Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Next year in Jerusalem
5 days ago
Random thoughts on the blue highways.
You never know what you will find on the blue highways. Particularly when the choice at an intersection is controlled by the roll of a die. About the only rule is that highway onramps don't count as an intersection. You don't even have to roll the die. If one road looks interesting, go for it.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Ebon wrote on beliefnet:It's especially a pointless question for humans because, unlike any other species, we have learned to decouple sexuality and fertility. In prehistoric times, it was in our biological interest for a child's parents to be committed to one another to ensure the survival of the child to adulthood and thereby, the continuation of the genes. In fact, the extended family was even better (and was, historically, the most common form of childrearing) for exactly the same reason.
But that's fairly irrelevent to us now. Since we have largely divorced sex from fertility, monogamy now becomes simply one option among many. For some people, monogamy comes naturally.
This is how I see it:
Like music is the result of the various interactions of the instruments of an orchestra, the mind is the result of the interactions of the various parts of the brain.
And since a brain (as in the actual brain matter) is as different from one person to another as a face is, each mind plays to its own tune. Truman47
Do you ever wish there was a jesus, a god, a day when all that is wrong will be made right? Do you wish there was a place where children go after they leave this place in terror to a place where they can play and smile and have no knowledge of the terror we witnessed them go through.
maticaVery early in my life I came to understand that God, or Jesus, or whoever holds the keys to heaven is a cop out to avoid dealing with the real issues of the world. If you try to filter out the real Jesus from the crap taught by Christianity you find a single person working with the poor and powerless to give them help in the world they live in. Being a responsible person does not mean personally changing the world, even Jesus didn't do that, but making as much difference in the lives of others, the children especially, to release their potential is much more important than wishing God will take care of it. Available evidence is nil that he will either in this life or the next.
I think you're conflating theory with support/evidence FOR the theory. The Theory of Plate Techtonics, for example, merely claims the existence and general behavior of tectonic plates. It does NOT specify the trajectory or velocity of these plates. Of course evidence FOR the Theory will almost certainly contain such data. But that doesn't mean that the Theory itself is mathematical, nor unscientific. The Theory is the conceptual skeleton to which the quantitative data "muscles" are attached. And science necessarily includes both: the conceptual AND the quantitative. If it did not it would be pure math, not science. Without that conceptual backbone, all the data would be devoid of meaning or value. oncomintrainOne of the best and certainly most succinct discussion of the relationship of science and math I have read. Congrats OCT.
Do you ever wish there was a jesus, a god, a day when all that is wrong will be made right? Do you wish there was a place where children go after they leave this place in terror to a place where they can play and smile and have no knowledge of the terror we witnessed them go through. matica
They're clearly trying to reach Regular Guys and the universe of gender politicsIn response to this excellent post and other news including the public gang rape in New Delhi and numerous articles on women all over the world including India now being able to choose how many children they wish to have including none. Add to that the empowerment of women in being able to choose the man that will be the father of those children. And the woman's choices not only in sex, but in living, working, and self fulfillment. It may be time to consider the implications of the title.
Blood and kinship. In some contexts, the two are synonymous. We say that we share blood with someone if we are familially related to them, if we are ‘blood kin’. Sharing blood is also understood as a way to establish kinship where it does not exist from birth: the old blood brotherhood or sisterhood. Why does this work (or to look at it another way), why is it believed to work? Because our blood is the essence of our life – it is the vehicle and condensed liquid form of life force. To share that is to be kin.To share that is to be kin.
This is an astute observation because research on the motivation of soldiers during combat—well summarized by Lt. Col. Dave Grossman in his deeply insightful book On Killing (Little, Brown, 2009)—reveals that a soldier's primary motivation is not politics and ideology but devotion to his band of brothers. “Among men who are bonded together so intensely,” Grossman explains, “there is a powerful process of peer pressure in which the individual cares so deeply about his comrades and what they think about him that he would rather die than let them down.”
As a social primate species, we modulate our morals with signals from family, friends and social groups with whom we identify because in our evolutionary past those attributes helped individuals to survive and reproduce. We do not just blindly concede control to authorities; instead we follow the cues provided by our moral communities on how best to behave