For anyone who'd gone through high school, like Din and Aya; but for Cha, especially, my classmate and oldest pal, busmate, seatmate, chismismate and, best of all, ka-telebabad =)
NOTE: Charry, yes, there's a mixup of at least 4 characters. This is fiction for half the part. Which half it is, I suppose, you're bound to notice--eventually. Enjoy! And no need to reply to this. As I've said, I'm just fiddling with the functions explorable on Facebook.
"Of High School & Meeting the Headmistress”
By BeatrixPG
Your day cannot be more terrific if, fetching groceries, you chance upon an old headmistress, aka the "Nun-in-Chief" (at the nunnery doubling as high school). It recalls for you briefly how she’d rave before innocents, shrilling, scaring you blink-less, chiding to total disgrace the “oppressed”--the losers, misfits like you--with the very same constancy as she’d probably hurry to the lavatory—okay, "scurry." So right away, it winds back thought to the rattling sound of punching and slapping and pounding at the desk with keys. And there once was that fright of a ruler: Not quite the usual by Orion, it appeared more lethal than plastic alongside a rust-eaten pen case--thicker, wooden, "to-feel-your-cheeks"-looking. So, back to today: As you imagine the past, everyone at the market gapes at the weirdo that is you. Bacon, sitting in hypothermic hands, starts to defrost, unfreezing the pictures of babyhood, wetting the tiles, unfortunately, dirtying your shoes. But being a bit too snobby who hasn't the sense to look her roots in the face, it never occurs to you to yell out, "Hi, Sister! How have you been? Remember me?" Because beneath the headlong reminiscing is the vulgar longing to rid some baggage and croak out, "Damn you! Damn you and your 'tickets for tuberculosis’!" So, in no mood for contact, you get on with the errand at the market, turning your face to wherever it won’t be glimpsed, as should, if you’re any way civilized, faking coolness, total unaffectedness, since that’s what “civilized” means. In other words, you proceed with the “dailiness” of it all—or weekliness, since you shop on that basis. As you trolley out the goods and trudge along the lanes—of Ma Ling, Lucky Me, Pepsodent, Ajax, the sudden humor or glee in remembrances—you remind yourself how she once said hurt, prior to your entering university, "You girls shall forget about prayer, ignore all I’ve taught you, and age into ladies of loose, lame morals. Why ever did I bother urging you at the kneelers?" True enough, nearly two decades after, you jeer at it all, except with unwelcome trembling, tidbits of care, pity. You make shuffling noises approaching the cashier being the weirdo and nuisance that you are, thinking absorbedly to yourself, and yes, in the middle of nowhere called Shoe Mart, that far less the “ladies of loose, lame morals," what became of you, rather, are women of loose, limp bowels… “Thanks be to Sister.” But thanks, too, to commencement exercises, you learn, not before long, that "goodness" and “life” and “love” and “kindness” and “friendship” and “growth” and “crisis” and any and every such labeling aren’t even half the chores made out to be. The nervous innocence fissures, the terrors fracture, as do glasses and crystals, in order that the broader real can set in and reveal some comedy, truer, hidden. At such a second, you come to resize your lenses, wake from a needless delirium, and perhaps, cheer in the newly, wondrously, captivatingly possible, for that may well be the future—perhaps, yours.
--end--
Peevish pets: Ignorant arrogance and arrogant ignorance. Socrates averred that "an unexamined life is not worth living." As though the unlived life were ever worth examining.
20.1.10
8.1.10
"Briony" from the marvelous film "Atonement"
Starring my eternal British favorites, Keira Knightley, James McAvoy, Saoirse Ronan (SEERshuh ROWnuhn) & Romola Garai; music by the equally astonishing Dario Marianelli:
30.11.09
"Thinking of Home" (tiny fiction)
“Thinking of Home” (tiny fiction)
for c...
By beatrixpg
I guess it won’t strike as odd. By the time I was thirteen, it had seemed all pretty ordinary to me… the moments she would come in bearing a huge teddy (bear, and yes, stuffed one), just to wait by my dresser for a weird few seconds, then for no clear reason one ever considers, throw the whole toy at me. It won’t strike as odd, I say, since if one lived in such a house for long enough a while, one too would grow quite immune to its own share of colorful contagious craziness. Digging up these episodes, I’m reminded instantly of mother, the much grown lady with a cute face at 35 who savored chewing and tearing—and I was 4 at which time, I know—at furniture, toys. It numbs, I suppose, accustoms. See it, be with it long enough, it won’t daze you, I’d think... Yeah.
-end-
for c...
By beatrixpg
I guess it won’t strike as odd. By the time I was thirteen, it had seemed all pretty ordinary to me… the moments she would come in bearing a huge teddy (bear, and yes, stuffed one), just to wait by my dresser for a weird few seconds, then for no clear reason one ever considers, throw the whole toy at me. It won’t strike as odd, I say, since if one lived in such a house for long enough a while, one too would grow quite immune to its own share of colorful contagious craziness. Digging up these episodes, I’m reminded instantly of mother, the much grown lady with a cute face at 35 who savored chewing and tearing—and I was 4 at which time, I know—at furniture, toys. It numbs, I suppose, accustoms. See it, be with it long enough, it won’t daze you, I’d think... Yeah.
-end-
11.11.09
Response to BDalisay's "Madder Gaugins"-A Repost
dear BD (in response to your new blog entry)
On a better day, in a better mood, I'd probably not react to this, but here is the best day and best mood for reactions =) I always tell my students that often the onus of understanding rests, for the most part, on the reader. If we always whine of hardships in comprehension then we won't stand a chance at growth. Reading troubles vary from case to case. What some find easy to read, others junk as hard to read. There surely is a certain language virtually purposeful in being impossible for humans. And I've always said, where frilly diction covers for fatuity--of thought, insight, point, topic--the patient reader must learn to detect it; and how else to acquire this rare skill if not by reading and reading and reading (one clearly made rare by the middling importance societies give to study, reading, knowledge). The best to help out a reader--and this I tell students of philosophy and theory--is his/her own effort at comprehension. In other words, the most capable of aid in reading is the reader's own fiery longing to know what's being said, or unpuzzle, as it were, what's going on on paper. Sad that there's much writing that most people think of as "puzzles," unbearable exhibitions that seem to demand unriddling. Much of the prose of TS Eliot was reprehensible; too much decor, too simple meaning. There are after all such things as undesirable syntax and damnable choice of words. But to be fair, is that all Literary Criticisms are about? At least those that we have here? Attempts at simplicity and tight speech are more than welcome if they don't spiral into exercises in facile scrutiny and oversimplification. That some balance needs striking between an interest in depth (which alone does service to complex questions) and an amour for the receivers of critical work goes without defending, naturally. But what sort of balance is this really? IF the problem has chiefly been inability to grasp words, then teaching in schools reveals, by that, how poorly we fledge our youth in reading as a practice--reading after all is no more simply a function of literacy but a skill in itself.
Truth is, criticisms of literature aren't always meant for the creative writers--practitioners of a discipline who rarely if at all would make a point of distilling opinion. It is silly and vain to believe that we write criticisms in the hope of remoulding the writers of texts under review. But criticisms are meant mostly for the students, for the building of discourse, of knowledge itself (though Lit CritS, like Pol Sci, Socio, Psych, Law, etc, are derivative disciplines, they mean precisely to apply the insights conceived by means of critical theorizing and epistemology). It is meant for the people who're willing to learn what speech (or quiet) entails, what discoursing in a certain drift results in, what they make, what they break, matters more epistemological than anything else. That there's too bare emphasis if at all accorded the creative hand that sculpts out literature--which seems often forgone as if to tilt to the "crucial questions"--is a sad state of critical affairs. Sure.
But just as unfortunate seems a too-rash dismissal of disciplined critique as no more than a show of hefty vocabulary. Truth is, however we temper the language of serious critique, its seriousness precisely renders it unpopular. Taking anything too seriously is a fault seen of critics. The species of criticism one finds too often in the dailies, here, abroad, The NYTimes or The Guardian, while at times, incisive, are mostly too brief and cursory--owing largely to restrictions on space or, as is much too usual, on minds barely there. The London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books seem, on the face of (god knows who), more intent on critique. How publications like that can be set up here and how best to strategize for those to gather audience I've still to "uncover" (I've thought of launching one online with friends if just to fill chasms dividing writers and critics, writers and readers, critics and readers, especially, the canonical and the brushed-aside; and we'll see in a year or two).
What I say comes not of an arrogance of a person typified to traffic, like me, in philosophy (I after all do pen some fiction when craving it). It's purely a comment on the case as it bared itself--before the practitioner of lit crit that I once was.
