I have only written three pieces for the man-o-sphere. One on leadership. One on man’s fear of responsibility. One on the true state of the world in politics, economics, and 21st century western culture. All of them have been met with some resistance, dare I say outright hostility, to the message I am trying to communicate to readers… to men… and I think I now know why.
The message I have been subtly trying to make in all my writing is this:
Man has stopped asking himself the moral question.
As the short video above articulates, so powerfully and so simply, the moral question of man and his place on earth is what has allowed him to not exterminate himself.
Throughout his entire historical past, the moral question was taken up by man’s quest for the spiritual, via religion, through belief in a power, a creator, a “god” that was beyond his reach and control and to whom man owed his existence and would one day be accountable to for his actions on this earth (by judgement as per Abrahamic faiths or by karma as per Asian traditions). In other words, man has always feared his own extinction by forces outside of his control and for good reason… it kept him alive.
The moral question is man’s suicide hotline.
In a secular, globalized world, the moral question is not only no longer sought nor asked, it is outright rejected and denied when man needs it most. If you go back and read the three pieces I have written, the underlying tone, the subtle message, is one of morality.
I wrote “On Leaders and Leadership” because I could not stand the fact that so many “men” in the MRM know the problems society faces, but no one wants to do anything about it – i.e take a leadership role. The consensus is to just let western feminist society, the world, go down in flames. I for one think this is wrong. Doing nothing in the face of societal collapse is a MORAL choice.
I wrote “The Fear of Manning Up” to illustrate that the MGTOW philosophy of a man “going his own way” and continuing to avoid his responsibilities on earth is a MORAL cop out. To make such a choice is to say one is a child, a selfish child of infinite complaining and whining, that refuses to grow up and become an adult. As much as I sympathize with the MRM movement, I feel at times like I am surrounded by children (the recent spat of race baiting articles on In Mala Fide being just one example of such childlike behaviour).
I wrote “Charlie Sheen Vs. The Devil?” because the fear of manning up, of growing up and becoming a responsible adult, is rooted in our inability, globally, to see the evil reality the world is being engulfed by and respond to these events and crisis from not just a point of knowing the truth about what we face, but from a moral perspective – what is right, what is just, what is good.
In that Charlie Sheen piece, Jay Hammers was the only one to comment on and question/search about God. ONE person. Does “God” exist or not? What are the implications of the answer to such a question? I left in the comments a couple of videos I thought might help Jay in his spiritual search, but he was not impressed by the arguments for God made by the Islamic lecturer. That is fine. Each man must come to his own belief about God or his existence or not.
Jay’s comments however left me with a question, a question that was further sparked by that video above and the genesis for this piece.
What happens in a world… to the future of man… when he completely STOPS asking ANY moral questions in searching for a god, a creator, a power BEYOND HIMSELF?
What happens when man truly believes HE is the only power on earth he has to contend with? What happens when the psychological and evolutionary mechanism by which man has been kept from exterminating himself is removed completely from man’s psycho-social and cultural vocabulary over multiple generations? (As we have seen since the 1960s, the birth of feminism and the true seed of a pure secular/godless state.)
It is my belief that much of what the world is facing today in crisis after crisis is not corporate greed, not feminism, not Terrorism™, not screwed up relationships nor destruction of the environment.
The real crisis the world faces today that puts ALL of what is happening in the world in perspective and in relation to each another is…
A fundamental lack of anyone asking any moral questions.
I can hear many say this sounds simplistic and obvious, but is it? Many may argue the MRM is a moral response to the amorality of the feminist state… but is it? Manning up is a MORAL exhortation and it is met with the most ZEALOUS opposition in the MRM (regardless of who says it or why). To ask a moral question, give a moral opinion or conclude a moral truth is to instantly be labeled a religious zealot, a person of “judgement” over others, an individual who is completely out of step with the “modern” world by wishing to impose a MORAL WORLD VIEW of behavioural norms and modes of thinking on others.
I ask you this:
Is that not PRECISELY the result of MORAL questioning and reasoning?
The adoption of beliefs and actions that are in line with what is RIGHT and GOOD for mankind, for society? WHAT IS MORAL?
Is this not the REAL threat Islam poses to “the West?” A MORAL JUDGEMENT of all the cultural norms, values and beliefs the west holds as sacrosanct – a globally imposed, secular, feminist, materialist, socialist/fascist/imperialist New World Order.
Am I incorrect?
I don’t think so.
What am I implying when I say men are afraid to man up?
What am I saying when I ask men to take more of a leadership role in their lives and in society in spite of the risks and dangers that are very real in doing so?
What am I suggesting when I offer an explanation as to WHY the world and our global, feminist culture is screwed up wherein the answer can be traced back to ancient rites and rituals practiced by the most evil of men?
I am suggesting to other men they need to start asking themselves moral questions.
This is PRECISELY the the threat Islam poses to the west.
And men, far more then women, seem to shun and reject such questioning. The reason? Because MAN is the ONLY ONE that can impose a system of moral values and ethics on himself, and therefore on society as a whole, making man RESPONSIBLE for the moral fabric of society. We already know where leaving the responsibility for the imposition of moral values on society up to women leads us.
I am asking men to start questioning whether “going their own way” is the MORAL thing to do… is Game a MORAL response to the current social dynamic in dating, sex and marriage… and many men are not liking the answer I am giving them.
I am, with this article, taking the risk of coming across and sounding like a “moralizer.”
mor·al·ize [mawr-uh-lahyz, mor-]
–verb (used without object)
1. to reflect on or express opinions about something in terms of right and wrong, especially in a self-righteous or tiresome way.
–verb (used with object)
2. to explain in a moral sense, or draw a moral from.
Anyone today, especially in the west, who comes across as having a moral stance on any issue is instantly tarred and feathered, drawn and quartered, strung-up and hung. One comment to my piece “The Fear of Manning Up” makes this sentiment clear.
ZenApprentice March 7, 2011 at 4:27 pm
Maximus: “Hey men, MAN UP!!!”
Me: “No, now bugger off”.
all that needs to be said.
This is an appropriate response by a person when told by someone else that their words, actions or choices are, or could be, MORALLY WRONG OR QUESTIONABLE. This comment and attitude, of course, would be acceptable and encouraged ONLY in a society that no longer thinks the moral question should be asked of them or anyone else.
Which begs by logical reasoning the following question…
Where does abandoning the moral question to expire in our religious past leave the future of man? The above comment is the result of this man having been born and raised in a culture that, for two going on three generations now, has stopped asking ANY moral questions of himself or society. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter… has turned man into the most selfish, narcasitic and ego-obsessed creature on Earth.
Clearly… “God,” the idea of a “power” beyond man’s own unbelievably impressive and amazing self, is no longer a part of human, evolutional, psychological consciousness. The “me” decade of the 1980s has been blown out of the water by the ALL ME, NOTHING BUT BE, HEY – DO YOU KNOW ABOUT ME? of the first decade of the 21st century.
Whatever faith, or non-faith, you profess, the moral question is now the number one focus I believe the men’s movement should adopt. It does not have to take the form of any particular religion, or even a philosophy. The only action the MRM should adopt in this regard is to simply start asking moral questions.
And I don’t think I am alone.
I would like to suggest that we are in the same condition. We have many leaders, but no generals; we have no explicit organization, no headquarters, no central target to be attacked by those who would lose when we win. This empowers each of us to look and think for ourselves, rather than wait for orders; to take the initiative where we see an opening; to act together where we can, but to act on our own – perhaps choosing our own path; but also, this demands of each of us the discipline and responsibility of a leader, and to be mindful of the greater goals of Men’s Rights.
The “discipline and responsibility of a leader” is to ask moral questions of himself, of the tribe, for the GOOD of all. To lead is to take a moral stance, to state what you believe, and seek out like minded souls in the hope of changing the moral fabric of society for the better, for its future happiness and survival.
This quote from the excellent article on leadership by Beija Flor, “Ten Thousand Generals,” articulates my point of man’s quest to answer the moral question – how should he live? This moral question must be answered individually first, but it will not be done so in a vacuum. Man is a SOCIAL animal and MUST live, work and play with other men. Your answer to the moral question of our time will be in concert with other men as each goes out in search of the truth. This is the evolutionary process of man’s moral development that has been the history of all religions and God. And if you have studied the history of religious faiths in any way, the answer to the moral question of man always seems to point in the same direction, to one answer. What we can’t do is stop asking it as seems to be the case in the west.
If the MRM movement is looking for a place to start – a strong root from which to branch out into a true movement – it most go back to answering the moral questions of life. What is good? What is right? What is just? For man as an individual? For society as a whole? To say that we cannot look to the ONLY storehouse of answers to man’s entire history of moral questioning, the religious traditions of the world, because they are of a “moral” bent and ask man to submit to “moral laws” that govern him on this earth… is to say you desire nothing but the extinction of man himself.
Religion… faith… IS the answer to man’s moral questions. It was in the past, it will be in the future, it cannot be avoided in the present. If man does not find his moral centre again, one which he must always struggle to keep, he will commit suicide and the earth will not notice his passing for one second.
The quest for God, for a creator, for a divine power beyond our comprehension is the only thing that has kept man from killing himself. Even if after your spiritual quest you still don’t adopt any belief of any kind, and become a confirmed and proselytizing nihilist, at least your nihilism will come from a true foundational search for meaning and found none; not simply from an emotional and programmed reaction to the sad state of your life, society, culture or the world and a childish reaction to simply “stuff it” and “go your own way.” I want your godless nihilism to MEAN something, to have a true source of belief and power, because in that way, you will be a man that BELIEVES something and not just be another cog in the wheel of the mass of men leading a life of quiet (or not so quiet) desperation. I am not against nihilism or anarchy, I just want it to come from a source of true faith and belief, not some childish tantrum.
Of course, I do not believe nihilism and anarchy are the future of man… merely a transitional stage once again in his endless, evolutionary quest to continue to answer the moral question.
To this end, I myself am exploring many religious traditions, save Christianity (no need to go into why here, my views are my own). Islam and Buddhism, for myself, seem to answer a lot of the moral questions we no longer wish to ask of ourselves in the west. There are a great many answers in both of these faiths, as well as other faith traditions including Christianity, that can help guide man BACK to a way of life that is centered around answering the basic moral questions of life – how to live rightly on earth in peace, tolerance, love and respect. Again, for myself, Islam and Buddhism seem to blend both the masculine and the feminine elements of man’s nature to the nth degree – a perfect balance and a mix I think is evolutionary, not revolutionary, and therefore possible as a synthesis of belief and faith for man in the 21st century moving forward into the future.
Man’s spiritual quest brings out his divine elements, his rising above his base nature. Without it, I fear man will find a way to exterminate himself and it seems he has now acquired the knowledge and the means to do so. The Fukishima meltdown is the Titanic distress call to the future of man’s survival if he continues to ignore the moral question.
The Richard Dawkins crowd will surely flame me in the comments to follow, but that again will only go to prove that I am winning – for the louder they protest and the more fiercely they attack religious traditions, the more one can see there arguments ultimately ring hollow and they themselves do not believe what they scream about. (Which is only logical, since they believe in NOTHING!)
The loudest argument of the religion of atheism (the claim of NO god is as dogmatic and religious a belief as the claim FOR god) is thus:
Man does not require “god” or “religion” to ask fundamental moral questions and answer them.
Here is my refutation.
Evolution.
Dawkins, not Darwin, may be trying to take God out of the question of creation, and therefore make man a god via his complete freedom to self-determination by any other power than his own imagination, but he failed to explain away the universal trait in man to go on a spiritual quest, to SEARCH for God, a creator, a power beyond himself. This is evident in ANY AND ALL cultures one looks at. Man’s quest for the eternal divine source of his being is universal, therefore it is a part of man’s evolutionary history, and you simply cannot wish it away because you happen to believe genes and the environment program man and all of life. And even if you do believe it is all genes and memes, it seems this damn question of God and man’s spirit just cannot die no matter how much “proof” secular, scientific and materialist man finds to convince himself he should not believe such “nonsense.”
What is the purpose for this quest? Why does man go looking for God? Why is Jay Hammers, a 21 century male for certain, asking “bat-shit insane” Maximus’ questions about God? Why is that “question” still there after so many years of secular Darwinism banishing God to the “primitive” history of man’s knowledge of himself?
Some may argue that the spiritual quest was simply man’s primitive and unenlightened way of answering moral questions, of discovering some of the “natural laws” that gave structure to the first complex primitive societies that eventually became cultures and finally nation states ruled by “laws.” God was not necessary, he just happened to be the vehicle by which man evolved a higher and higher consciousness of the greater good for all.
Which is precisely my point.
Nowhere on earth does man NOT have this quest to answer moral questions – the questions of ultimate importance to his survival – how he should live on Earth. What are the rules and laws that should govern man in relation to himself, other men and the earth? Survival I say because all of man’s religions (and all his philosophies trying to answer whether God exists or not) are about discovering a “god” or a “source” of power/creation (or reason), by which man could discover the laws that govern himself rightly and therefore ensure the survival of MAN! If Moses had not come along and unequivocally and universally declared “thou shall not kill,” some other dude would have because it is a LAW that needs to adopted, imposed and respected by ALL MEN if man is to prevent his own extinction!
Therefore, if the search for God, the quest for answers to the moral questions of man’s survival is universal, the removal of said questioning can only mean one thing – his extinction.
When man puffs his ego and pride so full that he believes himself to be OUTSIDE the laws of nature, the universe, of God, there can only be one destination for him – the dustbin of history, a fossil, just like the dinosaurs.
This is not merely a religious argument, it is also a philosophical one, as any philosopher who dares tread into “moral” territory will also be attacked for such an egregious breach of others “rights” and be accused of the “hate crime” of trying to judge others from a position of moral authority – what is right, just and good FOR ALL. This MORAL philosophy, begun in Greece with Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, was summarized and adopted as “faith” by the west (or at least it used to be) by John Stuart Mill’s classic essay – On Liberty.
Whether the readers in the MRM or MGTOW communities wish it or not, they are going to have to come to terms with the moral question.
Man will have to re-assert MORAL AUTHORITY in the world.
He will have to man up.
The future of any mass men’s movement MUST have a moral question, a moral code and law, at its heart. Men MUST become moralizers, despite the inherent risk common sense dictates to those that take such a position. But in this case, common sense might not be so common if asking moral questions about society and man is now wholly and completely taboo.
Which only goes again to prove my point – that questions of morality are extinct in the modern world, even here, in the so called radical male rebellion against it.
