Before we start I should add a caveat to this article: I am a philosopher and a Daoist. As such, I suppose, I am open to accusations of bias and a lack of objectivity. This is unavoidable. However, if one wants to know about racing horses, one does not talk to just those who gamble on horse races. I offer only my own understanding of the form and that is limited. I do not claim to have a "monopoly on the truth" or to being in the business of converting people to Daoism. Any mistakes of fact are all my...
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You are in possession of the one of the universe’s most mysterious objects. Your personal copy of this object differs in function only slightly from all the other similar objects in our solar system. It is the part of you that feels pleasure and yet it is also the part of you that knows pain. It is a part of your body that you cannot see, but it is also that which you rely on to make sense of what you observe. It is built of more than 33 billion neurons, linked in a mesh up to 10 thousand times each, making a total number of connections greater than the observable stars in the sky. It is the true wonder of planet Earth; for it grew here in the same way apples grow on trees.
It is your brain.
And while we can explore the furthest reaches of light-enabled space, we cannot claim to have begun understanding this small lump of tissue we each possess. Our sciences regarding it are crude at best and mostly replying on mere observation. That sum of knowledge eventually comes down to this: which bits you should not poke. On the other hand, our mental science experts, doctors and scientists try to reduce the functions of the brain down to an increasingly morbid collection of faculties about which they then bicker and argue about endlessly.
And every single one of them has missed the point… Read More
The first line of Philip Pullman’s novel reads:
This is the story of Jesus and his brother Christ, of how they were born, how they lived and how one of them died.
Despite the use of the definite ‘the’ in the first line of Philip Pullman’s new novel, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, it is not actually claiming to be the real back-story of the influential spiritual leader. Rather it is a telling of a myth; a fable. And in doing so makes us face what the story of Jesus really means. All stories of the Gods are the subject of myth and they all have within them the patterns that stretch directly into the mind and subconscious. As with other tales of half remembered, but not forgotten, ancient wisdom, the story of Jesus has meaning beyond the telling. His is the hero’s story told again and again through the ages, and its lessons are to be read and dwelt upon over many tellings. So, as he steps though the doors of his life – the foretold stages of his journey – we step with him and arrive on the other side together.
The layers of understanding, which come with changing from child to man, are ones I remember clearly. At 10 I was always told that Jesus was also a God. Or was the Christian God himself in a certain form. This lesson led to my childlike wondering of, given the immense creative powers ascribed to this God, how it was that Jesus allowed himself to be nailed up in the first place. Why did he not use his godly power to save himself? Such are the practical thoughts of the child.
To an adult, the answer to this question is Gnostic and illuminates the spiritual level, understanding and beliefs of the speaker. The story sold to me at my Sunday school was that Jesus let himself be executed because he wanted to save us. This was something my young mind could not understand and, I presumed at the time, I would have to ‘grow up’ to realise. In the same sense that one finds an answer to Santa Claus’s apparent ability to travel around the world in one night, I did. In the sense of coming to an understanding of the churches’ view of Jesus, I did not. Growing up involved coming to terms with the world, my limited place within it and to walking some of the steps of the spiritual journey within myself. Together with the practical teachings of my schooling, the categorisation of reality scientifically defined in certain ways, this meant that the Christian God did not fit into my life.
As with my first article expounding my political thoughts, philosophical views and religious methods, a reader has kindly taken the time to compose a question and view point long enough to require 3000 words to answer!
The question is this:
alexander hiboux. Further to your post of the 7th, and having taken some time to consider same, I agree that if someone were to act unlawfully in a moment of insanity, that persons temporary insanity should not absolve him of blame as to his actions, because, to return to a view expressed in my earlier post, a difference must be drawn between “temporary” and “permanent” insanity. If someone acts out of temporary insanity, then by definition, for the prior, and presumably post, act period, that person is in a state of sanity and as such they are aware of what is right and wrong, and thus must be aware of what could loosely be termed natural justice. Ergo, they have at sometime understood right and wrong, and presumably do so again. The fact that this was rejected for such period as to “allow” the act to happen should be no basis for a defence. However, if a person has always been “insane”, then that person may well have never understood the concept of right and wrong, and perhaps never will. Thus there has been no rejection of right and wrong, but rather a fundamental inability to understand the concept at any time, not just at the time of the act itself. The fact that the rest of society understands the concept should not be imposed upon the individual, otherwise we are moving towards a point where any deviation from popular and societal norms may be considered unacceptable, and in the extreme, criminal. Thus, whilst, for the safety of the rest of the population (the moral majority, if you will), the permanently insane should be kept from harming others, perhaps by effective imprisonment, (or hospitalised in a secure unit as the more p.r. conscious would term it), it is for the safety of others, and not for the permanently insanes inability to understand right from wrong, or his actions, that this should occur. Of course, if the “permanently” insane person were then to be medicated to a point where they were no longer deemed to be insane, and such that they no longer posed a threat to society, that would then open up a whole other argument…Here we go!
This post is a break from the normal schedule. It is a corollary to the “Philosophy Bites?” post a few days ago. I am going to try an answer one of the questions raised by readers of that post, in this case my old sparring partner Tom; who posted the following in the comments:
So, not to disagree with you, because I don’t, but merely to add to the argument, not so much in war, but in the scheme of moral judgements, where do you stand on killing for pleasure? and I don’t mean just for humans…
Note: Any complete answer could stretch to the length of a whole book. Ideas are not isolated but rather conjoined in a massive net of links comprised of concepts, indeed that is their purpose, and I am wary of giving a less than full account of an answer by the necessity to keep within a blog post length. Suffice to say, that this is a “clip notes” version. There may be much here that is lightly treated, but that is not (I hope) because it hasn’t been thought through.
Anyway, the short answer is this:
To kill purely for pleasure is to kill because one is grasping at desire.
