A couple weeks ago I saw a guy go absolutely crazy with rage at a worker at a Starbucks because she had made a mistake with his order. He ranted and raged for all of us to hear how this was why America was so "F'd up" Comic relief on that cue: An Englishman, an American and a Scotsman were all sitt...

The "Law of Attraction" is something Campbell never addressed. He neither confirmed nor denied it, as its current fashionable formulation did not exist during his lifetime, although its essentially American antecedents which developed into "New Thought" and "New Age" movements, did. He never equated...

A useful book on this topic is one I picked up yesterday, "Occidentalism" - subtitled "A Short History of Anti-Westernism" - by Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit. The title and approach were inspired by Edward Said's "Orientalism" describing the history of Western dehumanisations of an abstract "East"...

But some aspects of some religions can be taken as historical without necessarily all of them being taken literally. It's a historical fact that Muhammed existed and had some kind of profound experiences which he believed to be visitations from an Angel of God. Just how literally the recitations (Ko...

Submitted as evidence: http://abovethelaw.com/2010/03/the-pc-p ... #more-8121

Clemsy wrote - (HA! I'm really having fun in this discussion!) - well he wrote: No satisfying you is there Watson! Actually I'm very satisfied at the moment, after enjoying some barbecued chicken with my wife and then watching a DVD of the French movie "Queen Margot" with her, and then having a few ...

Clemsy wrote: ...I'll concede to influenced. Compels works for me., Thomas Aquinas, a Catholic and an astrologer, wrote: "The heavens (in his mind meaning "material environmental conditions") incline, but they do not compel." Substitute the 20th/21st century conventional terms of "environment" and "...

PS to add to my last sentence in my above comment, here's an example of what I mean by the overlap between "unstructured play" and "discipline" (and their relation to Zen and to several martial arts), from Bruce Lee's "Enter the Dragon", the scene where Bruce Lee teaches his circa 12 year old studen...

@ Clemsy, Watson... you gun post is not where I want this discussion to go. Okay. I thought it was relevant because it concerns childhood development and the relationship between "play" and deadly serious matters. But I'll drop it now, at your request. Watson, if 'determines' seems to strong a word,...

Another observation: Clemsy mentioned "playing guns" as a boy in circa 1960s metro New York. Well as a small boy I "played guns" too. But then at age 10, when I lived in a semi-rural area of an Eastern American state (not a backwater, rather part of a very cosmopolitan city's nearby countryside popu...

It should be remembered that by deity they are not referring to a God as in a "creator of the universe" or anything like that. Buddhism is a non-theistic tradition and the Buddha never denied or affirmed that God existed. Exactly right, and this is a cardinal reason - although not the only reason -...

Thoughts? One off the top of my head: Who we were as children determines who we become as adults. No it doesn't determine, it only influences. Hitler remains illustrative of human unpredictability/indeterminacy in this way as in so many others: At around age 17, when Hitler's mother died, Hitler bow...

By John Pilger: Norman Mailer once said he believed the United States, in its endless pursuit of war and domination, had entered a "pre-fascist era." Mailer seemed tentative, as if trying to warn about something even he could not quite define. "Fascism" is not right, for it invokes lazy historical p...

Well, Hugh, although I THINK I disagree with SOME of your above comments - which, to be candid, are not entirely clear or coherent to me - nonetheless I really did enjoy this bit you wrote: Like Batman, Jesus, etc., Oh how WONDERFUL, to equate Batman with Jesus! :D :lol: :wink: 8) By the way - and I...

@ Clemsy: Would Gore have invaded Afghanistan? Probably although differently. Iraq? No way. Would the economic collapse have occured? Gore and his administration would likely have been marginally less foolhardy and hubristic than Bush's, and considerably less hostile to civil liberties. However, som...