When did it become a matter of social “pressure” to NOT be moral? To NOT ask questions of moral significance? This was the underlying thesis of Mill’s essay On Liberty. Where does the freedom of the individual end, and his responsibility to the well being of society begin? How much liberty should a man be given before society says “that’s too much” and exerts social pressure and “laws” for the well being and future of society itself? These are all MORAL questions that were at the HEART of the Declaration of Independence and the debates about democracy vs republic vs monarchy of the times. And ALL of those debates spun around the moral centre of Christian faith and duty to GOD AND FAMILY. Where have those questions gone? Far more than feminism being the one to blame for the downfall in morals, values and ethics, man’s ABANDONING of asking the moral question is EQUALLY to blame for the situation humanity finds itself in.
The very idea of asking a moral question… to be seen as taking a moral stance… is now the socially accepted norm of being in the WRONG and will only “bite you in the ass.” Sure, taking a moral stance can bite you in the ass if you don’t practice what you preach, but to stop asking moral questions ENTIRELY do to such a fear, is to say a society no longer CARES or even HAS any morals to defend and therefore question if such-and-such or this-or-that is right or wrong?
What is the good life?
What is a happy life?
What is a just society?
What is a loving relationship between a man and woman?
These are all moral questions.
Questions that, no matter where I go or what company I find myself in (or you should you try asking them yourself after reading this article), are simply too taboo to ask in polite conversation and will get one shunned and ridiculed for even SUGGESTING there are not just answers to these questions, but RIGHT answers, to such questions. Answers that bear a personal RESPONSIBILITY for ones choices and actions in conducting your life.
21st century man is a man with no moral compass.
A man with no moral compass will kill himself and take the whole of humanity with him.
This is my argument for asking questions about God, whether one believes he exists or not.
I hope this article will spark other authors here at In Mala Fide to take on the topic of the moral question… which is really short hand for saying God and religion in many ways. So too philosophy to some degree but by nature, philosophy will never take a moral position because to take one is to make a claim to truth and no philosopher I have met will ever do such thing without grave reservation.
This is why Jay Hammers’ comments about God give me some hope.
In reviewing the comments to all three of my written pieces, they are, by in large, overwhelmingly positive. Where they were not, the criticisms were outright hostile and dismissive entirely and I now, in this piece, think I have figured out the root reason why. (In case the reader has not noticed, the only question I seem to ask about anything is WHY?) This goes to show me that questions of morality, of right and wrong conduct in society and between men and women, is once again coming to the foreground. Man, it seems, does want to stick around on this earth just a little while longer.
Many in the MRM may not like where my logical argument for a return to the moral question of man concludes. That man must once again come to know God and adapt himself to modes of thought and belief that constrict his actions and behaviour toward others in accordance with “natural” or “divine” laws. If evolution has taught us anything, it is that man cannot escape its laws. One of those laws just happens to be a moral one – grow up or die. The moral question of man must once again be answered for a new epochal generation of men. It is my belief that this answer will be a combination of Islam, Buddhism and the earth centered spiritual traditions of the aboriginal peoples. As the aboriginal elder spoke so poignantly to the rows of MEN in his audience (because women can never answer this question AND impose the answer on society):
If you don’t have a moral question in your governing process, you don’t have a process that’s going to survive.
And with that… I leave you with what appears to be the ultimate moral question of our upside down society.
Note… watch 0:50 for the submissive HAPPINESS of a woman being TOLD her place by an honorable and respectable holy man speaking about the MORALITY of female modesty. She smiles and bows her head and her shoulders go up all shy like she has been caught doing something naughty.
PS… I find it HILARIOUS that the woman asking the question is wearing a shirt emblazoned with the word NAIVE!
Yup… the games are over, girls. It is time to grow up and become ladies. It is also time we boys grew up and became men.
Maximus
{ 80 comments… read them below or add one }
Splendid article. Mirrors a lot of what is currently going through my head.
You are talking about the SOUL. That elusive spark that governs men and women alike. The soul needs love. Love of God, of Nature, of the Universe, whatever you want to call it. Once a person understands this need he understands that there are other force at play here too.
What is the absence of love? Is it hate? Is it indifference?
Exploring the depths of your being will bring you in a place of darkness but in that darkness you can find your “good” true self. Or not. Maybe you are evil. Maybe your actions are characterized by pure malice. Not everyone can be touched by light. People fail to understand that to any force there exists a counter force. The existence of evil is undeniably true. Just look around yourself and you will see millions of examples floating around.
“When all in the world understand beauty to be beautiful, then ugliness exists.
When all understand goodness to be good, then evil exists.
Thus existence suggests non-existence; Easy gives rise to difficult; Short is derived from long by comparison;
Low is distinguished from high by position; Resonance harmonizes sound; After follows before.” ( from the ” Tao te King”)
The problem lies in identifying “good” and “evil”. There is no consensus among this tiny blogosphere as to what is what. For me, abortion is just a procedure, for others it is an ultimate sin that will BRING DAMNATION FOREVER AND EVER AND FUCKING EVER.
When one as a species can’t even identify when it is still ok to kill a human without it having done something against that species’s rules (1-3 weeks after conception, 3 months, 20 years as it was in Roman times etc) then what can you expect from us?
I would not disparage any man who, after being denigrated, marginalized and outright insulted by feminists and manginas, decides to go his own way. As long as his own way involves something one could consider moral.
Why blame someone who after being bitten by a dog, chooses to distance himself from said beast, if the only alternative is to slay that beast (which ultimately would play right into Evil’s hands)?
Schopenhauer recognized that life is meaningful only for those few who peer behind the facade of representation. Who see beauty in the face of so much suffering from the personal to the global.
You have an interesting mish-mash of ideas here.
I am unsure where you are “grounding” your philiosophy. Is it biology or religion? In some places, you appeal to biology for what man is. In other places, you place religion in the central position. Choose one.
You need to put more focus into your essays. This is just poorly written.
Yeah Schopenhauer was a cheery old soul.. Not!
“Could we foresee it, there are times when children might seem like innocent prisoners, condemned, not to death, but to life, and as yet all unconscious of what their sentence means. Nevertheless, every man desires to reach old age; in other words, a state of life of which it may be siad; ‘It is bad to-day, and it will be worse to0morrow; and so on till the worst of all.”
Another half glass empty kinda guy . He was such a pessimist. What he really lacked, was love in his life. Had a cold uncaring mother.. Very sad..
Now, had he had a mother that loved and doted on him, things may have been different.. Particularly his outlook on life..
I’m an atheist. I don’t believe in absolute good or evil. All this, to me, seems like just more shaming to get me to fall back in line. To become a nice little slave working for the very system you rely on.
Fuck the society, fuck the women, and most importantly fuck all men like you, who try to force me into slavery by shaming me with meaningless words.
I am the most important person in my life and my own well being and happiness is my first priority.
Though a Muslim, he is absolutely right on this. I have been saying the same thing on Alte’s blog recently. Supposedly Christian women ignore their own scriptures.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Komm,_s%C3%BCsser_Tod_%28song%29
I think J.S.Bach has already articulated all my thoughts on suicide.
The only trick is that some allegedly spiritual sources claim that suicide is a crime in the opinion of heaven, and thus suicide might partially or totally prevent one from entering heaven.
@ Kathy: Nice speculation dear. Allow me to retort. If he had a loving and caring mother we would have become a pussy. An overprotected, shy mangina.
See, you don’t need to provide facts or say something useful.
‘I am suggesting to other men they need to start asking themselves moral questions.
This is PRECISELY the the threat Islam poses to the west.’
Kievsky has already started asking moral questions. I think Matt Parrott claims to have moral answers rather than moral questions, but he’s definitely been in the morality game for a while.
And I note that Steve Winwood has articulated a moral philosophy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=524Tf0dNRNw
‘The quest for God, for a creator, for a divine power beyond our comprehension is the only thing that has kept man from killing himself.’
Possibly true, but the claim requires more evidence.
’21st century man is a man with no moral compass.’
Well, King Crimson has addressed that.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBfCzhYbWBk
Speaking for my own personal preference, I would prefer you to write shorter essays. I am ready to consider all of your ideas, but if you want to write ten thousand words, I would rather read five separate 2000-word essays than a single 10000-word essay.
‘This comment and attitude, of course, would be acceptable and encouraged ONLY in a society that no longer thinks the moral question should be asked of them or anyone else.
Which begs by logical reasoning the following question…
Where does abandoning the moral question to expire in our religious past leave the future of man?’
Pet peeve: I don’t think you really mean “begs the question.” I think you mean “raises the question.”
But I don’t think the moral question has really been left in the past. I think that plenty of people are always ready to consider morality, but perhaps the writer does not listen to them. How can one read Matt Parrott and claim that Parrott does not make moral claims?
This captures my thoughts on the subject and why men continue to strive: Miserere
@ Ryu,
It is not an either or question. That is were so many people get stuck. Religion is IN our biology. Our biological “nature” is revealed by religion. That is why there is the struggle of Jacob’s ladder. We fight a biology that is constantly dragging us down to the earth, but our biology also compels us to climb up toward the heavens no matter how strong the ropes are that tie us to the earth.
The question reminds me of having just watched Star Wars Episode III. When one deals in absolutes (Vadar’s ultimatum to Kenobi – with me or my enemy), one shuts down OPEN minded thinking and questioning and enters a CLOSED system of philosophy (i.e. is it religion or biology, choose).
It is something I have encountered my whole life. Many people would say I am an absolutist when I speak for I am very confident about my opinions and state them in a way that APPEARS to have no wiggle room. However, I always leave my thinking open. I think there is a lot of cognitive dissonance for many people as they get to know me and what I think, value and believe. They can’t understand how Maximus can say/believe one thing, and then say another thing that appears to be the exact opposite (i.e. the lack of focus comment above) and still believe his mind is intact and “logical”.
How can one hold two conflicting ideas and believe BOTH at the same time?
Quite simple.
Light behaves both as particles AND waves. It is BOTH, yet neither. Another example is trying to measure an atom in space – one can find its position, but then not know is speed, or find its speed, but not know its position, and BOTH observations, in the act, close down the standing wave function (I believe) of POSSIBILITIES of that atom being just about anywhere and moving at any speed – the act of observation affects the results.
To reduce “man” to simply his biology (as the Dawkins/Darwin atheists would have us believe) or to only his spiritual nature (as the religious dogmatics would have us believe) denies the TRUTH of man – he is both, matter and spirit, and both require understanding and action based on the LAWS of both worlds
Precisely. Other “forces” at work means many men will have to open their minds to ways of thinking and believing that have been left behind with our “ancient and backward” ancestors. There was a REAL SCIENCE behind the study of the stars and their positions.
Case in point. I am reading an incredible “bat shit insane” book right now about physics, economics, and human behaviour… ALL tied together.
In essence, it says EVERYHING in the universe follows a standard wave function. (i.e. evidence for God?)
Does anyone know who Nikolia Tesla is?
In short… what I just read… Tesla in his last days of available financial backing from JP Morgan, not only theorized, but developed and tested sending electrical POWER THROUGH THE EARTH ITSELF with less than a 5% loss – and the power source was SPACE-TIME ITSELF!
He discovered in his “unfocused” experiments… i.e. just letting his mind FLOW with ideas and not “choosing” one or the other… that there is a DEEPER physics to the universe. A physics that FLIPS electrical concepts to the inverse – i.e. that the EARTH is the conductor (commonly understood as ground) and the air/aether/ether of the universe (i.e. the PHYSICAL MEDIUM of space-time) is the transmitter/poles. (i.e. positive negative flow of atoms through the conductor from one end to the other).
Now… while that may appear to be an unfocused comment… it is. It is very hard for me to “focus” on one thing when EVERYTHING I am learning about man, god and the universe is all connected at some point, no matter how opposite the notion. As Tesla has just taught me, to think in terms of “grounding” ones philosophy in A philosophy, leaves man shut down to personal growth if his observations and experiences in life show his philosophical “ground” can be inverted at and still function. LOL
Discoveries of man are not made by “choosing” a path and sticking to it. Discoveries are made by allowing the path to choose you and simply following it wherever it goes. The creative process is anathema to the way 99% of humanity functions – choose a goal and stick with it. FOCUS!!! (I got this on my report cards from elementary school as well, Maximus needs to focus more. Even then, the matrix of humanity was trying to force me to plug into the machine of zombie society.)
Suffice it to say… man is both matter AND spirit… biology and God… and both worlds have LAWS man must adhere to for his proper functioning. Until we men learn and accept this truth, we will only be half the man we can be if we choose to follow only one path. Yet in the end, the path is one, go figure.
“@ Kathy: Nice speculation dear. Allow me to retort. If he had a loving and caring mother we would have become a pussy. An overprotected, shy mangina.”
Rubbish. A loving and caring mother is what a child needs to thrive and to grow. Just as he needs a loving and caring father..
Every child thrives on love and care in a close family.
People are not robots!
Schopenhauer never had a “normal” loving childhood..
Pessimism and depression plagued him, as a result.
Ah so you forgot to add the word “father”. Tsk tsk. See that’s why you should think before you write.
Nope, never forgot, at all. Read what I said..I said a child needs both..
The fact that S had a cold and unemotional mother could only have been to his detriment.. A mother is usually more closely involved in the first couple of years of the child’s life.. feeding.. changing diapers..
Nobody cleaned my poop-stained britches!
I’m so depressed. Why do I even exist?
I am failing to send the bits correctly, or is there a lag for moderation purposes? My comments are not showing up promptly.
And then, of course, when I try to post a lengthy comment, I get another error. At least this time it’s a new error, claiming that I’ve already posted the comment.
Pet peeve: I don’t think you really mean “begs the question.” I think you mean “raises the question.”
But I don’t think the moral question has really been left in the past. I think that plenty of people are always ready to consider morality, but perhaps the writer does not listen to them. How can one read Matt Parrott and claim that Parrott does not make moral claims?
Kievsky has already started asking moral questions. I think Matt Parrott claims to have moral answers rather than moral questions, but he’s definitely been in the morality game for a while.
And I note that Steve Winwood has articulated a moral philosophy:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=524Tf0dNRNw
In all seriousness, I think Winwood’s point is that personal spiritual experience must precede collective moral consensus.
Possibly true, but the claim requires more evidence.
Well, King Crimson has addressed that.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBfCzhYbWBk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tz5BzIrHulE
You know who really asks moral questions?
Malik Zulu Shabazz of the Black Panther party.
We do what we can.
same rambling shit, different day.
c’mon ferd
Tell me about it. If you admit that you aren’t perfectly moral all the time, they immediately jump up and shout, “You’re a hypocrite! How can you talk about moral principles when you aren’t perfect?” If that were the baseline, then no one could discuss moral principles, which is what they actually want.
