God As A Psychological Event
There have been enough studies to show that Psychological Experiences are not arbitrary and random, that they show pattern, design, meaning, are predictable and can be mapped – that if a patient experience this, this and this, then it is likely he will soon experience that. In healthy patients Maturity Curves and Passages can be tracked along known curves, and in pathological cases deterioration can follow predictable lines as so also the course of healing. All this is to say that the Mind and its experiences are in a manner Real Events, following all the ordinary rules by which Objective Phenomena must abide. If it is Objective, then it is Real, and if it is real, then, well, it can’t be so easily dismissed, can it?
So what if Psychology has encountered God Delusions – patients that had experienced God? And then, what if many other patients had experienced much the same order of Delusion – that God is seen by different people, but in substantially the same way? And not in accordance with the doctrines of the Religion of their upbringing, but a Surprise God that is consistent across population groups? Years ago before the Internet I had read a Paper by a psychologist who maintained that the God Delusion was powerfully therapeutic – that certain psychotic patients would experience a God Delusion during the course of their affliction but that the God Vision would come as a healing crisis… that the God Epiphany would bring a Re-Integration of the personality. That God Heals.
Well, this raises the question as to whether an Atheist who ever dreams of God can really ever truly consider himself to be an Atheist? If God’s True Realm is in the Mind and nowhere else – the Collective Mind – then once that God is encountered, how can that God subsequently be denied?
And then we must wonder about an Atheist who reads a Psychology Paper that shows a consensus regarding God Delusions or Visions. Can one continue to deny God even after He has become a factor in one of our Scientific Disciplines?
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Lessons Learned With Second Languages
I have recently enjoyed some substantial success in applying myself to the reading of French, as a Second Language. While I can’t read French with the same speed and not yet with the same discernment with which I can read English, still, I have arrived at the point where I can read French Literature for the fun of it. I think I have even got to the point of telling a decently turned phrase when I see one… or at least of being able to come to such an opinion.
It took a lot of work, learning to read a second language, but it is work one begins to enjoy. Because reading French had started to become, well, effortless, and since I had been delighted to take the effort, I have decided to start learning to read German, so I can go back to the hard work again that I love so much. But I doubt that it will be as difficult as French was. You know, they say a Third Language comes much easier, if for no other reason than knowing where to begin. First I know that verbs must be attacked right off. When I first started with French it concerned me that I could not find almost any words in the dictionaries. Well, of course not, because I was being fooled by the funny looking conjugated verbs that do not appear in the basic pages of the dictionaries but only in the verb tables in the very back… and only if one is lucky enough to have bought a dictionary that includes verb tables, as not all of them do. With German I know straight off to learn what the basic infinitive verbs will probably look like up against all the various tense forms.
And then there are the practical issues – what to buy and where to buy it from. I was once hard pressed to guess where on earth I could possibly buy books in French. Then it finally occurred to me to type in ‘Amazon.fr’ and see where that would get me. France! It was like I was miraculously transported to another Planet! I could buy books directly from France. Who would have guessed it could be that easy. Now with German, there is no mystery. Amazon.de. Oh, and one’s accounts and passwords carry over from country to country and the credit cards continue to work fine and dandy.
Now, there are some hard lessons that I think I have learned… some mistakes that I may not wish to repeat. Mostly, I think I started out by making way too many 3 by 5 cards. There can be way too much of a good thing. It had become an obsession. I would spend my weekends generating more and more new cards. At my peek I was creating 300 new cards each week. From reference books, dictionaries, Movie subtitles (yes, most DVD’s have French Subtitles in their Language Choices, so one may listen in English but read in French). Well, of course, 300 cards is way too many to digest before the next weekend generates 300 more. At one time I had a rack of more than 2000 active cards, and a bucket behind my desk with 2000 more I was meaning to get back to. I would pocket about 100 cards at a time to carry on my person, and go through them over and over, placing comfortably known cards to the back of the deck and the tricky cards toward the front in order to see them again sooner, to get another chance with them earlier on. When I would finish with a deck of cards, it would go to the back of the stack and I would take new cards from the front. Eventually the cards I already studied would come around again to the front. But there were so MANY cards over all, that the ‘known’ cards would seem exactly the same as the very new cards. By the time I got through a full rotation, I would have forgotten the most of the cards. I simply was not getting in enough timely repetition. Probably the optimum number of cards should allow one to cycle through and repeat several times a week, so that the review would be reinforcing, not giving oneself enough time to totally forget a word or phrase before one goes over it again, and then again. So, now, during my weekends, I try to divide my time better between making new cards and flipping through and learning the old ones. I try not to add more than 50 new cards to the stack each week.
Then, there is the question of how long one should keep a card in the stack. If kept forever, one would soon enough be buried in cards. With 20,000 words in a language (and that’s modest, with some dictionaries claiming 40,000 or even 80.000 entries), and then multiply that by usages and colloquialisms, one would need to keep a separate room for all the cards. And, as I have said, one would not have time to root through all of them anyway… not to any lasting advantage. So, from my experience so far, I’m thinking that each card should have a lifespan of not more than several months. One finds that one might try to reward one’s vanity by keeping cards that one really knows rather well – one wants to congratulate oneself for knowing this or that as it comes up, but at a certain point one needs to make room for new cards – cards that will do their proper job of making one feel stupidly ignorant again. Also there is the matter of the old cards becoming familiar simply as old cards, that is, one does not know the word or phrase so much as one simply knows the card itself… if the cards are allowed to stay on too long, one simply grows used to the poor old dog-eared things, and one hardly sees what they have to say on their front before knowing from perhaps a coffee stain what is on the back. Such a card is no longer really doing a thing for you except taking up brain space and should be retired to the trash bins. As I have said, one needs to be able to go through ALL of one’s cards several times a week, for the optimum amount of repetition. So you can’t keep a lot of old cards laying around. If you make 50 new cards a week, then you really need to toss 50 cards also.
Yes, I know that there are arguments for keeping cards on for practically forever – that without a word or phrase in the card rotation, one may in time forget it. Yes, it in fact does happen that in the course of one’s reading that one will look up a word only to be reminded by its definition that it was once a ‘card’ word… that one had forgotten it. Is that disappointing? Yes. But is it tragic? NO! On should realize that at least one recognized the word upon looking it up, and that in itself shows some degree of familiarity. So just write out a new card… include the word in a phrase to make it different this time around. A word might go through the decks in two or three different incarnations before it becomes part of your solid lasting vocabulary. Besides, cards are cheap and writing the cards improves spelling skills and penmanship. Oh, and now that I am starting with German, I can testify that there is a great difference between totally new words and words which one has encountered before and subsequently ‘forgotten’. Words encountered before come back so much easier, and nothing is really ever totally forgotten. These new German words, on the other hand… well, I simply must remember when French had been that hard. It’s only a temporary problem.
Oh, there is more to experience than citing problems I have had and mistakes I have made. There were things that I think I had actually done quite well, indeed, very well. Call it beginners luck. I had been admirably systematic. I had gotten CD’s to play while driving in my car. Simple grammar is taught painlessly and one learns pronunciation. Michel Thomas has the best programs (entertaining and even fun) and I think he teaches every language there is, except maybe Mandarin. Then I got various Lesson Books, you know, those “How To Speak French” or whatever books. Again, this gives one exposure to necessary grammar and verb conjugation. Now, don’t make the mistake of supposing that you can read for comprehension while blowing off the need for learning the grammatical rules… thinking that you will pick up the sense by some kind of intuition. All those tenses, modes and what-ever-you-call-them carry substantial meaning that are not conveyed by the words themselves, that one would know offhand, but only by their grammatical presentation. You really need to know what the funny little endings mean, and then everything will make much more sense. And you need not plod along in rote memorization, but simply know enough to know where to look when in doubt. Soon enough you will know what you need to know with little loss of time and surprisingly little pain.
