Orwell’s 1984 was not a portrayal of a hypothetical future, but of the present. It was intended for the brainwashed captives of the existing system who believed themselves to be free, and where every public institution, every moral and political authority, was the opposite of what it claimed to be.
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Many people will kill one another, each convinced of being right, while others watch.
The war is not meant to be won. The aim of war is to balance the destructive forces of human nature, to the extent and for as long as humanity does not transcend its destructive nature.
EDIT: transcendence of nature is not transhumanism, it is not about augmenting or even replacing your body with some other object, but resolving the inconsistent, deterministic patterns of behaviour.
EDIT: transcendence of nature is not transhumanism, it is not about augmenting or even replacing your body with some other object, but resolving the inconsistent, deterministic patterns of behaviour.
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There is no such thing as the law of Australia, or of the USA, or Russia, or China. There is The Law, the same for every conscious being, and everything else that purports to be ‘the law of the land’ is contrary to it: monkey law.
If you did nothing wrong, you have nothing to be offended about. Being offended is a defensive reaction of a guilty mind.
Society expects us to be offended on account of false accusations. Society gets offended if we are not offended by false accusations. I do not feel that way, nor do I expect justice from the system. Society has a guilty mind. I would not plead for justice by acting offended in any case.
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A thought-exercise for those who believe the Bible (or any other scripture) is literally the word of God. How would it affect your faith if one day someone proved that the Bible is a forgery. For example, by discovering that every seventh letter of every seventh paragraph, assembled into a sequence, produces a confession of this forgery, with a further, more complex key given to decode a secondary confirmation, so it would be something that could not happen without intentional design. Would you reject your faith, or would it make no difference, and why?
This is possibly the key to understanding religion.
Authenticity of religious scripture no longer matters, insofar as the question of authenticity does not have the capacity to affect the experience of the believer. The reality structured on the basis of belief is capable of sustaining itself, via the community of believers, and this reality is authentically experienced, which makes the belief necessarily authentic in that reality, insofar as it supports reality.
I recall this segment from Mircea Eliade:
“In general it can be said that myth, as experienced by archaic societies, (1) constitutes the History of the acts of the Supernaturals; (2) that this History is considered to be absolutely true (because it is concerned with realities) and sacred (because it is the work of the Supernaturals; (3) that myth is always related to a ‘creation,’ it tells how something came into existence, or how a pattern of behaviour, an institution, a manner of working were established; this is why myths constitute the paradigms for all significant human acts; (4) that by knowing the myth one knows the ‘origin’ of thing and hence can control and manipulate them at will; this is not an ‘external,’ ‘abstract’ knowledge but a knowledge that one ‘experiences’ ritually, either by ceremonially recounting the myth or by performing the ritual for which it is the justification; (5) that in one way or another one ‘lives’ the myth, in the sense that one is seized by the sacred, exalting power of the events recollected or re-enacted.” (Eliade, Mircea. Myth and Reality. Harper & Row, 1963, 18-19)
Authenticity of religious scripture no longer matters, insofar as the question of authenticity does not have the capacity to affect the experience of the believer. The reality structured on the basis of belief is capable of sustaining itself, via the community of believers, and this reality is authentically experienced, which makes the belief necessarily authentic in that reality, insofar as it supports reality.
I recall this segment from Mircea Eliade:
“In general it can be said that myth, as experienced by archaic societies, (1) constitutes the History of the acts of the Supernaturals; (2) that this History is considered to be absolutely true (because it is concerned with realities) and sacred (because it is the work of the Supernaturals; (3) that myth is always related to a ‘creation,’ it tells how something came into existence, or how a pattern of behaviour, an institution, a manner of working were established; this is why myths constitute the paradigms for all significant human acts; (4) that by knowing the myth one knows the ‘origin’ of thing and hence can control and manipulate them at will; this is not an ‘external,’ ‘abstract’ knowledge but a knowledge that one ‘experiences’ ritually, either by ceremonially recounting the myth or by performing the ritual for which it is the justification; (5) that in one way or another one ‘lives’ the myth, in the sense that one is seized by the sacred, exalting power of the events recollected or re-enacted.” (Eliade, Mircea. Myth and Reality. Harper & Row, 1963, 18-19)
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Common beliefs define reality, and there can only be one consistent reality. All religions, cultures and ideologies want total conceptual domination, without realising that this would destroy them; if reality were cemented, definitive, no longer creatively challenged and negotiated, consciousness could not sustain itself.
Reality is continuously negotiated. It has to be negotiated, not to make it perfectly consistent (which is impossible) but to mutually sustain subjectivity, the confabulation of Self. The process of negotiation itself is the aim, which is the realisation of Self by mutual mirroring, and the external reality is an unstable byproduct.
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