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We Laugh at Honour and are Shocked to Find Traitors in our Midst!
People are the same most everywhere you go, they just make their living in different ways. A thing’s being a good X for K is treated as equivalent to its having the properties which it is rational for K to want in an X in view of one’s interests and aims. Yet we often assess the rationality of a person’s desires, and the definition must be extended to over this fundamental case if it is to serve the purposes of the theory of justice. Now the basic idea at the third stage is to apply the definition of good to plans of life. The rational plan for a person determines one’s good. A person may be regarded as a human life lived according to a plan. An individual says who one is by describing one’s purposes and causes, what one intends to do in one’s life. This plan is characterized by the coherent, systematic purpose of the individual and it makes one a conscious, unified moral person. If this plan is a rational one, then I say that the person’s conception of one’s good is likewise rational. In one’s case the real and the apparent good coincide. Similarly one interests and aims are rational, an it is appropriate to take them as stopping points in making judgments that correspond to the first two stages of the definition. These suggestions are quite straightforward but unfortunately setting out the details is somewhat tedious. Both the inward and outward lives of every human are controlled by a concealed entity—the Overself. Could one but see aright, one would see that everything witnesses to its presence and activity. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
A person’s plan for life is rational if, and only if, it is one of the plans that is consistent with the principles of rational choice when these are applied to all the relevant features of one’s situation, and it is that plan among those meeting this condition which would be chosen by one with full deliberative rationality, that is, with full awareness of the relevant fact and after a careful consideration of the consequences. For simplicity I assume that there is one and only one plan that would be chosen, and not several (or many) between which the agent would be indifferent, or whatever. Thus I speak throughout of the plan that would be adopted with deliberative rationality. Secondly, a person’s interests and aims are rational if, and only if, they are to be encouraged and provided for by the plan that is rational for one. Note that in the first of these definitions I have implied that a rational plan is presumably but one of many possible reason for this complication is that these principles do not single out one plan as the best. We have instead a maximal class of plans: each member of this class is superior to all plans not included in it, but given any two plans in the class, neither is superior or inferior to the other. Thus to identify person’s rational plan, I suppose that it is that plan belonging to the maximal class which one would choose with full deliberative rationality. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
We criticize someone’s plan, then, by showing either that it violates the principles of rational choice, or that it is not the plan that one would pursue were one to assess one’s prospects with care in the light of a full knowledge of one’s situation. A rational plan is fundamental for the definition of good, since a rational plan of life establishes the basic point of view from which all judgments of value relating to a particular person are to be made and final rendered consistent. Indeed, with certain qualification, we can think of a person as being happy when one in in the ways of a successful execution (more or less) of a rational plan of life drawn up under (more or less) favourable conditions, and one is reasonably confident that one’s plan can be carried through. Someone is happy when one’s plans are going well, one’s more important aspirations being fulfilled, and one feels sure that one’s good fortune will endure. Since plans which it is rational to adopt vary from person to person depending upon their endowments and circumstances, and the like, different individuals find their happiness in doing different things. The gloss concerning favourable circumstances is necessary because even a rational arrangement of one’s activities can be a matter of accepting the lesser evil if natural conditions are hard and the demands of humans oppressive. The achievement of happiness in the larger sense of a happy life, or of a happy period of one’s life, always presumes a degree of good fortune. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
Several other points are important. The first relates to their time structure. A plan, will, to be sure, makes some provision for even the most distant future and for our death, but it becomes relatively less specific for later periods. Certain broad contingencies are insured against and general means provided for, but the details are filled in gradually as more information becomes available and our wants and needs are known with greater accuracy. Indeed, one principle of rational choice is that of postponement: if in the future we may want to do one of several things but are unsure which, then, other things equal, we are to plan now so that these alternatives are both kept open. We must not imagine that a rational plan is a detailed blueprint for action stretching over the whole course of life. It consists of hierarchy of plans, the more specific subplans being filled in at the appropriate time. The second point is connected with the first. The structure of a plan not only reflects the lack of specific information but it also mirrors a hierarchy of desires proceeding in similar fashion from the more to the less general. The main features of a plan encourage and secure the fulfillment of the more permanent and general aims. A rational plan must, for example, allow for the primary goods, since otherwise no plan can succeed; but the particular form that the corresponding desires will take is usually unknown in advance and can wait for the occasion. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
Thus while we know that over any extended period of time we shall always have desires for food and drink, it is not until the moment comes that we decide to have a meal consisting of this or that course. These decisions depend on the choices available, on the menu that the situation allows. Thus planning is in part scheduling. We try to organize our activities into a temporal sequence in which each is carred on for a certain length of time. In this way a family of interrelated desires can be satisfied in an effective and harmonious manner. The basic resources of time and energy are allotted to activities in accordance with the intensity of the wants that they answer to and the contributions that they are likely to make to the fulfillment of other ends. The aim of deliberation is to find that plan which best organizes our activities and influences the formation of our subsequent wants so that our aims and interests can be fruitfully combined into one scheme of conduct. Desires that tend to interfere with other ends, or which undermine the capacity for other activities, are weeded out; whereas those that are enjoyable in themselves and support other aims as well are encouraged. A plan, then, is made up of subplans suitably arranged in a hierarchy, the broad features of the plan allowing for the more permanent aims and interests that complement one another. Since only the outlines of these aims and interest can be foreseen, the operative parts of the subplans that provide for them are finally decided upon independently as we go along. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Revisions and changes at the lower levels do not usually reverberate through the entire structure. If this conception of plans is sound, we should expect that the good things in life are, roughly speaking, those activities and relationships which have a major place in rational plans. And primary goods should turn out to be those things which are generally necessary for carrying out such plans successfully whatever the particular nature of the plan and of its final ends. If future shock were a matter of physical illness alone, it might be easier to prevent and to treat. However, future shock attacks the psyche as well. Just as the body cracks under the strain of environmental overstimulation, the “mind” and its decision processes behave erratically when overloaded. By indiscriminately racing the engines of change, we may be undermining not merely the health of those least able to adapt, but their very ability to act rationally on their own behalf. The striking signs of confusional breakdown we see around us—the spreading use of drugs, the rise of mysticism, the recurrent outbreaks of vandalism and undirected violence, the politics of nihilism and nostalgia, the sick apathy of millions—can all be understood better by recognizing their relationship to future shock. These forms of social irrationality may well reflect the deterioration of individual decision-making under conditions of environmental overstimulation. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Psychophysiologists studying the impact of change on various organisms have shown that successful adaptation can occur only when the level of stimulation—the amount of change and novelty in the environment—is neither too low nor too high. “The central nervous system of a higher animal,” says Professors D. E. Berlyne of the university of Toronto, “is designed to cope with environments that produce a certain rate of simulation. It will naturally not perform at its best in an environment that overstresses or overloads it.” He makes the same point about environments that understimulate it. Indeed, experiments with deer, dogs, mice and men all point unequivocally to the existence of what might be called an “adaptive range” below which and above which the individual’s ability to cope simply falls apart. Future shock is the response to overstimulation. It occurs when the individual is forced to operate above one’s adaptive range. Considerable research has been devoted to studying the impact of inadequate change and novelty on human performance. Studies of humans in isolated Antarctic outposts, experiments in sensory deprivation, investigations into on-the-job performance in factories, all show a falling off of mental and physical abilities in response to understimulation, but such evidence as does exist is dramatic and unsettling. Soldiers in battle find themselves trapped in environments that are rapidly changing, unfamiliar, and unpredictable. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
The soldier is torn this way and that. Shells burst on every side. Bullets whiz past erratically. Flares light the sky. Shouts, groans and explosions fill one’s ears. Circumstances change from instant to instant. To survive in such overstimulating environments, the solider is driven to operate in the upper reaches of one’s adaptive range. Sometimes, one is pushed beyond one’s limits. During World War II a bearded Chindit soldier, fighting with General Wingate’s forces behind the Japanese lines in Burma, actually fell asleep while a storm of machine gun bullets splattered around him. Subsequent investigation revealed that this solider was not merely reacting to physical fatigue or lack of sleep, but surrendering to a sense of overpowering apathy. Death-inviting lassitude was so common, in fact, among guerrilla troops who had penetrated behind enemy lines that British military physicians gave it a name. They termed in Long Range Penetration Strain. A soldier who suffered from it became, in their words, “incapable of doing the simplest thing for himself and seemed to have the mind of a child.” This deadly lethargy, moreover, was not confined to guerrilla troops. One year after the Chindit incident, similar symptoms cropped up en masse among the allied troops who invaded Normandy, and British researchers, after studying 5,000 American and English combat casualties, concluded that this strange apathy was merely the final stage in a complex process of psychological collapse. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
Mental deterioration often began with fatigue. This was followed by confusion and nervous irritability. The human become hypersensitive to the slightest stimuli around one. One would “hit the dirt” at the least provocation. One showed signs of bewilderment. One seemed unable to distinguish the sound of enemy fire from other, less threatening sounds. One became tense, anxious, and heatedly irascible. One’s comrades never knew when one would flail out in anger, even violence, in response to minor inconvenience. Then the final stage of emotional exhaustion set in. The soldier seemed to lose the very will to live. One gave up the struggle to save oneself, to guide oneself rationally through the battle. One became, in the words of R. L. Swank, who headed the British investigation, “dull and listless…mentally and physically retarded, preoccupied.” Even one’s face became dull and apathetic. The fight to adapt had ended in defeat. The stage of total withdrawal was reached. That humans behave irrationally, acting against their own clear interest, when thrown into conditions of high change and novelty is also borne out by studies of human behaviour in times of fire, flood, earthquake, and other crises. Even the most stable and “normal” people, unhurt physically, can be hurled into anti-adaptive states. Often reduced to total confusion and mindlessness, they seem incapable of the most elementary rational decision-making. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
Thus in a study of responses to tornadoes in Texas, H. E. Moore writers that “the first reaction may be one of dazed bewilderment, sometimes one of disbelief, or at least of refusal to accept the fact. This, it seems to us, is the essential explanation of the behaviour of persons and groups in Waco when it was devastated in 1953. On the personal level, it explains why a girl climbed into a music store through a broke display window, camply purcansed a record, and walked out again, even though the plate glass front of the building had blown out and articles were flying through the air inside the building.” A study of a tornado in Udall, Kansas, quotes a housewife saying: “After it was over, my husband and I just got up and jumped out of the window and ran. I do not know where we were running to but…I just did not care. I just wanted to run.” The classic disaster photograph shows a mother holding a dead or wounded baby in her arms, her face blank and numb as though she could no longer comprehend the reality around her. Sometimes she sits rocking gently on her porch with a doll, instead of a baby, in her arms. In disaster, therefore, exactly as in certain combat situations, individuals can be psychologically overwhelmed. Once again the source may be traced to a high level of environmental stimulation. The disaster victim finds oneself suddenly caught in a situation in which familiar objects and relationships are transformed. Where once one’s house stood, there maybe nothing more than smoke and rubble. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
One may encounter a cabin floating on the flood tide or a rowboat sailing through the air. The environment is filled with change and novelty. And once again the response is marked by confusion, anxiety, irritability, and withdrawal into apathy. Usually at times of physical, political, economic, and spiritual distress, that is when the mind turns towards the future, and when anticipations, utopias, and apocalyptic visions multiply. One thinks, for instance, of the chiliastic expectations of the Augustan age at the beginning of the Christian era, or of the spiritual changes in the West which accompanied the end of the first millennium. Today, as we are nearly a quarter of the way through the second millennium, we are again living in an age filled with apocalyptic images of universal destruction. What is the significance of that split, symbolized by the “Iron Curtain,” which divides humanity into two halves? What will become of our civilization, and of humans themselves, if the hydrogen bombs begin to go off, or if the spiritual and moral darkness of State absolutism should spread over Europe? We have no reason to take this threat lightly. Everywhere in the New World there are subversive marginalized groups who, sheltered by out humanitarianism and our sense of justice, hold the incendiary torches ready, with nothing to stop the spread of their ideas except the critical reason of a single, fairly intelligent, mentally stable stratum of the population. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
One should not overestimate the thickness of this stratum. It varies from country to country in accordance with national temperament. Also, it is regionally dependent on public education and is subject to the influence of acutely disturbing factors of a political and economic nature. Taking plebiscites as a criterion, one could on an optimistic estimate put its upper limits at about forty percent of the electorate. A rather more pessimistic view would not be unjustified either, since the gift of reason and critical reflection is not one of human’s outstanding peculiarities, and even where it exists it proves to be wavering and inconsistent, the more so, as a rule, the bigger the political groups are. The mass crushes out the insight and reflection that are still possible with the individual, and this necessarily leads to doctrinaire and authoritarian tyranny if ever the constitutional State should succumb to a fit of weakness. Culture shock, the profound disorientation suffered by the traveler who has plunged without adequate preparation into an alien culture, provides a third example of adaptive breakdown. Here we find none of the obvious elements of war or disaster. The scene may be totally peaceful and riskless. Yet the situation demands repeated adaptation to novel conditions. Culture shock, according to psychologist Seven Lundstedt, is a “form of personality maladjustment which is a reaction to a temporarily unsuccessful attempt to adjust to new surroundings and people.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
The culture shocked person, like the soldier and disaster victim, is forced to grapple with unfamiliar and unpredictable events, relationships and objects. One’s habitual ways of accomplishing things—even simple tasks like placing a telephone call—are no longer appropriate. The strange society may itself be changing only very slowly, yet for one it is all new. Signs, sounds, and other psychological cues rush past one before one can grasp their meaning. The entire experience takes on a surrealistic air. Every word, every action is shot through with uncertainty. In this setting, fatigue arrives more quickly than usual. Along with it, the cross-cultural traveler often experiences what Dr. Lundstedt describes as “a subjective feeling of loss, and a sense of isolation and loneliness.” The unpredictability arising from novelty undermines one’s sense of reality. Thus one longs, as Professor Lundstedt put it, “For an environment in which the gratification of important psychological and physical needs is predictable and less uncertain.” One becomes “anxious, confused, and other appears apathetic.” In fact, Dr. Lundstedt concludes, “culture shock can be viewed as a response to stress by emotional and intellectual withdraw.” It is hard to read these (and many other) accounts of behaviour breakdown under a variety of stresses without becoming acutely aware of their similarities. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
While there are differences, to be sure, between a soldier in combat, a disaster victim, and a culturally dislocated traveler, all three face rapid change, high novelty, or both. All three are required to adapt rapidly and repeatedly to unpredictable stimuli. And there are striking parallels in the way all three respond to this overstimulation. First, we find the same evidences of confusion, disorientation, or distortion of reality. Second, there are the same signs of fatigue, anxiety, tenseness, or extreme irritability. Third, in all cases there appears to be a point of no return—a point at which apathy and emotional withdraw set in. The available evidence strongly suggests that overstimulation may lead to bizarre and anti-adaptive behaviour. Rational argument can be conducted with some prospect of success only so long as the emotionality of a given situation does not exceed a certain critical degree. If the affective temperature rises above this level, the possibility of reason’s having any effect ceases and its place is taken by slogans and chimerical wish-fantasies. That is to say, a sort of collective possession results which rapidly develops into a psychic epidemic. Under these conditions all those elements whose existence is merely tolerated as asocial under the rule of reason come to the top. Such individuals are by no means rare curiosities to be met with only in prisons and lunatic asylums. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
For every manifest case of insanity there are, in my estimation, at least ten latent cases who seldom get to the point of breaking out openly but whose views and behaviour, for all their appearance of normality, are influenced unconsciously by pathological and perverse factors. There are, of course, no medical statistics on the frequency of latent psychoses—for understandable reasons. However, even if their number should amount to less than ten times that of the manifest psychoses and manifest criminality, the relatively small percentage of the population figures they represent is more than compensated for by the peculiar dangerousness of these people. Their mental state is that of a collectively exited group ruled by affective judgments and wish-fantasies. In a milieu of this kind they are the adapted ones, and consequently they feel quite at home in it. They know from their own experience the language of these conditions, and they know how to handle them. Their chimerical idea, sustained by fanatical resentment, appeal to the collective irrationality and find fruitful soil there; they expressed all these motives and resentments which lurk in more normal people under the clock of reason and insight. They are, therefore, despite their small number in comparison with the population as a whole, dangerous as sources of infection precisely because the so-called normal person possesses only a limited degree of self-knowledge. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
The greatest question of our time is not communism versus individualism, not Europe verses America, not even the Old World versus the New World; it is whether humans can live without God. What is wrong? Hypocrisy, betrayal, and greed unsettle the nation’s soul. At a time of moral disarray, America seeks to rebuild a structure of values. Yet even in the midst of this long-overdue national soul-searching, who is to decide what are the “right” values? Does ultimate moral authority lie with institutions such as church and state to codify and impose? Or, in a free society, are these matters of private conscience, with final choice belonging to the individual? We live in a society in which all transcendent values have been removed and thus there is no moral standard by which anyone can say right is right and wrong is wrong. What we live in is a naked public square. On the surface, a value-free society sounds liberal, progressive, and enlightened. It certainly sounded that way to the generations of sixties and seventies—probably many of the same people now wringing their hands on the pages of Time. However, when the public square is naked, truth and values drift with the winds of public favour and there is nothing objective to govern how we are to live together. Why should we be shocked, then, by the inevitable consequences; why should we be surprised to discover that society yield what is planted? #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
When parents fail to set stnadards of right behaviour in the home, when school teachers will not offer a moral opinion in the classroom, either out of fear of litigation or because they cannot “come from a position of what is right and what is wrong,” one New Jersey teacher out it, why are we surprised that crime soars steadily among juveniles? When pleasures of the flesh are treated as casualy as going out for a Frosty at Wendy’s—why are we horrified at the growing consequences of sexual promiscuity—including a life-threatening epidemic? When they have been preaching a get-rich-quick gospel all along, way are we shocked at disclosures of religious leader bilking their ministries of millions? Why the wonderment over the fact that for enough dollars or sexual favours, government employees and military personnel sell out their nation’s secrets? We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. Why is it so surprising that Wall Street yuppies make fast millions on insider information or tax fraud? Without objective values, the community or one’s neighbour has no superior claim over one’s own desires. Whether we like to hear it or not, we are reaping the consequences of the decades since World War II when we have, in Solzhenitsyn’s words, “forgotten God.” What we have left is the reign of relativism. However, humanity cannot survive without some law. The truly naked public square is at best a transitional phenomenon. It is a vacuum begging to be filled. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Exercise belief in God and you are left with only two principle: the individual and the state. In this situation, however, there is no mediating structure to generate moral values and, therefore, no counterbalance to the inevitable ambition of the state-as-church, toward totalitarianism. As we have seen, this has already occurred in Marxist nation where the death of God has created a new form of messiah—the all-power state whose political ideology acquires the force of religion. The same is true, though not as extreme, in the West where traditional religious influences have been excluded from public debated either by law or Chesterton’s taboo of tact of convention. As a result, government is free to makes its own ultimate judgments. Hence government ideology acquires the force of religion. The removal of the transcendent sucks the meaning from the law. Without an absolute standard of moral judgment backing government “morality,” where is the protection for the marginalized groups and the powerless? When in our public life no legal prohibition can be articulated with a force of transcendent authority, then there are no rules rooted in ultimacies that can protect the poor, the powerless, and the marginal, as indeed there are now no rules protecting the unborn, and only fragile inhibitions surrounding the ages and defective. With no ultimate reference point supporting it—no just cause for obedience—law can only be enforced by the bayonet. So the state seeks more and more coercive power. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Since the time of Adam, people have turned away from the gospel. They have turned away no matter how long and hard the prophets tried to teach the love of Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ and of Their desire for us to live with Them and enjoy all that They have for eternity. Each period of time when there has been at least one prophet on the Earth is called a “dispensation.” The prophets of each dispensation have had the power and authority of God, known as the priesthood, to help them testify of Jesus Christ and His gospel and perform the ordinances necessary for people to return to Him and Heavenly Father. “The prayers of the faithful shall be heard,” reports 2 Nephi 26.15. Know that the Lord loves you. You are a choice child of God. Pray always. Look to Him for guidance. He will not desert you in your hour of need. One will feel that this nobler self actually overshadows one at times. This is literally true. Hence we have named it the Overself. When humans shall discover the hidden power within oneself enabled one to be conscious and to think, one will discover the holy spirit, the ray of Infinite Mind lighting one’s little finite mind. If we could penetrate to the deeper regions of personality, the deeper layer of consciousness, we would find at the core a state that is utterly paradoxical. For it combines, at one and the same time, the highest degree of dynamic being and extreme degree of static being. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
This is the abiding essence of a human, one’s true self against one’s ephemeral person. Whoever enters into its consciousness enters into timelessness, a wonderful experience where the flux of pleasures and pains comes to an end in utter serenity, where regrets from the past, impatience at the present, and fears of the future are unknown. Nothing could be nearer to a human than the Overself for it is the source of one’s life, mind, and feeling. Nothing could be farther from one, nevertheless, for it eludes all one’s familiar instruments of experience awareness. Without the Overself no human creature could be what it is—conscious, living, and intelligent. The Lord who hath been mindful of us, may He bless us; may He bless the house of America; may He bless the house of Aaron. May He bless them that revere the Lord, small and great alike. May the Lord increase you, you and your children. Blessed may you be by the Lord, the Maker of Heaven and Earth. The Heavens are the Heavens of the Lord, but the Earth hath He given to the children of men. The dead praise not the Lord, neither any that go down into silence; but we will bless the Lord. From this time forth and forever. Hallelujah. I delight when the Lord hears the voice of my supplications. For He inclines His ear unto me on the day I call upon Him. The cords of death had encircled me, and the straights of the netherworld had overtaken me; I was in anguish and sorrow. But I called upon the name of the Lord: “O Lord, do Thou save me.” The Lord guarded the simple; when I was brought low, He saved me. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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There Will be No More Tuesday Morning Meetings or Everyone Will be Fired!
