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"I am..."
by Bohdan Yuri
2007-12-18 09:22:44

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hi guy
I have you

in my gun sight

why

why not
I am what I am
I was born
I was made
I am a part
of what there is

I aim because

I am…

so
I do it

I
just
do
it
because
I am
what
I am…

…a killer.

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Emanuel Paparella	2007-12-18 12:54:53
Indeed, the brothers Hare have it on target (no pun intended): without poetry or without the Sabbath life would be most prosaic and mired in utility and efficient ordering and we would end up with misguided Cartesian questions such “What is there before us and is without language?” which is equivalent to asking “How would I feel had I never been born?” Language allows man can reflect about the fact that he has a mind and a soul, and not a mere material body that can be seen and utilized for chemicals after he dies, and thus arrive at a sense of genuine identity, even if a reprehensible one such as “I am a killer.” No ape, or lion has ever thought, or indicated with sign language for that matter, that kind of identity; nor has an ape ever asked “how wonder how other apes are doing out there in the wide world of mother Gaia.” Here, for example is another expression of identity in Friulian dialect (the dialect utilized on purpose rather than Italian to better make the point) by Amedeo Giacomini: Jessi costress ta la lenghe/di to pari a disi-si/mi sonquel che son. Translation: To be compelled in the language/of one’s father to tell oneself:/I am who I am.


Chris	2007-12-18 17:38:37
This makes me think of Cain, and his curse. The good book tells us that Cain was the first child born out of Eden. He had a little brother. Both sought to make sacrifices to the Lord. The Lord favored Abel, and Cain was jealous. He killed his little brother, and was cursed to roam forever on the earth, marked, yet somehow immune. I wonder if this symbolicly presents us with man == outside the gates of Eden -- being willing to sacrifice, full of emotion, and willing to kill. I wonder what this tells us about humanity -- either as a symbolic paradigm or as some kind of historical reality. I wonder about people who identify themselves with the wish to kill. Bohdan, do you describe yourself, or merely write a poem with intent to capture an aspect of human feeling?


by	2007-12-18 19:34:00
Wars make us what we are. In peace, we only await the next war.


Sand	2007-12-18 21:16:32
As long as you accept it as inevitable it will be.


Emanuel Paparella	2007-12-18 22:48:24
Indeed, Chris, undoubtedly a myth is a symbolic paradigm which to the modern rationalist, at least since the Enlightenment, appears to be a child’s fairy-tale with no historical truth, but that is a wholly misguided understanding of myth, for to the contrary it has important existential truths to reveal to those who are not biased and prejudiced against it. That of Cain and Abel is certainly one of the most powerful of myths. Poetry works very much the same way in non-rational categories and yet it can effect people more powerfully than a rationally thought out philosophical treatise. Take away the mytho-poetic and you have truncated literature of at least 50%, but the modern Philistine seems to find that agreeable. See my comments under the Gaia posting where I mention Karen Armstrong as one of those authors who has aptly described the sad loss within modernity of an important cultural tool such as myth. Dicken’s Christmas story can be construed as a myth, hence its appeal to millions of people, adults as well as children, all over the world every year.


Sand	2007-12-18 23:01:19
There are millions of people who spend the bulk of their energy on gambling, on pornography, on cock and dog fighting, on devoting their lives in all sorts of foolishness. I would be very careful about accepting something because millions of people are devoted to it.


by	2007-12-18 23:03:10
Jan, from beginning to end, when has it not been so, when will it not be so? Power, Hate, and Greed will always be our darkest shadows, our constant companions, our instigators. The struggle of Good vs Evil leans from side to side but will never erase the other. As the tides are constant, so is our destiny, until the moon is no more.


