Mankind

[LightAngel]

All life is sacred, or no life is sacred. It is only the human race that discusses the rights and the wrongs, the good and the bad, the moral and the immoral - the just an the unjust. 

It is the history of humankind that has tried to make things black and white, trying to conjure up order out of chaos, trying to invent rules where there aren't any.

The dynamic balance of nature is something that we are all subjugated to, no matter how much the environmentalists are so "worried about the planet". If there is anything where the concern really is - it is for the future of the "human race", not the planet. 

Nature has this wonderful way of balancing itself out - something dies in order for something else to live, something gains advantage over another thing - but all of this is not permanent - what is up will be down and what is down will be up. 

Humans have choices that most other animals don't - and like any other thing - when given a choice - things can go either way. 

Give a man a hammer - and he will build a house. Give another man a hammer - and he'll smack the first one over the head with it. 
Don't give a man a hammer at all? Yes, that’s an option too. However, who has the authority, and I mean - really has authority to bestow or withhold man's freedoms to him or from him, respectively?

It is not man that has that authority.

There is one "intermediate agent of balance" that equalizes all - and that is nature.

However, it is only man that has the audacity and arrogance to raise himself above nature and think that he can do better, that there is a degree of authority over nature that he has that is higher than that of any other species. But still, in this capacity also - he is natural. 

All that man has - is more options - but in the whole of nature he is of no more worth than the single bacterium on a speck of dust.

 

[XenoFish]

Mankind is a barely domesticated animal with a birth defect called consciousness. 

[+Pettytalk]

Is not man a product of Nature? Man's nature is what it is, as fashioned by mother nature herself, choices or no choices! Man is precisely what Nature intended, if Nature rules the universe, either by chaos or order, whichever it may seem to be.

[Jodie.Lynne]

3 hours ago, LightAngel said:

All life is sacred, or no life is sacred.

That is a rather absolute statement, and I very cautious when presented with an either/or proposition.

QUESTION: if all life is sacred, including animals, plants, microbes and viruses, is it a sacrilege to eat, or to eliminate dangerous pathogens?

 

And the use of the term 'sacred', could you explain what you are referring to when using that word?

Quote

 

Definition of sacred

1a : dedicated or set apart for the service or worship of a deity a tree sacred to the gods

b : devoted exclusively to one service or use (as of a person or purpose) a fund sacred to charity

2a : worthy of religious veneration : holy

b : entitled to reverence and respect

3 : of or relating to religion : not secular or profane sacred music

4 archaic : accursed

5a : unassailable, inviolable

b : highly valued and important a sacred responsibility

 

 

[Piney]

26 minutes ago, Jodie.Lynne said:

 dangerous pathogens?

Most of them came from us doing the wrong thing or failing to do the right one. Hence the term "zoonotic". North America didn't have any dangerous pathogens until the Europeans brought them over because they keep animals in close quarters and didn't try to solve a rat or human waste problem.

So you can consider them "caused by man's stupidity" Not a "product of nature".  

 

[LightAngel]

With the word "sacred", I refer to sanctity in either a religious or moral sense (not necessarily one and the same thing). Something that perhaps I should have clarified is that also what is "sacred" and what is "sacrilegious" are also attributes administered by man.

In that sense - if all life is sacred - it is sacrilegious to eliminate dangerous viruses - and here it is quite obvious who it is that decides, or better to say has the arrogance to decide, what is "dangerous and for whom". 

In this sense, our choice to take e.g. antibiotics to cure ourselves of a disease that would otherwise kill us - is our advantage over bacteria. Many things that we do give us an advantage. However, an advantage has nothing to do with right and wrong or good and bad. Such is nature - survival of one comes at the expense of another. 

If no life is sacred and all life is sacred - the purpose of sanctity itself is defeated, and then at least perhaps we can discuss all life on equal footing without discrimination and hypocrisy.

My main point here is to dethrone man from a position where he has no rule at all - the throne of nature. 

 

[Jodie.Lynne]

3 minutes ago, Piney said:

Most of them came from us doing the wrong thing or failing to do the right one. Hence the term "zoonotic". North America didn't have any dangerous pathogens until the Europeans brought them over because they keep animals in close quarters and didn't try to solve a rat or human waste problem.

So you can consider them "caused by man's stupidity" Not a "product of nature".  

 

Agreed, but to be fair, those Europeans had no concept of pathogens. True, they knew about diseases, but most had no idea how those diseases spread.

[Jodie.Lynne]

6 minutes ago, LightAngel said:

My main point here is to dethrone man from a position where he has no rule at all - the throne of nature. 

And your solution to this is.... what?

[XenoFish]

By default nothing is sacred, sacredness is a human concept, a value. Every dies. 

[XenoFish]

7 minutes ago, Piney said:

So you can consider them "caused by man's stupidity" Not a "product of nature".  

Eh, 50/50. It existed, We allowed it to grow. 

[Piney]

20 minutes ago, Jodie.Lynne said:

And your solution to this is.... what?

Build a ecosystem that works for us. Not try to repair the one that's damaged beyond. 

[LightAngel]

24 minutes ago, Jodie.Lynne said:

And your solution to this is.... what?

 

The solution to this is that every man should find his own solution.

The solution to this and pretty much every problem that man has, has had or will ever have - is an individual one.

And this is precisely why "global" solutions and/or policies always fail as much as they succeed. I'm not saying that they should be done away with - they provide a good foundation - but the final push towards any viable solution is the work that is every man's own burden and his alone. 

[Jodie.Lynne]

5 minutes ago, LightAngel said:

The solution to this is that every man should find his own solution.

That is a great non-answer, that leaves the field open for you to condemn or condone the actions of others if their 'solution' varies from yours.