Life’s unfairness is not irrevocable; we can help balance the scales for others, if not always for ourselves. “It is bad to live under a prince who permits nothing, but much worse to live under one who permits everything,” reports John Calvin. Before the War of the Crosses erupted in the streets of Poland in 1984, a similar battle had already been lost in the United States of America. In 1980 the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional a Kentucky law requiring that the Tend Commandments be posted in public-schools. In Poland the outcry against removal of the crucifixes led to mass defiance. The crucifixes were reinstated. However, in Kentucky, when the offending commandments were taken down, the few holdouts, threatened with court action, soon capitulated. What a repressive government could not force upon Poland was quietly accepted in an indifferent West. The Kentucky case is less important on its own merits than as a symbol of a growing movement in the courts that is narrowing the influence of religion in American life. Some churches actually require their members to live right or they place them on probation and may suspend their membership to the church because people agree to abide by its doctrine and adhere to scriptural mandates. And they should know, or should have known, the consequences of their actions. After all, people do not join the church blindly, not knowing what is expected of them. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
And if the church cannot hold its members to a biblical standard, what is it allowed to do? Research suggests that bad behaviour is contagious. Like a yawn or chicken pox, there are behaviours that (for good and bad) can be passed between children, youth, and adults, among peers. And while that may work for beneficial behaviours such as kindness, behaviours we do not want to spread include anything that violates the Ten Commandments, and things like aggression, depression, and stress, yet studied have shown that these are susceptible to what research calls “peer contagion.” This is a process in which two or more people’s behaviours and emotions influence each other and (in these negative situations) undermine development and cause harm. So the church is against intimate relationships outside the marriage, and other things like drug use and the use of alcohol. They also abide by the biblical mandate that the church has a distinct responsibility not to associate with immoral people, and that rebuking their sin must be public so that others may take the warning. Nonetheless, the church’s principal task is a spiritual one—to proclaim the Good News and to cultivate holy living among its members. If a church cannot do this, it no longer has a purpose for existing. Let us dare to be different from the ways of the World when its ways are not the ways of God. In a World troubled with selfish greed, dishonesty, and dishonour, let us set ourselves on a higher path. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
As children of God, we must constantly be striving to develop and strengthen the qualities of unselfish service with wholehearted effort, dependability, honesty, morality, and every other good attribute that would lead us to integrity of character. We begin, then, with our thoughts and end with our eternal destiny. Our destiny is determined by our character, and our character is the sum and expression of our habits. Character is won by hard work. However, at Harper Elementary School in Evansville, teacher’s assistant Mary May and several Christian co-workers had met before classes every Tuesday morning for prayer, Bible reading, and discussion. Students were not allowed to participate. After two years of meetings, the principal told Mrs. May and her seven fellow Christians that there were to be no more Tuesday-morning meetings—or they would all be fired. Mary may eventually sued the board of education and the superintendent of schools, claiming that the school bord had violated her First Amendment rights to free speech, free association, and the free exercise of religion. She also argued that other teachers and assistants discussed politics, economics, and sports over their morning coffee before school; why could she and her friends not talk about God? A school-board representative replied that impressionable elementary-school kids might see “her carry a Bible to and from a meeting in their school, even if it is before classes. To children, teachers are very strong figures” #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
The school board representative also added, school officials would be forced to make sure that no Bibles or other religious materials were left behind. “We do not want the children exposed to them,” he concluded ominously. Character is not something to be obtained by ease and indolence or being socially agreeable. It cannot be acquired by absorption or by proxy or on the auction block. It is a reward derived from honest toil in overcoming difficulties. We grow by mastering tasks which others consider impossible. Yes, the character required to attain eternal life must be formed in this life with good habits supplying the building material. When the qualities that are desirable in individuals become universal in the people of a nation, that nation also will have good character. Goodness either in a person or in a nation is not simply the absence of wrongdoing. It is a love of and practice of all things that are true, honest, lovely, and of good reports. However, a number of zoning cases have affected the right of worship in private homes. In Colorado Springs, minister Richard Blanche has been repeatedly cited for holding religious meetings in his home in violation of a city zoning ordinance. In Fairhaven, Massachusetts, local zoning officials ruled that Bible studies were home occupations and therefore prohibited under the town’s property-use ordinances. In Los Angeles, California, officials ruled that home-occupancy regulations forbade orthodox Jews from holding prayer meetings in their homes. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
As civil-liberties lawyers could not help but note in a Stratford, Connecticut, case, prayer in home Bible studies is penalized while Tupperware parties enjoy full protection of the Constitution of the United States of America. During the spring of 1986 a last-minute decision by the Los Angeles Board of education took God off the programs of area high-school commencements. A law suit filed by an area atheist successfully barred prayers, invocations, or religious observances from graduation ceremonies. Even as local schools made sure that offending prayers were removed from programs, one principal noted, however, that students will, God forbid, occasionally mentioned Him during a speech. “If you happen to get a kid who’s religious, they frequently thank God. That is all right. I am not going to censor the kids’ speeches.” We can be grateful for that at least. Where religious symbols have been spared, it has been on grounds that offer little solace to the religious. The celebrated Pawtucket creche decision is a case in point. For forty years, one of the highlights for Pawtucket’s predominantly Catholic citizenry was the annual Christmas display that included something for everyone: Santa Claus, reindeer, Christmas trees, and a creche scene with baby Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, and assorted barn animals. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
The creche was challenged, however, because it was paid for ($1,365, with another $20 a year to maintain it) by tax money; this was said to be an infringement on the separation of church and state. In the 1984 Supreme Court decision, it was 5-6 that upheld the city’s right to display the creche—because, as Chief Justice Warren Burger expressed it, the creche served a “legitimate secular purpose.” After all, he noted, the creche was merely “a neutral harbinger of the holiday season, useful for commercial purposes, but devoid of any inherent meaning.” Chief Justice Burger’s words are significant beyond the Pawtucket case: religion “devoid of any inherent meaning” defines that which is legally and culturally acceptable in contemporary culture. However, religion has been a crucial aspect of human experience since the founding of America, and government’s sole purpose is to protect individual, personal values. As it stands, self-discipline and self-motivation in modern society are being replaced by negative peer pressure as the primary determinant of American character. Let us set high goals for ourselves and achieve those goals by making God the center of our lives. He is the fountainhead of all truth, justice, and peace. Let us remember that God’s laws are eternal. They do not change. There is no moral or spiritual code that grants permissiveness of conduct nor condones selection of evil or bad habits as a way to joyful living. Humans may assume the right to revise the ways of God, but the Lord remains the same yesterday, today, and forever. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
God’s standards and truths for His people will ever point the true way of life for all of His children. Maintaining good personal habits which are pleasing to our Heavenly Father will strengthen our character, increase our influence for good, improve our example, bless our loved ones and friends, enrich our lives, and enable us to accomplish those things that yield true personal satisfaction and build peace and happiness in our hearts. We will have joy eternally, possessing a treasure to be much desired and sought after, for the Lord gives this assurance: “Inasmuch as humans do good, they shall in nowise lose their reward,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 58.28. It all starts with a single step—we decide that we can do it. May we forsake all evil and take the first step to share our lives for eternity through good habits and righteous standards of good character. Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty. The future holds only opportunity. The ultimate support for any social system is the acceptance by the population of a moral justification of authority. With this support removed, it will cause all authority to be questioned. America is becoming a victim of an education adrift in relativity that doubts all values, and a degrades science that shirks the spiritual issues. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
Once the goal of education was allowing the student to learn and discover the truth, but now each student is allowed to decide the truth for oneself. Doctrine and Covenants, not ignorance, has become the enemy. The youth culture of most universities take what they are taught to heart, and develop a visceral sense that all forms of established authority, all rules, all demands for obedience, are inherently illegitimate. Autonomy and rebellion and vulgarity have become the god of many modern Americans, and the seek meaning in pleasures of the flesh and illegal barbiturates. Many people, instead of worshipping God believe, one who dies with the most toys wins. Separated from God, humans seek satisfaction in their senses. This is more than mindless hedonism; it is a World view in which the self has become the modern substitute for the soul. This is a reflection of the inevitable consequences of ten decades of steady erosion of absolute values. As a result, we lie with a massive case of schizophrenia. Outwardly many people are religious, but inwardly their religious beliefs make no difference in how they live. Several people are obsessed with self; they live, raise families, govern, and die as though God does not exist, just as Nietzsche predicted a century ago. This cultural revolution, rendering God irrelevant, has permeated the media in the New World, the instrument that not only reflects, but often shapes social attitudes. God is tolerated in the media only when He is bland enough to pose no threat. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
Some people take offense in talking about God and religion, and they will begin to steer the conversation to things they are more comfortable with such as sleezy gossip, prisons, criminal justice, and current news events. When someone brings the conversation back to one’s experiences with Jesus Christ, they usually appear aghast. The print medium does the same thing. It has been discovered that one major U.S. daily, as a matter of policy, will not print the two words Jesus Christ together; when combined, the editor says, it represents and editorial judgement. Such reporting is not always a matter of hostility; it often reflects the reporter’s lack of knowledge in spiritual matters. It can also be the result of the very nature of news itself. By definition, the media report events that are out of the ordinary—the bizarre, the hostile, the aberrant; otherwise news is not news. Thus, coverage of Christianity, when it occurs at all, is most often the outlandish exception rather than the norm practiced by millions of Christians daily. The news is more like a morbid parody of life. Rarely informative, never anything new and good. As God is stripped away from society, orthodox faith is treated the way clandestine intimate preferences that were not considered traditional love once were: it is tolerated as long as it is practiced only by consenting adults and is not flaunted in public. Religion appears to be relevant only in remote points in history. Pictures of pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving are bountiful—without any mention of to whom thanks is being giving. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
One mother reported that her son’s social-studies book made no mention of religion s part of the pilgrims’ life. Her son told her that “Thanksgiving was when the pilgrims gave thanks to the Indians.” When the mother called the principal of her son’s suburban New York City school to point out that Thanksgiving originated when the pilgrims thanked God, the principal responded, “That is your opinion.” He continued by saying that the schools could only teach what is in the books. A psychological motive behind the obvious censorship of religion presented in these books appears to be a deep-seated fear of any form of active contemporary Christianity, especially serious, committed Protestantism. This fear could have led the authors to deny and repress the importance of this kind of religion in American life. The prevailing notion is that the state should be neutral as to religion, and furthermore, that the best way to be neutral about it is to avoid all mention of it. By this sort of logic, nudism is the best compromise among different styles of dress. The secularist various of “pluralism” amounts to nudism. We are dismantling the church bit by bit and where necessary we are using economic means to do so. Statues of Christ have been hauled away from downtown squares, and replaced by oversized gummy bears and rocket ships. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
Many believe that religious values and liberties have fallen victim to some sinister conspiracy in which the ACLU, humanist educators, and the media meet in darkened corridors of CBS headquarters to plot the demise of religion in America. God designed life for believers to be an abundant life, God designed for you to live in overflow of blessings. American government makes no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith. Without God, democracy will not and cannot long endure. “The Earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof; the World, and they that dwell therein,” reports Psalms 24.1. It has always interested me to note that in the scriptures when the Lord talks about righteousness, we hear Him declare abundance, fullness, and plenty. Shortage and scarcity are not from Him, but are humanmade because of our failure to follow his original instructions to “be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the Earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over it,” reports Genesis 1.28. Now to maximize our potential, God has given us direction from the beginning on our behaviour while we sojourn here as mortals on Earth. God asked us first to love Him by believing His words, and secondly to love our fellow humans enough to help bring them to a realization and a testimony of Him. Born of God, people can change from their carnal and fallen state, to a state of righteousness, being redeemed of God, becoming His sons and daughters. “And thus they become new creatures; and unless they do this [the warning], they can in nowise inherit the kingdom of God,” reports Mosiah 27.24-26. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
All sides seem to agree upon two general facts. First, the terms “good” and “bad” and the like are typically used in giving advice and counsel, and to praise and extol, and so on. To be sure these terms are not always used in this manner, since they may appear in conditional statements, in commands and questions, as well as in other remarks that have no practical bearings. Still, their role in giving advice and counsel and in praising and extolling is characteristic. Second, the criteria for evaluation vary from one kind of thing to another. What is wanted in dwellings is not what is wanted in clothes. A satisfactory definition of goodness must fit these two facts. Despite the variation in criteria from object to object, the term “good” has a constant sense (or meaning) that, for philosophical purposes, is of the same kind as that of other predicates normally counted as descriptive. Indeed, this constant sense enables us to understand why and how the criteria for evaluation vary from one kind of thing to another. The other thesis is that the propriety using the term “good” (and its relatives) in giving advice and counsel, and in expressions of commendation, is explained by this constant sense together with a general theory of meaning. It is assumed that this theory includes an account of speech, acts, and illocutionary forces that considers the total situation in which utterance is issued. A descriptive theory holds that the constant descriptive meaning of good accounts for its being used, when in fact it is properly used, to praise and to advise, and the like. There is no necessity to assign “good” a special kind of meaning which is not already explained by its constant descriptive sense and the general theory of speech acts. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
Goodness as rationality is a descriptive theory in this sense. In the required way, it explains the two general facts which everyone recognizes. The constant sense of “good” is characterized by the definition in its several stages. Thus something’s being good is its having the properties that it is rational to want in things of its kind, plus further elaborations depending on the case. In the light of this definition it is easy to account for the fact that the criteria of evaluation differ from one kind of thing to another. Since we want things for different purposes, it is obviously rational to assess them by different features. It is helpful to think of the sense of “good” as being analogous to that of a function sign. We can then view the definition as assigning to each kind of thing a set of properties by which instances of that kind are to be assessed, namely, the properties which it is rational to want in things of that kind. Furthermore, the account of goodness as rationality explains why the term “good” appears in statements of advice and counsel and in remarks of praise and approval. Thus, for example, when we are asked for advice someone wishes to have our opinion as to which course of action, say, is best for one. One wants to know what we think is rational for one to do. A climber who advises another about the equipment and route to use on a difficult pitch takes up the other’s standpoint and recommends what one thinks is a sensible plan of attack. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
The meaning of “good” and of related expression does not change in those statements that are counted as advisory. It is the context that converts what we say into advice even though the sense of our words is the same. Climbers, for example, have a duty of mutual assistance to help one another, and hence they have a duty to offer their considered opinion in urgent circumstances. In these situations their words become advisory. And so as the situation warrants, what we say may be, and in some cases must be, reckoned as advice and counsel. Accepting the theory of right already sketched, the constant descriptive sense together with the general reasons why persons seek out the view of others explain these characteristic uses of “good.” At no point must we appeal to a special kind of prescriptive or emotive meaning. It may be objected to these remarks that the theory of illocutionary forces allows all that has been claimed by those who have proposed a prescriptive or an emotive theory of meaning. If so, there may be no disagreement. I have not denied that the understanding of the illocutionary forces of the various uses of “good,” its being employed in statements of praise and advice, and the like, is relevant to grasping the meaning of the term. Nor do I oppose the view that a certain illocutionary force is central to “good,” in the sense that one cannot accept as true the statement that something is good and at the same time dissent from its illocutionary force (assuming this force to obtain in the context). The question is how these facts are to be explained. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
Thus the descriptive theory maintains that “good” is characteristically used with the force of a recommendation or advice, and the like, precisely because of its descriptive sense as given by the definition. The descriptive meaning of “good” is not simply a family of lists of properties, a list for each kind of thing to convention or preference. Rather in the way that the definition explains, these lists are formed in the light of what it is rational to want in objects of various kinds. Therefore understanding why the word “good” (and its relatives) is employed in these speech acts is part of understanding this constant sense. Similarly, certain illocutionary forces are central to “good” as a result of its descriptive meaning, just as the force of factual narration belongs to some utterances in virtue of their descriptive meaning. For if we assent to the statement that something is best for us when it is offered as advice, say, we will indeed accept this advice and act upon it if we are rational. The dispute, if there is one, is not about these recognized facts but concerns the place of the descriptive meaning of “good” in explaining them. The descriptive theory holds that conjoined to a general theory of speech acts the definition of “good” yields an adequate account of these facts. There is no occasion to introduce a distinct kind of meaning. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
This is really Real, its moral directions the rightest of the Right. They joy that emanates from the Overself has a healing quality It dissipates anxieties and eradicates neuroses. Its power can carry one through a grave crisis with unfaltering steadiness. Do not think so much of looking for outside help. Your Higher self is with you. If you could have enough faith in its presence, you could look inwards. With persistence and patience, it would guide you. Without this awareness one is not a whole human, for one is not functioning in all one’s being. It is a truth by whose light a human lives nobly and in whose comfort one may die serenely. Where the ego fails or falters, the Overself proves equal to every occasion. Enfolded by that inner strength, one ceases to fear, to be anxious, or to dread the future. For one the most worthy achievement is to live in this state of being and to love it. It is always there, always present in one although not always easily reachable. It is the secret center of one’s being. This conscious contact with it gives a feeling of marvelous security, of mountain-like strength. One feels as sheltered by its presence inside one as the seed by the Earth outside it. In its warm glow, humans find a holy therapy for their suffering, a healing remedy for their disordered and dismembered selves. In its sacred presence fear and suffering must take their inevitable departure. One can assert this protective truth against whatever evils and dangers may appear from time to time. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
The Overself is there and in its presence, one becomes indifferent to the praise of friends or the venom of enemies. One dwells in some inner fortress—safe, protected, and sure of oneself. One is hardly touched by the turmoil of passing events. One will gain with time the sense of a Presence which walks with one and dwells in one. It is a guide with practical value, too, for it warns one what not to do if one would live ethically and avoid additional suffering. Even if one does not advance so far as perfect realization, one will advance. The early Christian Fathers believed that only a few privileged souls ever received this Grace of direct divine illumination. In this healing presence the past is washed away and old sins with it. It is the part of one’s being which, being worth most to one, deserves most from one. Quite a number get a mysterious support and consolation from simply knowing at second hand that the Overself is there, even though they themselves cannot make any contact with it. It is real, it is present and active in our very midst, its power and its guidance can be felt and recognized. Why look to any human who is outside you—when IT is inside you? And why forget that all humans are imperfect whereas It alone is perfect? In our present plight we cannot give ourselves too many supports, and there is none better than that which is to be found in the Overself. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
All of the abundance, fullness, and plenty of this Earth was given to us by God to be enjoyed in righteousness. We in turn are expected to love Him; to be converted to Him and His ways, and to feed His sheep; to multiply, replenish, and strengthen our human beings. I pray that we may all catch the vision of what conversion means and focus our service on the effort to build the kingdom of God here on Earth; that we may catch sight of God’s marvelous work and proceed to dedicate our lives for its purpose. God lives, and Jesus Christ is the Saviour of this World. Be assured there is a real craving for your companionship and a genuine need for your unique strengths. However, do not look too deeply into the eyes of the pleasure-seekers about you, for if you do, you will see a certain sadness in sensuality, and you will hear artificiality in the laughter and licentiousness. Do not look too deeply, either, into the motives of those who deny God, for you may notice their doubts of doubt. Do not risk thinking the unthinkable, lest you find yourself drawn with a deep and powerful pull toward the reality that God does exist, that He loves you, and that finally there is no escaping Him or His love! There is some life-power from which we derive our capacities and our intelligence. It is hidden and intangible. No one has ever seen it but everyone who thinks deeply enough can sense that it is there, always present and always supporting us. It is the Overself. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
This is the ultimate beauty behind life, which all people seek blindly and unknowingly in such varied external forms that merely and momentarily hint, suggest, or herald its existence. The Overself is a term to indicate that the holy front of our being and root of our consciousness is still ourselves, and is indeed our true self. The picture is of the higher element in humans controlling the lesser self, and goodwill to all beings. It is this grandeur of self that is the magnetic pole drawing us to the Good, the Beautiful, the True, and the Nobel. Yet itself is above all these attributes for it is the Attributeless, the Ineffable, and the Infinite that human thought cannot grasp. Not for us, O Lord, not for us, but for Thy name give glory for Thy mercy, and for Thy truth’s sake. Wherefore should the nations taunt us, saying: “Where is not their God?” Our God is in the Heavens, doing all that He willeth. Their idols are mere silver and gold, the work of men’s hands. They have mouths, but they speak not; eyes have they, but they see not: they have ears, but they hear not; noses have they, but they inhale not; they have hands, but they touch not; feet have they, but they walk not; neither can they make sound with their throats. Whoever makes them shall become like them; yea, every one that trusts in them. But America, trust in the Lord! He is your help and your shield. O house of Aaron, trust in the Lord! He is your held and your shield. You who revere the Lord, trust in the Lord! He is your help and your shield. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
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One Lesson Already Seems Vividly Clear: Change Carries a Physiological Price Tag!
Our ability to speak is just one aspect of the evolutionary drive to create a more accurate World in our Heads. Eons ago the shrinking seas cast millions of unwilling aquatic creatures onto the newly created beaches. Deprived of their familiar environment, they died, gasping and clawing for each additional instant of eternity. Only a fortunate few, better suited to amphibian existence, survived the shock of change. Today, says sociologist Lawrence Suhm of the University of Wisconsin, “We are going through a period as traumatic as the evolution of man’s predecessors from sea creatures to land creatures. Those who can adapt will; those who cannot will either go on surviving somehow at a lower level of development or will perish—washed up on the shores.” To assert that humans must adapt seems superfluous. They have already shown themselves to be among the most adaptable of life forms. They have survived Equatorial summers and Antarctic winters. Humans have survived Dachau and Vorkuta. They have walked the lunar surface and travel to Mars. They have invented vaccines overnight. Such accomplishments give rise to the glib notion that their adaptive capabilities are “infinite.” Yet nothing could be further from the truth. Afterall, as hard as humans work, they have not even evented a silent leaf blower to stop disturbing the peace with the sound of its engine that seems to be having an extremely loud, painful and agonizing death, which is probably the most annoying sound in the World. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
For despite all their heroism and stamina, humans remain a biological organism, a “biosystem,” and all such systems operate within inexorable limits. Temperature, pressure, caloric intake, oxygen and carbon dioxide levels, all set absolute boundaries beyond which humans, as presently constituted, cannot venture. Thus when we hurl a human into outer space, we surround one with an exquisitely designed microenvironment that maintains all these factors within livable limits. How strange, therefore, that when we hurl a human into the future, we take few pains to protect them from the shock of change. It is as though NASA had short Armstrong and Aldrin naked int the cosmos. There are discoverable limits to the amount of change that the human organism can absorb, and by endlessly accelerating change without first determining these limits, we may submit masses of humans to demands they simply cannot tolerate. We may define future shock in different ways. Its symptoms also vary according to the stage and intensity of the disease. These symptoms range all the way from anxiety, hostility to helpful authority, and seemingly senseless violence, to physical illness, depression and apathy. Its victims often manifest erratic swings in interest and life style, followed by an effort to “crawl into their shells” through social, intellectual and emotional withdrawal. They feel continually “bugged” or harassed, and want desperately to reduce the number of decisions that must make. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
As to the conditions that contribute to the develop of future shock and necrophilia, our knowledge is still developing in this field of research and as we expand our understanding, we will throw more light on the problem. We may safely assume that a very unalive, necrophilous family environment will often be a contributing factor in the formation of necrophilia and future shock (as well as in the formation of schizophrenia). Lack of enlivening stimulation, the absence of hope, and a destructive spirit of the society as a whole are certainly of real significance for fostering these conditions. That genetic factors play a role in the formation of necrophilia is, in my opinion, very likely. These people tend to be very jealous—they must keep their unique position—and they are simultaneously insecure and anxious whenever they have to perform a real task; while they might not fail, their performance can never really equal their narcissistic conviction of superiority over any human (while having at the same time a nagging, unconscious feeling of inferiority to all), so one can see how dealing with necrophiles can produce future shock in other individuals. It is hardly necessary to stress that severely necrophilous persons are very dangerous. They are the haters, the racists, those in favour of war, bloodshed, and destruction. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
Necrophilous persons are dangerous not only if they are political leaders, but also as the potential cohorts for a dictatorial leader. They become the executioners, terrorists, torturers; without them no terror system could be set up. However, the less intense necrophiles are also politically important; while they may not be among its first adherents, they are necessary for the existence of a terror regime because they form a solid basis, although not necessarily a majority, for it to gain and hold power. It is the efforts of Eros to combine organic substance and disintegrate living structure. The relationship of the death instinct with necrophilia hardly needs any further explanation. In order to elucidate the relation between life instinct and biophilia, however, a short explanation of the latter is necessary. Biophilia is the passionate love of life and of all that is alive; it is the wish to further growth, whether in a person, a plant, and idea, or a social group. The biophilous person prefers to construct rather than to retain. One is capable of wondering, and one prefers to see something new rather than to find confirmation of the old. One loves adventure of living more than one does certainty. One sees the whole rather than only the parts, structures rather than summations. One wants to mold and to influence by love, reason, and example; not by force, by cutting things apart, by the bureaucratic manner of administering people as if they were things. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
Because one enjoys life and all its manifestations, the biophilous person is not a passionate consumer of newly packaged “excitement.” Biophilic ethics have their own principle of good and evil. Good is all that serves life; evil is all that serves death. Good is reverence for life, all that enhances life, growth, unfolding. Evil is all that stifles life, narrows it down, cuts it into pieces. Biophilia is understood to refer to a biologically normal impulse, while necrophilia is understood as a psychopathological phenomenon. The latter necessarily emerges as the result of stunted growth, of physical “crippledness.” It is the outcome of unlived life, of the failure to arrive at a certain stage beyond narcissism and indifference. Destructiveness is not parallel to, but the alternative to biophilia. Love of life or love of the dead is the fundamental alternative that confronts every human being. Necrophilia grows as the development of biophilia is stunted. Humans are biologically endowed with the capacity for biophilia, but psychologically they have the potential for necrophilia as an alternative solution. Considering these facts, would it now be of great social and political significance to know what percentage of the population can be considered to be predominantly necrophilous or predominantly biophilous? The las of history will eventually bring justice to the oppressed and wipe away every tear. It is a system that an atheist can put one’s faith in. Lenin, Stalin, and Rakosi recognized that a renewed and purified Christianity was the only force that could move the masses as powerfully as the Marxist ideal could. They attacked it as the enemy that it was and is to them. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Trosky, Tito, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Castro—and the Sandinistas of the eighties—all the tyrants who have followed Marx have believed substantially the same thing about Christianity. Nothing has changed. Despite his shrewd public effort to picture himself as a benign and progressive reformer, Mikhail Gorbachev adhered to the same ideology. As recently as November 1986, he descried the struggle with traditional religion as “decisive and uncompromising” and called for more aggressive atheistic education. Like Lenin, Gorbachev knew who his enemies were. The greatest obstacle to the Marxist ideal of total control is the Christian faith, which is not simply a set of intellectual beliefs or weekly worship services, but involves personal submission to a King whose culture is incompatible with Lenin’s. The Christian church and the Marxist state may work out an accommodation for a time, but they will always be adversaries. The very nature of each makes any lasting accommodation impossible. They are the two great contenders for the soul of humankind. The people of Jaworzyna had had enough. For years they had petitioned the party authorities in the Silesia region of Poland for permission to build a church. Their repeated applications were denied. The people on the church-building committee tried pulling strings with higher party officials in Crakow and Warsaw. No luck. When they angrily protested the refusal, the petty bureaucrats turned a deaf ear. Now, other measures were required. #RandolphHarri 6 of 20
Months before, the authorities had issued a permit to build an auto-repair garage on a site near a highway. Now workers moved into the site, erected a tall fence, and began to build a garage. The building progressed slowly over a period of two years, but no one paid much attention. The party authorities in Jaworzyna were busy people. Then, on Sunday, February 5, 1978, the fence came down and the garage turned out to be a new church—its wide portals adorned with a picture of Our Lady of Czestochowa, the protector of Poland. Masses celebrated until late in the evening; thousands of people came to worship and rejoice. That spring, Cardinal Karol Wojtlya of Crakow came to Jawrzyna to dedicate the church. Soon afterward the authorities tried to close it, but hundreds of angry Poles organized a twenty-four-hour guard. The church building committee was taken to court and fined. Their clever lawyers tied up the case up in procedural disputes. The World saw that the church possessed the soul of the Polish people and embodied the essence of Polish nationhood. By contrast, the Polish Communists who operated the machinery of the state were alien usurpers who did the bidding of Russian masters. Though he went out of his way to avoid a direct confrontation with the Communist regime, John Paul’s message was widely understand by the restive Polish masses, and he lit a fuse during his triumphant nine-day visit to his homeland. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
“Christ would never approve that man be considered merely as a means of production,” he told workers in his old archdioceses in Mogila. At Czestochowa, John Paul urged the government to honour “the cause of fundamental human rights, including the right to religious liberty.” At Novy Targ, he told the Poles to set a Christian example, “even if it means risking danger.” The election of a Polish pope is surely why the church is so much stronger in Poland than almost anywhere else in the World, certainly strong than in Hungary and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. So is the fact that Christianity has become firmly established in Poland for a thousand years. However, a primary reason is the church’s long tradition of resistance to secular power. When the Communist imprisoned him in 1953, Cardinal Wyszynski reflected that of his seventeen seminary classmates, only he had thus far escaped being sent to German or Russian concentration camps. Cardinal Wyszynski confided a somewhat wry reflection to his diary: “Most of the priests and bishops with whom I worked had experienced prisons. Something would have been wrong if I had not experienced imprisonment. What was happening to me was very appropriate.” Collaboration with power, whether Communist or not, is always ruinous for the church. If the church exists, if it is to have legitimacy in the eyes of the people, it must always stand erect as a counter-power to political power. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
Cardinal Wyszynski understood this. In prison in 1953, alone but supremely confident, he wrote a prophetic comment in his diary: “Any form of government, no matter how ruthless, will slowly cool and wane as it runs up against difficulties that the bureaucrat cannot resolve without cooperation from the people. Somehow the people must be taken into account. When the time came to reach the people, the Polish state found the church already there. It had been there for centuries. The only way to love God, whom we do not see, is by contributing to the advancement of this revolutionary process of biblical faith in the most sensible and radical way possible. Only then shall we be loving others, whom we do see. Therefore, we say that to be a Christian is to be a revolutionary. Do not legitimize tyranny. Remain aloof from the enticements and threats of the secular authority. Be faithful to God alone. At no other time in human history, than currently, has so much of the World come under the dark cloud of an oppressive regime consciously determined to eliminate religious influence from culture. However, we can be grateful that the Kingdom of God does not depend on the structures of humans. Though a third of the World, and growing, lives under tyranny and the official “religion” of atheism, the Kingdom of God remains visible. We must pull together from such scattered fields of psychology, neurology, communications theory and endocrinology, what science can tell us about human adaptation. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
There is, as yet, no science of adaptation per se. Nor is there any systematic listing of the diseases of adaption. Yet evidence now sluicing in from a variety of disciplines makes it possible to sketch the rough outlines of a theory of adaptation. For a while researchers in these disciplines often work in ignorance of each other’s efforts, their work is elegantly compatible. Forming a distinct and exciting pattern, it provides solid underpinning for the concept of future shock. What actually happens to people when they are asked to change again and again? To understand the answer, we must begin with the body, the physical organism, itself. Fortunately, a series of startling, but as yet unpublicized, experiments have cast revealing light on the relationship of change to physical health. These experiments grow out of the work of the late Dr. Harold G. Wolff at the Cornell Medical Center in New York. Dr. Wolff repeatedly emphasized that the health of the individual is intimately bound up with the adaptive demands placed on one by the environment. One of Dr. Wolff’s followers, Dr. Lawrence E. Hinkle, Jr. has termed this the “human ecology” approach to medicine, and has argued passionately that disease need not be the result of any single, specific agent, such as a germ or virus, but a consequence of many factors, including the general nature of the environment surrounding the body. Dr. Hinkle has worked for years to sensitize the medical profession to the importance of environmental factors in medicine. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Today, with spreading alarm over air pollution, water pollution, urban crowding and other such factors, more and ore health authorities are coming around to the ecological notion that the individual needs to be seen as part of a total system, and that one’s health is dependent upon many subtle external factors. It was another of Dr. Wolff’s colleagues, however, Dr. Thomas H. Holmes, who came up with the idea that change, itself—not this or that specific change but the general rate of change in a person’s life—could be one of the most important environmental factors of all. Originally from Cornell, Dr. Holmes also taught at the University of Washington School of Medicine, and it was there, with the help of a young psychiatrist named Richard Rahe, that he created an ingenious research tool named the Life-Change Units Scale. This was a device for measuring how much change an individual has experienced in a given time span of time. Its development was an important methodological breakthrough, making it possible, for the first time, to qualify, at least crudely, the rate of change in individual life. Reason that different kinds of life-changes strike us with different force, Dr. Holmes and Dr. Rahe began by listing as many such changes as they could. A divorce, a marriage, a move to a new home—such events affect each of differently. Moreover, some carry greater impact than others. A vacation trip, for example, may represent a pleasant break in the routine. Yet it can hardly compared in impact with, say, the death of a parent. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
Dr. Holmes and Dr. Rahe next took their list of life-changes to thousands of men and women in many walks of life in the United States of America and Japan. Each person was asked to rank order the specific items on the list according to how much impact each had. Which changes required a great deal of coping or adjustment? Which ones were relatively minor? To Dr. Holmes’ and Dr. Rae’s surprise, it turned out that there was widespread agreement among people as to which changes in their lives require major adaptations and which ones are comparatively unimportant. This agreement about the “impact-fullness” of various life events extends even across national and language barriers. (The work in the United States of America and Japan was also supplemented by studies in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands.) People tend to know and to agree on which changes hit the hardest. Given this information, Dr. Holmes and Dr. Rahe were able to assign a numerical weight to each type of life change. Thus each item on their list was ranked by its magnitude and given a score accordingly. For example, if the death of one’s spouse is rated as one hundred points, then moving to a new home is rated by most people as worthy only twenty points, a vacation thirteen. (The death of a spouse, incidentally, is almost universally regarded as the single most impactful change that can befall a person in the normal course of one’s life.) #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Now Dr. Holmes and Dr. Rahe were ready for the next step. Armed with their Life-Change Units Scale, they began to question people about the actual pattern of change in their lives. The scale made is possible to compare the “changefulness” of one person’s life with that of another. By studying the amount of change in a person’s life, could we learn anything about the influence of change itself on health? To find out, Dr. Holmes, Dr. Rahe, and other researchers compiled the “life change scores” of literally thousands of individuals and began the labourious task of comparing these with the medical histories of these same individuals. Never before had there been a way to correlate change and health. Never before had there been such detailed data on patterns of change in individual lives. And seldom were the results of an experiment less ambiguous. In the United States and Japan, among servicemen and civilians, among pregnant women and the families of leukemia victims, among college athletes and retirees, the same striking pattern was present: those with high life change scores were more likely than their fellows to be ill in the following year. For the first time, it was possible to show in dramatic form that the rate of change in a person’s life—one’s pace of life—is closely tied to the state of one’s health. The results were spectacular, but Dr. Holmes, at first, hesitated to publish them. So when you doctor says you are allergic to something in your environment and it is causing an illness, it could be more than just the known allergen. There could be other precipitating factors contributing to the illness. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
In every case in which it has been applied, the Life-Change Units Scale and the Life Changes Questionnaire have been applied to a wide variety of groups of people. In every case, the correlation between change and illness has held. It has been established that “alteration in life style” that require a great deal of adjustment and coping, correlate with illness—whether or not these changes are under the individual’s own direct control, whether or not one sees them as undesirable. Furthermore, the higher the degree of life change, the higher the risk that subsequent illness will be severe. So strong is this evidence, that it is becoming possible, by studying life change scores, actually to predict levels of illness in various populations. Thus Commander Ransom J. Arthur, head of the United States Navy Medical Neuropsychiatric Research Unit at San Diego, and Dr. Richard Rahe, a the time a Captain in Commander Arthur’s group, sat out to forecast sickness patterns in a group of 3,000 Navy Men Drs. Arthur and Rahe began by distributing a Life Change Questionnaire to the sailors on three cruisers in San Diego harbour. The ships were about to depart and would be at sea for approximately six months each. During this time it would be possible to maintain exact medical records on each crew member. Could information about a human’s life change pattern tell us in advance the likelihood of one’s falling ill during the voyage? #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
Each crew member was asked to tell what changes had occurred in one’s life during the year preceding the voyage. The questionnaire covered an extremely broad spectrum of topics. Thus it asked whether the man had experienced either more or less trouble with superiors during the twelve-month period. It asked about alterations in one’s eating and sleeping habits. It inquired about change in one’ circle of friends, one’s dress, one’s forms of recreation. It asked whether one had experienced any change in one’s social activities, in family get-togethers, in one’s financial condition. Has one been having more or less trouble with one’s in-laws? More or fewer arguments with one’s wife? Had one gained a child through birth or adoption? Had one suffered the death of one’s wife, a friend or relative? The questionnaire went on to probe such issues as the number of times one had moved to a new home. Had one been in trouble with the law over traffic violations or other minor infractions? Had one spent a lot of time away from one’s wife as a result of a job-related travel or marital difficulties? Had one changed jobs? Won awards or promotions? Had one’s living conditions changes as a consequence of home remodeling or the deterioration of one’s neighbourhood? Had one’s wife started or stopped working? Had one taken out a loan or mortgage? How many times had one taken a vacation? Was there any major change in one’s relations with one’s parents as a result of death, divorce, remarriage, et cetera? #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
The questionnaire tried to get at the kind of life changes that are part of normal existence. It did not ask whether a change was regarded as “good” or “bad,” simply whether or not it had occurred. For six months, the three cruisers remained at sea. Just before they were scheduled to return, Drs. Arthur and Rahe flew new research teams out to join the ships. These teams proceeded to make a fine-tooth survey of the ships’ medical records. Which men had been ill? What diseases had they reported? How many days had they been confined to sick bay? When the last computer runs were completed, the linkage between changefulness and illness was nailed down more firmly that ever. Men in the upper ten percent of life change units—those who had had to adapt to the most change in the preceding year—turned out to suffer from one-and-a-half to two times as much illness as those in the bottom ten percent. Moreover, once again, the higher the life change scored, the more severe the illness was likely to be. The study of life change patterns—of change as an environmental factor—contributed significantly to success in predicting the amount and severity of illness in widely varied populations. “For the first time,” says Dr. Arthur, appraising life change research, “we have an index of change. If you have had many changes in your life within a short time, this places a great challenge on your body…An enormous number of changes with a short period might overwhelm its coping mechanisms. #RandolphHrris 16 of 20
“It is clear,” he continues, “that there is a connection between the body’s defenses and the demands for change that society imposes. We are in a continuous dynamic equilibrium…Various “noxious” elements, both internal and external, are always present, always seeking to explode into disease. For example, certain viruses live in the body and cause disease only when the defenses of the body wear down. There may well be generalized body defense system that prove inadequate to cope with the flood of demands for change that come pulsing through the nervous and endocrine systems. Or the body may overreact to something in the environment and start attacking its self because it detects something foreign. The stakes in life-change research are high, indeed, for not only illness, but death itself, may be linked to the severity of adaptational demands placed on the body. Thus a report by Drs. Arthur, Rahe, and a colleague, Dr. Joseph D. Mckean, Jr., begins with a quotation from Somerset Maugham’s literary autobiography, The Summing Up: My father…went to Paris and became solicitor to the British Embassy…After my mother’s death, her maid became my nurse…I think my father had a romantic mind. He took it into his head to build a house to live in during the summer. He bought a piece of land on the top of a hill at Suresnes…It was to be like a villa on the Bosphorous and on the top floor it was surrounded by loggias. It was a white house and the shutters were painted red. The garden was laid out. The rooms were furnished and then my father died. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
“The death of Somerset Maugham’s father,” they write, “seems at first glance to have been an abrupt unheralded event. However, a critical evaluation of the events of a year or two prior to the father’s demise reveals changes in his occupation, residence, personal habits, finances and family constellation.” These changes, they suggest, may have been precipitating events. This line of reasoning is consistent with reports that death rates among widows and widowers, during the first year after loss of a spouse, are higher than normal. A series of British studies have strongly suggested that the shock of widowhood weakens resistance to illness and tends to accelerate aging. The same is true for men. Scientists at the Institute of Community Studies in London, after reviewing the evidence and studying 4,486 widowers, declare that “the excess mortality in the first six months is almost certainly real…[Widowerhood] appears to being in its wake a sudden increment in mortality-rates of something like 40 percent in the first six months.” Why should this be true? It is speculated that grief, itself, leads to pathology. Yet the answer may lie not in the state of grief at all, but in the very high impact that loss of a spouse carries, forcing the survivor to make a multitude of major life changes within a short period after the death takes place. The work of Drs. Hinkle, Holmes, Rahe, Arthur, McKean and others now probing the relationship of change to illness is still in its early stages. Yet one lesson already seems vividly clear: change carries a physiological price tag with it. And the more radical the change, the steeper the price. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
If we say that the Overself resides in each human we say something that is not quite true nor quite false. It would be better to say that each human first feels the Overself—when one does have the good fortune to feel it—as residing within one’s heart, but the result of further development is to show one that the contrary, although a paradox, is also correct, which is that one resides in the Overself! The godlike abides in each of us but only the master knows and feels it. The mind keeps on moving about until sleep overcomes it…and because it never stopped to collect itself, it still does not know the higher and better part of itself—the Overself. The divine presence is constant, it does not go away: but humans themselves are too often absent, heedless, interested elsewhere. However, each return gives one a glimpse which one calls a grace. The soul is present and active in every human. This is why it is quite possible for every human to have a direct glimpse of the truth about one’s own inward non-materiality. Nothing can ever exist outside God. Therefore, no human is bereft of the divine presence within oneself. All humans have the possibility of discovering this fact. And with it they will discover their real selfhood, their true individuality. This is the truth that must be proclaimed to our generation, that the Soul is with us here and now—not in some remote World or distant time, not when the body expires—and that it is our joy and strength to find it. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
There is no pint of seawater in which salt is not present in solution. There is no human entity in whom a divine soul is not present in secret. Not even a solitary Crusoe passes through life alone. Everyone passes through it in fellowship with one’s higher self. That such fellowship is, in most cases, an unconscious one, is not enough to nullify it. That humans may deny in faith or conduct even they very existence of their soul is likewise not enough to nullify it. This, the real I, is always accessible to one in prayer and always is the half-known background of one’s conscious self at other times. So long as the Overself is sought elsewhere than were It is, as apart from the seeker oneself, so long will the quest for its end in failure. The divine being is present in all people, from the crudest to the most cultured. Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who hast sanctified us by Thy precepts and hast enjoined upon us the taking of the Lulav. Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who hast kept us in life, and hast sustained us, and enabled us to reach this festive season. As we wave the Lulav in all directions, we acknowledge as did our forefathers that Thou, O Lord, art everywhere. From the north and from the south, from the east and from the west, praise the Lord. The shining Heavens praise Thee. All the Earth praises Thy name. The eyes, represented by the leaves of the myrtle, the lips, represented by the leaves of the willow, the spine, by the palm branch, and the heart, by the citron,–all render praise unto Thee, O Lord on high. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
CRESLEIGH MEADOWS AT PLUMAS RANCH
Plumas Lake, CA |
Now Selling!
