, and things are so bright, so pure, it is the highest, the eternal place. The eternal place is, of course, Nirvana. It is totally opposite of the use of complex psychological categories in explaining human nature. The experience involves both the attainment of a marvelous serenity as knowledge and ignorance is dispelled. These terms served bring out the ineffability and undifferentiated nature of ultimate reality, which in turn correspond to the undifferentiated and void nature of the contemplative experience itself. 

Of course, the adoration and love of God, leads to a different valuation of mysticism. One need not be blind to the World if they are performed in a spirit of self-surrender to God; they way of works should be seen in the light of the way of devotion. Mystical experience is the duality of the soul and God implicit with the worshiper having a strong sense of the majesty and glory of God. Their virtues are wisdom and knowledge, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence. Different strengths contribute to each virtue. The virtue of humanity and mysticism include the strengths bravery, persistence, integrity, and vitality. Doing the right the at greater risk or cost to oneself strikes us as more heroic than doing good in a way that benefits oneself. People will accomplish greater things because of their feelings toward others and will succeed each time through hope, faith, loyalty, and compassion. Empathy plays an important role in altruistic behavior. Some believe mysticism is part of the essence of life and through one’s intellect, one has an affinity with God; and though the contemplative life, one can in principle attain a state where one can see God’s essence, and will give people ever fresh chances of living the pure life and would provide the punishment for those who transgressed.  

Adam was a Universal being who before the Fall embraced the Universe, then in an ideal state. With his fall, the material World was created, and the light of his divine nature was fragmented into the sparks that illuminate the myriads of livings soul. In the final consummation, all will be reunited. Asceticism is concerned with the devotion in all one’s acts—were the means of purifying the soul. Social conditions may have helped the growth of such doctrines, for the emphasis on meekness, love, and a quiet interior life were well adapted to the unhappy outer circumstances of the people, and mysticism hope gave the contemplative a cosmic role. Through righteous acts the favor of God is channeled. That I always did love, I bring thee proof: that till I loved I did not love enough. That I shall love always, I offer thee that love is life, and life hath immortality. This, dost thou doubt, sweet? Then have I nothing to show but calvary. He fumbles at your spirit as players at the keys before they drop full music on; he stuns you by degrees, prepares your brittle substance for the ethereal blow, by fainter hammers, further heard, then nearer, then so slow.

Your breath has time to straighten, your brain to bubble cool—deals one imperial thunderbolt that scalps your naked soul. Mysticism became the pattern after which eternal life was conceived. Humans are considered the connecting link between the visible and invisible Worlds. One was created perfect but through the Fall lost his immortal, incorruptible, and passionless nature. A certain cope for free will remained, however. This image of God, although defaces, was not entirely lost. The restoration of man to the true end for which he was made—the contemplation of God—was effected through Christ’s incretion. Mysticism takes place through the illumination of the soul; its divinization, through the Divine Light. O Lord Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. In a mysterious manner, the very repetition of the sacred name of Jesus was supposed to contain Divine power. The soul and God remain distinct in substance, although they are joined by the glue of love. Through man’s love flowing up to God and through the downward movement of God’s grace, the two become united. This mysticism is combined with intense powers and one can gain continuing union with God through love. This love is nourished by concentrating upon God, to the exclusion of mutable things.

The Winchester Mystery House

The Winchester Mystery House appears to be a bright Queen Anne Victorian Mansion from the Old World filled with sunshine and love, but there are many frightening tales that have taken place in this beautiful home of Mrs. Winchester. Hidden inside is an evil which lies hidden from the World. https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/

 

 

 