Not be combative or hostile, but it seems as though you are content to merely point out the problem, without outlining any solutions.

 

But to get back on point... Do you consider all life to be sacred, or no life to be sacred?

Did you ingest food today? Was it animal or vegetable? Weren't the lives of those plants and animals sacred?

[XenoFish]

12 minutes ago, LightAngel said:

The solution to this is that every man should find his own solution.

Cool. Let's wipe out humanity and let nature take back over.

[DebDandelion]

4 hours ago, LightAngel said:

All life is sacred, or no life is sacred. It is only the human race that discusses the rights and the wrongs, the good and the bad, the moral and the immoral - the just an the unjust. 

It is the history of humankind that has tried to make things black and white, trying to conjure up order out of chaos, trying to invent rules where there aren't any.

The dynamic balance of nature is something that we are all subjugated to, no matter how much the environmentalists are so "worried about the planet". If there is anything where the concern really is - it is for the future of the "human race", not the planet. 

Nature has this wonderful way of balancing itself out - something dies in order for something else to live, something gains advantage over another thing - but all of this is not permanent - what is up will be down and what is down will be up. 

Humans have choices that most other animals don't - and like any other thing - when given a choice - things can go either way. 

Give a man a hammer - and he will build a house. Give another man a hammer - and he'll smack the first one over the head with it. 
Don't give a man a hammer at all? Yes, that’s an option too. However, who has the authority, and I mean - really has authority to bestow or withhold man's freedoms to him or from him, respectively?

It is not man that has that authority.

There is one "intermediate agent of balance" that equalizes all - and that is nature.

However, it is only man that has the audacity and arrogance to raise himself above nature and think that he can do better, that there is a degree of authority over nature that he has that is higher than that of any other species. But still, in this capacity also - he is natural. 

All that man has - is more options - but in the whole of nature he is of no more worth than the single bacterium on a speck of dust.

 

We need an applause and take a bow button. We'll said

[DebDandelion]

44 minutes ago, XenoFish said:

By default nothing is sacred, sacredness is a human concept, a value. Every dies. 

True

[LightAngel]

2 minutes ago, DebDandelion said:

We need an applause and take a bow button. We'll said

 

I'm glad you got my point! 

But I don't need any applause.

[Piney]

1 hour ago, LightAngel said:

My main point here is to dethrone man from a position where he has no rule at all - the throne of nature. 

[Piney]

20 minutes ago, XenoFish said:

Cool. Let's wipe out humanity and let nature take back over.

Abraham's 3 dysfunctional children are already working on that. 

[Piney]

23 minutes ago, Jodie.Lynne said:

Did you ingest food today? Was it animal or vegetable? Weren't the lives of those plants and animals sacred?

In the Algonquian, Japanese and Baltic beliefs cooking is a sacred process and respect must be shown to the life you need to take to survive.

That's why traditional Natives can't wrap their heads around vegans. Whether it's animal or a plant you are still taking a life. 

[Tatetopa]

5 hours ago, LightAngel said:

All that man has - is more options - but in the whole of nature he is of no more worth than the single bacterium on a speck of dust.

 

Do we, or is that another of your  illusions?  Are we just mobile housing and distribution systems driven by the 100 trillion microbial cells that we transport in our gut and various other places?  We have ensured their global habitat and left some in frozen safe deposit on the glacial fields of Antarctica and the top of Mt. Everest, waiting for the thaw.  We have even shot some into space to begin a long slow journey to parts unknown, a little insurance for planetary cessation.   Is it bacteria that truly have the most unrealized potential and the most options?  Beats me.

I still can't remember whether worth is in metric or English units and if you multiply by 17 then add pi to get sacreds or do you add first them multiply?

 

[+Pettytalk]

On 5/26/2019 at 11:11 AM, Tatetopa said:

I still can't remember whether worth is in metric or English units and if you multiply by 17 then add pi to get sacreds or do you add first them multiply?

Why 17 and not 5 or 10? As worth is an American unit, although no longer in use since 1997.

 

[LightAngel]

On 26.5.2019 at 8:11 PM, Tatetopa said:

Do we, or is that another of your  illusions?  Are we just mobile housing and distribution systems driven by the 100 trillion microbial cells that we transport in our gut and various other places?  We have ensured their global habitat and left some in frozen safe deposit on the glacial fields of Antarctica and the top of Mt. Everest, waiting for the thaw.  We have even shot some into space to begin a long slow journey to parts unknown, a little insurance for planetary cessation.   Is it bacteria that truly have the most unrealized potential and the most options?  Beats me.

 

 

I would say that man, in thinking that because he has more options - he has more control over nature (or himself, for that matter), is in a state of delusion rather than dealing with illusions.

With that said, I'd conclude that man spends far more time making sense out of life as opposed to just living it. 

It is from there that most woes of mankind sprout. 

[+Pettytalk]

I cannot understand why people keep making mankind an outside adversary to mother Nature. To believe that man is not (collectively) a product of nature is a problem. And the solution to this problem is to place mankind back where we belong, which is in the bosom of our mother, Nature.

And what is this foolish talk about feeling guilty for us to eat other lifeforms? Why, for some humans even cannibalism is natural, and not a violation against mother nature. Just about all irreligious creatures have no qualms about taking other life to sustain their own. It's obviously a selfish physical existence that Mother Nature intended for all living creatures.

“The Key to Survival.”

African proverb?

"Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death. It doesn't matter whether you're a lion or gazelle. When the sun comes up, you'd better be running."  

[+and-then]

On 5/26/2019 at 11:39 AM, Piney said:

Abraham's 3 dysfunctional children are already working on that. 

I read the "Cliff's notes"  they fail