Cresleigh Meadows is now selling! Found just north of Feather River Boulevard, Cresleigh Meadows is home of the largest neighborhood in Plumas Ranch as well as the popular Bear River Park. With four floor plans available, ranging from approximately 2,000 – 3,500 square feet offering, three to five bedrooms, we are certain you will find the home that fits your needs and lifestyle.
Popular design elements include open floor plans, large kitchen islands, and flex spaces are staples in Cresleigh homes. Multi-generational living options also available in select homes.
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To be Sure, One Step is Less than Five, but it is Only a Quantitative Difference!
The majority of believers have belief without understanding. Faith is that quality or power by which the things desired become the things possessed. For centuries theologians have argued about the meaning of Jesus’ declaration that the kingdom of Heaven was at hand. Most of them have given it a historical interpretation. Only those who could approach the mind of Jesus have given it a mystical interpretation. For only they can see that He meant that the kingdom of the Overself is really close to us as is our own hand. When it starts from different planes of knowledge, all such argument is unless, and the arguers never really meet each other. Everywhere we see people in bondage to their egos. Everywhere, too, the self-actualized sees the Overself waiting, always present, for them to turn from themselves to It. The overlooked part is one’s consciousness; the forgotten self is one’s knowing power. These exist uninterruptedly, even in apparently subconscious forms like deep sleep and swoon. Yet one denies this share of one’s in the Real Being, identifies with the body instead of making it merely an object of awareness. The Overself is in the heart of every human but few care to seek it out until pressure of its grace from within, or fatigue with the World-life without, drives them to do so. The difference between the pessimist and the cynic is that the pessimist carries on the losing battle against life in one’s own soul, while the cynic tries to wage the battle in someone else’s soul. #RandolphHarris 1 of 25
The Overself exists in all of us—the bad as well as the good, the unenlightened as well as the clever. When the divinity in one’s own self is found at last, one will afterwards find its light reflected upon every other man and woman one encounters. Every human is sacred did one but know it. The fusion of technique and destructiveness was not yet visible in the first World War. There was little destruction by plans, and the tank was only a further evolution of traditional weapons. The second World War brought about a decisive change: the use of the airplane for mass killing. The Battle of Britain at the beginning of the war was still fought in the old-fashioned style; the British fighter pilots engaged their German adversaries; their plane was their individual vehicle; they were motivated by the passion to save their country from German invasion. It was their personal skill, courage, and determination that decided the outcome; in principle, their fighting was not different from that of the heroes of the Trojan war. The men dropping the bombs were hardly aware that they were killing and were hardly aware of an enemy. They were concerned with the proper handling of their complicated machine along the lines laid down in meticulously organized plans. That as a result of their acts many thousands, and sometimes over a hundred thousand people, would be killed, burnt, and maimed was of course known to them cerebrally, but hardly comprehended affectively; it was, paradoxical as this may sound, none of their concern. #RandolphHarris 2 of 25
Because it was their job and they believed the act to be righteous, it was probably for this reason that they—or at least most of them—did not feel guilty for acts that belong to the most horrible a human being can perform. However, I hope that the Lord’s people may be at peace one with another during times of trouble, regardless of what loyalties they may have to different governments or parties. The nations of the Earth have been divided. Feelings run strong. There are demonstrations for and against war. Our people have feelings. They have concerns. War, of course, is not new. The weapon change. The ability to kill and destroy is constantly refined. However, there has been conflict throughout the ages over essentially the same issues. The book of Revelation speaks briefly of what must have been a terrible conflict for the minds and loyalties of God’s children. “And there was war in Heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought his angels, and prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in Heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole World: he was cast out into Earth, and his angels were cast out with him,” reports Revelation 12.7-9. #RandolphHarris 3 of 25
Satan’s plan is to destroy the agency of humans. We sometimes are prone to glorify the great empires of the past, such as the Ottoman Empire, the Roman and Byzantine Empires, and in more recent times, the vast British Empire. However, there is a darker side to every one of them. There is a grim and tragic overly brutal conquest, of subjugation, or repression, and an astronomical cost in life and treasure. I think our Father in the shining Heaven must weep as He looks down upon His children throughout the centuries as they have squandered their divine bright right in ruthlessly destroying one another. In the course of history tyrants have arisen from time to time who have oppressed their own people and threatened the World. Such is adjudged to be the case presently, and consequently great and terrifying forces with sophisticated and fearsome armaments have been engaged in battle. In modern aerial warfare destruction has been transformed into an act of modern technical production, mechanically organized work and mechanically organized destruction, in which both the worker and the engineer are completely alienated from the product of their work. They perform technical tasks in accordance with the general plan of management, but often do not see the finished product; even if they do, it is none of their concern or responsibility. They are not supposed to ask themselves whether it is a useful or harmful product—this is a matter for management to decide; as far as the latter is concerned, however, “useful” simply means “profitable” and has no reference to the real use of the product. #RandolphHarris 4 of 25
In war “profitable” means all that serves the defeat of the enemy, and often the decision as to what is profitable in this sense is based on data as vague as those that led to the construction of Ford’s Edsel. For the engineer as well as for the pilot it is enough to know the decisions of management, and one is not supposed to question them, nor is one interested in doing so. Whether it is a matter of killing one hundred thousand people in Dresden or Hiroshima or devastating the land and people of Vietnam with Agent Orange which was produce by Dole, it is not up to one to worry about the military or moral justification of the orders; one’s only task is to serve one’s machine properly. One might object to this interpretation by stressing the fact that soldiers have always owed unquestioning obedience to orders. This is true enough, but the objection ignores the important difference between the ground soldiers and the bomber pilot. The former is close to the destruction caused by one’s weapon, and one does not, by a single act, cause the destruction of large masses of human beings whom one has never seen. The most one could say is that traditional army discipline and feelings of patriotic duty will also, in the case of pilots increase the readiness for unquestioning execution of orders; but this does not seem to be the main point, as it undoubtedly is for the average soldier who fights on the ground. These pilots are highly trained, technically minded people who hardly need this additional motivation to do their job properly and without hesitation. #RandolphHarris 5 of 25
Even the mass extermination of the Jews by the Nazis was organized like a production process, although the mass extermination in the gas chambers did not require a high degree of technical sophistication. At one end of the process the victims were selected in accordance with the criterion of the capability for doing useful work. Those who did not fall into this category were led into the chambers and told that it was for a hygienic purpose; the gas was let in; clothes and other useful objects such as hair, gold teeth, were removed from the bodies, sorted out and “recycled,” and the corpses were burned. The victims were “processed” methodically, efficiently; the executioners did not have to see the agony; they participated in the economic-political political program of the Fuhrer, but were one step removed from direct and immediate killing with their own hands. Today, people like Senator Bernie Sanders and the fallen Senator, now Mayor of Sacramento, California USA, Darrell Steinberg are still bitter and holding on to deeply rooted hostility about the holocaust. However, I should like to remind those who may say that this “one step” was too little to matter, that millions of otherwise decent people show no reaction when cruelties are committed many steps removed from them by their state or party. How many steps removed were the men and women who profited from the atrocities committed against the Blacks and Whites in Africa by the Belgian administration at the beginning of the twentieth century? To be sure, one step is less than five, but it is only a quantitative difference. #RandolphHarris 6 of 25
N doubt, to harden one’s heart against being touched by the fate of human beings whom one has seen and selected, and who are to be murdered only a few hundred yards away within hours requires a much more thorough hardening than is the case with the aircrews who drop bombs and Agent Orange. However, in spite of this difference the fact remains that the two situations have a very important element in common: the technicalization of destruction, and with it the removal of the full affective recognition of what one is doing. Once this process has been fully established there is no limit to destructiveness because nobody destroys; one only serves the machine for programmed—hence, apparently rational—purposes. Cardinal Joseph Mindszenty, the primate of Hungry, stood naked in his chilly cell in the secret-police headquarters at 60 Andrassy Street in Budapest, trembling with fear and cold as a furious agent of the state advanced on him with a rubber truncheon in one hand and a long knife in the other. “I’ll kill you,” the man snarled, lashing the truncheon across the cardinal’s back. “By morning I’ll tear you to pieces and throw the remains of your corpse into the canal. We are the masters now.” He prodded Cardinal Mindszenty with the knife. The cardinal moved away. And another prod. And another. The cardinal moved and moved again. Soon he was running in circles. For several hours the agent drove the naked, middle-aged prelate unrelentingly around the cell like a horse in training. #RandolphHarris 7 of 25
It was late January 1949. Cardinal Mindszenty had been enduring such tortures since his arrest the day after Christmas. Every night his Communist interrogators demanded that he confess to crimes against the state, including the preposterous charge that he had conspired with the American government to restore a Hapsburg king to the throne of Hungary. Every night Cardinal Mindszenty refused to sign the confession. During the day the cardinal sat on a filthy couch trying to recover from the night’s tortures. If he drifted into sleep, one of the jailers who sat in the room prodded him awake. At night the cycle began again. “I was being made to feel in my soul, my body, my nerves, and my bones the power of bolshevism which was taking over the country,” he later wrote. Although his jailers may not have known it, Cardinal Mindszenty embodied, in a sense, the sufferings of an entire nation. The events that led to his imprisonment paralleled the ideological imprisonment of the Hungarian churches. The Communists had consolidated their power the Summer before, in 1948, and their first target had been the churches. Two days after the new regime took control, they secularized the nation’s religious schools. Party boss Matyas ‘Rakosi pressed church leaders to submit to government control over church affairs, including requirements that priest and ministers publicly support government policies. #RandolphHarris 8 of 25
Bishop Lajos Ordass, the ablest leader of the Lutheran Church, refused to cooperate and was arrested and imprisoned. Bishop Laszlo Ravasz, the independent-minded head of the Hungarian Reformed Church, was forced out and replaced by a complaint theologian who thought support for Marxist Leninism was obligatory for Christians. The chief obstacle to the Communists’ plans, however, was Cardinal Mindszenty. As Catholic primate, he was the leader of the largest denomination in Hungary, a stubborn man with a record of fierce opposition to tyrants. The Nazis had jailed him during World War II. Later, as Communist powers grew in Hungary, he constantly protested their abuses of human rights. Cardinal Mindszenty was especially offended by the government’s demand that the church sign a formal treaty with the state. He had watched Lenin and Stalin subdue the Orthodox Church in the Soviet Union through a campaign of terrorism, judicial persecution, and subversion. He vowed that he would not allow the same thing to happen in Hungary. The church-state agreement in the Soviet Union gave the state control over religious instruction, seminary education, and appointment of bishops. Bishops were called upon to give public support to government policies when their Communist masters wanted it, and all priests had to swear allegiance to the Communist government. Significantly, the party ruthlessly forbade the church to evangelize or to provide services to the less affluent, elderly, sick, and disadvantaged. Thus, the church was barred from conducting any activities that would publicly testify to its members’ allegiance to another King, even of the King was God! #RandolphHarris 9 of 25
Party Chief Rakosi wanted to make the church in Hungary a puppet church like the one in the Soviet Union. Cardinal Mindszenty would have none of it. After months of bickering with the recalcitrant cardinal, Chief Rakosi and his henchmen moved against the church leader. The day after Christmas 1948, police occupied the cardinal’s offices in Esztergom. Officers carrying submachine guns led Cardinal Mindszenty to a car and drove him to secret-police headquarters in Budapest. There he was subjected to torture. Thirty-nine days after his arrest—beaten, confused, plagued with despair, and racked with fear and anxiety—the cardinal signed the confession the authorities wanted. Later he told the harrowing account of those wees of torture in his memoirs. The mental and psychological pain were far worse than the deprivations and beatings, he wrote, and he was certain that the police had used drugs on him. He candidly admitted that the Communist torturers had shattered his personality, reducing him to a state where even the regime’s most absurd charges began to seem plausible. Certainly the man whom the Communists put on public trial for treason in February 1949 looked like a drugged, programmed shell, reciting the lines of a memorized script. He was found guilty of treason and sentenced to life in prison. Soon after Cardinal Mindszenty’s trial, the government suppressed the Catholic Church in Hungary. Religion schools were abolished, religious instruction was outlawed, and religious orders were dissolved. Monks and nuns scattered into the population and were left to what work they could. #RandolphHarris 10 of 25
In their place the government organized “peace priests” composed of ambitious collaborators and cover Communist agents. Soon the priests, many of whom led dissolute lives, controlled all the higher posts in the church. Catholics who wanted authentic pastoral care had to seek out priests who carried on their ministry in secret. Eventually the regime got the agreement it wanted. The bishops agreed to support the government and its “peace priest” movement, and to tolerate state supervision of seminary training, clerical appointments, and other internal matters. In return, the government allowed the church to open eight schools and out the clergy on the state payroll. The Reformed Church submitted to a similar agreement. Thus the Communist rulers in Hungary have achieved what they consider “normal” relations with the church. Church authorities clear key appointments in advance with the government. Troublesome clerics are reassigned to the provinces. Bishops make regular expressions of support to the regime. When needed, priests and ministers read from their pulpits pastoral letters composed by the government Bureau of Religious Affairs. However, Christianity and Communism are irreconcilable in their basic premises. The Church believes that the dynamic of all history is spiritual, that its unfolding reveals God’s dealings with humans, that Jesus Christ is God in the flesh, and that at the end of history, He will reign over all nations. #RandolphHarris 11 of 25
For Marxists, the material realm is all there is. God and spiritual order are illusions. Humankind swims in the current of history, which progresses by economic forces from the decline of capitalism, through the dictatorship of the proletariat, to the Earthly paradise of the classless society. Communists are materialists and determinists; individuals count for nothing, the collective of the state for everything. Lenin thought that those who believed in God were worse than fools. “For he occupies himself not with activity, but with self-contemplation and self-reflection, and tries thereby to deify his most unclean, most stupid, and most servile features and pettinesses.” Consequently, anyone who believes in God is not simply in error; one is mentally deranged. This is why believers in God in the Soviet Union are frequently judged insane and committed to mental institutions. If these considerations regarding the technical-bureaucratic nature of modern large-scale destructiveness are correct, do they not lead to the repudiation of my central hypothesis concerning the necrophilous nature of the spirit of total technique? Do we not have to admit that contemporary technical humans are not motivated by a passion for destruction, but would be more properly described as a totally alienated human whose dominant orientation is cerebral, who feels little love but also little desire to destroy, who has become, in a characterological sense, an automaton, but not a destroyer? #RandolphHarris 12 of 25
This is not an easy question to answer. To be sure, in Marinetti, in Hitler, in thousands of members of the Nazi and Stalinist secret police, guards in concentration camps, members of execution commandos the passion to destroy is the dominant motivation. However, were they not perhaps “old-fashion” types? Are we justified in interpreting the spirit of the “technotronic” society as necrophilous? Sadism is often a by-product of the anal character. However, even the sadists are will with others; they want to control, but not to destroy them. Those in whom even this perverse kind of relatedness is lacking, who are still more narcissistic and more hostile, are the necrophiles. Their aim is to transform all that is alive int dead matter; they want to destroy everything and everybody, often even themselves; their enemy is life itself. While statistically speaking the phenomenon of total alienation probably does not exist in the majority of the American population, it is characteristic of the sector that is most indicative of the direction in which the whole society is moving. In fact, the character of the new type of human does not seem to fit into any of the older categories, such as the oral, anal, or genital character. I have tried to understand this new type as a “marketing character. #RandolphHarris 13 of 25
For the marketing character everything is transformed into a commodity—not only things, but the person oneself, one’s physical energy, one’s skills, one’s knowledge, one’s opinions, one’s feelings, even one’s smiles. This character type is a historically new phenomenon because it is the product of a fully developed capitalism that is centered around the market—the commodity market, the labour market, and the personality market—and whose principle it is to make a profit by favourable exchange. This market is by no means entirely free in contemporary capitalism. The labour market is determined to a large extent by social and political factors, and the commodity market is highly manipulated. Cybernetic humans are so alienated that they experience their bodies as an instrument for success. One’s body must look youthful and healthy; it is experienced narcissistically as a most precious asset on the personal market. This new type of person, after all, is not interested in feces or corpses; in fact, one is so phobic toward corpses that one makes them look more alive than the person was when living. (This does not seem to be a reaction formation, but rather a part of the whole orientation that denies natural, not human-made reality.) However, one does something much more drastic. One turns one’s interest away from life, persons, nature, ideas—in short from everything that is alive; one transforms all life into things, including oneself and the manifestations of one’s human faculties of reason, seeing, hearing, tasting, loving. #RandolphHarris 14 of 25
These people become a sum of lifeless artifacts; from synthetic food to synthetic organs, the whole human becomes part of the total machinery that one controls and is simultaneously controlled by. One has no plan, no goal for life, expect doing what the logic of technique determines one to do. One aspires to make robots as one of the greatest achievements of one’s technical mind, and some specialists assure us that the robot will hardly be distinguished from living humans. This achievement will not seem so astonishing when humans themselves are hardly distinguishable from a robot. The World of life has become a World of “no-life”; persons have become “nonpersons,” a World of death. Death is no longer symbolically expressed by unpleasant-smelling feces or corpses. Its symbols are now clean, shining machines; humans are not attracted to smelly toilets, but to structures of aluminum and glass However, the reality behind this antiseptic façade becomes increasingly visible. Humans, in the name of progress, are transforming the World into a stinking and poisonous place (and this is not symbolic). They pollute the air, the water, the soil, the animals—and themselves. They are doing this to a degree that has made it degree that has made it doubtful whether the Earth will be livable within a hundred years from now. One knows that facts, but in spite of many protesters, those in charge go on in the pursuit of technical “progress” and are willing to sacrifice all life in the worship of their idol. #RandolphHarris 15 of 25
In earlier times humans also sacrificed their children or war prisoners, but never before in history have humans been willing to sacrifice all life to the Moloch—one’s own and that of all their descendents. It makes little difference whether one does it intentionally or not. If one had no knowledge of the possible danger, one might be acquitted from responsibility. However, it is the necrophilous element in one’s character that prevents one from making use of the knowledge one has. The same is true for the preparation of nuclear war. The two superpowers are constantly increasing their capacities to destroy each other, as well as developing nations who are benefiting from the catch-up effect, and at least large parts of the human race with them. Yet they have not done anything serious to eliminate the danger—and the only serious things would be the destruction of all nuclear weapons. In fact, those in charge were already close to using nuclear weapons several times (some suspect that is how Obama got elected)—and gambled with the danger. Strategic reasoning—for instance, Herman Kahn’s On Thermonuclear War (1960)—calmly raises the question whether fifty million dead would still be “acceptable.” That this is the spirit of necrophilia can hardly be question. The phenomena about which there is so much indignation—drug addition, crime, the cultural and spiritual decay, contempt for genuine ethical values—are all related to the growing attraction to death and dirt. #RandolphHarris 16 of 25
When it is promoted by those who direct the course of modern society, such as the fake news media who profits off of death, destruction, pain, suffering, and chaos, how can one expect that the young, the less affluent, and those without hope would not be attracted to decay? Thus far we have considered the connection: mechanical—lifeless—anal. However, another connection can hardly fail to come to mind as we consider the character of the totally alienated, cybernetic human: one’s schizoid or schizophrenic qualities. Perhaps the most striking trait in one is the split between thought-affect-will. (It was this split that had prompted E. Bleuler to choose the name “schizophrenia”—from Greek schizo, to split; phren, psyche—for this type of illness.) In the description of the cybernetic human we have already seen some illustrations of this split, for instance in the bomber pilot’s absence of affect, combined with the clear knowledge that one is killing a hundred thousand people by pushing a button. The cybernetic human is almost exclusively cerebrally oriented: one is a monocerebral human. One’s approach to the whole World around one—and to oneself—is intellectual; one wants to know what things are, how they function and how they can be constructed or manipulated. This approach was fostered by science, and it has become dominant since the end of the Middle Ages. It is the very essence of modern progress, the basis of the technical domination of the World and of mass consumption. #RandolphHarris 17 of 25
Is there anything ominous about this orientation? Indeed it might seem that this aspect of “progress” is not ominous, were it not for some worrisome facts. In the first place this “monocerebral” orientation is by no means only to be found in those who are engaged in scientific work; it is common to a vast part of the population: clerical workers, reporters, sales people, engineers, lawyers, judges, physicians, managers, and especially many intellectuals and artists—in fact, one may surmise, to most of the urban population. (It is a remarkable fact that the most creative contemporary scientists, humans such as Einstein, Born, Schrodinger, have been among the least alienated and monocerebral individuals. Their scientific concern has had none of the schizoid quality of the majority. It is characteristic of them that their philosophical, moral, and spiritual concerns have pervaded their whole personality. They have demonstrated that the scientific approach as such does not have to lead to alienation; it is rather the social climate that deforms the scientific approach into a schizoid approach.) However, for most others who do display the schizoid character, they all approach the World as a conglomerate of things to be understood in order to be used effectively. #RandolphHarris 18 of 25
Second, and not less important, this cerebral-intellectual approach goes together with the absence of an affective response. One might say feelings have withered, rather than that they are repressed; inasmuch as they are alive they are not cultivated, and are relatively crude; they take the form of passions, such as the passion to win, to prove superior to others, to destroy, or the excitement in pleasures of the flesh, speed, and noise. The monocerebral human is s much part of the machinery that one has built, that one’s machines are just as much the object of narcissism as one is oneself; in fact, between the two exists a kind of symbiotic relationship: the union of one individual self with another self (or any other power outside of the own self) in such a way as to make each lose the integrity of its own self and to make them dependent on each other. In a symbolic sense it is not nature any more than is human’s mother but the “second nature” one has built, the machines that nourish and protect one. Another feature of the cybernetic human—one’s tendency to behave in a routinized, stereotyped, and unspontaneous manner—is to be found in a more drastic form in many schizophrenic obsessional stereotypes. There is a loss of that primordial differentiation between living and lifeless matter. An attachment to a lifeless object, such as a chair or a toy is combined with the inability to relate to a living person. #RandolphHarris 19 of 25
For the cybernetic human, the use of language (if they speak) is for manipulative purposes, but not as a means of interpersonal communication. If monocerebral cybernetic humans did not offer a picture of low-grade chronic schizophrenic process, it would be surprising. They live in an atmosphere that is only quantitatively less empty than a human being living alone in a cave because they do not relate to others and their presentation is schizogenetic (schizophrenia-producing) families. I believe that it is legitimate to speak of an “insane society” and of the problem of what happens to the sane human in such a society. If a society produced a majority of members who suffer from severe schizophrenia, it would undermine its own existence. The full-fledged schizophrenic person is characterized by the fact that one has cut off all relations with the World outside; one has withdrawn into one’s own private World, and the main reason one is considered severely sick is a social one: one does not function socially; one cannot take care of oneself properly; one needs in some way or other the help of others. (This is not entirely true, either, as experience has shown in all those places where chronic schizophrenics worked or took care of themselves, although with the help of certain people who arranged favourable conditions and at least some material contributions from the state.) A society, not to speak of a large and complex one, could not be run by schizophrenic persons. Yet it can be very well managed by persons suffering from low-grade schizophrenia, who are perfectly capable of managing the things to be managed if a society is to function. #RandolphHarris 20 of 25
People with low grade schizophrenia have not lost the capacity to look at the World “realistically,” provided we mean by this to conceive of things intellectually as they need to be considered of in order to deal with them effectively. They may have lost entirely the capacity to experience things personally, id east, subjectively, and with their hearts. The fully developed person can, for instance, see a rose and experience it as warming or even fiery (if one puts this experience into words we call one a poet), but one also knows that the rose—in the realm of physical reality—does not warm as fire does. Modern humans have lost the capacity for subjective experience, and experiences the World only in terms of practical ends. However, one’s defect is not small than that of the so-called sick person who cannot experience the World “objectively,” but who has retained the other human faculty of personal, subjective, symbolic experiences. Many people are seized by one and the same affect with great consistency. Even if it is not, all one’s senses are so strongly affected by one object to be present. If this happens while the person is awake, the person is believed to be insane. However, if the greedy person think thinks only of money and possessions, the ambitious one only of fame, one does not thin of them as being insane, but only as annoying; generally one has contempt for them. However, factually greediness, ambition, and so forth are forms of insanity, although usually one does not think of them as “illness.” #RandolphHarris 21 of 25
The pathology of normalcy rarely deteriorates to graver forms of mental illness because society produces the antidote against such deterioration. When pathological processes become socially patterned, they lose their individual character. On the contrary, the sick individual finds oneself at home with all other similarly sick individuals. The whole culture is geared to this kind of pathology and arranges the means to give satisfactions which fit the pathology. The result is that the average individual does not experience the separateness and isolation the fully schizophrenic person feels. One feels at ease among those who suffer from the same deformation; in fact, it is the fully same person who feels isolated in the insane society—one may suffer so much from the incapacity to communicate that it is one who may become psychotic. The most difficult problem with the schizophrenias offers in relation to necrophilia is that of destructiveness rooted in the schizophrenic aspect of the cybernetic human. One hundred fifty years ago, the answer would have seemed to be clear. It was generally assumed that schizophrenic patients are violent, and that for this reason they needed to be put in institutions from which they could not escape. The experiences with chronic schizophrenics working on farms or under their own management have demonstrated beyond any doubt that the schizophrenic person is rarely violent, when one is left in peace. #RandolphHarris 22 of 25
Trying to force people with mental illness into the game of normal life intrudes on their private World. And, if additional, if the individual is forced to keep one’s ties with one’s family and cannot ye afford, one may withdraw completely. This situation may produce intense hate and destructiveness and account for the relatively greater frequency of violent tendencies some adults with mental illness. These speculations are of course very hypothetical and will need to be confirmed or rejected by specialists in this field. To formulate these aims of a successful life, reason is required, and reason is more than mere intelligence; it develops only when the brain and the heart are united, when feeling and thinking are integrated, and when both are rational. There is, I believe, no other country where the chances for the reassertion of life are greater than in the technically most developed country, the United States of American, where the hope that more “progress” will bring happiness has been proved to be an illusion for the most of those who have already had a chance to het a taste of the new “paradise.” Whether such a fundamental change will happen, nobody knows. The forces working against it are formidable and there is no reason for optimism. However, I believe there is reason for hope. #RandolphHarris 23 of 25
