Comment on Chris Martenson on VivaBarnes predicted fertilizer shortage 2 weeks ago. WSJ confirmed it today
iamtanmay@wolfballs.com 2 years agoOh, I see. Yes, I understand what you mean. I agree.
People are very unaware of who they really are, and how they behave vs their imagination of themselves. They also don't understand their own motivations and needs.
I don't think religious people are any smarter, but they have a huge advantage with the religious superstructure that keeps their psychology grounded much better.
We really owe a huge debt to our ancestors for making and passing on such systems for us.
sj_zero@lotide.fbxl.net 2 years ago
I wrote a book for my son before he was born, which I called The Graysonian Ethic: Lessons for my unborn son. One thing I keep coming back to in the different chapters is that a lot of our humanity was passed down from our ancestors. Not just culture, but even things we don't think about. We have so much survival, thousands of generations of survivors, written in our blood.
One example that's invisible is sickle cell anemia. This is common in black people but nobody else. It's a trait that evolved because sickle cell traits are more resistant to malaria. It's considered a disorder because that world doesn't matter, but back then it helped entire bloodlines survive. Same with our propensity to be overweight. It's a vice in an age of plenty, but most of human history was filled with famine, so having some extra meat on your bones might be the difference between survival and death.
These lessons built into our DNA are a good example of what you're talking about.
Looking at religion through a different lens, instead of thinking of it as the divine word of God passed down, and instead thinking of it as the combined wisdom of millennia of human beings helps to contextualize it and explain things that don't make sense in terms of it being divine word: The values of 2000 years ago are not the values of 1000 years ago, and the religion practiced today doesn't even look the same as the religion practiced 250 years ago in the least, but that's because it's a body of knowledge that's passed down, and parts are emphasized, and other parts are de-emphasized, and it evolves over time.
In that sense, it makes sense that Christianity while being imperfect has a huge lead over contemporary replacements. There have been 2000 years of sanding down the rough parts. The bible has instructions on how to keep your slaves, but the living ideology of Christianity is the thing that helped end the global slave trade. By contrast, the postmodern woke religion is still very rough, and contains a lot of rough edges that haven't been sanded down yet, and may never for all we know.
iamtanmay@wolfballs.com 2 years ago
I absolutely, 100% agree. All of our life's struggles and hard work get passed on to the next generation. Maybe that is the real kingdom of heaven/hell. The world we leave behind.
Did you publish your book ?
sj_zero@lotide.fbxl.net 2 years ago
I did. It's on amazon. At first I only did it because it's the most economical way to have a book printed, but I'm glad I did because feedback has been very positive.
You might be right -- the difference between a life where you build something and follow the rules and do the best things and one where you don't build anything, and you go out of your way to break the rules, and not do very good things are going to be very different.
You don't notice it at first, it's sort of like the carrying capacity of an island in environmentalism. If an island has enough to support 100 deer and a 101st deer is born, the ecosystem doesn't just immediately collapse, but because the balance has changed, over time the resources of the island will end up getting consumed and eventually the deer on the island will go extinct.
In the same way, if you are out partying and doing drugs and having lots of promiscuous sex and maybe even having kids out of wedlock it probably won't even be that bad at first. It might be way better than if you follow the rules. But the thing is you're not in your twenties forever. Soon you're in your thirties, your forties, and your god-given gifts start to either plateau or fall away depending on what they were. You're in your fifties, and at that age you are relying a lot on the continuity that came before you in terms of what you have accessible to you. You hit your 60s, and you just find that you're tired of working, and the question is to whether you can retire or not depends very much on what you've built before that. You're in your seventies, and maybe you don't have a choice at that point because your body and your mind just aren't capable of heading out and working like they were, and what you built in the decades before that really matter. You're in your 80s you're in your 90s, at that point nobody cares about who you had sex with at a really great party when you were 22. But if you have kids, and you've raised them right, and you've built strong relationships with them; if you have relationships with other people, and those relationships are strong enough that they care about you; if you put away resources and made a plan for retirement so that you have some money to have a comfortable life after you are no longer physically capable of working; if you've built a legacy in your family and in your works so that even when you know that your time is coming you know that you will live on in what you've built, in a lot of ways that is heaven on Earth, and the opposite must absolutely be hell on Earth.
iamtanmay@wolfballs.com 2 years ago
I think you wrote down the passage of time by decade, really well. As grandparents pass away, you really feel the hole left by them, how much impact they had on your family. Also, that its the ultimate end point for you, if you happen to be lucky and live your life well.
I bought a copy. Its a thoughtful read so far. Good job.