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I make my living as a consultant, and follow this dictum from the immortal Gerald Weinberg:
As such, in producing a better earth I would have to start with humanity, because of another of Gerald's principles:
In other words it would in fact take a god, or at least a very powerful being capable of completely re-engineering and re-building humanity from the ground up, to insure that we wouldn't take a perfect world handed us on a silver platter and before long turn it right back into what we have right now.
Fantasizing aside, the only real solution to the BS in the world is knowledge / education combined with empathy and compassion. As humanity slowly claws its way out of a deep pit of ignorance and superstition, the BS weakens. This trend has been ongoing from the beginning as evolutionary forces play out at the societal level. It has accelerated a great deal in recent generations, and this gives me much hope.
Mordant, I'm sure what you said is just too much common sense for some of the believers on this board who keep dreaming of a day when their made-up God will supposedly do away with how things are with the planet. The ones who waste their time hoping that the end of the Earth will come soon instead of doing their part to make it better NOW. Just one of many reasons why the Book of Revelations is not only false and man made but it teaches a dangerous mentality. Just one of many reasons why Christianity is a sick religious belief system.
Mordant, I'm sure what you said is just too much common sense for some of the believers on this board who keep dreaming of a day when their made-up God will supposedly do away with how things are with the planet. The ones who waste their time hoping that the end of the Earth will come soon instead of doing their part to make it better NOW. Just one of many reasons why the Book of Revelations is not only false and man made but it teaches a dangerous mentality. Just one of many reasons why Christianity is a sick religious belief system.
"Don't worry about the human condition, there's a pie in the sky when you die." Agree, it's one of the most dangerous ideas ever created.
Too many people who are having a rough time in life tend to romanticize the past - they envision a "simpler time" of "good old days" that never actually existed. It's part of the fantasy.
But if you knew and understood your history, you'd realize that we have gotten much, MUCH better over the years. Just think of our nation less than a century ago when there was no social security, no welfare, no minimum wage, no medicare or medicaid, no welfare, no disability. There was child labor, women couldn't vote, and most Americans lived in horrible slums, many without so much as a bathroom.
Go back even further and it gets worse, more brutal, more violent. Life becomes cheaper, less valuable, less important. This was a time when there were no laws against child or domestic abuse; children and wives could be beaten as often and as harshly as desired. Nor were there any laws against pedophilia.
This is true. However, why do you suppose this happened? Do you think advances happen naturally? Hell no! If nobody does or says anything "that's the way we've always done it" is the prevailing philosophy. Yes, the way things were is sometimes worse. But sometimes it's better. But here's the thing. Things do not get better on their own. It takes people working together over time to make a difference.
Further back and nearly everyone was a farmer. Individual families tried to be self-sufficient, but that meant endless drudgery. There were no antibiotics, no knowledge of germs, viruses, or bacteria. Firelight was the only light we knew and most people died within 10 miles of where they were born. Everyone but the rich were just one bad harvest away from starvation.
Everyone was a farmer as a second job. This wasn't actually that bad. It meant that the veterinary practice had a couple of pigs or chickens to tend to. But it also meant self-sufficiency. Which we actually don't have anymore, thanks to a thriving business of apartments. In general, even if someone wanted to, you often can't grow crops on land that you pay rent to own. This means, that to a large extent, your landlord (which btw, the term "land lord" has got to be a leftover from feudal times, which is a grim reminder of some of the chains we need to throw off) controls where you can get a job, the food nearby you get to eat, etc. Unless you feel like paying more either to commute or get an apartment near what you love, your landlord controls you. Farming on the other hand, is not drudgery, but rather freedom. If done well, you don't need 50 acres of land, or even 10 acres. 1 acre of land will keep you fed for much of the year, and actually it's not drudgery at all (maybe 5-10 hours a week, unless you feel like micromanaging). Here's an example. I actually was allowed some land to farm by my landlord. Maybe two 15-ft boxes, I planted some veggies, watered it maybe three times and forgot about it. In two weeks, when it was time to move out (I decided I was sick of him raising my rent), the peas I had planted had grown into a small vine, and the salad greens I had planted had grown thickly as microgreens, which I thinned enough to make a salad. This was just prepping/tilling the soil and watering, maybe 3 hours total, and they grew on their own.
The farming as drudgery is itself a myth. If you know how to work hard, a subsistence farm is not really that hard. What is hard is being a farmer for other people. Even during the time everyone had a farm, this is not to say everyone was a full-time farmer.
Further back and we enter the age of superstition. Every crack of a twig, every noise in the darkness was a demon - or Satan himself - coming to corrupt you. Or perhaps the Grim Reaper to harvest your soul. Fear was rampant and every natural disaster, every comet, every solar eclipse, every plague, every genetic disease was the result of an angry god. In America, we were still colonial subjects of Britain. We had to use outhouses even in the dead of winter and our houses were little more than shacks, some so shoddily built that you could see the outside light under the front door and between the wall boards. Infant mortality claimed 3 of every 5 babies, and 2 of every 5 mothers. Things like laughing and kissing were banned on Sunday, church attendance was mandatory, and a husband could put a dog muzzle on his wife if he thought she was nagging too much.