A blessing expresses a wish that a deity look kindly on a person other than the one praying. It differs from the usual prayer in that pray-er offers themselves up as a link between the deity and the person blessed. They stand in, as it were, for the deity, serving as a mediator. God, please enter our home, and find your own, for the old ways are kept here and hospitality is a law all are proud to honour. Please be at my right hand, guiding my way. Please be at my left hand, guiding my way. God, please open my mind, and keep me safe, as I begin the great adventure of school. I stand here as your father, in the pace of the Father of All, as you prepare to move away and start your own household. Though you may live in another house, still God will protect you. Through you may join your life to another’s family, still will the Ancestors guide you. Though you may travel in strange lands, still will the spirits there welcome you. For my father’s blessings is not for your ears alone: the numinous beings hear, and they will honour it. Go on your way in safety, brining with you the blessings of my household God. As you have been with us, so will you stay a part of us. May they watch over you until we meet again. We stand in your place, Ancestors. We perform your deeds, Ancestors. Do not forget, let it be these words, Holy Ones, that my heart sings in my chest. Do not forget, do not forget, to walk in the sacred way. Do not forget, do not forget, that all I see is sacred. #RandolphHarri 24 of 25
Do not, forget, do not forget, my sacred duty to the World which surrounds me. Do not forget, do not forget. Please grant me this gift, you whom I worship, not to forget. Bring to naught designs of those who seek to do me ill; speedily defeat their aims and thwart their purposes for thine won sake, for Thine own power, for Thy holiness and Law. That Thy loved ones be delivered. Answer us, O Lord, and save with Thy redeeming power. May the words of my mouth and the prayer of my heart be acceptable unto Thee, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer. Thou wo establishes peace in the shining Heavens, please grant peace unto us and unto all America. Amen. May it be Thy will, O Lord our God and God of our fathers, to grant our portion in Thy Torah, and may the Temple be rebuilt in our day. There we will serve Thee with awe as in the days of old. I rise in reverence ready to fulfill the command of my Creator who hath enjoined upon us in His Torah: “And ye shall take for yourself on the first day the fruit of the goodly Hardar tree, branches of palm trees, a bough of the thick tree, and willows of the brook.” As I wave them, may the blessings of God be vouchsafed unto me and may I be imbued with holy thoughts reminding me that God is the supreme Lord, whose divine rule pervades the Earth below and the Heavens above, and whose kingdom has dominion over all. May my observance of this commandment be accounted as through I had fulfilled it with whole-hearted devotion. And let the graciousness of the Lord our God be upon us; establish Thou the work of our hands; yea, they work of our hands establish Thou it. Blessed be the Lord forever. Amen. #RandolphHarris 25 of 25
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The More Individualized People are, the More Difficult it is to Attain Identification
Those who take the long view of human’s experience will find that from time to time there were other societies no less honest and courageous than ours in facing all the ugliness, cruelty, and indifference the mirror reveals, but with the greater honesty still to hold the brighter, nobler view of humans and with greater courage to pursue the vision. Despite romantic rhetoric, freedom cannot be absolute. To argue for total choice (a meaningless concept) or total individuality is to argue against any form of community or society altogether. If each person, busily doing one’s thing, were to be wholly different from every other, no two humans would have any basis for communication. It is ironic that the people who complain the most loudly that people cannot “relate” to one another, or cannot “communicate” with one another, are often the very same people who urge greater individuality. The sociologist Karl Mannheim recognized this contradiction when he wrote: “The more individualized people are, the more difficult it is to attain identification.” Unless we are literally prepared to plunge backward into pre-technological primitivism, and accept all the consequences—a shorter, more brutal life, ore disease, pain, starvation, fear, superstition, xenophobia, bigotry, and so on—we shall move forward to the more and more differentiated societies. This raises severe problems of social integration. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
What bonds of education, politics, culture must we fashion to tie the super-age of information order together into a functioning whole? Can this be accomplished? “This integration,” writes Bertram M. Gross of Wayne State University, “must be based upon certain commonly accepted values or some degree of perceived interdependence, if not mutually acceptable objectives.” A society fast fragmenting at the level of values and life styles challenges all the old integrative mechanism and cries out for a totally new basis for reconstitution. We have by no means yet found this basis. Ye if we shall face disturbing problems of social integration, we shall confront even more agonizing problems of individual integration. For the multiplication of life styles challenges our ability to hold the very self together. Which of many potential selves shall we choose to be? What sequences of serial selves will describe us? How, in short, must we deal with overchoice at this, the most intensely personal and emotion-laden level of all? In our headlong rush for variety, choice and freedom, we have not yet begun to examine the awesome implications of diversity. When diversity, however, converges with transience and novelty, we rocket the society toward an historical crisis of adaptation. We create an environment so ephemeral, unfamiliar and complex so to threaten millions with adaptive breakdown. This breakdown is future shock. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
The problem of synchronicity has puzzled me for a long time, ever since the middle twenties, when I was investigating the phenomena of the collective unconscious and kept on coming across connections which I simply could not explain as chance groupings or “run.” What I found were “coincidences” which were connected so meaningfully that their “chance” concurrence would represent a degree of improbability that would have to be expressed by an astronomical figure. By way of example, I shall mention an incident from my own observation. A young woman I was treating had, at a critical moment, a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. While she was telling me this dream I sat with my back to the closed window. Suddenly I heard a noise behind me, like a gentle tapping. I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking against the window-pane from outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to a golden scarab that one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), which contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt an urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment. I must admit that nothing like it ever happened to me before or since, and that the dream of the patient has remained unique in my experience. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
I should like to mention another case that is typical of a certain category of events. The wife of one of my patients, a man in his fifties, once told me in conversation that, at the deaths of her mother and her grandmother, a number of birds gathered outside the windows of the death-chamber. I had heard similar stories from other people. When her husband’s treatment was nearing its end, his neurosis having been cleared up, he developed some apparently quite innocuous symptoms which seemed to me, however, to be those of heart-disease. I sent him along to a specialist, who after examining him told me in writing that he could find no cause for anxiety. One the way back from this conclusion (with the medical report in his pocket) my patient collapsed in the street. As he was brought home dying, his wife was already in a great state of anxiety because, soon after her husband had gone to the doctor, a whole flock of birds alighted on their house. She naturally remembered the similar incidents that had happened at the death of her own relatives, and feared the worst. Although I was personally acquainted with the people concerned and know very well that the facts here reported are true, I do not imagine for a moment that this will induce anybody who is determined to regard such things as pure “chance” to change one’s mind. My sole object in relating these two incidents is simply to give some indication of how meaningful coincidences usually present themselves in practical life. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
The meaningful connection is obvious enough in the first case in view of the approximate identity of the chief objects (the scarab and the beetle); but in the second case death and the flock of birds seem to be incommensurable with one another. If one considers, however, that in the Babylonian Hades the souls wore a “feather dress,” and that in ancient Egypt the ba, or soul, was thought of as a bird (in Homer the souls of the dead “twitter”) it is not too far-fetched to suppose that there may be some archetypal symbolism at work. Has such an incident occurred in a dream, that interpretation would be justified by the comparative psychological material. There also seems to be an archetypal foundation to the first. It was an extraordinarily difficult case to treat, and up to the time of the dream little or no progress had been made. I should explain that the main reason for this was my patient’s animus, which was steeped in Cartesian philosophy and clung so rigidly to its own idea of reality that the efforts of three doctors—I was the third—had no been able to weaken it. Evidently something quite irrational was needed which was beyond my power to produce. The dream alone was enough to disturb ever so slightly the rationalistic attitude of my patient. However, when the “scarab” came flying in through the armour of her animus possession and the process of transformation could at last begin to move. Any essential change of attitude signifies a psychic renewal which is usually accompanied by symbols of rebirth in the patient’s dreams and fantasies. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
The scarab is a classic example of a rebirth symbol. The ancient Egyptian Book of What Is in the Netherworld describes how the dead sun-god changes himself at the tenth station into Khepri, the scarab, and then, at the twelfth station, mounts the barge which carries the rejuvenated sun-god into the morning sky. The only difficulty here is that with educated people cryptomenesia often cannot be ruled out with certainty (although my patient did not happen to know this symbol). However, this does not alter the fact that psychologist is continually coming up against cases where the emergence of symbolic parallels cannot be explained without the hypothesis of the collective unconscious. The other part of the answer is that the Overself is always here as human’s innermost truest self. It is beginningless and endless in time. Its consciousness does not have to be developed as something new. However, the person’s awareness of it begins in time and has to be developed as a new attainment. The ever-presence of Overself means that anyone may attain it here and now. There is no inner necessity to travel anywhere or to anyone in space or to wait years in time for this to happen. Anyone, for instance, who attends carefully and earnestly to the present exposition may perhaps suddenly and easily get the first stage of insight, the lightning-flash which affords a glimpse of reality, at any moment. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
By that glimpse one will have been lifted to a new dimension of being. The difficulty will consist in retaining the new perception. For ancient habits of erroneous thinking will quickly reassert themselves and overwhelm one enough to push it into the background. This is why repeated introspection, reflective study and mystical meditation are needed to weaken those habits and generate the inner strength which can firmly hold the higher outlook against these aggressive intruders from one’s own past. Those who are unable to grasp this explanation the first time may do so at a later attempt, while those who will not grasp it and refuse to consider it further thereby indicate that they are not subtle enough to receive its truth. They will continue to seek reality among the cozening deceivers of superficial experience, but it will ever elude them there. Although It is at the very heart of human beings, the Overself is very far from their present level of consciousness. Nothing could be close yet this is the supreme paradox of our existence and the strangest enigma confronting our thought. The Overself is implicit in all humanity but explicit only in a few solitary figures. Its golden note of harmony falls dead upon our muted ears. The Overself is not a goal to be attained but a realization of what already is. It is the inalienable possession of all conscious beings and not of a mere few. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
No effort is needed to get hold of the Overself, but every effort is needed to get rid of the many impediments to its recognition. We cannot take hold of it; it takes hold of us. Therefore the last stage of this quest is an effortless one. We are led, as children by the hand, into the resplendent presence. Our weary strivings come to an abrupt end. Our lips are made shut and wordless. No situation in human life lasts totally unchanged forever, just as no condition on the very planet which harbours that life lasts forever. It is folly to demand changelessness. And ye we do. Why? Because beneath this conscious desire for fresh experiences there is the unconscious longing for That which is the permanent core of selfhood. The stilled, one-pointed, and reverent mind may know it, the self may dissolve in it. We carry the divine presence with us everywhere we travel. We do not directly profit by it simply because we are not directly conscious of it. The effort to arouse such awareness is a worthwhile one, brining rich reward in its train. The soul is always with us but our sense of its presence is not. There is a spiritual element in every human. It is one’s essence. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
Although we are divided in awareness from the higher power, we are not divided in fact from it. The divine being is immanent in each one of us. This is why there is always some good in the worst of us. Goethe: “You give me space to belong to myself yet without separating me from your own life.” The Overself is always present but human’s attention seldom is. Because the soul is present deep down in each human heart, none is so depraved that one will not one day find the inward experience of it. There is a zone of utter clam within a human. It is not only there but always there. Those who suffer, fret, or are confused may doubt or deny this—understandably and pardonably. It is always possible for a human to gain enlightenment anytime anywhere even though I may not be probable, for one has within oneself the Light itself as an ever-present Reality. What does happen and what is probable is that some moment during the course of a lifetime a glimpse may happen, and the glimpse itself is nothing less than a testimony to that ever-presence, a witness telling one that it is true and real. Just then, as thoughts themselves stop coming into one’s mind, one stops living in time and begins living in the eternal. One knows and feels one’s timelessness. And since all one’s sufferings belong to the World of passing time, of personal ego, one leaves them far behind as though they had never been. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
One finds oneself in the Heaven of a serene, infinite bliss. One learns that one could always have entered it; only one’s insistence on holding to the little egoistic values, one’s lack of thought-control, and one’s disobedience to the age-old advice of the Great Teachers prevented one from doing so. If that divine element into which they exalted us did not already exist within us, these rear moments of spontaneous spiritual exaltation, which cast all other moments in the shade and which are remembered ever after, could not have been born. Its very presence in our hearts makes always possible and sometimes actual the precious feeling of a non-material sublimely happy order of being. It is not really a goal to be reached, nor a state to be attained, nor something new to be added to what one now has or is. However, if one insists on thinking that it is any of these things, there is no other course open than to take the appropriate action, make the necessary effort, for such achievement. One’s labours are really self-imposed, a consequence of incorrect thought about oneself. Is this benign state a past from which we have lapsed or a future to which we are coming? The true answer is that it is neither. This state as always been existent within us, is so now, and always will be. It is forever with us simply because it is wat we really are. It is not as if one has to find something foreign, making communication too distant and too difficult, for this is one’s very native being, giving one meaning and awareness. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
If the real Self must have been present and been witness to our peaceful enjoyment of deep slumber—otherwise we would not have known that we had such enjoyment—so must it likewise have been present and been witness to our rambling imaginations in dream-filled sleep and to our physical activities in waking. This leads to a tremendous but inescapable conclusion. We are as near to, or as much in, the real Self, the Overself, at conclusion. We are as near to, or as much in, the real self, the Overself, at every moment of every day as we shall ever be. All we need is awareness of it. A thing that is infinite and eternal hath n qualities, since it hath all qualities. This nothingness or fullness we name the PLEROMA. Therein both thinking and being cease, since the eternal and infinite possess no qualities. In it no being is, for one then would be distinct from the pleroma, and would possess qualities which would distinguish one as something distinct from the pleroma. In the pleroma there is nothing and everything. It is quite fruitless to think about the pleroma, for this would mean self-dissolution. The opposites are contained in the pleroma, but because they are equally balanced, they void. Although the opposites are manifested in individuals, they are not balanced and void. The individual’s task is to pursue one’s own distinctiveness, and this involves one in distinguishing oneself from the opposites. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
We labour to attain the good and beautiful, yet at the same time we also lay hold of the evil and ugly, since in the pleroma these are one with the good and the beautiful. When, however, we remain true to our own nature, which is distinctiveness, we distinguish ourselves from the good and the beautiful, and, therefore, at the same time, from the evil and the ugly. And thus we fall not into the pleroma, namely into nothingness and dissolution. In the pleromatic or (as the Tibetans call it) Bardo state, there is a perfect interplay of cosmic forces, but with the Creation—that is, with the division of the World into distinct processes in space and time—events begin to rub and jostle one another. Although the birth of Christ is an event that occurred but once in history, it has always existed in eternity. For the layperson in these matters, the identity of a nontemporal, eternal event with a unique historical occurrence is something that is extremely difficult to conceive. One must, however, accustom oneself to the idea that “time” is a relative concept and needs to be complemented by that of the “simultaneous” existence, in the Bard or pleroma, of all historical processes. What exists in the pleroma as an eternal process appears in time as an aperiodic sequence, that is to say, it is repeated many times in an irregular patten. To take but one example: Yahweh had one good son and one who was a failure. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, correspond to this prototype, and so, in all ages and in all parts of the World, does the motif of the hostile brothers, which in innumerable modern variants still causes dissension in families and keeps the psychotherapist busy. Just as many examples, no less instructive, could be found for the two women prefigured in eternity. When these things occur as modern variants, therefore, they should not be regarded merely as person episodes, modes, or chance idiosyncrasies in people, but as fragments of the pleromatic process itself, which, broken up into individual events occurring in time, is an essential component or aspect of the divine drama. Wen Yahweh created the World from his prima materia, the “Void,” he could not help breathing his own mystery into Creation which is himself in every part, as every reasonable theology has long been convinced. From this comes the belief that it is possible to know God from His Creation. When I say that He could not help doing this, I do not imply any limitation of is omnipotence; on the contrary, it is an acknowledgment that all possibilities are contained in Him, and that there are in consequence no other possibilities than those which express Him. All the World is God’s, and God is in all the World from the very beginning. Why, then, the tour de force of the Incarnation? One asks oneself, astonished. God is in everything already, and yet there must be something missing is a sort of second entrance into Creation has now to be staged with so much care and circumspection. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
Since Creation is universal, reaching to the remotest stellar galaxies, and since it has also made organic life infinitely variable and capable of endless differentiation, we can hardly see where the defect lies. The fact that Satan as everywhere intruded his corrupting influence is no doubt regrettable for many reasons, but it makes no difference in principle. It is not easy to give an answer to this question. One would like to say that Christ had to appear in order to deliver humankind from evil. However, when one considers that evil was originally slipped into the scheme of things by Satan, and still is, then it would seem much simpler if Yahweh would, for once, call this “practical joker” severely to account, get rid of his pernicious influence, and thus eliminate the root of all evil. He would then no need the elaborate arrangement of a special Incarnation with all the unforeseeable consequences which this entails. Wen God becomes man, one should make clear to oneself what it means. It means nothing less than a World-shaking transformation of God. It means more of less what Creation meant in the beginning, namely an objectivation of God. At the time of the Creation, He revealed Himself in Nature; now he wants to be more specific and become man. It must be admitted, however, that there was a tendency in this direction right from the start. For, when those other human beings, who had evidently been created before Adam, appeared on the scene along with the higher mammals, Yahweh created on the following day, by a special act of creation, a man who was the image of God. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
This was the first prefiguration of His becoming man. God took Adam’s descendants, especially the people of Israel, into His personal possession, and from time to time He filled this people’s prophets with His spirit. All these things were preparatory events and symptoms of a tendency within God to become man. However, in the omniscience there had existed from all eternity a knowledge of the human nature of God or of the divine nature of man. That is why, long before Genesis was written, we find corresponding testimonies in the ancient Egyptian records. These intimations and prefigurations of the Incarnation must strike one as either completely incomprehensible or superfluous, since all creation ex nihilo is God’s and consists of nothing but God, with the result that humans, like the rest of creation, are simply God become concrete. Prefigurations, however, are not in themselves creative events, but are only stages in the process of becoming conscious. It was only quite late that we realized (or rather, are beginning to realize) that God is Reality itself and therefore—last but not least—man. This realization is a millennial process. The conception of “the millennial process” refers to a profound belief that change is about to take place in human’s conception of oneself and the Universe. Traditionally, the reign of Christ ended with the first millennium, to be succeeded by the reign of Antichrist. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
The reign of the Antichrist is now nearing its end, coinciding with the entry of the vernal equinox into Aquarius, and the end of the aeon of Pisces. A human’s refusal to allow spiritually intuitive feelings to awaken in one cannot obliterate the presence of the source of those feelings. One bears that presence ever within one and one day must reconcile oneself willingly, knowingly, even yearningly, with it. The Overself is always within call, for its hiding place is no farther than a human’s heart. However, if the call does not go forth, or goes forth without faith, or is not sustained with patience, the response will not come. God is ever present with us but we are ever turning away from Him. No one is forsaken except those who look only to, and into, the ego, and even then only for a time. In one sense that World of the Overself remains always inaccessible and inexpressible, but in another sense it is as close as breathing and as palpable in highest art forms or in the illuminated human’s presence as a fragrant perfume. By one’s ignoring of the Overself’s presence, humans commit their greatest sin and shows one’s worst stupidity. If God did not exist, then we humans would not exist. A divine ray, atom, soul, call it what you wish, is present in each of us. Some are aware of this, others must one day come to this knowledge. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
The Overself is always present in human’s heart. If one does not receive awareness of this face in one’s mind, that is because one makes no proper and sustained effort to do so. You may be an insignificant creature in the vastness of the cosmos, but the divine life—of which that cosmos is but a channel—is in you, too. Have enough faith in your divine heritage, take it into your common everyday life and thought, and in some way, to some people, you will become very significant and important. If unconscious, we life all the time in unfailing union with the Overself. Perhaps the most wonderful thing which the illuminate discovers is that one’s independence from the infinite life power never really existed and was only illusory, that one’s separation from the Overself was only an idea of the imagination and not a fact of being. Even the desire to unite with the Overself was only a dream, and consequently all lesser desire of the ego were merely dreams within a dream. Speaking of dreams, the Winchester mansion is something reminiscent of a dream, it is so surreal. Surrealism is a style of art in which the reality of the dream, or the subconscious mind, is seen as more “real” than the surface of everyday life. Its reality is a higher reality. It is usually reflected in works of art. When using surrealism, people are directly presenting the reality of their own feelings and emotions on the canvas. Nothing can be more concrete to a human than one’s own felt thought, one own thought feeling. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
There are many surreal elements in the Winchester mansion such as a spiral stairway that has 42 steps, each two inches high. Other stairways melt into blank walls. A second story door opens into the great outdoors, and a 20-foot step. A linen closet has the area of a three-room apartment; a nearby cupboard is less than one-inch deep. A skylight is placed in the middle of a room, in the floor! Another floor is apparently a series of trap-doors. Exterior faucets project unexpectedly from under second-story windows. The visitor must stoop through one door to enter, the next gives clearance for an eight-foot giant. Many stairway turnposts are set upside down. Entire walls are built entirely of half-inch, “half-round” strips. Everywhere prevails that uncanny deference to the number 13; 13 stairsteps, 13 hangers in a closet, 13 wall panels, 13 lights in the chandeliers, 13 windows to a room and if necessary to make that number, some placed in an inside wall. No wonder the one-time visitors Houdini and Ripley stood in awe; imagine Houdini in the dead center of this 160-room catacomb, perhaps wondering if blindfolded he could make a timely midnight escape from such a maze, or imagine a spellbound Ripley, reaching for his Believe-It-Or-Not sketch pad to immortalize this architectural dream. In searching out potential hunts, human investigators may be drawn to the Winchester mansion with its long, dark corridors, widow’s walk, and dramatic staircases. However, the ghost themselves show a profound indifference to such things. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
The ghost, it seems, is concerned with what happened to one, not where it happened. In most accounts of hauntings, the spirit comes back to erase, re-enact, avenge or simply brood about some awful event or unfulfilled longing. The Winchester mansion with its mysterious history and unresolved hauntings would inspire a legion of restless spirits and that is not surprising. In December of 1897, several curious people flocked to the Winchester mansion—in a window in the house—a bodiless head appeared at a second story window. The floating visage manifested itself at random day or night. Many people thought it resembled William Wirt Winchester, but Mrs. Winchester disagreed. Eventually the whole window concealed inside of the mansion by new construction. It is reported to be the one next to the most expensive window in the house. Judging from the number of individuals reporting spectral contact, one does not have to be a professional medium to see a ghost. They attract believer and nonbeliever indiscriminately. One man reports in the 1960s medical students would sleep in the Winchester mansion because of their professional interests. One of the students who had a skeleton in his bedroom told an analyst after some time and with great embarrassment that he often took the skeleton into his bed, embraced it, and sometimes kissed it. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
Another student reported that one night he slept in the attic in the witch’s cap, and was suddenly wrenched up out of the bed and dragged across the floor! He was fully awake in an instant. Into the bathroom he was forced by powerful hands that hurt his arms. His head was smacked against the wall. He was lifted off his feet and held that way, and by the thin light from the door through which he had just been dragged he saw that it was a tall man who held him. His hair was clearly brushed from his high rounded temples, and his large dark eyes were fastened on him. His hands came up around the student’s neck and then he vanished. However, if nothing paranormal occurs while you are visiting the house, that can be expected. Ghost tend to be shy and more active overnight. Nonetheless, you will have lost nothing. As an adventure in historical research, the Winchester mansion has no equal. A spirit has literally conquered death and come back to prove it. It is both a clue and an invitation to a World beyond our own limited reality, an offer to broaden our awareness to encompass everything and anything that just might be possible. The truth is that this feeling or its presence has been shut up so long, that we have come back to look upon it as non-existent and to regard the rumours of its actual experience as hallucination. This is why religion, mysticism, and philosophy have so hard a battle to fight in these ties, a battle against human’s inevitable incredulity. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
Even more scary than the Land of Spirits are the deities of destruction and death. Since mysticism seeks to include all life, it must include its bad parts as well as its good. That is not to say that we have to like the bad things. It is certainly understandable to ask that they pass us by. However, some of its is unavoidable, so we ask for the strength to deal with it. Sometimes we ask benevolent deities to protect us, and sometimes we ask the not-so-benevolent ones to deal lightly with us, or to show us in what way our sufferings are necessary and even valuable. I do not want to wax poetic about how curses can be blessings in disguise, after all Mrs. Winchester was said to be cursed and look at the beautiful work of art that was produced as a result. However, I also do not want to insult those who suffer by implying that their suffering is a good thing. I do want to say, however, that sometimes suffering can indeed bring blessings. It shows us that the World is not all bunnies, kittens, and rainbows, which means we come face to face with reality, a great blessing. It both tests us and strengthens us. We learn how much we can stand and how to stand worse, if it should come. We learn that sometimes good things are born from bad things. Think of the pain that comes with childbirth. All in all, may God protect the person who grows up without experiencing suffering; the first strong wind they encountered as an adult will blow them away. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
Beyond all this, destruction can be beneficial. Sometimes the weeds need to be whacked back to let the good stuff grow. Part of us must die so the best of us can live. Deities of destruction can do this for us. This is not easy, nor is it safe. The fire that burns away brush can get out of control and destroy the forest. It has become fashionable in neo-Paganism to worship “dark” deities—Kali, Loki, Hecate, et cetera. They are seen as misunderstood. They are in fact misunderstood, but by those who see them as “fun.” They are not fun. They are scary, dangerous, and difficult to deal with. I hesitate to share ghost stories and episodes of real demonic possession to readers. No sense in calling up trouble for people. However, we need to acknowledge the darker side of things in order to fill out our relationship with the Universe, as Mrs. Winchester did. Loki is a demon who, when the gods grew too comfortable in their unending like, stole the apples that kept them young and made them face age. When they sought to cheat the giant of the wages for his work, they turned to him to save themselves. When Thor grew too sure of his strength to end Chaos, Loki showed him that craftiness is as necessary as raw power. Loki is a god of unpleasant truths, and he can open your eyes to your own limits. It is only by seeing them that we can overcome them. May all your weaknesses be burned away, making you fit for God. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
Winchester Mystery House
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Humans are Good and there is No Evil that the Mind Cannot Overcome!
