INCITEMENT FOR CHANGE

Civilization is one of those big, stuffy words that may intrigue philosophers and historians but put most people to sleep. Unless it is used in a sentence like " our civilization is threatened" at which point large numbers of people prepare to load their AK-47.

Today many people do, in fact believe that their civilization is threatened, and that the United States is doing the threatening. IT IS.

But not in the way most of us think.

Around the world, critics of the United States point to its military and its economy as the main source of its predominance, maybe it is in part, however knowledge in the broadest sense and new technologies based on it, are the big threat that America constitute over the world.

The most extraordinary engine of power change in modern history is the accumulated bases of knowledge and the ensuing technologies,PCs,programing,Internet,etc..etc...

America is by far the leader in the world of export and distribution of this scientific knowledge and of popular culture,including, fashion,music,TV,programing,books,movies and computer games.In the meantime,however,the influence of all this is so powerful that other societies fear for the survival of their own cultures.

Many societies, are so different today from the present American youth and adult psyches and way of life. One example I'm going to site is this recorded conversation in a West African society.(And it could as well be in so many parts of the world.) So I ask why there seem to be no girls older than thirteen or fourteen appearing in public life or in the streets. "That's when their parents marry them off and they spend most of their time inside the house." I ask whether the girls choose whom they marry. "Of course not" the answer comes,"Marriage is too important for the girl or boy to make the choice; our parents always decide."

This conversation shows us why millions of parents around the world who see their cultures under attack. The United States, they feel, is seducing their kids.

While Hollywood sends its messages that freedom means unrestrained hedonism, Wall Street was sending a parallel message saying that unrestrained business and trade offer the best path to wealth. Washington, echoing this theme, chanted the mantra that unrestrained free trade benefits everyone. This was combined with a magic formula: Liberalization + globalization = democracy.

For several decades America thus told the world, and itself, that Laissez-faire(especially privatization and deregulation) would deliver democracy and prosperity, as though any one-size-fits-all formula would work everywhere overriding all differences in religion, culture, history, and levels of economic and institutional developments.

But America, arrogant though as it often seems, is itself shaken and uncertain as it experiments with novel ideas, social structures and values. In fact, the very variety that comes with knowledge-based developments ensures that other countries will adopt quiet different economic,social and political pathways for the future. They will not look like America. But ,then, neither will tomorrows America.

The real message that America sends,more important than its ideological, commercial or military rhetoric is an incitement for change. It is the dominant message now being delivered to billions of people in rigid societies around the world: Change is possible, and not just in some blue-sky future, but soon, in your own life time or that of your child. It doesn't specify whether change will be good or bad. That will be interpreted differently and fought over.

If and when the emergent generation world wide is inspired by the incitement for change,the changes to come will not necessarily please America and Americans. In the Middle-East,it could take the form of popular elected theocratic-fascist regimes duly voted into power, Hammas is one example,and the Iraqi situation as well, in Africa and Latin America, it might take completely different forms.

Still this is the message emanating from the United States. And is what, at the deepest level,disturbs the dreams, and triggers the nightmares, of billions of human-beings. The United States cannot help but transmit that message because it itself exemplifies changes.

That is why even present and former allies are increasingly troubled by America's role in the world. Even as they, too, undergo significant transformation, the recent enlargement of the European Union and the rejection by some countries of its proposed constitution, indicates that they are themselves slower and less revolutionary. As many struggle to build their own future, they see the United States pulling away, speeding into the unknown and pulling other cultures and countries in its uncertain and turbulent wake.

But if everything is in fact temporary, so is American power.


As usual many thanks for the inspiration brought by the Tofflers,helping me to compile these few words and ideas, salamat.

IT ALL STARTED WITH ADAM AND EVE !!!!!

"So the biblical story goes". If the apple really led to the " Knowledge of good and evil," then Adam and Eve did not know good and evil before sampling it. So it doesn't seem very fair to punish a woman for something she didn't know was not good, such as disobeying God telling her to not eat a piece of fruit. We don't morally judge infants for taking things from a friend's purse, but we do condemn older children, or praise them for not doing so. Plus, once Eve learned that her actions were not good, she immediately felt ashamed,which actually seems quiet commendable. It's not like she ran around the garden afterward bragging; How delicious those apples are.

And after all that, it seems unfair and excessively harsh for everyone else, especially people not living at the time,to be punished for what this dynamic duo did without their even knowing they did wrong in the first place. Imagine a principal punishing an entire school as well as all future enrolled students for two people caught doing something they didn't even know -couldn't know- was wrong. None of this seems anywhere close to what we currently value in an ethical system.
If God is all-knowing, why couldn't he find Adam after he ate the apple? And why didn't he also call out "Eve, where are you?" especially since she ate the apple to begin with.

In 2007, Nebraska state senator Ernie Chambers sued God for terrorizing humanity with widespread death. (the case was dismissed on grounds that God couldn't be properly notified, despite the senator's plea that God's omniscience should require that He knew of the lawsuit.) So couldn't God be put on trial for entrapment as well, by knowingly placing two people with no knowledge in a garden with a talking snake and a magic apple he knew they'd eat?.

