XNJNG RTS

Remember that happiness is a way of travel - not a destination.


/////////////////070705-SOME AWARENESS OF THE SHATTERING OF LVS



//////////////////All quiet on the God front
Simon Blackburn discusses the argument that religious experience can't be discussed
Buzz up!
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Simon Blackburn
The Guardian, Saturday 4 July 2009
Article history
This is an eloquent and interesting book, although you do not quite get what it says on the tin. Karen Armstrong takes the reader through a history of religious practice in many different cultures, arguing that in the good old days and purest forms they all come to much the same thing. They use devices of ritual, mystery, drama, dance and meditation in order to enable us better to cope with the vale of tears in which we find ourselves. Religion is therefore properly a matter of a practice, and may be compared with art or music. These are similarly difficult to create, and even to appreciate. But nobody who has managed either would doubt that something valuable has happened in the process. We come out of the art gallery or concert hall enriched and braced, elevated and tranquil, and may even fancy ourselves better people, though the change may or may not be noticed by those around us.



///////////////////THEY WILL BE EDUCATED



////////////////////Multiple intelligences provides a kind of cover to preserve that fable. "OK, little Jimmie may not be a rocket scientist, but he can dance real well. Shouldn't that count equally in school and life?" No. The great dancers of the Pleistocene foxtrotted their way into the stomach of a saber-tooth tiger.

That is the root of the matter. Too many people have chosen to believe in what they wish to be true rather than in what is true. In the main, the motive is a pure one: to see every child as having equal potential, or at the very least some potential. Intelligence is a fundamentally meritocratic construct. There are winners and there are losers. A relative doofus may live a comfortable life so long as his or her parents are wealthy. However, clawing one's own way out of abject poverty is best achieved with a healthy dose of both motivation and "g."



/////////////////POST TRAUMATIC EMBITTERMENT DISORDER
Bitterness is "so common and so deeply destructive," writes Shari Roan at the Los Angeles Times, "that some psychiatrists are urging it be identified as a mental illness under the name post-traumatic embitterment disorder." "The disorder is modeled after post-traumatic stress disorder," she continues, "because it too is a response to a trauma that endures. People with PTSD are left fearful and anxious. Embittered people are left seething for revenge."

Now I grant that there's a lot of anger and bitterness out there. How much of it should be attributed to the last Republican administration? The question straddles psychology and politics, I concede, but in the eyes of many Americans that administration managed in eight years to bring a largely healthy economy to its knees.

To many Americans, there are addition


/////////////////////magine, if you will, the inevitable ads: "Think it's just bitterness from job loss, foreclosure on your home, or that nonexistent pension for which you've been saving all your working years? It may be 'post-traumatic embitterment disorder,' a mental illness that some doctors think is due to a chemical imbalance . . ."



////////////////////These days, when many people approaching retirement open their 401(k) statements, they doubtless feel a bad twinge of "angry plus helpless." How about making that frantic concern and impotent rage? Do we really want the DSM telling us that those feelings—including over the need to postpone retirement by up to a decade—could soon be a symptom of "post-traumatic embitterness disorder"? Wouldn't that be comparable to rubbing salt in an already large wound?



ANGRY PLUS HELPLESS


///////////////////t a recent meeting of a Conservative think-tank in London about the possibility of reducing concepts of moral action entirely to scientific explanations of behaviour, one politician joked about the policy applications of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation techniques. The world of understanding, cognition and even action can be managed by manipulating atoms rather than arguments ("opium of the people" in reverse -- chemicals inducing meaning, instead of meanings acting chemically). Even where such claims seem strongest and most striking, it is important to ask what exactly they amount to. Can we really move with ease from the world of atoms to the world of meanings? Or is any apparent smoothness due to the conceptual confusion involved in applying neuro-scientific discoveries to meaningful questions -- so that in the transition we inevitably lose essentially human parts of existence? These questions, newly pertinent because of scientific and social developments, have been anticipated in the philosophy of mind of the past 70 years.



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