There are only three sins—causing pain, causing fear, causing anguish. The rest is window dressing. A somewhat less drastic expression of necrophilia is a marked interest in sickness in all its forms, as well as in death. An example is the parent who is always interested in one’s child’s sicknesses, one’s failures, and makes dark prognoses for the future; and the same time one is unimpressed by a favourable change, one does not respond to the child’s joy or enthusiasm, and one will not notice anything new that is growing within the child. One does not harm the child in any obvious way, yet one may slowly strangle one’s joy of life, one’s faith in growth, and eventually one will infect the child with one’s own necrophilous orientation. Anyone who has occasion to listen to conversations of people of all social classes from middle age onward will be impressed by the extent of their talk about sickness and death of other people. To be sure, there are a number of factors responsible for this. For many people, especially those with no outside interest, sickness and death are the only the only dramatic elements in their lives; it is one of the few subjects about which they can talk, aside from events in the family. However, granting all this, there are many persons for whom these explanations do not suffice. They can usually be recognized by the animation and excitement that comes over them when they talk about sickness or other sad events like death, financial troubles, and so forth. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
The necrophilous person’s particular interest in the dead is often shown not only in one’s conversation but in the way one reads the newspapers. One is most interested—and hence reads first—the death notices and obituaries; one also like to talk about death from various aspects: what people died of, under what conditions, who died recently, who is likely to die, and so on. One likes to go to funeral parlors and cemeteries and usually does not miss an occasion to do so when it is socially opportune. It is easy to see that this affinity for burials and cemeteries is only a somewhat attenuated form of the more gross manifest interest in morgues and graves. A somewhat less easily identifiable trait of the necrophilous person is the particular kind of lifelessness in one’s conversation. This is not a matter of what the conversation is about. A very intelligent, erudite necrophilous person may talk about things that would be very interesting were it not for the way in which one presents one’s ideas. One remains stiff, cold, aloof; one’s presentation of the subject is pedantic and lifeless. One the other hand the opposite character type, the life loving-person, may talk of an experience that in itself is not particularly interesting, but there is life in the way one present it; one is stimulating; that is why one listens with interest and pleasure. The necrophilous person is a wet blanket and joy killer in a group; one is boring rather than animating; one deadens everything and makes people feel tired, in contrast to the biophilous person who makes people feel more alive. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
Interior Word—it speaks not through uttered words clairaudiently heard as in spiritistic phenomena but through the higher form of spontaneous intuitively formulated thoughts. A voice comes to one’s hearing but not with the ordinary kind of audibility. It is within one for it is only a mental voice yet it speaks with a strange authority. It says to one, “I am the Way, the Truth, the Life.” However, still another dimension of necrophilous character only the past is experienced as quite real, not the present or the future. What has been, id est, what is dead, rules one’s life: institutions, laws, property, traditions, and possessions. Briefly, things rule the human; having rules being; the dead rule the living. In the necrophile’s thinking—personal, philosophical, and political—the past is sacred, nothing new is valuable, drastic change is a crime agist the “natural” order. Another aspect of necrophilia is the relation to colour. The necrophilous person generally has a predilection for dark, light-absorbing colours, such as black or brown, and a dislike for bright, radiant colours. (This colour preference is similar to the one often found in depressed persons.) One can observe this preference in their dress or in the colours they choose if they pain. Of course, in cases when dark clothes are worn out of tradition, the colour has no significance in relation to character. As we have already seen in the clinical material above, the necrophilous person is characterized by a special affinity to bad odors—originally the odor of decaying or putrid flesh. They have a frank enjoyment of bad odors. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
That form of enjoyment leads to the repression of the desire to enjoy bad odor that in reality does not exist. (This is similar to the overcleanliness of the anal character.) Whether of the one form or the other the necrophilic person’s fascination with bad odors frequently gives such persons the appearance of being “sniffers.” Not infrequently this sniffing tendency even shows in their facial expression. Many necrophilous individuals give the impression of constantly smelling a bad odor. Anyone who studies the many pictures of Hitler, for instance, can easily discover this sniffing expression in his face. This expression is not always present in necrophiles, but when it is, it is one of the most reliable criteria of such a passion. Another characteristic element in the facial expression is the necrophile’s incapacity to laugh. One’s laughter is actually a kind of smirk; it is unalive and lacks the liberating and joyous quality of normal laughter. In fact it is not only the absence of the capacity for “free” laughter that is characteristic of the necrophile, but the general immobility and lack of expression in one’s face. One can observe that such people in reality never “laugh” but only “grin.” While watching television one can sometimes observe a speaker whose face remains completely unmoved while one is speaking; one grins only at the beginning or the end of one’s speech when, according to American custom, one knows that one is expected to smile. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
Such persons cannot talk and smile at the same time, because they can direct their attention only to the one or the other activity; their smile is not spontaneous but planned, like the unspontaneous gestures of the poor actor. The skin is often indicative of necrophiles: it gives the impression of being lifeless, “dry,” sallow; when we sense sometimes that a person has a “dirty” face, we are not claiming that the face is unwashed, but are responding to the particular quality of a necrophilous expression. The necrophilous person is characterized by the predominant use of words referring to destruction and to feces and toilets. They frequently use foul language, one word in particular. They live in a deadened, joyless atmosphere. Mussolini and Hitler were, perhaps, rebels (Hitler more than Mussolini), but they were not revolutionaries. They had no genuinely creative ideas, nor did they accomplish any significant changes that benefited humans. They lacked the essential criterion of the revolutionary spirit: love of life, the desire to serve its unfolding and growth, and a passion for independence. However, some people disagree with that. They believe that Hitler’s belief that blonde, blue eyed, Germans were God’s chosen people and a master race is what lead to genetic editing and the idea of the American dream. The American Dream is more than just owning a beautiful house in the suburbs, a college education, successful career, a married couple with two kids and a car. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
The American dream also includes being beautiful or handsome and having blonde hair and blue eyes, fairly tall, and thin. Also loving things like red meat, barbeque, apple pie, milk, baseball, church, and American cars. There is also a love for the colour blue because it signifies intelligence. America is supposed to be the baby of Germany. “For any government deliberately to deny to their people what must be their plainest and simplest right, to live in peace and happiness without the nightmare of war, would be to betray their trust, and to call down upon their heads the condemnation of all humankind. I do not believe that such a government anywhere exists among civilized peoples. I am convinced that the aim of every state’s person worthy of the name, to whatever country one belongs, must be the happiness of the people for whom and to whom one is responsible, and in that faith I am sure that a way can and will be found to free the World from the curse of armaments and the fears that give rise to them, and to open up a happier, and wiser future for humankind,” reports Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, November 1937. Interior Word: Something within begins to speak to one, some mind beings to find its own expression. It is one’s, and yet not one’s. Government is a natural vocation for those raised in Unitarian tradition, with its belief in the universal goodness of all humans, growing out of a sense of duty to humankind and a deep-seated belief that reasonable, fair-minded humans can work together to solve any difficulty. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
The Overself issues its commands and exacts its demands in the utter silence and privacy of a human’s heart. Yet they are more powerful and more imperious in the end than any which issue from the noisy bustling World. If one comes under the tutelage of the Interior Word, one may count oneself fortunate. However, one’s good fortune will last only as long as one faithfully obeys it. The failure to do so will bring painful but educative retribution. It is as if no one existed but these two—the listening mind and the soundless voice. This is real solitude; this is the true cloister to which a human may retire in order to find God; this is the desert, cave, or mountain where, mentally, one renounces the World’s business and abandons friends, family, and all humanity. The Germans believed themselves, on the whole, to be the most powerful humans of the most powerful empire in the history of the World. His Majesty’s Government could not take responsibility of advising the chancellor to take any course of action that might expose his country to dangers against which His Majesty’s Government was unable to guarantee protection. Nancy Astor, a devout Christian Scientist, always had Christian Science lectures at her weekend gatherings. Lord Astor and Lord Lothian were Christian Scientists too. Their sympathetic view of Germany was strengthened by the Christian Science doctrine that humans are good, that there is no evil that the mind cannot overcome. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
If human beings can sit down and reason together, it would be possible to ease tensions overnight. Yet some people are intent on singing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness. They glorify war as they believe in is the World’s only hygiene, and want to destroy museums, libraries, academies of every kind, and want to fight moralism, feminism, and every opportunistic individual. Nancy Astor said in one of her wild, stabbing protests, “It’s madness. War will destroy Western civilization. Europe will be destroyed. Then certainly Communism will spread, for it always feeds on death like a vulture.” Unquestionably! We would not be fighting to preserve something. Unless war is averted now there will be no one left who knows the meaning of the words right and wrong. This is no longer an affair of national pride and laws of right and wrong. It is a case of our whole civilization going under. A darkness hangs over America. Trenches are being dug in secret locations. Children are expected to be herded into trains, evacuating cities that everyone expects to be annihilated by COVID-19. Our first duty is not to avoid confrontations with evil but to restrain it. Place your faith in the innate goodness and reasonableness of humans. Christian Scientists believe that all evil is an illusion that can be eliminated by the exercise of the mind. We need an independent moral voice for the country. God Himself speaks exclusively through international gatherings. However, many people are putting more faith in progressive politics and economics and the fictional news media than in God. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
Many churches, representing the Kingdom of God, are caught up in the trendy issue of the time, surrendering its influence as an independent moral voice. This failure of both the state and the church contributed to the disaster that has befell the World. However, peace may be restored. It is my earnest hope and indeed the hope of all humankind that from this solemn occasion a better World shall emerge out of the blood and carnage of the past—a World founded upon faith and understanding—a World dedicated to the dignity of humans and the fulfillment of their most cherished wish—for freedom, tolerance, and justice. Nietzsche was not saying that God does not exist, but the God had become irrelevant to people because they are closing the church, partaking in evil, worshipping fictional news and political, not God. Men and women may assert that God’s exists or that He does not, but it makes littler difference either way. God is dead not because He does not exist, but because we live, play, procreate, govern, and die as though He does not. The effect of this widespread notion can be seen in the despair that followed the COVID-19 pandemic. Churches were forced to close, but you see people out in the streets eating expensive restaurant food, but no accommodations like that being made for people who want to worship God. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
This militant atheism that has claimed countless lives Worldwide and caused the death of God has had profound implications for individuals as well as for society and politics because it is the philosophic context in which modern governments operate. In the New World civilization, God has traditionally played the role of legitimizing government. In classical and Christian political philosophy He was the author of natural law—that body of just and reasonable standards that guided human rulers and by which the ruled were bound to respect and obey those given charge over them. Even atheistic political philosophy acknowledged that the idea of God was useful: a little dose of religion would keep the masses quiet. As Napoleon said, “Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.” Atheism has become militant…insisting it must be believed. Atheism has felt the need to impose its views, to forbid competing visions. Without Gd there will be wars of a kind that have never happened on the Earth, this is more serious the climate change. The devaluation of all values is what the death of God has meant to politics. Distinctions between right and wrong, justice and injustice have become meaningless. No objective guide is left o choose between “all men are created equal” and “the weak to the wall.” In Year Zero no one could have predicted the consequences that the void at the heart of nations would produce. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
However, this spiritual vacuum means that humans can only pursue two options: first to imagine that they are gods themselves, or second, to seek satisfaction in their senses. “If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God), you should pay your respects to Hitler and Stalin,” reports T.S. Eliot. God remains dead. How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves? Must not we ourselves become gods simply to seem worthy of it? Today, 33 percent of the World’s population and growing lives in the viselike grip of states that are the product of such gangster-state’s people who established governments that attempt to fill the vacuum of values with secular ideology or the cult of personality. The goal of these massive bureaucracies is to preside over the death of God; their system for achieving it is most often called Marxist Leninism. It carries out its policies with surgical efficiency, as millions of Christians and Jews who have passed through Communist gulgas would testify. If they could. However, sometimes the system performs with comic clumsiness. We live in a Cairo bazaar of competing models. In this psychological phantasmagoria we search for a style, a way of ordering our existence, that will fit our particular temperament and circumstances. We look for heroes or mini-heroes to emulate. The style-seeker is like the lady who flips through the pages of a fashion magazine to find a suitable dress pattern by Paris Hilton. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
She studies ne after another, settles on one that appeals to her, and decide to purchase that dress. Next she begin to collect the necessary materials, thinks about how many hours she will have to work to earn the dress, imagines the cloth, thread, piping, buttons, et cetera. In precisely the same way, the life style creator acquires the necessary props One lets one’s hair grow. One buys art nouveau paintings and hardcovers of Anne Rice’s novels. One learns to discuss Marcuse, Guevara, Edith Warton, and Frantz Fanon. One picks up a particular jargon, using words like “relevance” and “establishment.” None of this means that one’s political actions are insignificant, or that one’s opinions are unjust or foolish. One may (or may not) be accurate in one’s views of society. Yet the particular way in which one chooses to express them is inescapable part of one’s search for personal style. The lady, in constructing the work hours to pay for her dress, alters her habits here and there, deviating from the usual pattern in minor ways to make sure she has enough money saved up to buy that high quality dress. If she buys one a month, in a year she will have 12 fancy dresses that may last a lifetime. The end product is she has a truly custom-made wardrobe; enough dresses to wear a new one everyday for nearly two weeks. In quite the same way we individualize our style of living, yet usually winds up bearing a distinct resemblance to some life style model previously packaged and marketed by a subcult. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
People know how to make themselves look rich. They do not waste money, but they save up and buy the things they desire. Often we are unaware of the moment when we commit ourselves to one life style model over all others. The decision to “be” and Executive or Militant Atheists or a West Side Intellectual is seldom the result of purely logical analysis. Nor is the decision always made cleanly, all at once. The research scientist who switches from Ocean Spray Cranberry 100 percent juice to R. W. Knudsen 100 percent cranberry juice may do so for health reasons without recognizing that the trat taste of cranberry juice is part of a whole life style toward which one finds oneself drawn to. The couple who choose the Tiffany Magnolia Nouveau Floral 73” floor lamp think they are furnishing their Cresleigh Home; they do no necessarily see their actions as an attempt to flesh out an overall style. Most of us, in fact, do not think of our own lives in terms of life style, and we often have difficulty in talking about it objectively. We have even more trouble when we try to articular the structure of values implicit in our style. The task is doubly hard because many of us do not adopt a single integrated style, but a composite of elements drawn from several different models. We may emulate both Hippie and Surfer. We may choose a cross between West Side Intellectual and Executive—a fusion that is, in fact, chose by many publishing officials in Manhattan, New York USA. When one’s personal style is a hybrid, it is frequently difficult to disentangle the multiple models on which it is based. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
Once we commit ourselves to a particular model, however, we fight energetically to build it, and perhaps even more so to preserve it against challenge. For the style becomes extremely important to us. This is doubly true of the people of the future, among whom concern for style is downright passionate. This intense concern for style is not, however, what literary critics means by formalism. It is not simply an interest in outward appearances. For style of life involves not merely the external forms of behaviour, but the values implicit in that behaviour, and one cannot change one’s life style without working some change in one’s self-image. The people of the future are not “style conscious” but “life style conscious.” This is why little things often assume great significance for them. If it challenges a hard-worn life style, if it threatens to break up the integrity of the style, a single small detail of one’s life may be charged with emotional power. Aunt Wendy gives us a wedding present. We are embarrassed by it, for it in in a style alien to our own. It irritates and upsets us, even the we know that “Aunt Wendy does not know any better.” We banish the Sophia 35-Light Candle Style Tiered Chandelier with Crystal Accents by Schonbek to the attic of the house. Aunt Wendy’s Amana MXP22TLT Menumaster Higher Speed Combination Oven – WiFi ready or the set of eight Prestige Gala Charger Dinner Plates is not important in and of itself. However, it is a message from a different subcultural World, and unless we are weak in commitment to our own style, unless we happen to be in transition between styles, it represents a potential threat. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
The psychologist Leon Festinger coined the term “cognitive dissonance” to mean the tendency of a person to reject or deny information that challenges one’s preconceptions. We do not want to hear things that may upset our carefully worked out structure of beliefs. Similarly, Aunt Wendy’s gift represents an element of “stylistic dissonance.” It threatens to undermine our carefully worked out style of life. Why does the life style have this power to preserve itself? What is the source of our commitment to it? A life style is a vehicle through which we express ourselves. It is a way of telling the World which particular subcult or subcults we belong to. Yet this hardly accounts for its enormous importance to us. The real reason why life styles are so significant—and increasingly so as the society diversifies—is that, above all else, the choice of a life style model to emulate is a crucial strategy in our private war against crowing pressures of overchoice. Deciding, whether consciously or not to be “like” William Buckley or Joan Baez, Lionel Trilling, Paris Hilton, Jet Li, Aaliyah Haughton, E40, or his surfer equivalent, J. J. Moon, rescues us from need to make millions of minute life-decisions. Once a commitment to a style is made, we are able to rule out many forms of dress and behaviour, many ideas and attitudes, as inappropriate to our adopted style. The college boy who chooses to give it the Ole American try wastes little energy agonizing over whether who to vote for in the presidential election, carry an attache case, or invest in mutual funds. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
By zeroing in on a particular life style we exclude a vast number of alternatives from further consideration. The fellow who opts for a BMW M8 need no longer concern oneself with the hundreds of types of automobiles available to one on the open market, but which violate the spirit of one’s style. One need only choose among the far smaller repertoire of M8 Competition Ultimate Driving Machines from Niello BMW in Sacramento, California that fit within the limits set by one’s model. And what is said of BMW M8 Competition Ultimate Driving Machines is equally applicable to one’s ideas and social relationships as well. The commitment to one style of life over another is thus a super-decision. It is a decision of a higher order than the general run of everyday life-decisions. It is a decision to narrow the range of alternatives that will concern us in the future. So long as we operate within the confines of the style we have chosen, our choices are relatively simple. It is painful because, freed of our commitment to any given style, cut adrift from the subcult that gave rise to it, we no longer “belong.” Worse yet, our basic principles are called into question and we must face each new life-decision afresh, alone, without security of a definite, fixed policy. We are, in short, confront with the full, crushing burden of overchoice again. The Interior Word: When another personality speaks from the entranced or semi-entranced body, be the latter a spiritualist medium, a hypnotized person, or a psychologically auto-suggested one, we have a phenomenon in which no true mystic would take part. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
When this same personality announces itself to be Jesus, Krishna, Saint Francis, Mrs. Eddy, or Mme. Blavatsky, it may immediately be labelled as spurious. Whether the phenomenon be produced by actual spirit-possession (when usually a lying spirit is the operating agent) or by psychological self-obsession, with the wakeful personality unconscious of what the other has said, in both cases it is one which ought to be avoided. The Catholic Church, with its very wide experience in such matters, has cautioned its adherents against being seduced either into allowing the thing to happen or into believing the teaching given by the mysterious visitor. Pope Benedict XIV went so far as to ascribe a diabolic origin in the voice. From the standpoint of philosophy it may be said that the Inner Word speaks only to a human, never through one to others. Nor is it heard clairaudiently and therefore psycho-physically; it is heard only mentally and inwardly. The phenomenon of the Interior Word does not ordinarily appear before one is able to carry the mind to a certain depth or intensity of concentration, and to hold it there continuously for not less than about a half hour. In that state of inspired communion when the Interior Word is heard, thoughts keep coming into consciousness from a source deeper than the personal mind. The ego is not directly thinking them but instead experiences them as being impressed upon it or released into it. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
The utterance of the Interior Word can be heard only in Heaven, only in a state detached from the animality and triviality of the common state. It is as if another being spoke inside me—not with audible voice but with mental voice—and imposed itself strongly on my own mind. Interior Word: Out of this blankness something will begin to speak to one. It will not be a sound heard with the body’s ears. If it happened, that would be a low psychic manifestation which must be stopped at once. Until the internal Word speaks in one one is really incapable of helping others spiritually. One may be able to do so intellectually or to comfort them emotionally but that is a different and inferior thing. If the Interior Word bids one move in any direction which seems encompassed by difficulties or blocked by obstacles so that one can see no way before one, let one not doubt or fear. A way will be made by the power of the Overself. One need only obey, relax, and trust the guidance. When the Inner Word begins to speak to one, one may begin to speak to others—not before. For only then will what one says bear any creative power, spiritual inspiration, enlightenment, or healing in it. The Interior Word carries an authoritative and commanding tone. Adults have some control over their environment, but children depend on adults to provide a home for them. In addition to love, security, understanding, and encouragement, reverence plays an important part in a safe and happy home. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
Reverence is respect, honour, and love for our Heavenly Father, for His Son, Jesus Christ, and for all of His creations. It is more than just holding bodies still and being quiet during meetings; it is an attitude. It can become a way of life for each of us as members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Reverent habits often precede reverent feelings. Prayer is a source of great peace for all of us. Habits of reverence can begin early in our home when we help children learn to pray. The way we pray with our children can be a teaching and building experience. In general, the divine beings like us. That is one of the reasons they want our prayers and offerings; if they did not care about us, they would not care about our prayers. That is why they respond well to petitionary prayers; they want to help us. They really do. Some of them are ambivalent, however. Why should the Land Spirits feel warmly toward us when we cut down their forests and pave over their meadows? Do not feel too smug because you have protested against logging in old growth forest or rain forest. Where do you think the land your house is built on came from? What kind of land was there before it was plowed under to grow your food? There used to be rain forests in the Bay Area. Dealing with Land Spirits can be difficult. We have to show them we are grateful for their sacrifice. We do this by giving something back. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
Dear Lord in the shining Heaven, I offer you my thanks and condolences for your sacrifices. I know you are here, and I wish for your friendship, for me and my people. Please accept what I give you, and please do not forget me. The Interior Word is not heard with the reasoning mind, even though its statements may be very reasonable. It is not connected with the intellect at all, as are all our ordinary words. It is received in the heart, felt intensively and deeply. Now that one has developed the capacity to hear, there are sounds forth out of the obscure recesses of one’s being a silent voice, a messenger without name or form. It is the Word. The Interior Word is never enigmatic and puzzling but always direct and simple. Only the revelations of occultism are obscure, never the revelations of truth itself. What the German mystics called “the Interior Word” is precisely the same as what two thousand years earlier the Mandarin Chinese mystics called the “Voice of Heaven.” The Interior Word cannot speak frequently until there is complete silence within the human’s being. The ideas which come to one’s mind through the Interior Word come stamped with the certitude of truth. Internal Word: In the New Testament, John introduces the idea of the logo, the Word which speaks in every human who comes into the Word. Every human is not able to hear it although it is always there, always immanent. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
The Interior Word is referred to in the Bible: “I will hear what the Lord God will speak to me,” reports Psalms 84.9. To corrupt nature is not the work of providence. However, it is the nature of some things to be contingent. Divine providence does not therefore impose any necessity upon things so as to destroy their contingency. Divine providence imposes necessity upon some things; not upon all, as some formerly believed. For to providence it belongs to order things towards an end. Now after the divine goodness, which is an extrinsic end to all things, the principal good in things themselves is the perfection of the Universe; which would not be, were not all grades of being found in things. Whence it pertains to divine providence to produce every grade of being. And thus it has prepared for something necessary causes, so that they happened of necessity; for others contingent causes, that they may happen by contingency, according to the nature of their proximate cause. The effect of divine providence is not only that things should happen somehow; but that they should happen either by necessity or by contingency. Therefore whatsoever divine providence ordains to happen infallibly and of necessity happens infallibly and of necessity; and that happens from contingency, which the plan of divine providence conceives to happen from contingency. The order of divine providence is unchangeable and certain, so far as all things foreseen happen as they have been foreseen, whether from necessity or from contingency. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
That indissolubility and unchaneableness of which Boethius speaks, pertain to the certainty of providence, which fails not to produce its effect, and that in the way foreseen; but they do not pertain to the necessity of the effects. We must remember that properly speaking “necessary” and “contingent” are consequent upon being, as such. Hence the mode both of necessity and of contingency falls under the foresight of God, who provides universally for all being; not under the foresight of causes that provide only for some particular order of things. Our God and God of our fathers, please bless us with the threefold blessing written in the Torah of Moses, Thy servant, and spoken by Aaron and his sons, Thy consecrated priests: May the Lord bless thee and keep thee; so may it be His will. May the Lord make His countenance to shine upon thee and be gracious unto thee; so may it be His will. May the Lord turn His countenance unto thee and give thee peace. So may it be His will. Please grant peace, well-being and blessing unto the World, with grace, lovingkindness and mercy for us and for all America, Thy people. Bless us, O Father, all of us together, with the light of Thy presence; for by that light Thou hast given us, O Lord our God, the Torah of life, lovingkindness and righteousness, blessing and mercy, life and peace. O may it be good in Thy sight at all times to bless Thy people America with Thy peace. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, wo blesses Thy people American with peace. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
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I Am the Resurrection, and the Life—Glory to God in the Shining Heavens and on Earth!