I began my reading with books of the sort called “Easy Readers”, and they come with vocabulary listings, but sometimes fall down in not providing translations of what the editors probably thought was obvious, but which a new student might still have doubts about. Easy is never really Easy enough. But the Easy Readers are a good source for start up vocabulary. These are the words you will see again and again, so there is no sense moving on to High Literature until you can read “Baby’s First French Book” or whatever, without too much stumbling.
Then there are the Dual Language Books, which are convenient in their own way, but there are not many of them available… and the choices are, well, a matter of taste. They also suffer from problems of translation. Now, how to explain that? Sometimes people come up to me and ask, “how does one say such and such a thing in French”, and the answer is often “Well, they wouldn’t.” That is, what is literally said in one language is often not what is literally said in another – colloquial phrases and figurative usages are simply different. Different languages communicate differently. Its not just different words, but different concepts, images, metaphors. So you will find that almost every translation you encounter will go way beyond translating word for word, but will convert to concepts and expressions familiar in the target language. So a ‘translation’ may be of limited utility in understanding the word by word presentation in a Second Language. What we find in the Dual Language Books, and indeed in almost any ‘Translation’ is that we get a sense for the details of the story and that is about it. But that may be a great deal better than nothing! As long as paperbacks only cost a few dollars, I still make it a point to have a ‘cheater’ translation lying around when reading a foreign language book, just in case some strange colloquialism throws me entirely off the track. Oh, and thinking back to the beginning, when the grammar was still so strange that it was entirely likely that one could mix up subject and object, and not know whether somebody was doing or being done to, then even a loose translation could straighten out such a misunderstanding.
Anyway, while Dual Language Books can be worthwhile, one should consider that one can arrive at the same benefits, simply by finding books that are published in both languages. Then you have a much larger choice of books! It may take awhile, but one can bring up both Amazon.com and Amazon.fr or .de or whatever and keep digging until one finds a book published in both languages. Now, I have encountered problems with modern books where the titles are rendered so fancifully that it is not easily guessed, from one language to the next, whether one is looking at the same book (Harlan Corbin and Lee Child are published in many languages, but the Publishers make up the titles for how sexy they sound and not for their similarity in meaning to the English Title). But one can find Websites put together for or by the fans, and going to the discussion forums you can simply ask the question, what the French Title is for a certain English Title, giving them a list of possible choices, and some busy-bee of a person is always willing to research it out for you. Sometimes one gets lucky. “Echo Park” in English is “Echo Park” in French. With fine literature and well known books the Titles are very close to literal. “The Big Sleep” by Raymond Chandler is “Le Grand Sommeil” in French. “Wuthering Heights”is “Les Hauts de Hurle-Vent”. Oh, some translations are actually abridgments, without saying so. But every cheater copy I have ever had was worth having around. But, again, translations only go so far and you can count on doing a lot of the hard reading yourself.
Now, here’s a hard-earned piece of advice: once one starts one’s reading, after the sufficient preparations suggested earlier, one must assume that anything that seems odd, strange or somehow puzzling in its meaning is probably figurative or colloquial. Every language will have funny and idiosyncratic ways of saying some things… strange ways to express some ideas. Its in the nature of the Beast we call Language. Most good dictionaries will embed within their definitions the most common colloquialisms where certain words are used. But this requires a fairly decent dictionary. The most basic English French Dictionary will not show every usage. Now some dictionaries are better than others. Look for dictionaries that include phrases. I had been rescued time and time again by Merriam Webster’s French English Dictionary and was sad to find they did not publish an English German edition. The Country’s own Dictionary – their Single Language Dictionary, will be more complete in listing usages and colloquialisms. So, as soon as it becomes possible one should graduate to a One Language Dictionary – NOT the biggest one in the Language, as they are very expensive, very heavy and awkward, and one gets TOO Much Information and each words takes forever to go through (important little words can take up pages), but a good Medium Size Dictionary will have what you need and be easier to use. What a One Language Dictionary will do for you is provide you with a context of other words in the language you want to be learning. But go to a One Language Dictionary too soon, and it will be largely meaningless, forcing you to chase from one word to another in a circular hunt for definition which could almost seem to go on forever. But after you have gone through 500 to a thousand pages of reading with a Dual Language Dictionary, you should have enough command of the most commonly used words to understand a One Language Dictionary definition without excessive ‘dictionary chasing’—some of which is even useful.
The best reference materials are a wonderful aid and a great convenience. But they may rate perhaps only as a distant second behind your tenacity to know. When a passage seems confusing and it simply does not sound right against what you think it must mean, then you have a problem – a colloquialism, or a word or a grammar point you have somehow confused. These are the passages that try men’s souls! You really need to stay with these sentences or phrases until you figure them out. Starting a habit of skipping passages one does not fully understand … well, I have often wondered how it is that people could possibly do badly in a reading comprehension test. You read a paragraph. You answer the questions. What is hard about that? Well, the problem is that some people began the habit of skipping over what they read. So, don’t skip. Don’t move on until it makes sense to you.
Oh, those who are planning to begin reading in a foreign language may be wondering how much one should read before one can expect to be reasonably proficient. Well, assuming that everybody learns at the same rate, there is the matter of how much it takes before one has really seen a good representation of the language, and that may take several thousand pages, maybe four or five big thumping books. You see, many words, not just the big ostentatious words, are not used in the course of just one book. The same goes for grammatical constructions. You may have to read for quite some time before one has effectively ‘seen it all’ or even seen most of it. For instance, in the grammar books for French I was taught that I would see a puzzling construction consisting of a form of ‘avoir’(to have), combined with ‘beau’ (good or beautiful), and that it would be used in a manner that would have a parallel meaning with “despite doing good, something bad happened”, or “despite best efforts, failure occurred”. Okay, I was ready for “avoir beau”. But I never saw it. I finished book after book. Not until just shy of having read 2000 pages did I finally encounter “I HAD searched BEAU the entire district, and still nobody would rent me a room”. Of course, thank God, I knew it when I saw it. I honestly gasped! One gets a warm fuzzy rewarding feeling inside when one finally encounters in print some word or construction one had bothered to study and then was waiting to finally see out in the real literary world, like a rare and elusive butterfly. Anyway, my guess is that if one divides one’s time well between literary and modern books, to see a good representation of the language, then 4 or 5 books ought to get one through the difficult period in which one seems to always be slowed down in looking up new vocabulary and running down colloquialisms.
