Virtue becomes a mate; beauty becomes a concubine.
Seek, therefore, virtue.
Archive for » February, 2009 «
20
February
There is nothing worse, I assure you, than to have your child despise you for the truth. Lies can be corrected and overcome. The truth cuts and severs completely.
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19
February
It is certainly possible that the theory of evolution might actually fall apart someday with new evidence but the likelihood of such happening, given the facts on the ground, is so remote that it doesn’t warrant much time at all (if any) in an anthropology class
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17
February
When Man is defined in some kind of domination role such as found within the Judaeo-Christian worldview (i.e., And God said to [Man], Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.) then the aggressive discourse that results severs any kind of harmony that could be found between the various elements of nature. It’s interesting to me that the dominion principle did not hit its full stride until Christianity came along and took such “commands” literally. The early Hebrew tribes took such dominion to be metaphoric and lived very much as a pastoral and agricultural people in harmony with the land. Anywhere Everywhere that Christianity has gone, the rape and destruction of the natural world was the inevitable result—and almost always in the name of capitalist profits.
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17
February
We have become accustomed to our corporate-infused lives that takes in what a cultural profiteer, trying to turn another penny, tells us is important in life. We live in a disposable society with disposable lives. Even our relationships are like Happy Meals that we throw away when we don’t like the toy inside (or get tired of the toy itself) and just pop on down to the next establishment to pick up another just as cheaply. Rinse, repeat, ad nauseum. Through the use of language, these profiteers—much like their cousins in the war department—manipulate and change culture as a means to a profitable end without any concern for the natural evolution of culture nor the damage they do to the cultural constructs that, in some cases, have taken hundreds or thousands of years to form. Is this capitalism at its finest or is this merely the intellectual rape of the ignorant and blasé?
Category: 2009
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17
February
Undisciplined faith is, as we continue to see, an inhibition to objective and factual pursuit of the truth (whatever that maybe be in the end). If we cannot step outside of our own ethnocentric perspectives—and this includes those cultural edifices that are built up by religion—then we are merely giving lip-service to the concept of cultural relativity.
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17
February
Western religion (and specifically the Abrahamic Three) has a clear history of moral and political control through fear rather than the promotion of reverence for the divine.
Category: 2009
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16
February
In the end, my dreams of providing … tangible evidence of [my] virtues and values are not left to the silver screen or the dusty pages of some book in my treasured library, but in the exposition of my own life as a role model of the values I hold to be true, good, and beautiful. It is a role model not only of those virtues but of the failure that attends the disappointment of those same virtues when ignored in favor of more expedient avenues in life.
Category: 2009
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09
February
Science uses faith as a means to an end. Religion sees faith as an end in itself. Likewise, both faith and certainty entertain questioning. Faith is part of the ultimate questioning process. Most religion has merely forgotten to go past that initial question and seek out the answers through more reliable methods than ‘because some dude behind a big block of wood on a stage with a book of words said so.’
Category: 2009
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03
February
Culture, simply put, could be described as learned artifacts (the 3 B’s: beliefs, behaviors, and boundaries) that are communicated from generation to generation in order to secure an evolving rate of success for survival on both an individual and a social stratum. One of the most basic rules of existence is that we are the sum of those with whom we surround ourselves. In this our environment plays an enormous role in shaping our mental, emotional, and even physical responses to exterior and interior stimuli. Exploring how culture is shaped, promulgated, and reinforced—and even how it evolves over time—through individuals in our social groups provides a type of map that gives a glimpse not only of the past but of the future of a society.
Category: 2009
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