From Watergate we learned what generations before us have known; our Constitution works. And during Watergate years it was interpreted again so as to reaffirm that no one—absolutely no one—is above the law. The total rejection of any religious belief is so contrary to human’s natural instincts and so destructive of one’s peace of mind. However, the French revelation was a conscious effort to replace the Kingdom of God with the kingdoms of man. Thus Grace’s irreligion was soon replaced by a new faith—man’s worship of man. Meanwhile, in the New World a radical experiment opened another chapter in church-state relations. There a group of gentlemen farmers, who were neither naïve about human nature nor pretentious about human society, were drawing up the American Constitution. By refusing to assign redemptive powers to the state or to allow coercive power to the church, the American experiment separated these two institutions for the first time since Constantine. What might be considered the modern phase in church-state history has emerged in out live times. It is an amalgam of elements from the previous eras. The rise of totalitarian regimes has brought back the kind of persecution the church experienced in early Rome; like Herod, modern dictators tolerate no other kinds. In the West secularism has aggressively spread irreligion, turning Europe into a post-Christian culture and America into a battleground with orthodox religion in retreat. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
This is dangerous because of people like Heinrich Himmler, who is an excellent example of a vicious, sadistic character who illustrates what has been said about the connection between sadism and the extreme forms of the anal-hoarding, bureaucratic, authoritarian character. The “bloodhound of Europe,” as he was called by many, Mr. Himmler was, together with Adolph Hitler, responsible for the slaughter of between fifteen and twenty million unarmed and powerless Russians, Poles, and Jews. Mr. Himmler impressed one as of uncanny subalternity, narrow-minded conscientiousness, inhuman methodicalness, blended with an element of an automaton. This sadistic authoritarian character is not the description of a hater or of that of a monster as the latter is usually conceived, but of an extremely dehumanized bureaucrat. Mr. Himmler was the type of a cruel educator of the old school, strict against himself but stricter against others. The signs of compassion and especially friendly tone of his thank you letters were all a fake, as one often finds in clearly cold natures. He could be a tender family father, a correct superior and a good comrade. At the same time he was an obsessed fanatic, an eccentric dreamer and a will-less instrument in Mr. Hitler’s hands to whom he was tied in an ever increasing love/hate. The most extreme example of his submission was that to Mr. Hitler, although one must suspect that his opportunism may have induced him to use a degree of flatter that was not entirely genuine. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Mr. Hitler was for Mr. Himmler the god-man, to be compared to the significance of Christ in the Christian religion or of Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita. He writes of him: “He is destined by the Karma of the universal Germanness, to lead the fight against the east and to save the Germanness of the World; one of the very great figures of light has found its incarnation in him.” Mr. Himmler submitted to the new Krishna-Christ-Hitler as he had to the old Christ/God, except much more fervently. It must be noted, however, that under the circumstances the new gods offered greater opportunities for fame and power. Can we conclude from this cursory overview that the church and the state must inevitably be in conflict? To some extent the answer is yes. Dual allegiances always create tension. And in a sinful World the struggle for power, which inevitably corrupts, is unavoidable. When the church is not being persecuted, it is being corrupted. So as much as anything else, it is human’s own nature that has created centuries of conflict. While they know that they represent different nations each living under the normal circumstances of their own society, its power and strength in comparison with other nations, nor do they know their place in their own society. Once again the contracting parties, in this case representatives of states, are allowed only enough knowledge to make a rational choice to protect their interests but not so much that the more fortunate among them can take advantage of their special situation. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
However, every generation has an obligation to seek anew a healthy relationship between church and state. Both are reflections of human’s nature; both have a role to play. Christ’s teaching clearly delineates these roles. Jesus was remarkably indifferent to those who held political power. He had no desire to replace Caesar or Pilate with His apostles Peter or John. He gave civil authority its due, rebuking both the Zealots and Peter for using the sword. This infuriated the religious right of His day. Eager to discredit Jesus, the Pharisees and Herodians tried trapping Jesus over the question of allegiance to political authority. “Tell us,” they asked, “is it right to pay taxes to Caesar or not?” The question puts Jesus in the middle: If He said no, He would be a threat to the Roman government; if He said yes, He would lose the respect of the masses who hated the Romans. Jesus asked them for a coin. It was a Roman denarius, the only coin that could be used to pay the hated yearly poll tax. On one side was the image of the Emperor Tiberius, around which were written the words Tiberius, Caesar Augusts, son of the divine Augustus. “Whose portrait is this?” Jesus asked, rubbing His finger over the raised features of the Roman ruler. “And whose inscription?” “Caesar’s,” they replied impatiently. “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s,” replied Jesus, handing the coin back to them. They stared at Jesus in stunned silence. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Not only had Jesus eluded the trap, but He has put Caesar in his place. Christ might simply have said, “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s.” That is all that was at issue. It was Caesar’s image on the coin, and Caesar had authority over the state. What made Jesus add the second phrase, “Give to God what is God’s”? The answer is found on the reverse face of the coin, which showed Tiberius’s mother represented as the goddess of peace, along with the words highest priest. The blasphemous words commanded the worship of Caesar; they thus exceeded the state’s authority. Jesus’ lesson was not lost on the early church. Government is to be respected, and its rule honoured. “It is necessary to submit to the authorities,” wrote the apostle Paul. “If you owe taxes, pay taxes.” However, worship is reserved solely for God. The distinction Christ made is clear; both the church and state have clear and distinct roles ordained by God. The issue is how to apply these teachings to each institution in today’s volatile World. Christ did not give the keys to of the Kingdom to Caesar nor the sword to Peter. In God’s provision the state is not to seize authority over ecclesiastical or spiritual matters, nor is the church to seek authority over political matters. Yet the constant temptation of each is to encroach upon the other. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
The basic principle of the law of nations is a principle of equality. Independent peoples organized as states have certain fundamental equal rights. This principle is analogous to the equal rights of citizens in a constitutional regime. One consequence of this equality of nations is the principle of self-determination, the right of a people to settle its own affairs without the intervention of foreign powers. Another consequence is the right of self-defense against attack, including the right to form defensive alliances to protect this right. A further principle is that treaties are to be kept, provided they are consistent with other principles governing the relations of states. Thus treaties for self-defense, suitably interpreted, would be binding, but agreements to cooperate in an unjustified attack are void ab initio. Even in a just war certain forms of violence are strictly inadmissible; and where a country’s right to war is questionable and uncertain, the constraints on the means it can use are all the more severe. Acts permissible in a war of legitimate self-defense, when these are necessary, may be flatly excluded in a more doubtful situation. The ai of war is a just peace, and therefore the means employed must not destroy the possibility of peace or encourage a contempt for human life that puts the safety of ourselves and of humankind in jeopardy. The conduct of war is to be constrained and adjusted to this end. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
The representatives of states would recognize that their national interest, as seen from the original position, is best served by acknowledging these limits on the means of war. This is because the national interest of a just state is defined by the principles of justice that have already been acknowledged. Therefore such a nation will aim above all to maintain and to preserve its just institutions and conditions that make them possible. It is not moved by the desire for World power or national glory; nor does it wage war for purposes of economic gain or the acquisition of territory. These ends are contrary to the conception of justice that defines a society’s legitimate interests, however prevalent they have been in the actual conduct of states. Granting these presumptions, then, it seems reasonable to suppose that the traditional prohibitions incorporating the natural duties that protect human life would be chosen. Now if conscientious refusal in time of war appeals to these principles, it is founded upon a political conception, and not necessarily upon religious or other nations. While this form of denial may not be a political act, since it does not take place in the public forum, it is based upon the same theory of justice that underlies the constitution and guides its interpretation. Moreover, the legal order itself presumably recognizes in the form of treaties the validity of at least some of these principles of the law of nations. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
Therefore if a soldier is ordered to engage in certain illicit acts of war, one may refuse if one reasonably and conscientiously believes that the principles applying to the conduct of war are plainly violated. One can maintain that, all things considered, one’s natural duty not to e made the agent of grave injustice and evil to another outweighs one’s duty to obey. Conscription is a drastic interference with the basic liberties of equal citizenship, it cannot be justified by any needs less compelling than those of national security. Citizens agree to this arrangement as a fair way of sharing in the burdens of national defense. In a well-ordered society anyway, evils arise externally, that is, from unjustified attacks from the outside. It is impossible for just institutions to eliminate these hardships entirely. The most that they can do is to try to make sure that the risks of suffering from these imposed misfortunes are more or less evenly shared by all members of society over the course of their life, and that there is no avoidable class bias in selecting those who are called for duty. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
And, of course, it is unjust and contrary to the law of nations to attack the liberty of other societies without just cause. Therefore if a just case for war does not exist, and this may be sufficiently evident under some circumstances, a citizen is justified in refusing to discharge one’s legal duty. Both the law of nations and the principles of justice for one’s own society uphold one in this claim. It no more challenges the state’s authority than the celibacy of priest challenges the sanctity of marriage. Governments, with rare exceptions, seek to expand their power beyond the mandate to restrain evil, preserve order, and promote justice. Most often they do this by venturing into religious or moral areas. The reason is twofold: the state needs religious legitimization for its polices and an independent church is the one structure that rivals that state’s clam for ultimate allegiance. However, when the state has presumed on God’s role, whether in ancient Rome, in Germany, or modern America, the first liberty, freedom of conscience, suffers. On the other side of the coin, the church, whose principal function is to proclaim the Good News and witness the values of the Kingdom of God, must resist the tempting illusion that it can usher in that Kingdom through political means. Jesus provided the best example for the church in His wilderness confrontation with Satan when the Devil tempted Jesus to worship him and thus take dominion over the kingdom of this World. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
No small temptation. With that kind of power, Christ could enforce the Sermon on the Mount; love and justice could reign. He might have reasoned that if He did not accept, someone else would. This rationalization is popular today, right up through the highest councils of government: compromise to stay in power because there you can do more for the common good. However, as the saying goes, “People who lie down with dogs, get flees.” It is just another way of achieving success by compromising one’s morals and yielding to coercive power. And think of the popularity Jesus could have gained. After all, the people wanted a Messiah who would vanquish their oppressors. However, Jesus understood His mission, and it could not be accomplished by taking over the kingdoms of the World in a political coup. The mission of the church is to build the kingdom of God on Earth, and the means of the mission is politics. We live with both good (the wheat) and evil (the tares), and cannot root out the tares. Only God is able to do that and He will—when the Kingdom comes in its final glory. However, citizens of the World have a duty to work through civil authority for the advancement of justice and human good. They may provide critical illumination, personal example and vocational leadership. There are proper ways as well for the institutional church to provide society with its moral vision and hold government to moral account. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Some Christian traditional similarly believe that they can best model Kingdom values not by involvement in politics but by the establishment of alternative communities in which they live out the teachings of the Kingdom. In its proper form, this is not a withdrawal from the World or abandonment of Christian responsibility; nor is it a privatization of Christian values as with those who profess to believe but live as they do not. Instead a different strategy to the same end of providing a witness in the kingdom of man to the values of the Kingdom of God. While I do not agree with the generally negative view of government held by such groups, I respect the faithfulness by which they live their convictions. This split up of the social order is precisely analogous to the process of growth in biology. Embryos differentiate as they develop, forming more and more specialized organs. The entire march of evolution, from the virus to the man, displays a relentless advance toward higher and higher degrees of differentiation. There appears to be a seemingly irresistible movement of living beings and social groups from less to more differentiated forms. Thus it is not accidental that we witness parallel trends toward diversity—in the economy, in politics, in religion, in art, in education and mass culture, in the social order itself. These trends all fit together forming part of an immensely larger historic process. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
The Super-age of information Revolution can now be seen for what, in large measure, it is—the advance of human society to its next higher stage of differentiation. This is why it often seems to us that our society is cracking at the seams. It is. This is why everything grows increasingly complex. Where once there stood 1,000 organizational entities, there are now at least 21.6 million in America alone—interconnected by increasingly transient links. Where once there were a few relatively permanent subcults with which a person might identify, there are now thousands of temporary subcluts milling about, colliding, and multiplying. The powerful bonds that integrated industrial society—bons of law, common values, centralized and standardized education and cultural production—are breaking down. All this explains why cities suddenly seem to be “unmanageable” and states “ungovernable.” For the old ways of integrating a society, methods based on uniformity, simplicity, and permanence, are not as effective. For the individual, this leap to a new level of differentiation holds awesome implications. However, not for the ones most people fear. We have been told so often that we are heading for faceless uniformity that we fail to appreciate the fantastic opportunities for individuality that the Super-industrial Revolution brings with it. And we have hardly begun to think about the dangers of over-individualization that are also implicit in it. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Therefore keep in mind that the common grace is God’s provision for the welfare of all His created beings, both those who believe in God and those who do not. The human race, far from being flattened into monotonous conformity, will become far more diverse socially than it ever was before. The new society, the super-age of informational society now beginning to take form, will encourage a crazy-quilt pattern of evanescent life styles. The critical dynamic in the church-state tension is separation of institutional authority. Religion and politics cannot be separated—they inevitably overlap—but the institutions of church and state must preserve their separate and distinct roles. In this regard, the American experiment merits closer examination. The Kingdom of God is universal, bound by neither race nor nation. The church was ordained principally for the conversion of men and women—conversion grounded in individual conscience wrought by the supernatural work of a sovereign God upon the soul. So that state could neither successfully establish nor destroy the church, since it could not rule conscience nor transform people’s hearts and soul. Each rational soul has an equal right to judge for oneself, every person has an unalienable right to act in all religious affairs according to the full persuasion of one’s own mind. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Thus two typically mortal enemies, the Enlightenment and the Christian faith, found a patch of common ground on American soil. Both agreed (for different reasons) that the new government should neither establish nor interfere with the church. The religion of every human must be left to the conviction and conscience of every human; and it is the right of every human to exercise it as these may dictate. It was this reasoning, not the right for the news reporters to spread lie, that led to the adoption of the First Amendment, expressly to protect the individual’s right to freedom of conscience and expression, and to prevent the establishment of a state church. However, contrary to the belief of many today, this separation of church and state did not mean that America was to be a nation free of religious influence. From the very beginning the American Revolution itself was seen by many as a rebellion fueled by the conviction that humans are creatures of God, and one’s political life is conditioned by that truth. As James Madison insisted, “This duty [homage to the Creator] is precedent, both in order of time and degree of obligation, to the claims of civil society. Before any human can be considered as a member of civil society, one must be considered as a subject of the governor of the Universe.” A nation under God was no idle phrase. Nor did the separation of church and state mean religion and politics could be separated or religious values removed form the public arena. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
For one’s political life is an expression of values, and religion, by definition, most profoundly influences values. The concept of a “wall of separation,” a phrase incidentally first used by Jefferson fifteen years after the Constitution was adopted, applied to institutions of church and state, not religious and political values. The Founding Father were all aware that the form of limited government they were adopting could only succeed if there was an underlying consensus of values shared by the populace. I am reminded of this when I visit the House of Representatives. A beautiful fresco on the upper walls of the chamber itself contains the portraits of history’s great lawmakers. Standing at the speaker’s desk and looking straight ahead over the main entrance, one’s eyes meet the piercing eyes of the first figure in the series: Moses, the one who recorded the Law from the original Lawgiver. John Adams eloquently acknowledged the understanding of our constitutional framers when in 1798 he wrote: “We have no government armed in power capable of contending with human passion unbridled by morality and religion. Our constitution was made only for moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any others. Many of these original American visionaries believed that Christian citizens would actively bring their religious values to the public forum. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
George Washington faintly echoed Augustine when he asserted, “Of all the dispositions and habit which lead to a political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that men claim that tribute of patriotism, who should labour to subvert these great pillars of human happiness.” Thus, when laws were passed reflecting the consensus of Christian values in the land, no one panicked supposing that the Christian religion was being “established” or that a sectarian morality was being imposed on an unwilling people. The point of the First Amendment was that such convictions could only become the law of the land if a majority of citizens could be persuaded (without coercion), whether they shared the religious foundation or nor, of the merits of a particular proposition. Today’s widespread relegation of religion to merely something people do in the privacy of their homes or churches would be unimaginable to the founders of the republic—even those who personally repudiated orthodox Christian faith. Though America has drifted far from the vision of its founders, this system continues to offer one of the World’s most hopeful models in an otherwise contentious history of conflict #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
The record of the centuries should not cause despair, however. Tensions between church and state is inherent and inevitable. Indeed, it is perhaps the outworking of one of God’s great mysteries, part of the dynamic by which He governs His Universe. For from the constant tension—the chafing back and forth—a certain equilibrium is achieved. To maintain this balance the church and the state must fulfill their respective role. One cannot survive without the other; yet neither can do the work of the other. Both operate under God’s rule, each in a different relationship to that rule. Certainly one thing is clear. When they fail in their appointed tasks—that is, when the church fails to be the visible manifestation of the Kingdom of God and the state fails to maintain justice and concord—civic order collapses. The consequences can be catastrophic and tumultuous events demonstrate that. To confess that intellectually we know nothing about the Absolute is understandable. However, to say that therefore we should leave its existence entirely out of our intellectual World-view, is not. For although that exact definition and direct explanation of the spirit is unable to catch the whole of this subtle experience within our receiving range because it is turned into ordinary human intellectual, emotional, and physical experience, by studying the spirit we may nevertheless evoke an intuitive recognition of its beauty; we may be able to better understand the world of the soul and the spirit may arouse the first aspirations towards spiritual enlightenment. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Spiritual enlightenment is the topic most worth writing about yet least understood. Whoever has entered into a partial understanding—it would be too much to demand more—of it, bears some responsibility. One must communicate with one’s fellows. Because the Real is beyond the thinking intellect’s grasp, it cannot be formulated into ideas. Yet because we need signpost and a goal to give guidance and direction, we must tentatively and provisionally formulate it. Dear Lord in shining in Heaven, I drop my fears into your ocean and watch them sink from sight. I place my fears on your broad Earth and see them rot away. I put my fears into your hands and they are no more. When you offer your arms to me, Great Father, your hands hold nothing but love. We sanctify Thy name on Earth even as it is sanctified in the shining Heavens above, as described in the vision of Thy Prophet: And the seraphim called one unto another saying: Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts, the whole Earth is full of His glory. Whereupon the angels in stirring and mighty chorus rise toward the seraphim and with resounding acclaim declare: Blessed be the glory of God from His Heavenly abode. From Thy Heavenly abide, please reveal Thyself, O our King, and reign over us, for we wait for Thee. O when wilt Thy reign in America? Speedily, even in our days, do Thou establish Thy dwelling here forever. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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Good-bye, good night. Merry Christmas. God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth. What seems to be reasonable conditions for engaging in civil disobedience, and can we connect these conditions more systematically with the place of civil disobedience in a state of near justice? Of course, the conditions enumerated should be taken as presumptions; no doubt there will be situations when they do not hold, and other arguments could be given for civil disobedience. The first point concerns the kinds of wrongs that are appropriate objects of civil disobedience. Now if one views such disobedience as a political act addressed to the sense of justice of the community, then it seems reasonable, other things equal, to limit it to instances of substantial and clear injustice, and preferably to those which obstruct the path to removing other injustices. For this reason there is a presumption in favour of restricting civil disobedience to serious infringements of the first principle of justice, the principle of equal liberty, and to blatant violations of the second part of second principle, the principle of fair equality of opportunity. Of course, it is not always easy to tell whether these principles are satisfied. Still, if we think of them as guaranteeing the basic liberties, it is often clear that these freedoms are not being honoured. After all, they impose certain strict requirements that must be visibly expressed in institutions. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
Thus when certain marginalized members of the population are denied the right to vote or to hold office, or to own property and to move from place to place, or when certain religious groups are repressed and others denied various opportunities, these injustices may be obvious to all. They are publicly incorporated into the recognized practice if not the letter, of social arrangements. The establishment of these wrongs does not presuppose an informed examination of institutional effects. By contrast infractions of the difference principle are more difficult to ascertain. There is usually a wide range of conflicting yet rational opinion as to whether this principle is satisfied. The reason for this is that is applied primarily to economic and social institutions and policies. A choice among these depends upon theoretical and speculative beliefs as well as upon a wealth of statistical and other information, all of this seasoned with shrewd judgement and speculative beliefs as well as upon a wealth of statistical and other information, all of this seasoned with shrewd judgment and plain hunch. In view of the complexities of these questions, it is difficult to check the influence of self-interest and prejudice; and even if we can do this in our own case, it is another matter to convince others of our good faith. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
Thus unless tax laws, for example, are clearly designed to attack or to abridge a basic equal liberty, they should not normally be protested by civil disobedience. The appeal to the public’s conception of justice is not sufficiently clear. The resolution of these issues is best left to the political process provided that the requisite equal liberties are secure. In this case a reasonable compromise can presumably be reached. The violation of the principle of equal liberty is, then, the more appropriate object of civil disobedience. This principle defines the common status of equal citizenship in a constitutional regime and lies at the basis of the political order. When it is fully honoured the presumption is that other injustices, while possibly persistent and significant, will not get out of hand. A further condition for civil disobedience is the following. We may suppose that the normal appeals to the political majority have already been made in good faith and that they have failed. The legal means of redress have proved of no avail. Thus, for example, the existing political parties have shown themselves indifferent to the claims of the minority or have proved unwilling to accommodate them. Attempts to have the laws repealed have been ignored and legal protests and demonstrations have had no success. Since civil disobedience is a last resort, we should be sure that it is necessary. Note that it has been said, however, tat legal means have been exhausted. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
At any rate, further normal appeals can be repeated; free speech is always possible. However, if past actions have shown the majority immovable or apathetic, further attempts may reasonably be thought fruitless, and a second condition for justified civil disobedience is met. This condition is, however, a presumption. Some cases may be so extreme tat there may be no duty to use first only legal means of political opposition. If, for example, the legislature were to enact some outrageous violations of equal liberty, say by forbidding the religion of a weak and defenseless minority, we surely could not expect that sect to oppose the law by normal political procedures. Indeed, even civil disobedience might be much too mild, the majority having already convicted itself of wantonly unjust and overtly hostile aims. The third and last condition being considered is rather complicated. It arises from the fact that while the two preceding conditions are often sufficient to justify civil disobedience, this is not always the case. In certain circumstances the natural duty of justice may require a certain restraint. We can see this as follows. If a certain minority is justified in engaging in civil disobedience, then any other minority is relevantly similar circumstances is likewise justified. Using the two previous conditions as the criteria of relevantly similar circumstances, we can say that, other things equal, two minorities are similarly justified in resorting to civil disobedience if they have suffered for the same length of time for the same degree of injustice and if their equally sincere and normal political appeals have likewise been to no avail. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
It is conceivable, however, even if it is unlikely, that there should be many groups with an equally sound case (in the sense just defined) for being civilly disobedient; but that, if they were all to act in this way, serious disorder would follow which might well undermine the efficacy of the just constitution. I assume here that there is a limit in the extent to which civil disobedience can be engaged in without leading to a breakdown in the respect for law and the constitution, thereby setting in motion consequences unfortunate for all. There is also an upper bound on the ability of the public forum to handle such forms of dissent; the appeal that civilly disobedient groups wish to make can be distorted and their intention to appeal to the sense of justice of the majority lost sight of. For one or both of these reasons, the effectiveness of civil disobedience as a form of protest declines beyond a certain point; and those contemplating it must consider these constraints. The ideal solution from a theoretical point of view calls for cooperative political alliance of the minorities to regulate the overall level of dissent. For consider the nature of the situation: there are many groups each equally entitled to engage in civil disobedience. Moreover they all wish to exercise this right, equally strong in each case; but if they all do so, lasting injury may result to the just constitution to which they each recognize a natural duty of justice. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
Now when there are many equally strong claims which if taken together exceed what can be granted, some fair plan should be adopted so that all are equitably considered. In simple cases of claims to goods that are indivisible and fixed in number, some rotation or lottery scheme may be the fair solution when the number of equally valid claims is too great. However, this sort of device is completely unrealistic here. What seems called for is a political understanding among the minorities suffering from injustice. They can meet their duty to democratic institutions by coordinating their actions so that while each has an opportunity to exercise its right, the limits on the degree of civil disobedience are not exceeded. To be sure, an alliance of this sort is difficult to arrange; but with perceptive leadership, it does not appeal impossible. Certainly the situation envisaged is a special one, and it is quite possible that these sorts of consideration will not be a bar to justified civil disobedience. There are not likely to be many groups similarly entitled to engage in this form of dissent while at the same time recognizing a duty to a just constitution. One should not, however, that an injured minority is tempted to believe its claims as strong as those of any other; and therefore even if the reasons that different groups have for engaging in civil disobedience are not equally compelling, it is often wise to presume that their claims are indistinguishable. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
Adopting this maxim, the circumstances imagined seems more likely to happen. This kind of case is also instructive in showing that the exercise of the right to dissent, like the exercise of rights generally, is sometimes limited by others having the very same right. Everyone’s exercising this right would have deleterious consequences for all, and se equitable plan is called for. Suppose that in the light of the three conditions, one has a right to appeal one’s case by civil disobedience. Thus injustice one protests is a clear violation of the liberties of equal citizenship, or of equality of opportunity, this violation having been more or less deliberate over an extended period of time in the face of normal political opposition, and any complications raised by the question of fairness are met. These conditions are not exhaustive; some allowance still has to be made for the possibility of injury to third parties, to the innocent, so to speak. However, I assume that they cover the main points. There is still, of course, the question whether it is wise or prudent to exercise this right. Having established the right, one is now free, as one is not before, to let these matters decide the issue. If our conduct only serves to provoke the harsh retaliation of the majority, we may be acting within our rights but nevertheless unwisely. To be sure, in a state of near justice, vindictive repression of legitimate dissent is unlikely, but it is important that the action be properly designed to make an effective appeal to the wider community. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
Since civil disobedience is a mode of address taking place in the public forum, care must be taken to see that it is understood. Thus the exercise of the right to civil disobedience should, like any other right, be rationally framed to advance one’s ends or the ends of those one wishes to assist. The theory of justice has nothing specific to say about these practical considerations. In any event questions of strategy and tactics depend upon the circumstances of each case. However, the theory of justice should say at what point these matters are properly raised. Now in this account of the justification of civil disobedience I have not mentioned the principle of fairness. The natural duty of justice is the primary basis of our political ties to a constitutional regime. As we noted before only the more favoured members of society are likely to have a clear political obligation as opposed to a political duty. They are better situated to win public office and find it easier to take advantage of the political system. And having done so, they have acquired an obligation owed to citizens generally to uphold the just constitution. However, members of subjected minorities, say, who have a strong case for civil disobedience will not generally have a political obligation of this sort. This does not mean, however, that the principle of fairness will not give rise to important obligations in their case. For not only do many of the requirements of private life derive from this principle, but it comes into force wen persons or groups come together for common political purposes. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
Just as we acquire obligations to others with whom we have joined in various private associations, those who engage in political action assume obligatory ties to one another. Thus while the political obligation of dissenters to citizens generally is problematical, bonds of loyalty and fidelity still develop between them as they seek to advance their cause. In general, free association under a just constitution give rise to obligations provided that the ends of the group are legitimate and its arrangements fair. This is as true of political as it is of other associations. These obligations are of immense significance and they constrain in many ways what individuals can do. However, they are distinct from an obligation to comply with a just constitution. My discussion of civil disobedience is in terms of the duty of justice alone; a fuller view would note the place of these other requirements. When religion is allowed to invade public life, things have come to a pretty pass when. Slavery, for instance, was a very unjust institution. People were packed into a dark bottom of a ship, barely able to breathe because of the stench of human waste and vomit, as they lay chest to back, legs drawn into a fetal position, feet resting on the heads of those in the next row. Some were taken prisoner during tribal wars. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
Others were jailed as petty criminals; and many had been unsuspecting dinner guests of Englishmen visiting their country. However, all had been forcibly enslaved and held in a stockade on the African coast until sold to the highest bidder. That bidder was the captain in the cabin above. Once purchased they had been branded and rowed to the schooner waiting offshore, their screams and cries ignored by the seamen who hoisted them abroad and chained them in the stinking hold. For the women, however, there was a further torture. The crew, diseases and ill-treated themselves, claimed the one sordid privilege of their trade—the pick of the slave women. Once under way, the ship had become half bedlam, half brothel. Now, several weeks into the voyage, sixty slaves had already died. Fever had taken some. Others, driven insane by the horror of their lot, had been killed by the crew. Each morning when the lower decks were opened, several dead or near-dead bodies were thrown to the sharks trailing the ship. The captain cursed as the bodies hit the choppy water. Each body overboard meant lost profits. For those who survived the hellish three-month journey, an equally gruesome future awaited. They would be auctioned naked in the marketplace to planter who would work them to death on their Caribbean plantations. Never again would these African men and women see their homeland. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
Thousands of miles to the north, in a country that profited richly from this human misery, another man sat at his desk. He too gazed into darkness still filled his second-floor library at Number 4 Old Palace Yard, London. Only his piercing blue eyes reflected the turmoil of his thoughts as he eyed the jumble of pamphlets on his cluttered desk. He ran his hand through his wavy hair and opened his Bible to begin the day, as was his custom, with Scripture reading and prayer. However, his thoughts kept returning to the pamphlets, grisly accounts of human flesh sold like mutton for the profit of his countrymen. No matter how be tried, William Wilberforce could not wipe these scenes from his mind. William Wilberforce was the only son of prosperous merchant parents. High society revolved around romantic intrigue and adulterous affairs. An upper-class couple might not be seen together in public for weeks during the social season, for no popular hostess would invite a husband and wife to the same event. The poor, of course, had no such opportunity to escape from one another. Crammed together in shabby dwellings, they were cogs grinding out a living in the Empire’s emerging industrial machines. Pale children worked eighteen hours a day in cotton mills or coal mines to bring homes a few shillings a month to parents who often wasted in on inexpensive gin. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
London was a city where unchecked passions and desires ran their course. Few raised their voice in opposition. So it is not surprising that few argued against one of the nation’s most bountiful sources of wealth—the slave trade. In fact, the trade was both a successful business and a national policy. Political alliances revolved around commitments to it. It became known euphemistically as “the institution,” the “pillar and support of British plantation industry in the West Indies.” In a celebrated case in England’s high court only four years earlier, slaves had been seemed “goods and chattels.” Corruption in government was so widespread that few members of Parliament thought twice about accepting bribes for their votes. Planters and other gentlemen involved in the slave trade paid three to five thousand pounds to “buy” boroughs, which sent their representatives to the House of Commons. The same attitude reigned in the House of Lords. Their political influence in Parliament grew until a large bloc was controlled by the vested influence of the slave trade. The horrors of the trade were remote and unseen, the cotton and sugar profits they yielded very tangible. So most consciences were not troubled about the Black men and women suffering far away on the high sea or on remote plantations. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
Many people say that some used Christianity and the Bible to incorrectly justify slavery, but that was not always the case. John Newton, son of a sailor, had been impressed into the Royal Navy when he was eleven. He deserted, was caught in West Africa, flogged, and placed into service on a slave ship. Eventually he became involved in the slave trade and in 1750 was given command of his own ship. On one especially stormy passage to West Indies, however, Mr. Newton was converted to faith in Jesus Christ. He renounced slaving and expressed his wonder at the gift of salvation in his famous hymn, “Amazing Grace.” Some people become so absorbed in politics that they never give themselves time for due reflection on religion. God wants to being compassion to the oppressed as well as oppose the oppressors. Almighty God has set before His people even today, two great objectives. The abolition of the slave trade and the reformation of manners. Slaver is so enormous, so dreadful, so irremediable, and an iniquity such as this, because it still happens today, must be abolished. We still live in a time, even in American, where the country’s economic strength depends on slavery at home and abroad. There are different forms from forced labour to human trafficking. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