It’s as if someone jumped up at every speech of St. Paul’s and shouted, “How can you talk about Jesus when you used to be a Pharisee and persecuted Christians?”
The only moral saying most Americans seem to know is, “Do not judge lest you be judged”, which they take out of context, and which seems to be the intellectual motto of tolerance.
Buddhism … and Islam. Fascinating.
On the one hand, Buddhism; a religion which holds you utterly responsible for your own state, and your own salvation. Where was Gautama Siddhartha Sakyamuni when he tore free the veil and reached Enlightenment? Sitting by himself under a fig tree, having Gone His Own Way – abandoning his family and his princedom for the quest, learning all he could from those who didn’t quite know enough, and bringing the full force of his intellect and his will in a do-or-die effort to reach “That before which all words recoil.” And then, on reaching it, coming back to show the Way to those who would listen and learn.
On the other hand, a religion based on “submission to God’s will,” and one whose holy book and holy commentaries lay forth “God’s will” in exhaustive detail. I know a great deal less about Islam than I know of Buddhism, but what little I know (setting aside events of the last ten years or so) paints it as a sharp contrast to Buddhism.
I guess my preference for Buddhism is evident. But there is truth at the root of all great religions, or they wouldn’t have survived to become great.
Excellent, thought-provoking article, Maximus. These are questions of tremendous import, whether we look to the guidance of a Deity or we seek our own answers within.
The secular is a dead end in general, even so for the MRA. Search for a hearth of soul if not for a deity.
Close.
It should be: “kept man from killing each other”.
Pre-deluvian: man was created without morality programming. We were given the “knowledge of good and evil” (per Genesis), but without the ability to wield it properly. So, the first iteration of man was basicaly that of a sociopath and all we did was to seek power over each other and ultimately to be violent to each other. This lead to less than optimal results for the _experiment_.
SO, our creator realized the flaw in our initial design and fixed it by selecting and updateing “Noah”, then killing everyone else. Essentially starting the _experiment_ over again.
Our need for “meaning”, “morality”, “religion”, whatever… is part of our programming. Notice that what that “meaning” or “religion” ends up being is pretty much open-ended. There’s no one best or correct answer BECAUSE THERE ISN’T ONE. The point to this programming is so that the EXPERIMENT will continue running correctly… and to see what results from it.
Our creator will be back soon to see what’s become of us. The sociopaths will be seperated out, and the rest of the “moral” slaves will be used for… _something_. Who knows what that might be. I’m guessing farm animals given the way our population is spiking JUST as the creator is about to return, but that’s just a particular theory. There are MANY other possibilities that fit the evidence.
@ BeijaFlor
Yes, truly fascinating. I first came to Buddhism myself through my martial arts background which also included Zen. But it was not until I decided I wanted to know the Koran and Islam in order to learn for myself what this religion was (not what the media is smearing it to be) that I found the profound union of philosophy and purpose in both those religions.
I will use your own words as an example of that union.
. Contrary to Christian belief that “faith alone” in Jesus (idol worship) has absolved you of all past sins, Allah will judge you by what is in your HEART, and by all the deeds you have done, good and bad, and place you on a scale of judgement. In Islam, you might very well not end up in hell, but somewhere inbetween. It was this curious expansion of Islamic “judgement” that seemed to mirror Buddhism’s concept of “realms” (from God’s to hell) that began for me to see the possible union of these two faiths. There is no guarantee of heaven in Islam… none whatsoever… without MERIT AND DEED on this earth to have earned it.
Mohammed (PBUH) spent a good deal of his pre-prophet time by himself in a cave. It was in that cave in fact that he had his first revelation. I can assure you, this was a man that went his own way and when you consider the CONTEXT of the time and place he lived, Mohammed (PBUH) was literally a STRANGER in his own land (as his followers would also come to be known). Having learned how to pray in Islam (I am not a Muslim yet, but YouTube can teach you a lot), I can tell you, the method is very much a form of “meditation” that I never learned in a Christian church. It is very much like ritual Jewish Prayer, which is why Jews assert Islam is nothing but a bad copy of their true faith. Regardless, it is the process of prayer, the physical act, that is akin to Buddhist meditation that I found interesting. Kneeling in place for any period of time, contemplating compassion or Allah, is meditation on “something” beyond this world of material existence. BOTH Islam and Buddhism have meditation practices, of which Sufism and the whirling dervish is the extreme example thereof.
This, in a nutshell, is the life story of Mohammed(PBUH) from the time of the first revelation to his death. Again, if you read the historical and cultural facts of the time and place that was Arabia, it is a miracle Islam took hold.
Again… this is exactly the state of nirvana/samadhi/enlightenment that is beyond words in Islam… the will/word of Allah. He that is not of creation, but before it, beyond it, and forever. This was the second link between Islam and Buddhism for me. While Buddhists claim there to be no god what-so-ever, they all meditate for decades to attain “union” with the eternal peace, truth, state of “reality.” That is simply a fancy way of saying God without saying so. The lesser gods (green tara, etc), or buddhas, that exist in Buddhism fit perfectly into Islam’s teaching of Jinn, spirits, that do exist in a realm “between this world and the next” and cause both good and ill to man in all manner of mischief and assistance. While Buddhists claim there is no “god” in their practice (as such, they don’t call it a religion for that very reason), they clearly have a focus in their meditation that the Islamic tradition mirrors almost completely in its philosophy.
This is the whole purpose of renouncing the physical world and entering into Buddhist retreat and meditation! Total and complete submission to the discovery of one’s ignorance of reality and, when if one should achieve enlightenment, abject submission to the “truth” of reality and living it in the hear and now. Why would one go back to the three poisons – anger, greed and ignorance – once one has liberated oneself from them? Buddhism is submission to the will of the eternal reality of “all that is.” There is no difference in doctrine between Islam and Buddhism on the point of submission… both seek it, and both desire it.
Have you seen the notes on Buddhism? The extensive commentaries going back thousands of years? I have only found one such book, and it boggles the mind. Islam has nothing on the depth of teachings of the “eternal”, but the method of instruction is the same. The Heart Sutra is the sacred text in buddhism and the commentaries on it are infinite.
Yes… it is… Islam is MASCULINE, Buddhism is FEMININE. That is why I can’t seem to make up my mind and go for one or the other, BOTH make up man’s nature and therefore BOTH are needed for his spiritual development.
My personal opinion?
Islam answers questions I have about a power and “purpose” to life that deserves worship and respect. God exists, although man still has not been able to accurately describe him, and most likely never will.
Buddhism is the PRACTICE required to reach God, the divine, the eternal, and free oneself now instead of waiting for judgement day.
Islam is wrong in saying there is no re-incarnation. Muslims contradict themselves in making this claim for, if re-incarnation was not possible, God would require no need to resurrect us for judgement now would he? And, when he does, and God sends us to “heaven or hell or somewhere in between,” what is he talking about?
Why… the seven realms of Buddhist re-incarnation of course. What could be a greater hell for a soul to endure than to be reborn as Dick Cheney! Or a lower realm of consciousness of an instinctual animal, or a rock, no consciousness at all.
Enlightenment or Paradise, re-incarnation or resurrection, they are not incompatible, they are one, or at least they are beginning to be so for myself.
Islam could grow by learning the meditation aspects of Buddhism and the SCIENCE it has developed for ridding the human soul of greed, anger and ignorance. Study of Buddhism would help many Muslims attain an even stronger path toward knowing Allah and submitting to his laws that govern man to his ultimate happiness.
Buddhism could grow in learning that there is a power, a divine presence, that guides all of life. A creator that brought “cause and effect”, and the suffering of the three poisons, into being for a reason… to test man and see if he is capable of attaining the divine state that the creator gave man, and only man out of all his creations, the capability of achieving. (Which is why Buddhists claim it is a PRECIOUS GIFT to have been given a human body in order to learn how to achieve enlightenment!) To say all material existence is an illusion, which is true, is to miss the point of the illusion being an actual THING that exists for man to clear his mind of to the truth. That is why in Islam, the best advice a Muslim can follow in living his life for Allah is to live in this world “as if a stranger, a traveller” for this earthly world is not real, and we are only here but to learn and return to where we came from. How is this incompatible or opposite to Buddhist teachings? It is not, it is simply stated differently.
I doubt many are interested in such matters. But it was contemplating such matters that man advanced himself to the point he has. If we abandon this kind of moral questioning about God and man’s purpose, I fear we will only regress and commit suicide, as is clearly evident the world over today.
As a Buddhist, you might be interested in this book I just found. It is an excellent read on the PRACTICE of Buddhism.
Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines: Or Seven Books of Wisdom of the Great Path
Also… I think Buddhism has it wrong in requiring a man to leave the world and all it has to become more attuned to his natural state of divinity. That is why in Islam, monasticism is forbidden as it goes against man’s nature and God’s law of sexual union for the propagation of the human race – as well as love and companionship, which even Buddhism (coming directly from a lama who was assistant to the Dalai Lama) makes clear – man and woman need each other to acheive enlightenment, it cannot be done alone. To “go your own way” and simply deny women a role in your spiritual development, and you in hers, is false.
“…What happens in a world… to the future of man… when he completely STOPS asking ANY moral questions in searching for a god, a creator, a power BEYOND HIMSELF?…”
The birthrate of that society (or, that subset of society, eg, white liberals) quickly drops well below replacement level, and they are doomed.
Children are an offering on the altar of the future of whatever power or cause you believe in; people who believe in no cause higher than themselves, and don’t care about the future after themselves, typically find that having more than 1 or 2 for vanity’s sake (if any at all), is way too much work.
“…Is this not the REAL threat Islam poses to “the West?” A MORAL JUDGEMENT of all the cultural norms, values and beliefs the west holds as sacrosanct – a globally imposed, secular, feminist, materialist, socialist/fascist/imperialist New World Order…”
To what extent Islam hates us for what we’ve got wrong, versus, what we’ve got right, is a longer discussion than I care to pick apart here. It’s probably a mix.
Interestingly…People who actually CARE about the future of the West, regard the “globally imposed, secular, feminist, materialist, socialist/fascist/imperialist New World Order” not as “sancrosanct” but exactly the opposite: an enemy, alien ideology, a parasitism of the true West, which they earnestly wish to be rid of. Whereas liberals, who think that’s all “sancrosanct”, are precisely the ones who want to leave the West defenseless against an Islamic conquest that would surely destroy it. Strange.
@ MeMyself
Po-ta-toes…. Pa-ta-tas… same difference. Keeping man from killing each other is keeping man from killing himself. Let’s not quibble over semantics.
The thrust of my argument is that religion, in the form of the search for meaning and purpose to life, IS what kept man from killing himself/each other. Without it, death and extinction will be the end game, as is quickly approaching.
That was the whole point. This life is a test, as per Islamic and Buddhist doctrine. Islam makes this test explicit in saying there will be a judgement rendered by our creator at a time in the future. Buddhism makes this test fait accompli, we are judged with every action we take in the here-and-now, which is why freeing oneself from the state of ignorance is so vital to Buddhist practice.
As for Genesis… the story of “the tree of knowledge” is not that of good and evil. It was the discovery of MALE PATERNITY and the ending of goddess/pussy worship… EXACTLY what the west is consumed by today. The Abrahamic faiths, all of them, was the establishment of man as the moral compass and guide for human social development, not woman. And wow… from grass huts to skyscrapers in only a couple 1000 years. Compared to the 10s of 1000s of years worshipping the all-powerful, life giving pussy. I kid you not. I just learned the Kaba in Mecca was most likely a house of sex in PRE Islamic times. Which is why, Islam was THE MRM MOVEMENT of human history. It left Judaism and Christianity in the dust in terms of putting a woman in her “place” so to speak. It had to… for just listen to what http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpUz4Yyttdg“>pre-Islam Arabia was like. I don’t agree with all the speaker has to say about the Kaba, but he has illuminated for me WHY Muhammed rebeled against the social norms of his time, and the resulting PROGESS AND ADVANCEMENT that literally skyrocketed once Islam was established in the Middle East (math, medicine, law and jurisprudence to be only THREE things Islam gave to the “dark ages” west.)
There is an answer, which is WHY Islam irks so many people. Muslims claim to HAVE the answer to man’s laws to live a good life where many others will say that is impossible. We are still discovering this law, that is WHY there are so many answers to date (Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc) For those that look into ALL faiths, there IS a single answer that starts to emerge – truth over falsehood, sexual modesty, family as the foundational unit of society, reverence/faith/gratitude to a “power” beyond man’s comprehension. I am saying it is now time, with our religious past behind us, to look at ALL faiths and find the laws that govern man’s happiness on earth and put them into practice. The MRM is the beginning of the movement in challenging the falsehood of feminism – which is the return to the vagina worship of pagan goddess societies (i.e. pre-genesis)
There is no “return”. No 2nd coming. Allah does not have to physically intervene in our world for his will to be done, neither does he require a prophet or medium for he is all that is. The prophets of the past (Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha) were simply MEN that connected with the divine presence and, to the best of their HUMAN capacity, unearthed some revealed truths about Allah’s plan for man and how he should live. As much as I like Islam, it does truly read like a man simply “making stuff up” as he goes about building his empire. (Even his wife says as much in one Hadith I must verify, when she says Mohammed “revelation” sure seem to conveniently coincide with EXACTLY what he wants at the time.) Mohammed may very well have been nothing more than a very smart, wise and clever Leonidas dealing with the religious hypocrisy that surrounded him… and came up with a solution that catapulted the middle east into the modern age of civilization (i.e. states and laws, not tribes and pagan idol worship)
Any return of anything will simply be this…
A return to the moral question, and perhaps, some wise and prophetic men who come to the foreground to lead the philosophies and religious ideals/stories that will become the root of man’s next giant leap in evolutionary and spiritual development.
There is no divine “punishment” to come. No fire and brimstone… no “rapture”.
Just plain old man learning from his mistakes, picking himself up, and continuing on. Assuming of course he does not kill himself… each other… out of existence.