It is silly to think that literary pedants have much to teach writers concerning technique. That is dumb to presume. Classifications being more than terms tag along a baggage of criteria and rules for "attack," no wonder then, that the best critics I know here happen to have command of the rigor vital to critical reading, while also knowing what it takes to write prose or poetry--being fictionists and poets themselves.
That i believe is the ultimate literary critic--one "clever" enough on account of her practice, to identify the tricks, the devilry, the charms, the habits, the moods that fashion phrasing into literature of any labeling, but also analytical enough to like attuning to questions to do with more than surface skillfulness. Any text is a piece of communication, prompting scrutiny for its claim of being, say, art. On the other hand, as it does all that, it occasions at the very least exchange, such as on the currents, cross-currents in the branding of a text or the crafting of the brand itself, and on issues, queries pertaining to the text as a resident in the village of knowledge & life.
To me bad writing is plain (in critique or literature)--horrible diction, horrible syntax, and god forbid, horrific idioms. Infatuation with problem construction is, like all infatuations, fevered silliness. Ezra Pound once fielded a question from Paris Review in regard to content versus form. He said, "Technique is the test of sincerity. If a thing isn't worth getting the technique to say, it is of inferior value."
Now, if we do criticism to assist reception and to dictate which practices need be ceased, writers would scream we don't need such foolish censorship (I won't discuss censorship here, it being always present, contrary to what the misled libertarians think). We do criticism to thresh out areas that may need illumining in a way not done within literature itself--concerned as those areas are with matters literature alone can't confront, challenge. Anything with much at stake once let out to be seen occasions shifting extents of polemic. I dream of a future for literary criticism in which practitioners know the art like they do their moles and the dents on their nose, and the farther-reaching questions it brings with it. If we share a fiery love for literature, the world in which we make it and the world in which literature remakes us, then half the aspiration should be to seize the love from a menacing death and keep its flickers from cooling.
I hope this finds you well, BD =)
Pls forgive me for having to expound... expand... expunge. hee hee hee.
Cheers always,
bee
On a better day, in a better mood, I'd probably not react to this, but here is the best day and best mood for reactions =) I always tell my students that often the onus of understanding rests, for the most part, on the reader. If we always whine of hardships in comprehension then we won't stand a chance at growth. Reading troubles vary from case to case. What some find easy to read, others junk as hard to read. There surely is a certain language virtually purposeful in being impossible for humans. And I've always said, where frilly diction covers for fatuity--of thought, insight, point, topic--the patient reader must learn to detect it; and how else to acquire this rare skill if not by reading and reading and reading (one clearly made rare by the middling importance societies give to study, reading, knowledge). The best to help out a reader--and this I tell students of philosophy and theory--is his/her own effort at comprehension. In other words, the most capable of aid in reading is the reader's own fiery longing to know what's being said, or unpuzzle, as it were, what's going on on paper. Sad that there's much writing that most people think of as "puzzles," unbearable exhibitions that seem to demand unriddling. Much of the prose of TS Eliot was reprehensible; too much decor, too simple meaning. There are after all such things as undesirable syntax and damnable choice of words. But to be fair, is that all Literary Criticisms are about? At least those that we have here? Attempts at simplicity and tight speech are more than welcome if they don't spiral into exercises in facile scrutiny and oversimplification. That some balance needs striking between an interest in depth (which alone does service to complex questions) and an amour for the receivers of critical work goes without defending, naturally. But what sort of balance is this really? IF the problem has chiefly been inability to grasp words, then teaching in schools reveals, by that, how poorly we fledge our youth in reading as a practice--reading after all is no more simply a function of literacy but a skill in itself.
Truth is, criticisms of literature aren't always meant for the creative writers--practitioners of a discipline who rarely if at all would make a point of distilling opinion. It is silly and vain to believe that we write criticisms in the hope of remoulding the writers of texts under review. But criticisms are meant mostly for the students, for the building of discourse, of knowledge itself (though Lit CritS, like Pol Sci, Socio, Psych, Law, etc, are derivative disciplines, they mean precisely to apply the insights conceived by means of critical theorizing and epistemology). It is meant for the people who're willing to learn what speech (or quiet) entails, what discoursing in a certain drift results in, what they make, what they break, matters more epistemological than anything else. That there's too bare emphasis if at all accorded the creative hand that sculpts out literature--which seems often forgone as if to tilt to the "crucial questions"--is a sad state of critical affairs. Sure.
But just as unfortunate seems a too-rash dismissal of disciplined critique as no more than a show of hefty vocabulary. Truth is, however we temper the language of serious critique, its seriousness precisely renders it unpopular. Taking anything too seriously is a fault seen of critics. The species of criticism one finds too often in the dailies, here, abroad, The NYTimes or The Guardian, while at times, incisive, are mostly too brief and cursory--owing largely to restrictions on space or, as is much too usual, on minds barely there. The London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books seem, on the face of (god knows who), more intent on critique. How publications like that can be set up here and how best to strategize for those to gather audience I've still to "uncover" (I've thought of launching one online with friends if just to fill chasms dividing writers and critics, writers and readers, critics and readers, especially, the canonical and the brushed-aside; and we'll see in a year or two).
What I say comes not of an arrogance of a person typified to traffic, like me, in philosophy (I after all do pen some fiction when craving it). It's purely a comment on the case as it bared itself--before the practitioner of lit crit that I once was.
It is silly to think that literary pedants have much to teach writers concerning technique. That is dumb to presume. Classifications being more than terms tag along a baggage of criteria and rules for "attack," no wonder then, that the best critics I know here happen to have command of the rigor vital to critical reading, while also knowing what it takes to write prose or poetry--being fictionists and poets themselves.
That i believe is the ultimate literary critic--one "clever" enough on account of her practice, to identify the tricks, the devilry, the charms, the habits, the moods that fashion phrasing into literature of any labeling, but also analytical enough to like attuning to questions to do with more than surface skillfulness. Any text is a piece of communication, prompting scrutiny for its claim of being, say, art. On the other hand, as it does all that, it occasions at the very least exchange, such as on the currents, cross-currents in the branding of a text or the crafting of the brand itself, and on issues, queries pertaining to the text as a resident in the village of knowledge & life.
To me bad writing is plain (in critique or literature)--horrible diction, horrible syntax, and god forbid, horrific idioms. Infatuation with problem construction is, like all infatuations, fevered silliness. Ezra Pound once fielded a question from Paris Review in regard to content versus form. He said, "Technique is the test of sincerity. If a thing isn't worth getting the technique to say, it is of inferior value."
Now, if we do criticism to assist reception and to dictate which practices need be ceased, writers would scream we don't need such foolish censorship (I won't discuss censorship here, it being always present, contrary to what the misled libertarians think). We do criticism to thresh out areas that may need illumining in a way not done within literature itself--concerned as those areas are with matters literature alone can't confront, challenge. Anything with much at stake once let out to be seen occasions shifting extents of polemic. I dream of a future for literary criticism in which practitioners know the art like they do their moles and the dents on their nose, and the farther-reaching questions it brings with it. If we share a fiery love for literature, the world in which we make it and the world in which literature remakes us, then half the aspiration should be to seize the love from a menacing death and keep its flickers from cooling.
I hope this finds you well, BD =)
Pls forgive me for having to expound... expand... expunge. hee hee hee.
Cheers always,
bee
On KArmstrong's "the need for deity"
(From a letter I sent a friend)
Hello, RC. Just read an article published in Foreign Policy. http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/10/19/god_0?page=full
(Please forgive me for the errors, typographical or otherwise, should there at all be any.)
She seems at pains to defend the need for ideas of God and for faiths by claiming neither of those is inherently vile and cruel. That may be true, but here’s why it doesn’t matter: As you know, I too believe in the notion of a higher power conceding the many phenomena we can't explain in the relatively “tawdry” terms of logic. But it follows that as certain things cannot be explained--those ascribable to a higher force (who knows? Perhaps not even a God, perhaps a part of Cosmos much greater than man or anything conceivable to man)--so can this high force not be explained. We can never tell what "the good" in higher terms really means, or if "the good" as we conceive of it is even a concern for a higher power. Humans, a mere part of the "created," can never fully unravel all of "creation," let alone "the creator" whose language, whose scope of knowledge is always much more sophisticated than ours, being the force higher than ours. Even whether such force is the "god" often pictured in our conceptions of "god" or simply a working of nature/cosmos which led to the evolution of our creatures is itself beyond the reach of any logical learning. The mere reality of difference in attitudes, in senses of value or of importance, already testifies to the lack of a power (like a god's) intent on imposing its sense of right and wrong for all of us. So, who is KA to say that the true God is naturally kind, the true faith is naturally giving and forgiving, etc, etc. In the end, Armstrong's conclusions or recommendations about God and faith are a mere function of a liberal, humane attitude toward religion. That's all it is. The irony in Armstrong's work lies in her rationalisms about "God's and faith's" inherent, natural goodness and kindness--things humans have no power of proving in the language of reason, inductive reason to be exact. The best way to deal with the inexplicable, like the weird miracles that do happen, like near-death which sciences now begin conceding as real and possible, is perhaps by attributing it to a force definitely higher stronger than we are and leaving it at that. After all, beyond that nothing else proves accessible to rational language. God, if it is indeed the creator of all, is also the creator of reason, which naturally shows God is extra-rational. So who are we who at best use reason to say this and not that is the true God, this and not that is the true belief (either the liberal or the cruel and punishing)? Religion has always been mixed with logic, thus the centuries of effort to make its case by way of proofs and arguments. But maybe that's where we've been erring--that we should let God be, let the higher power be the higher power, and not pretend to know that this or that is what is preordained, because in reality, though there might be such curious things as love and desire, and those are shared by all of humanity-- the rest of kingdom animalia too-- (often argued as the proof of an existing, unifying, master-planning God), our ways of loving, our attitudes of love and toward love, our desires, our counter-desires, are so intractable because through time, over distances, those things can change, they can and do differ. The meaning of life can be sought without espousing any intricate body of mystic musings...
