Thoughts from Kazantzakis's The Last Temptation

Flesh ultimately either becomes mud and returns to dust, or becomes spirit and ascends.

Life is mostly spent somewhere in between mud and spirit—flesh strives to remain strong and firm, but never finds an upwards purpose, continuously trying to sprout wings, but in the end remaining grounded. There is contentment to be found on the ground, the ground offers security, familiarity, and acceptance. In the end, it is a choice between body and mind, flesh and spirit—the body loves the ground, seeks to become dust and return to the ground. The mind or spirit, however, strives against the ground and, seeking separation, tries to build wings and explore the world above.

To honor your father means to honor God, and to honor your mother means to honor the Earth.

Pg. 346- The old law instructs you to honor your father and your mother; but I say, Do not imprison your heart within your parents’ home. Let it emerge and enter all homes, embrace the whole of the Israel from Mount Hermon to the desert of Idumea and even beyond: east and west—the entire Universe. Our father is God, our mother is Earth. We are half soil and half sky. To honor your father and mother means to honor Heaven and Earth.

The foundation for happiness.

(from Anthony De Mello's Awareness)
“People don’t really want to grow up, people don’t really want to change, people don’t really want to be happy. As someone so wisely said to me, “Don’t try to make them happy, you’ll only get in trouble. Don’t try to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and it irritates the pig.” Like the businessman who goes into a bar, sits down, and sees this fellow with a banana in his ear—a banana in his ear! And he thinks, “I wonder if I should mention that to him. No, it’s none of my business.” But the thought nags at him. So after having a drink or two, he says to the fellow, “Excuse me, ah, you’ve got a banana in your ear.” The fellow says, “What?” The businessman repeats, “You’ve got a banana in your ear.” Again the fellow says, “What was that?” “You’ve got a banana in your ear!” the businessman shouts. “Talk louder,” the fellow says, “I’ve got a banana in my ear!”
So it’s useless. “Give up, give up, give up,” I say to myself. Say your thing and get out of here. And if they profit, that’s fine, and if they don’t, too bad!” – Awareness pg. 8

The foundation is the body, we argue. Each woman is to become God to one man, each man God to one woman. In this way, all become God, and all are engaged in a continual worship. Heaven and Earth are thus joined into beautiful, joyful harmony.

Pg. 359 - “Jesus of Nazareth,” said the angel, unwrapping his wing from around him, “the two sisters lighted a fire, did the milking first thing in the morning and are now preparing the milk for you. On our way, didn’t you want to ask me the meaning of Paradise? Thousands of small joys, Jesus of Nazareth. To knock at a door, to have a woman open it for you, to sit down in front of the fire, to watch her lay the table for you; and when it is completely dark, to feel her take you in her arms. That is the way the Saviour comes: gradually—from embrace to embrace, son to son. That is the road.”

The foundation is the soul

On Wanting Happiness - pg. 10

“I was saying that we don’t want to be happy. We want other things. Or let’s put it more accurately: We don’t want to be unconditionally happy. I’m ready to be happy provided I have this and that and the other thing. But this is really to say to our friend or to our God or to anyone, “You are my happiness. If I don’t get you, I refuse to be happy.” It’s so important to understand that. We cannot imagine being happy without those conditions. That’s pretty accurate. We cannot conceive of being happy without them. We’ve been taught to place our happiness in them.

Pg. 78 – Happiness is our natural state. Happiness is the natural state of little children, to whom the kingdom belongs until they have been polluted and contaminated by the stupidity of society and culture. [Why do we believe we need the “thousands of small joys” in order to be happy? That is the lie we are taught, conditioned since birth to believe in...] To acquire happiness you don’t have to do anything, because happiness cannot be acquired. Does anybody know why? Because we have it already. How can you acquire what you already have? Then why don’t you experience it? Because you’ve got to drop something. You’ve got to drop your illusions.

A Conservative Christian argument for politically accepting gay marriage -- (reemphasize politically)

Sept. 10, 2009

I think I have a problem with wanting to start arguments for no reason, and tending to support contrarian positions. But anyways... the idea i've been getting at is this: for any issue that does not directly threaten the well-being of other citizens, whether the issue is religious beliefs, substance abuse, adult content in media, and even polygamy, regulation and control make more sense than a complete prohibition or ban. (The soul is never enriched by blindly following rules or “codes of proper behavior.” This is precisely why Jesus condemned the Pharisees.)