As many as there are men with imagination. But only one will prove to be true, and neither you nor I will be around to see it. LOL
this article mirrors my recent thoughts on the matter. it may not be perfect, but it’s asking the questions that need to be asked, and raising the points that need to be raised. mrm exists because of man’s co-opted authority. game exists to artificially bolster man’s authority to improve his attractiveness to women. yet neither focuses on what needs to happen: men simply reclaiming the legitimate authority that is their birthright. women cream their fucking panties over this because it represents a man at his apex; it represents the platonic ideal of what a man should be from their eyes. there are all these signs of alpha that game teaches men, but true alphas display these signs without even being conscious of them. why? because they’re too busy making the world their bitch to allow bitches to interfere with the process
marriage and children are no threats to a man who has the simple foresight to sign a pre-nup (and any man so pussy-whipped that he can’t convince her to do this deserves what he gets; chances aren’t bad that if he can’t stand up to her like this the marriage isn’t gonna last long anyhow). feminism can be safely ignored by a society containing men who have legitimate authority. we are the patriarchy. we are brothers. yet we continually divide ourselves with bickering and internal conflict. we can stand united in ways that i have never once witnessed women achieve. yet we don’t
authority is meaningless without a common moral code. how can two walk together unless they are agreed? as soon as my morality is called into question, all pretense of my authority vanishes. the camp has split in two: my camp and the camp of he who questions me. so then, what’ll it be? love your neighbour as yourself? do unto others as you would have them do unto you? an it harm none, do as thou wilt? the laws of the state are inherently moral and simply obeying them makes one moral?
i’m stickin with jesus; i think he was the closest anyone has come to being right and to actually living out the beliefs they claimed. buddha was too much of a whiny rich boy for me, complaining about all the suffering in the world instead of offering a viable alternative. muhammad was clearly on a power trip, trying to do for arabs what jesus did for jews. moses had a lot of shit right, but his teachings have been twisted by thousands of years of interpretation; jesus’ views on moses’ teachings are the ones i agree with most. the philosopher/atheist/agnostic sects use their knowledge and understanding to further self-divide into arbitrary factions
Maximus,
All moral conducts can be generated by just few principles. The Evangiles contain enough of those principles.
Maximus,
Btw, all moral codes were deduced through observasion.
Morality is like physics and chemistry: it is mainly about actions and reactions.
The elements of physics are sets of molecules, the elements of chemistry are atoms and sets of atoms, and the elements of morality are humans.
Morality never accomplished anything. Brute force and ruthless cunning have.
@ Rev Irie
Can I get a hu-ah? Finally… someone GETS what I am talking about and WHY I wrote The Fear of Manning up.
Game is NOT the end-game (pun fully intended). It is a MEANS that will become a CRUTCH to man re-asserting his position of moral guide and authority over society to advance it to the next age of development. (and all evidence is pointing to such an age, like when Jesus split time into BC and AD, although one can rightly argue that was most likely just a Roman thing in context, but none the less, it is what it is).
That is why game for me is so limiting. It focuses on EMULATING other men when one should be CREATING the man one is meant to be. Game is a crutch, a necessary stop on the self-esteem rebuild that is the N. American male, but a crutch none the less and one I hope to break in my next article.
Alpha is not making the world your bitch. You have NO CONTROL over the world. Alpha is total and complete control and mastery of ONESELF, and therefore, control and mastery over WHATEVER THE WORLD THROWS at him. Many men are mistaking cause for effect.
No… marriage and children are no threat to a man who CHOOSES the right woman from the start. You don’t need a pre-nup if you make the right choice. Despite the statsitics, 50% of marriage DO NOT end in divorce, and many of those men and women are VERY HAPPY. Methinks instead of Game and alhpa, men need to be emulating men who have SUCCESSFULL MARRIAGES AND RELATIONSHIPS – not just the ability to score a number and successfully get his dick wet. The real reason behind the marriage strike is this – men are telling women… ALL of you ladies are no good…. smarten up, and MAYBE we will consider union with you again.
No… a pre-nup is not needed IF from the beginning, a man uses a the small two letter word I did to start this sentence PRODIGIOUSLY in courting her (to you Game dudes, that is getting to know a woman and dumping her BEFORE you have sex with her).
No. Do you FEEL the power in the sentence above? It is just ONE word… but a woman KNOWS the difference between a man who says it and does not mean it, and one that does and will use it again if she does not shape up.
The power of NO is all a man needs to be alpha. You can still be the NICEST guy in the world.. but if and when you say NO you MEAN it… she will know she has a man to deal with and not a boy, and she will be in need of a panty change to boot.
Judaism. Christianity. Islam.
Patriarchy.
The uniting of MEN under a single MORAL CODE that ripped humanity into the civilized world.
It can be done again.. it WILL be done again… the cycle demands it.
Nuff said.
This is the essence and BEAUTY of the American Constitution. It enshrined the moral law common to all religions and made it THE law, and man FREE to worship as we wished in accordance to LIVING those common moral laws as he saw fit.
So in answer to your above question? Yes. it is possible to live by the moral law AND choose one’s religion that best express it in practice for his life.
And so you should be free to do. I am a big fan myself, but only because I have learned the truth of his real life and history. I simply cannot swallow ANY of the lies that is Paulianity, the religion of PAUL, not Jesus, that Christians follow.
Do you know WHY Jesus spoke in parables?
It was because his message was for JEWS, not gentiles. He wanted to keep the real shit for his own people who were his target audience. But, he kept having these non-Jews pester him for wisdom and advice, and because he believed in the prophets and the Torah, he did not wish to explain to ‘heathens” the secrets of Jewish salvation… it was NOT FOR THEM. So, he spoke in stories and parables that obfuscated the message. Not something to be proud of, but Jesus is NOT perfect and only HUMAN after all.
Paul… a Jew… DID here the message. Paul also CORRECTLY removed the racial taint of the Jews being God’s “choosen people” and made salvation of ALL of God’s creation available to those that wished to believe IN GOD. But Paul muddled up the teachings of Christ in then advocating faith and worship of the MESSENGER, and not the message. (To be far, Muslims make the same mistake in Mohammed emulation, but at least they believe and assert the difference between FOLLOWING what a man says and does and BELIEVING that man to be a divine incarnation of God, which is patently false and against the fundamental rule of law – “Do not have any other gods before me”)
If you read Paul’s writings, his underlying thesis is a desire to be RID of the Judaic “laws and rules” of the Torah. He wanted salvation the easy way, in that “faith alone” can get you into heaven. Many a Christian will debate this point, that good works are also required, but as a FUNDAMENTAL ARTICLE OF FAITH… to be Christian and to be saved, all one needs to do is believe Christ is Lord and Saviour and… snap… you’re in, for he already DIED for you (sacrifice, paganism again) and therefore you are forgiven (i.e. no personal responsibility as that has been shuffled off on to Jesus. YOU cannot save yourself!)
That is why for me, Islam and the doctrine of PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY should be the core of the MRM moral philosophy. Jesus’ teachings, ALL of them Islam accepts which means the doctrine of love and forgiveness should also be a core plank of MRM philosophy, but NOT at the expense of personal responsibility.
Rev Irie, if you are open to learning the true context of Jesus’ life… you might want to check out this book.
The Jesus Papers
http://www.amazon.ca/Jesus-Papers-Exposing-Greatest-Cover-Up/dp/0060827130/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1302731298&sr=1-1
You can disagree with the author’s claims of Christ’s fake death and resurrection, but what you CAN’T deny is the TRUTH of the historical, political, religious, and archeological contextual record of the TIME AND PLACE that Jesus inhabited. Jesus was a man with balls and ambition who wanted to overturn the flagrant and wide spread HYPOCRISY of faith in his own people (Jews) and return them to the true word of God – love and peace with thy neighbor. (i.e. the other Jewish tribes, which Paul expanded to include Gentiles and all those who believed in Jesus and his message. An amazing and important time in man’s moral development.)
No matter what religion I research now, I will not and cannot divorce it from the TIME AND PLACE of its genesis. Which again, is why Islam seems like such a PROGRESSIVE book of revelation. To be a Muslim is to accept the Koran as the word of god IN CONTEXT to the time and place the Prophet lived. That is something many westerners do not understand nor accept. They read of “kill the Jews and Christians where you find them” in a Koranic verse and extrapolate that to mean the same TODAY. It does not. Those verses are God’s commandments to Mohammed in his dealings with the peoples around him AT THE TIME he was establishing Islam. And like today, Christians and Jews did not like some “Arab” telling them they are once again, not following the word of God and have incurred his wrath (the Jews) and are misguided (the Christians).
The Bible… for myself… has always read like a “story book”. Interesting, but not something to base your life’s moral centre upon.
The Koran on the other hand, if you should read it, reads like wisdom on life and the hubris of man in denying God’s existence and the laws by which he is bound.
Islam and Muslims today… need a reformation of their faith, much like Martin Luther did for Christians to free them from Catholic dogma and political machinations (for it was, for the time and place, merely the continuation of the Roman Empire under Popes instead of Emperors).
Islam is undergoing a reformation, a questioning of its fundamental PRACTICES, not its teachings. (i.e. the hijab, jihad, etc). What we are seeing in the men’s movement, and I think with my article, is the PARALLEL reformation of men AROUND THE WORLD in searching for and looking to reassert their moral authority to move forward into the next phase of man’s progress and evolution.
So… you can stick with Jesus and be guided aright, as any Muslim will attest because it is NOT the particular faith by which one believes in that will get him into heaven or not, but in the ADHERENCE AND LIVING of God’s word and advice to man having been revealed over the centuries by many prophets.
Enjoin together in what we share in common, and do not argue and divide by that in which we differ.
Is this not PRECISELY what you are asking of men in the MRM Rev Irie?
Damn straight he was. Jesus was in Rome, a place that was a lot closer to Greek “civilization” (i.e. by rule of law, not tribes) than Mohammed was. Mohammed HAD TO go on a power trip and kick ass because of how BACKWARD his fellow Arabs were in their spiritual development. This, I think, will explain to many a western and Christian complaint WHY the arab world is still so “backward.” Mohammed tried to do to Arabia what Apple ended up doing with the Mac OS… kicking it whole scale into the future with one “revelation.” But unlike a software computer system, the “core operating software” of human moral development can’t just be “updated” and made new. There will a shit load of patches to problems and fixes that underlie the OS that was already there before.
And he succeeded. No matter your faith or views on Islam, if you look at the life of the Prophet, and the Empire that emerged from it, you simply cannot say that Islam did nothing for moral development of the Arab people or the future of man. The discoveries and advancements in science that came about during that time were BECAUSE Islam differentiated between FAITH and SCIENCE in a way dark age Christian Europe could not. It was not until AFTER the Crusades, when the knowledge of Islam science came back to Europe, that Galileo was able to convince Europe that if the Church did not STOP interfering in man’s quest to understand the universe with dogmatic adherence to Biblical “revelation”, that “The West” ever BECAME an entity at all. The West IS a product of Islam. Without it, we would still be without soap, surgery and asking “how much” it will cost to get into heaven.
See Koran. See Jesus. See what happened historically AFTER the Jews were released from Babylon and returned to the “holy land” where the Jews that DID NOT LEAVE kept up the traditions the returning ones HAD LOST! Nuff said. This is THE split in the Jewish faith that has resulted in the banking/oligarchic NWO system we have in place today. It is not conspiracy if it is based on FACT. There was a split in Judaism upon the return of the exiles from Babylon. This is evident today in the HEART of Israel itself. The tribe of Judah (I believe, can’t check just right now) MOVED the temple from the mountain where Moses had established “the law” to the current site of Jerusalem because the Jews that were already there upon the exiles return where TELLING THE EXILES THEY WERE WORSHIPPING AND SACRIFICING ALL WRONG! The returned exiles got uppity about it and said, “Screw you, we are going to setup our own one God temple.” The rest, as they say, is history.
It is a digression… but Wikipedia begins to explain the split here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Judah
“For the first sixty years, the kings of Judah tried to re-establish their authority over the northern kingdom, and there was perpetual war between them. Israel and Judah were in a state of war throughout Rehoboam’s seventeen year reign. “
There was a VERY clear split in the Jewish faith of Abraham and his one God, and if you research WHY AND HOW that split came about, it explains THE ENTIRE situation in the middle east. Family feuds are the most nasty and brutal of all wars, and the world is about to be engulfed in the biggest family feud of them all.
The lost. Period.
Excellent commentary. Far more so than I expected. Thank you all.
@ Maximus,
This is where you lose me. How is religion created by biology? What is the mechanism? How do you reconcile the creation of many different religions?
It is not an either or question. That is were so many people get stuck. Religion is IN our biology. Our biological “nature” is revealed by religion. That is why there is the struggle of Jacob’s ladder. We fight a biology that is constantly dragging us down to the earth, but our biology also compels us to climb up toward the heavens no matter how strong the ropes are that tie us to the earth
Islam does have an interior, spiritual dimension- and it is usually called Sufism. There are hundreds of Sufi brotherhoods from one end of the Islamic world to the other, from Morocco to China. I would suggest looking
into any one of the major Sufi schools such as the Mevlevi, Naqshbandi, Qadiri, Nimatollahi or Alawiyya.
And here is a clip showing a Turkish Sufi circle performing the remembrance ritual:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP-RNYIyDKE&feature=related
Attilla
“A fundamental lack of anyone asking any moral questions.”
Sounds reasonable. I always say the reason I am so passionate about these issues is I loathe injustice. I strive for morality, not because I want to, but because I have to. It’s in me, regardless of my opinions regarding faith or nihilism.
Yet I won’t sacrifice everything for justice, nor at this point in my life do I believe I will ever have children. Why? Because I believe the lack of morality in humans to be a disease without a lasting cure. Religion is a salve, perhaps, but religion is failing. It remains to be seen if religious civilizations will win out over the Godless ones in the long run, thus self-correcting and returning humanity to morality (until we lose morality once again). Perhaps it is inevitable that, as you said, “When man puffs his ego and pride so full that he believes himself to be OUTSIDE the laws of nature, the universe, of God, there can only be one destination for him – the dustbin of history, a fossil, just like the dinosaurs.” Perhaps that is true.
There is no argument for the existence of a God that has ever convinced me since I became an adolescent. And I find it likely that there is no argument against the existence of a God that will ever convince you. But it doesn’t really matter, truthfully.
The real question is how to instill morality in humanity at large even in the face of those in power who discourage it. Perhaps religion is the answer, and if so, we must ask ourselves how to instill faith in the populace even in the face of those in power who discourage it.
So, how to make people *believe*, in a society where it’s so much easier not to believe?
I have a feeling technological collapse will tend to bring people back to morality and religion, but there will be a great deal of immorality before order is restored once more. Maybe we’ll realize again that we are social animals and must work and play with other men. Right now, it’s so easy to be disconnected and take things for granted.
I wonder if, rather than being transitional stage, it is part of a cycle that will never end. There’s the misandry bubble, but maybe you could call this the immorality bubble. When the bubble bursts, collapse will result in a period of strife, which will lead to a period of morality, allowing for technological advances and immorality to return once more and lead once again to a collapse.