An estimated 25 million victims are trapped in modern-day slavery. Of these, 16 million (64 percent) were exploited for labour, and approximately 5 million (19 percent) were exploited for pleasures of the flesh, 4 million (17 percent) were exploited in state-imposed forced labour. Forced labour takes place in many different industries. Therefore, private faith that does not act in the face of oppression is no faith at all. Slavery is a subject, in which the interest, not of this country, nor of Europe alone, but of the whole World, and of posterity, are involved. It is impossible for me not to feel both terrified and concerned at our leader’s inadequacy to abolish slavery in their communities before taking hold of state, nation, or international positions. However, as a race—the human race—as a nation, and as citizens of God’s Kingdom, we must fight for the total abolition of the slave trade. This is bigger than climate change, bigger than COVID-19, and much bigger than any jobs report because without human life, we have nothing. I mean not to accuse anyone for having suffered this horrid trade to be carried on under their authority. We are all guilty—we ought all to plead guilty, and not to exculpate ourselves by throwing the blame on others. This evidence cannot be ignored. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
Never, never will we desist till we extinguish every trace of this bloody traffic, which our posterity, looking back to the history of these enlightened ties, will scarce believe that it has been suffered to exist so long a disgrace and dishonour to this country. The courts, law enforcement, and your employers have a duty to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America! For instance Amendment IV of the Constitution states people have a right to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probably cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the person or things to be seized. Our sister, Breonna Taylor, an innocent young lady in the prime of her life was murdered in her own home, on 13 March 2020, while she lay in bed resting, so she could return to her job as a nurse in the morning, and because the police killed her by accident, no one is being held responsible for the crime, but so many are fighting to keep our boarders open and floor the streets with illegal immigrants, when we will not even protect our own citizens. How humane is that? Amendment VIII states the excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishment inflicted. However, our brother George Perry Floyd was killed by the police on 25 March 2020, while telling the officer he could not breath because the officer had his knee on the man’s neck. How cruel and unusual is that! #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
Amendment XVI states that all persons born or naturalized in the United States of America, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, but innocent 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was gunned down after buying some candy because someone did not like the way he looked. There are just a few laws that ought to be observed and we must never take our freedom for granted, nor allow criminals to roam the streets without answering for their crimes. That is why Amendment VI of the United States Constitution states in all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against one; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in one’s favour, and to have the assistance of counsel for one’s defense. We do not want chaos on our streets, we do not want people becoming law enforcement agents to get away with murder, and we do not want people taken into custody without being read their Miranda rights or being allowed to have a trial. It should not be easier for those in public office or law enforcement to break the laws than it is to enforce it. The laws and law enforcement are there to protect us, not facilitate and help crime to fester. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
Just remember, slavery is still a reality and in was not long ago, in the year 1788 in a ship destined for the slave trade, out of 650 persons on board, 155 died. In another, 405 were on board, out of whom were lost 200. In another there were on board 402, out of whom 73 died. When Captain Charles Wilson was asked the causes of this mortality, he replied that the slaves had a fixed melancholy and dejection; that they wished to die; that they refused sustenance, till they were beaten in order to compel them to eat; and that when they had been so beaten, they looked in the faces of their captures and said, piteously, “Soon we will be no more.” Now, I am sure you know someone who was happy and full of life who has suffered some adverse circumstances and is emotionally, physically, or born so worn down that they no longer want to live, and you know that is not them talking, but the endless pain and torment they so badly want to escape from and cannot. Often times, it is much harder for victims to get help than people know. It is not that they do not want to be saved, it is however, that the system is set up to make victims of those they want to harm. How else did Larry Nassar go on abusing hundreds of girls from 1992 until 2015? How did Jerry Sandusky go on abusing young boys from 1994 until 2011? Because people in positions of authority liked him and protected him, until they could not. Nonetheless, countless lives were ruined while these innocent children were enslaved. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
Even the vested economic interests of the West Indian bloc could not gloss over the appalling facts nor ignore the public support the abolitionists were gaining. However, in modern times, the force of the people has to be involved in stopping slavery. We cannot allow radicals to continue to fan the flames of this reign of terror. Unless the Divine power has raised you up to be as Athanasius contra mundum, I see not how you can go through your glorious enterprise in opposing that execrable villainy, which is the scandal of religion, of England, and of human nature. Unless God has raised you up for this very thing, you will be worn out by the opposition of humans and devils, but if God be for you who can be against you? Are all of them together stronger than God? Oh, be not weary of well-doing. Go on in the name of God, and in the power of His might, till even modern American slavery, the vilest thing currently under the Sun, shall vanish away before it. That God that has guided you from your youth up may continue to strengthen in this and all things, is my prayer. Be not weary of well-doing. We must issue a proclamation at the deluge of every kind of vice which, to the scandal of our holy religion, and to the evil example of our loving subject, have broken upon this nation. The only wat to reform morals is to ruin purses. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
Make them pay. How can you sleep while the fate of men, women, and children are in the hand of abusers should be rushing to your minds, and the guilt of our wicked land. If one really loves another, one would rather die for that person than to injure the individual. “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? Nor height, nor depth, not any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord,” reports Romans 8.35, 39. If we would truly seek to be more like our Saviour and Master, learning to love as He loves should be our highest goal. Love is the foundation of marriage, but love itself is a product of law and lives by law. True love is law-abiding, for the highest satisfaction come to a law-abiding life. To those who are sealed to each other for all existence, love is ever warm, more hopeful, believing, courageous, and fearless. Such people live the richer, more joyful life. To them happiness and the making of it have no end. Above physical charm, love is begotten by qualities, often subtle, of mind and spirit. The beautiful face may hide an empty mind; the sweet voice may utter coarse words; the lovely form may be ill-mannered; the person of radiant beauty and the ne of kingly form may be intolerable bores on nearer acquaintanceship. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
The person who looks attractive may really have no faults, may excel us in knowledge and courtesy, yet one is not of our kind, one’s ways are not ours. Under either condition, love wilts in its first stage. “Falling in love” is always from within, rather than from without. That is, if true love is to be born and have long life, physical attractiveness must be reinforced with mental and spiritual harmony. There must be common ideals and standards. There must be a great devotion and companionship. Love is cleanliness and progress and sacrifice and selflessness. This kind of love never tires nor wanes, but lives through sickness and sorrow, poverty and privation, accomplishment and disappointment, time and eternity. Love cannot be forced, it comes out of Heaven, unasked and unsought. This respect comes of recognition that each of us is a son or daughter of God, endowed with something of one’s divine nature that each is an individual entitled to expression and cultivation of individual talents and deserving of forbearance, of patience, of understanding, of courtesy, of thoughtful consideration. True love is not so much a matter of romance as it is a matter of anxious concern for the well being of one’s companion. The World is filled with too many of us who are inclined to indicate our love with an announcement or declaration. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
True love is a process. True love requires personal action. Love must be continuing to be real. Love takes time. Too often expediency, infatuation, simulation, persuasion, or lust are mistaken for love. If our love is no deeper than the arousal of momentary feeling or the expression in words of what is more lasting than the time it takes to speak them, how hollow, how empty. We must at regular and appropriate intervals speak and reassure others of our love and the long time it takes to prove it by our actions. Real love does take time. The Great Shepherd had the same thoughts in mind when he taught, “If ye love me, keep my commandments,” reports Jon 14.15. If you love me, feed my sheep,” reports John 21.16. If it is to be continuing, love demands action. Love is a process, not a declaration. Love is not an announcement. Love is not a passing fancy. Love is not an expediency. Love is not convenience. God-given proclamations should remind us we can often best show our love through the process of feeling and keeping. Love of God takes time. Love of family takes time. Love of country takes tie. Love of neighbour takes time. Love of companion takes time. Love in courtship takes time. Love of self takes time. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
One who loves has and feels responsibility. If we look at love between two who are preparing for a temple marriage, we see the elements of sacrifice and of serving each other’s best interest, not a shortsighted “me” interest. True love and happiness in courtship and marriage are based upon honesty, self-respect, sacrifice, consideration, courtesy, kindness, and placing “we” ahead of “me.” Perfect love is perfectly patient. Unlike our love, Jesus’ love consists of active restraint as well as pressing encouragement. His perfect love of each and all spares Him the need to accept us as we now are for He knows perfectly what we have the possibility to become. Love, as defined by the Lord, elevates, protect, respects, and enriches another. It motivates one to make sacrifices for another. At the hour of sin, pure love is pushed out of one door while lust sneaks in the other. Affection has then been replaced with desire of the flesh and uncontrolled passion. Accepted has been the doctrine which the devil is so eager to establish, that illicit relations in pleasures of the flesh that are justified. Dear Lord in Heaven, with your quick-sent lightning and penetrating rain, please make the Earth fertile, storm-rider, hammer-wielder. Please wield the lightening on my side, Thunderer, and I will ensure that my cause is just. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
Wilder of the hammer, red-bearded one, God, protector, to you I call. I stand in the midst of a storm, and ask your protection. You who bear the flaming hammer, to you I pray: please fight on my side against all my opponents. For with you on my side, who can stand before me? Please remember my devotion to you, Lord of Thunder. As I work to your honour, may you work also to mine. Thou didst thus make Thy greatness and holiness known in Thy World, and didst bring great deliverance to America. Then Thy children came into Thy dwelling place, cleansed the Temple, purified the Sanctuary, kindled lights in Thy sacred courts, and they designated these days for giving thanks and praise unto Thy great name. For all this, Thy name, O our King, shall be blessed and exalted for ever and ever. O, please inscribe all the children of Thy covenant for a happy life. May all the living do home unto Thee forever and praise Thy name in truth, O God, who art our salvation and our help. Please blessed be Thou, O Lord, Beneficent One, unto whom our thanks are due. Our God and God of our fathers, please bless us with threefold blessing written in the Torah of Moses, Thy servant, and spoken by Aaron and his sons, Thy consecrated priests: May the Lord bless thee and keep thee; so may it be His will. May the Lord make His countenance to shine upon thee and be gracious unto thee; so may it be His will. May the Lord turn His countenance unto thee and give thee peace. So may it be His will. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
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If You Do His Work, You Must Prepare for His Wages!
I must be getting absent-minded. Whenever I complain that things are not what they used to be, I always forget to include myself. The theory of civil disobedience is designed only for a special case of a nearly just society, one that is well-ordered for the most part but in which some serious violations of justice nevertheless do occur. A state of near justice requires a democratic regime, and the theory concerns the role and the appropriateness of civil disobedience to legitimately established democratic authority. It does not apply to the other forms of government nor, except incidentally, to other kinds of dissent or resistance. It is not necessary to discuss this mode of protect, along with militant action and resistance, as a tactic for transforming or even overturning an unjust and corrupt system. There is no difficulty about such action in this case. If any means to this end are justified, then surely nonviolent opposition is justified. The problem of civil disobedience, arises only within a more or less just democratic state for those citizens who recognize and accept the legitimacy of the constitution. The difficulty is one of a conflict of duties. At what point does the duty to comply with laws enacted by a legislative majority (or with executive acts supported by such a majority) cease to be binding in view of the right to defend one’s liberties and the duty to oppose injustice? This question involves the nature and limits of majority rule. For this reason the problem of civil disobedience is a crucial test case for any theory of the moral basis of democracy. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
A constitutional theory of civil disobedience has three parts. First, it defines this kind of dissent and separated it from other forms of opposition to democratic authority. These rand from legal demonstrations and infractions of law designed to raise test cases before the courts to militant action and organized resistance. A theory specifies the place of civil disobedience in this spectrum of possibilities. Next, it set out the grounds of civil disobedience and the conditions under which such action is justified in a (more or less) just democratic regime. And finally, a theory should explain the role of civil disobedience within a constitutional system and account for the appropriateness of this mode of protest within a free society. As a word of caution, we should not expect too much of a theory of civil disobedience, even one framed for special circumstances. Precise principles that straightway decide actual cases are clearly out of the question. Instead, a useful theory defines a perspective within which the problem of civil disobedience can be approached; it identifies the relevant considerations and helps us to assign them their correct weights in the more important instances. If a theory about these matters appears to us, on reflection, to have cleared our vision and to have made our considered judgments more coherent, then it has been worthwhile. The theory has done what, for the present, ne may reasonably expect it to do: namely, to narrow the disparity between the conscientious convictions of those who accept the basic principles of a democratic society. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
Civil disobedience as a public, nonviolent, conscientious yet political act contrary to law is usually done with the aims of being about change in the law or policies of the government. Civil disobedience can also be considered a deliberate, discriminate violations of the law for a vital social purpose. By acting in this way one addresses the sense of justice of the majority of the community and declares that in one’s considered opinion the principles of social cooperation among free and equal humans are not being respected. A preliminary gloss on this definition is that it does not require that the civilly disobedient act breach the same law that is being protested. It allows for what some have called indirect as well as direct civil disobedience. And this definition should do, as there are sometimes strong reasons for not infringing on the law or policy held to be unjust. Instead, one may disobey traffic ordinances or laws of trespass as a way of presenting one’s case. Thus, if the government enacts a vague and harsh statue against treason, it would not be appropriate to commit treason as a way of objecting to it, and in any event, the penalty might be far more than one should reasonably be ready to accept. In other cases there is no way to violate the government’s policy directly, as when it concerns foreign affairs, or affects another part of the country. A second gloss is that the civilly disobedient act is indeed thought to be contrary to law, at least in the sense that those engaged in it are not simply presenting a test case for a constitutional decision; they are prepared to oppose the statue if it should be upheld. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
To be sure in a constitutional regime, the courts may finally side with the dissenters and declare the law or policy objected to unconditional. It often happens, then, that there is some uncertainty as to whether the dissenters’ action will be held illegal or not. However, this is merely a complicating element. Those who use civil disobedience to protest unjust laws are not prepared to desist should the courts eventually disagree with them, however pleased they might have been with the opposite decision. It should also be noted that civil disobedience is a political act noted that civil disobedience is a political act not only in the sense that it is addressed to the majority that holds political power, but also because it is an act guided and justified by political principles, that is, by the principles of justice which regulate the constitution and social institutions generally. In justifying civil disobedience one does not appeal to principles of personal morality or to religious doctrines, though these may coincide with and support one’s claims; and it goes without saying that civil disobedience cannot be ground solely on group or self-interest. Instead one invokes the commonly shared conception of justice that underlies the political order. It is assumed that in a reasonably just democratic regime there is a public conception of justice by reference to which citizens regulate their political affairs and interpret the constitution. The persistent and deliberate violation of the basic principles of this conception over any extended period of time, especially the infringement of the fundamental equal liberties, invites either submission or resistance. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
By engaging in civil disobedience a minority forces the majority to consider whether it wishes to have its actions construed in this ways, or whether, in view of the common sense of justice, it wishes to acknowledge the legitimate claims of the minority. A further point is that civil disobedience is a public act. Not only is it addressed to public principles, it is done in public. It is engaged in openly with fair notice; it is not covert or secretive. One may compare it to public speech, and being a form of address, an expression of profound and conscientious political conviction, it takes place in the public forum. For this reason, among others, civil disobedience is nonviolent. It tries to avoid the use of violence, especially against persons, not from the abhorrence of the use of force in principle, but because it is a final expression of one’s case. To engage in violent acts likely to injure and to hurt is incompatible with civil disobedience as a mode of address. Indeed, any interference with the civil liberties of others tends to obscure the civilly disobedient quality of one’s act. Sometimes if the appeal fails in its purpose, forceful resistance may later be entertained. Yet civil disobedience is giving voice to conscientious and deeply held convictions; while it may warn and admonish, it is not itself a threat. Civil disobedience is nonviolent for another reason. It expresses disobedience to law within the limits of fidelity to law, although it is at the outer edge of theory. The law is broken, but fidelity to law is expressed by the public and nonviolent nature of the act, by the willingness to accept the legal consequences of one’s conduct. One should be willing to undergo the legal consequences for the sake of fidelity to law. The charge may be contested in court, should this prove appropriate. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
This fidelity to law helps to establish to the majority that the act is indeed politically conscientious and sincere, and that it is intended to address the public’s sense of justice. To be completely open and nonviolent is to give bond of one’s sincerity, for it is not easy to convince another that one’s acts are conscientious, or even to be sure of this before oneself. No doubt it is possible to imagine a legal system in which conscientious belief that the law is unjust is accepted as a defense for noncompliance. Humans of great honesty with full confidence in one another might make such a system work. However, as things are, such a scheme would presumably be unstable even in a state of near justice. We must pay a certain prince to convince others that our actions have, in our carefully considered view, a sufficient moral basis in the political convictions of the community. Civil disobedience has been defined so that it falls between legal protest and the raising of test cases on the one side, and conscientious refusal and the various forms of resistance on the other. In this range of possibilities it stands for that form of dissent at the boundary of fidelity to law. Civil disobedience, so understood, is clearly distinct from militant actions and obstruction; it is far removed from organized forcible resistance. The militant, for example, is much more deeply opposed to the existing political system. One does not accept it as one which is nearly just or reasonable so; one believes either that it departs widely from its professed principles or that it pursues a mistake conception altogether. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
While one’s action is conscientious in its own terms, one does not appeal to the sense of justice of the majority (or those having effective political power), since one thinks that their sense of justice is erroneous, or else without effect. Instead, one seeks by well-framed militant acts of disruption and resistance, and the like, to attack the prevalent view of justice or to force a movement in the desired direction. Thus the militant may try to evade the penalty, since one is not prepare to accept the legal consequences of one’s violation of the law; this would not only be to play into the hands of forces that one believes cannot be trusted, but also to express a recognition of the legitimacy of the constitution to which one is opposed. In this sense militant action is not within the bounds of fidelity to law, but represents a more profound opposition to the legal order. The basic structure is thought to be so unjust or else to depart so widely from its own professed ideals that one must try to prepare the way for radical or even revolution change. And this is to be done by trying to arouse the public to an awareness of the fundamental reforms that need to be made. Now in certain circumstances militant action and other kinds of resistance are surely justified. The year 2100 A.D. is closer to us in time than the great depression, yet the World’s economists, traumatized by it, 9/11, the recession of 2008, and the COVID-19 crisis, remain frozen in their attitudes of the past. Economist, even those who talk the language of revolution, are peculiarly conservative creatures. If it were possible to pry from their brains their collective image of the economy of, say, the year 2125, it would look very much like that of 2010—only more so. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
Conditioned to think in straight lines, economists have great difficulty imagining alternatives to communism and capitalism. They see in the growth of large-scale organizations nothing more than a linear expansion of old-fashion bureaucracy. They see technological advance as a simple, non-revolutionary extension of the known. Born of scarcity, trained to think in terms of limited resources, they can hardly conceive of a society in which human’s basic material wants have been satisfied. One reason for their lack of imagination is that when they think about technological advance, they concentrate solely on the means of economic activity. Yet the super-age of information revolution challenges the ends as well. It threatens to alter not merely the “how” of production but they “why.” It will, in short, transform the very purposes of economic activity. Before such an upheaval, even the most sophisticated tools of today’s economists are helpless. Input-output tables, econometric models—the whole paraphernalia of analysis that economists employ simply do not come to grips with the external forces—political, social and ethical—that will transform economic life in the decades before us. What does “productivity” or “efficiency” mean in a society that places a high value on psychic fulfillment? What happens to an economy, when, as is likely, the entire concept of property is reduced to meaninglessness? #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
How economies likely to be affected by the rise of supra-national planning, taxing, and regulatory agencies or by a kind of dialectical return to “cottage industry” based on the most advanced cybernetic technologies? Most important, what happens when “no growth” replaces “growth” as an economic objective, When Gross National Product (GNP) ceases to be the holy grail? Only by stepping outside the framework of orthodox economic thought and examining these possibilities can we begin to prepare for tomorrow. And among these, none is more central than the shift in values that is likely to accompany the super-industrial revolution. Under conditions of scarcity, humans struggle to meet their immediate material needs. Today under more affluent conditions, we are reorganizing the economy to deal with a new level of human needs. From a system designed to provide material satisfaction, we are rapidly creating an economy geared to the provision of psychic gratification. This process of “psychologization,” one of the central themes of the super-age of information revolution, has been all but overlooked by the economists. Yet it will result in a novel, surprise-filled economy unlike any human has ever experienced. The issues raised by it will reduce the great conflict of the twenty-first century, the conflict between capitalism and communism, to comparative insignificance. For these issues sweep far beyond economic or political dogma. They involve, as we shall see, nothing less than sanity, the human organism’s ability to distinguish illusion from reality. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
Much excitement has accompanied the discovery that once a techno-society reaches a certain stage of informational development, it begins to shift energies into automation and autonomy. Many experts see in the services the wave of the future. They suggest the many retail, jobs, food service jobs and manual labor jobs, even news broadcasting, teaching, many aspects of medical care, and law enforcement will be handled by androids and other machines—a prophecy already on its way toward fulfillment. Actors and musicians are expected to be replaced by holograms. What the economists, however, have not done, is ask the obvious question. Where does the economy go next? After the services, what? The high technology nations must, in coming years, direct vast resources to rehabilitating their physical environment and improving what has come to be called “the quality of life.” The fight against air and noise pollution, aesthetic blight, crowding, noise and dirt will clearly absorb tremendous energies. However, in addition to the provision of these public goods, we can also anticipate a subtle change in the character of production for private use. They very excitement aroused by the mushrooming growth of the service sector has diverted professional attention from another shift that will deeply affect both goods and services in the future. It is this shift that will lead to the net forward movement of the economy, the growth of a strange new sector based on what can only be called the “experience industries.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
For the key to post-service economies lies in the psychologization of all production, beginning with manufacture. One of the curious facts about the production in all the techno-societies today, and especially the United States of America, is that goods are increasingly designed to yield psychological “extras” for the consumer. Technology becomes a Veblen good. As the demand of technology increases, which is a luxury good and also a necessity with new products, the price also increases. The future will be packed with positional good, which are goods valued only by how they are distributed among the population, not by how many of them there are available in total (as would be the case with other consumer goods). The source of greater worth of positional goods is their desirability as a status symbol, which usually results in them greatly exceeding the value of comparable good. Various goods have been described as positional in a given capitalist society, such as gold, real estate, diamonds, and luxury goods. More formally in economics, positional goods are a subset of economic goods whose consumption (and subsequent utility), also conditioned by Veblen-like pricing, depends negatively on consumption of those same goods by others. In particular, for these goods the value is at least in part (if not exclusively) a function of its ranking in desirability by others, in comparison to substitutes. Therefore, new is not always better. It depends on the status and ranking of an item you possess. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
The term-Veblen good is sometimes extended to include services and non-material possession that may alter one’s social status and that are deemed highly desirable when enjoyed by a relatively few in a community, such as college degrees, Cresleigh Homes, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, big trucks, college degrees, achievements, awards, memberships to exclusive clubs, et cetera. The manufacturer adds a “psychic load” to one’s basic product, and the consumer gladly pays for this intangible benefit. A classic example is the case of the appliance or auto manufacturer who adds buttons, knobs, touch screens, dials to the control panel or dashboard, to replace basic tools that are slightly out of fashion. Or home builders who add luxury features to their new homes like butler’s panties, California rooms, coded entry doors, surveillance systems and other luxury features like stained glass, floor to ceiling windows, and so forth. The manufacturer has learned that increasing the number of gadgets and features, up to a point, gives the operator of the machine or home the sense of controlling a more complex device, and hence a feeling of increased mastery. This psychological payoff is designed into the product. Conversely, pains are taken not to deprive the consumer of an existing psychological benefit. Thus a large American food company proudly launched a labour-saving, add-water-only cake mix. The company was amazed when women rejected the product in favour of mixes that require extra labour—the addition of an egg along with the water. By inserting powered egg in the factory, the company had oversimplified the task of the housewife, depriving her of the sense of creatively participating in the cake-baking process. The powered egg was hastily eliminated, and women went happily back to cracking their own eggs. Once again a product was modified to provide a psychic benefit. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
Examples like these can be multiplied endlessly in almost any major industry, from soap and clothing stores to dishwashers and diet colas. According to Dr. Emanuel Demby, president of Motivational Programmers, Incorporated, a research firm employed in the United States of America and Europe by such blue-chip corporations as General Electric, Caltex, and IBM, “The engineering of psychological factors into manufactured goods will be a hallmark of production in the future—not only in consumer goods, but in industrial hardware. “Even the big cranes and derricks built today embody this principle. Their cabs are streamlined, slick like something out of the twenty-first century. Cater-pillar, International Harvester, Ferguson—all of them. Why? These mechanical monsters do not dig better or hoist better because the cab is aesthetically improved. However, the contractor who buys them likes it better. The men who work on them like it better. The contractor’s customers like it better. So even the manufacturers of earthmoving equipment begin to pay attention to non-utilitarian—id est, psychological—factors.” Beyond this, Dr. Demby asserts, manufacturers are devoting more attention to reducing tensions that accompany the use of certain products. Manufacturers of sanitary napkins, for example, know that women have a fear of stopping up the toilet when disposing of them. “A new product ha been developed,” he says, “that instantly dissolves on contact with water. It does not perform its basic function any better. However, it relieves some of the anxiety that went with it. This is psychological engineering if ever there was any!” #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
Affluent consumers are willing and able to pay for such niceties. As disposable income rises, they become progressively less concerned with price, progressively more insistent on what they call “quality.” For many products quality can still be measured in the traditional terms of workmanship, durability and materials. However, for a fast-growing class of products, such differences are virtually undetectable. Blindfolded, the consumer cannot distinguish Brand A from Brand B. Nevertheless, she often argues fiercely that one is superior to another. This paradox vanishes once the psychic component of production is taken int account. For even when they are otherwise identical, there are likely to be marked psychological differences between one product and another. Advertisers strive to stamp each product with its own distinct image. These images are functional: they fill a need on the part of the consumer. The need is psychological, however, rather than utilitarian in ordinary sense. Thus we find that the term “quality” increasingly refers to the ambience, the status associations—in effect, the psychological connotations of the product. As more and more of the basic material needs of the consumer are met, it is strongly predictable that even more economic energy will be directed at meeting the consumer’s subtle, varied and quite personal needs for beauty, prestige, individuation, and sensory delight. The manufacturing sector will channel ever greater resources into the conscious design of psychological distinctions and gratifications. They psychic component of goods production will assume increasing importance. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
A merciful human aims at one’s neighbour’s good and so does “God’s will,” consciously co-operating with “the simple good.” A cruel human oppresses one’s neighbour, and so does simple evil. However, in doing such evil, one is used by God, without one’s own knowledge or consent, to produce the complex good—so that the first human serves God as a son (or child), and the second as a tool. For you will certainly carry out God’s purpose, however you act, but it makes a difference to you whether you serve like Judas or like John. The whole system is, so to speak, calculated for the clash between good humans and bad humans, and the good fruits of fortitude, patience, pity and forgiveness for which the cruel human is permitted to be cruel, presuppose that the good human ordinarily continues to seek simple good. I say “ordinarily” because a human is sometimes entitled to hurt (or even, in my opinion, to kill) one’s fellow, but only where the necessity is urgent and the good to be attained obvious, and usually (though not always) when one who inflicts the pain has a definite authority to do so—a parent’s authority derived from nature, a magistrate’s or soldier’s derived from civil society, or a surgeon’s derived, most often, from the patient. To turn this into a general charter for afflicting humanity because the affliction is good for them is not indeed to break the Divine scheme but to volunteer for the post of Satan within that scheme. If you do his work, you must prepare for his wages. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
The problem about avoiding our own pain admis a similar solution. Some ascetics have used self-torture. As a layman, I offer no opinion on the prudence of such a regimen; but I insist that, whatever its merits, self-torture is quite a different thing from tribulation sent by God. Everyone knows that fasting is a different experience from missing your dinner by accident or through poverty. Fasting asserts the will against the appetite—the reward being self-mastery and the danger pride: involuntary hunger subjects appetite and will together to the Divine will, furnishing an occasion for submission and exposing us to the danger or rebellion. However, the redemptive effect of suffering lies chiefly in its tendency to reduce the rebel will. Ascetic practices, which in themselves strengthen the will, are only useful in so far as they enable the will to put its own house (the passions) in order, as a preparation for offering the whole human to God. They are necessary as a means; as an end, they would be abominable, for in substituting will for appetite and there stopping, they would merely exchange the animal self for the diabolical self. It was, therefore, truly said that only God can mortify. Tribulation does its work in a World where human beings are ordinarily seeking, by lawful means, to avoid their own natural evil and to attain their natural god, and presuppose such a World. In order to submit the will to God, we must have a will and that will must have objects. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Christian renunciation does not mean stoic “Apathy,” but a readiness to prefer God to inferior ends which are in themselves lawful. Hence the Perfect Man brought to Gethsemane a will, and a strong will, to escape suffering and death is such escape were compatible with the Father’s will, combined with a perfect readiness for obedience if it were not. Some of the saints recommend a total renunciation at the very threshold of our discipleship; but I think this can mean only a total readiness for every particular renunciation that may be demanded, for it would not be possible to live from moment to moment willing nothing but submission to God as such. What would be the material for the submission? It would seem self-contradictory to say “What I will is to subject what I will to God’s will,” for the second what has no content. Doubtless we all spend too much care in the avoidance of our own pain: but a duly subordinated intention to avoid it, using lawful means, is in accordance with nature—that is, with the whole working system of creaturely life for which the redemptive work of tribulation is calculated. It would be quite false, therefore, to suppose that the Christian view of suffering is incompatible with the strongest emphasis on our duty to leave the World, even in a temporal sense, better than we found it. In the fullest parabolic picture which He gave to the Judgment, Our Lord seems to reduce all virtue to active beneficence: and though it would be misleading to take that one picture in isolation from the Gospel as a whole, it is sufficient to place beyond doubt the basic principles of the social ethics of Christianity. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
Before Abraham was God. God is a higher mentalism. “I am” points to the eternal One where no individual entity ever was, is, or shall be. Philosophy raises the questions of Reality and pursues it until an answer can be found. That answer assets there is something unique which alone can be the Real, which ever was, is, and shall be. Philosophy’s fundamental postulate is that there is but one ultimate Power, one sublime Reality, one transcendent Being. It is invisible to all, since it is the power that makes the World visible. It is without form, since it is the Substance out of which all forms are made. The Real is unique—the only undivided, unsplit being beyond which there is nothing else. There is nothing else either beyond it or besides it. It is the unique not only because of what IT is but also because two statements concerning IT can be quite contradictory, yet each can still be correct! Ne transcends all categories. Since the Real is unique, the One without a second and not the One which is related to the Many that spring out of it, it cannot correctly be set up in opposition to the Unreal, the Illusory, the Appearance. They are not on the same level. That which both Greek Plato and Indian Vedantin called “the One” did not refer to the beginning figure of a series, but to “One-without-a-Second.” It is unique. There is nothing to which it can be justly likened, or with which it can be compared. This must be so since it goes beyond and transcends all things without any exception. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
Whatever is said of it will only succeed in describing an idea in the mind of the sayer, and this goes beyond and transcends all ideas, again without any exception. You can compare one being or one thing with another but not This, not This! There is a Mind which is self-existent, unique, unlike anything else, unbegotten. The Universal Mind is also unique in that, while comprehending all things, it is itself incomprehensible. It stands alone, unique, unseen and untouchable. Yet from it emerge all the gods of all the planets which they govern, all the ethical injunctions which humans need and must in the end. Please stand about me, your protective spirits, on all six sides, please establish your guards. From all dangers, no matter from what quarter, whether from above or below, please keep me safe. My Lord at my right hand, and my Lord at my left: please be with me throughout my life, watching over me by night and by day. Thy dwelling there forever. Mayest Thou be exalted and sanctified in Jerusalem, Thy city, throughout all generations and to all eternity. O please let our eyes behold the establishment of Thy kingdom, according to the word that was spoken in the inspired Psalms of David, Thy righteous anointed: The Lord shall reign forever. Thy God, O American, shall be Sovereign unto all generations. Hallelujah! Unto all generations we will declare Thy greatness and to all eternity we will proclaim Thy holiness. Our mouth shall ever speak Thy praise, O our God, for Thou art a great and holy God and King. Your arms are strong, Father; they can hug a child or restrain one from harm. Please Wrap them about me: I trust You to know which is needed. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, the holy King. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
CRESLEIGH RANCH: BRIGHTON STATION– Rancho Cordova, CA
3-5 Beds 3-3.5 Bath 2,054-3,634 Square Feet
Brighton Station at Cresleigh Ranch is Rancho Cordova’s newest home community! This charming neighborhood offers an array of home types with eye catching architecture styles such as Mid-Century Modern, California Modern, Prairie, and Contemporary Farmhouse.
