From HERB RUHS
The Compassionate Misanthrope
Boonville
[Herb comments on: Slamming the door on Jehovah Witnesses, et al....]
My sincere condolences for any and all people who suffer under illegitimate authority, be it religious, governmental, academic or any of the rest of the many sources for opportunity for sociopathic ambitious. When I was in private practice many physicians in Southern California banned Witnesses from their practices. My wife and I did not. OTOH, we would have a little talk with these families at the first visit to be sure they understood that if a conflict occurred with the church, around blood transfusion typically, then the matter would be promptly turned over to the courts to decide what to do. Witness families we dealt with were fine with this and we never, fortunately, had problems. You could never tell who was a Witness by seeing them in the waiting room, they were indistinguishable from the rest of our practice, and treated that way.
I am a closet totalitarian I guess. When I see organizations doing criminal and unconscionable things I want them stopped. That implies that I want to live in a society that has the power to do that. If you posit the continued existence of massive societies then these societies need to be able to step in and stop heinous behavior, or abandon the pretense of being a society. In a “pluralistic society” (in quotes because there is nothing plural about societies like ours) there is the idea that freedom of association means that any group can calve off and isolate itself and treat its members however it wants, commit all the crimes it can get away with and prey on vulnerable individuals. Ultimately it matters little what sort of authoritarian group is involved in the abuse. Many giant corporations do terrible things to people on a scale that dwarfs any abuses by churches. Functionally any closed authoritarian group is a source of the same sort of abuse of individuals that the religious groups impose. Therefore such societies, if they are to maintain a humanitarian standard of care and relationship, if they are going to claim sovereignty as more than a pretense, have to treat organizations that present a pattern of criminal behavior in a manner similar to individual criminals. While I am not a believer in capital punishment for individuals I am A BIG FAN of capital punishment for criminal organizations. They need to be destroyed root and branch. I shouldn’t leave this discussion without mentioning the grand daddy of all abusive authoritarian organizations, the standing army. Societies that maintain standing armies generally see those military organizations become criminal and dominant, as we have seen here in the US.
A traditional village, such as I lived in in Vietnam for a few years, is an inclusive organization. This inclusivity tends to moderate abuses by authoritarian individuals, if not completely prevent it. This is a much better, more biologically consistent, approach to human organization. When society invites EXCLUSIVE organizations it is surrendering a degree of sovereignty and will begin loosing control to criminals. The US is a great example of this. National sovereignty is a joke in the US as is our “representative democracy.” Human and civil rights are crumbling as corporations and other authoritarian organizations have systematically established a system of legalized bribery backed up by all sorts of criminality committed under the veil of secrecy. And the professional lying industry (Public Relations) works tirelessly to cover up the crimes and confuse people into immobility in the face of mortal threat.
Furthermore, any top down form of organization will succumb to criminal control, eventually. The first generation of leaders may be saints, but the second or third are sure to be sociopaths. The churches come in for a lot of outrage largely, I think, because folks feel that churches should operate with a higher ethical and moral standard than non-sectarian ones. But that is just silly thinking. It sets church groups aside from groups like Wallmart, investment banks and the military that also act in secret according to a sacred dogma and ultimately, just like the churches, seek to concentrate power and wealth in as few hands as possible.
I totally agree that the hidden crimes of authoritarian religion are heinous, I just don’t get why we are paying attention to them to the exclusion of attention to the monster organizations that, in the balance, are doing virtually all the damage. Any mutualist society must deal with organized criminality MUCH more harshly than crimes by individuals. If an injury to one is an injury to all, then organizations that injure people need to be disbanded for the protection of everyone.
In the mean time we have this chaotic free for all where the smart move is to conspire to dispossess your neighbor, where massively wealthy criminals, like so many of our leading bankers and politicians, are celebrated as heroes and exemplary individuals worthy of emulation. We live in a pirate culture. The evil churches are just another aspect of institutionalized injustice and aren’t all that important compared to other sources of organized evil.
A society committed to justice will not tolerate any of this. Time to start organizing people power to establish a just regime and rectify all this.
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The list of sociopathic organizations is a long one. They include pharmaceutical companies, the Food & Drug Agency (FDA), the American Medical Association (AMA), and the American Dental Association (ADA). Those organizations cause death, disease, and suffering to thousands each year by their support of greed before humanity.
Walmart does not preach/teach morals. Walmart does not hold the threat of hell over your head if you do not shop there. Walmart does not tear your famly apart if there is a desire on the part of one member to not shop there. Walmart does not control your life from birth to death. Walmart does not brainwash you from the first breath to your last, that there is no other stores to shop at, but religions do, and they use your parents to do it.