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Sept. 4, 2009

Okay, so my original argument was extremely naive. (It happens, I guess.) There are valid arguments for allowing homosexual marriage without legalizing group marriages. (It comes down to "Should government put restrictions on how people organize their personal relationships?" Valid affirmative arguments can be made in the name of social stability.)

A better summary of the issues than my original post--
http://www.indegayforum.org/topics/printer/26668.html

I really should have just found a message board that discusses this topic, but whatever. And
here's a site that makes a few of the points I was getting at (although it endorses polygamy religiously as well as politically.)

Final thought: Banning polygamous marriage tranquilizes the objectification of women into a socially acceptable, stable form. But is this a good thing or not? Wouldn’t Jesus say not? “Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart,” right? (Matthew 5:28) The objectification of women (or men) in any form is as much a sin as adultery.

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Original -- May 15th, 2009
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--Why We should have Freedom of Marriage in the same way that we have Freedom of Religion--

History
The key idea is to realize that Freedom of Marriage is a technological change, and not necessarily symbolic of a changing morality in our culture.

Methods for controlling STDs and STIs have changed dramatically over the past 60 years. According to Wikipedia: “Sexually transmitted infections have been well known for hundreds of years” and “Prior to the invention of modern medicines, sexually transmitted diseases were generally incurable, and treatment was limited to treating the symptoms of the disease.”

Due to these factors, the values of traditional marriage, in addition to encouraging healthy community-oriented attitudes, have historically been used to control STIs. (funny WWII poster)

For obvious reasons, defining sexual expression as only appropriate during marriage decreased the amount of STIs within society—this is the rationale behind abstinence-only sex education. Now, of course, there are other effective methods for controlling STIs, which have made sexual activity far less dangerous to an individual’s physical safety. Sexuality is no longer the threat to physical safety that it once was.

Safety and Freedom
Government must balance physical safety with individual rights. Certain freedoms should be restricted in the interest of ensuring our physical safety—i.e., laws against hard drugs or owning bazookas. However, in cases where physical safety is not endangered, government should allow freedom for individuals to gather information and make their own choices. Crack cocaine still threatens people’s physical safety—sexuality now no longer does.

Values
Still, traditional marriage is an ideal that I believe in—traditional marriage and the values that it represents are an important part of the moral health of a community. I am against my church or pastor performing gay marriages. As it currently stands though, churches that speak against gay marriage politically are positioning themselves to be perceived by the rest of society as discriminatory, because they are trying to use politics to impose their views on everyone else.

Standing up for traditional marriage and the values it represents is not discriminatory—trying to use politics to impose your view on others, when there is no longer a threat to the physical safety of individuals, is. Just as Christianity survived the idea of freedom of religion, traditional marriage and, just as importantly, the values that it represents, will remain strong after freedom of marriage.

Churches recognize the rights of atheists to be treated politically as equal members of society—rights regarding marriage now should be given to homosexuals, and to poly-amorous families as well (and no, James Dobson, this does not have to extend to brothers and sisters—that risks the physical safety of potential offspring—or to people and animals—that's still just ridiculous.)

Conservative Christians need to understand this—need to see that Freedom is not contrary to conservative principles. God gave his creation free will for a reason—because freedom creates the best possible forum for moral development to take place.

“Community” vs. “Job Market”
All this talk about “the values of traditional marriage” may seem outdated and obsolete—in today’s America maybe so. The benefits of traditional marriage are diminished outside of strong, personal communities, and (as all of us college graduates know by now) in America, the idea of community has been replaced by the idea of the “job market"—the fight for social justice should come first and all... So bottom line, basically, thank God for people like Ralph Nader.


—Okay, so, if you’re a conservative Christian who believes in the principle of Freedom, how can you disagree with any of that?

Sports experiments I would like to see

Baseball – Change to 8 fielders instead of 9.
The biggest advantage is it would reward hitting the ball, rather than waiting for either a walk or a pitch to slug, like the current system rewards. (So game would go faster, as a side advantage.) Great contact hitters like Juan Pierre, Michael Young, and Johnny Damon could legitimately be considered great players again, and Ichiro would possibly be the perennial MVP.