Oh, some people may be wondering what their incentive could possibly be for learning to read in a second language. Well, there are several very good reasons. Firstly, if one is a scholar or concerned with World Affairs, then one really needs to go beyond English to escape from the prejudices, even the propagandas of the English Speaking World – the language of George Bush and his poodledog Prime Ministers – the language of the Unilateral Protestant Empire and the one Country of Europe that fights against every Collective Decision. One must face the fact that the English Speaking World has some peculiar notions, when considered from the point of view of Everybody Else. Other cultures have other viewpoints, and these viewpoints are expressed in other Languages, and one can never entirely count upon translations. And many books are not translated. Magazines, and newspapers are not translated. Then there is the matter of enjoyment of literature. Frankly I read all of English Literature… at least looking at everything to see if I would like it. After having finished it all, my choice was to go back over and re-read my favorites, AGAIN, or pick up another language and move onto a New Field of Literature. Oh, yes, there is Modern Fiction, but, honestly, who wants to waste one’s time with such absolute rubbish, when reading another Culture’s Fine Literature is not really all that difficult. If one is attracted to foreign authors or foreign philosophers, realize that you are only tagging on another year or two of time and trouble so that you can read it all in the Original. Isn’t that worth it? If you will live to be 60, 70 or 80, then don’t you really have the time, especially if you are still young?
Also, I should mention that by learning second and third languages, one becomes much more attuned to the play and dynamics of language in general – of English! My writing has improved as well as my appreciation of writing styles. It gives one more to think about, and thinking is never entirely bad.
So go for it. Pick a Second Language and get to work. Let me know if I can help.
It took a lot of work, learning to read a second language, but it is work one begins to enjoy. Because reading French had started to become, well, effortless, and since I had been delighted to take the effort, I have decided to start learning to read German, so I can go back to the hard work again that I love so much. But I doubt that it will be as difficult as French was. You know, they say a Third Language comes much easier, if for no other reason than knowing where to begin. First I know that verbs must be attacked right off. When I first started with French it concerned me that I could not find almost any words in the dictionaries. Well, of course not, because I was being fooled by the funny looking conjugated verbs that do not appear in the basic pages of the dictionaries but only in the verb tables in the very back… and only if one is lucky enough to have bought a dictionary that includes verb tables, as not all of them do. With German I know straight off to learn what the basic infinitive verbs will probably look like up against all the various tense forms.
And then there are the practical issues – what to buy and where to buy it from. I was once hard pressed to guess where on earth I could possibly buy books in French. Then it finally occurred to me to type in ‘Amazon.fr’ and see where that would get me. France! It was like I was miraculously transported to another Planet! I could buy books directly from France. Who would have guessed it could be that easy. Now with German, there is no mystery. Amazon.de. Oh, and one’s accounts and passwords carry over from country to country and the credit cards continue to work fine and dandy.
Now, there are some hard lessons that I think I have learned… some mistakes that I may not wish to repeat. Mostly, I think I started out by making way too many 3 by 5 cards. There can be way too much of a good thing. It had become an obsession. I would spend my weekends generating more and more new cards. At my peek I was creating 300 new cards each week. From reference books, dictionaries, Movie subtitles (yes, most DVD’s have French Subtitles in their Language Choices, so one may listen in English but read in French). Well, of course, 300 cards is way too many to digest before the next weekend generates 300 more. At one time I had a rack of more than 2000 active cards, and a bucket behind my desk with 2000 more I was meaning to get back to. I would pocket about 100 cards at a time to carry on my person, and go through them over and over, placing comfortably known cards to the back of the deck and the tricky cards toward the front in order to see them again sooner, to get another chance with them earlier on. When I would finish with a deck of cards, it would go to the back of the stack and I would take new cards from the front. Eventually the cards I already studied would come around again to the front. But there were so MANY cards over all, that the ‘known’ cards would seem exactly the same as the very new cards. By the time I got through a full rotation, I would have forgotten the most of the cards. I simply was not getting in enough timely repetition. Probably the optimum number of cards should allow one to cycle through and repeat several times a week, so that the review would be reinforcing, not giving oneself enough time to totally forget a word or phrase before one goes over it again, and then again. So, now, during my weekends, I try to divide my time better between making new cards and flipping through and learning the old ones. I try not to add more than 50 new cards to the stack each week.
Then, there is the question of how long one should keep a card in the stack. If kept forever, one would soon enough be buried in cards. With 20,000 words in a language (and that’s modest, with some dictionaries claiming 40,000 or even 80.000 entries), and then multiply that by usages and colloquialisms, one would need to keep a separate room for all the cards. And, as I have said, one would not have time to root through all of them anyway… not to any lasting advantage. So, from my experience so far, I’m thinking that each card should have a lifespan of not more than several months. One finds that one might try to reward one’s vanity by keeping cards that one really knows rather well – one wants to congratulate oneself for knowing this or that as it comes up, but at a certain point one needs to make room for new cards – cards that will do their proper job of making one feel stupidly ignorant again. Also there is the matter of the old cards becoming familiar simply as old cards, that is, one does not know the word or phrase so much as one simply knows the card itself… if the cards are allowed to stay on too long, one simply grows used to the poor old dog-eared things, and one hardly sees what they have to say on their front before knowing from perhaps a coffee stain what is on the back. Such a card is no longer really doing a thing for you except taking up brain space and should be retired to the trash bins. As I have said, one needs to be able to go through ALL of one’s cards several times a week, for the optimum amount of repetition. So you can’t keep a lot of old cards laying around. If you make 50 new cards a week, then you really need to toss 50 cards also.
Yes, I know that there are arguments for keeping cards on for practically forever – that without a word or phrase in the card rotation, one may in time forget it. Yes, it in fact does happen that in the course of one’s reading that one will look up a word only to be reminded by its definition that it was once a ‘card’ word… that one had forgotten it. Is that disappointing? Yes. But is it tragic? NO! On should realize that at least one recognized the word upon looking it up, and that in itself shows some degree of familiarity. So just write out a new card… include the word in a phrase to make it different this time around. A word might go through the decks in two or three different incarnations before it becomes part of your solid lasting vocabulary. Besides, cards are cheap and writing the cards improves spelling skills and penmanship. Oh, and now that I am starting with German, I can testify that there is a great difference between totally new words and words which one has encountered before and subsequently ‘forgotten’. Words encountered before come back so much easier, and nothing is really ever totally forgotten. These new German words, on the other hand… well, I simply must remember when French had been that hard. It’s only a temporary problem.
Oh, there is more to experience than citing problems I have had and mistakes I have made. There were things that I think I had actually done quite well, indeed, very well. Call it beginners luck. I had been admirably systematic. I had gotten CD’s to play while driving in my car. Simple grammar is taught painlessly and one learns pronunciation. Michel Thomas has the best programs (entertaining and even fun) and I think he teaches every language there is, except maybe Mandarin. Then I got various Lesson Books, you know, those “How To Speak French” or whatever books. Again, this gives one exposure to necessary grammar and verb conjugation. Now, don’t make the mistake of supposing that you can read for comprehension while blowing off the need for learning the grammatical rules… thinking that you will pick up the sense by some kind of intuition. All those tenses, modes and what-ever-you-call-them carry substantial meaning that are not conveyed by the words themselves, that one would know offhand, but only by their grammatical presentation. You really need to know what the funny little endings mean, and then everything will make much more sense. And you need not plod along in rote memorization, but simply know enough to know where to look when in doubt. Soon enough you will know what you need to know with little loss of time and surprisingly little pain.
I began my reading with books of the sort called “Easy Readers”, and they come with vocabulary listings, but sometimes fall down in not providing translations of what the editors probably thought was obvious, but which a new student might still have doubts about. Easy is never really Easy enough. But the Easy Readers are a good source for start up vocabulary. These are the words you will see again and again, so there is no sense moving on to High Literature until you can read “Baby’s First French Book” or whatever, without too much stumbling.