Very few beings really seek knowledge in this World. Mortal or immortal, few really ask. None of us really changes over time, we only become more fully what we are. The prince is never going to come, everyone knows that, and maybe sleeping beauty is dead. We know that the brain is not immortal, and that the organized energy of a living body, becomes incorporeal when it is disembodied. The difficulty is to attach enough sense to the expression so that some discovery about disembodied people could provide us with grounds for believing we survive death. In their present senses persons words have logical liaisons of the very great human importance. Personal identity in the present sense is the necessary condition of both accountability and expectation. This is only to report that it is unjust to reward or punish someone for something unless, as a minimum condition, one is the same person who did the deed and that it is absurd to expect things to happen to me in 1984, as a minimum condition, there is going to be a person in existence in 1984 who will be the same person as I am.  The difficulty is to change the use of persons words so radically that it becomes significant to talk of people’s surviving dissolution without changing it in such a way that these crucial logical liaisons must be broke. If this difficulty cannot be overcome—and there seems to be little reason to think that it can—then the apocalyptic words that our life is endless as the visual field is without limit. Death is not an event in life. Death is not lived through. However, the soul carries with it experiences and knowledge. His memory stretches to a time before he knew humans, perhaps, two thousand years ago. He was born on an island of perpetual warmth, a kind of Garden of Eden where life went on in innocence and crimes were rare. There was a great cataclysm, and they came to Britain and broke up into their individual families. They adapted their initial cultural practices to the changed circumstances of four seasons. Their disdain for, and indifference (not cruel) treatment of, human is also noticeable. It is mostly due to the social and cultural differences. One of the questions that Christian theologians have repeatedly discusses is whether there is both general and special revelation.  

Are nature and history as a whole—including the whole religious history of mankind—revelatory of God, as well as the special occasions of the Bible Heilsgeschichte? Many theologians of all communions today hold that God is indeed Universally active and that his activity always discloses something of his nature, even though his fullest personal self-revelation has occurred only in the person of Christ. It touches on the meaning of human power and its corrupting influence and their contact with humans. “They stole our women and raped them until they died of the bleeding. They stole our men and sought to enslave them, and laughed at them and ridiculed them, and in some instances drove them mad. Often we fought them off. We were not by nature as brutal, by any means, but we could defend ourselves, and great circles were concened to discuss their metal weapons and how we might make our own. Indeed, we imprisoned a number of human beings, invaders all, to try to pry the knowledge from them. And the men have deep, inveterate hatred of our softness. They called us ‘the fools of the circle’ or ‘the simple people of the stones.’” The locus of revelation is not propositions but events, and its content is not a body of truths about God but “the living God” revealing himself and history with humans. The nonpropositional view thus centers upon what has come in recent theology to be known as Heilsgeschichte (“salvation history”) identified as the medium of revelation. It Is not supposed that God has marked his presence by performing a series of miracles, if “miracle” is taken to mean an event that compels a religious response by eluding all natural explanations. It is not characteristic of those theologians who think of revelation in nonpropositional terms to regard the Bible miracles as constituting theistic proofs. Rather, the Heilsgeschichte is the way in which a certain segment of human history—beginning with the origins of the national life of Israel and ending with the birth of the Christian community as a response to Christ—was experienced by men of faith and became understood and remembered as the story of God’s gracious dealings with his people.

What Christianity (and, confining itself to the Old Testament, Judaism) refer to as the story of salvation is a particular stream of history that was interpreted by prophets and apostles in the light of a profound and consistent ethical monotheism. They saw God at work around them in events that accordingly possessed revelatory significance.  God continues his story and describes the slaughter of his people while they were celebrating a great religious festival. On their flight to escape the human, they find it necessary to resort to laughter to rescue their fellow angles or to protect themselves. However, he draws the parallel with other tribes throughout history who underestimate the blood lust of their conquerors and so list out to them in many other ways they were their superiors. The role of Christianity as a corrupting influence becomes publicly observable in the series of events forming its basis belonging to the secular World of history and is capable of a variety of political, economic, psychological, and other analyses besides that of a theistic faith. Humans have a blood lust. Humans sacrifice and blood lust are the root of human religion. Even as many of you are attracted to the teaching of the gentle Christ, these teachings stressing Christ’s gentleness lose their meaning, as they become the basis for even greater slaughter and lust for money. The virtual annihilation of the angels results from their division into Christian and pagan groups. Adam is forced to watch as his own wife Eve is forced to abandon the antiquated ways.  Revelation refers to the completed communication that occurs when God’s approach has met with a human response. Good negotiators appreciate the role of ambivalence and can resist drawing conclusions from contradictory information. People saw more patterns in obscure pictures, even where to patterns existed, and expressed their beliefs more fervently. Christ is the divine Son incarnate in a human life, seeking to draw humans into a new life in relation to God. “Gentle beings, out of time, out of place, and maybe out of luck. And of such tragic import to his fledgling and her human kindred.