KA on the whole is just as fallacious and facile as those she cares to reproach. If not more. She speaks in the language of reason, but her reasoning of course is inadequate. The greatest teaching of epistemology tells us that humble acknowledgment must be made of the reality/possibility of a power much greater than we are--so great in fact is this power that even logic (the most advanced, universal, leveling of languages known to humanity) proves ill-placed, ill-equipped to take up God in its terms. It teaches that we can go on ahead charging to nature or cosmos or god anything and everything that all the branches of logic have been miserably unable to explain. But it also teaches that we must leave it at that. To stop rationalizing what is clearly beyond reason. That we must make no further “logical” forays into realms supposedly God's--god who is likewise the creator of "logic"—for such attempts at some point do cease to be logical. One of the things epistemology can never explain is "logic" itself--epistemology is the most expansive branch of logic being the quest for logic behind "knowledge" itself, "truth," "reason," in short, epistemology is a delicate attempt at "meta-knowledge" which if done erroneously will end up paradoxical, unreliable, invalid, unsustainable, pointless (like Existentialism, etc). So only to a very tiny extent can it take up its chosen concerns being itself a form of "knowledge" which naturally is meant to lay down "truths," making use of the language of "reason," "logic."
Armstrong has been wrong from the start by attempting metaphysics, by believing so subtly that she can work round all these restrictions on reason, and thinking impertinently that she can use reason in the study of something clearly beyond reason--the higher power, God, the boss. From what position of authority can we say for certain that this is who God is, this is what God wants, this is what God is like ergo this is what faith should be like, if not only from God's. Who are we to submit to our scrutiny, to define in our terms something much larger and more complex and stronger than we are? That's the question.
Even movies suggesting aliens created us show sophisticated beings possessed of a language or a thought-process more complex than our “logic” is ever fit or ready to decipher. In such flicks, the presumed higher powers in the shape of aliens condescend and simplify their language in order to make contact with humans. Precisely because the idea of a higher and all-creative power must allow of suppositions of a God as extra-rational being the very maker of reason.
If for anything, I appreciate her work for cultivating a less dismissive outlook on religion. But as an opus of analysis (which it should be, being clearly a treatise that communicates in the language of reason, of "knowledge" in the strict sense), her writing, her insights, are every way inadequate, if not for the most, fallacy-ridden, argumentatively too simple. Tolerance, for example, is a wonderful virtue, sure. But it is necessarily, logically, a secular liberal virtue. Injecting religious tolerance in a religion itself, which by its very tenet, proclaims its words as those of the God it recognizes, amounts to admitting quite subtly that it might be wrong, that for all its claim of being the word of God, the teaching of this or that religion might be mere guesses at what God wants. Rules are hard to impose if we say they come from God and we’re also unsure about who God is. The religious are supposed to be sure and definitive.
The beginning of the renaissance (the medieval times, middle ages) helped the cause of the religious in seeking coherence in their respective faiths, reason was used to make the case of religion—selectively blind though they’ve stayed to the rational caveats against all mysticism which issued from the same age. Logic dictates, that if we say our god is the Only god and our teachings are the words of this One God, then any deviation from it is unpardonable. That’s the logical argument about faith. Arguments then were about who’s right about God. The words of caution of the devoted rationalists who questioned preoccupations with God as a whole became more sustained with the rise of empiricism during modernity and the enlightenment, whose “irreverence” improved owing to the disciplined skepticism that followed to challenge empiricism.
As I always say, goodness and faith and kindness and sincerity and integrity and fairness had never been the preserve of the religious.
-end of letter-
Hello, RC. Just read an article published in Foreign Policy. http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/10/19/god_0?page=full
(Please forgive me for the errors, typographical or otherwise, should there at all be any.)
She seems at pains to defend the need for ideas of God and for faiths by claiming neither of those is inherently vile and cruel. That may be true, but here’s why it doesn’t matter: As you know, I too believe in the notion of a higher power conceding the many phenomena we can't explain in the relatively “tawdry” terms of logic. But it follows that as certain things cannot be explained--those ascribable to a higher force (who knows? Perhaps not even a God, perhaps a part of Cosmos much greater than man or anything conceivable to man)--so can this high force not be explained. We can never tell what "the good" in higher terms really means, or if "the good" as we conceive of it is even a concern for a higher power. Humans, a mere part of the "created," can never fully unravel all of "creation," let alone "the creator" whose language, whose scope of knowledge is always much more sophisticated than ours, being the force higher than ours. Even whether such force is the "god" often pictured in our conceptions of "god" or simply a working of nature/cosmos which led to the evolution of our creatures is itself beyond the reach of any logical learning. The mere reality of difference in attitudes, in senses of value or of importance, already testifies to the lack of a power (like a god's) intent on imposing its sense of right and wrong for all of us. So, who is KA to say that the true God is naturally kind, the true faith is naturally giving and forgiving, etc, etc. In the end, Armstrong's conclusions or recommendations about God and faith are a mere function of a liberal, humane attitude toward religion. That's all it is. The irony in Armstrong's work lies in her rationalisms about "God's and faith's" inherent, natural goodness and kindness--things humans have no power of proving in the language of reason, inductive reason to be exact. The best way to deal with the inexplicable, like the weird miracles that do happen, like near-death which sciences now begin conceding as real and possible, is perhaps by attributing it to a force definitely higher stronger than we are and leaving it at that. After all, beyond that nothing else proves accessible to rational language. God, if it is indeed the creator of all, is also the creator of reason, which naturally shows God is extra-rational. So who are we who at best use reason to say this and not that is the true God, this and not that is the true belief (either the liberal or the cruel and punishing)? Religion has always been mixed with logic, thus the centuries of effort to make its case by way of proofs and arguments. But maybe that's where we've been erring--that we should let God be, let the higher power be the higher power, and not pretend to know that this or that is what is preordained, because in reality, though there might be such curious things as love and desire, and those are shared by all of humanity-- the rest of kingdom animalia too-- (often argued as the proof of an existing, unifying, master-planning God), our ways of loving, our attitudes of love and toward love, our desires, our counter-desires, are so intractable because through time, over distances, those things can change, they can and do differ. The meaning of life can be sought without espousing any intricate body of mystic musings...
KA on the whole is just as fallacious and facile as those she cares to reproach. If not more. She speaks in the language of reason, but her reasoning of course is inadequate. The greatest teaching of epistemology tells us that humble acknowledgment must be made of the reality/possibility of a power much greater than we are--so great in fact is this power that even logic (the most advanced, universal, leveling of languages known to humanity) proves ill-placed, ill-equipped to take up God in its terms. It teaches that we can go on ahead charging to nature or cosmos or god anything and everything that all the branches of logic have been miserably unable to explain. But it also teaches that we must leave it at that. To stop rationalizing what is clearly beyond reason. That we must make no further “logical” forays into realms supposedly God's--god who is likewise the creator of "logic"—for such attempts at some point do cease to be logical. One of the things epistemology can never explain is "logic" itself--epistemology is the most expansive branch of logic being the quest for logic behind "knowledge" itself, "truth," "reason," in short, epistemology is a delicate attempt at "meta-knowledge" which if done erroneously will end up paradoxical, unreliable, invalid, unsustainable, pointless (like Existentialism, etc). So only to a very tiny extent can it take up its chosen concerns being itself a form of "knowledge" which naturally is meant to lay down "truths," making use of the language of "reason," "logic."
Armstrong has been wrong from the start by attempting metaphysics, by believing so subtly that she can work round all these restrictions on reason, and thinking impertinently that she can use reason in the study of something clearly beyond reason--the higher power, God, the boss. From what position of authority can we say for certain that this is who God is, this is what God wants, this is what God is like ergo this is what faith should be like, if not only from God's. Who are we to submit to our scrutiny, to define in our terms something much larger and more complex and stronger than we are? That's the question.