To put an end to the cycle, you would have to live in a perpetual state of either morality or immorality. To achieve a state of lasting morality, you would need a powerful force for morality, perhaps a very strong religion. To achieve a state of lasting immorality, well, that’s what the bad guys at the top are trying to do.
But human beings have evolved to be competitive. We are part (mostly?) selfish, even if we are also part altruistic. The most ruthless usually rise to the top, it seems. So a successful religion would have to punish the ruthless, the immoral, and have the moral agree that this is just. But it would be hard for a sense of morality to overcome family ties and selfishness – if a child commits a terrible sin, how many parents would still protect them?
Maybe with enough knowledge, men could create a religion that could hold together a lasting moral society. But isn’t it that pursuit of knowledge that leads us to the belief that we know more than God, and to denial that God even exists?
We will always question *why* we are here, just as you stated. But with enough knowledge of the way things work, there will always be a few people who question how we can *know* there is a God, and therefore question the whole system. And a few people questioning the system will lead to others questioning it, one day leading to collapse of the system.
Perhaps the only way to keep human beings moral is to deny them knowledge so that we do not have the opportunity to live in excess. Perhaps with enough knowledge, such a system could be set up and then the knowledge destroyed. But I doubt we will ever gain enough knowledge to do it. What if we were wrong, and we missed something? Perhaps you could have “keepers” of the knowledge, a small set of people chosen to have the truths revealed to them. But I think there would be great risk in this – great risk for the “keepers” to mess things up, thinking they could do it “better” or just responding in immoral ways when they realize they’ve been lied to their entire lives.
Is not our desire for knowledge, to *understand* it all, the ultimate heresy? We desire the omniscience of God. We are Babylon.
Yet how do you create a lasting moral civilization without intimate knowledge of how human beings really work? You can’t do it with faith alone. And so a few men of moral character, of faith in *something*, would need to seek the powers of God to put things in motion, then willingly give them up.
I don’t think I could be one of those people. I don’t even know that such a society would be better off than where we’re heading now, which seems to be pure survival of the fittest / most ruthless, in a never-ending cycle of bubble and burst.
But I do not have faith. I feel powerless to change things. And so, why put all my effort into it?
And what if a moral society without knowledge just stayed on this planet until they perished by natural catastrophe? What if an immoral society had a better chance of establishing on other planets due to their greed? Could morality be a threat to survival in the long run?
It feels like too much to comprehend and resolve.
I don’t know much about religions, though. Maybe someone’s already solved these problems. :/
@ Nestorius
Dude… I just shit my pants. You have NO IDEA how TRUE this statement is and the implications that can be drawn from it.
Let me correct your observation, for it is NOT an analogy as you tried to use it.
Morality IS like physics
And so to therefore the human condition, a perfectly predictable and undeniable, repeatable wave form throughout history.
Way to much to go into here to explain why… and if I lost Ryu at the biological level, I will completely disappear at the level of physics and man. I am still trying to collect my brains from the cognitive dissonance it is undergoing today.
Let’s me say this… I now want to by a PS3 and a 43″ plasma so I can numb myself and stop reading/searching. Because the more I search and read, the weirder this rabbit hole gets and I am starting to get really freaked out.
@ Attila.
Agreed. I really do need to search out and research Sufism. Although many more dogmatic Muslim Imam’s will argue it goes against the Koran and Sunna to create a division and name it (i.e. Sunni and Shia as well), they particularly seem to have a problem with Sufism for some reason and I think it is because it does focus on more “mystical” aspects of spirituality, which to a hard core Muslim, starts to smack of challenging Allah and his knowledge.
Time for bed.. I hope my brain shuts down so I can sleep. LOL
@ Jay Hammers.
I
Physics!
Shit… people… God… please stop sending me this stuff. I am not looking for it nor do I want to find it… but it keeps coming.
I wanted to read your comments before bed… will reply tomorrow.
God damn… the PHYSICS of MAN!
I feel like this sometimes too. I tend toward nihilism now but I still recognize there may be other options.
One could spend his entire life looking for a solution and never find it. But if we keep learning, we can always make an informed choice each step of the way.
A pre-nup won’t do anything for child support, right?
I think it’s true that if you can’t convince her to sign a pre-nup, you probably aren’t doing it right.
But if you’re doing it right, and you’re choosing the right girl, there’s no need for a pre-nup anyway. In some ways, a pre-nup is an acknowledgment of a man not being confident in his choice of woman, which isn’t very “manly”.
Still, I wouldn’t fault anyone for getting a pre-nup – I would suggest most guys do. And if she were not willing to get one if you asked, then that would be a red flag.
I simply don’t feel the need for a pre-nup with my fiancee.
I hope you’re right, but I am concerned that with “too much” knowledge, morality is compromised. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe with enough knowledge we can really make the case for sustainable morality.
I think I see where you’re going with humanity/physics/waves, but that doesn’t bode well for the idea that we could become truly enlightened and moral, does it, if we continue in an oscillating pattern? Perhaps Islam increased the offset from zero. Perhaps one day we could increase the offset above zero significantly while reducing the amplitude to near zero, resulting in an enlightened, stable society that would continue to increase the offset above zero. I don’t think this can happen quickly, as unless human nature changes the offset will always be quite limited. But natural processes, with enlightened society as a catalyst, could get us there.
But who will win, the “bad guys” at the top right now or the “good guys” who want us to truly progress? Is there really enough awareness building that men could band together for morality? When the collapse comes, how far will we plummet? And when we rebuild, will we really be able to do better? Has humanity ever learned anything from its past? Perhaps there is some hope?
This is where my ignorance shines, as I’m not a student of history or religion. They certainly interest me, it seems, but most history as it was taught in school was made boring, and religion in church was boring too. And I was too busy distracting myself with other things at the time.
Perhaps we are not meant to know too much. Not only does it get harder to make a choice, but I perceive a risk of losing one’s grip – and then how does one changes things, how does one survive at all?
Good discussion, all.
“Shit… people… God… please stop sending me this stuff.”
Well, you deserve it. I hadn’t wanted to spend this much time here tonight.
The reason that manning out is a moral choice for many is that the only other road left to one right now is violence. Yes if all men stood up (they won’t too many profit from the system) we wouldn’t need to do this but grabbing responsibility while trapped in a irresponsible system requires bloodshed. 10,000 men deciding that death is preferable to divorce court/feminism and taking it upon themselves to attack the judges, lawyers, etc. would start a larger war that would in America at least, likely end with nuclear and biological solutions by our betters.
This may happen anyway but if the GOD you say exists does exist it is that belief that should stay your hand. Sooner or later you will be accountable to him and he is going to want to know how you justified killing his creation. It was the right thing? Really? Can you make a man? I am a Christian with a firm belief in GOD – that is where I come from. I do not believe that walking away from evil, simply stopping my participation in it (rather than actively fighting it with the only effective methods left to us) is a morally reprehensible choice. Is it the right decision… I don’t know but I do know that I am not willing to gamble on killing people I cannot make or replace hoping that this is the right decision.
Two things I thought about in the shower….
- Times of decline and collapse are probably the best times to institute a new belief system. If it weren’t for our economic and social problems, would In Mala Fide or men’s rights blogs even exist? If they did, they wouldn’t have nearly as many followers.
- It seems to me the more we understand technology (physics?) the easier it is to doubt the existence of God and thus lose faith. But if your belief system were to focus on some other faith, perhaps faith that human beings can be better, then that gives us something to strive for. Good men could doubt it, but they’d still cling to the hope that we can be better, because we do want a reason for being. It would also be nice for the teachings to be demonstrably universally correct. I’ve never liked Christianity because it seemed unnecessary – what need did I have for a belief system that had little utility for me AND whose teachings didn’t even make sense (sometimes because they were wrong, sometimes perhaps they weren’t explained). I didn’t realize *why* traditional roles work for men and women until I got into the manosphere, and then it all came together. Until then, I thought perhaps I was just a misogynist.
A belief system would have to stand the test of time – it would have to reflect reality AND explain why the system really makes sense. It would have to incorporate refutations of alternative systems (like feminism). And it would have to show a path to achieve meaning in one’s life and in humanity.
It’s not that human beings want to believe in a God, but that they want to believe life has meaning and that they can contribute to a purpose. And personally I want to believe humanity can become better. I have, however, lost my faith.
Yet I can’t help but hope. Could hope be enough?
Moral codes are not shorthand for religious codes. No religion is not shorthand for nihilism. It is perfectly possible to have ethical codes with no divinity, though it certainly takes effort. With that said Maximus, you are onto something about the lack of moral questioning in the 21st century. “Judging” and “discrimation” are now words of horror to many people.
@maximus
Interesting view. Yet, I still can’t decide if it’s not God who nudges Man toward Death.
The sense of abandonment by a god/God is what often becomes THE lure of suicide.
@ GrellFar,
“Moral codes are not shorthand for religious codes. No religion is not shorthand for nihilism. It is perfectly possible to have ethical codes with no divinity, though it certainly takes effort.”
And we swing back toward Buddhism … more toward Theravada Buddhism, the Path of an individual making his own way toward Enlightenment. Maximus pointed out, rightly, that there exists a vast library of commentary on the Buddha’s teachings … but commentary is not the Path; neither is erudition, neither is book-learning. You get there by going there – via right knowledge, right aspiration, right speech, right behavior, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right absorption.
Pardon me for not being eloquent, erudite and authoritative about Buddhism. It’s been a long, long time since I studied it originally. I’ve come back to it, this time around, partly for more exploration and partly because I’ve learned some things along the way that might be worth sharing … unfortunately for this space, they’re lessons that don’t quite translate into words in print….
@BeijaFlor
I likely know even less about buddhism (though I have read “The Unfettered Mind”). Perhaps it’s a way worth pursuing. My thoughts are more on creating meaning instead of falling into nihilism at the prospect of no deities.
And here is another clip showing a different Sufi group invoking the Living One (Hayy Hayy Allah) -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqZkeoNkA2o&feature=related
Not for the weak-willed or faint-hearted!
I skipped this video you linked in your last article, Maximus:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5_zbrAYnQE
But I’ve watched it now.
I just want to say this is what I hate about religion – the lack of intellectual honesty.
Only a fool would believe that pulling 3 marbles out of a hat of 10 and expecting them to come in out in order of 1, 2, 3, is at all similar to the process of evolution, which relies on survival of the fittest for selection. These are not at all comparable scenarios.
The guy even asks who is a genius of calculus, who can calculate the odds of pulling out the marbles in a specific order?
Well, it’s not calculus, guy, it’s statistics, and the odds are:
1/10*1/9*1/8*….*1/2*1/1 = 1/3.6million, NOT 1 to 26 million.
This is what I hate about religion – the blatant lies and misinformation, no better than feminism. And people wonder why intellectuals resist religion?
You don’t know me, Mr. religious guy with a white hat, just because you talk like you do.
@ Jay Hammers
Nothing wrong with knowledge… it is man’s choice in APPLICATION of that which he learns that gets him into trouble… thinking he is “god” and beyond his laws. Islam was THE religion that made it FUNDAMENTAL as an article of faith to search for TRUE knowledge. They did not shun science, the embraced it and found no threat to their religion in discovering the secrets of the universe.
Think of it this way. The wave pattern of life and humanity/matter are all harmonics of the “one” wave… the “logos” and the sacred word of Jewish lore. The waves that overlap from this one fundamental wave and interact with others creating interference patterns, give birth to matter and ALL THERE IS, including the cyclic (i.e. asian) nature of humanity/the universe.
So… while there may be a cycle wave we cannot avoid (i.e. booms and busts economically and morally), that does not mean WE need to be carried away by them. That is for the sheep (or unbelievers). I found it profound that in learning the above physics (I am just absorbing the concepts I have taken in), “zero-point” wave energy where all matter springs from really does make a strong case for God and an inevitable fate we cannot outrun (as well as the Buddhist concept of a single “mind” we can return to).
One Islamic lecturer put your question of cycles being inevitable this way.
Like a ship on the ocean, faith in Allah does not mean you will not encounter any waves.
Faith means that no matter what waves come your way, you will be able to sail through them.
This is why man’s search for God/meaning is so important, and why this search in action via religion in a society is so paramount to humanity’s survival. Nihilism is all well and good as in the search, the possibility of it all meaning “nothing” does come up. But the fact these cycles DO exist, and that good and moral man CAN affect the outcome of these cycles and guide them (while inevitable, they are not unalterable being harmonic wave patterns that we CAN influence since the human soul/DNA is a WAVE from the primary source)… gives one hope… but you have to believe, in something, or else nihilism takes over and the gun gets pointed to the head pretty quick.
Oh boy did it. Or more precisely, as all religions seem to point in one direction, it was not an offset but a RETURN to zero – the fundamental law/wave!
You really have to go back into the archeological record and understand the CULTURE of pagan arab society to understand just HOW MUCH OF A MIRACLE Islam was to have been born and take hold in that region. In fact, in one movie about the rise of Islam, the time of the Prophet allegorically MIRRORS EXACTLY what is happening in the world today… I shit you not. Take all the corruption, banking and corporate greed and control, abject poverty, sexual immodesty (i.e. feminism/femals running amock and the pussy men, nice guys PUA’s and jerks and all)… it is all there in pagan arabia. Keep in mind as well… that a fundamental practice of Islam is an outright BAN on usury… the making of money from money with NO WORK OR VAUE created for society.
It is a powerful film.
The Message: The Story of Islam
http://youtu.be/Di3YabImTM4
We can… we just have to decide to make it so. I think the MRM is the beginning of this “wave” of new men. I have met a few in my home town and while small… there is a strength of conviction and purpose that is unmistakeable in their body language and countenance.
Man has always rebuilt. That is why the wave is a cycle. Good shall overcome as inevitably as evil shall return. With faith, you simply ride the waves and laugh the whole time through the storm while everyone else around you is gripped in fear and panic and anxiety. We are born to meet death, but they are few that prepare to meet it. That is is why my first article for In Mala Fide to men here was to address the topic of fear. Remove fear. Know that good exists. Stop worrying and live your life for good.
I suspect I have a few years on you, that is all, in my reading and questioning. I think I am going to make a post of my book list alone…. all that I have read… as a guide for others, should they care to turn off the computer and venture into a library or bookstore.
That is why I lamented and talked about turning to the “god” of video games, the PS3, and the boob-tube to numb myself. Not gonna happen, but I would be dishonest if I did not admit to thinking it at times.
