Forum Post: Isaac, Rebecca and Beginnings
Posted 7 years ago on Feb. 12, 2017, 10:54 a.m. EST by agkaiser
(2552)
from Fredericksburg, TX
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
Retro note: The aborted murder of Isaac may have been a clunky metaphor to indicate the cultural shift away from human sacrifice. Then there's the story of Joseph, which we'll visit in the not to distant future, that ends with a commodities/grain broker enriching himself by the suffering of others and enslaving his own people as the cost of relieving the famine that was killing them. Now there's a deadly sort of human sacrifice on the altar of free trade.
There must have been a time when racism and ethnocentrism didn't exist. Perhaps that was when human communities were small and widespread clans of hunter gatherers, who seldom encountered one another. When God told Abraham to find a wife for Isaac among Abe's native people, genetic purity and discrimination thereby became a moral imperative associated with the foundation of Judaism, Christianity and Muslim-ism.
With such a start, are the centuries of persecutions, pogroms, ethnic cleansings, holocausts, wars, enslavements and all the rest of our self destructive behaviors really a great wonder? Many have always rationalized the evil done to "others" as God's will. And that even as they direct hatred towards other factions among the children of Abraham.
With such as our heritage, demagogues like Hitler and Trump find it easy to appeal to our worst instincts and the lowest common denominator of morality and scruples that lingers in a diseased portion of our collective consciousness.
I don't believe the Earth will suffer our malignancy much longer. If we don't change radically and soon, by rediscovering and bringing to the fore our earlier social instincts to work together for the common good of the [global] community, we will utterly destroy the social, economic, cultural and physical environment we depend on for life. Life on the Planet Earth will continue to adapt to the new environment we're establishing by our mass mentally diseased ways, but we and many other mammals won't be here to see it. That prophecy is an extrapolation from the course of human history to date.
the next attack will likely come soon.
Trump needs one to push his fascist agenda.
Yes Drumpf is looking for his own 911 to respond to - even if he has to invent one out of pure lies (or is that out of alternative facts) !
possibly just misdirection w.r.t the perpetraitors. [stet] Have you seen the latest episode of Homeland. They suggest the FBI framing a domestic dissident for a bomb they planted.
Speaking of media & it's use to mind manage the population....
Funny moment caught with Bernie on CNN https://youtu.be/BWQcxUIYUcQ (damn those live feed programs anyhow - they can make anyone look bad - damn - Why in the Hell do we continue to air these things without a reasonable live broadcast delay period so that we can do a better job of on air live editing!!!! - damn did I just say that out loud?)
Speaking of the media and mind management - do you think this magical moment would have been shared if it were Obama instead of Drumpf? https://t.co/6HdwXmRpJA
Poor Shinzo looked totally rattled by the incident.
ROFLMFAO
Maybe Trump will rebrand bullying and make it acceptable behavior like it was for ten thousand years or so. What other barbarisms and tyrants tools will the thug rehabilitate?
Drumpf's supporters already believe that bullying (by them) is totally OK
Right that! Left too much too.
Oh there is NO doubt that the Drumpf administration is relying heavily on misdirection and lies (ummm sorry alternative facts)
It's not like they have never done that before! Use of the media in using TV programming to influence the public mind "has never before in history been more blatant and numerous or immediate" ! (Ripped from the headlines - and massaged for the producer's "Employer's message") further - yes - good issues for the public get some presentation and then the crap gets the same presentation (hide the crap inside of seemingly socially responsible programming).
We also must not forget about the fact of 100's of 1,000's (1,000,000's ?) of people not being able to vote due to voter suppression.
Then we also can not forget "that" the system is rigged to go against a public popular vote as well = electoral college = districting = Not Necessarily The Will Of The People!
Hitler was basing his racial purity ideology on an erroneous foundation but he was an artist, not a scientist. Besides, genetics was not a well developed science at that time. Yes, as we say nowadays: "garbage in, garbage out."
Trump's recent immigration hiatus has some basis in counter-terrorism. People keep on confusing the real security issue at stake with Islam, Muslim-majority, race, and skin colors. The real issue is the propensity to commit terrorist acts and the skill level and training to support the acts. Wars in war-torn countries provided former warriors with combat trainings so they acquired the means to conduct terrorist acts. Think of Timothy McVeigh. He was trained as an explosives expert. His irritation by Janet Reno's armored invasion of the Davidian Compound in Waco, Texas, killing more than 70 men, women, and children who were citizens of the U.S.A. provided the end. It was all done in the name of saving the children from being sexually abused by the Davidians.