Emanuel Paparella	2007-12-18 23:07:07
In between the lines what is being proposed here is the hubris of the elitist "enlightened" man who assumes a superior posture vis a vis the unwashed masses who do not understand his superior postute which once accepted and followed one's all life needs to be rationalized at any cost or one would become a normal person. Eistein who was a scientist who preserved his humanity and integrity called it rationalism and advices those who would get out of it to use a different method than a rationalistic method. Try the mytho-poetic, with an open mind however, and see what happens.


Sand	2007-12-18 23:15:52
Speaking frankly my postute is a total mystery to me, whatever the masses might hold conventions about me might decide. I am puzzled as to why they are interested since I have seen no indications that soapless people are an organized group.


Sand	2007-12-18 23:20:56
To be powerless, totally without desire, and have not enough discrimination to be disgusted by horrifying things is not necessarily a good thing. Good and evil are absolutes invented by silly people who have little or no depth of understanding of the nature of reality but find the labels very useful politically to motivate foolish people to do awful things.


Emanuel Paparella	2007-12-19 04:37:48
Oh, I seeeeeeeeee, a rationalist is beyond good and evil...didn't Nietzsche write an essay by that title? He postulated the "Uber Mensch" beyond good and evil. As we know, he went crazy in the attempt, for indeed the paradox is that to declare a world without good and evil means to declare a world without meaning, in other words to fall into nihilism in the name of reason. That is what Einstein was talking about.


Sand	2007-12-19 05:54:05
Emanuel, I wish you did see, but your theatrical adolescence only demonstrates that you have not the slightest capability to comprehend that the world is not the simple two dimensional conflict between good and evil. I am not interested in side issues of whether or not whomever you decide to assault philosophically by claiming they are insane but whether the issues involved have any pertinence in the discussion. Your whole technique of avoiding discussion of the issues at hand by trying to divert attention away with irrelevant points smacks of nothing but the techniques of that thankfully defunct Senator McCarthy who was one of the more disgraceful figures in American history. Your twisting of Einstein's point of view to fit your own purposes only displays your own obvious devious stupidity. You are the kind of guy who would kick a car because it does not start and is therefore "evil" instead of dispassionately examining why it does not function properly and thereby correct it.


Emanuel Paparella	2007-12-19 08:17:44
"Your twisting of Einstein's point of view to fit your own purposes only displays your own obvious devious stupidity." Here are some excerpts from an article by Einstein on Religion and Science which makes us beg the question: who is obviously deviously stupid, Einstein, Paparella or Sand? "For the scientific method can teach us nothing else beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other. The aspiration toward such objective knowledge belongs to the highest of which man is capabIe, yet it is equally clear that knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduct from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations.


Emanuel Paparella	2007-12-19 08:21:48
(continued from above) Objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievements of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source. And it is hardly necessary to argue for the view that our existence and our activity acquire meaning only by the setting up of such a goal and of corresponding values. The knowledge of truth as such is wonderful, but it is so little capable of acting as a guide that it cannot prove even the justification and the value of the aspiration toward that very knowledge of truth. Here we face, therefore, the limits of the purely rational conception of our existence. …The highest principles for our aspirations and judgments are given to us in the Jewish-Christian religious tradition. It is a very high goal which, with our weak powers, we can reach only very inadequately, but which gives a sure foundation to our aspirations and valuations.…the ancients knew something- which we seem to have forgotten. All means prove but a blunt instrument, if they have not behind them a living spirit. But if the longing for the achievement of the goal is powerfully alive within us, then shall we not lack the strength to find the means for reaching the goal and for translating it into deeds.


Emanuel Paparella	2007-12-19 08:31:35
The sentence below ought to be especially emphasized for it shows that indeed conceived or reason as much more than mere rationality and he was no pure rationalist: "HERE WE FACE THEREFORE THE LIMITS OF THE PURELY RATIONAL CONCEPTION OF OUR EXISTENCE. THE HIGHEST PRINCIPLES FOR OUR ASPIRATIONS AND JUDJMENT ARE GIVEN TO US IN THE JEWISH-CHRISTIAN RELIGIOUS TRADITION." --Albert Einstein


Emanuel Paparella	2007-12-19 08:52:11
To follow-up on Einstein's statement on what the ancients knew which we no longer seem to know, consider this: "IT IS THE MARK OF AN EDUCATED MIND TO BE ABLE TO ENTERTAIN A THOUGHT WITHOUT ACCEPTING IT." --Aristotle To which I'd add that it is the mark of a subtle mind to be able to conceive of the possibility that both/and may apply to certain phenomena. But to be able to do that one has to step outside the box of rationalism.