Then there are the Dual Language Books, which are convenient in their own way, but there are not many of them available… and the choices are, well, a matter of taste. They also suffer from problems of translation. Now, how to explain that? Sometimes people come up to me and ask, “how does one say such and such a thing in French”, and the answer is often “Well, they wouldn’t.” That is, what is literally said in one language is often not what is literally said in another – colloquial phrases and figurative usages are simply different. Different languages communicate differently. Its not just different words, but different concepts, images, metaphors. So you will find that almost every translation you encounter will go way beyond translating word for word, but will convert to concepts and expressions familiar in the target language. So a ‘translation’ may be of limited utility in understanding the word by word presentation in a Second Language. What we find in the Dual Language Books, and indeed in almost any ‘Translation’ is that we get a sense for the details of the story and that is about it. But that may be a great deal better than nothing! As long as paperbacks only cost a few dollars, I still make it a point to have a ‘cheater’ translation lying around when reading a foreign language book, just in case some strange colloquialism throws me entirely off the track. Oh, and thinking back to the beginning, when the grammar was still so strange that it was entirely likely that one could mix up subject and object, and not know whether somebody was doing or being done to, then even a loose translation could straighten out such a misunderstanding.
Anyway, while Dual Language Books can be worthwhile, one should consider that one can arrive at the same benefits, simply by finding books that are published in both languages. Then you have a much larger choice of books! It may take awhile, but one can bring up both Amazon.com and Amazon.fr or .de or whatever and keep digging until one finds a book published in both languages. Now, I have encountered problems with modern books where the titles are rendered so fancifully that it is not easily guessed, from one language to the next, whether one is looking at the same book (Harlan Corbin and Lee Child are published in many languages, but the Publishers make up the titles for how sexy they sound and not for their similarity in meaning to the English Title). But one can find Websites put together for or by the fans, and going to the discussion forums you can simply ask the question, what the French Title is for a certain English Title, giving them a list of possible choices, and some busy-bee of a person is always willing to research it out for you. Sometimes one gets lucky. “Echo Park” in English is “Echo Park” in French. With fine literature and well known books the Titles are very close to literal. “The Big Sleep” by Raymond Chandler is “Le Grand Sommeil” in French. “Wuthering Heights”is “Les Hauts de Hurle-Vent”. Oh, some translations are actually abridgments, without saying so. But every cheater copy I have ever had was worth having around. But, again, translations only go so far and you can count on doing a lot of the hard reading yourself.
Now, here’s a hard-earned piece of advice: once one starts one’s reading, after the sufficient preparations suggested earlier, one must assume that anything that seems odd, strange or somehow puzzling in its meaning is probably figurative or colloquial. Every language will have funny and idiosyncratic ways of saying some things… strange ways to express some ideas. Its in the nature of the Beast we call Language. Most good dictionaries will embed within their definitions the most common colloquialisms where certain words are used. But this requires a fairly decent dictionary. The most basic English French Dictionary will not show every usage. Now some dictionaries are better than others. Look for dictionaries that include phrases. I had been rescued time and time again by Merriam Webster’s French English Dictionary and was sad to find they did not publish an English German edition. The Country’s own Dictionary – their Single Language Dictionary, will be more complete in listing usages and colloquialisms. So, as soon as it becomes possible one should graduate to a One Language Dictionary – NOT the biggest one in the Language, as they are very expensive, very heavy and awkward, and one gets TOO Much Information and each words takes forever to go through (important little words can take up pages), but a good Medium Size Dictionary will have what you need and be easier to use. What a One Language Dictionary will do for you is provide you with a context of other words in the language you want to be learning. But go to a One Language Dictionary too soon, and it will be largely meaningless, forcing you to chase from one word to another in a circular hunt for definition which could almost seem to go on forever. But after you have gone through 500 to a thousand pages of reading with a Dual Language Dictionary, you should have enough command of the most commonly used words to understand a One Language Dictionary definition without excessive ‘dictionary chasing’—some of which is even useful.
The best reference materials are a wonderful aid and a great convenience. But they may rate perhaps only as a distant second behind your tenacity to know. When a passage seems confusing and it simply does not sound right against what you think it must mean, then you have a problem – a colloquialism, or a word or a grammar point you have somehow confused. These are the passages that try men’s souls! You really need to stay with these sentences or phrases until you figure them out. Starting a habit of skipping passages one does not fully understand … well, I have often wondered how it is that people could possibly do badly in a reading comprehension test. You read a paragraph. You answer the questions. What is hard about that? Well, the problem is that some people began the habit of skipping over what they read. So, don’t skip. Don’t move on until it makes sense to you.
Oh, those who are planning to begin reading in a foreign language may be wondering how much one should read before one can expect to be reasonably proficient. Well, assuming that everybody learns at the same rate, there is the matter of how much it takes before one has really seen a good representation of the language, and that may take several thousand pages, maybe four or five big thumping books. You see, many words, not just the big ostentatious words, are not used in the course of just one book. The same goes for grammatical constructions. You may have to read for quite some time before one has effectively ‘seen it all’ or even seen most of it. For instance, in the grammar books for French I was taught that I would see a puzzling construction consisting of a form of ‘avoir’(to have), combined with ‘beau’ (good or beautiful), and that it would be used in a manner that would have a parallel meaning with “despite doing good, something bad happened”, or “despite best efforts, failure occurred”. Okay, I was ready for “avoir beau”. But I never saw it. I finished book after book. Not until just shy of having read 2000 pages did I finally encounter “I HAD searched BEAU the entire district, and still nobody would rent me a room”. Of course, thank God, I knew it when I saw it. I honestly gasped! One gets a warm fuzzy rewarding feeling inside when one finally encounters in print some word or construction one had bothered to study and then was waiting to finally see out in the real literary world, like a rare and elusive butterfly. Anyway, my guess is that if one divides one’s time well between literary and modern books, to see a good representation of the language, then 4 or 5 books ought to get one through the difficult period in which one seems to always be slowed down in looking up new vocabulary and running down colloquialisms.
Oh, some people may be wondering what their incentive could possibly be for learning to read in a second language. Well, there are several very good reasons. Firstly, if one is a scholar or concerned with World Affairs, then one really needs to go beyond English to escape from the prejudices, even the propagandas of the English Speaking World – the language of George Bush and his poodledog Prime Ministers – the language of the Unilateral Protestant Empire and the one Country of Europe that fights against every Collective Decision. One must face the fact that the English Speaking World has some peculiar notions, when considered from the point of view of Everybody Else. Other cultures have other viewpoints, and these viewpoints are expressed in other Languages, and one can never entirely count upon translations. And many books are not translated. Magazines, and newspapers are not translated. Then there is the matter of enjoyment of literature. Frankly I read all of English Literature… at least looking at everything to see if I would like it. After having finished it all, my choice was to go back over and re-read my favorites, AGAIN, or pick up another language and move onto a New Field of Literature. Oh, yes, there is Modern Fiction, but, honestly, who wants to waste one’s time with such absolute rubbish, when reading another Culture’s Fine Literature is not really all that difficult. If one is attracted to foreign authors or foreign philosophers, realize that you are only tagging on another year or two of time and trouble so that you can read it all in the Original. Isn’t that worth it? If you will live to be 60, 70 or 80, then don’t you really have the time, especially if you are still young?