Further back ... well, you get the idea, right?
Some times were arguably worse than others. I could probably find a time 200 years before that that was actually better. We have this notion that things are inherently an upward evolutionary movement. But things don't necessarily work like that. Sometimes you have war, then eventually peace, then later stagnation, then slavery, and then an uprising, and then things get better again. After the rise of Rome, culture was somewhat at a high, then they got decadent. After the rise of Christianity, medicine and culture tended to rise (at least in comparison to Roman decadence), and then you saw people like Oliver Cromwell passing moral laws on everyone.
I do tend to agree with you, though. Our economic system is obsolete, our business models are disastrous, and our lifestyle is totally unsustainable. The amount of waste we generate simply to make an extra buck is staggering. Ideologies like "planned obsolescence" keeps people spending their money replacing things they already own ... again and again and again. Meanwhile the money keeps dwindling.
I won't get into it all here because it's too political and would take too long to explain. But suffice it to say, I hear your lamentations and I know how you feel. Becoming disabled in this country was a really big eye-opener to how miserable things are for many ... and many must bear it all in silence. How disappointing it is to be one of those people who, as Thoreau said, are "living lives of quiet desperation."
Things can change, but they have to have people willing to change things.
Too bad this thread turned into a debate about Hebrew translations.
Quote:
"Don't worry about the human condition, there's a pie in the sky when you die." Agree, it's one of the most dangerous ideas ever created.
That's precisely the belief system I'm trying to fight here. I don't care about Heaven, I want Earth to improve. Once that happens, it won't matter what Heaven is like, because Earth will be the happening destination for souls to go.
ExpatCA, I would like that. Not so much having a new world, as having a new rulership of it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Shirina
It's too bad you believe that nonsense ... because even if you do, surely you can see that God is the one responsible, not humanity. How can anyone hold a child-race accountable when an all-powerful, all-knowing god all but railroaded Adam and Eve into disobeying. Everything from putting the forbidden tree in the garden in the first place to allowing Satan into the Garden of Eden, and plenty more, reeks of a big set-up. Yet despite all of that, you still think things are the way they are because of a single bite of fruit.
*sigh*
Whether you realize it or not, clinging to these kinds of primitive superstitions is one of the stumbling blocks when we try to change our world.
Do you play D&D or something?
Shirina, seriously? And yes, I do. I also DM, so I have a pretty good concept of how world-building works.
Blaming God for your mistakes is pretty dumb. God created us, and then became part of our universe. This means everything that has happened is largely our doing. Also, the knowledge of good and evil is something that existed, because we created it.
As in, you are looking at this text literally. It's not literal text, though. I thought so for the longest time, but now I don't. There is no "Garden of Eden" it does not exist on maps. Eden is the known world at the time the story was written, and is still so. We had our pick of knowledge. What happened to it was up to us.
Here's what really happened.
In the beginning, God existed. God was alone in the universe for thousands of eons, and it got lonely/boring. By the way, the universe was not as we currently know it, but rather like a giant blank canvas, that God could wander in any direction, and go nowhere (because God was infinite and eternal). God created humans to have company, and to experiment with something besides boring Unity and Eternity. So God makes humans, male and female, and they are material beings, able to exist in a material rather than spiritual world. God "puts them in a garden" and tells them to name things. That is, to ancient cultures, naming had something to do with creation and/or control of the thing's name. So, effectively, blank canvas, then from basically nothing, there is sky (and outer space), sun, moon, and a garden as part of the material world, and humans are describing creatures they want to see in the world. There is a huge garden that uses water, and feeds humans, and animals in all kinds of places. We have a physical world, but it's basically a painting with no laws attached to it, because there is no knowledge. Humans in addition to creating stuff through naming, are given any options as to how the universe works. If they wanted, they could choose the Fruit of Desire and make the law of the universe "the more you want something, the more it happens." Or the Fruit of Disinterest and make the law of the universe "the less you care about something, the more it happens." All of these fruits were truths. They chose the Fruit of Good and Evil, meaning that they invented this story about God telling them that it was a good thing not to eat from the Tree, and that a bad creature told them to eat it. Nonsense. Humans ate of their own free will. Satan did not exist, until we humans created him, and we can unmake this too.
Heaven is the universe as it actually is, Earth is the world as humans have made it. The world of Heaven is the Spirit World, and has no concept of Good or Evil, things simply are. But because we decided we wanted Earth to have different laws, we called this decision a "bad" one. Maybe it was a "good" one? God actually doesn't appear to care, but rather loves us regardless, so we effectively just made a judgement call on ourselves, and got ourselves kicked out of a garden, which is actually the entire world. So yea, this story is a metaphor, and a screwy one at that, since it is almost always seen literally. I know this, from what I understand from reading between the lines of religions (and because of a strong feeling that this makes more sense than an omnipotent perfect God creating humans giving rules that they would break and zero supervision), but yea. I don't really know what I'd like to see the world become. Maybe just the same but people able to do/to be more with less people bothering them.
Last edited by bulmabriefs144; 06-13-2015 at 09:16 AM..
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