Wonder and amazement at the glories and patterns of the created universe. Evolved from quarks or smaller beginnings, an awesome thing to be part of and aware of.
The gap in all of us when down, unloved, depressed or dubious. Is it a god-shaped hole?
Whence goodness in us? Prisoner’s dilemma writ large, or something far more deeply intertwined?
The sense of the numinous could be hysteria induced by loneliness or presence of god.
Prayer could be the syncopating electrons.
The euphoria of communal worship could be the formation of tribal identity – the warmth of the crowd.
The people of Israel found a way of feeding priests and acolytes and children through ritual meals and security. The multi-millenial thriving of the House of Abraham was not by accident.
The Christian god saves in all senses repeated sacrifice, and until the enlightenment (= ?the atheist-agnostic spectrum) let the state keep the masses in awe of sacrament.
The pillars of Islam give feelings of release from troubles like the magreb diaspora, as well as in the Friday sermon contact with local comforts and wisdoms. Also in learning the Koran, solidity with the past and direct contact with the Prophet and Allah.
All the peoples of the book have hard-wired memories, fear and degrees of guilt from pogroms, crusades and jihads. Each religion forgives itself its own sins: morbid introspection brings loss of group manhood.
All literate peoples of the book can return to their book for solace and reinvigoration. Hence schisms lead by local interpretations.
Hence also our current tabloid and broadsheet abhorrence of corruption in secular and religious leaders. Also our fascination with leaders who tell it like it is: rappers, Thatcher, young New Labour, before we see the clay in the feet.
Evolution has answers for all of these, with gaps for me at creation of consciousness and conscience and soul.
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( 3 / 192 )The poor we will have with us always, but our response varies. We no longer eat them except in extremis, but we condemn their children to poverty. For those who claw their way up, a hero’s welcome to Elysium. For those who sweated for it ethically, too often the children see a dark underside the parents ignored, and can go radical.
For those in urban and trailer ghettoes, the outlook is bleak. By failing them, we fail the Martian decency test, and deserve to join the dinosaurs.
Money is not an option: the drug problem just gets bigger. Nor is the excellent set of state proposals UK announced in May 2007, except as problem admitter and definer, both giant steps. Governments by nature and by law cannot invent consumer product.
People can: and the leaders of both major UK political parties have grievous problems among their own offspring, lending people power to this fatwa and the crusade it is part of.
As a first step for learning to work, the process needs flow. The individual in release mode from environment, in control of destiny, empowered to start, stop and go at will. This is not entrapment except by the feelgood mental chemicals, but it usually means the teachers are getting what they want while the learner is enjoying what the teacher wants. Sadly, once the learner emerges from the euphoria, they are either indoctrinated – you should learn like this too when I am a parent or a teacher – or in an individualised society, prone to cynicism.
Seems that flow alone is not enough. Hence the strength of projects where the leader is still carrying the message, but rare is the project that survives its builder. In education it seems that flow is hard to canalise. The learners keep peeping over the edge of the levee, especially when just one of their classes has a boring moment or an off-net teacher or pupil.
The second step is the hard one, for learners, corpoorates, and all in between. Consider the ant for yourself, or see or ask for other posts.
There are solutions coming, largely by melding online with on target, deliverer of system with goodwill interactor. When the olpc project reaches sewer children to where we care enough to do something about them, we may just pass the Martian test.
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( 3 / 204 )If fail means few get to cabinet level, that’s stats. But where few get fulfilment of potential, that’s bad. If there was a path whereby the reading enthusiasts got to meet the stimulators, those who are moving and shaking or their brothers and sisters, that’s education.
Convention says that for a school to work for you, you need to be at ease academically, socially and financially. Conventional wisdom can be overturned by drive. So how about trying to school outside school and family detritus. How about sharing with an able mentor the reading she did, the family wisdoms she has, and the skills she acquired in her ascent from baby to mother figure? Then when the teenage crisis is on, finding a male figure from the real world to continue the inspiration.
These good people do exist, but can we tease them out of their own worlds? One irony is that they cannot be provided de jure by a state or system - see the (few) bad oxbridge tutors. The human in us rebels against such. The teacher who for pay tries to mentor is doomed by himself before he starts. He needs to do it from conviction. This conviction the mentee picks up and makes his own, giving trust (not without questioning every aspect of the relastionship, often publicly and loudly) and care to what is being shared and learned.
Without this trust and care from the learner, the rest is transient and even dispiriting. Why spend time on the pointless? But to the pointful, we will willingly give forever.
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( 3 / 184 )Been reading and teaching a bit from Daniel and other parts of the Bible. Struck by the wisdoms in the stories. How to square your conscience with worshipping God and Rimmon as Naaman had to? (Answer: clear it with your spiritual guru, your shrink.) How to use insider knowledge to make a million legally, as Elisha’s servant was caught doing? (Answer: register it as a charity in advance. Or catch financial leprosy.) How to get God to listen to you? (Answer: sing along with Psalm 14 and end on the happy bits.)
The revelation for me in this is that the enlightenment may have pushed scientists at work to seek evidence for their theories, but the wisdoms of millennia are encoded in the Torah onwards. Foolish is anyone who ignores these lessons of history. Pork is ok now we have found the tape worm. But coveting is not yet seen as the moloch of our consumerist temples. When will Jerusalem learn that one?
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( 3 / 164 )World bank is currently worse for the world than Putin, Saddam as was and Mugabe combined. At least with them we can see the iniquities. The small number of millions these three have removed is nothing compared to the steady death rate and burgeoning misery in the countries WB has helped. By attracting the self-interested in the banking world, by moving money to where it feeds the interests of the wealthiest nation, and by liquidating the collective conscience of the West – we just know we could never be party to anything so wicked – the Bank grants probity to corruption, theft, tyranny, and degradation. We walk away feeling good: surely a Bank is a source of security and protection. Just the name says it all: banker to the world’s poor, directed for the world’s rich, run by those who are responsible to no call but an inflated salary. Who would resist the hubris of such affluence? Or the thought that their own interest is of more import than the lives of the billions toiling to repay the Bank’s loans to the easily corruptible.
The irony of Wolfie is not putting the wolf in charge of the sheepfold, it is the other shepherds grumping about his threat as alpha-wolf to limiting their expense accounts. And since the fifty destroyers, lend-lease, and Bretton Woods we are all shareholders.
One good thing is that the actual AGM is neither annual nor real: online may well be a useful way ahead for the evolutionaries.
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