Also, I should mention that by learning second and third languages, one becomes much more attuned to the play and dynamics of language in general – of English! My writing has improved as well as my appreciation of writing styles. It gives one more to think about, and thinking is never entirely bad.
So go for it. Pick a Second Language and get to work. Let me know if I can help.
Saturday, June 7, 2008
Religion Looking Back and Looking Forward
Religion Looking Back and Looking Forward
Nowadays people’s choices of Religion seem only to involve what period and sphere of History one is to look far back upon – dead Prophets, dead Messiahs, dead Saints, dead Avatars, even a Buddha who died of food poisoning… from eating food that had gotten too old. How ironic. Yes, occasionally there are new appearances on the Religious landscape, but this is in the way of designer Religions, that is, People tossing out all Revelation and deciding simply from personal preference and taste as to what appeals to them in the way of Doctrine – people creating by themselves a Religion they can feel good about. That God Himself does not ever weigh in with His Opinion does not seem to bother them in the least.
Well, how would God weigh in with His Opinion anyway? He had in the Past. Again, there are all those old dead Saints, Messiahs, Avatars, Prophets and such. Miracles of Supernatural fact and knowledge – Saints doing the Impossible and knowing things it was Impossible for them to know. Religions were accepted not because they sounded good or met with certain aesthetic expectations. It was necessary that they be validated by the Supernatural. You see, the Ancient Peoples had at least that much common sense more than us.
Now, God could easily validate any of the New Designer Religions simply by effectively accrediting the Founder, or even any of the more assiduous of its members or devotees, for, after all, a string of signatory miracles should not be all that impossible for God to accomplish. It does make me wonder that People who design their own Religions do not feel horribly self-conscious that God so pointedly ignores them. Oh, one does hear the most foolish of comments – one Founder says that he deliberately has renounced Miracles as being SO egotistical. Yeah, that’s right! They aren’t all a bunch of frauds and fakes. It’s just that they have all renounced the Miraculous. Makes perfect sense.
Even some 50 years ago one could still read about living Saints and Miracles. All that seems now to be drying up, everywhere. It’s as though the entire World has been handed over to Hell in a Hand-basket, so to speak.
Anyway, all of the preceding was simply preface to the point I would like to make now, and that is that while people are looking back to find their Religions of Choice, well, I think they happen to be looking back too far. If one evaluates the History of Religion to determine any particular one Golden Age, one can discern a salient that occurs at none of the Founding Moments of any of the Major Religions, and none of the Major Scriptural Documents and Holy Books cover the events thereof. I am speaking of the High Middle Ages and Catholic Civilization. There were dozens of Saints of the First Magnitude and hundreds of others, and a significant few of them were frankly more miraculous than Jesus ever was – for instance, Saint Vincent Ferrer probably did more on his laziest day than Jesus accomplished in his entire lifetime.
You would think that the Catholic Church would capitalize on all of this, but they have two problems there. The first problem is that at the Council of Nicea in the 3rd Century they officially closed the Book on New Revelation – yes, saying in effect that if God were to speak again, in the Future, that He would be thoroughly ignored. Islam did the same thing. Indeed, so did the Sikhs. You see, it all comes down to basic Theology with the underlying assumption that God is Absolute, with one of the corollary propositions being that an Absolute God never changes… if a Doctrine seems complete, then the Theologians assume, a priori, that it would be impossible for God to add anything. So they Close the Book… whatever their Religious Book happens to be. Well, Catholicism closed the Book, and now they find that they would have a difficult time opening it up again to say that a Great Deal happened from the 4rd to the 16th Centuries. But it did happen, and so the Church has created something of a Loop Hole, as such things are called. All Miracles, Saints, Revelations and things of that order that happened after the Council of Nicea had affirmed God’s Practical Deadness, all such things are classified as ‘Personal Revelations’ – NOT Church Revelations which would be illegal, but if private Catholics wanted to believe such things on their own, then nobody would burn them at the Stake for it… well, not most of the time anyway. This is why there were so many Religious Orders created, as a Religious Order would give refuge to individuals who would wish to join with other in the celebration of certain ‘Private Revelations’. And as it happened, ALL of the grandiose and spectacular Religious Phenomena of the High Middle Ages, the Golden Age of World Religion, was not Catholic, in the Collective Church sense at all, but was always Revelatory in regards to some ‘Private Revelation’… well, as it would have to be by the very way that the Church forced itself to define such things. The Council of Nicea took away all discretion and latitude in such affairs and decisions. So it is that the Catholic Church virtually ignores its Greatest Moments, and why the Church does not write the New Bible that really ought to have been written.
Also, there is the matter that the Catholic Church AFTER the Wars of the Reformation was not the same Church anymore. One of the big secrets of History is that the Catholics TOTALLY lost that War. It did not end in a truce as we are asked to believe. Look at the facts. The Peace of Westphalia was one thing, ending the War between the Protestant and Catholic Combatants. But then there was the Council of Trent which followed quickly on the heals of the Political Peace Treaty. The Council of Trent redefined the Church, gutting the Practices that had held up Catholic Civilization, and making way for the Protestant Institutions which would lead the way to all subsequent Barbarisms. With that Redefinition of Catholicism, the Spiritual Holiness of the Church was severely damaged, and Saints almost disappeared from History, though there would still be a few now and again, but the Golden Age of Religion and Spirituality was clearly over. Now, after the Council of Vatican II from back in the 1960’s, where the Catholic Bishops pledged Religious Unity with the Protestant Evangelicals, who see no God but Paul, well, that was the complete Death of Catholicism – now its just a stiff cold stinking Body of what it once was… with an Ex-Nazi Pope in charge, of all things.
Well, there have been Apparitions for the last several hundred years, even intensifying in frequency and spectacle – Marian Apparitions – predicting all of this – the decline of the Church and the decline in the Providence and Grace of God, with People not deserving God’s Grace, and all of that. But what we need to keep in mind is that the Predictions look forward to Extremely Bad Times which will be followed by a New Era, a New Time. I suppose Religion will finally come back. And then, PLEASE, and I address here those who will be the SURVIVORS – PLEASE, throw out the Stupid old Bibles and instead pick up your notebooks, and take note of what you see and hear in the way of the Miraculous, in the way of Revelations of God. Write a New Bible. After all, the Old Stuff only let us down in the End, didn’t it?
Nowadays people’s choices of Religion seem only to involve what period and sphere of History one is to look far back upon – dead Prophets, dead Messiahs, dead Saints, dead Avatars, even a Buddha who died of food poisoning… from eating food that had gotten too old. How ironic. Yes, occasionally there are new appearances on the Religious landscape, but this is in the way of designer Religions, that is, People tossing out all Revelation and deciding simply from personal preference and taste as to what appeals to them in the way of Doctrine – people creating by themselves a Religion they can feel good about. That God Himself does not ever weigh in with His Opinion does not seem to bother them in the least.
Well, how would God weigh in with His Opinion anyway? He had in the Past. Again, there are all those old dead Saints, Messiahs, Avatars, Prophets and such. Miracles of Supernatural fact and knowledge – Saints doing the Impossible and knowing things it was Impossible for them to know. Religions were accepted not because they sounded good or met with certain aesthetic expectations. It was necessary that they be validated by the Supernatural. You see, the Ancient Peoples had at least that much common sense more than us.