While knowledge can be dangerously paradigm shifting, all that I have learned has only GROUNDED me more… far more… than those around me. I walk with a calm step and grace, laugh easily, and anger is a shadow emotion to me… it simply does not exist in my life. I find that people who are AFRAID of knowledge, of having their “world” turned upside down by learning truths, are the most fearful, anxious, controlling, ANGRY people one will ever meet in their lifetime. So not one of those people, which is what drives me to constantly learn all I can about life in the short time I have available to do so.
Searchers like Nietzsche… who clearly DO lose their minds… are the men who refuse to have faith in anything. These men are not meant to survive, and they pass on and leave nothing to the future of man’s development. They are afraid to act because they believe action is useless. And if they do act, they act entirely for themselves and, as with all narcisstic / psychopathic behviour, they eventually devour themselves and all those that follow them… hence, the birthrate of “the west” plummeting to below replacement level while the Arab nations are pumping out 3 to 6 kids and more per female.
The Koran speaks of this (an incredible book). Allah made all peoples, but for those that refuse his guidance, he takes them out and replaces them with another of his choosing.
Have faith in something… survive and prosper.
Have faith in nothing but yourself…. extinction and decline.
Sound like any cultures we know?
I don’t have time right now to read your response, Maximus, but I will later today.
I wanted to link you to something I said over at Paul Elam’s website in response to one of his articles, regarding what we do after the collapse (building a better society, y’know).
I think there is a lot of room for discussion out there on how to rebuild after the collapse. And I have a feeling there are places out there already in the manosphere that are discussing how, but I haven’t looked into it yet. I know there is a “collapse” blog out there but I don’t know if it discusses the “reconstruction”.
Here’s the link to my comments:
http://www.avoiceformen.com/2011/04/14/a-letter-to-traditional-women/comment-page-1/#comment-30787
(also see the responses from Paul and myself – I am “The Enlightener”)
Be back later.
@ Remhoraz,
Indeed… but your concept of violence is a shallow one.
Notice that men are choosing to WALK AWAY, and NOT commit violence. Far from man being the violent one, it is WOMAN that goads all weak men into violence. Real men… the majority… want nothing to do with it.
Violence is always an act of WEAKNESS…. an admission of no power… when used FIRST and as the AGGRESSOR.
The men that walk away from violence are the ones that will USE violence only as a last resort and to good purpose – a LAST choice and in DEFENCE. This gives me hope. This is why EVERY FIRST MOVE in karate is a DEFENSIVE posture.
Walking away is a fine choice. But refusing to defend yourself when under attack is another matter entirely.
Those who cannot defend themselves will never know peace, for they will always be under threat of attack by those that choose violence first in all their dealings with other men.
I think the last Rambo film was quiet simple in this message. A brutal film of abject violence (as it should be for an 80s remake)… but the MESSAGE… was simple.
RAMBO: “Are you bringing in any weapons?”
MISSIONARY: “Of course not.”
RAMBO: “You’re not changing anything.”
Peace… at all costs. But when CONFRONTED with violence against you… you cannot simply turn your back and walk away. And when VIOLENCE is the only method the enemy respects, talking is of no use. Ghandi, with great respect, would not have accomplished what he did if America was in control of India today. The British, with its history of respect for its own people in freeing itself from the crown’s control in establishing a parliamentary system, could be swayed by non-violence and moral exhortation to grant the same to the Indian nation and its peoples.
Today?
America would shoot Ghandi on the spot and that would be the end of it… and anyone that tried to march in peaceful protest with him.
Once violence is used against a peaceful people (i.e. MGTOW)… and shows no signs of abating… to continue to “turn the other cheek”, to walk away, is asking to be enslaved.
Islam is a religion of peace, but it has no MORAL problem with violence in defense of oneself.
That is something the Christian west, and many Christians, cannot and will not ever understand. Christianity, in my personal experience, is a religion of slavery, not submission, to God. Slavery is not by choice, it is by imposition which is what Constantine did – a pagan Roman Emperor that “found Jesus” and made it the state religion of oppressive control. Islam, was by choice, individual choice, to be FREE to submit to God out of belief and faith. There is a WORLD of difference between the two and why we see uprisings in the Middle East that SHOULD BE TAKING PLACE on every street in America… but it won’t, not yet, because of the programming of the slave mindset that Christianity has impressed on the western mind.
Islam came out of an OPPRESSIVE environment and was a response to being asked to continue to be slaves and disrespected by the elite.
Islam said no.
Christianity, was the good teaching of Jesus, that become perverted in the hands of the Roman’s and absorbed by the ruling elite to continue their oppressive control over the masses they viewed as slaves. When the Spanish inquisition began, Christians did not say “no”, they pointed fingers and joined in the persecution of their fellow men.
Those that turn away in FEAR of violence are the ones that commit the greatest atrocities upon mankind.
Those that turn away from violence in RESTRAINT, and choose their time and place of DEFENSE (peaceful, if possible, violence if necessary), are the ones that do God’s will on earth.
Far from it.
The power they have is useless in the face of a MASS uprising.
They know it… and that is why it scares the shit out of them that so many people are waking up to what they are planning.
Secondly… while insane, the elite fear death EVEN MORE than you or I ever could imagine. They won’t risk killing themselves. They will use violence and repression ONLY so long as it actually works and there is FEAR in the populace. Take away that fear… challenge the bully… and they will cringe in fear and horror at the TRUE strength of good men and women who finally stand up, break their slave mind programming, and say NO, NO MORE!
While numb and passive now compared to Europe and the M. East… America will have its “wake up” movement and when it does, I think it will be massive, non-violent (to a degree) and sweeping. It will be game over for the people in power. The psychopaths that make up the police/military are but a tiny, tiny FRACTION of the good men and women in uniform that will not shoot at fellow citizens and in turn demand these bankster tryrants hand back the keys to the people… or else!
Don’t give into fear. That is what the elite want. That is how they win.
What hand? I advocate nothing other than defense of your right to existence free from oppression and bondage to a wealthy elite?
God will judge me… and I fear not his judgement. It is the one tenant of Islam (and all Abrahamic faiths) I have never understood. Fear God. Why? What have I to fear if I have done good in my life? Knowing I am not perfect, again, what have I to fear?
I will not have killed his creation. Man will have killed himself. God will judge those by what is in their hearts, and I have no fear of God looking into my heart for what he will find.
No. I can not make a man. But I can BECOME one.
Walking away from evil.. letting it continue its work… is PRECISELY the kind of action one will be judged by.
If you are ignorant of evil, that is one thing.
But if you know it, and refuse to combat it, that is a whole other matter.
I also find it interesting that the first option your belief seems to entail is violence and death.
It does not have to be this way.
Peaceful protest, with DEFENSIVE violence if required, is the way.
That is why Islam appeals to me.
As a Christian growing up, this whole “turn the other cheek” business… i.e. walk away… never sat right with me. It is weak. It is slavish. It is unmanly.
Islam does not advocate violence UNLESS it is in defense of oneself, one’s family and community.
Secondly… should those that fight you STOP and request peace… as a Muslim, you must grant it and put down your sword.
The Crusades were the BLOODIEST of all religious wars. The Crusaders killed EVERYONE they met… men, women, children, animals… they left NOTHING alive.
When the Muslims took back their territory from the Crusaders, they only killed combatants and left those that sumbitted to Muslim rule live.
Islam… is a religion of peace… but it is NOT one of fear of confrontation when threatened.
The Middle East is the LAST REGION of earth that has not submitted to TOTAL CONTROL of the global corporate banking system.
For one world government, you have to have NO INDEPENDENT states. All states must come under the rule of the coming one world currency and government… and therefore they must all “plug in” completely to the matrix of the west. This is why Libya is under attack. Iran is next. And these “revolutions” in the M. E. are CIA driven to remove tyrants that, while useful in the past, are a barrier now to COMPLETE control over oil and market integration into the “global economy.”
That is why the revolt, if there is to be no violence and no deaths, must come from America. America has to stand up and finally say no to IT’S OWN SLAVERY! If America can free itself from the satanic psychopaths that control it, the WHOLE WORLD will be freed.
That is why it pisses me off to no extent that so many Americans will not stand up and start protesting what the government is doing. Sheep… slaves… you get what you deserve. I for one, live in Canada. I for one, when the shit hits the fan, will not walk away and do nothing when the time comes. I doubt I will be a leader. My character is more in line with my namesake, Maximus. A good general who believes in following when a GOOD leader is at the front of the line. But, when that leader is killed (the fascist banking coup of Obamerica)… I will have to find a way to do my duty and defend my nation’s independence. Peacefully and through the political process if at all possible… but should collapse come… well… I am glad I have four years of karate and some judo under my belt.
@ Jay Hammers,
Damn… so it is not just me that has epiphanies in the shower? LOL
That is why fear of the future, which still looms large in my thinking some days, subsides the more I come to terms with this simple fact, which also implies faith.
What is meant to be will be. IT IS OUT OF YOUR CONTROL!
One could not have this MRM revolution without feminism having been forced upon him.
One could not have a potential evolutionary leap in moral consciousness without a preceding near collapse of all morality.
It is in trying to CONTROL things that man loses faith. Which is why religion and the search for God evolved to prevent man from killing himself – give up control, you don’t have it, and trust that whatever happens, will be and there is no point in wishing it “was not so.”
And what is the result? A near universal search by all men, all races, creeds and colours, all searching for SOMETHING despite the tsunami of “evidence” that his fears of nihilism and there being no God just might be true.
It seems… just like a wave… the more we REJECT GOD… the more we go in SEARCH of him.
You might think you are alone, as do I many times, but one google search and walk through the “new age” aisle of any bookstore is clear. Man, the world over, is searching like he has never searched before for meaning in his life.
They are. Pick any religion. Throw out the dogma and “cultural” errors, keep the underlying philosophies and teachings… and they are ALL universally applicable and correct. Where the squabling comes in is in ACTION, in practice.
Once man realizes religion is merely the EXERCISE of the search for meaning, the search for God, and that it does not matter what faith one chooses, we will move forward and most likely create something new.
More importantly… instead of institutionalizing this new belief system, and therefore imposing it on others via social pressure who only become hypocrites in the end, I think man’s faith and religion will be personal and his own… and will mesh well with all men. Very much an aboriginal approach… kind of like a vision quest, but global in scope with RESPECT for all views since it will be acknowledged there is no SINGLE path to God, as long as God is the end of the journey.
The vision you outlined in your comment…
“perhaps faith that human beings can be better, then that gives us something to strive for”
This will be the result of man the globe over, with the internet and google translation and personal quests of billions, researching all faiths and coming to realize all faiths are one. I suspect we may see “religion” morph into people going to a Mosque, a Church and a Temple… with no requirement to stay or leave.
I am not Muslim. I have taken no Shahada.
That said… in light of your comments above… go pick up a Koran (by Yusef Ali, 1600 pages with notes and commentary!)
Christianity is not wrong… but it is seriously misguided and leads one far far astray from the true path.
If you felt “alien” in a Christian church/world to the point of thinking you were a misogynist… that comment alone… proves to me Christians are misguided and Islam will be a BREATH OF FRESH AIR. It will feel like FINALLY… someone that gets ME.. a MAN!
Islam has its problems… even Muslims admit this and their community is in as dire straights as Christians… but the foundation they have is so much stronger to grow and REFORM from. I doubt that we will see Christianity as a “religion” in the near future. I suspect in my life time, I will read about Christianity as a religion in man’s past that once guided him, but no more.
Islam is rising like a phoenix the world over. Buddhism as well in many places, especially here in N. America. All other faiths are barely able to hang on to the believers they have. This is fact. Judaism, Hinduism, Sikism… and those with names we don’t know are clearly not in the game… are simply not going to be players in man’s future quest to know the divine. That is why I selected Islam and Buddhism for study myself. I still want to learn more about the Hindu tradition as it seems to have influenced Buddhism immensely… but in doing so… Buddhism shuffled off and left behind all the caste and gods-upon-gods-upon-gods that make Hinduism THE pantheon, pagan religion on the planet.
Islam. Buddhism. Library. Go. NOW!
Don’t lock your brain into “this or that” religion. Just go and read. You might be surprised at what you will find.
You have not lost faith. You are closer than ever.
If you had lost faith in humanity… you would have TL;DR this piece and not looked back.
By the way… what is TL;DR?
A Grellfar
Shit… one sentence and you summed up my whole argument.
I bow to you sir.
@ Firepower
Allah abandons no one.
Man abandons the search for God.
Man mistakes God having abandoned him when he does not “find” God, or God does not seem to respond to his pleas.
The weak man thinks he is in control of the world. When he admits defeat and appeals to the one that is supposed to control the world and still gets no relief from his suffering… he says God does not exist and therefore there is no purpose to life. He kills himself.
The man of strength realizes all he can do is try and, God willing, he may be successful. Should he not be, he does not blame God for his trouble, but looks into himself first. If he finds he has done no wrong (unlikely), he then assumes that whatever failure or stress has been put to him is for his own good, it was meant to be, for as time goes by and in hindsight, looking back… he can see that ALL HIS LIFE was but preparation for who and where he is now and that NOTHING HE CHOOSE would or could be changed if he had tried. His whole life was planned, and the more he fought to control it, the more life controlled him.
There is Japanese Kanji on my wall that sums this up simply.
“Struggle is the meaning of life. Defeat or victory is in the hands of God. But struggle itself is one’s duty and should be one’s joy.”
There you have it. The meaning of life. The Japanese… are now undergoing the most serious struggle for victory or defeat they as a people have ever had to face.
I have a feeling.. if this is their cultural heritage.. Japan will do just fine.
The west?
Not a betting man myself.
@ BeijaFlor
The parallels are so clear it is scary.
From the opening Sura of the Koran…
Guide us to the STRAIGHT WAY/PATH
ALL the tenants of Buddhism summed up in one sentence and core belief.
This is why Islam needs to open itself to the ideals and teachings of Buddhism. While Islam sets the goal (living for and submission to Allah and his will)… Buddhism guides man to the PRACTICE of exercising complete control over his mind, in meditation, to focus on the divine/eternal and achieve union with it.
Mind blowing.
@ Atilla
WOW…. that video… is definitely not for the faint of heart. I concur because… in the west, that kind of FAITHFUL OBSERVANCE in action is simply UNKNOWN to us.
What is even scarier is this.
Look at the UNITY of those men. They are all ONE!
Decades of oppression by their own hypocritical leaders.
Bombing and foreign invasion from all sides in their home countries.
And still… STILL… they take to the streets in PEACEFUL protest.
