Note from Phil…..  Hey everyone.  Just in case you missed it, a few weeks ago my blog suffered from a DOS attack.  I don’t want to go into the details of what worked and did not work.  The person of people the did it may read the blog – hi ya douche bags!

Well, the new super tight security has hardened the site and everything is running smoothly.  However, we are still working on a few technical details, like getting Jim connected again  So for this post he just sent it to me and I pasted it here.  Please read, share or comment below.  I would like to give a big thanks to Jim for all of his great posts!

/commentary
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Post by Jim Newman
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Thanks to Religious Love I am now doomed to emailing an article to Phil so he can post them for me. Unlike Ecoterrorism or retaliatory terrorism a la Syrian rebels, Religious Terrorism self justifies itself. Based on the absolute truth of the BIble, Koran, or Pearl of Great Price (Mormon terrorism??) and its righteous indignation at those who might not just dare to disagree but insist that it is harmful and more certainly that it is not the one, true way, I am left agape at the insistence that we must all agree or be damned.

Revelatory of this insistence to agree or be damned or dead or terrorized or at least ostracized is the growing loss of privacy. Anyone who hasn’t read George Orwell or at least Hitch’s book on Orwell should. Literary realism like magic realism has its dark side. The one because it tends to display the less positive aspects of ourselves that may nevertheless be too true and the other because the magic is part political and part superfluous. Who gives a shit about the ending, or even ” in media res” if it’s an unbelievable deus ex machina, even if the deus is simply magic. Respecting Borges as one of my favorite all-time authors (I adore his language even in translation), he still requires some sort of religious base to get it, either culturally or from the family. I simply was not raised in any religion and have no conflict with not believing. I was raised as a democrat, an artist, a fact finder, a self reliant, and a philosophical independent. These are my family bags to carry.

The bible says thinking an evil is as bad as doing an evil. Jimmy Carter is famous for having said in a Playboy interview that he sinned in his heart. Many sighed in relief because they too sinned in their hearts and didn’t know how guilty or shamed they should fee, or even if others sinned in their hearts. Many condemned Carter knowing that he was just as evil as they had presumed. The now-platitutidnous contradictions of the bible ensure that  no single interpretation reigns supreme without some sort of philosophical fascism.

If we are all to be moral then why would we not wish for humans to think pure thoughts all of the time? Wouldn’t an evolved civilization establish a set of rules in which we could all believe whole heartedly? A trope, narrative, even DNA-based constitution that never let us lie, steal, or kill. We wouldn’t even think of it. So pure and innocent we would be, we would all be heaven bound from birth. The stark beauty of the Abrahamic religions is their tolerance of evil. While sociologists and moral psychologists are wont to say that religion is precisely to deal with the existence of evil and wrong doing, they must admit that religion acts as a lightning rod for immoral people. If you can’t behave properly, join a religion–cosmic therapy for all. If you do behave properly and don’t wish to join a religion, you must be wrong somehow because everyone has sinned equally if only by inheriting either the evil of Adam and Eve, the birth of the devil (evil), or the necessity of evil to ensure free will.

Biut we humans don’t work that way. Evolution and inevitable molecular mutation ensure we will behave differently from one generation to the next. And thankfully so or we wouldn’t survive and thrive. We would not be able to adapt to the changing circumstances of life. Without diversity on all levels we wold not be able to take advantage of the changing world. We would have simply died out eons ago. In fact, no life would ever have happened much less the physical universe. Even if we consider the rather ethereal multiverse, we have to wonder why this universe? How is it that we came to be? In this case it would be in the evolution of universes, this one was able to succeed and thrive. Evolution is utterly  bound to the laws of physics and is its most dispersed and if you hate it, pernicious, aspect of it.

Privacy is the means in which individuals can remain mute in the face of external forces. It is the means in which consciousness negotiates its way through the tangle of choice. Even if choice is limited and we have only some small aspect of free will that we feel greatly, privacy is the way in which we consciously work through our decisions before having to set them in concrete. Biologically, it is an inevitable result of the manifold mind and its varying  inputs. It is good to vent. It is good to reflect. It is good to consider alternatives. It is good to have emotions. We cannot survive unless we have the freedom to consider all aspects of an issue. Our minds need to be able to absorb and moderate the many views of perception, of the elephant so to speak. We cannot believe or understand another’s opinion unless we are willing for awhile to consider our own to be wrong. Without imagination we cannot survive. Imagination is nothing more or less than the suspension of what we believe to be true at the moment. The social cell needs to be able to evaluate potential harm and good before acting. Blind security is the last resort.

Politically, privacy is the way in which we can assert ourselves democratically. If everyone is to participate in their political world there must be freedom to disagree. Religious insistence that we all agree to a single authority or hierarchy is death to a people. It’s only purpose is intellectual tyranny. A tyranny that is useful when we must band as one to fight or when we must band as one to build great infrastructures that support us all, and when we can band as one to oppress the market by numbers or scalability. In this sense religion has clearly played a strong evolutionary role. A benevolent dictator has had its successful use and is often admired as a kind king or pleasant god but in the end we will not endure pure monoculturalism. Hence democracy for all of its slowness and slop is a a necessity. Because of inevitable evolution the children of kings, dictators, and gods will not be like their ancestors. Continuity of benevolence is not ensured without greater codification. Israel is becoming religiously fascist because of its lack of constitution. Our constitution is under enormous pressure to become religiously totalitarian–as if the founding fathers thought it to be made in permanent ink.

If we cannot express ourselves to each other under the sanctity of privacy we have no means of ensuring the freedom to evolve. The “polis” because like the soil under the Walnut tree: so filled with Juglone only other Walnuts can grow in it. It’s a great tactic but like the great monoculture of White Pine in the Northern Midwest that had a strong advantage when the glaciers retreated and it completely outnumbered its rivals by its simple tolerance to cold, its singular ability led to its decline as weather warmed and diseases and pests, like humans, finally could come in and harvest their wealth. Now we plant White Pine and we have become their stewards.

But I guess, people will just have multiple email accounts. One for the public, one for work, one for friends and family, one for notes to one’s self. How easy it will be to hack them all. Most likely we will be convinced to allow themselves to be hacked for perceived utility. Open the door and let the monster in. It won’t be the young and adaptable that get hacked–they welcome it. It will be the old, infirm, and those who get confused with having multiple accounts.

Jim Newman, bright and well
www.fromntiersofreason www.brightpride.com