Even movies suggesting aliens created us show sophisticated beings possessed of a language or a thought-process more complex than our “logic” is ever fit or ready to decipher. In such flicks, the presumed higher powers in the shape of aliens condescend and simplify their language in order to make contact with humans. Precisely because the idea of a higher and all-creative power must allow of suppositions of a God as extra-rational being the very maker of reason.
If for anything, I appreciate her work for cultivating a less dismissive outlook on religion. But as an opus of analysis (which it should be, being clearly a treatise that communicates in the language of reason, of "knowledge" in the strict sense), her writing, her insights, are every way inadequate, if not for the most, fallacy-ridden, argumentatively too simple. Tolerance, for example, is a wonderful virtue, sure. But it is necessarily, logically, a secular liberal virtue. Injecting religious tolerance in a religion itself, which by its very tenet, proclaims its words as those of the God it recognizes, amounts to admitting quite subtly that it might be wrong, that for all its claim of being the word of God, the teaching of this or that religion might be mere guesses at what God wants. Rules are hard to impose if we say they come from God and we’re also unsure about who God is. The religious are supposed to be sure and definitive.
The beginning of the renaissance (the medieval times, middle ages) helped the cause of the religious in seeking coherence in their respective faiths, reason was used to make the case of religion—selectively blind though they’ve stayed to the rational caveats against all mysticism which issued from the same age. Logic dictates, that if we say our god is the Only god and our teachings are the words of this One God, then any deviation from it is unpardonable. That’s the logical argument about faith. Arguments then were about who’s right about God. The words of caution of the devoted rationalists who questioned preoccupations with God as a whole became more sustained with the rise of empiricism during modernity and the enlightenment, whose “irreverence” improved owing to the disciplined skepticism that followed to challenge empiricism.
As I always say, goodness and faith and kindness and sincerity and integrity and fairness had never been the preserve of the religious.
-end of letter-
20.10.09
Nudity, Education, Prurience, Malicious Prudery
I spoke in a daily abroad 4 years ago against d CBCP blocking the Sex Education Program. Like the Reproductive Health Bill, it was deemed by Church morally objectionable. They consider the modules "pornographic" and vulgar endorsements of premarital sex, maintaining that all talk of sex must stay restricted between children and parents. Illustrations, for instance, of use of a condom (which proves a double moral infraction) were found to be base, instead of honest, explanatory and clinical.
Now herein lies the huge rub: The reason nudity titillates, overexcites, overcrazes in Philippine society—moreover, why tasteless prurience and objectification so thrive—is the very upbringing that fosters malicious prudery about d human body.
If we're truly raised to love, care, value, honor, and dignify the human body—female or male—we'll be allowed to know and confront it. For only by learning and facing it can we care for it out of love, self-valuing and respect. Barring a clinical view of the human body is what is unhealthy. If we do it in the fashion student doctors do, we get to understand the body WITH NO MALICE.
Now herein lies the huge rub: The reason nudity titillates, overexcites, overcrazes in Philippine society—moreover, why tasteless prurience and objectification so thrive—is the very upbringing that fosters malicious prudery about d human body.
If we're truly raised to love, care, value, honor, and dignify the human body—female or male—we'll be allowed to know and confront it. For only by learning and facing it can we care for it out of love, self-valuing and respect. Barring a clinical view of the human body is what is unhealthy. If we do it in the fashion student doctors do, we get to understand the body WITH NO MALICE.
16.10.09
Reaction to reaction to BD's essay "Propaganda"
BDalisay's "Propaganda (1)"
NOTE TO BD: lest my comment be split in 2, i'll split it myself hee hee.
PART 1:
hee hee welcome sir =) i'm intrigued though by the comment of Norm.
Hi, Norm. I hope u wouldn't mind my asking, but since u've gone quite a good stretch implying knowledge of critical thought, may I ask you (and I shall, merely, as an inquisitive teacher, writer, theoretician) what notion of this u have in mind? [No need to freak out, i'm but a 27-yr-old philosopher, not working in the philippines; i come in piece, este, peace.]
To what sort of arguing practice or style, if u will, do u refer with d use of terms "critical," "thinking," "critical thinking," and "rational"? Do u catch little reason in the essay on which u've commented? Not to side with anyone with these questions (BD & I had our share of exchanges too--albeit pleasantly, respectfully, honorably, agreeably), but would u pls care to show us, piece by piece, the problems u find in an essay like BD's--i mean, for our own relearning. Ur input is most welcome--as BD's gracious reply to u can evidence.
[TO BE CONT'D/ PART 2 RIGHT BENEATH]
PART 2/ PART LAST:
The value of critical thought is much too easily overlooked these days. But as it is minimally known of hence minimally seen (vice versa), so it is headlong junked and handily belittled--sadly, mostly, by the people who claim fidelity to it, through malpractice, hee hee. Moreover, if not to avert at least work round the horror of proving dullards, we who announce some mastery must always be counted on especially for mastery--whatever it is.
So pls, pls, do oblige us. I'm to find ur input a healthy one if, in the interest of practice improved, u'll deepen ur reaction with insight. I'm sure, how u feel about the words, the "irrational" locutions--certain of which u deem woeful, rather fiercely--bears some extent of airing. But I hope, to the benchmark for "thought," "intellect," "reason" that u say u'd precisely like reached. just ironic sounds to me what u've said--i mean, against all rants--with ur writing being, well, chiefly that--a rant... for every bit of square inch.
thank u, norm. i'm wishing, truly, u grant this request--if u have the time, of course. no fights here needed, just a minor detailing perhaps (and tidying up) of exactly how u like things to be. let's spare it a good look =) after all, in no rigidly rational venture have the ornery and whimsical room--none at all.
thanks mounds, and cheers no end,
bee
ps: bd, great thing certainly u've been well. =)
NOTE TO BD: lest my comment be split in 2, i'll split it myself hee hee.
PART 1:
hee hee welcome sir =) i'm intrigued though by the comment of Norm.
Hi, Norm. I hope u wouldn't mind my asking, but since u've gone quite a good stretch implying knowledge of critical thought, may I ask you (and I shall, merely, as an inquisitive teacher, writer, theoretician) what notion of this u have in mind? [No need to freak out, i'm but a 27-yr-old philosopher, not working in the philippines; i come in piece, este, peace.]
To what sort of arguing practice or style, if u will, do u refer with d use of terms "critical," "thinking," "critical thinking," and "rational"? Do u catch little reason in the essay on which u've commented? Not to side with anyone with these questions (BD & I had our share of exchanges too--albeit pleasantly, respectfully, honorably, agreeably), but would u pls care to show us, piece by piece, the problems u find in an essay like BD's--i mean, for our own relearning. Ur input is most welcome--as BD's gracious reply to u can evidence.
[TO BE CONT'D/ PART 2 RIGHT BENEATH]
PART 2/ PART LAST:
The value of critical thought is much too easily overlooked these days. But as it is minimally known of hence minimally seen (vice versa), so it is headlong junked and handily belittled--sadly, mostly, by the people who claim fidelity to it, through malpractice, hee hee. Moreover, if not to avert at least work round the horror of proving dullards, we who announce some mastery must always be counted on especially for mastery--whatever it is.
So pls, pls, do oblige us. I'm to find ur input a healthy one if, in the interest of practice improved, u'll deepen ur reaction with insight. I'm sure, how u feel about the words, the "irrational" locutions--certain of which u deem woeful, rather fiercely--bears some extent of airing. But I hope, to the benchmark for "thought," "intellect," "reason" that u say u'd precisely like reached. just ironic sounds to me what u've said--i mean, against all rants--with ur writing being, well, chiefly that--a rant... for every bit of square inch.
thank u, norm. i'm wishing, truly, u grant this request--if u have the time, of course. no fights here needed, just a minor detailing perhaps (and tidying up) of exactly how u like things to be. let's spare it a good look =) after all, in no rigidly rational venture have the ornery and whimsical room--none at all.
thanks mounds, and cheers no end,
bee
ps: bd, great thing certainly u've been well. =)
10.10.09
Barack & the Nobel--what gives? Timeliness contra Deservedness?
ADDED NOTE (comment-proper beneath this note):
Comment posted on RC's blog
Hmm, I'd like to help clear up something, ie why Ricky, in my view, called it "preemptive"--it's been lost in the raging wash of pro- and anti-reactions.