Now, God could easily validate any of the New Designer Religions simply by effectively accrediting the Founder, or even any of the more assiduous of its members or devotees, for, after all, a string of signatory miracles should not be all that impossible for God to accomplish. It does make me wonder that People who design their own Religions do not feel horribly self-conscious that God so pointedly ignores them. Oh, one does hear the most foolish of comments – one Founder says that he deliberately has renounced Miracles as being SO egotistical. Yeah, that’s right! They aren’t all a bunch of frauds and fakes. It’s just that they have all renounced the Miraculous. Makes perfect sense.
Even some 50 years ago one could still read about living Saints and Miracles. All that seems now to be drying up, everywhere. It’s as though the entire World has been handed over to Hell in a Hand-basket, so to speak.
Anyway, all of the preceding was simply preface to the point I would like to make now, and that is that while people are looking back to find their Religions of Choice, well, I think they happen to be looking back too far. If one evaluates the History of Religion to determine any particular one Golden Age, one can discern a salient that occurs at none of the Founding Moments of any of the Major Religions, and none of the Major Scriptural Documents and Holy Books cover the events thereof. I am speaking of the High Middle Ages and Catholic Civilization. There were dozens of Saints of the First Magnitude and hundreds of others, and a significant few of them were frankly more miraculous than Jesus ever was – for instance, Saint Vincent Ferrer probably did more on his laziest day than Jesus accomplished in his entire lifetime.
You would think that the Catholic Church would capitalize on all of this, but they have two problems there. The first problem is that at the Council of Nicea in the 3rd Century they officially closed the Book on New Revelation – yes, saying in effect that if God were to speak again, in the Future, that He would be thoroughly ignored. Islam did the same thing. Indeed, so did the Sikhs. You see, it all comes down to basic Theology with the underlying assumption that God is Absolute, with one of the corollary propositions being that an Absolute God never changes… if a Doctrine seems complete, then the Theologians assume, a priori, that it would be impossible for God to add anything. So they Close the Book… whatever their Religious Book happens to be. Well, Catholicism closed the Book, and now they find that they would have a difficult time opening it up again to say that a Great Deal happened from the 4rd to the 16th Centuries. But it did happen, and so the Church has created something of a Loop Hole, as such things are called. All Miracles, Saints, Revelations and things of that order that happened after the Council of Nicea had affirmed God’s Practical Deadness, all such things are classified as ‘Personal Revelations’ – NOT Church Revelations which would be illegal, but if private Catholics wanted to believe such things on their own, then nobody would burn them at the Stake for it… well, not most of the time anyway. This is why there were so many Religious Orders created, as a Religious Order would give refuge to individuals who would wish to join with other in the celebration of certain ‘Private Revelations’. And as it happened, ALL of the grandiose and spectacular Religious Phenomena of the High Middle Ages, the Golden Age of World Religion, was not Catholic, in the Collective Church sense at all, but was always Revelatory in regards to some ‘Private Revelation’… well, as it would have to be by the very way that the Church forced itself to define such things. The Council of Nicea took away all discretion and latitude in such affairs and decisions. So it is that the Catholic Church virtually ignores its Greatest Moments, and why the Church does not write the New Bible that really ought to have been written.
Also, there is the matter that the Catholic Church AFTER the Wars of the Reformation was not the same Church anymore. One of the big secrets of History is that the Catholics TOTALLY lost that War. It did not end in a truce as we are asked to believe. Look at the facts. The Peace of Westphalia was one thing, ending the War between the Protestant and Catholic Combatants. But then there was the Council of Trent which followed quickly on the heals of the Political Peace Treaty. The Council of Trent redefined the Church, gutting the Practices that had held up Catholic Civilization, and making way for the Protestant Institutions which would lead the way to all subsequent Barbarisms. With that Redefinition of Catholicism, the Spiritual Holiness of the Church was severely damaged, and Saints almost disappeared from History, though there would still be a few now and again, but the Golden Age of Religion and Spirituality was clearly over. Now, after the Council of Vatican II from back in the 1960’s, where the Catholic Bishops pledged Religious Unity with the Protestant Evangelicals, who see no God but Paul, well, that was the complete Death of Catholicism – now its just a stiff cold stinking Body of what it once was… with an Ex-Nazi Pope in charge, of all things.
Well, there have been Apparitions for the last several hundred years, even intensifying in frequency and spectacle – Marian Apparitions – predicting all of this – the decline of the Church and the decline in the Providence and Grace of God, with People not deserving God’s Grace, and all of that. But what we need to keep in mind is that the Predictions look forward to Extremely Bad Times which will be followed by a New Era, a New Time. I suppose Religion will finally come back. And then, PLEASE, and I address here those who will be the SURVIVORS – PLEASE, throw out the Stupid old Bibles and instead pick up your notebooks, and take note of what you see and hear in the way of the Miraculous, in the way of Revelations of God. Write a New Bible. After all, the Old Stuff only let us down in the End, didn’t it?
Paulism and Turning Logic Around
Paulism and Turning Logic Around
Barrie Wilson’s “How Jesus Became Christian”, though a shallow work written by an unimaginative drudge, still it raised some bookish facts. At the end of the First Century the point was raised by the Messianic Jews that since the Apostles disagreed with Paul on every single doctrinal point, that Paul must have been wrong, because two contradictory points cannot both be true – if one believed the Apostles, the True heirs of the Messianic Legacy, than one could not also believe Paul. It was thought that the Jews finally found a Logical Tool for excluding Paulism – they finally found a weapon that the Greek Mind could appreciate.
Well, a certain very wealthy Greek Merchant, Marcion, saw this Anti-Paulist Logic as something of a challenge… even as an opportunity. If the Jews wished to play Logic with the Greeks he would be pleased to oblige. He saw that this logical sword had two edges and could point either way. If both Paul and the Jews could not both be right, then, fine, he agreed. But he would insist it was the True Apostles of Jesus who were wrong. We can wonder today how Marcion could have the brass to assert such an outrage, but we need to remember his context – he was a Greek in Greece arguing for Free Sin, and against the Jews who were considered a troublesome minority (in the Roman Jewish Wars of the early 2nd Century hundreds of thousands of Greeks had been caught in between… indeed, in many instances the Romans only interceded after the Jews had massacred entire regions of Greeks. So we need not be surprised that if in the 2nd Century the Greek would see the Jew with a certain tinge of hostility and resistance).
So Marcion went on the offensive. Jesus would be presented not as a Messianic Jew, not as the Jewish Messiah, but instead as a Rebellious Individual challenging the Old Jewish Traditions and Laws while offering a completely New Dispensation, which the old fish mongering Apostles were too dense to understand, but which Paul, studied in Greek Philosophy, had the spiritual and mental agility to comprehend correctly. The Argument of the Jews was reversed as like a Mirror Image and turned back against them, and in this format, the Greeks were quite convinced by it.
Now, unfortunately, there is more in Barrie Wilson’s book “How Jesus Became Christian”. He goes far to point out the sophistic and false nature of Marcion’s reverse argument. But if two contradictory points cannot both be True, nothing prevents them both from being False, and this is what Barrie Wilson decides in the case of Jesus and the Messianic Jews, that they are wrong too. We are informed that Jesus was false because he had claimed to be a Messiah, but, well, never became a Messiah. Historically Jesus simply never amounted to anything. When Barrie Wilson decided to sum up his book with a big moral message, it was this, that Christianity should just strike its tent and quit Religion altogether and accept themselves only as Gentiles, defined in terms only of not being Jewish, and that they should learn from it all to find a new appreciation for Jews as the Chosen People of God, and to stop being so Anti-Semitic.
