lol jgnat. I would say my wife is not too different from you. She pursues the Good (at all costs), and I pursue the Unknown (at all cost). I think we work well, and I don't always understand how.
Posts by rmt1
-
110Why do so many people NEED to believe in a greater purpose?
by gringojj ini am an atheist.
i believe that this is the only life we have, there is nothing more.
i have no greater purpose.
-
-
-
110
Why do so many people NEED to believe in a greater purpose?
by gringojj ini am an atheist.
i believe that this is the only life we have, there is nothing more.
i have no greater purpose.
-
-
rmt1
AuldSoul, this is additionally irrelevant, centrifugal, and possibly inconsiderate. “a long-range plan whereby the entire world could be controlled by one nation.” If this is not a metaphor for cultural de-centralization of the individual, such a fear if actual is probably transferrence of adolescent anxiety, probably never dealt with, over paternal hegemony. The odds of any one nation getting political, economic, cultural, military control over “the entire world” is (adding…) Zero. For instance, Rome, however great its power has become in our historical lens of looking back upon some great Republican heritage (not those Xi-oxide emperors), had its ass handed to it several times. Unity is inversely proportional to minimum threat distance, and distance only. Even if we discovered a Klingon empire with laser vision in the next solar system, 4 light years away, even this threat would not be enough to caused every last political earth unit to recall their prerogatives and yield for the greater good to one supreme crisis manager. To get this planet to the point where “the entire world could be controlled by one nation” would require an imminent extraterrestrial threat that would foreground the likeness of our species vis-à-vis that of the Other, so that our self-preservation instincts and leopard brain socialization skills would slap everyone (way down) into the mode of being acutely sensitive to the subtle minutiae that ultimately distinguishes poser-Alpha male from asskicking-Alpha male. Until that point, the resistance power of any one individual to such a Marvel/DC/Star Wars/GIJoe/X-Filean monolithism (all mythic, observe ) is inversely proportional to his or her investment in the enterprise. Yes, a great portion of the planet does not resist imperialism because they do not have the resources. Yes, a small portion of the world does have the investment to perpetuate imperialism. But at the minimum-size political unit of “one planet,” in the absense of a context of other planets, the Other-ness of other peoples under other political units, upon which elite investment in “not causing a palace coup” is predicated, evaporates. At a planetary scale (in the absense of peers) you cannot sustain the investment of enough elites to counteract the erosive forces of the unenfranchised, because you’ve gone and broken open the Freudian closet of where it is we abject our worst feelings about ourselves; i.e., upon “other peoples”. I am really convinced now that I am resisting finishing this damn archaeology paper on “seismic agency, access and architectural change at Knossos.”
-
110
Why do so many people NEED to believe in a greater purpose?
by gringojj ini am an atheist.
i believe that this is the only life we have, there is nothing more.
i have no greater purpose.
-
-
rmt1
tetrapod, this may be irrelevant, inconsiderate, etc. Probably every day I affirm to myself the absolute, sovereign, inalienable, unquestionable right that I as a human being have, to drive myself off a cliff. I know where there is one, and when things are hot, I remind myself where a snappy, adequately irreversible solution lies. (None of this is my imputing that you are suicidal; I know you're not.) What I'm getting at is this: Every time I hear that an ex-JW has lost their center, lost it, whatever 'it' is, I think of nothing other than Orwell's 1984, where the system got in so deep that it took the person's center. The JWs spout that God rejoices more over one lamb being saved than 99 being good: I think this disguises the reality that JWs rejoice more over a single disfellowshipped/disassociated apostate who self-destructs, particularly by actual suicide, than they do over the disfellowshipped/disassociated persons who merely find a 'worldly' kind of selfish self-satisfaction that is only moderately self-destructive and will only kill them (sigh) at Armageddon. It may seem naive and symptomatic of the same entrapment I ostensibly attempt refute, but I think there is some sense in not giving the JWs more grist for their grind by "succumbing to" self-destruction. (Not that I'm saying you are planning it: this is me making free with your online personal as a Socratic apodosis.) "Choose" self-destruction, yes; "Succumb to" self-destruction, no. There's a fine line and one's mileage may vary. The main point, difficult to get at, is that if there was any purpose in leaving the JWs, there may be some good planetary-scale purpose in not giving them EXACTLY what they are WAITING for. I believe this idea can be held even without calling it a 'purpose'. Again, this is addressed to the words your persona spoke, not to the 'you' behind the screen. I don't know 'you' from Angelina Jolie's mitochondria.