Like a friend said, the moment they gave out the Peace Prize to Henry Kissinger, it had already been cheapened. Kissinger, much unlike Obama in politics, was the author, like Milton Friedman, of ultra-right coups and dictatorships in Latin America (even in Greece, Iran, etc). To say that the standards for the prize have, until now, been grossly compromised is to offer a woeful misreading. It's falsehood, quite simply. But the conferment of the prize to Obama, however undeserving he seems of it, has clearly not been concerned with achievement, but the best strategic pitch for the politics of the committee--which, as the title of Ricky already states, is aimed at preempting something. What that is, according to impressions mine and others' in the field, is any conceivable change in what is currently a more peace- and diplomacy-inclined President Obama (far far more so than any of his predecessors). There's that hope from the committee that the US pursues initiatives in the line of its previous impressive efforts--denuclearization, etc, etc.
Is it about any plan already realized? Of course not. That's been obvious enough. What it could be about, though, has for too long been lost in the debates between those who headlong approve of it and those who as handily don't.
The whys are no less crucial (in fact, several times more) than the what.
----
I guess, from any group anxious for a leadership role much ought to be expected. I wasn’t made a fan of his by his surface charisma. To be fair, he’s being credited for what he’s begun doing (inadequate though it is to merit drunken feting): As US President, he reached out amicably and invitingly to Latin America, accepting that however left-leaning its democracies are, those are bona fide democracies built with resounding approval from their non-token demos; he initiated global denuclearization; he chid the Israelis (finally, someone did); and he sided with freedom against fascist takeovers–an enormous break from and rebuke of a staple American leadership, as history can tell. All this I say of course, however critical I am of a US establishment with global tentacles, simply in order to be fair. A great deal has still to be seen though as far as would go a more radical follow-through and how he might help effect market-steadying controls, emissions decrease, or justice for victims of America’s excesses. Also, to be more fair, he wasn’t eager for the prize, thanks to intelligence and integrity, even admitting ineligibility. Besides, selections for the Nobel aren’t all that stringent; they have a history of choosing on the basis of what best promotes an agreed-upon advocacy or, in the case of the other categories, what feels cogent, what proves brilliant but timely. Timeliness of course has been an effective exclusionary criterion, edging out Gandhi, or Cory and our People, and the far more brilliant and sophisticated lifework in the sciences and literature. Such have been its quirks. IT'S OKAY. The point is not to get devoted to winning awards and ensuring institutional praise, but to creating possibilities of palpable accomplishment--the basis for reward.
Of course, while Obama’s awarded little on the ground of achievement, Noynoy is pushed into the presidency barely if at all on the basis of accomplishment, competency. Some considerations, besides deservedness, just happen to send some distances.
Comment posted on RC's blog
Hmm, I'd like to help clear up something, ie why Ricky, in my view, called it "preemptive"--it's been lost in the raging wash of pro- and anti-reactions.
Like a friend said, the moment they gave out the Peace Prize to Henry Kissinger, it had already been cheapened. Kissinger, much unlike Obama in politics, was the author, like Milton Friedman, of ultra-right coups and dictatorships in Latin America (even in Greece, Iran, etc). To say that the standards for the prize have, until now, been grossly compromised is to offer a woeful misreading. It's falsehood, quite simply. But the conferment of the prize to Obama, however undeserving he seems of it, has clearly not been concerned with achievement, but the best strategic pitch for the politics of the committee--which, as the title of Ricky already states, is aimed at preempting something. What that is, according to impressions mine and others' in the field, is any conceivable change in what is currently a more peace- and diplomacy-inclined President Obama (far far more so than any of his predecessors). There's that hope from the committee that the US pursues initiatives in the line of its previous impressive efforts--denuclearization, etc, etc.
Is it about any plan already realized? Of course not. That's been obvious enough. What it could be about, though, has for too long been lost in the debates between those who headlong approve of it and those who as handily don't.
The whys are no less crucial (in fact, several times more) than the what.
----
I guess, from any group anxious for a leadership role much ought to be expected. I wasn’t made a fan of his by his surface charisma. To be fair, he’s being credited for what he’s begun doing (inadequate though it is to merit drunken feting): As US President, he reached out amicably and invitingly to Latin America, accepting that however left-leaning its democracies are, those are bona fide democracies built with resounding approval from their non-token demos; he initiated global denuclearization; he chid the Israelis (finally, someone did); and he sided with freedom against fascist takeovers–an enormous break from and rebuke of a staple American leadership, as history can tell. All this I say of course, however critical I am of a US establishment with global tentacles, simply in order to be fair. A great deal has still to be seen though as far as would go a more radical follow-through and how he might help effect market-steadying controls, emissions decrease, or justice for victims of America’s excesses. Also, to be more fair, he wasn’t eager for the prize, thanks to intelligence and integrity, even admitting ineligibility. Besides, selections for the Nobel aren’t all that stringent; they have a history of choosing on the basis of what best promotes an agreed-upon advocacy or, in the case of the other categories, what feels cogent, what proves brilliant but timely. Timeliness of course has been an effective exclusionary criterion, edging out Gandhi, or Cory and our People, and the far more brilliant and sophisticated lifework in the sciences and literature. Such have been its quirks. IT'S OKAY. The point is not to get devoted to winning awards and ensuring institutional praise, but to creating possibilities of palpable accomplishment--the basis for reward.
Of course, while Obama’s awarded little on the ground of achievement, Noynoy is pushed into the presidency barely if at all on the basis of accomplishment, competency. Some considerations, besides deservedness, just happen to send some distances.
8.10.09
Some questions like "how do we, in the tropics, embrace our rivers?"
In response to RCarandang's show.
Hi, Ricky. I've been lucky enough to catch your 10:30 show for the past two days. The discussions to do with riverbank communities intrigue me much. While I do agree that the migrating poor shouldn't be allowed to settle too close to ill-managed waterways, I also recognize problems in completing quick flood-remedies like clearing up the banks without addressing the persistent issue not just of poverty but labor surge to market-central Manila. But for the moment, I'll be zeroing in on the question of how we might maximize topography and sustain riverside communities.
Some are of the opinion that it's best to leave the riversides uninhabited. I suppose, if construction and population clogged waterways (canals, lakes, rivers, bays) or are allowed on banks without care for potential rises in water levels, then crises like Ondoy would follow and persist. Problems would also emerge if we build on generously margined shores but the bodies of water behave like Yangtze. If the river-clearance rule were to be followed (is it twice the width of rivers on each side?), the communities by the Thames, the Nile, the Danube, the Rhine, and the Ganges wouldn't be possible (I wouldn't be surprised if the scientists are in much disagreement--the factors to weigh or gauge by aren't constant after all). So my question is, how can we, in the storm-beleaguered tropics, manage our floodways without deserting our bodies of water? Won't feats of engineering (which naturally will need lots of money) tide us over this? Japan had the problem of earthquakes and storms that had to be dealt with if they were to speed up commutes between two far flung islands. They built hanging bridges that were fit to endure the strongest chronicled winds and tremors ever to hit the areas. They didn't abandon their islands and close them off to residents and commerce. I suppose, with the proper amount of well-guarded funding backing up efforts at ingenuous thinking, we can care for our rivers and gain from them without keeping them at too cold a distance.
How do we, in the tropics, embrace our rivers? Here are photos of the Rivers Danube, Nile, Rhine, and Thames.
Many thanks and cheers,
Bee
Hi, Ricky. I've been lucky enough to catch your 10:30 show for the past two days. The discussions to do with riverbank communities intrigue me much. While I do agree that the migrating poor shouldn't be allowed to settle too close to ill-managed waterways, I also recognize problems in completing quick flood-remedies like clearing up the banks without addressing the persistent issue not just of poverty but labor surge to market-central Manila. But for the moment, I'll be zeroing in on the question of how we might maximize topography and sustain riverside communities.
Some are of the opinion that it's best to leave the riversides uninhabited. I suppose, if construction and population clogged waterways (canals, lakes, rivers, bays) or are allowed on banks without care for potential rises in water levels, then crises like Ondoy would follow and persist. Problems would also emerge if we build on generously margined shores but the bodies of water behave like Yangtze. If the river-clearance rule were to be followed (is it twice the width of rivers on each side?), the communities by the Thames, the Nile, the Danube, the Rhine, and the Ganges wouldn't be possible (I wouldn't be surprised if the scientists are in much disagreement--the factors to weigh or gauge by aren't constant after all). So my question is, how can we, in the storm-beleaguered tropics, manage our floodways without deserting our bodies of water? Won't feats of engineering (which naturally will need lots of money) tide us over this? Japan had the problem of earthquakes and storms that had to be dealt with if they were to speed up commutes between two far flung islands. They built hanging bridges that were fit to endure the strongest chronicled winds and tremors ever to hit the areas. They didn't abandon their islands and close them off to residents and commerce. I suppose, with the proper amount of well-guarded funding backing up efforts at ingenuous thinking, we can care for our rivers and gain from them without keeping them at too cold a distance.