Not defending corporations like Walmart, or any other, but you are comparing grapes (corporations) and watermelons (religions).
“I totally agree that the hidden crimes of authoritarian religion are heinous, I just don’t get why we are paying attention to them to the exclusion of attention to the monster organizations that, in the balance, are doing virtually all the damage.” Amen. Despite the long list of heinous acts committed in the name of Christianity, none compare with those now being committed in the name of materialist science and technology a la geneticist Richard Dawkins – think global warming. According to him and his, we’re all only machines to be manipulated, often to succumb to hell on earth to enrich others. That is a sick old science that has been widely repudiated, yet continues to be preached as a far more dangerous religion than the old one.
We must go to the root: belief systems. Rigid religious and economic belief systems are at the root of our problems. Climate change, energy, financial fraud… all solutions resisted and fought against by wealthy conservatives backed by economic fundamentalists who have recruited religious fundamentalists. Until they are rooted out and exposed, fought at every level of education and rationality… exposed at every attempt to impose their authoritarian God in schools and in the political process, progress and solutions will be impossible…
There is surely no denying that so-called neo-economics and some religions, specifically those derived from ancient Judaism, are dragging us down with assertions that are clearly nonsense. I claim that there is one that is much worse, materialistic science and it technology offspring. Indeed, there are those who convincingly assert that fundamentalist neo-economics and its socialist and Marxist cousins are other of its brood and fundamentalist religions arose as reactions to it. Materialist scientists assert without any expression of doubt that all your feelings of beauty, love, compassion, and creative inspiration, all your hopes and dreams, your very consciousness are epi-phenomena, only smoke and mirrors that they, given enough time and computer power, can reduce to collections of chemical reactions, that invariant natural laws dictate all events including apparently everything they insist we (and they) believe. Reality is all a machine somehow started at the big bang.
Recent surveys indicate that a large majority of scientists of all disciplines, other than psychology, consider this assertion to be nonsense. Many are willing to explain very convincingly, for those who aren’t afraid of science, why this is so. Case en point, Nobel laureate physicist Robert Laughlin’s “A Different Universe – Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down.” He begins the book by quoting physicist Sir Arthur Eddington, “Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.” This is only one of several that have recently been published written by some other pretty well connected physicists from related points of view: Robert Lanza’s “Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe”, Shlmon Majin’s “Nature Loves to Hide – Quantum Physics and the Nature of Reality:”, Henry Stapp’s “Mindful Universe – Quantum Mechanics and the Participating Observer”, and Bruce Rosenblum’s and Fred Kuttner’s “Quantum Enigma – Physics Encounters with Consciousness”. Physicists have been escaping the materialist cause since at least early in the twentieth century with Eddington and Einstein. In 1962, physics research student Brian Josephson discovered what came be known as the Josephson junction quantum effect, which earned him a Nobel Prize eleven years later. Upon receiving the prize, he announced he no longer would partake in mainstream physics, but would devote himself to the study of so-called paranormal phenomena, in which activities he continues. Since Josephson was one of the most promising physicists of his day, many found this to be incredible. However, as Dean Radin has surveyed in his “Entangled Minds – Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality”, there are massive amounts of temptingly solid experimental scientific research that indicate that reality is stranger than we imagine. Since materialistic scientists can’t image how these could occur in their materialist world, they chose to respond by mockery, which is the typical way we each respond when our sacred beliefs are confounded.
The problem that is miring us is that fundamentalist materialistic science’s reality view has become deeply embedded in our culture. Our school curricula at every level is suffused with it – except where it is somewhat countered by fundamentalist religionists. Along the way, that science, which was at least somewhat understood by most who were educated in materialist science’s nineteenth century heyday, has become something mysterious to be left to specialists except for cute little surveys in “science” magazines and internet blogs. Bottom line: the world out there and in here are is incredibly complex seemingly beyond what we can imagine. Anyone who is convinced that they know anything to be absolutely true is deluded.
Nonetheless, we all somehow learn often exceedingly complex heuristics, i.e. rules of thumb, which we successfully repeatedly use in the act of living. Experimental science is constructed on this. How this happens remains mysterious. The great secret that theoretical scientists mostly keep hidden is that their great theories often, arguably usually, come to them as inspirations, not by rational processes. How this happens also remains mysterious. Experiment evidence indicates very persuasively that we are burning up the world and destroying it in a myriad of other ways and that materialist science hubris is the culprit. Of course, I’m not certain, but I have a feeling that this behavior is repeating. Suppose I’m right.
Is there a God? What do you mean by “God”? There is certainly mystery and beauty everywhere we look. I stand in awe and invite you to join me..
We’re already there, Don… http://ukiahcommunityblog.wordpress.com/2013/02/03/is-there-a-god-out-there/