After eating the apple,they both became ashamed of their bodies and invented the first fashion item, the fig leaf collection.

Now with a clear understanding of this particular story of creation,we can move on with our discussion. It's been suggested that same-sex marriage will tear down the fabric of the family, devaluing marriage,first of all this is coming from people in a country, the United States, where 45% of marriages end in divorce,and with most of the concern over gay marriage coming from the religious right, it should be somewhat of a surprise that their divorce rate is higher than that of non-religious atheists and agnostics.In contrast, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden have all allowed gay civil unions for at least a dozen years, and in each of those countries not only did the heterosexual marriage rate increase (by upward of 25% in Sweden), but the divorce rate dropped, This all might be part of the motivation for the harsh saying "Focus on your own damn family."

In like manner,in many parts of the US, only back in 1966, marriage was defined as "two people of the same race." ( of course man and woman) In a court case upholding this, the trial judge proclaimed, "Almighty God created the races...(and) placed them on separate continents...(which) shows that he did not intent for the races to mix." Interracial marriages remained illegal until a 1967 Supreme court decision ruled otherwise.

Even today, Muslem women are victims of so-called honor killings in which family members or others in the community kill them for such "crimes" as interracial dating, though also for infidelity, flirting, and in some extreme cases, such as the husband having a dream that the woman betrayed him. these are often carried out publicly and even celebrated, it is estimated by the United Nations that more than 6000 cases occur annually.

Though how soon and easily we forget about the story of creation, as told by no one who was there.

As usual, my thanks to MR.Bowen for his invaluable inspiration.

INTELLECTUAL HONESTY

Religion once offered answers to many questions that have now been ceded to the care of science. Many people have taken inspiration from Blaise Pascal and argue that evidence is beside the point and that religious believers have simply taken the wiser of two bets: if a believer is wrong about God, there is not much harm to him or to anyone else, and if he is right, he wins eternal happiness, if an atheist is wrong, however, he is destined to spend eternity in hell. On this view, atheism is the very picture of reckless stupidity.

While Pascal deserves his reputation as a brilliant mathematician, his gamble was never more than a cute ( and false) analogy. Like many cute ideas in philosophy, it is easily remembered and often repeated. A person can profess any creed he likes, of course, but to really believe it, he must believe that it's true. To believe that there is a God , for instance, is to believe that you are not just fooling yourself, it is to believe that you stand in some relation to God's existence such that, if he didn't exist,you wouldn't believe in him.

Everyone who has eyes to see can see that if the God of Abraham exists, he is an utter psychopath, as the God of nature is too. If you can't see these things just by looking, you have simply closed your eyes to the realities of our world. Your own consciousness is the cause and substance of any experience you might want to deem "spiritual" or "mystical". realising this, what possible need is there to pretend to be certain about ancient miracles, or for wine and virgins in heaven.

THE PROBLEM WITH MODERATE RELIGION

Whenever nonbelievers like myself criticize Christians for believing in old Biblical miracles or the imminent return of Christ, or Muslims for believing in martyrdom and or other Koranic contradictions, religious moderates declare that I am caricaturing Christianity and Islam, considering "extremists" to be representative of these great religions wrong, or otherwise overlooking an ocean of other nuances. We are invariably reminded and told that a mature understanding of scripture renders faith perfectly compatible with reason, and that our attacks upon religion are, therefore, "simplistic","dogmatic", or even "fundamentalist".

But there are several problems with such a defence of religion. First, many moderates (and even some secularists)assume that religious "extremism" is rare and therefore not all that consequential. But religious extremism is not rare, and is hugely consequential. The United States is now a nation of 300 million souls, wielding more influence than any people in human history,and yet 240 million of these souls apparently believe that Jesus will return someday and orchestrate the end of the world with his magic powers.There is no question that most Americans reliably claim to believe the preposterous, and these claims themselves have done genuine harm to our political discourse, to our public policy,foreign policies, and to our reputation in the world.
Half of the one point four billion Muslims at least believe that the jihad and the extremists carrying the godly jihad is compatible with there beliefs and with the holy message of the Qur'an and it's prophet.

Religious moderates also tend to imagine that there is some bright line of separation between extremist and moderate religion. But there isn't. Scripture itself remains a perpetual engine of extremism: because, while he may be many things, the God of the Bibles and of the Qur'an is not a moderate. Reading scripture more closely, one does not find reasons to be a religious moderate; one finds reasons to be a proper religious lunatic--to fear the fires of hell,to despise nonbelievers, to persecute atheists, and condemn homosexuals,etc. Of course anyone can cherry-pick scripture and find reasons to love his neighbor and to turn the other cheek. But the more fully a person grants credence to these books, the more he will be convinced that infidels, heretics, and apostates deserve to be smashed to atom in God's loving machinery of justice.