How do we, in the tropics, embrace our rivers? Here are photos of the Rivers Danube, Nile, Rhine, and Thames.
Many thanks and cheers,
Bee
18.9.09
Rights vs Institut'lized Cultural Relativism & Political Pluralism
The religious are sheer virtuosos at dangling perdition before those they differ with—sad to say, right this very moment, before opportunistic candidates for president and senator.
The subject at the heart of this essay is not religion per se but the conflict generated by a certain democracy that seeks to institutionalize cultural and religious freedom at the level not just of speech and exchange and debate and open political dispute, but at the very level of state laws, while also, on the other hand, attempting to strengthen universalistic rights provisions (like human rights, for instance) which literally are meant to apply in all of society, irrespective of bounds and differences in personal, sectoral belief-systems. Rights and laws embody ideology too; they are perched on values or ideas of things held most important by, ideally, a society that maintains belief in, adherence to, state-rules, or in casual terms, THE LAW. When those rights and laws, coherent as they ought to be in spirit and direction, begin scuffling with the tenets of some or other sub-sect, -culture, sectarian ideas that inform a different (dissident) way of life, created is a social reality where value-difference is not just free to vie for political societal dominance and, in the name of which quest, lure in the majority (such as must be the case in any true democracy), but is also given rein to be practiced however such practice defies other rules, rules FOR ALL, like other liberties well-agreed upon by state-majority. Which multiculturalist freedom is invoked on the basis of legal assurances entitling such sects to the freedoms of belief and its practice. This engenders scenarios where sub-sects of truth- and belief-systems lay claim on pockets in society in which to cocoon themselves from the very jurisdiction of certain universalist laws. This is happening in the United States as it is in much of Europe, i.e. Muslim migrant communities demanding in the name of the very libertarianism, multiculturalism and political pluralism institutionalized in the West, that Sharia law be observed for their faithful, that their own beliefs never be tainted in the enforcement of laws, rights, policies so universalistic as to infringe on distinctive ways of life. This of course exemplifies the sure contradiction that builds as if on its own between the liberty to believe and practice beliefs, and the non-relative, non-waivable liberties such as are ridden into codes for civil rights, human rights (eg women's rights, gay rights, labor rights), animal rights, etc, etc.
Thanks to this twitter thing, I learn so quickly of the news (no plugging meant there). Please do bear with my message for tonight. It concerns a subject much too important (for me at least) to simply let go and shove aside. I hope plainly to share with you some of what I came to know of the new fights the Church has been waging (the CBCP together with the active, noisy laity). If any of you happen to be the devout religious of any faith or denomination, I apologize this early for words that might turn out too coarse to your personal feelings. This is a very important issue. It's to do with reproductive healthcare and the Magna Carta for women. If you have the time I'd love to have with you whatever discussion you feel might be needed, or absorb, hands tied, mouth gagged, your sermons (if there will be such that this shall provoke). Anything at all. Just please first consider. If you have friends you can tell (will listen) about what's taking place as far as these go, you might like to share with them your fresh finds. Having you sit this one out is imposition enough. But I’d be blessed indeed to see you consider. In my take on the matter, I forgot to include some brief words on why RH and MC are, to me and for me, even necessary. I'm assuming you’ll pluck out your reasons for that yourself, that is, if you count them important as well.
There is a chaos of liberties embodied in our laws.
Thank you for the audience. Lying at the bottom of this short note is a news report lifted as is from the Inquirer website, following which is my take. Thank you for browsing or better yet, patiently prettily perusing line by line (if you shall read them at all during breaks, I mean).
beatrixpg
I'd like to say, first, lest you bristle at my tastes, that I believe there's a power much greater than myself, or than anything in life that I can cognize well enough to deal, cope and even go along healthily with. I'm not above all vanity, but I'm well above the vanity of clerics, prelates. The very boundaries of reason/logic tell me this, and most such hard-to-see limits can only be touched and felt when intellect/reason is utilized greatly. I'm an epistemologist and theoretician first. Ergo, logic is my gauge and guide. But the best epistemology, that is to say, the solid one, teaches not that there's no GOD or metaphysics (metaphysis, to be accurate). Logic, driven to the limit, neither illumines nor gainsays divinity, metaphysics. Astrophysics, the Big Bang, are physics; they're not metaphysics. Why is smart epistemology humbler, quieter than your textbook delusional metaphysics? Because it learns to concede, along a tiresome way of trying its utmost to reason with life, that in order to know to a logical sureness that God exists and moulded from nothing all of our universe, in short to know and outknow God both (as the crafter of the universe and of logic included), we must stand on a plane higher than God's and logic's--the paradox of all paradoxes, or the fallacy of all fallacies which we can overcome only by junking logic itself. Metaphysics, by its sheer name, suggests a plane beyond "this one" (physis) from which to peek and poke into not just our world, but into what God does and what God’s done, and how our world appears from the farthest farthest "exterior." I stress I believe there's a higher, higher power, inasmuch as there are such things logic alone can never suffice to thresh out (and I can debate with physicists any given time, people without any sense of self-irony). Unlike Aquinas and unlike the non-sectarian metaphysicians, I shan’t dare for a "fuller" or "fullest" knowing of God. I, as mere human, am in no place to know and outknow this God let alone invoke "God's law" (divine absolute law) and back it up with human reason when simply crusading for my wishes.
The religious—or most I’ve learned about, to be fair—when trapped in a bind of having to justify dogma, battling foremost for power over all of human activity, like applying for a job laden with perks, wheel in God as major character reference. Come to think of it, who beats “God” as endorser, as mentor, trainer? The holy books lend them unequivocal (they believe unassailable) integrity, authority. I concede there are matters, events on earth just so tough to dice up as to be unreadable in the vocabs of reason. In the far almost unreachable past, those took the shapes of miracles which centuries hence, were remade into biblical lore. I'm saying God could be real or unreal/God can’t be/isn’t real or unreal. What proves so inexplicable (like logic's nature plus logic’s origins) has become the feast of eras of mysticism; it may just be a function of a powerful nature/universe Humans aren’t smart enough to probe. What's written lengthily in the bible, though it clashes with the great deal prescribed, say, in the Koran, may be true or untrue. What I’m saying, I and you are in no place at all to state too surely that the so-called will of the so-called divine is any way for real or unreal; most of them, taken down as God's revelations, are ideas I'm in no place to prove or disprove. So what gives me the license to invoke “divine command” while seeking to prevail in a contest between evaluations, a contest for humans who are moved, primarily, by yearning? But let's assume they're for real, that the bushes scorching were indeed sounding off like megaphones: If, fighting off a beating and raping husband, I must subject myself to God-ordained punishment, then so be it for so it shall be. I shall let myself burn in damnation; I'll bring my suntan, even; let's start with my bra. If that's the case, I shall welcome perdition. What do I do? Christians are so so sure fearing as they do what becomes of them in the afterlife more than they worry about fairness in this life. Goodness here is all about reward in heaven. Well, not for me. If God, as the bible says, makes me atone, scalding, torturously for irreverence, then so shall I endure all punishment. And the image of that does not keep me from fighting for the oppressed and choiceless on earth. The bible prescribes that I yield without struggle to a husband (I don't have one, thankfully; I have three—kidding). I've said this before, I'll say it again: Relationships are about love. Love does not concern itself with hierarchies, revolving not round lordships. I can never be with a man who wheels in "God" praying to be obeyed by me at all costs, insisting (respecting himself and God but not me) that he's my master, the last word in the house and my wisest and final handler in the bedroom. Show me IQ and heart, first. If a husband says I’ll burn in hell, so be it, I’ll bring buns and hotdogs. Thing is, I am so damn fortunate I have the power to assert myself this way. Most women in the Philippines do not.
More shocking, of course, would be a Church that eases so readily on reproductive healthcare, homosexuality, divorce, teenage pregnancy, single parenthood, etc, like it’s muting now its scriptural misogynism (yes, it is; Christianisms as practiced now are mostly less murderous of womankind, impertinently editing, correcting "god's" word). POINT IS, why keep believing them? The argument of lobbyists for the RH-bill and the Magna Carta for Women is that the Church and the State are as distinct as separate. Which on closer look seems a wobbly rebuttal. The religious, of all parties, make the valid point: For any of the religious to concede that religion and politics are split is to concede that their ethic is relative and arbitrary, not life-tenets as ordered by their "God"—their assertion being that religion must be a way of life (a value-theory/ideology practiced) setting rules for living as laid down in the strict terms of “God.” The fast rebuttal should be (1) that the word of god is not ours to dictate or impose (not that we know the higher power is a punishing one flailing a whip), (2) that we can't even jibe on who god is let alone what god requires of us (thus the maelstrom of faiths), and (3) that at the most basic level, or at the level we humans can negotiate among ourselves, values contending are all merely politics, or desires, interests, wishes, ambitions, dreams, longing in collision. If politics is also the venue on which the bases of LAWS in society are clinched, then religion can assert stake in politics and law-making, and therefore must participate in them. The Muslims understand this. But here is the CATCH: if they lose in the human contest that we have for centuries labeled "politics," they must accept, grinning, bearing, that, as much as winning is a part of any dispute, any opposition, any battle or combat, losing is its necessary obverse.
