Change of direction.

So, clearly I haven't had the inclination to write much here lately. I feel like i have been writing quite a bit though. Most of my writing has been in the form of responses to various people that I find on the Internet with opinions that suck (no shortage there). The problem is that all that effort eventually disappears into the digital abyss. Since I put so much effort into that time suck I should have something to show for it. To that end I have decided to use this blog primarily as a repository for my altercations with other people on issues of theology, philosophy, and politics with my commentary (appearing in red) as needed.

First up is a guy named Neal. He is a right-wing fundy with a blog. I first encountered him at a right-wing fundy site called Federal Observer that posts some of his essays. I posted biting, but not rude counter-points to nonsense of his and other essayists there for a bit. I was called names and indirectly threatened by the readers there and soon was banned from posting at that site. Anyway, Neal is just slightly more thoughtful than the average person there, though still a raving nut bag. He is typical of the mindset of the burgeoning tea party movement. His latest post is a rant against health care reform. He makes use of the argument that since polling on health care reform reflect slightly negative views of it by the American people that our government has done something bad by passing it. Not just bad but something something warranting violence. We are now in a position comparable to that of the colonists facing King George in the American revolution. Here's my two cents:

Whether you, as an individual supported this health care bill or not, what does the action of Congress tell you about what they think about the wishes of a majority of the people? It tells me that they could give a rats ass about what we think.

Well, our government is not (at least it shouldn’t) be run on the basis of opinion polls. You may recall that the public option polled well, so by your logic we should be upset with Republicans for promising to filibuster legislation with the public option in it. Health care reform was a primary platform of the Obama campaign, so no one ought to be surprised that reform is what we got.

In my opinion, though, I don’t think there could be such a thing as health care reform that could poll higher that 50% given the convoluted state of thought of the average person. People want high quality, affordable health care, available to all citizens while at the same time wanting lower taxes, a lower deficit and smaller government. Well, they may as well want their surgeries done by magic talking pandas.

The problem with health care is that it is not like any other good or service. It would be like someone suddenly showing up at your house one day and telling you that you have to by a car or you will die. You happen to have insurance for such an occasion, but of course, the insurance company losses profit by shelling out money for you to by the car, so they will find ways to get out of doing that. Government could probably regulate the “buy a car or die” insurance industry better, but no one wants that because it would result in expanding governments power. So just what type of policies would you support if you were a person in this position?

There are those in this country who feel that history is repeating itself, that the actions of our government bear a striking resemblance to the actions of King George, leaving the colonists no recourse but to take up arms against their government.

Obama is not King George and the Tea partyers are not colonists. The founding fathers saw fit to create a system where you do, in fact, have recourse if you are in the political minority. It is known as the democratic process: persuade a majority of Americans to elect representatives that vow to repeal the health care reform bill. That ought to be easy for tea partyers to do given the polling data you cited, right? If that’s the case then why should anyone need to resort to tactics that are utterly antithetical to democracy and would surely be condemned by the founders of this great nation.

In fact, I would argue that our nation has remained as strong and stable as it has because political minorities, in fact, do have peaceful recourse. It can be a slow and difficult process, granted, but that is not a valid excuse. Of course some minorities have had to fight for their basic political rights- the right of suffrage, for example- but tea partyers are not in that position. They should be condemned, in my view, for pretending that they are, thereby trivializing what a true fight against tyranny is really about.

Sitting and drinking things. Is it like going to church?

I like to sit and drink things. At least once a day I like to take some time to sit quietly, drink something and think about things. Is this activity at all related to something like going to church or some other form of religious practice? I think that it is in one important way.

It seems we all have at least a vague idea of the types of values that we ought to aspire to in order to live a happy, flourishing, healthy, rewarding life and it is the cause of great sorrow and feelings of guilt or inadequacy when we allow ourselves to be moved to act by transient desires that are contrary to this set of values. Religions espouse their respective concepts of the ideal self and they promote overarching values to guide behaviour so that adherents might live a more righteous, fulfilled life. One of the primary roles of religious practice is to make explicit and consistently bring to mind those most important values. Making those values explicit and making them an object of attention and contemplation on a routine basis better prepares us to avoid betraying our better selves in the pull of immediate desires, and in this way we might avoid feelings of shame associated with acting in a way antithetical to our higher values and to experience the sense of well being that comes with fidelity to those values.

What types of values and priorities ought to guide us, given what we know about ourselves as human beings and the world in which we live? What types of values, if affirmed and lived by by everyone, would make for better societies and therefore ought to be promoted and defended? What should we do when different values conflict in the context of society or in our lives? These questions and more ought to be considered and meaningful answers ought to be arrived at as a first step toward a more useful and accurate worldview. But this is not much good if the answers are not frequently given sufficient attention, scrutiny and, if needed, revision so as to guide action. Something like this could be done on your knees (although, in that case, not much revision would be allowed) or it could be done while drinking tea on the couch. I like to sit and drink.