Religious moderates invariably claim to be more "sophisticated" than religious fundamentalists (and atheist). but how does one become a sophisticated believer? by acknowledging just how irrational many of the claims of scripture are,and thereafter reading it selectively, bowdlerising it if need be, and allowing it's assertions about reality to be continually mixed. There is a pattern here, and it is undeniable. Religious moderation is the direct result of taking scripture less and less seriously. So why not take it less seriously still? Why not admit that the Bibles and Qur'an are merely a collection of imperfect books written by highly fallible human beings?.


Compiled by me with special thanks to Sam Harris,salamat.

CURSED WATER.....

WE know Nostradamus from his predictions, which are still hot tickets all over the world.
WE may not know that Nostradamus was also a physician, an extraordinary one who did not believe in leeches. For the plague he prescribed air and water; ventilating air,cleansing water.
Though filth incubated disease, water had a bad reputation in Christian Europe. Except in baptism, bathing was avoided because it felt good and invited sin. In the tribunals of the Holy Inquisition, frequent bathing was proof of Mohammedan heresy. When Christianity was imposed on Spain as the only truth, the crown ordered the many public baths left by the Muslims razed, because they were sources of perdition.
Not a single saint, male or female, ever set foot in a bath, and kings rarely bathed since that's what perfume was for. Queen Isabella of Castile, maybe, had a soul that was sparkling clean, but historians debate whether she bathed two or three times in her entire life. The elegant Sun King of France, the first man to wear high heels, bathed only once between 1647 and 1711 and that time it was only on doctor's orders.
Europe in general and Spain particularly did not like water, the devil's toy, a Muslim heresy.


Compiled through Galeano's mirrors. salamat.

ACCORDING TO EDUARDO !!

" What did the Chinese not invent ?

When I was a child, I knew China as a country on the other side of the world from where I was. You thought you could get there if you had the patience to dig a hole deep enough.
Later on, I learned something about world history, but world history was the history of Europe and it remains so today. The rest of the world lay, and still lies, in darkness. China too, we know little or nothing of the past of the country that invented practically everything.
Silk began there, five thousand years ago.
Before anyone else the Chinese discovered, named, and cultivated tea.
They were the first to mine salt from below ground and the first to use gas and oil in their stoves and lamps.
They made lightweight iron plows and machines for planting, threshing, and harvesting two thousand years before the English mechanized their agriculture.
They invented the compass eleven hundred years before Europe's ships began to use them.
A thousand years before the Germans, they discovered that water driven mills could power their iron and steel foundries.
Nineteen hundred years ago, they invented paper.
They printed books six centuries before Gutenberg, and two centuries before him they used mobile type in their printing presses.
Twelve hundred years ago, they invented gunpowder, and a century later the cannon.
Nine hundred years ago, they made silk- weaving machines with bobbins worked by pedals, which the Italians copied after a two-century delay.
They also invented the rudder, the spinning wheel, acupuncture, porcelain, soccer, playing cards, the magic lantern, fire works, the pinwheel, paper money, the mechanical clock, the seismograph, lacquer, phosphorescent paint, the fishing real, the suspension bridge, the wheel barrow, the umbrella, the fan, the stirrup, the horseshoe, the key, the toothbrush, and other things hardly worth mentioning.

EPILOGUE !! (6)

Essentially there are two fundamental and pivotal events in human history, the agricultural revolution, in which men passed from hunting to tillage and settled down to build homes, schools, and civilization, and the industrial revolution, which threw millions and millions of men, first in England, then in America and Germany, then in Italy and France, then in far away Japan and the ex soviet union now in China, India and Brazil,out of their homes and their farms into cities and factories. It transformed society and government by empowering the owners of machinery and the controllers of commerce beyond the owners of titles and land.

It transformed religion by generating science and its persuasive miracles and including many men to think in terms of cause and effect and machine. It transformed the mind by substituting novel and varied stimuli. It transformed woman by taking her work from the home and forcing her into the factories and the work force. It transformed morals by complicating economic life, postponing marriage, multiplying contacts and opportunities, liberating woman, reducing the family, and weakening religious and parental control and authority. And it transformed art by subordinating beauty to use, and subjecting the artist, not to a favored few with inherited standards of judgement and trained tastes,but to a multitude who judged all things in terms of power and cost and size.

ALL this and more,incredible as it may seem, Capitalism, Socialism, the Imperialism that must come when industrialised nations need foreign markets and foreign food, the wars that must come for these markets, and the revolutions that must come from these wars.

I know how partial and provincial all these lists must be. We are all born within frontiers of space and time,and, struggle as we will, we never escape from our boxes. To us, civilisation means Europe and America, and the orient, which considers us barbaric, seems barbarous.

I will let the reader, then, make his own lists, helping himself to what he likes in mine. Let him try to build for himself another perspective that shall clarify human development and progress for him.



Thanks again to MR. Durant, Little, et al.
thanks to all my readers for their patience in following my line of thoughts.
And finally salamat to all.