Semtek wrote:
-1- wrote:
“well, verily I say unto you… seek the path of thine own feet for your shaft will never return into its slate without watering the length of thine journey crosswise.”
Hahaha. Where do your disciples congregate? Can I make a financial contribution?
"Pssst... hey, buddy... do you want to buys some bishoptry, or high priestess designation? Sorry, I'm straight out of Vestal Virgins, but come back next Tuesday, I should have a fresh shipment. Today half price... oops, there is someone coming... okay, he's gone, so how'bout becoming the main dervish of my hajamatha? Only two-hundred and thirty are remaining... make up your mind quickly, they go fast."
P.s. N.B. This is not an actual offer, strictly forbidden by the rules. This was an attempt at humour.
-- Updated 2017 August 19th, 3:02 am to add the following --
Greta wrote:
It's an interesting point how fewer choices make us happier, but weaker. If It exists, in terms of survival over the long term, God most rewards those who strive and struggle to the point of agony and most punishes those who would like to kick back and enjoy life. So, if any kind of god/s exist, we humans are not the main game to God/the gods but just either collateral damage like other animals en route to entities that can either balance joy and survival, or they will suffer in ever more refined and abstracted ways.
Yes, I had thought about that quite long and hard in the past. In my opinion it were the Europeans who discovered America or ventured out of their cocoon of comfort zone, because they, as a society, from top to bottom, were more oppressed and restricted than the Chinese or the Indian empires at the same time in history. In China, it is my understanding, absolute capitalism was the rule of the day, under a veil of feudalism. By that I mean that there was no state ideology like Christianity in Europe, or like Hinduism in India. Society operated purely on humans' natural instincts, and on their original, innate morals. It was okay to have as many wives as one could afford, or even a private army. It was all about the almighty buck.
IN contrast, in Europe at the time the vogue of the time was to wear the restrictive and harshly punitive yoke of landlords and religion, and there was no escape. You could only fornicate to produce children, and when the wife got pregnant, you bones were broken into many interesting pieces by the landlord's or the church's executioners if you were caught masturbating. ETC.
So in this environment there had got to be an outburst. You can only increase pressure in any hermetically sealed container, or hermeneutically sealed society, before the container bursts open. That lack of human face to society in Europe, which China had, kept China stagnant, and kept Europe like a keg a dry gunpowder, so to speak.
So, some Europeans fizzed out at high temperatures and velocity at the seams, and took a boat across the pond to see if the Earth were really round.
Greta wrote:
Happiness is a state, like weather, so it usually must change (aside from deserts).
True. True, true, treu. Life is a kangaroo locomoting. You get some needs develop, you strive to satisfy those needs, you satisfy the needs, you relax, need develops again. When you have the need, you are unhappy, but you have a purpose. When your need gets satisfied, you become happy. It's not exactly like a kangaroo... you are better with words, Greta, what onomatopoeic English noun or verb or adjective would be most apt to describe this struggle-satisfaction-rest-cycle that keeps repeating in humans' lives?
Greta wrote:So ultimately we seek a balance that will emphasise stability but still includes enough chaotic agents to mix things up and create new connections, but controlled enough so as to not break things down. For many, religion provides that stability. Technology and globalisation have brought us a rapidly-changing world, like a flood or a mudslide sweeping through societies and many people are clinging to fixed ideas as if they were rocks. Everything, bar the scriptures and various humanist and simple prejudiced ideologies, appears to be changing, so they cling. And well they may cling, because they are amongst the most vulnerable.
So I doubt you will find any bursts of theology in northern Russia, where I expect they anticipate a time of warming, greening, the opening up of new arable land and fresh glacier water, a time when the US, China, India and other competitors are struggling with wildfires, storms and displaced people and Russia becomes the world's great superpower. No, it's in Africa, the middle east and SE Asia where people whose existence is most threatened who cling to the (ostensibly) stabilising lifeline of religion.
Dammit, I'm trying to give up babbling. Oh well
Life is either peaceful but boring, or else interesting but frought with difficulties.
Neither is satisfactory.
In large parts of Europe and in North America at least two generations were born, raised, and grown, that never saw war. Guess what they watch on tv? Sex and VIOLENCE. Right after the war we watched epic stories (Ben Hur, etc.) and every story had to do about peace and harmony: the Brady Bunch, Leave it to Beaver, Three's Company, Carol Burnett, Dick Van Dyke, Mary Tyler Moore, Gilligan's Island.
It is true that war is hell. But we need hell in our lives to experience complete happiness. (Just like you said, or similarly to what you said.)
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