I can understand how the Jews would enjoy being proclaimed the Master Race, and have every Gentile bow before them, their faces in the dirt. But I wonder what appeal Barrie Wilson thought the Gentiles would see in it. The book probably had Jewish Publishers.
Anyway, the same kind of Double Edged Argument as before crops up and I was surprised the Barrie Wilson missed it. What Mr. Wilson fails to point out is that the Failure of Jesus reflects equally upon the Jew. His Failure is their Failure. The only reason Jews have been held in high regards, more than we appreciate, say, the Gypsies or the Kurds, is because they were the Race that brought us our Messiah, Our Savior. If Jesus was a nothing, then what does that make the Jews? Without a Jesus, then the claim of the Jews to be a Chosen People resounds only of self-aggrandizement, bigotry and anti-gentile Apartheid.
Without the New Testament to give it point and direction, the Old Testament is only a chronicle of a cunning and quarrelsome people from whom God obviously withdrew all favor. Solomon’s Temple was destroyed. The Promised Land, held for only a few hundred years anyway, was taken back. And God would give it, to paraphrase Alexander the Great on his death bed, to whomever was strong enough to take it.
But, you know, it is not necessary that Jesus was not the Messiah just because his people turned against him and killed him. Because his people were incredibly Evil is no logical proof that he wasn’t absolutely Good… indeed, it is just one more Spiritual Paradox we find ourselves having to deal with. Professor Wilson takes no look at the History of Spiritual Christianity, particularly at the High Point of Christian Civilization, when the numerous Christian Saints stood at least the equal to any Jewish Prophet or Patriarch, and when Paulism was all but forgotten except by a small cluster of the hedonistically corrupt Bishops. But the Christianity of a great Civilization believed in a God, a Messiah and a Pure Mother of a Messiah, worthy of joining with God Almighty Himself. Yes, it was a Religion that went way beyond its Judaic roots, but it is no crime to rise up above one’s roots – every plant, every flower, every tree hopes to do the same. Life reaches toward the Sky. Death reaches down, staying with the Roots. And reaching up Christianity became a Moral Religion, with Moral Expectations. Indeed everything we have today which makes us capable of Moral Reflection comes to us from that Old Christian Civilization and Religion that was vibrantly alive with its own Miracles and deeply inspired with brilliant Visions of actual Spirituality.
Barrie Wilson’s “How Jesus Became Christian”, though a shallow work written by an unimaginative drudge, still it raised some bookish facts. At the end of the First Century the point was raised by the Messianic Jews that since the Apostles disagreed with Paul on every single doctrinal point, that Paul must have been wrong, because two contradictory points cannot both be true – if one believed the Apostles, the True heirs of the Messianic Legacy, than one could not also believe Paul. It was thought that the Jews finally found a Logical Tool for excluding Paulism – they finally found a weapon that the Greek Mind could appreciate.
Well, a certain very wealthy Greek Merchant, Marcion, saw this Anti-Paulist Logic as something of a challenge… even as an opportunity. If the Jews wished to play Logic with the Greeks he would be pleased to oblige. He saw that this logical sword had two edges and could point either way. If both Paul and the Jews could not both be right, then, fine, he agreed. But he would insist it was the True Apostles of Jesus who were wrong. We can wonder today how Marcion could have the brass to assert such an outrage, but we need to remember his context – he was a Greek in Greece arguing for Free Sin, and against the Jews who were considered a troublesome minority (in the Roman Jewish Wars of the early 2nd Century hundreds of thousands of Greeks had been caught in between… indeed, in many instances the Romans only interceded after the Jews had massacred entire regions of Greeks. So we need not be surprised that if in the 2nd Century the Greek would see the Jew with a certain tinge of hostility and resistance).
So Marcion went on the offensive. Jesus would be presented not as a Messianic Jew, not as the Jewish Messiah, but instead as a Rebellious Individual challenging the Old Jewish Traditions and Laws while offering a completely New Dispensation, which the old fish mongering Apostles were too dense to understand, but which Paul, studied in Greek Philosophy, had the spiritual and mental agility to comprehend correctly. The Argument of the Jews was reversed as like a Mirror Image and turned back against them, and in this format, the Greeks were quite convinced by it.
Now, unfortunately, there is more in Barrie Wilson’s book “How Jesus Became Christian”. He goes far to point out the sophistic and false nature of Marcion’s reverse argument. But if two contradictory points cannot both be True, nothing prevents them both from being False, and this is what Barrie Wilson decides in the case of Jesus and the Messianic Jews, that they are wrong too. We are informed that Jesus was false because he had claimed to be a Messiah, but, well, never became a Messiah. Historically Jesus simply never amounted to anything. When Barrie Wilson decided to sum up his book with a big moral message, it was this, that Christianity should just strike its tent and quit Religion altogether and accept themselves only as Gentiles, defined in terms only of not being Jewish, and that they should learn from it all to find a new appreciation for Jews as the Chosen People of God, and to stop being so Anti-Semitic.
I can understand how the Jews would enjoy being proclaimed the Master Race, and have every Gentile bow before them, their faces in the dirt. But I wonder what appeal Barrie Wilson thought the Gentiles would see in it. The book probably had Jewish Publishers.
Anyway, the same kind of Double Edged Argument as before crops up and I was surprised the Barrie Wilson missed it. What Mr. Wilson fails to point out is that the Failure of Jesus reflects equally upon the Jew. His Failure is their Failure. The only reason Jews have been held in high regards, more than we appreciate, say, the Gypsies or the Kurds, is because they were the Race that brought us our Messiah, Our Savior. If Jesus was a nothing, then what does that make the Jews? Without a Jesus, then the claim of the Jews to be a Chosen People resounds only of self-aggrandizement, bigotry and anti-gentile Apartheid.
Without the New Testament to give it point and direction, the Old Testament is only a chronicle of a cunning and quarrelsome people from whom God obviously withdrew all favor. Solomon’s Temple was destroyed. The Promised Land, held for only a few hundred years anyway, was taken back. And God would give it, to paraphrase Alexander the Great on his death bed, to whomever was strong enough to take it.
But, you know, it is not necessary that Jesus was not the Messiah just because his people turned against him and killed him. Because his people were incredibly Evil is no logical proof that he wasn’t absolutely Good… indeed, it is just one more Spiritual Paradox we find ourselves having to deal with. Professor Wilson takes no look at the History of Spiritual Christianity, particularly at the High Point of Christian Civilization, when the numerous Christian Saints stood at least the equal to any Jewish Prophet or Patriarch, and when Paulism was all but forgotten except by a small cluster of the hedonistically corrupt Bishops. But the Christianity of a great Civilization believed in a God, a Messiah and a Pure Mother of a Messiah, worthy of joining with God Almighty Himself. Yes, it was a Religion that went way beyond its Judaic roots, but it is no crime to rise up above one’s roots – every plant, every flower, every tree hopes to do the same. Life reaches toward the Sky. Death reaches down, staying with the Roots. And reaching up Christianity became a Moral Religion, with Moral Expectations. Indeed everything we have today which makes us capable of Moral Reflection comes to us from that Old Christian Civilization and Religion that was vibrantly alive with its own Miracles and deeply inspired with brilliant Visions of actual Spirituality.
