Why Religion is Dangerous to Children

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Difference Makers - Robert Ekas
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Political change with pen and paper

Speechlessness

Perhaps in the back of our minds we already understand, without all the science I've discussed, that something terribly wrong is happening. Our sustenance now comes from misery. We know that if someone offers to show us a film on how our meat is produced, it will be a horror film. We perhaps know more than we care to admit, keeping it down in the dark places of our memory -- disavowed. When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own. - From Eating Animals I challenge you to watch all the videos.

Courage

Euripides said, 'A coward turns away but a brave man's choice is danger.' What the ancient Greeks learned, as the first truly intellectual and philosophical people, is that there is more danger to one's hopes, one's mettle, one's pride, in venturing into the battle of ideas, than in murdering a man who disagrees with you - and that doing so therefore takes proportionally more courage. Most people tend to think of courage as a warrior virtue, as belonging typically to battle; and therefore, by analogy, to endeavour on the upper slopes of Everest, in the deeps of the sea, and even on the sports field - in other words, wherever endurance, grit and determination in the face of physical challenges are required. That is true enough. But courage is often demonstrated, beacause it is often needed, in greater quantities in daily life; and there are even times when 'merely to live', as Seneca put it in a letter to Lucilius, 'is itself an act of courage'. Ordinary life evokes more extraordinary courage than combat or adventure because both the chances and inevitabilities of life - grief, illness, disappointment, pain, struggle, poverty, loss, terror, heartache: all of them common features of the human condition, and all of them experienced by hundreds of thousands of people every day - demand kinds of endurance and bravery that make clambering up Everest seem an easier alternative. Whereas mountaineering and deep-sea diving are self-contained activities that last a certain length of time with - if all goes well - return to a status quo ante when they are over, facing (say) grief or disappointment is quite different. They are open-ended, new, different dispensations with unforseeables deeply embedded in them, promising only that much will have to be borne before relief comes. To lie sleepless with pain at night, or to wake every morning and feel the return of grief, yet to get up and carry on as best one can, is courage itself. Moreover, courage can only be felt by those who are afraid. If a man is truly fearless as he leaps over the enemy parapet or hurls himself into a rugby tackle, he is not courageous. Because most people fail to recognise this simple fact, the true quantum of heroism in the world goes unrecognised and therefore unrewarded. The quaking public speaker, the trembling amateur actor, the nervous hospital patient submitting himself to needles and scalpels, are all manifesting courage. 'This is courage in a man,' Euripides further said, 'to bear what heaven sends.' Actually he said 'to bear unflinchingly,' but by this addition he spoils the sentiment, because if courage requires fear, then flinching is perfectly in order. Although ordinary life demands courage, sometimes in exceptional amounts, there is yet another kind of courage required for the task of being human: the courage to meet the new and to accept the different in the chances of experience. Rilke gave luminous expression to this idea in his Letters to a Young Poet, by saying that we need 'courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter'. He meant the courage to accept love when it offers, to face death when it comes, to bear the burdens that life imposes in return for its gifts; and above all the courage to create something to mark our own individual responses to the world, however modest, for even when the courage to do this is unostentatious and private, it can make a crucial difference to the content or the quality of our lives. - A. C. Grayling

Eating Animals

Just last night, I looked up from my reading to find George staring at me from across the room. "When did you come in here?" I asked. She lowered her eyes and lumbered away from me, down the hall -- not a silhouette so much as a kind of negative space, a form cut out of the domesticity. Despite our patterns, which are more regular than anything I share with another person, she still feels unpredictable to me. And despite our closeness, I am occasionally thrilled, and even a bit scared, by the foreignness of her. Having a child greatly exacerbated this, as there was absolutely no guarantee -- beyond the one I felt absolutely -- that she wouldn't maul the baby. The list of our difference could fill a book, but like me, George fears pain, seeks pleasure, and craves not just food and play, but companionship. I don't need to know the details of her moods and preferences to know that she has them. Our psychologies are not the same or similar, but each of us has a perspective, a way of processing and experiencing the world that is intrinsic and unique. I wouldn't eat George, because she's mine. But why wouldn't I eat a dog I'd never met? Or more to the point, what justification might I have for sparing dogs but eating other animals? - Jonathan Safran Foer

All great truths begin as blasphemies. - George Bernard Shaw

Advice for the Church

"The cleric or monk who molests youths or boys or is caught kissing or committing some turpitude, let him be whipped in public, deprived of his crown [tonsure] and, after having his head shaved, let his face be covered with spittle; and [let him be] bound in iron chains, condemned to six months in prison, reduced to eating rye bread once a day in the evening three times per week. After six months living in a separate cell under the custody of a wise elder with great spiritual experience, let him be subjected to prayers, vigils and manual work, always under the guard of two spiritual brothers, without being allowed to have any relationship . . . with young people." - St. Basil of Caesarea (330 - 379 C.E.)