-
17
Are Liberal Arts Degree worth it?
by truthseeker inan excellent article, which also refutes the idea that people only go to college to get rich and make money.. http://encarta.msn.com/encnet/departments/elearning/?article=liberalartsare liberal arts degrees worth anything?by jim pollock.
for everyone who says that a liberal arts degree doesn't prepare you for anything, you'll find someone else who claims that it prepares you for everything.
well, both, to some extent.the one thing that's pretty much certain is that right out of the gate, a liberal arts grad will tend to pull a smaller starting salary than his or her friends who majored in business or a technical field.
-
-
rmt1
Truthseeker, the ‘growth stock’ is a fantastic analysis. I'm done with my English and Classics BA as of May 06, and I have zero expectation that life thereafter will be anything but an impossible slog through a sun's heart. But, I have reason to believe that I am chemically addicted to learning and epistemologic struggle. The dopamine hit I receive on a daily basis from confronting the stultifyingly stupifying stupidity and brilliance of the cosmos has been, so far, worth more than the money I have thrown into my liberal education. I expect absolutely no one to understand this sensation, and do not yet have the monetary incentive to explain it. Since the need for liberal degrees in this consumerist, technologically enslaved era has been reduced to a low percentage, the continued admissions of a high number of liberal arts majors will ensure the punctual production of a slave class perfectly fit for jobs one increment above minimum wage. I am operating under the current paradigm that to survive and then succeed with a liberal education, you have to die trying. I.e., don't even waste a damn second thinking that your liberal B.A. actually represents a living wage: it doesn't; adjusted for technological-consumerist inflation, it represents the diploma you got in high school, is worth only as much, and is unfortunately the burning ring you must jump through to get on to your Real degree, the masters. Your mileage may vary.
-
110
Why do so many people NEED to believe in a greater purpose?
by gringojj ini am an atheist.
i believe that this is the only life we have, there is nothing more.
i have no greater purpose.
-
-
rmt1
I don’t know about “higher meaning” or “purpose”, but there is something to be looked at in Newton, Thermodynamics and the Heisenberg Principle, which are about as much “text” or BIOS as we’re going to get. We’re the product of mass and energy and so is much of our cognitive and emotional processes. Newton’s I: Momentum keeps me going, inertia gets me down. Newton’s II: It’s going to take a life-time of hauling ass to pull myself out of the nosedive the JW years put me into. Accelerate and reduce mass: Get thee to college and forget Paradise. Newton’s III: Unless you’re much smarter, you generally reap what you sow. Pick your battles wisely, for you know not who it is that not only speaks softly but also carries a big stick. Thermodynamics I: Time and money are inversely proportional. Thermodynamics II: The center falls, all the time. Global warming is human nature. Find a place to make your stand. Heisenberg: Not only do we forget where we are if we stick our nose in too far, there are also some things that cannot be penetrated or illuminated under infinite investigation. An ethical, emotional, guilt-cathected best-performance of these phsyical laws is not what I have in mind. I believe that dopamine is the real purpose, however it is you can get it at minimum cost in human and material capital.
-
57
Leaving JWs Has Made Me Intolerant of Stupid Thinking - How About U?
by Seeker4 inlori (my girlfriend - a non-jw).
and i had quite a discussion last night.
i am almost always a very tolerant, easygoing person, but there is this one aspect of my personality that has caused us a certain amount of tension.
-
-
rmt1
[PG warning: high pressure, some language.] Quarantining your elusive, nebulous, slippery feelings into textual prisons is one way to start to get mastery over the impulse. Face it, if you were a JW and had even 80% reasoning capacity, you were, in an epistomological sense, “abused” and you suffered “trauma.” I was. I’m not talking a pleasant, jejune “traumatic experience” that everyone has when they narrowly avoid dying in a car wreck: I’m talking about the mythic, preliterate (inarticulable), preconscious (un/subconscious), limbic (physiologic lizard brain stem) abomination that cannot actually be articulated, and which triggers a physiologic response of readyness for physical combat, because to the preconsious mind, it IS a fucking physical threat. Although you can remember the play by play bullshit of how the elders did it, the actual trauma (I acknowledge accumulated, not all at one instant) is buried so deep in the psyche that there’s really no way to revisit it under controlled circumstances so as to get mastery. The physiologic response will recur until the preconscious mind has enough other senses of assurance (monetary, status, fame, health, anything you can ‘have’ that makes you more able to resist threats) to effectively overlook, or deprioritize, the re-experience as a physical threat. I believe that the emotional cathexis (outrage, badness, sense of naughtiness) attached to cases of sexual pedophilia cowers before the cathexis resulting from adequately-intelligent, or particularly brilliant people, being brain-raped by authority figures. I.E., what the Lacanian father, with his inscrutibly irrefutable WORD, does to young minds. It demands a taxonomy, say, “Pedoepistophilia.” Nothing less than a class action suit would satisfy, but you can’t articulate the crime, because it exists before/beneath/behind the written records of rational articulation. You can’t get at it, thus can’t prove it, and thus it goes on.