Sand	2007-12-19 09:54:22
There are may different steps outside of rationalism. Some lead to stupidity, some lead to insanity, some lead to ignorance and some lead to a mind so sterile it has no concept as to which way is reality.


Emanuel Paparella	2007-12-19 14:02:04
One has to logically and rationally infer from your answer that you think Einstein is obviously deviously stupid for believing that there is more to reason than mere rationality. I'm glad tha's settled. P.S. How about Aristotle. You don't say but would you also brand him as an idiot of sort for advising to hold two different thoughts in one's mind?


Emanuel Paparella	2007-12-19 15:29:36
Regarding the comment of Mr. By, I'd like to get this off my chest for one can always dream of a genuine convivial dialogue especially during this season: what you say may seem quite plausible when one reflects on the sad history of humankind but if that is so, then we are involved in the myth of the eternal return with no escape from its inexorability and determinism. Nietzsche postulated such a myth and he ended up exactly where one could have expected to end: in nihilism. Actually the ancient Stoics had a similar position, that is why a Seneca could stoically go into his bathtub and slash his wrists. On the other hand if the Christmas season means anything at all it means the hope that there is a way out of such an existential impass, be it only that of the myth of Utopia; that the cross with the vertical intersecting the horizontal at a particular place, a particular time, a particular people, is not and never will be the rquivalent of the crooked cross of the swastika or the sickle and hammer, which turn upon themselves and conceive of no transcendence.


Chris	2007-12-19 15:38:12
To be or not to be -- is it the question? In YB's poem we read a clear intent to kill. His words above indicate that in a world where humanity is defined by anamousity, and the I/Thou relationship is some thing like dog-eat-dog. Such a view is repugnant to me, but can be understood. The hated and the hater depend on each other, and the feedback of hatred over centuries seems to ratify this madness. Your good philosophy, Paparella, and your direct remarks, Sand, do not serve to address BY's basic point --- it appears that for some the world has become defined as kill-or-be-killed. This is not a philosophical discussion anymore. We are at the core of a basic human problem. I invoked the story of Cain, as it is primal -- just outside the gates of Eden. Is murder a true aspect of humanity? Are humans, then, much less what they would have us believe? Do humans hypnoitize themselves with grand theories of kindness and good will, while harboring murderous intent as a reliable resort? Paparella, it's time to get out of the philosophy books and the theories of the ancients and face this reality head on -- what a piece of work is man? And is human reason nothing more than a veil for crude emotions that might be defined as "sins" but are actually the core identity of the creature? This is not theory anymore, but the practice of being human.


Sand	2007-12-19 16:25:00
It is worthwhile, in this time of the year when peace and good will are much spoken about but little acted upon, to be reminded that the revered symbol of the cross represents an instrument of torture invented by the ancients to create prolonged and horrible agony for someone that society disdained. The results of humanity's inquiries into the nature of the universe and its fascinating secrets have, beyond creating a modern civilization far beyond the dreams of previous primitive cultures, put into the hands of religious fanatics and men determined to see to it that their particular cultural outlook should prevail such means for killing that will, if unleashed, destroy us all. I cannot see that the mere proclamation to do good which all sides declare but do not realistically implement will save us from our new powers.


