God is found within beauty or, more importantly, harmony

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"It's just that the world doesn't parse with simpleminded unthought out naive concepts of good and evil. An emotional emetic is frequently the proper medicine to crack through the fixated corroded misconceptions promulgated by the primitive social minds entranced by much conventional social doctrine."

A. Now try saying THAT five times fast without stumbling.

B, Seriously - Could you restate that in English, French, German, or Swahili - your choice?. I could likely handle Spanish or Dutch if it works better for you. But I need a translation. What, for example, is an emotional emetic?

I'm terribly sorry, I assumed you were an English speaker. Let me know your language and I'll see what I can do.

Very true. We may disagree on this, but I also am averse to "tradition for tradition's sake." A questioning mind won't necessarily find that all traditions are unnecessary or useful, but it can certainly discern between primitive traditions that are in error or improperly motivated. I believe what I believe because of a lifetime of questioning the status quo, not in spite of my doubts.

Not all of "conventional social doctrine" constitutes a problem. We must be careful not to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Sand and I are often on opposite sides here, but I've come to appreciate his "emotional emetics" as a call to attention to the issue at hand. If something upset you, dig down and find out what or why it bothers you. You aren't necessarily mistaken. But if you take up the challenge, you find yourself much stronger intellectually and better positioned in future discussions.

Sand is not saying that rapists are good people. He's just pointing out the truth that committed rapists have a different idea of good vs. evil than we do. And in some places in the world and in certain situations, rape might be considered the proper thing to do.

I am an English speaker - though a bit eccentric in idiolect owing to my life path.

It is simply that there are parts of your English [over a goodly series of observed postings] that fail to parse as either Mainstream North American nor any variant of British known to me. And [as in the questioned bit] I am not always sure whether you are speaking to communicate.

I have myself been known to aim my talk, like at times my chalk, over the recipient's head or just to one side. In fact, that was one of the no-fun evil actions I mentioned.

I was born in and grew up in New York City. It is a city of many languages but English is my base. I now reside in Helsinki. I have never encountered any difficulty communicating with another native English speaker and Finns, who are mostly all acquainted with English give me no problems. Since you seem to be a dwarf, perhaps you think I am speaking down to you. That is not my intention.

I once had a dream that a guy was trying to rape me and I started talking to him asking him why he was the way he was. In dreams I can telepathically talk to the other people in my dreams. I understood him and felt sorry for him. He changed his mind. That moment was beautiful. In real life I had a few of those encounters.

From my encounters with the rapist types, they don't feel good. They want power. Wanting this power proves that they feel a lack of it. That is not a good feeling. They delude themselves in trying to satisfy desires because once they act on attaining it, the desire increases and consumes them. It doesn't feel beautiful and definitely lacks harmony. These "evil" sorts are utterly alone in their delusions. They have to continuously feed their desires in order to feel alive. They are slaves to their desires.

Ah, Sand, I have to eny you. I have had MANY difficulties communicating with other English speakers, and Finnish [intriguing tongue] is a mostly closed book to me though I have heard both Finnish and Estonian.

Be that as it may - there ARE problems of communication between us as 1st language Anglophones, and if you COULD rephrase the essay at communication that I honestly queried it might get me over at least that hump.

I do wish I knew whether the dwarf thing by you is genuine or wilful play - but it doesn't really matter.

The differences between Brer Rabbit and Anansi are important. You seem to lean toward the arachnoid.

Consciousness/qualia is a hint that we are missing something major. Unfortunately, I don't think we will ever be able to understand it. Consider an ape, which is arguably over 95% genetically similar to us. Consider what their understanding of the universe is compared to ours. They could never understand what we are capable of: science, biology, physics, abstract algebra, etc. We are qualitatively different, so we think. Assume that even our cognitive abilities are only slightly more advanced than an ape's. Of course, from our perspective it doesn't appear that way.

Assume reality is extremely complex. The ape's mind might be able to understand/pick up .001% of it. The human mind may have access to about .01% of it. Big improvement but still a miniscule part of all of reality/totality of "true" theories. C. McGinn:

"Let me introduce the idea of cognitive closure. A type of mind M is cognitively closed with respect to a property P (or theory T) if and only if the concept-forming procedures at M's disposal cannot extend to a grasp of P (or an understanding of T). Conceiving minds come in different kinds, equipped with varying powers and limitations, biases and blindspots, so that properties (or theories) may be accessible to some minds but not to others. What is closed to the mind of a rat may be open to the mind of a monkey, and what is open to us may be closed to the monkey. Representational power is not all or nothing. Minds are biological products like bodies, and like bodies they come in different shapes and sizes, more or less capacious, more or less suited to certain cognitive tasks. This is particularly clear for perceptual faculties, of course: perceptual closure is hardly to be denied. Different species are capable of perceiving different properties of the world, and no species can perceive every property things may instantiate (without artificial instrumentation anyway). But such closure does not reflect adversely on the reality of the properties that lie outside the representational capacities in question; a property is no less real for not being reachable from a certain kind of perceiving and conceiving mind. The invisible parts of the electromagnetic spectrum are just as real as the visible parts, and whether a specific kind of creature can form conceptual representations of these imperceptible parts does not determine whether they exist. Thus cognitive closure with respect to P does not imply irrealism about P."

http://art-mind.org/review/IMG/pdf/...y-problem_M.pdf

Are you an optimist?

I tend to think your right on this point. Time will tell however.

As creatures evolved to survive in a dense forest of malignant possibilities humans and other life forms have developed a sense apparatus that captures and analyzes only those significant inputs that affect our survival. The universe itself is far too raucous with noise for a limited sense system to deal with much more than a minor part so much is totally filtered out as not meaningful. We consciously sense very little of what we might be capable of and almost nothing of much much more.

Let it be so. But I speak the truth.

ruveyn

How very true.