The U.S. interventions for oil, oil, oil in the countries with Islamic Muslim-majority Arab/African races with darkish skin colors inflame the peoples there so they provide the 'end' for committing terrorist acts. The war-torn nature of the countries provides the means because people have more expertise in making bombs, shooting guns, and other military training. (Means + End) × Probability(Radicalization) = Terrorist Acts.
In any case, the incidents of refugees turning into domestic terrorists in the U.S. were very few, 0 ~= Probability(Radicalization) << 1, so the complete banning of refugees is probably an overkill.
Some calculations for terrorism are: Where there's a cultural conflict, there may go a misfit. Probability(Radicalization) ~ intercultural cross sectional interface area × surface density of radicalization interaction frequency. pre-Terrorist ~ Maladjustment factor × Misfit.
The U.S. has lower Maladjustment factor than the U.K. but that advantage is vanishing due to the economic viscosity becoming higher and structural impediments to reforms imposed by the eelites: Citizens United v. FEC, purchasing of votes and political offices through soft and dark money, creating more superfluous licensing requirements for occupations, resisting changes affecting the currently vested interests, selling of influence and public policy votes to patrons worldwide, etc.
The U.S. is not alone on this dire road to disaster - other countries where the silencing of political oppositions is routinely practiced will blow up spectacularly someday - it's a basic law of Nature, pent-up discontents will surely build until all restraints are overcome because all things change with time and not making the conforming changes creates stresses for the future, one day to burst forth catastrophically.
The focus of preventing terrorism should be on the stringency of the vetting process. There are ways to screen out fanatics because they exhibit distinctive autocratic/authoritarian traits. The Israeli Airline El Al has already screened out in the short term potential terrorists for many decades with success.
I doubt very much your premise that there was ever "a time when racism and ethnocentrism didn't exist." Even within a small clan with multiple women mating with the same father such as Abraham, there would still be discriminations based on the social rank of the mother of a subfamily. For example, Rebecca's son Isaac was favored over Ismael who was born of a slave servant to Rebecca.
As for how silly people's attachment to genetic "purity" truly is, let me show you my ancestral line of descent: sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, ... , sex, sex, me. How can anyone honestly say that amongst these countless matings that there was no so-called impurity at all?
I do know from Genetics that one must use inbreeding in order to approach genetic purity. We must mate mothers to sons, fathers to daughters, brothers to sisters, etc. and eliminate from reproduction the defective ones without the desirable trait. Mankind had apparently tried that before as in the story of Lot and his daughters due to isolation after fire and brimstones(volcanic eruption? creating a population bottleneck from inbreeding) having destroyed sin cities. Most populations invented numerous taboos to prohibit the horrible results of inbreeding from occurring. It's absolutely no accident that we use terms such as incestuous, inbreds, and motherfuckers as insults.
Even the genetic purity achieved finally at great human costs makes the purebreds very vulnerable to die-offs(unfortunately, modern-day humans are already relatively close to being purebreds doing near-incests, perhaps due to the Toba supervolcanic eruption about 75000 years ago bringing about a global environmental catastrophe which we may trigger again if our Gigatons of nuclear weapons[or a new "Monsanto unit-731" product for culling long-pig infestations] are unleashed so we may even lose our genetic "brothers" and "sisters" to mate with). We can probably guess that genetic purity is a rather poor evolutionary strategy by examining the prevalence in animals of sexual or asexual reproduction because asexual reproduction preserves genetic purity of the progenitor in the offspring.
The data show that the ancestral line of descent: sex, sex, sex, sex, sex, ..., has been the overwhelmingly favorite winning reproductive strategy. I suspect that very few human beings can claim that they have ever deviated from this in eons and reproduced asexually such as by budding. Racial discrimination stemmed mostly from a time of megalomaniacal ignorance. I suspect that signs of health play an important role in mate selection and reproductive success because being healthy equates rather well to being beautiful. Health's pleasurable. So is sex.
that time was in the hundreds of thousands of years of the successful hunter gatherer culture that preceeded the [up to] ten thousand years of our failing civilization.
But that's hardly the point of the essay.
"Life on the Planet Earth will continue to adapt to the new environment we're establishing by our mass mentally diseased ways, but we and many other mammals won't be here to see it. That prophecy is an extrapolation from the course of human history to date."
That's all there is, Folks!