I, having spent two centuries in the Blood, should possess a wisdom and restraint that makes such a request unnecessary, but alas, within my heart I feed a human flame that it may never completely go out, and it is the heat of this flame which distracts me now and renders me so powerless in your presence.” Recall in the Bible that angels were mating with humans and also eating them and that God flooded the World to destroy him because he saw his Earthly creation, human, which he had cherished and loved so much had a blood lust and provoked the angels to attack and feed on them, which is probably why Lucifer was so jealous and upset that God loved these worthless, lustful, evil beings so much. There is certainly an event and appreciation; and in the coincidence of these revelations consists of. However, the discernment are interpretations in which men are convinced that they are conscious of God at work in and through certain events of both their personal experiences and World history. Is there an image of God (imago dei) in man that constitutes an innate capacity to respond to divine revelations or whether, on the contrary, human nature is so totally corrupted by the Fall that in revealing himself to men God has created them in a special capacity for response? Certainly, it is clear that humans have exploited angles. A mere listing of their atrocities is sufficient to make the point. At one time or other ritual slaughter, rape, infanticide, various tortures, and other physical violations. In addition, there are the usual psychological abuses; perpetuation of stereotypes, denigration of their physical and cultural traits, attribution of brutal traits, and various means for devaluing their lives. At once, it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.  

The Winchester Mystery House

Come explore the weird phenomena, ghostly legends, and ghoulish folklore of the Winchester Mystery House. Hear tales of vengeful ghosts, malevolent, red-eyed orbs, and statues that come to life. https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/

 

 

 

Fines and imprisonments and corporal punishments operate more forcibly on the human mind than all the fears of damnation. Punishment is deliberately inflicted pain or deprivation on an offender because of an offense he has committed; it is deliberately imposed, not just the natural consequence of a person’s action (like a hang-over), and the unpleasantness is essential to it, not an accidental accompaniment to some other treatment (like the pain of a dentist’s drill). It is imposed by an agent authorized by the system of rules against which an offense has been committed; a lynching is not a standard case of punishment. My interest in punishment is mainly connected with questions of justification. It is, prima facie (based on the first impression), wrong to deliberately inflict suffering or deprivation on another person, yet punishment consists in doing precisely this. What conditions would justify it? Or, more generally, what kind of considerations would count toward a justification? 

We must reconcile the apparently conflicting principles that wrongdoers should be punished and that it is wrong to make another man suffer. For instance, if a person had already committed a crime, that would clearly be relevant to the questions of whether he ought to be punished (although it might not be conclusive). What if he were only expected to commit a crime in the future? Or, again, is it relevant to the question of whether this man should be punished to say that punishing him would deter others? And assuming that criminals ought to be punished, how should we set about deciding appropriate penalties? Punishment can be justified only if it has beneficent consequences that outweigh the intrinsic evil of inflicting suffering on human beings. However, it is better that the wicked should be punished than that they should prosper more than the virtuous and, perhaps, at the hands of their expense. Sin is always punished in this World, whatever may come in the next. There is always some penalty in health, in comfort, or in peace of mind to be paid for every wrong. 

One can take for granted the principle that wrongdoers should be punished and ask whether a particular cause of punishment was justified. For instance, “The War on Drugs,” is an American term commonly applied to a campaign of prohibition of drugs, with the purpose to reducing the illegal drug trade. It was started by President Richard Nixon 18 June 1971. Since then, “The War on Drugs,” has cost Americans $51,000,000.00 a year. And in the year 2014, 1.6 million people were arrested for drug offenses in the United States of America, 700,993 of those were for marijuana law violations, 1,297,384 (83 percent) of those arrest were for possession only, and 46.4 percent of people are in prison for drug related charges. Punishment has the advantage of impressing both on the criminal and on everyone else that a breach of law and morals is so serious that society must do something to prevent it.  Happy is it for those few who are detected in their sins, and brought to exemplary punishment for them in this World.  