Emanuel Paparella	2007-12-19 16:58:06
Chris, Since you mention the I-Thou relationship and assuming you mean it as Martin Buber means it, perhaps we can also take it as a starting point of a potentially convivial and fruitful conversation devoid of sophistry, beyond the obsessive and ultimately boring bashing and trashing of religion, one interested in the quest for truth which indeed seems to be one of man’s quests since his exit from the famed garden of Eden (understood mythologically of course; Jung would call it an archetype of human nature). Machiavelli on the other hand is very proud of his consummate realism about human nature and the killer instinct vis a vis the history of mankind which he neatly separates from his private morality as a Christian. So we end up with the Christian in Church for one hour on Sunday (albeit in Europe some 80% consider it hypocritical and no longer go) and the practical Machiavellian or the more benign Frlanklinian man the rest of the week who would rather be feared than loved. The Western world for five hundred years has been enamored of Machiavelli’s realistic philosophy of “real politik” (he has been praised in this very magazine by a devout Christian no less) which it has perfected and it practices all year around consonant with its consummate materialism and rationalism rationalizing all kinds of monstrosities which ought never be rationalized… while at the same time singing banal and funny and not so funny carolls about the spirit (as distinct from the spirits) of peace and love on Christmas eve, some in church some at home. After all it is fun to sing and be marry, and indeed so it is. (continued below)


Emanuel Paparella	2007-12-19 16:59:05
Martin Buber, a Jew, may have it on target however: when man has so dehumanized himself that he cannot distinguish an I-Thou from an I-it relationship then the sickness is unto death (that is more aptly described by Kirkegaard); then man will confuse an I-it relationship for an I-Thou one. The I-it relationship assumes that not only dogs screaming under the knife of vivisectionist, but humans too are nothing else but res extensa, so much matter or extension into space and therefore can be objectified and treated and manipulated as objects. That is a sorry spiritual condition to be in and post-modern man is actually proud of it, in a bizarre sort of way. I have been trying to put this simple point across from the very first piece I wrote on Levinas, but it feels more often than not as a voice crying in the wasteland to the deaf. Now, you may come back and say that it all sounds too bookish and that repels most people, and you may have a point but that, I submit is the nature of a written conversation beyond banalities on how to make a good universal cake or what is the weather in Finland lately. Of course the face to face encounter is always more human and more open to the possibility that it becomes an I-Thou relationship, but I don’t apologize for standing on the shoulders of those giants so that I may see a bit further and hope to find my way “in the middle of the journey of our life,” for the journey too is another archetype governing man’s life. In any case, Merry Christmas.


Sand	2007-12-19 17:28:57
Parrots frequently stand on shoulders blatting out all sorts of nonsense seen and obscene without benefiting to any degree from their platform. But even a parrot can, on occasion, benefit from a well baked cake. It is worthwhile to confront the differences between the I-thou and I-it relationship. It is most common in the I-thou relationship that humans regard each other as each being responsible for himself so whatever rewards that each individual can wrest from the other is a total benefit and it becomes a dog eat dog society. But when a man regards his employee as a valuable instrument to use well and care for for the benefit of both in an I-it relationship just as a man takes good care of his new car then both benefit. This is an obvious stretch and both types of relationships can be handled well or poorly. A poor relationship is always stupid and in the end, detrimental to all participants. To return to the poem, it displays a psychology involving a weapon that requires a mere finger twitch for destruction. The gun people have it right in that it is not guns that kill people, it is people that kill people. But their conclusion that therefore guns should be freely distributed fails because it is precisely people that cannot be trusted with guns. On their same logic, atomic bombs do not kill people, people do the killing but I wonder if they would sponsor a project for every citizen to own his own atomic bomb. So the problem resides within the minds of people and I do not see much progress in convincing people not to kill each other. All the religions have has their chance through thousands of years to no concrete result. “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. ” -Benjamin Franklin


Emanuel Paparella	2007-12-19 17:43:21
Mock on, mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau: Mock on, mock on: ‘tis all in vain! You throw the sand against the wind, And the wind blows it back again. --William Blake


Sand	2007-12-19 19:07:03
Paparella is that feller, Left his brains In the cellar Where he keeps Dusty heaps Of old tin cans And a black umbrella.


