FAIR ?

About: rush monologue: life is not fair

Rush's point of view is that of politics. If one contemplates the question "What is Life?" then life becomes neither fair nor unfair!

In politics Liberals depend upon creating a context that life is unfair so that ever increasing Big Government can have something to fix!

Comments

C says

I have contemplated "What is Life?", "Who am I?" and "What is another?" & some other basic zen questions. I have groked them all! You are right in that the answers can't be just passed to another person in language, only pointed to. Otherwise, there would be no need for contemplation & children would learn from their parents' experience! When you say "Christ is a symbol" & the Spiritual World likewise & then reason them to be private; it ends up demeaning the realities. Maybe it's easier that way requiring less intense inquiry beyond the physical. In a nutshell - symbology is not real life. The practitioners of NLP say the map is not the territory. I say real life is neither! That you can not describe something in language does not mean that it does not exist nor that you can not become conscious of it! Language is one tool we use for the reasoning part of consciousness. - see P.2693 in the webbrain.

Do I have to create a new item to get these Zen topics off alien items?

Seth says

source: M above
Zen holds that life is not a symbol nor a category nor anything else it just IS! Contemplate the question What is Life? and when you grok it as a direct experience see if any symbol or description suffices.

You cannot communicate in language, as we are doing here at fastblogit, and not use symbols (period) ... and i suspect you know that. When you say "life is not a symbol" ... or perhaps you say "Christ is not a symbol" ... apparently you seem to be saying something different than if you would say "cat is not a symbol" because otherwise you would be saying nothing at all and would be just confusing the semantics of language itself. There is no symbol which will give you the experience of the thing it symbolizes. I think what the Zen wisdom is communicating here is that some of the experiences of things like life, Christ, God, etc are so subjective and private that they cannot be described in language.

When you say "Contemplate the question What is Life? and when you grok it as a direct experience see if any symbol or description suffices" to me, i get that you have done that contemplation, have gotten that experience, and cannot describe it to me adequately to do it justice ... or perhaps not ... perhaps you are merely repeating something somebody else told you ... one never can tell with these kinds of statements ... it being traditional to be circuitous here. So which is it ... did you do it?

Seth says

source: M above
There is one other word that bears on religious beliefs & that is faith.

I don't like the word "faith" used alone, rather i prefer it when used in a form like {faith in X} or {faith that Y}. Used alone it sounds more like a PR slogan for something that you are not supposed to question. So i have faith that my cut will heal and i have faith that you will not lie to me. I have faith in a person or a process that i know well. I have no generalized Faith.

Mark de LA says

seth 2010-08-07 05:34:08 14181

M 2010-08-06 15:11:56 14181

C 2010-08-06 15:02:57 14181

seth 2010-08-06 13:23:37 14181

Yep, life is neither fair nor unfair. That category error is just about as stupid as conservatives sticking words in liberals mouths.

Or brain-dead liberals (progressives) unable to wake-up.

BTW, category error means nothing except to you.

Why would make a statement quite so easily falsified by Google: About 38,500 results in 0.26 seconds ?

Oops! I'm sorry, I should have said it means nothing to me since it doesn't apply here. In general life itself is everything going on for individuals & people everywhere - this is it! It is going on now. Fair, isn't one of it's attributes. Ontologically, life just is. If you compared it to a deck of cards dealt in a poker game you probably wouldn't call the hand dealt fair (or unfair) - it may be advantageous for winning or losing but that's neither fair nor unfair. Ultimately, we all die - is that fair or unfair? Did we end up in a game that is rigged? It should be obvious that we can't know that until the last hand is won or lost. I say that life is not a game to be won or lost. Some hold it that way but that doesn't make it so nor make it so for all of us (worthy of generalization) as we all live life whatever its duration. My comments above come from the context in which the following question a la Zen is intriguing: What is the meaning of life? The reply: Life has no meaning & that (it not meaning anything) doesn't mean anything either! You may have to extend your consciousness & thinking beyond the rules of rhetoric to grok it.

Mark de LA says

seth 2010-08-07 07:52:00 14181

Yeah i totally agree. The Zen that "life is not meaning anything" was new to me .... but, yes, it works brilliantly. Strangely enough i hold it untrue for it means quite literally everything to me ... but then that is another matter.

Incidentally when you say "Fair, isn't one of it's attributes" you are saying that life is in a category which has things which do not possess fairness as their attributes ... hence the category error.

Another zen context holds that everything & nothing are the same thing - but that's the advanced course; similar to the holdings of projective geometry with infinity (or the infinite sphere) & the infinite line and an infinitesimal small point being polar opposites which behave congruently. That which holds true for 5 points on a conic section also behaves for 5 lines on a conic section interchanging lines for points in their designations.

