what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020

Thursday, May 26, 2022

an interesting political map

Dave Pollard has a terrific discussion here which puts our current ills in a great perspective 

A lot of people who profess to be atheists or pantheists in their youth, tend to adopt religions when they get older. More than anything else, this seems due to their running out of capacity for feeling responsible for all the world’s ills. Deciding to believe in some higher power and authority — a god, a guru, a Gaia — to some extent gets you off the hook.

Most of my friends throughout my life have been salvationists of one stripe or another (right half of the chart above), and the lion’s share of them have been what I would call Humanists — people who, in wikipedia’s words have a “philosophical stance that emphasizes the individual and social potential and agency of human beings”. They believe that humans can and must exert social and ethical responsibility for our personal and collective actions, and the stewardship of the entire planet. More importantly, they believe, mostly, in the myth of progress, and that there is almost nothing that humans cannot accomplish if we set our minds to it.

This can, of course, be exhausting, especially when things are going particularly badly for the human experiment, as they are now.

Religions offer the comforts of tradition, rigour, continuity and ritual, all salves for the exhausted and disenchanted. 

https://howtosavetheworld.ca/images/The-New-Political-Map-2015.png


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