What would be the best way to react to this? I’m assuming have the pitcher cover first base? It’d be interesting to see what teams came up with. Other less drastic (but less fun) options are to make fields wider (but some stadiums would have to be altered), or possibly change rules about fouling balls off to stay alive (three foul offs and you’re out, or the ball has to move forward on a foul-off.)

Men’s tennis – only get 4 faults per game.
This change would be the easiest to implement and I think has real potential toward making the game more entertaining. You can go for big serves still, but not an unlimited amount. And if the game is dragged on in deuce, the advantage would shift to the fleet of foot. This could make things really enjoyable I think.

Basketball – higher rims and bigger penalty for fouling, maybe?
The combination of both of these could be interesting. Make it harder on players like Lebron to take it to the hoop, but also give a greater incentive to draw fouls—a free throw and the ball, perhaps. This would really be too much of a change though. I like basketball for the most part how it is.
(Except NBA really needs to get rid of the stupid “Timeout moves the ball to mid-court” that has hurt the last seconds of games since it was adopted in 1976. Last-second, full-court passes/drives are awesome! Look at plays #7-#3 here—and #1 if you’re a Duke fan. But yeah. None of these ever happen with NBA rules!)

Football – too many options to even consider
Football has a bunch of rules. Too complicated to try to change them!

Teach for America application essays

Here are the two essays I wrote for my application to Teach for America. I received a rejection saying I was ineligible for the program since I didn't have the 2.5 GPA that TFA requires because it's required by some states for teacher certification purposes or something, so I'm assuming the essays were never read.

1st essay: The topic was “A Time You Overcame an Obstacle to Success”

Success, I think, is actually a somewhat vague concept. The idea of success that’s most prevalent in our schools, corporations, and social circles could probably be described as “getting ahead,” or “beating out others.” We compete for grades, we compete for scholarships, we compete for internships, we compete for jobs… And then that’s when the real competition begins.

I grew up going to a K-12 private college prep school in Huntsville Alabama. I remember in middle school, grades were everything to me. That’s just what my friends did at the time, I guess: play computer games and maximize the grades on our next test, our report card, etc. As far as I was concerned, education = grades. I had no conception of what one would be like without the other.

Gradually I began to differentiate between the two. Around 10th grade, I remember being in a math class that was covering something I had learned about year ago. I remembered that I had understood it pretty well a year ago, had gotten a 99 or something on the test, but a year later, I was totally clueless again. This troubled me a little bit at the time, but I didn’t really know what to do about it, so for the most part I went on trying to make good grades, believing that was the right approach for learning how to function in society.

In college, around the end of my sophomore year, I finally got it. Grades only have meaning within the academic/corporate cultures that use them. They have little relation to how smart students are, and much more relation to how willing they are to follow directions and how much time they willing to invest in them.

The problem is that schools spend little time on providing actual educations for students (teaching how society works) and too much time on training them for life in “the real world” (aka the privatized corporate business world). Sure the content may be geared toward education, but the method through which students are evaluated twists it toward corporate training.

We’ve replaced the natural reasons for learning (wanting to know how society works, how it can be improved), with “incentives” and “motivators” like grades to some extent, but most glaringly adult approval. The result is that learning occurs through imitation of processes rather than through the creation/recreation of ideas. (See my Letter of Intent.)

For me, my reasons for learning are now much more varied than simply the desire to get good grades/the approval of others. I want to learn math and physics, because I find it interesting to learn the stories behind technology, how we are able to do all the amazing things and are able to make such accurate predictions about how the world works.

Most students today equate success with acceptance into a corporate structure. They get jobs because it pays well, because it has “upward mobility”; usually not because they believe in their work. I believe my greatest success in school has been to escape form this approach to education, and begin to truly learn about our society, and how I can contribute to its progress.


2nd essay: The topic was "Why I want to join Teach for America"

Learning can be approached as imitation or as creation/re-creation.

Most teachers are somewhat aware of this distinction: they might call it memorization vs. understanding, higher level vs. lower level, or something like that. The problem is imitation is the only method that is commonly taught, because imitation is the only method that can be effectively graded. And most teachers rely on some sort of grade, or reward mechanism to control their classes.