Shit… if THIS is the unity of man that is possible in Islam… if they EVER put aside Shia/Sunni/Sufi differences and UNITE…
Nothing will stop Islam from removing the west from the Middle East forever.
We are kicking a LION… and expect it not to roar and fight back?
@ Jay Hammers,
All right… honesty… I can respect a desire for that. Let us examine where the dishonesty lies.
Not similar at all? Is that not the EXACT definition of chance? This is the argument evolutionists put forward for the CREATION OF LIFE is it not? Or am I mistaken?
By your reasoning above, the process of evolution has a DESIGN to it if it is not by chance. Are you saying there is a design? Is there then a designer? Evolution is the designer… oh… I see… it does not work by total random chance, but neither by design. It is calculated based on instinct and genetic programming…the design part, but there is also the random chance part of instinct and genetic programming in action?
If evolution is not chance… then it is by design.
If evolution is not by design… it is by… what?
If it is by BOTH… then one has to admit of SOME kind of pre-mixed-into-the-recipe of design where by chance is able to work its magic. But to admit ANY design at all to evolution is to admit the possibility of a…
Who is the intellectual fool?
If I am a fool…. here is why.
I was given a great book that challenged evolution from a creationist perspective. Far from the reactionary bias of most secular atheists, creationists DO NOT deny evolution. The fool creationists will, but not the educated ones.
Creationists accept evolution as a PROCESS of biological diversity and change. Where they reject evolution is in the false argument that evolution CREATES LIFE!
This is false. With all our advances in science, the human genome project, we have not been able to experimentally create a single life form from the basic building blocks of life. All we have EVER successfully created is a COPY of a pre-existing design, or taken parts of one design and stuck it into another one where it would not naturally belong (again, the titanic metaphor is apt here).
On top of that… science has not been able to produce ANY information INCREASE in the genetic package… i.e. of ADDING information to EVOLVE a design. Again, they take information from someplace else and force it into another design in the location it is supposed to work in. Actual increase of information… adding to the design to enhance it… nowhere has this ever been tested or proven.
It is simply false science to believe evolution CREATED life.
Evolution EVOLVES life… tinkers, breaks, re-tools, retrofits, expands, contracts, re-directs… but it cannot create it.
And now… with the physics I have learned, there is a valid argument for the “big bang” theory and life having been created IN ONE FAIL SWOOP.
The zero-point wave theory… the fundamental harmonic of the universe. A wave of “determined length” that determines ALL HARMONICS of interference MATTER that come from it… i.e. all of life.
Therefore… life being left to evolutionary “chance” is false. There was a design, a plucking of the string as it were, it is clear in the biological and genetic record of “programming”.
Take a simple process… like baking bread. Just throw all the ingredients in a bag, open it, and poof… bread! Of course not, you are going to have to not only pull the marbles out in order to get a fully baked loaf of bread, they are going to have to go INTO THE BAG in order to!
That is the whole point of the speakers argument.
Darwin did see design in nature. This is fact.
Darwin saw this design was capable of “evolving” and changing. This is fact.
What Darwin and evolution did not do was refute where this design came from?
All birds can evolve into birds… but you cannot evolve a bird into a human. Species and types are different and something that evolutionists are constantly confusing.
I wish I had that book to quote from…. I fully confess I am not a geneticist nor biologist so I am just running at my mouth here in trying to remember what I read.
Evolution requires similarities in DNA for them to “bind” and therefore cross information. This is how evolution “works”… selection of the fittest right? But there are TWO strategies for evolution of any species, not type… the other being SEXUAL! That is, the one that actually REPRODUCES! Just being the smartest, strongest, fastest, etc means NOTHING if you can’t get laid!
That being taken as fact… that means SEXUAL SELECTION is paramount to any evolutionary hypothesis of the future of a species changes.
That means the fundamental sexual DNA… chromosomes… have to be able to pair up. This is why you will never see a bird mate with an alligator. These are two completely different TYPES, not just different species of animal.
An alligator can evolve into something alligator-ish… but not become a bloody bird!
All of Darwin’s observations were on the evolution of species into new versions of their base TYPE… their base chromosomal “design.” I.e. There was NO NEW LIFE created, only a new VERSION of a life/design that was already in existence.
Going back to the physics theory of all matter arriving out of the harmonic wave interference pattern from a single and sole source wave… that means… all life came about INSTANTANEOUSLY… like the striking of all keys on a piano AT THE SAME TIME.
It is possible that man… is a design TYPE and not an evolutionary change from an ape template. We may share many genetic traits… but if evolutionists want to PROVE we came from apes… than take a female ape egg and fertilize it with a human male sperm, or vice versa. You will get NOTHING!
Now. If that is taken as true on argument (I seriously doubt someone will try this)… and I am betting that if trialed on computer software, they would find it to be true…
What does that mean?
It means that man did NOT come from the ape.. and was instead.. created from a design that was specifically and only human in nature.
If we take that statement as true… that means ALL TYPES on earth that cannot sexually cross and breed new evolved “versions” of themselves came about how?
From ONE single electrified cell at the big bang?
No.
Multiples types… harmonics… were created from a single SOURCE wave that, if you play a piano, does not exist in the musical scale/key change sequence.
You want intellectual honesty. I say try some yourself.
Here is the book…I found it.
The Greatest Hoax on Earth?: Refuting Dawkins on Evolution
http://www.amazon.ca/Greatest-Hoax-Earth-Refuting-Evolution/dp/1921643064/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1302900974&sr=1-1
If you are HONEST in your search for the truth… and have taken any introductory Philosophy class of any merit… the first step to knowing the truth is to read and understand BOTH sides of a topic in order to argue the merits of BOTH. Then, and only then, are you able determine where one side is false and the other is true. If you don’t know both sides, you can’t know the truth.
I also found this… A Dawkins interview where he admits to the existence of a designer? Intellectual honesty? Does this guy KNOW he is being recorded and his words will now refute EVERYTHING he has ever written about “God” not existing?
Richard Dawkins ADMITS to Intelligent Design!!!
http://youtu.be/IbsUqwsP4UE
I mean… watch that clip. It is CLEAR that Dawkin’s target is not a designer, it is God as envisioned by religion. He is against RELIGION!
No… I am mistaken.
Dawkins is against RELIGIOUS MORALITY… the very reason I wrote this piece.
Richard Dawkins Lays Into Religious Morality
http://youtu.be/zSYosM2ZhzY
If there is no ABSOLUTE morality.. a fundamental moral LAW which only religion says is absolute… than what is morality other than WHAT ONE WISHES IT TO BE! Or whatever one can philosophically “rationalize” morality SHOULD be – i.e feminism. I won’t even begin to rip apart his argument that today’s secular morality due to rational philosophical discussion does not come from religion. Where does Dawkins and his atheist zealots get their secular moral arguments about what is right and wrong from in the first place?
But I digress.
When I found the above book… it was in my Facebook news feed from a friend who is a hardcore Christian. We have not had good conversations. That said… I was curious about this book BECAUSE it flew in the face of my “assumed knowledge” about life and how we came to be… I was an evolutionist. In refusing to here the argument for creationism, I realized I was committing hubris… assuming I knew all. Jonathan Safati knows his science… and… if you are open to his arguments… you might take back the “foolish” notion that the marble argument by the speaker is dishonest.
If man can barely engineer the genetics of basic food crops… do you really think ALL OF LIFE AND THE UNIVERSE… in PERFECT ORDER AND DESIGN… came about by mere chance?
Putting marbles in a bag… pulling them out one by one… and creating the ENTIRE UNIVERSE at random…
Sorry… I don’t buy it anymore.
Can you throw all the ingredients to bake bread in a bag… and bread comes out? No…. despite the existence of instant bread makers… someone still has to collect the ingredients, in the right proportion, put them together, program the bread maker, come back, check on it, take out the bread and see if it actually worked or do they need to tweak the recipe to get it right.
Chance… evolution… man… the universe… just throw the marbles in a bag… close it… shake it… open and PRESTO!
Who is the one being intellectually dishonest?
Absolutely correct!
Statistically… our existence is INFINITELY greater than 1/3.6 million… just 10 marbles… 10 MARBLES FROM A BAG IN ORDER… man.. the universe… evolution did it all… random chance… if 10 marbles are 1 in 3.6 million… what are the odds for gravity, light, atomic spin, matter cohesion, visual cortex… etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc……………
Do you still believe your finding this article and me was by random chance?
Indeed- there is nothing more joyful than stepping into the circle of remembrance and chanting the various names of Allah. Once the rememembrance takes a hold of you – your heart will start invoking naturally, the top of your head will blow off and you will be delivered onto a limitless space- where all that will be left is the voices chanting “Hayy Hayy Allaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah” over and over….HAYY HAYY ALLAH!
There are lots more videos like that one showing you different school of Sufism “doing their thing”.
And, Maximus, if you thought the Turkish clip was intense- check out the clip showing the Chechens performing their traditional chanting!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajpOxdFhptw&feature=related
Acc/to Solzhenitsyn in his Gulag Archipelago, the Russians never succeeded in breaking the Chechen inmates!
@Atilla,
Thanks for the video links. They are interesting as I have not found such lengthy clips of practicing Muslims, let alone Muslims outside the M. East.
It’s funny… no pun intended. LOL
Some people might comment and link to those clips in an attempt to make fun of the argument I am making… for the existence of God and for Islam as a faith to practice the search for God. The chanting, the praying, the spinning… to a westerner, especially a secular atheist… would make them laugh and think “Oh the fools, how can they believe as they do? Don’t they see what fools they are?”
One could argue this.
What do I see?
I see men sitting in peace, in union, and brotherhood. Something entirely lacking in the western world.
I see a culture whose value is not for the next release of an iPad, but for something dare I say might just be a tad more important than that… inner peace.
I also don’t see men… in any way… about to become President of a country, lie outright to its citizens about ending a war based on a lie, and then go about expanding that war and invading another country in his first term with the real prospect of more American boots on the ground in a THIRD war for “democracy and human rights” as they massacre the very civilians they hypocritically claim to wish to protect.
At least the Islamic youth of the M. East are finally daring to take back their governments and their countries for themselves. The CIA/elite might try to engineer a fake democracy like they have in America with the sheeple totally asleep at the wheel… but democracy, and giving people the ability to vote for WHOEVER they want, in a land that has never been able to do so, might not turn out as they expect.
Thanks again for the clips. The power in their voices is amazing. It would be a shame for anyone to laugh at such a display for it would truly show how shallow their spiritual development is and betray a deep, selfish need to belittle others in order to feel good about themselves.
I.
In 399 BC, Plato quoted Socrates in Plato’s ‘Euthyphro’ dialogue. Euthyphro contains Euthyphro’s Dilemma. Euthyprho’s Dilemma goes like this: Does morality come from God? Then God is a-moral, and should God not exist then there can be no morality. Do morals come from outside of God? Then we have no need of God to be moral, and a God that is less than something outside of God to boot.
II.
God is omnipotent because a less than omnipotent God would not be God. Therefore what is to be is known by God. Therefore there is no free will. Therefore there can be no moral choices by mankind if God exists.
III.
Morality comes not from knowing what is right, or from doing what is right. Morality is not repeating mistakes, either your own or ones you learn of.
That would be cool. I mean, TL;DR.
The problem for me is that I loathe willing ignorance and stupidity in people. I hate that there are so many fools who make the injustices of the world possible. I hate it when people drive like fucking idiots. I hate it when people discount possible truths without thinking things through, not wanting to believe what they don’t LIKE. I just hate the overall stupidity of humanity. Why? Because it’s a large part of the reason things are the way they are, and I want to change these people. Why is such a species worth saving? Because a few aren’t fucking idiots? I am a misanthrope who wishes he didn’t have to be.
Perhaps atheism/nihilism also lead to a lack of uprisings. It’s hard to sacrifice it all when one believes there is no reason to. And to be honest, I don’t want to sacrifice it all when I think about it. Still, I’m compelled to take risks I don’t logically think I should to fight against stupidity. But what have I really gained if I help humanity but hurt myself? What guarantee do I have that it was worth it? It is so much easier to just live for myself and say “fuck everyone else”. And it seems that this is the western paradigm. My only problem is I can’t live comfortably with that, because that’s just how I’m built. Which brings me back to my irritation with everyone else. If everyone were like you and me, we wouldn’t have this God damn problem. I am pissed at everyone else for doing nothing.
More than I could imagine? I doubt that.
No, I can’t stop thinking. That’s my problem. Especially when I’m Charlie Sheen manic from alcohol withdrawal!
Well I don’t have faith now but hope, and hope is weak.
You said a couple times that a lack of faith = suicide. I don’t think that’s true. It either equals suicide or just hedonistic living… or somewhere in between. Actually, lack of hope = suicide. Lack of faith = hedonism.
Struggle can be joyful, yes. Strife, not always. I don’t want to end up in prison being ass-raped because some woman thought I was “cyber-bullying” her or I “defamed” someone or I “spewed hate speech” merely for saying women are not all angels. It would hurt my fiancée and my mom even more than it would me, and I don’t think I would react very well to society doing that to them. And it’s not just the state – it is people. People allow this shit to happen. Look at what they have allowed to happen, how little they care, how they celebrate when Evan Emory goes to county jail. How can I NOT loathe human beings?
No. The chances are weighted based on what is evolutionary successful. It is not the chance of choosing 10 marbles in order at all. It is more like putting 10 marbles of varying size into a funnel in which only 5 of them can actually fit through. Then you shake the funnel for 5 seconds. Of course the smallest marbles are more likely to come through, but there is no guarantee they will. That is because the smallest marbles are selected for based on their higher value in terms of the experiment.
We have not been around that long, and we don’t understand much. If we are never able to, that doesn’t prove anything but that we are not intelligent enough to understand. However, I think we will understand just fine. We will play with the building blocks of DNA like they are toys – and if we are guided by a moral compass, we could do great things; if not, we could destroy ourselves so very easily, as we are with GMO crops (possible infertility results from consuming them).
I don’t know if evolution is truly possible, but even in the last 50 years, we know that those who are given to reproduce more often win the battle of life. So that says something. Those who are more likely to reproduce have an advantage. The traits that increase reproductive potential and survival (dependant upon the current circumstances of the environment) are more likely to advance to the next generation.
It seems amazing to me that life could evolve from random combinations, however. That organization could come from randomness, but it’s not incomprehensible. The planets have orbits, and not necessarily because of God, but because of the laws of the universe. So why does our universe have laws? Perhaps we are in a universe that just happened to have the laws it does, and there are other universes that are completely random shit without any intelligent life. We cannot know. To assume there is intelligent design just because we have laws in the universe is illogical.