Friday, June 6, 2008
Pirate Island As An Economic Model
Does everyone have a brother that listens too much to Rush Limpbugger while not reading enough nonfiction? Anyway, I do. One time when arguing about World Economic Policy, he brought up the example of one thriving economic community that charged next to nothing in taxes, offered a Labor Force that received abysmally low wages, and he proposed that every Economy could equally prosper by doing exactly the same.
He had forgotten a very important point, which should have been obvious to any orthodox and observant Capitalist… he had forgotten about Competition, and that in Free Market Economics the predictive models can reduce only to one foreseeable outcome – that there will be one Winner and a bunch of losers. In this sense Competition amounts to a huge race toward the most minimal standards and infrastructures. Yes, one particular Pirate Island, positioned optimally so that a very Imposing and Curiously Lenient neighboring Political Jurisdiction can pick up all the Social and Military Slack, can forgo most in the way of Tax Rates in order to attract the most number of Tax Payers. But such a competitive trick can only work once. If Tax Rates were Universally Low, then there would be no reason for any body to move. One Pirate Island works because there is Law and Order everywhere else. The Pirates from Everywhere Else have only one place to go with all their Loot. If the Law was equally unobserved everywhere, then Outlaws and Pirates could might as well just stay home. Oh, and please forgive my hasty metaphor where I inadvertently compare the Rich and Wealthy People to criminals, but if it helps us to understand the picture… as, after all, both groups are after exactly the same thing. In fact one needs to wonder how such levels of selfishness and greed can ever NOT be against one law or another.
So, anyway, is it wise for the Entire World to engage in a Competition, a virtual race to the bottom, where only one Economy can hope to win anyway… and a meager win it would be for a People who would have to satisfy itself with the slimmest margin of wages and social spending in the Entire World; and we would need to wonder how long adjoining Political Jurisdictions could possibly consent to receive the impoverished overflow of social, political and economic refugees from such an Economic Winner?
But let’s think again about this argument for Universal Criminality, that if laws were ignored everywhere, then Outlaws could simply stay home. Well, this same argument works equally in reverse – that if Laws are Universally Upheld then the Criminals, in this case Rich People and Corporations, would have no reason to flee – they might as well take their chances at Home as anywhere else. Do Rich Corporations REALLY want to go to live with Sand Fleas in Bahrain except that they go there explicitly to escape Taxation? If Taxes were the same, they’d stay home and save themselves the unease of being hated by all the poor natives.
It is about time that the people
e who make decisions concerning the World Political Consensus should examine the possibility of arriving at One Legal and Economic Standard – no downward trending Competition offering Pirate Level tax breaks and lower than subsistence level wages in order to steal businesses from other Economies. Let everyone renounce the possibility of being the One Lone Winner in order that everyone can be certain not to be one of the bankrupt and miserable losers.
Also, it may be added that the possibility of their ever being one Winner is entirely imaginary. History has shown that while Economic Competition had always been propelled on the hopes of their being some Perfect Economic Winner, the effects of the Over-Concentration of Wealth had always precipitated a Complete Collapse before any single Winner could have the chance to emerge. You see, Social and Military complications arise. Economies that pair down on their Social and Military Infrastructure in order to Pad the Wealth of their Rich, find that they are exposed to both internal rebellion and foreign invasion, and it can’t be ignored that their Tremendous Wealth does present an irresistible target. But, the Wealthy Classes are lulled into the belief that their tremendous Personal Wealth can purchase them Invulnerability –Gated Communities… even Castles, moots and drawbridges… and even Private Armies. But unless they are prepared to scale up their efforts until they are again willing to pay for real levels of National Security Infrastructure, any limited and focused effort can only provide some temporary island of Security, under siege, and doomed to eventual fall. Again, a review of History shows that there has never yet ever been the first Winner. History only shows a succession of continuous losers, and this will be the case until we finally get serious about what must transpire before we all can become Civilized.
He had forgotten a very important point, which should have been obvious to any orthodox and observant Capitalist… he had forgotten about Competition, and that in Free Market Economics the predictive models can reduce only to one foreseeable outcome – that there will be one Winner and a bunch of losers. In this sense Competition amounts to a huge race toward the most minimal standards and infrastructures. Yes, one particular Pirate Island, positioned optimally so that a very Imposing and Curiously Lenient neighboring Political Jurisdiction can pick up all the Social and Military Slack, can forgo most in the way of Tax Rates in order to attract the most number of Tax Payers. But such a competitive trick can only work once. If Tax Rates were Universally Low, then there would be no reason for any body to move. One Pirate Island works because there is Law and Order everywhere else. The Pirates from Everywhere Else have only one place to go with all their Loot. If the Law was equally unobserved everywhere, then Outlaws and Pirates could might as well just stay home. Oh, and please forgive my hasty metaphor where I inadvertently compare the Rich and Wealthy People to criminals, but if it helps us to understand the picture… as, after all, both groups are after exactly the same thing. In fact one needs to wonder how such levels of selfishness and greed can ever NOT be against one law or another.
So, anyway, is it wise for the Entire World to engage in a Competition, a virtual race to the bottom, where only one Economy can hope to win anyway… and a meager win it would be for a People who would have to satisfy itself with the slimmest margin of wages and social spending in the Entire World; and we would need to wonder how long adjoining Political Jurisdictions could possibly consent to receive the impoverished overflow of social, political and economic refugees from such an Economic Winner?
But let’s think again about this argument for Universal Criminality, that if laws were ignored everywhere, then Outlaws could simply stay home. Well, this same argument works equally in reverse – that if Laws are Universally Upheld then the Criminals, in this case Rich People and Corporations, would have no reason to flee – they might as well take their chances at Home as anywhere else. Do Rich Corporations REALLY want to go to live with Sand Fleas in Bahrain except that they go there explicitly to escape Taxation? If Taxes were the same, they’d stay home and save themselves the unease of being hated by all the poor natives.
It is about time that the people
e who make decisions concerning the World Political Consensus should examine the possibility of arriving at One Legal and Economic Standard – no downward trending Competition offering Pirate Level tax breaks and lower than subsistence level wages in order to steal businesses from other Economies. Let everyone renounce the possibility of being the One Lone Winner in order that everyone can be certain not to be one of the bankrupt and miserable losers.
Also, it may be added that the possibility of their ever being one Winner is entirely imaginary. History has shown that while Economic Competition had always been propelled on the hopes of their being some Perfect Economic Winner, the effects of the Over-Concentration of Wealth had always precipitated a Complete Collapse before any single Winner could have the chance to emerge. You see, Social and Military complications arise. Economies that pair down on their Social and Military Infrastructure in order to Pad the Wealth of their Rich, find that they are exposed to both internal rebellion and foreign invasion, and it can’t be ignored that their Tremendous Wealth does present an irresistible target. But, the Wealthy Classes are lulled into the belief that their tremendous Personal Wealth can purchase them Invulnerability –Gated Communities… even Castles, moots and drawbridges… and even Private Armies. But unless they are prepared to scale up their efforts until they are again willing to pay for real levels of National Security Infrastructure, any limited and focused effort can only provide some temporary island of Security, under siege, and doomed to eventual fall. Again, a review of History shows that there has never yet ever been the first Winner. History only shows a succession of continuous losers, and this will be the case until we finally get serious about what must transpire before we all can become Civilized.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)