Located off Douglas Road and Rancho Cordova Parkway, the residents of Cresleigh Ranch will enjoy, being just minutes from shopping, dining, and entertainment, and quick access to Highway 50 and Grant Line Road providing a direct route into Folsom. Residents here also benefit from no HOA fees, two community parks and the benefits of being a part of the highly-rated Elk Grove Unified School District.
Best of all, each Cresleigh home comes fully equipped with an All Ready connected home! This smart home package comes included with your home and features great tools including: video door bell and digital deadbolt for the front door, connect home hub so you can set scenes and routines to make life just a little easier. Two smart switches and USB outlets are also included, plus we’ll gift you a Google Home Hub and Google Mini to help connect everything together!
Eco-Technological Development is Firmly Convinced that Human Nature is Eternal and Stability Will Return!
The human task is to make of oneself a work of art. It is now life and not art that requires the willing suspension of disbelief. There are four chief ways in which guidance may be given. They are: intuitive feeling, giving in a general ways approbation or rejection of a proposed course of action; direct and precise inner message; the shaping of outer circumstances; and the teaching of inspired texts. If all four exist together, and if they all harmonize, then you may step forward in the fullest assurance. However, if there are contradictions between them, then great caution and some delay is certainly advisable. It is also needful to remember that the higher self can only be known by the higher part of the mind, that is, the intuition. The emotions are on a lesser and lower level, however noble or religious they may be. The immense satisfaction which the ecstatic raptures give is no indication that one is directly touching reality, but only that one is coming closer to it. They may seem purely spiritual, but they still belong to the ego’s feeling nature and if one believes otherwise one will fall into self-deception. Only through the pure intuition, freed from emotional egoism and transcending intellectual illusion, can one really make a contact with the Overself. And that will happen in a state of utter and perfect tranquillity; there will be none of the emotional excitement which marked the successful practice of the earlier stage of meditation exercises. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
When the deliverance of intuition cancels the deliverance of reason, one may trust oneself to the first, but only when one is sure it is what it purports to be. When one finds some of one’s own intuitions formulated and printed in someone else’s book, one feels their truth is confirmed and one’s own mind confronted. One has the right to judge an intuition rationally before submitting to it, but what if one’s judgment is itself wrong? Intuition may support reason but must supplant it only on the gravest occasions. The sudden revelation of correct understanding, whether in certain situations or about uncertain problems, may come unexpectedly or abruptly anytime during the day. It springs up of its own accord or it appears in a dream message. If the intuitive feeling leads one gently at some times, it also leads one firmly at other times. An intuition is directly self-revealing; it does not depend on what kind of thought and study were done before it appeared. It is also self-evident: the correctness of the receiving conscious is very calm, and when the lapse of time tends to strengthen its authority. The intuitive answer may come in one of several ways, but the commonest is either a self-evident that one cannot help thinking it. This is how intuition usually appears and is usually recognized for what it is. Develop them that another sign to recognize intuitions is the unexpectedness. #RandolphHrris 2 of 21
The mysterious appearance of an intuition may well make us ask where it comes from. At one moment it is no there; at the next it is lodged in the mind. Sometimes we are wiser than we know and utter involuntary answers which surprise us with their unexpected wisdom or unknown Truth in one way intuitions are born. Because it comes from within, it comes with its own authority. When it is “the real thing,” the seeker will not have to question examine or verify its authenticity, will not have to run to others for their appraisal of its worth or its rejection as a pseudo-intuition. One will know overwhelmingly what it is in the same way that one knows who one is. Education and experience alone do not make the mind; there is something higher that mixed itself in now and again with disconcerting incomprehensible spontaneity. One reason why an intuition is so often missed is that it flashes into the mind as disjointedly, as abruptly, and as inconsequentially as a person or s thing sometimes comes momentarily into the field of vision through the corner of an eye. Today the human with a pacemaker or a plastic aorta is still recognizably a human. The inanimate part of one’s body is still relatively unimportant in terms of one’s personality and consciousness. However, as the proportion of machine components rise, what happens to one’s awareness of self, one’s inner experience? If we assume that the brain is he seat of consciousness and intelligence, and that no other part of the body affects personality or self very much, then it is possible to conceive of a disembodied brain—a brain without arms, legs, spinal cord or other equipment—as a self, a personality, an embodiment of awareness. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
It may then become possible to combine the human brain with a whole set of artificial sensors, receptors, and effectors, and to call that tangle of wires and plastic a human being. All this may seem to resemble medieval speculation about the number of angels who can pirouette on a pinhead, yet the first small seps toward some form of human-machines symbiosis are already being taken. Moreover, they are being taken not by a lone mad scientist, but by thousands of highly trained engineers, mathematicians, biologists, surgeons, chemists, neurologists and communications specialists. Dr. W. G. Walter’s mechanical “tortoises” are machines that behave as though they had been psychologically conditioned. These tortoises were early specimens of a growing breed of robots ranging from the “Perceptron” which could learn (and even generalize) to the more recent “Wanderer,” a robot capable of exploring an area, building up in its memory an “image” of the terrain, and able even to indulge in certain operations comparable, at least in some respects, to “contemplative speculation” and “fantasy.” Experiments by Ross Ashby, H. D. Block, Frank Rosenblatt and others demonstrate that machines can learn from their mistakes, improve their performance, and, in certain limited kinds of learning, outstrip human students. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
Reports Dr. Block, professors of Applied Mathematics at Cornell University: “I do not think that there is a task you can name that a machine cannot do—in principle. If you can define a task and a human can do it, then a machine can, at least in theory, also do it. The converse, however, is not true.” Intelligence and creativity, it would appear, are not a human monopoly. Robotology may be the new wave of the future. Technicians at Disneyland have created extremely life-life computer-controlled humanoids capable of moving their arms and legs, grimacing, smiling, glowering, simulating fear, joy and a wide range of other emotions. Built of clear plastic, that according to one reporter, “does everything but bleed,” the robots chase girls, play music, fire pistols, and so closely resemble human forms that visitors routinely shriek with fear, flinch and otherwise react as though they were dealing with real human beings. The purposes to which these robots are put may seem trivial, but the technology on which they are based is highly sophisticated. It depends heavily on knowledge acquired from the space program—and this knowledge is accumulating rapidly. There appears to be no reason, in principle, why we cannot go forward from these present primitive and trivial robots to build humanoid machines capable of extremely varied behaviour, capable of even “human” error and seemingly random choice—in short, to make them behaviourally indistinguishable from humans except by means of highly sophisticated or elaborate tests. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
At that point we shall face the novel sensation of trying to determine whether the smiling, assured humanoid behind the airline reservation counter is a pretty young lady or a carefully wired robot. (This raises a number of half-amusing, half-serious problems about the relationships between humans and machines, including emotional and even relationships involving pleasure of the flesh. Professor Block at Cornell speculates that human-made relationships involving pleasures of the flesh may not be too far distant. Pointing out that people often develop emotional attachment to the machines they use, he suggests that we shall have to give attention to the “ethical” questions arising from our treatment of “these mechanical objects of our affection and passion.”) The likelihood the that flight attendant with be both human and robot is likely. The thrust toward some form of human-machine symbiosis is furthered by out increasing ingenuity in communicating with machines. A great deal of much-publicized work is being done to facilitate the interaction of humans and computers. However, quite apart from this, Russian and American scientists have both been experimenting with the placement or implantation of detectors that pick up signals from the nerve ends at the stub of an amputated limb. These signals are then amplified and used to activate an artificial limb, thereby making a machine directly and sensitively responsive to the nervous system of a human being. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
The human need not “think out” one’s desires; even involuntary impulses are transmittable. The respon 89sive behaviour of the machine is as automatic as the behaviour of one’s own hand, eye or leg. In Flight to Arras, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, novelist, poet and pioneer aviator, described buckling himself into the seat of a fighter plane during World War II. “All this complication of oxygen tubes, heating equipment; these speaking tubes that form the ‘intercom’ running between the members of the crew. This mask through which I breathe. I am attached to the plane by a rubber tube as indispensable as an umbilical cord. Organs have been added to my being, and they seem to intervene between me and my heart.” We have come far since those distant days. Space biology is marching irresistibly toward the day when the astronaut will not merely be buckled into one’s capsule, but become a part of it in the full symbiotic sense of the phrase. One aim is to make the craft itself a wholly self-sufficient Universe, in which algae is grown for food, water is recovered from body waste, air is recycled to purge it of the ammonia entering the atmosphere from urine, et cetera. In this totally enclosed fully regenerative World, the human being becomes an integral part of an on-going micro-ecological process whirling through the vastness of space. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Thus Theodore Gordon, author of The Future and himself a leading space engineer, writes: “Perhaps it would be simpler to provide life support in the form of machines that plug into the astronaut. One could be fed intravenously using a liquid food compactly stored in a remote pressurized tank. Perhaps direct processing of body liquid wastes, and conversion to water, could be accomplished by a new type of artificial kidney built in as part of the spaceship. Perhaps sleep could be induced electronically…to lower one’s metabolism.” Und so weiter. One after another, the body functions of human become interwoven with, dependent on, and part of, the machine functions of the capsule. The ultimate extension of such work, however, is not necessarily to be found in the outer reaches of space; it may well become a common part of everyday life here on the mother planet. This is the direct link-up of the human brain—stripped of its supporting physical structures—with the computer. Indeed, it may be that the biological component of the supercomputers of the future may be massed human brains. The possibility of enhancing human (and machine) intelligence by linking them together organically opens enormous and exciting probabilities, so exciting that Dr. R. M. Page, director of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, has publicly discussed the feasibility of a system in which human thoughts are fed automatically into the storage unit of a computer to form the basis for machine decision-making. Furthermore, research from countless sources contributes toward the eventual symbiosis. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
In one of the most fascinating, frightening and intellectually provocative experiments ever recorded, Professor Robert White, director of neurosurgery at the Metropolitan General Hospital in Cleveland, has given evidence that the brain can be isolated from its body and kept alive after the “death” of the rest of the organism. The experiment, described in a brilliant article by Oriana Fallaci, saw a team of neurosurgeons cut the brain out of a rhesus monkey, discard the body, then hook the brain’s carotid arteries up to another money, whose blood then continued to bathe the disembodied organ, keeping it alive. Said one of the members of the medical team, Dr. Leo Massopust, a neurophysiologist: “The brain activity is largely better than when the brain had a body…No doubt about it. I even suspect that without his senses, he can think more quickly. What kind of thinking, I do not know. I guess he is primarily a memory, repository for information stored when he had his flesh; he cannot develop further because he no longer has the nourishment of experience. Yet this, too, is a new experience.” The brain survived for five hours. It could have lasted much longer, had it served the purposes of research. Professor White has successfully kept other brains alive for days, using machinery, rather than a living monkey, to keep the brain washed with blood. “I do not think we have reached the stage,” he told Miss Fallaci, “where you can turn humans into robots, obedient sheep. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
“Yet…it could happen, it is not impossible. If you consider that we can transfer the head of a man onto the trunk of another man, if you consider that we can isolate the brain of a human and make it work without its body…To me, there is no longer any gap between science fiction and science…We could keep Dr. Einstein’s brain alive and make it function normally.” Not only, Professor White implies, can we transfer the head of one person to the shoulders of another, not only can we keep a head or a brain “alive” and functioning, but it can all be done, with “existing techniques.” Indeed, he declares, “The Japanese will be the first to [keep an isolated human head alive]. I will not, because I have not resolved as yet this dilemma: Is it right or not?” A devout Catholic, Dr. White is deeply troubled by the philosophical and moral implications of his work. As of the year 2018, a team of scientists recently revealed they had successfully conducted experiments on hundreds of pigs that involved keeping their brains alive for up to 36 hours after the animals had been decapitated. Researcher Dr. Nenad Sestan, who lead the team of Yale University scientists, disclosed the nature of the research in a meeting at the National Institutes of Health to discuss the ethical concerns surrounding edge research with the human brain. In essence they were able to successfully remove the pigs’ heads and resuscitate their brains while no longer connected to a body. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
Through a delicate, complex process they were able to keep the brains alive by connecting them to a closed-loop system called “BrainEX” that pumps oxygen-rich artificial blood through the necessary areas of the brain to sustain life. The researchers intent, reportedly, is to create a complete atlas of the connections between human brain cells, a monumental undertaking that has never been done. By keeping the pig brains alive, they are able to study them in ways that will contribute to further breakthroughs. This could lead to a radical enhancement of our understanding of the human brain. The research itself is remarkable and, it could change everything. We may have to evolve the way we think about death, consciousness, souls, and what it means to be human. As the brin surgeons and he neurologist probe further, as the bio-engineers and the neurologists probe further, as the bio-engineers and the mathematicians, the communications experts and robot-builders become more sophisticated, as the space humans and their capsules grow closer and closer to one another, as machines begin to embody biological components and humans come bristling with sensors and mechanical organs, the ultimate symbiosis approaches. The work converges. Yet the greatest marvel of all is not organ transplantation or symbiosis or underwater engineering. It is not technology, nor science itself. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
The greatest and most dangerous marvel of all is the complacent past-orientation of the race, its unwillingness to confront the reality of acceleration. Thus humans move swiftly into an explored Universe, into a totally new stage of eco-technological development, firmly convinced that “human nature is eternal” or that “stability will return.” He stumbles into the most violent revolution in human history muttering, in the words of one famous, though myopic sociologist, that “the processes of modernization…have been more or less ‘completed.’” He simply refuses to imagine the future. In 1865 a newspaper editor told his readers that “Well informed people know that it is impossible to transmit the voice over wires and that, were it possible to do so, the thing would be of no practical value.” Barely a decade later, the telephone erupted from Mr. Bell’s laboratory and changed the World. One the very day that the Wright brothers took wing, newspapers refused to report the event because their sober, solid, feet-on-the-ground editors simply could not bring themselves to believe it had happened. After all, a famous American astronomer, Dr. Simon Newcomb, had not long before assured the World that “No possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery, and known forms of force, can be united in a practical machine by which humans shall fly long distances.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Not long after this, another expert announced publicly that it was “nothing less than feeblemindedness to expect anything to come of the horseless carriage movement.” Six years later the one-millionth Ford automobile rolled off an assembly line. And then there was the great Dr. Rutherford, himself, the discoverer of the atom, who said in 1933 that the energy in the atom’s nucleus would never be released. Nine years later: the first chain reaction. Again and again the human brain—including the first class scientific brain—has blinded itself to the novel possibilities of the future, has narrowed its field of concern to gain momentary reassurance, only to be rudely shaken by the accelerative thrust. This is not to imply that all the scientific or technological advances so far discussed will necessarily materialize. Still less does it imply that they will all occur between now and the turn of the century. Some will, no doubt, die a-borning. Some may represent blind alleys. Others will succeed in the lab, but turn out to be impractical for one reason or another. Yet all this is unimportant. For even if none of these developments occur, others, perhaps even more unsettling, will. We have scarcely touched on the computer revolution and the far-ramifying changes that must follow in its churning wake. We have barely mentioned the implications of the thrust into outer space, an adventure that could, before the new millennium arrives, change all our lives and attitudes in radical and as yet unpredicted ways. (What would happen if an astronaut or space vehicle returned to Earth contaminated with some fast-multiplying, death-dealing microorganism or space ghost?) #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
We have said nothing about the laser, the holograph, the powerful new instruments of personal and mass communication, the new technologies of crime and espionage, new forms of transport and construction, the developing horror of chemical and bacteriological warfare techniques, the radiant promise of solar energy, the discovery that life can be conceived in a test tube, the startling new tools and techniques for education, and an endless list of other fields in which high-impact changes lie just ahead or are already here. In the coming years, advances in all these fields will fire off like a series of rockets carrying us out of the past, plunging us deeper into the new society. Now will this new society quickly settle into a steady state. It, too, will quiver and crack and roar as it suffers jolt after jolt of high-energy change. For the individual who wishes to live in one’s time, to be a part of the future, the super-industrial revolution offers no surcease from change. It offers no return to the familiar past. It offers only the highly combustible mixture of transience and novelty. This massive injection of speed and novelty into the fabric of society will force us not merely to cope more rapidly with familiar situations, events and moral dilemmas, but to cope at a progressively faster rate with situations that are, for us, decidedly unfamiliar, “first-time” situations, strange, irregular, unpredictable. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
This will significantly alter the balance that prevails in any society between the familiar and unfamiliar elements in the daily life of its people, between the routine and non-routine, the predictable and unpredictable. The relationship between these two kinds of daily-life elements can be called the “novelty ratio” of the society, and as the level of newness or novelty rises, less and less of life appears subject to our routine forms of coping behaviour. More and more, there is a growing weariness and wariness, a pall of pessimism, a decline in our sense of mastery. More and more, the environment comes to seem chaotic, beyond human control. Thus two great social forces converge: the relentless movement toward transience is reinforced and made more potentially dangerous by a rise in the novelty ratio. Nor, as we shall next see, is this novelty to be found solely in the technological arrangements of the society-to-be. In its social arrangements, too, we can anticipate the unprecedented, the unfamiliar, the bizarre. All things which are as they ought to be are conformed unto this second law eternal; and even those things which to this eternal law are not conformable are notwithstanding in some sort ordered by the first eternal law. There is a paradox about tribulation in Christianity. Blessed are the poor, but by “judgment” (id est, social justice) and alms we are to remove poverty wherever possible. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
Blessed are we when persecuted, but we may avoid persecution by flying from city to city, and may pray to be spared it, as Our Lord prayed in Gethsemane. However, if suffering is good, ought it not to be pursued rather than avoided? I answer that suffering is not good in itself. What is good in any painful experience is, for the sufferer, one’s submission to the will of God, and, for the spectators, the compassion aroused and the acts of mercy to which it leads. If wholeness or integration consists in the union of opposites, symbolized by the emergence of quaternities and mandalas, it follows that the most obvious pair of opposites, good and evil, are to be found in the self. Yet the self, as we have seen, is a God-image, or at least cannot be distinguished from one. The conventional Christian view of God is dualistic, in that God is entirely good (the doctrine of the Summum Bonum), while evil is contained in Satan. However, earlier Christian belief was monotheistic. Clement of Rome taught that God rules the World with a right and a left hand, the right being Christ, the left Satan. All of our lives, many of us has wrestled with the problem of the origin of evil. Just as we have to remember the gods of antiquity in order to appreciate the psychological value of the anima/animus archetype, so Christ is our nearest analogy of the self and its meaning. It is naturally not a question of a collective value artificially manufactured or arbitrarily awarded, but of one that is effective and present per se, and that makes its effectiveness felt whether the subject is conscious of it or not. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
Yet, though the attributes of Christ (consubstantiality with the Father, co-eternity, filiation, parthenogenesis, crucifixion, Lamb scarified between opposites, One divided into Many, et cetera) undoubtedly mark Him out as an embodiment of the self, looked at from the psychological angle He corresponds to only one half of the archetype. The other half appears in the Antichrist. The latter is just as much a manifestation of the self, except that one consists of its dark aspect. Both are Christian symbols, and they have the same meaning as the image of the Saviour crucified between two thieves. This great symbol tells us that the progressive development and differentiation of consciousness leads to an ever more menacing awareness of the conflict and involves nothing less than a crucifixion of the ego, its agonizing suspension between irreconcilable opposites. However, it is fitting that one of these two extremes, and the best, should be called the Son of God because of His excellence, and the other, diametrically opposed to him, the son of the evil demon, of Satan and the devil. The opposites even condition one another. Where there is evil…there must needs be good contrary to the evil. The one follows from the other; hence we must either do away with both, and deny that good and evil exist, or if we admit the one, and particularly evil, we must also admit good. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
Evil spirits and impure demons do not have the contrary virtue substantially, and they were not created evil but chose the condition of wickedness (malitiae gradus) of their own free will. For it is certain that to be evil means to be deprived of good. To turn aside from good is nothing other than to be perfected in evil. However, who can accurately judge what is good and evil because in some cases it is subjective. Take for instance, The Queen of the Damned, the movie by Warner Brothers, which is based on an Anne Rice novel Queen of the Damned. The vampire Queen, Akasha is 6,000 years old and trying to preserve her race and the planet by feeding on humans. Some might see this as an evil act, where others might she it as a benevolent act. After all, how much different is it from humans trying to preserve their race from feeding on animals and plant life? Food is food, right? This shows clearly that an increase in either good or evil means a diminution of the other, so that good and evil represent equivalent halves of an opposition. Naturally there can be no question on a total extinction of the ego, for then the focus of consciousness would be destroyed, and the result would be complete unconsciousness. The relative abolition of the ego affects only those supreme and ultimate decision which confront us in situations where there are insoluble conflicts of duty. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
This means, in other words, that in such cases the ego is a suffering bystander who decides nothing but must submit to decision and surrender unconditionally. The “genius” of humans, the higher and more spacious part of one whose extent no one knows, has the final word. It is therefore well to examine carefully the psychological aspects of the individuation process in the light of Christian tradition, which can describe it for us with an exactness and impressiveness far surpassing our feeble attempts, even through the Christian image of the self—Christ—lacks the shadow that properly belongs to it. In the fallen and partially redeemed Universe we may distinguish the simple good descending from God, the simple evil produced by rebellious creatures, and the exploitation of the evil by God for His redemptive purposes, which produced the complex good to which accepted suffering and repented sin contribute. Now the fact that God can make complex good out of simple evil does not excuse—though by mercy it may save—those who do the simple evil. And this distinction is central. Offences must come, but woe to those why whom they come; sins do cause grace to abound, but we must not make that an excuse for continuing to sin. The crucifixion itself is the best, as well as the worst, of all historical events, but the role of Judas remains simply evil. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
Love is a feeling of deep devotion, concern, and affection. The greatest example of God’s love for His children is found in the infinite Atonement of Jesus Christ. Love for God and fellow humans is a characteristic of disciples of Jesus Christ. Have you recognized the love of God in your life? We manifest our love for Heavenly Father by keeping His commandments and serving His children. Our expressions of love for others may include being kind to them, listening to them, mouring with them, comforting them, serving them, praying for them, sharing the gospel with them, and being their friend. When we remember that we are all children of God—that we are spirit brothers and sisters–our love for those around us increases. The love that results from this realization has the power to transcend all boundaries of nation, creed, and colour. Dear Lord in Heaven, please remind me on my drive that my anger harms me more than that which angers me. Lord of Peace, in ultimate calm sitting, please pass on to me some of your beatific pose. Please remind us that we have the power to overcome anger, as our Saviour Jesus Christ, who gave his life for us and love us and is not angry that our sins before he was born, while he was born, and after his death is the toll he paid for us to cross over into this mortal realm and he still love us. May even my commute be done in beauty. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Land folk, I am here, newly arrived to this place. I have come from my previous home, where I lived under the protecting gaze of the Land Spirits there. In this new place, then, I wish to establish peace again between my people and the people of the land, as it as been done since the unremembered time. I bring gifts to you, I bring offerings, as a suppliant should when entering a chieftain’s hall. Please accept the from me and, with them, my friendship. Please establish between us peace. Please encompass me about with your protection, Holy Ones of ancient times. Please stand about me on all sides, warding away from me all dangers, keeping away from me all harm. Who may be compared to Thee, Father of mercy, who in love rememberest Thy creatures unto life? Faithful art Thou to grant eternal life to the departed. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who callest the dead to life everlasting. Holy art Thou and holy is Thy name and unto Thee holy beings render praise daily. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, the Holy God. We sanctify Thy name on Earth even as it is sanctified in the Heavens above, as described in the vision of Thy Prophet: And the seraphim called one unto another saying: Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts, the whole Earth is full of His glory. Whereupon the angels in stirring and mighty chorus rise toward the seraphim and with resounding acclaim declare: Blessed by the glory of God from His Heavenly abode. From Thy Heavenly abode, please reveal Thyself, O our King, and reign over us, for we wait for Thee. O when wilt Thou reign in America? Speedily, even in our days, do Thou establish Thy dwelling here forever. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
Cresleigh Homes
You made it past Wednesday! Time to kick back and relax in your #Riverside Residence 1 home. Grab some loungewear from your spacious Primary Bedroom closet and head downstairs to the kitchen to make plans for the weekend. 😄
Or you could learn more about this residence on our website! And with approximately 2,300 square feet, all on one level, you will likely find all the space you need. Link in bio. https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-riverside-at-plumas-ranch/residence-1/
Randolph Harris II International Institute 