Thanks to the gap-ridden cultural/religious/political pluralism that is bequeathed by the West or thoughtlessly seized by the Philippines, we're now faced with a crisis of freedoms. Values as politics naturally compete in order to become the foundation of RULES (rules of any kind, anywhere). This crisis is a case of institutionalized relativism gone messily awry. It's been happening for a decade or so in the West. It's catching on in our country. Pluralism chafes against the simple fact that values and truths, while plural in any given spectrum, differ within such spectrum, each one of them trying to prevail as LAW or at least its base. I don’t disfavor the plurality of values; the plurality of values is a given reality if not possibility. I like values to be able to compete openly and freely. BUT the operative word here is "COMPETE," and from no honest-to-goodness competition would its participants emerge equal winners and losers. Even a synergy of opposing values or ideas which we often call "the middle ground" is but a speckle in a spectrum of gradations of values. In short, it's a value in itself, this so-called middle ground, to which we can try to coax round the differing sides, to neutralize difference, to extinguish the chaotic plurality, to dispose of the bones of crazed contention, to cease temporarily all contest, to rescue discussion from the realm of the confrontational, in short, to unify the camps round a harmonizing value, in turn, much needed order. Clearly, logically, that's not political pluraLISM. Values, if political, are necessarily plural, hence the friction, the opposition, or being political. And the only thing worse than political pluralism and/or cultural relativism, which, both, are fallacious paradigms, is intellectual pluralism/relativism—it is the joyously inane belief that any explanation, any given claim of logical answer, irrespective of strengths and idiocies, is very much valid, with the right to be expressed and taught anywhere. "It's all just perspectives, different perspectives, each adding to knowledge. Free speech, free speech!!!" Too much arrogant talk matched by too ignorant thought.
The subject at the heart of this essay is not religion per se but the conflict generated by a certain democracy that seeks to institutionalize cultural and religious freedom at the level not just of speech and exchange and debate and open political dispute, but at the very level of state laws, while also, on the other hand, attempting to strengthen universalistic rights provisions (like human rights, for instance) which literally are meant to apply in all of society, irrespective of bounds and differences in personal, sectoral belief-systems. Rights and laws embody ideology too; they are perched on values or ideas of things held most important by, ideally, a society that maintains belief in, adherence to, state-rules, or in casual terms, THE LAW. When those rights and laws, coherent as they ought to be in spirit and direction, begin scuffling with the tenets of some or other sub-sect, -culture, sectarian ideas that inform a different (dissident) way of life, created is a social reality where value-difference is not just free to vie for political societal dominance and, in the name of which quest, lure in the majority (such as must be the case in any true democracy), but is also given rein to be practiced however such practice defies other rules, rules FOR ALL, like other liberties well-agreed upon by state-majority. Which multiculturalist freedom is invoked on the basis of legal assurances entitling such sects to the freedoms of belief and its practice. This engenders scenarios where sub-sects of truth- and belief-systems lay claim on pockets in society in which to cocoon themselves from the very jurisdiction of certain universalist laws. This is happening in the United States as it is in much of Europe, i.e. Muslim migrant communities demanding in the name of the very libertarianism, multiculturalism and political pluralism institutionalized in the West, that Sharia law be observed for their faithful, that their own beliefs never be tainted in the enforcement of laws, rights, policies so universalistic as to infringe on distinctive ways of life. This of course exemplifies the sure contradiction that builds as if on its own between the liberty to believe and practice beliefs, and the non-relative, non-waivable liberties such as are ridden into codes for civil rights, human rights (eg women's rights, gay rights, labor rights), animal rights, etc, etc.
Thanks to this twitter thing, I learn so quickly of the news (no plugging meant there). Please do bear with my message for tonight. It concerns a subject much too important (for me at least) to simply let go and shove aside. I hope plainly to share with you some of what I came to know of the new fights the Church has been waging (the CBCP together with the active, noisy laity). If any of you happen to be the devout religious of any faith or denomination, I apologize this early for words that might turn out too coarse to your personal feelings. This is a very important issue. It's to do with reproductive healthcare and the Magna Carta for women. If you have the time I'd love to have with you whatever discussion you feel might be needed, or absorb, hands tied, mouth gagged, your sermons (if there will be such that this shall provoke). Anything at all. Just please first consider. If you have friends you can tell (will listen) about what's taking place as far as these go, you might like to share with them your fresh finds. Having you sit this one out is imposition enough. But I’d be blessed indeed to see you consider. In my take on the matter, I forgot to include some brief words on why RH and MC are, to me and for me, even necessary. I'm assuming you’ll pluck out your reasons for that yourself, that is, if you count them important as well.
There is a chaos of liberties embodied in our laws.
Thank you for the audience. Lying at the bottom of this short note is a news report lifted as is from the Inquirer website, following which is my take. Thank you for browsing or better yet, patiently prettily perusing line by line (if you shall read them at all during breaks, I mean).
beatrixpg
Catholic schools seeks women’s law exemption
By Philip Tubeza
Philippine Daily Inquirer First Posted 14:01:00 09/17/2009
MANILA, Philippines—Insisting on their religious and academic freedoms, Catholic educational institutions are seeking exemption from a provision in the new Magna Carta of Women banning the dismissal of unwed mothers from employment or school.
Monsignor Gerardo Santos, national president of the Catholic Educational Association of the Philippines (CEAP), said the CEAP would ask that a provision on such an exemption be inserted into the new law’s implementing rules and regulations.
He said the chairman of the Commission on Higher Education (CHEd), Emmanuel Angeles, has said he would support the CEAP’s participation in the writing of the IRR.
“It is important that we respect the religious affiliation of these institutions, the schools, or company the persons [concerned] belong to,” Santos told the CEAP national convention at the Manila Hotel.
Women’s rights activists have said that under the new law, unwed mothers who are kicked out can file a civil case and sue for damages while government officials who dismiss them can be sanctioned under administrative and civil service laws.
Santos insisted on the Catholic schools’ right to have an unwed pregnant student or employee go on leave “after due process,” or to enforce other disciplinary action.
http://globalnation.inquirer.net/news/breakingnews/view/20090917-225651/Catholic-schools-seeks-womens-law-exemption
I'd like to say, first, lest you bristle at my tastes, that I believe there's a power much greater than myself, or than anything in life that I can cognize well enough to deal, cope and even go along healthily with. I'm not above all vanity, but I'm well above the vanity of clerics, prelates. The very boundaries of reason/logic tell me this, and most such hard-to-see limits can only be touched and felt when intellect/reason is utilized greatly. I'm an epistemologist and theoretician first. Ergo, logic is my gauge and guide. But the best epistemology, that is to say, the solid one, teaches not that there's no GOD or metaphysics (metaphysis, to be accurate). Logic, driven to the limit, neither illumines nor gainsays divinity, metaphysics. Astrophysics, the Big Bang, are physics; they're not metaphysics. Why is smart epistemology humbler, quieter than your textbook delusional metaphysics? Because it learns to concede, along a tiresome way of trying its utmost to reason with life, that in order to know to a logical sureness that God exists and moulded from nothing all of our universe, in short to know and outknow God both (as the crafter of the universe and of logic included), we must stand on a plane higher than God's and logic's--the paradox of all paradoxes, or the fallacy of all fallacies which we can overcome only by junking logic itself. Metaphysics, by its sheer name, suggests a plane beyond "this one" (physis) from which to peek and poke into not just our world, but into what God does and what God’s done, and how our world appears from the farthest farthest "exterior." I stress I believe there's a higher, higher power, inasmuch as there are such things logic alone can never suffice to thresh out (and I can debate with physicists any given time, people without any sense of self-irony). Unlike Aquinas and unlike the non-sectarian metaphysicians, I shan’t dare for a "fuller" or "fullest" knowing of God. I, as mere human, am in no place to know and outknow this God let alone invoke "God's law" (divine absolute law) and back it up with human reason when simply crusading for my wishes.