Zen holds that life is not a symbol nor a category nor anything else it just IS! Contemplate the question What is Life? and when you grok it as a direct experience see if any symbol or description suffices.

Mark de LA says

See also [liberal obama bashing cartoons: item 13949].

Mark de LA says

BTW, Here is a nice obituary for that Obama Spirit you mentioned that once was (from the Wall Street Journal.)

Fouad Ajami (WSJ): ...

The vaunted Obama economic stimulus, at $862 billion, has failed. The "progressives" want to double down, and were they to have their way, would have pushed for a bigger stimulus still. But the American people are in open rebellion against an economic strategy of public debt, higher taxes and unending deficits. We're not all Keynesians, it turns out. The panic that propelled Mr. Obama to the presidency has waned. There is deep concern, to be sure. But the Obama strategy has lost the consent of the governed.

...

Big as Reagan's mandate was, in two elections, the man was never bigger than his country. There was never narcissism or a bloated sense of personal destiny in him. He gloried in the country, and drew sustenance from its heroic deeds and its capacity for recovery. No political class rode with him to power anxious to lay its hands on the nation's treasure, eager to supplant the forces of the market with its own economic preferences.

...

It is in the nature of charisma that it rises out of thin air, out of need and distress, and then dissipates when the magic fails. The country has had its fill with a scapegoating that knows no end from a president who had vowed to break with recriminations and partisanship. The magic of 2008 can't be recreated, and good riddance to it. Slowly, the nation has recovered its poise. There is a widespread sense of unstated embarrassment that a political majority, if only for a moment, fell for the promise of an untested redeemer—a belief alien to the temperament of this so practical and sober a nation.

...

C says

seth 2010-08-09 09:14:06 14181

Correction: Matthew XVIII,20 is talking about Jesus Christ and not Matthew himself.

Where in fact you say then that Matthew is referring to Jesus Christ as a symbol - which he is not doing. Do you think that what Matthew is describing is only a symbol? Just how do you hold the quote from Matthew?

C says

seth 2010-08-09 06:40:06 14181

source: M above
When you say "Christ is a symbol" & the Spiritual World likewise & then reason them to be private

No M, i did not say that. What did i say that lead you to thinking i said that?

I gather that to be your stand from many of your arguments. Just exactly is your stand in that regard ?

C says

One thing that may provide context for the symbol thingy comes from CFR:

Barbara Cubed, pg. 6 Paragraph VII - Demonstration: ...
Clear thinking will inevitably discover that the true nature of illative force is wholly empirical. To prove is to demonstrate; the process is always sensible or perceptual, either as sensual or imaginative. It may be refine & abbreviated, as in the higher mathematics, for we often grasp an intricate conception by means of a single stenographic symbol. But soar as high as we may into the realm of abstract, yet at least some symbol must be present in the mind, else we are not reasoning at all, but merly muddling in chaos not yet becom cosmos.

... he is of course talking about formal logic & we are talking zen. You have expanded the idea of symbol beyond formal logic context, but the flavor still applies.

C says

seth 2010-08-09 07:35:45 14181

C 2010-08-09 06:46:46 14181

seth 2010-08-09 06:40:06 14181

source: M above
When you say "Christ is a symbol" & the Spiritual World likewise & then reason them to be private

No M, i did not say that. What did i say that lead you to thinking i said that?

I gather that to be your stand from many of your arguments. Just exactly is your stand in that regard ?

Well it is you who have started talking about whether Christ was, or was not a symbol, i would not do that just because it introduces unnecessary semantic confusion for the reasons i have gone on and on about here recently and need not be repeated again. Obviously Christ belongs in a different category than Cat. We can touch and feel and pet and feed a cat ... those all being public actions. You can't do that with Christ ... no those experiences are must needs be private. So if you are asking me whether i have had any private experiences that seem to correspond to what people call "Christ" ... no i have not. Have you?

What about Love? I associate Christ with Love! So whenever I have a genuine feeling of Love I think of that in a source way. I'm pretty sure that you first brought up the symbol of Christ in some of our recent discussions. In 14165 regarding the quote from Matthew you assert:

Seth: ... I also hold what Matthew said true. It goes pretty much for any symbol that has become emotionally charged and people gather around. And in that sense people share as best they can private experiences all the time ... but they are never the same from one person to another ... they are not like physical things that you can pass around and have identical experiences with, or numbers and procedures which work the same for everybody.

... implied, but not extrinsic.

Seth says

C 2010-08-09 08:35:18 14181

seth 2010-08-09 07:35:45 14181

C 2010-08-09 06:46:46 14181

seth 2010-08-09 06:40:06 14181

source: M above
When you say "Christ is a symbol" & the Spiritual World likewise & then reason them to be private

No M, i did not say that. What did i say that lead you to thinking i said that?