With enough time, maybe.
Yes, but over time, the traits that increase the likelihood of reproduction would converge with the traits that increase the likelihood of survival. It is a prerequisite of reproduction that one must survive long enough to be able to reproduce.
Um, I don’t know much about DNA but it would seem to me that once DNA has diverged enough you wouldn’t get anything useful from an attempted mating. Hell, I Google searched “Why can’t humans mate with apes” and got something that sounded more reasonable than this. We wouldn’t combine the source code for two different computer programs written in different programming languages and expect them to just work together.
He said that there may have been a lifeform that evolved due to a natural process and then seeded the lifeforms on this planet, and that that seeding may have been “intelligent design”, but that the original lifeform would have come about due to some natural process. There are natural processes hypothesized that could have explained the formation of organic compounds and could have taken us on the path toward organic life. It seems rather silly to conclude that just because we don’t understand it, some magical force must have created life – not only is that ignorant, but it is hubris to claim that because we don’t understand it, it must have been “intelligent design” (God). We don’t know, and as far as I am aware there is no data to make an argument either way.
Honestly, when you twist someone’s words like this, like Ben Stein has done, it does far more to damage your argument than anything else. This is the kind of thing I never liked about religion – twisting things to suit one’s purpose. He clearly stated that the “intelligent designer” would have come to be through some sort of natural process, indicating the designer would not have been a God but merely another lifeform. This twisting of facts does more damage than anything else, because it makes one doubt everything you say, it makes one consider the possibility that you will say whatever is necessary to convince the weak-minded.
And this is the worst thing about religion. Its believers and practitioners so often twist and misconstrue that one must call into question their honesty and their rationality, so much so that you cannot really believe anything you say. I doubt everything a feminist says because feminists demonstrate a pattern of irrationality. And so it is with the religious. Give me something that makes sense and is honest, and I’ll listen.
Yes, morality IS what one wishes it to be. We’ve seen that in so many societies, with their subjective morality. Morality, however, is a product of the interpretation of biology, which is a product of evolution. Fathers hate men who corrupt their daughters because of the inherent biological realities.
No, it’s whatever we want it to be. That’s WHY we can talk about designing a faith or set of moral standards that MAKE SENSE for us, based in part on traditional values and perhaps faiths that MAKE SENSE – that help humanity join together rather than break apart. What Dawkins says is, and I didn’t write this down perfectly: “I don’t think i want an absolute reality. I think i want a morality that is thought out, reasoned, argued, discussed, and based upon almost an intelligent design – can we not design our society that has the sort of morality of a society that we want to live in.” What he is saying is that we should design a morality that makes SENSE. Should 18 year old boys go to jail for having sex with 16 year old girls? Hell, no. Should men go to jail for having consensual sex with a woman who later regrets it? Hell no. We can decide what is moral, what is just, and sometimes current religions get it right – and sometimes they get it way wrong. A morality that balances the good of society versus the good of individuals is moral because it progresses society.
Again, we are just starting. That proves nothing, and is an argument either intentionally or accidentally misleading. And again, the marbles analogy isn’t analogous at all.
Well, in a way, yes. Due to my own nature, I was more likely to assign higher value to information on the web that led more toward a deeper understanding of “the truth” than to information that did not, which increased my likelihood of stumbling onto men’s rights and misandry websites, which increased my likelihood of stumbling onto and understanding the evils of corporatism, which increased my likelihood of coming here to In Mala Fide. If I had been a little less lucky I could have easily ended up dead or in jail rather than searching the internet for these truths. My whole life has been a journey of valuing certain ideas with a bias or weighting based on the fact that I value truth no matter what and also based on my previous experiences. It hasn’t been a perpetual coin flip or dice roll to determine the next step in my path. So, yes, my finding this article was never guaranteed, it was certainly by chance, but I had a damn good chance due to my inherent bias for truth and information relevant to me.
I agree. It seems rather foreign to me, but I understand we are animals who enjoy ritual displays of comradery, which we are sorely lacking. We make noise not because we have to, but because we want to.
I think folks arguing for religion or intelligent design do more harm to their cause by trying to argue it “logically” than they would by saying “it could be” – because every “logical” argument I’ve heard is flimsy, illogical, error-ridden, and really just not good at all. When you can only argue a case through logical fallacies and explanations that would only fool a kindergartener, it implies to me that there are no reasonable explanations and therefore it’s quite likely that the case is FALSE.
In this way, the idealism of feminists and liberals isn’t that much different than that of religious folks. Yuck.
The world has constraints built into it, for whatever reason – could be intelligent design or could just be random chance, but no one will have a convincing argument for either, ever.
The marble experiment shows that given certain constraints, certain outcomes are simply more likely than others. Repeated ad infinitum, and given a mating strategy with variability in outcomes, the marbles will become smaller and smaller and smaller. That is, assuming that smaller marbles ARE more likely to go through the funnel even when bigger marbles will also fit through the hole – that is an assumption I’m making, but whether that is true in real life is irrelevant – because the only thing that is required is SOME constraint to demonstrate that constraints affect outcomes.
Now if one’s argument is that just because to create some organic compound in the first place (origin of life), you’d have to randomly draw 10 marbles in order out of a hat (or 10 molecules would have to come together by chance to create a certain compound), then one can look at the actual probability of this happening if 10 marbles are drawn out of a bag, 1 out of 3.6 million, and then ask what would happen if we repeated the experiment 1 million times a year for 100 years. So, if each time we run the experiment, our chances of succeeding to create the organic compound are 1/3.6 million, and our chances of NOT succeeding are (3.6 million – 1)/(3.6 million). So our chance of NOT succeeding if we repeat the experiment 1 million times a year for 1 year is [(3.6 million - 1)/(3.6 million)]^(1 million) or 75%. Repeat it for only a hundred years and the chance of NOT succeeding is (0.75)^100 = ~0. This is another way of saying that we will almost certainly create at least one instance of this compound if we repeat the experiment 1 million times a year for 100 years. Now, consider how many of these little varied experiments would be run in a vast ocean over billions of years, and it doesn’t seem that surprising that experiment after experiment might have had a fairly decent chance of panning out and creating organic compounds which would have then been guided by evolution due to the inherent value of certain compounds to perpetuate themselves and align to create new compounds.
I find it amusing that someone linked a video here a couple weeks ago to try to “prove” intelligent design by showing the vastness of space and of what you can see under a microscope, so vast and so complex at the smallest levels of detail that no human can really comprehend its enormity. There are an amazing amount of particles in this universe, which hints at how likely it would be that somehow, somewhere, some compounds would form, bound by the laws of the universe, by the environment, and by random chance, and then form more compounds, again bound by the laws of the universe/environment/chance, ad infinitum.
Just another flaw of religion – expecting me to bow down in awe when I don’t understand something, and to assume that there is no explanation for the origin of life other than intelligent design. Little did I know I only needed a little basic statistics to show that genesis by chance is quite possible.
Also see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis
What god do you follow – is he Arabic or Japanese. What is his name.
@ FIrepower
I follow my own god… my own daemon… as did Socrates when he first discovered that he had a voice of his own that he could trust instead of being swallowed by the delusion of the masses.
The question should not be what god/belief does one FOLLOW.
The question should be… what god/belief do you choose to LEAD you.
To follow a god/belief is passive… feminine.
To choose a god/belief and allow it to lead your life is masculine.
The first is Christian… the latter is Islam. It is a subtle difference in attitude, but it makes for a world of difference in how one lives one’s life.
Leading can be following. Following can be leading. It is a dance analogy and if you are not a dancer, you won’t get it. Take a ballroom dance class… and you will learn the truth of such circular thinking.
@ Jay Hammers,
Ah… the hubris of man.
The whole point is to admit that man will NEVER understand how all this came to be, including himself. To do otherwise, as atheists do, is to assume the mantle of God himself and take on the role of “creator and destroyer” in “understanding” the universe. (as so many in science hubristically claim to believe).
Your statistical arguments for random chance are good… but don’t be fooled into thinking you have it figured out. That is when God usually steps in and throws a TITANIC wrench into man’s plans and tries once again, to humble man into submission.
If you have no awe for the universe… I say there is little reverence for life itself. One loses one’s childlike amazement and reduces the world to statistical mathematics in predicting the likelihood of intelligent life combining in the right way, in the right proportion, at the right time, and in just the right order to create life.
Honestly.
What would man do with the power of God? To create matter and life?
All the evidence in history points to nothing but destruction.
For that reason… man needs to learn there are some questions that just don’t need to be answered (for his functioning does not require them to be)… and that it would be better to simply celebrate life (food, good company, moral and ethical action) and appreciate all that has been given to him without having to life a finger.
I can see we are coming from two different side of the question. That is good. I would be curious to cross paths with you in 10 years time, 20 years, and see the results of your inquiries.
Abiogenesis is an interesting theory. But it fails to account for one MASSIVE fact.
In the realm of pure chance, which your statistics and abiogenesis theory advocates for the creation of life, how does one account for the moral question?
The fact that man seems to have an “arrow” in his development. A path, a plan, a process for improved functioning.
If life was created by total random chance via the statistical method, there should be NO PREDICTABILITY in the system. Even if such random chaos produces a pattern of sorts, that pattern in itself will be random.
Are you saying there is no direction in the moral and ethical development of man?
Why, despite the most single most morally toxic and degenerating environment man has ever created for himself, does the moral question keep popping up? Why does love persist? Why do people strive to do good and care for one another? Even if all these concepts can be explained away, the mystery removed, down to genetics and evolutionary mechanisms, it still does not take away the fundamental question….
WHY does man have a direction?
Random chance implies NO PLAN OR DESIGN.
Yet… the whole of man is but one unfolding design in a single direction, albeit the most circuitous and self-sabotaged of them all.
Even should man succeed in committing suicide, it will be DESPITE his desire to live and grow and progress.
Take a seed for a rose… put it in the earth… give it the right conditions and it will become a rose.
Take away the conditions, randomly change its environment, the seed is still going to try to become what it was designed to be.
If random chance created us, why the need for a design? If random chance was enough to evolve life, why the steady march of evolution toward “ends” when it is all a matter of statistics in the end?
Great rebuttal, but I fail to see how statistically proving life could evolve from base materials over enough given time… explains WHY it would then continue to evolve along a clearly defined and designed path?
Hi Maximus –
Here is a beautiful rendering of one of Rumi’s poems as sung by Shahram Nazeri, a Kurdish Iranian Sufi or the Ahl-e-Haqq. THIS IS IT … the real f’kng thing! Jump Right In, the Water of Annihilation is just fine!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jm2hUUPPnTM&feature=related
Attila
When certain traits are more likely to perpetuate an organic structure, or a species, then there is no need for a design to perpetuate that structure or species. If natural selection is valid, there is no need for intelligent design, and thus one can make no conclusion that a designer must exist.
I would postulate that the reason men ask the moral question is that human beings having the trait of being likely to ask this question were more likely to perpetuate their DNA than were those who did not ask this question. A civilization full of men who did not ask this question would have no reason to venture further into the vast wilderness, to conquer and execute their “manifest destiny,” to reproduce in large numbers. By your own words, such a society would “commit suicide”.
We ask the moral question precisely because it is a question that increases the likelihood of our survival and reproduction. No intelligent design is required.
There is no rational argument that can conclude *original* intelligent design – by original, I mean intelligent design by a force that was not itself created through natural selection – another species who put us here on earth, for example. Thus far, there is no evidence to support intelligent design that cannot be explained by natural phenomena. Furthermore, intelligent design can never be proven because even if we found compelling evidence that *we* were designed, this does not prove that our designers were not designed, or that their designers were not designed, and so forth.
Attempts to convince the public of proof of intelligent design rely on the public’s ignorance. The arguments are not compelling. The worst arguments, such as trying to conflate a theoretical system of random chance with the stark reality of a universe where certain traits have more reproductive potential than others, will appear obtuse to the most discerning individuals. In this way, religion betrays man. It is not something that can be argued logically. Making the mistake of trying to convince people rationally of the existence of God, when no valid rational argument exists, merely pushes those who may have a desire to believe away. It is deceitful, and compels men to doubt its practitioners’ true motives.
Growing up hearing religious people consistently make deeply flawed arguments, and knowing the Bible was filled with obvious contradictions, how easy it was for me to disbelieve. Leftists, on the other hand, are much more successful in convincing even fairly intelligent people, since they obfuscate the truth while providing explanations for the world that, on the surface, may seem noble.
Religion ought to stop lying to people. Tell us ways we can improve ourselves and our society, and tell us why these things are good to do, but don’t try to make arguments that are irrational.
Do I believe in God? No. Would I like to? Sure. When I am lied to consistently by those who believe in God, will I start to look at them, and their beliefs, with suspicion and scorn? Damn right. Even if the intention is not to mislead, even if they are merely ignorant, it casts a great deal of doubt on the wisdom of the religious.
Maybe the reason I was somewhat fooled by leftism originally was that it relied on one kind of faith – faith that human beings could be “better” and that enough human beings are “good” to counter those who are “bad”. Faith or hope, whatever. Leftism tells people they can do something to make the world better, and they want to believe it. It relies on one kind of ignorance to convince the hopeful. Ignorance of human nature – and if you are someone who thinks you’re a “good” person it’s easy enough to project this onto other human beings.
I was not fooled, however, by religion. Religion relies on another kind of ignorance. Ignorance of science, of math, of reality. You don’t need an understanding of human nature to understand that God’s existence cannot be demonstrated or to see through the obvious misinformation religious folks spew. There are other explanations that make more sense.
Solutions? To end leftism, teach people to better understand human nature. To increase acceptance of moral tenets, religion, or whatever, make people understand how it can help them. If certain tenets are really better for human beings and society as a whole, why do we need to try to prove God’s existence at all? Why not just demonstrate their value? And if you cannot, then perhaps those tenets aren’t worth a shit.
Or, at least, a lot of people will *think* those tenets aren’t worth a shit, whether they have value or not.
I also think that part of the reason I was initially fooled by a lot of leftist thought was due to the common rejection of religion by leftists, and the adherence to it by many of those I perceived as being on the right. Growing up thinking to myself, wow, people on the right are a bunch of anti-intellectual religious idiots, and boy, it sure seems like we could really help people if we just listened to leftists, and relying on my ignorance of philosophy/human nature/politics, it was easy to believe the idea that leftism had a lot going for it, even when I knew it got some things wrong. I wanted to believe socialism could help people. I’ve always wanted to make the world a “better” place, whatever that means.
Ignorance is a problem. Human beings seem to prefer it most of the time.
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