I believe these two methods have very little in common; that being able to imitate the process of getting a “right answer”, writing a “5-paragraph essay”, etc has little to do with being able to create/recreate for yourself why math is useful in developing technologies or recreating in your mind why our country is so politically divided along party lines.

Don’t get me wrong. I believe imitation has its place; society, reality, is built on imitation. And in school also. In order to get a degree, students should prove they have attained a minimum level of proficiency in reading, writing, math and science, and imitation is a perfectly acceptable method of attaining this minimum level.

But our understanding! Our ideas! Our ideas should never be subjected to learning by imitation. An idea that is learned through imitation has no purpose, no vision of its potential, of what it could be. Imitation has its functional place in reality; there it should remain.


I believe progress is achieved through innovation, through the creation/recreation of vibrant ideas. Imitation can serve to spread and maintain existing social structures, but ideas are kept alive by people believing in them, not by people imitating what they have been told.

I think Teach for America is one of these vibrant ideas that people believe in, and that is serving to help our society progress. I believe I would benefit from and could contribute a lot to the Teach for America program. Otherwise, I’m planning on working in a high school somewhere in the southeast anyway, so no biggie either way. : )

Why I support Ralph Nader for President

For me, I guess it comes down to moral authority of government. Should government be a source of moral authority? In other words, should citizens be able to look to their government when trying to find some direction or sense of community for their lives?

I believe so.

The separation of church and state does not require the absence of moral authority from government. Our nations most celebrated achievements have a significant moral dimension to them. Civil rights, the end of slavery, and the founding of our country were all at least partly pursued due to the moral claim that “All men ['men' in the universal, un-gendered sense, of course] are created equal.”

In fact, without access to government, morality itself can become impotent, unable to take significant action.


Both the Democrat and Republican parties have become dependent on corporations to:

1. provide media coverage that champions their platform
2. donate an unlimited amount of soft money to the parties, and
3. help pay for political rallies, such as the parties’ national conventions.

[Not to mention the unavoidable dependence politicians will have to corporations threatening to move jobs out of their district.] Hence, both parties have rejected the moral issues that Nader is trying to address: poverty, lack of medical attention, disease caused by pollution/other corporate abuses. Both parties have instead come to embrace a "corporate moral relativism" whose only ideology is that of dollars and markets.


To quote Neil Postman’s book The End of Education:

“Our genius lies in our capacity to make meaning through the creation of narratives that give point to our labors, exalt our history, elucidate the present, and give direction to our future…
“The measure of a narrative’s ‘truth’ or ‘falsity’ is in its consequences: Does it provide people with a sense of personal identity, a sense of a community life, a basis for moral conduct?"

“Our genius lies in our capacity to make meaning through the creation of narratives;” not in our capacity to create dollars.

Corporations, when they are granted too much political influence, demand that our “narratives,” our sense of community life, be rooted within business, within our economic interactions with others. That's why they demand our schools place standardized test-taking above all other concerns, such as civic participation, staying healthy, or pursuing extra-curricular interests. That’s why corporations make sure they have control over the media and the messages we hear on TV, which are often opinions from corporate-funded think-tanks.
Why? To make sure we hear the message that the creation of “wealth” (as defined in terms of monetary exchanges) is the only real way to help people, the only real ideology to build a life around.


And that’s where they get it wrong. It’s NOT money that decides what’s worthwhile; it’s the reasoned judgment of individuals.

Reasoned. As in free from the tyranny of greed, which INEVITABLY will play a role in judgment, when men trying to climb the corporate ladder gain influence over our political institutions. Of course such men will pull political strings to save their business some money; they have their employees (real people they interact with everyday) to think of and all.
Corporate abuse shouldn’t just be pinned on rogue individuals; it is a systematic problem within the structure of our economy.
And it comes at the cost of thousands of deaths and infections caused by air pollution, hundreds of millions of tax-payer dollars used to pay corporate bills, and millions of people in our country living in conditions that could be improved by responsible congressional action.


I believe that Ralph Nader understands as well as, if not better than anyone, how to use government to help people, without damaging the capitalist institutions and values that have made our economy great. Equally important to me, he is standing up against the corporate moral relativism that is communicated through the structuring of our educational, industrial, and news-media systems.