I gather that to be your stand from many of your arguments. Just exactly is your stand in that regard ?

... implied, but not extrinsic.

Quite so ... i said that in response to your quoting of Matthew ...

Matthew XVIII,20: ...
For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.

... where in fact Matthew is referring to himself as a symbol.
And yes, i have had many private experiences of love .... it is great stuff !!!

C says

seth 2010-08-11 11:13:49 14181

Well to be honest about this, Jesus probably did mean that his spirit would be there existing quite independent of people's private experience. To be authentic and honest with you, i must admit that i have had no such private experiences of his spirit which matched the descriptions from the Christian church, or RS. And while I am not so arrogant as to claim to write true sentences about those things which exceed my awareness by many orders of magnitude; i can speak of my own beliefs ... and no, i do not believe in the existence of spirits in that sense independent of my private experience. That said there is another sense of the word "spirit" of which i have had many experiences. For example I certainly got caught up in a spirit during the last presidential election. That spirit seems to have died down since. In that sense Christians have been keeping the spirit of Christ alive for a millennium, though i doubt it is the same as it was in the first century. I have fond that this sense of spirits is quite adequate for my life, while at the same time not forcing me to presume knowledge of things of which i know nothing.

Nor have I had such experiences. But, then I don't match my experiences against other people's volcanoes. I might try their methods & see if there is something worthwhile in their pursuits. What you describe as spirit is what I described earlier as like the team spirit experienced in a high school football game. Likewise, elections sometimes provide such fruit. That's why it is less confusing for me to use the word being as in human being. Most of what the current Christian Church professes I hold as BS, particularly their notion of Hell, Heaven & the sudden assumption (warping up) to heaven of the saved off the freeway to a better life. There is one other word that bears on religious beliefs & that is faith.

faith

Online etymological dictionary: ...
mid-13c., "duty of fulfilling one's trust," from O.Fr. feid, from L. fides "trust, belief," from root of fidere "to trust," from PIE base *bhidh-/*bhoidh- (cf. Gk. pistis; see bid). For sense evolution, see belief. Theological sense is from late 14c.; religions called faiths since c.1300. Old Faithful geyser named 1870 by explorer Gen. H.D. Washburn, Surveyor-General of the Montana Territory, in reference to the regularity of its outbursts

.... first of all there I must say that I don't have much faith in the faith that today's Christian Church tries to sell it. In general it means a belief in things unseen (unsensed?). It is part of the education of the human being, e.g. you have faith that the driver on the other side of the road coming in your direction is not going to swerve into your lane & terminate your existence.

Mark de LA says

seth 2010-08-12 05:35:37 14181

source: M above
There is one other word that bears on religious beliefs & that is faith.

Yep, it is one of the three (Christian?) virtues (& Saints) viz. faith, hope & charity.

Seth says

M 2010-08-12 06:25:24 14181

seth 2010-08-12 05:35:37 14181

source: M above
There is one other word that bears on religious beliefs & that is faith.

Yep, it is one of the three (Christian?) virtues (& Saints) viz. faith, hope & charity.

Well i have faith in thing that work and Christian Saints and myths are not one of them.

Mark de LA says

seth 2010-08-13 06:50:00 14181

M 2010-08-12 06:25:24 14181

seth 2010-08-12 05:35:37 14181

source: M above
There is one other word that bears on religious beliefs & that is faith.

Yep, it is one of the three (Christian?) virtues (& Saints) viz. faith, hope & charity.

Well i have faith in thing that work and Christian Saints and myths are not one of them.

And yet you voted for Obama who campaigned on HOPE & whose myth (remember the Greek columns in Denver?) about change sucked you & all too many voters completely in.

Seth says

M 2010-08-13 07:33:45 14181

seth 2010-08-13 06:50:00 14181

M 2010-08-12 06:25:24 14181

seth 2010-08-12 05:35:37 14181

source: M above
There is one other word that bears on religious beliefs & that is faith.

Yep, it is one of the three (Christian?) virtues (& Saints) viz. faith, hope & charity.

Well i have faith in thing that work and Christian Saints and myths are not one of them.

And yet you voted for Obama who campaigned on HOPE & whose myth (remember the Greek columns in Denver?) about change sucked you & all too many voters completely in.

I didn't vote for Obama because of his slogans.

C says

No, I didn't think so - nobody would admit such. But, you and many others got hypnotized by the myth of Obama & who he was, is & will become. That crowd of disciples is shrinking rapidly.

Heard on the mall:

FAIR ?

About: rush monologue: life is not fair

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