The religious—or most I’ve learned about, to be fair—when trapped in a bind of having to justify dogma, battling foremost for power over all of human activity, like applying for a job laden with perks, wheel in God as major character reference. Come to think of it, who beats “God” as endorser, as mentor, trainer? The holy books lend them unequivocal (they believe unassailable) integrity, authority. I concede there are matters, events on earth just so tough to dice up as to be unreadable in the vocabs of reason. In the far almost unreachable past, those took the shapes of miracles which centuries hence, were remade into biblical lore. I'm saying God could be real or unreal/God can’t be/isn’t real or unreal. What proves so inexplicable (like logic's nature plus logic’s origins) has become the feast of eras of mysticism; it may just be a function of a powerful nature/universe Humans aren’t smart enough to probe. What's written lengthily in the bible, though it clashes with the great deal prescribed, say, in the Koran, may be true or untrue. What I’m saying, I and you are in no place at all to state too surely that the so-called will of the so-called divine is any way for real or unreal; most of them, taken down as God's revelations, are ideas I'm in no place to prove or disprove. So what gives me the license to invoke “divine command” while seeking to prevail in a contest between evaluations, a contest for humans who are moved, primarily, by yearning? But let's assume they're for real, that the bushes scorching were indeed sounding off like megaphones: If, fighting off a beating and raping husband, I must subject myself to God-ordained punishment, then so be it for so it shall be. I shall let myself burn in damnation; I'll bring my suntan, even; let's start with my bra. If that's the case, I shall welcome perdition. What do I do? Christians are so so sure fearing as they do what becomes of them in the afterlife more than they worry about fairness in this life. Goodness here is all about reward in heaven. Well, not for me. If God, as the bible says, makes me atone, scalding, torturously for irreverence, then so shall I endure all punishment. And the image of that does not keep me from fighting for the oppressed and choiceless on earth. The bible prescribes that I yield without struggle to a husband (I don't have one, thankfully; I have three—kidding). I've said this before, I'll say it again: Relationships are about love. Love does not concern itself with hierarchies, revolving not round lordships. I can never be with a man who wheels in "God" praying to be obeyed by me at all costs, insisting (respecting himself and God but not me) that he's my master, the last word in the house and my wisest and final handler in the bedroom. Show me IQ and heart, first. If a husband says I’ll burn in hell, so be it, I’ll bring buns and hotdogs. Thing is, I am so damn fortunate I have the power to assert myself this way. Most women in the Philippines do not.
More shocking, of course, would be a Church that eases so readily on reproductive healthcare, homosexuality, divorce, teenage pregnancy, single parenthood, etc, like it’s muting now its scriptural misogynism (yes, it is; Christianisms as practiced now are mostly less murderous of womankind, impertinently editing, correcting "god's" word). POINT IS, why keep believing them? The argument of lobbyists for the RH-bill and the Magna Carta for Women is that the Church and the State are as distinct as separate. Which on closer look seems a wobbly rebuttal. The religious, of all parties, make the valid point: For any of the religious to concede that religion and politics are split is to concede that their ethic is relative and arbitrary, not life-tenets as ordered by their "God"—their assertion being that religion must be a way of life (a value-theory/ideology practiced) setting rules for living as laid down in the strict terms of “God.” The fast rebuttal should be (1) that the word of god is not ours to dictate or impose (not that we know the higher power is a punishing one flailing a whip), (2) that we can't even jibe on who god is let alone what god requires of us (thus the maelstrom of faiths), and (3) that at the most basic level, or at the level we humans can negotiate among ourselves, values contending are all merely politics, or desires, interests, wishes, ambitions, dreams, longing in collision. If politics is also the venue on which the bases of LAWS in society are clinched, then religion can assert stake in politics and law-making, and therefore must participate in them. The Muslims understand this. But here is the CATCH: if they lose in the human contest that we have for centuries labeled "politics," they must accept, grinning, bearing, that, as much as winning is a part of any dispute, any opposition, any battle or combat, losing is its necessary obverse.
Thanks to the gap-ridden cultural/religious/political pluralism that is bequeathed by the West or thoughtlessly seized by the Philippines, we're now faced with a crisis of freedoms. Values as politics naturally compete in order to become the foundation of RULES (rules of any kind, anywhere). This crisis is a case of institutionalized relativism gone messily awry. It's been happening for a decade or so in the West. It's catching on in our country. Pluralism chafes against the simple fact that values and truths, while plural in any given spectrum, differ within such spectrum, each one of them trying to prevail as LAW or at least its base. I don’t disfavor the plurality of values; the plurality of values is a given reality if not possibility. I like values to be able to compete openly and freely. BUT the operative word here is "COMPETE," and from no honest-to-goodness competition would its participants emerge equal winners and losers. Even a synergy of opposing values or ideas which we often call "the middle ground" is but a speckle in a spectrum of gradations of values. In short, it's a value in itself, this so-called middle ground, to which we can try to coax round the differing sides, to neutralize difference, to extinguish the chaotic plurality, to dispose of the bones of crazed contention, to cease temporarily all contest, to rescue discussion from the realm of the confrontational, in short, to unify the camps round a harmonizing value, in turn, much needed order. Clearly, logically, that's not political pluraLISM. Values, if political, are necessarily plural, hence the friction, the opposition, or being political. And the only thing worse than political pluralism and/or cultural relativism, which, both, are fallacious paradigms, is intellectual pluralism/relativism—it is the joyously inane belief that any explanation, any given claim of logical answer, irrespective of strengths and idiocies, is very much valid, with the right to be expressed and taught anywhere. "It's all just perspectives, different perspectives, each adding to knowledge. Free speech, free speech!!!" Too much arrogant talk matched by too ignorant thought.
2.9.09
Animal Cruelty & the Evils of the Market
Please find out for yourselves how the steaks and barbecues at dinner are produced. I'm all for eating meat, with meat being a food-chain requirement (though thanks to a project begun at Oxford there are now ways to produce meat without making animals suffer). After watching this footage, I also suggest that you look up videos taken of dogs raised in Mills for selling in boutiques. It will serve further to read "Disgrace" written by JM Coetzee and "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair. Hypocrisy in situations like this assumes either of two
forms: People push for meat's consumption arguing it's natural for carnivores (including humans) to feed on other animals, without bravely confronting the truths about meat massproduction; or people completely denounce cruel massproduction without changing habits of wasteful consumption. How we have come to an era marked by horrific imbalances in our natural environment is easily explained by the abusive habits of humans--the worst of beasts in kingdom animalia. We chain animals, drug them, tether them, forcefeed them, forcemate them, starve them, overfeed them, overstimulate them, dirty them, and let them out in the cold or under the scorching heat. We make money out of them in every possible merciless way. We massproduce swine and poultry and when disease afflicts them because of our errors we gun them down by crates. And we think ourselves superior.
Please help animals any simple way you can, by giving the thirsty a bowl of clean water, the hungry a packet of crackers, the cold and shivering, a blanket or old pillow, and the dirty, a warm gentle bath. Please stop chaining ur pets. Please stop ordering them around. Learn to establish a medium of communication with your pets without making fun of them. Let them run freely and play with you freely. Helping them scratch some areas can offer relief. Those who are cruel to animals, I hope the worst for them, I hope they become flies I can swat off as mercilessly. Eat them if you must. But why hurt them when they don't hurt you? Stop harming animals. If they bother you put them in an appropriate place. Stop kicking kittens. Stop disciplining animals like slaves.
If you take pets to keep them in cages, to let them die in filth and hunger, you have no business having them. Only those who know how to love animals are given the chance to see how happy they can be. They have a right to that happiness, to a feeling of security. If people can't love them, care for them, we should at the very least just let them be.
Save a pet, save a friend.
forms: People push for meat's consumption arguing it's natural for carnivores (including humans) to feed on other animals, without bravely confronting the truths about meat massproduction; or people completely denounce cruel massproduction without changing habits of wasteful consumption. How we have come to an era marked by horrific imbalances in our natural environment is easily explained by the abusive habits of humans--the worst of beasts in kingdom animalia. We chain animals, drug them, tether them, forcefeed them, forcemate them, starve them, overfeed them, overstimulate them, dirty them, and let them out in the cold or under the scorching heat. We make money out of them in every possible merciless way. We massproduce swine and poultry and when disease afflicts them because of our errors we gun them down by crates. And we think ourselves superior.
Please help animals any simple way you can, by giving the thirsty a bowl of clean water, the hungry a packet of crackers, the cold and shivering, a blanket or old pillow, and the dirty, a warm gentle bath. Please stop chaining ur pets. Please stop ordering them around. Learn to establish a medium of communication with your pets without making fun of them. Let them run freely and play with you freely. Helping them scratch some areas can offer relief. Those who are cruel to animals, I hope the worst for them, I hope they become flies I can swat off as mercilessly. Eat them if you must. But why hurt them when they don't hurt you? Stop harming animals. If they bother you put them in an appropriate place. Stop kicking kittens. Stop disciplining animals like slaves.
If you take pets to keep them in cages, to let them die in filth and hunger, you have no business having them. Only those who know how to love animals are given the chance to see how happy they can be. They have a right to that happiness, to a feeling of security. If people can't love them, care for them, we should at the very least just let them be.
Save a pet, save a friend.
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