However, this raises the philosophical question of how one justifies a set of rules or an institution like a penal system to incarceration of people who deal drugs, but allows corporations to deal drugs and even local governments want in on the action. Mind you, it is still against federal law to sale and distribute drugs like marijuana. Nevertheless, according to David Downs of the East Bay Express in “Oakland, California USA, the city of Oakland wants to require any new Oakland marijuana company to make the city a partner—and direct revenue from the cannabis industry to elected officials’ special projects. Oakland would require new marijuana-shop owners to give the city 25 percent ownership stake in a business, plus one seat on a company’s board.” So, in what sense can punishment be said to restore the balance or annul the wrong, when it taken for granted that criminals deserve to be punished? How can we have 1.6 million people arrested for drug crimes annually, making up nearly 50 percent of prison populations, but allow corporations and cities to be involved in the cultivation and distribution of drugs that are deemed illegal by the federal government?  

Nor is it clear that virtue must be rewarded or that universal justice requires the kind of human rectification that this sort of retubutivism envisages. Of course, in a universe in which the wicked prospered, there might be no incentive to virtue. Again, evil motives and a bad character are necessary conditions for wickedness, but not of legal guilt and criminal liability. The state’s function is to punish breaches of those rules which in the public interest ought to be upheld; it is a matter of indifference in law (but not in morals) that some men who observe the rules do so from the unworthy motive of fear and others break them from the laudable motives of principle. Conversely, it is at least doubtful whether the criminal law should provide penalties for offenses against morality except where the public interest is at doubtful whether the criminal law should provide penalties for offenses against morality except where the public interest is at stake—exempli gratis (for the sake of example), whether it should extend to cases of lying other than, say, false pretenses and perjury. 

Punishment is necessary to annul the wrong done by the criminal. By this something more than restitution or compensation, neither of which is strictly punishment. It is, rather, that the criminal has upset the balance of the moral order, which can be restored only be their being made to suffer. In what sense can punishment be said to restore the balance or annul the wrong, unless it is taken for granted that criminals deserve to be punished? All punishment is a mischief…If it ought at all to be admitted, it ought only to be admitted in as far as it promises to exclude some greater evil. By reforming the criminal, by deterring them or others from similar offenses in the future, or by directly preventing further offenses by imprisonment, deportation, or execution, the good that comes out of punishment may outweigh the intrinsic evil of suffering deliberately inflicted. Without such effects, or if the suffering inflicted exceeded the suffering avoided, the institution would be unjustified. 

If people generally could be persuaded that an innocent man was guilty, some would justify punishing him since as a warning to other he would be just as useful as a genuine offender. Again, offenders might be deterred by threatening to punish their wives and children, particularly, if as is so often the case with political terrorists and resistance fighters, it were difficult to catch the offenders themselves. Or again, if punishment could be justified as a way of reforming criminals, it would seem better to punish them before, rather than after, they have committed their crimes. Nonetheless, do not lose sight of the two conditions which are necessary to the very idea of punishment—namely, that an offense should have been committed and that punishment shall be of the offender himself, who alone can be said to deserve it. Even justice makes victims. Punishment is punishment only when it is deserved; punishment for any other reason is a crying injustice. Proof must be built up stone by stone. The end crowns the work. It is not enough that Justice should be morally certain; she must be immorally certain—legally that is.  

I hate the man in whom kindness produces no responsive affection, and injustice no swell, no glow of resentment. Some think that it is a good idea to punish innocent people provided that such punishment causes less suffering than might otherwise be caused by the would-be criminals it deters because in the end, the deception would break down, that it could not be used systematically, or that the long-term consequences would be bad for society. However, these answers are unsatisfactory because they depend on assumptions of purely contingent consequences. Our revulsion against punishing innocent men seems to go deeper than that. In any cause, these answers will not meet the case for punishing hostages, which can certainly be done systematically and requires no deception or secrecy. The truth is always incredible, because the blind eyes of humanity can see only half-truths except by great effort. Child predators like, Kevin Maurice Johnson, the Mayor of Sacrament, California USA will eventually be punished for his crimes. Kings are accountable for injustice permitted as well as done.