Although sometimes when I sit and drink I like to just think about cats...

Earth island

A group of people stranded on a deserted island, as a matter of common sense, would not be able to have their population grow indefinitely. Space limitations are an obvious limiting factor, but also these people would require food, shelter and potable water in order to survive. The island, it would seem, would have a carrying capacity; it would have a maximum rate of consumption that it would be able to sustain. New technologies may increase this maximum rate somewhat, but only somewhat. The rate of consumption of the population may increase as a result of the growth of the population or as a result of the increased rapacity of the individuals or both. If the needs of the islands population exceeds the sustainable rate of consumption allowable by the islands available resources the results would be the same as those witnessed in every other region of the world plagued by scarcity: the breakdown of social structures, war, famine, etc. Averting social disintegration and maintaining the habitability of the island would require implementing sustainable modes of resource acquisition and consumption and taking steps to avoid runaway population growth before problems arise. In other words the rate of consumption must be kept below the maximum rate allowable by the islands renewable resources.

Granted planets are not islands, but with regard to the use of resources used to provide food, shelter and potable water, an analogy between an island and Earth seems reasonable and illuminating. If so then it would be imperative for the Earth's population to 1) recognize that a maximum rate of consumption exists and 2) to avoid exceeding it by employing sustainable methods for acquiring needed resources and 3) maintaining the Earths population below a critical limit. This would require long term forethought and a willingness to address problems that are not yet felt; two things the human species does not do well (most likely because solving the reoccurring problems in our evolutionary histories did not require these traits).

In my opinion finding solutions to the sustainability problem will be the most difficult challenge the human species has ever faced, primarily because we and our institutions seem to be so ill equipped for these types of problems. In future posts I would like to explore some of the psychological, social, political, and ideological obstacles to successfully meeting these challenges.

My meaningful life.

The existentialist philosophy of the 20th century takes as a primary starting point the acknowledgment of the inherent meaninglessness of existence. With the death of god and with him the immortal soul went any notion of a transcendental source or grounding of meaning. Indeed there seems to be no identifiable external source of meaning. Far from being problematic, I would argue, this is an ideal situation. An external source for meaning (God or the ambient culture) might imply certain constraints that we might deem to be unfavorable. The point is that any prospective source of meaning must be judged by our own lights and deemed worthy of acceptance by us only to the extent that it suits our nature. A meaningful life is a life filled with things that are meaningful to us; meaningful as determined by our own standards, judged by our own light, suitable for our own natures.

Problems arise, it seems to me, when we fail to recognize the active role we have in judging and accepting what is meaningful to us and integrating these meaningful things into our lives. We tend to assume that meaning is something that happens to us, something we are fortunate enough to find ourselves having at any particular moment or we are not.

Moreover we tend to passively accept the standards of meaning offered up by our surrounding culture. A meaningful life is a life where you are, say, popular or good looking or own a lot of stuff, or are the best at something a lot of people are interested in. The problem is that these standards of meaning, because they are widely accepted, are mistakenly assumed to be the only standards that matter. It fact they happen to be merely the standards by which modern consumer culture determines a meaningful life. Perhaps these standards are suitable for some people, but they are clearly not for everyone. Some very good looking, successful people have lived miserable lives, lives lived under someone else's standards of meaning. Most likely they never thought about what standards of meaning they were subjecting themselves to and they never thought about what standards would better suit them, or else they never had the courage to reject popularly held standards of meaning and forge something better, more substanitive to live by.

A note to readers.

Hello and welcome to my blog.

There is no real structure or theme to what will be posted here. This is merely a forum for me to get down and think out some things that I happen to find interesting. The process of writing things out helps to clarify certain ideas and hopefully uncover and bring to light some heretofore unnoticed assumptions. Comments are welcome since I believe inquiry is most effective when is an interpersonal pursuit.

We are always privy to just a limited amount of information about the world in which we live. What information we take in shapes our model of the world, or worldview. I say "take in" because our store of beliefs is not composed just of information we actively seek. In fact only a small fraction of what we take to be true is the product of direct personal investigation. Most all of what we know we have assimilated from our surrounding cultural environment. We were either taught these things from childhood or we tacitly assume these things to be true because everyone in our cultural milieu takes these things to be true. This information composes our worldview. All of us have, and have to have, a worldview. Clearly what we believe to be true about the world in which we live, including what we believe to be true about ourselves, about what kind of beings we are, profoundly effects what we do, what we value and how we feel about ourselves. My contention is that ones worldview, functioning as it does as a model of the actual world, is better (better in several ways) if it is more accurate.

So the main purpose of this blog for me is to have a means by which to flesh out my own worldview, to expose lurking assumptions, to add nuance where needed, to expose prevailing views within the culture to need criticism and to examine and integrate new information relevant to all this. I hope anyone reading this will find it interesting, thought provoking (provoking enough to comment) and offensive (more on the importance of being offended in a later post.) Thanks.