Emanuel Paparella	2007-12-19 19:46:26
That should earn you a high five and a perhaps even a few guffows, if from nobody else, the counselling voices in your head of which you spoke some time ago. Mock on, mock on...throw the sand against the wind...I am tempted to make a pun on that "sand" but I think I'll refrain; I have already earned enough high fives in kindergarde. As the bard put it: maturity is all; but it seems that he did not contemplate decrepitude.


Sand	2007-12-19 19:50:41
C'mon. Give it a shot! Sand is easy to screw around with. It has lots of rhymes. But then, you have absolutely no capability for creativity do you?


Emanuel Paparella	2007-12-19 19:58:25
P.S. In Italian there is a special verb, "rimbambire," and a special noun, "rimbambito," which are not easily translatable: their etymology is the noun "bambino" or child and so the best one can do is to tranlate it as "to become a child again," or to emter senility, which for a lucky few may well be the return of the imagination of a child and with it wisdom, but alas, for most it only means to become childish without having gathered any wisdom in the process.


Sand	2007-12-19 20:08:57
It's evident, Paparella, that you have never realized that I did not become a child again because I never was anything else but a child. When I was a kid almost everything I saw about adults seemed stupid but I assumed as I grew up I would get to understand why adults do what they do. As time passed I began to realize that what adults do really is stupid and therefor I never grew up. But I gained an acute eye for spotting stupidity and I must say, as far as stupidity is concerned, you are a prime candidate for the Guinness Book of Records.


Emanuel Paparella	2007-12-19 22:21:50
Now, now, considering the innumerable eminent scholars, poets, spychologists, philosophers and even one or two scientists that in the name of political correctness, have inquisitorially been prosecuted, slandered and duly consigned to the virtual bonfire in this site, I need not worry much as to where idiocy and invincible ignorance will be assigned by a fair-minded reader.


Sand	2007-12-20 06:16:03
What you do or do not worry about, Paparella, is of no real concern to me as your capability to evaluate people and events is based on such flimsy fantasies that they merely add a touch of humor to my day. Friedrich Nietzsche remarked that to fight a dragon one must become one. I am grateful he didn't insist that to fight an idiot one must become one.


Emanuel Paparella	2007-12-20 09:27:54
Indeed, don't be too modest now and take some well deserved credit for adding a touch of humor to anybody who might be reading those outlandish comments of yours. The form can be a bore, for it is always that of the truculent slanderous insults and argumentum ad hominem, but the content has indeed a touch of creative hilarity. One of the readers even pointed out two popular clowns who go at each other seriously and pomposously and their pomposity makes everybody laugh. Indeed, it takes hard work to be a clown. You may wish to add another self-appointed title and function vis a vis Ovi: Clown in chief.


Emanuel Paparella	2007-12-20 09:32:39
As regards Nietzsche, it is well known that first he had a madman go around shouting God is dead. Eventually he became the madman. Pari passu, be careful about calling all those who disagree with you stupid. After a while people beging to think that "the lad protests too much" and put two and two together.


Sand	2007-12-20 09:36:02
Some clowns, like Woody Allen and the Marx Brothers and Charlie Chaplin are exceedingly perceptive and clever and some are merely clumsy idiots stumbling through stupidities. Humor has a way of revealing the depths of human contradictions far more surgically than bluster and a laugh is very frequently a signal of nervousness over the revelation of persistent and embedded stupidities. I try to embody the best efforts in the business but it is not easy as it involves stepping on very sensitive toes.


Sand	2007-12-20 09:45:58
Nietzsche, like many clever and articulate people, was perceptive enough to discomfort many who took the established beliefs of society without close examination. As you yourself have noted different cultural establishments have sent many perceptive critics to the madhouse to discredit their observations. God, as an accepted concept requiring faith rather than proof to continue existing, does indeed seem to have been consigned to the dustbin prematurely but the power structure, in the west at least, that requires obeisance to this outmoded superstition, is not as rigorously empowered currently as it was in the past so people are beginning to accept that there are other views more consistent with sanity.