-
19
Six Convincing Lines of Evidence that the WTS was RIGHT
by jgnat intrue believers meet at armageddon (december 30, 2000)
i find it oddly satisfying to read old reports of intelligent, scholarly, well-read men who confidently picked the time of the end.
and were obviously wrong.
-
-
rmt1
Responses to Point 4 could be distilled to the Sigmoid Curve: no biological organism or structure of organisms (empires) evades the Sigmoid Curve. Foretelling the (inevitable) decline of an empire is equivalent to foretelling the decline of an individual. Additionally, Point 6 seeks to appeal to our innate understanding of the inverse, or opposite side of, the Sigmoid Curve, i.e., that things decay in a logarithmic fashion. I'd love to see a graph of hard numbers Memorial partakers vs publishers vs attendees for all times recorded. If Point 6 is true, partakers very well |ought| to have a conspicuous, distinguishable logarithmic decay. We know, however, that it's been hovering at 8000+ long past what logarithmic decay woudl suggest. (I'm sure such a graph exists on this board.)
-
18
Pioneer Sisters & Field Service
by prophecor insome of you sisters were so adept at going out in service, that it seemed as if you really didn't need a brother, who was willing to take the lead.
many of you were already well suited in marking out and mapping out the territory, and sometimes big brother such and such, who just happened to be newly baptised, but is now in a position to serve shows up and begins to make himself feel useful.
i mean, this is how the climbing up the ladder begins for us brothers, isn't it?.
-
-
rmt1
The experienced elderesses' reminders and or indirect compulsions to the snivvly dorks is a form of subtle power. Certainly it's one of the few avenues of power they have but it's there.
-
36
Define your "pantheism"
by Narkissos ini read a post by satanus today which made me think this might be a topic worthy of discussion.. "pantheism" is quite an attractive concept on the way of many of us who have been drifting from theism.
however it sounds like a problematic concept too.
here are a few questions i'd like to raise:.
-
-
rmt1
The Latin “numen, numinis” was pantheistic in origin but makes a really good word now, “numinal,” “1. A presiding divinity or spirit of a place. 2. A spirit believed by animists to inhabit certain natural phenomena or objects. 3. Creative energy; genius.” The "sacred place, or sacred geography" has undefinable power that no one can appropriate quickly, and its power precedes and is independent of claims the sentient agent divinities. Numinus geography would include locations where uunexpected, unstatistical things happen, frequently in the intersections of earth, sky and water (convex/protruding like cliff over the sea and waterfalls or concave/recessive like caves and pools). Irregularities cause a knot in the spacetime of awareness and accrue numinal sensations.
-
27
Ever think why the collection box is in the back of the KHall?
by biddie ini used to thinik it was better... but now i realize it was a way for the elders to keep an eye on who was giving!
biddie
-
-
rmt1
It keeps the nuts and bolts of the organization - taking money - out of the sight of the congregation when they are in the structural unit called an audience. This originally had the benefit of preventing wealthy benefactors from displaying their contributive power before others, as well as taking the pressure off the unwealthy who previously felt that the pressure of plate-passing in "Christendom" was wrong. The audience section is the 'formal' part of the Hall while the rear is the 'informal' part. Christendom concentrated on shaming the faithful into giving |money| in a |formal| space, money that was usually the parishoners' only form of contribution, and an action that once accomplished allowed the parishoner off the hook for the week. The Society shrewdly distanced itself by not pressuring for money-right-now in a formal space, AND found a way to keep pressure on the 'friends', by demanding a line of credit on one's time. This is like a mental bank note that says, "This note is legal tender and the holder shall yield up all proceeds of the next time unit of field service." Of course the game changes from pressuring parishoners to empty their pockets to getting 'friends' to stop mentally seperating the two ideas of "taking a donation" and "turning in the donation". As long as those two ideas stay bound and inseperable, the machine works and the Society gets to claim difference. And if the Society claims that the contribution boxes are out of sight, they explicitly demand that you only conceive of them as being out of sight of the formal audience. They are Quite within sight of the congregation once it has stood down into the informal spaces. They occupy key junction points like a panoptical shaded Mr. Smith, and are near the pulp cartoon distribution centers. The pressure is never off. The pulp cartoons cost, what, $.03 apiece with Brooklyn's massive economies of scale?