My Creed

To love justice, to long for the right, to love mercy, to pity the suffering, to assist the weak, to forget wrongs and remember benefits, to love the truth, to be sincere, to utter honest words, to love liberty, to wage relentless war against slavery in all its forms, to love wife and child and friend, to make a happy home, to love the beautiful in art, in nature, to cultivate the mind, to be familiar with the mighty thought that genius has expressed, the noble deeds of all the world, to cultivate courage and cheerfulness, to make others happy, to fill life with the splendor of generous acts, the warmth of loving words, to discard error, to destroy prejudice, to receive new truth with gladness, to cultivate hope, to see the calm beyond the storm, the dawn beyond the night, to do the best that can be done and then be resigned. This is the religion of reason, the creed of science. This satisfies the brain and heart. -Robert G. Ingersoll

The Values We All Stand For

Allegory of the Cave

When then, if he recalled to mind his first habitation and what passed for wisdom there, and his fellow bondsmen, do you not think that he would count himself happy in the change and pity them? He would indeed. And if there had been honors and commendations among them which they bestowed on one another and prizes for the man who is quickest to make out the shadows as they pass and best able to remember their customary precedences, sequences, and coexistences, and so most successful in guessing at what was to come, do you think he would be very keen about such rewards, and that he would envy and emulate those who were honored by these prisoners and lorded it among them, or that he would feel with Homer and greatly prefer while living on earth to be serf of another, a landless man, and endure anything rather than opine with them and live that life? Yes, he said, I think he would choose to endure anything rather than such a life. And consider this also, said I. If such a one should go down again and take his old place would he not get his eyes full of darkness, thus suddenly coming out of the sunlight? He would indeed. Now if he should be required to contend with these perpetual prisoners in 'evaluating' these shadows while his vision was still dim and before his eyes were accustomed to the dark--and this time required for habituation would not be very short--would he not provoke laughter, and would it not be said of him that he had returned from his journey aloft with his eyes ruined and that it was not worth while even to attempt the ascent? And if it were possible to lay hands on and to kill the man who tried to release them and lead them up, would they not kill him? They certainly would, he said. - From The Republic by Plato

Tiger's Moral Hazard

After reading Robin Wright's Essay on the NYT Opinionator (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/30/tigers-rapid-redemption/), I found this particular reader's comment to be very thought provoking. Woods owes the American people nothing but a good golf game. He is not our moral hero now and he never should have been in the first place. This American ethos of moralization is pathetic and it obfuscates the most essential character of what it means to be human. Our celebrities are not our heros, they are not even 'ours'. They are artists and athletes that excel in a particular area and share their talents with us. I don't mean to suggest that we are plebeians graced with the privilege to view their talents, but I do not think that we should judge them as anything but the performers they are. The author's suggestion that Woods is somehow pursuing golf success solely for the spoils it brings is misguided on two fronts. Firstly, it is a brash and stupid assumption, as well as a mean spirited thing to say about a person. Secondly, even if he did spend many, many years perfecting his golf game just so he could pick up women (which seems unlikely), it would make absolutely no difference to his talent. To say that Woods' contribution to golf is somehow negated by his philandering is like saying Gauguin's contribution to art is somehow worthless because he was he failed his family. If we have truly reached a point where a person's unethical actions negates absolutely all of his actions then our society has been poisoned by something truly and profoundly tragic. In his Shame and Necessity, the great ethical philosopher Bernard Williams lamented that "We are in an ethical condition that lies not only beyond Christanity, but beyond its Kantian and its Hegelian legacies. We have an ambivalent sense of what human beings have achieved, and have hopes for how they might live (in particular, in the form of a still powerful ideal that they should live without lies). We know that the world was not made for us, or we for the world, that our history tells no purposive story, and that there is no position outside the world or outside history from which we might hope to authenticate our activities. We have to acknowledge the hideous costs of many human achievements that we value, including this reflective sense itself, and recognise that there is no redemptive Hegelian history or Leibnizian cost-benefit analysis to show that it will come out well enough in the end" (166). We should all take a hint from Williams. The task of being human and living a robust life is not defined solely by one's ethical or moral actions. We are robust creatures capable of great achievements and great follies and our ethical character diminishes once we start condemning people on the basis of some moral litmus test. by WillL of Southborough, MA Tiger, I hope you win the Master's.