Emanuel Paparella	2007-12-20 10:37:03
Einstein would be the first one, as I have shown already, to say that sanity does not reside in mere rationalism. That intuition, imagination, the poetic, the mythological are also part of reason and to discount them is to end in intellectual insanity. The name for that rampant disease, especially acute in the West, is rationalism.


Sand	2007-12-20 11:12:42
I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves. Neither can I nor would I want to conceive of an individual that survives his physical death; let feeble souls, from fear or absurd egoism, cherish such thoughts. I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and with the awareness and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world, together with the devoted striving to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the Reason that manifests itself in nature. -- Albert Einstein, The World as I See It


Sand	2007-12-20 11:44:35
The more a man is imbued with the ordered regularity of all events the firmer becomes his conviction that there is no room left by the side of this ordered regularity for causes of a different nature. For him neither the rule of human nor the rule of divine will exist as an independent cause of natural events. To be sure, the doctrine of a personal God interfering with the natural events could never be refuted, in the real sense, by science, for this doctrine can always take refuge in those domains in which scientific knowledge has not yet been able to set foot. But I am persuaded that such behaviour on the part of the representatives of religion would not only be unworthy but also fatal. For a doctrine which is able to maintain itself not in clear light but only in the dark, will of necessity lose its effect on mankind, with incalculable harm to human progress.... If it is one of the goals of religions to liberate mankind as far as possible from the bondage of egocentric cravings, desires, and fears, scientific reasoning can aid religion in another sense. Although it is true that it is the goal of science to discover (the) rules which permit the association and foretelling of facts, this is not its only aim. It also seeks to reduce the connections discovered to the smallest possible number of mutually independent conceptual elements. It is in this striving after the rational unification of the manifold that it encounters its greatest successes, even though it is precisely this attempt which causes it to run the greatest risk of falling a prey to illusion. But whoever has undergone the intense experience of successful advances made in this domain, is moved by the profound reverence for the rationality made manifest in existence. By way of the understanding he achieves a far reaching emancipation from the shackles of personal hopes and desires, and thereby attains that humble attitude of mind toward the grandeur of reason, incarnate in existence, and which, in its profoundest depths, is inaccessible to man. This attitude, however, appears to me to be religious in the highest sense of the word. And so it seems to me that science not only purifies the religious impulse of the dross of its anthropomorphism but also contributes to a religious spiritualisation of our understanding of life. -- Albert Einstein, Science, Philosophy, and Religion, A Symposium, published by the Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion in Their Relation to the Democratic Way of Life, Inc., New York, 1941


Emanuel Paparella	2007-12-20 14:39:37
Is this quoting of Einstein a conversion of sort? A coming out of the box of rationalism to the acceptance of the importance of the religious spirit (no matter how understood)for a holistic life of the mind and the soul? Let us hope so. Then we could have a dialogue rather than the usual boring predictable prosecutorial trahsing and bashing of religion parading as documented historical facts.


Emanuel Paparella	2007-12-20 14:43:08
"HERE WE FACE THEREFORE THE LIMITS OF THE PURELY RATIONAL CONCEPTION OF OUR EXISTENCE. THE HIGHEST PRINCIPLES FOR OUR ASPIRATIONS AND JUDJMENT ARE GIVEN TO US IN THE JEWISH- CHRISTIAN RELIGIOUS TRADITION." --Albert Einstein


Sand	2007-12-20 16:06:24
I had no comment. If you consider that Einstein was bashing religion you'll have to take it up with him. It seems to me, since the quotes are genuine, that Einstein's words meant some something else than a complete support of your point of view. Fight it out with him. He seems quite happy with rationality.


Emanuel Paparella	2007-12-20 16:28:33
Point missed again. It is not rationality that is being disputed. As those quotes from Eistein make abundantly clear it is rationalism that is the issue: a fanatical insistence that rationality is the only characteristc of reason and intelligence. It is not, and that is why Einstein talk of its limits and of the Judeo-Christian tradition. But of course for a fanatical rationalist to accept that is to put in doubt his whole rationalistic house of cards. Pity!


Sand	2007-12-20 16:57:30
So we have finally arrived at the point where you must clarify the important difference between rationalism and rationality. Once you have done that it might be possible to understand what all this conflict has been about.


Emanuel Paparella	2007-12-20 17:03:17
It's all there, elaborated in most of my contributions, especially the ones on Vico's philosophy. It appears that not much attention was paid, but then one wants answers and a dialogue and pretends that he is after truth and understanding of ideas. A bit too disengenuous. Wouldn't you say?


Chris	2007-12-20 17:34:46
The poet who started this thread spoke of killing. Paparella and Sand have laid out a long string of words-of-disagreement. They do put each other down. The threat to an-eye-a-late is absent in both. I don't know what human progress is. It does strike me that the kill or be killed attitude is inferior to the verbal bickering approach. I would aspire for something like "the diplomatic approach."


Sand	2007-12-20 17:40:39
I am not bickering, I am merely asking the professor to please lay out again here and now precisely what he means. Is that unreasonable? His predictable reaction id to vaguely indicate my answer is out there somewhere(which I doubt) and he is either too lazy to clear up this with a few simple sentences or he has no answer and will continue avoiding clarity with some sort of nonsensical insult.


by	2007-12-21 05:46:31
Who of us would not kill: to protect (our families?), if need be - to survive. Aren't we all just latent killers awaiting a reason, a cause, to let loose our darkest core? Anyone who was in the army has been taught to be a killer. "I was born I was made I am a part of what there is" And what there is -- is warfare: criminal, civil, and nationalistic.


Sand	2007-12-21 08:21:31
Although I am sure there is the occasional psychotic who can kill another person with no sense of doubt or guilt and even with the spontaneous joy that many children exhibit in the digital games now so popular there is a long record of soldiers returning from war where their governments encourage killing for political ends and who are damaged for life by the experience of rampant official murder. It is a commonplace that soldiers from WWII never spoke of the horrible things they had to do to win the war. I do not say that the killing was unnecessary considering the horrible Nazi ideals but there is no denying the psychological toll on the men designated to do a very dirty job. There are soldiers now returning from Iraq who have been psychologically maimed for life by their experience in the ubiquitous "collateral damage" which has been officially accepted as one of the consequences of an invading army in the midst of a hostile population. I do not evaluate as to the necessity of the operation, merely note that ordinary decent people when forced to do awful things suffer irretrievable damage.


Emanuel Paparella	2007-12-21 16:18:03
“The people that walked in darkness has seen a great light; on those who live in a land of deep shadow a light has shone. You have made their gladness greater, you have made their joy increase; they rejoice in your presence as men rejoice at harvest time, as men are happy when they are dividing the spoils. For the yoke that was weighing on him, the bar across his shoulders, the rod of his oppressor, these you break as on the day of Midian. For all the footgear of battle, every cloak rolled in blood, is burnt, and consumed by fire. FOR THERE IS A CHILD BORN FOR US, a son given to us and dominion is laid on his shoulders; and this is the name they give him: Wonder-Counsellor, Mighty-God, Eternal-Father, Prince of Peace. (continued below)


Emanuel Paparella	2007-12-21 16:19:12
Wide is his dominion in a peace that has no end, for the throne of David and for his royal power, which he establishes and makes secure in justice and integrity. From this time onwards and for ever, the jealous love of Yahweh Sabaoth will do this. --Isaiah, 9: 1-7.


Sand	2007-12-21 16:51:57
What peace with no end?