The action of taking legal possession of assets until a debt has been paid or other claims have been met.
The action of taking forcible possession of something; confiscation.
Okay, maybe this doesn’t quite count as sequestration but I do want my subscribers to know that for the last couple of weeks and for the foreseeable future I will be drowning in work. If I am not commenting on your blogs or reading, I want you to know that it is not because I don’t want to. I am forcing myself into a 14 hour work day to get through a large project. It makes me sad that this imbalance needs to be but I see no way around it right now.
I hope that you all continue to learn and live well. I’ll be here now and then.
I don't know, man. I'm starting to believe strangers on the corner would treat me better than my "family".
June 15, 2013 (my son just turned two on the 14th), I got into an argument with - wait, let me start from the beginning...
I'm staying with a relative long enough to get back on my feet. I made it clear to this relative that I'm not planning on staying here too much longer - seeing as I hate it here.
There is no rule in atheism about lying. There is a common feeling that we provide for ourselves as best we can. If you have to lie a bit for a month or two nobody will blame you if it keeps you housed and fed. We’ve all had to lie to get through for the same reasons. No, you should not have to and I’m not telling you that it is the best course of action. I’m saying that nobody will blame you. You’ve already walked away from them mentally… for what they do and are.
Do what is necessary to get to the next place, the next point. I wouldn’t look back either. Do what it takes to go… sometimes that means pretending. I feel for you. Survival requires dishonesty in your case it would seem. You already know you are alone. Nobody protects your child but you.
I would happily donate to a paypal account to help you get to the next place. I do not know why you are getting no positive reaction to your job search, but I know it happens. In my life I have found that this is the situation type where you have to be the angel despite what others are doing. Endure, suffer, get by… not what you deserve, but what must be done to get beyond it. I wish you much fortune. Know that there are people in the world that do not want you to suffer. Where you are now is not the only place… there are better places.
If there are other atheists and humanists who read this and do not want to donate a few dollars to help, I’d like to know why…
Recently, I did post a youtube video of our cousins having one of those moments of dispute resolution or is it ending group tension. There is this post here that presents some interesting studies of what goes on in the bonobo kingdom.
The author has very interesting views on the human race. For example he writes
Throughout these little narratives, we enjoy looking back smugly at capitalized Nature and in particular the other primates—the chimpanzees, the gorillas, the orangutans—to marvel at the superiority of our evolutionary state and the hideous detritus we left behind on our way upward.
If there is anything that should make you think about the grand spectrum of human sexuality it is the animal kingdom. Here is a tidy summation of that... enjoy
Perhaps you’ve heard of the new movie called ‘The Purge’. Spoiler alert, I’m going to talk about it.
NOTE: Contains minor additions from the original post.
It kind of looks like a scary movie. If that’s what you’re looking for, don’t look here. As a scary movie it is mediocre at best. It’s not an action movie either but it does combine elements of both. Check the trailer before we move on.
Rather than have the computer involved with communism and war undertones to the plot, The Purge movie uses humans as the origination and executors of the purge method. Rather than explore technology or politics this new movies explores morality.
Yep, I said that. It is a morality tale with a bit of action and scary bits and a couple of parts that had people in the audience speaking out loud.
In the movie is it already widely accepted that once per year for 12 hours there are no laws. This seems to be largely used to rid the country of those who are not productive contributing citizens – mostly poor and homeless folk. It relies on the ‘idea’ that most people seem destined to be psychotic murderers if there is no law against them being so. You’ll remember this kind of theme from theists that think atheists who do not believe in god have no morality so they should be okay with murder and eating babies and such.
In the movie, we follow a four member family. The father is a successful salesman for lock down security systems to protect ‘good’ people during the Purge night. The law says that during the Purge there is no law, all crime is legal. The family is conflicted over whether this is right. Apparently there is a lot of murder on this annual Purge. One by one each family member makes up their own mind whether or not the Purge is morally good or not. This leads to the introduction of killers…. dun dun duuunnnnn
What I’m writing about is that the movie very realistically portrays morally good action (doing the right thing) as a natural and human thing to do. This further implies that those who don’t are psychotic or vengeful and animal like. What the audience is left thinking is that if these people are like that on the annual Purge, why would you like them the other 364 days of the year?
Let me translate that for you: If your god and his laws are the only thing that stop you from killing and raping then you are most likely a psycho or lunatic and can you just get the hell away from me please, don’t ever come back here again.
Above, I mentioned that each of the family members concludes that the Purge is not morally good and that they did so individually, mostly as a result of direct exposure to raw aggression and violence. This leaves the thinking viewer understanding that good morality comes from within our brains, not from an external source.
To me, this gives the movie a deeper meaning. From this we can imagine how morality came to be common among humans. We can also see that not only did violence, rage, and murder spawn morally good behavior and thinking, it also was the impetus for those same morally good people to act in depraved ways. They seemed to almost enjoy the violence required to punish those murdering psychos. This, in effect, justifies the core values in the justification for the Purge in the first place. I find it hard to take a moral stand on either side of the Purge justification without deep reflection on many things.
We need to consider things like the death penalty, cruelty to non-humans, cruelty to those we dehumanize, violence, the cost of peace and safety and many other things. Are we justified in killing murderers? Is violence an answer to anything except violence?
It is ridiculous to say that religion is a "choose my choice"undertaking for women. Religion is used to control our relationships, our bodies, our minds and our voices. Religion impacts our rights and our freedoms. Religion is POLITICAL.
Religion sees women and "women's issues" in very particular ways which are political, which disadvantage us legally, socially, economically, physically and mentally. You cannot choose your choice to believe the "good parts"of religion whilst ignoring the widespread oppression of women which is done in the name of "god".
As an equalist, I support this idea and criticism of religion both in general and specifically in regard to the Abrahamic religions.
WrongSide has some good posts, if you are not familiar with her blog. YMMV
I know I keep at this topic almost relentlessly and I seem to have to draw it out as I think about it. Today’s thought is brought to you by our cousins.
If human consciousness is to have special meaning, which I do not ascribe to it, we should see some differences between human apes and all other animals. Clearly humans and elephants are not going to be similar in any physical way. Likewise, this is so with most other animals. What are the ways that we are similar though?
Mammals
same body plan for many of us
social creatures
wake/sleep cycles
…. well, in fact we seem to have quite a few things in common even though we humans don’t think of things that way very often
When we look at animals that save other animals we see a trend in their behavior. They act in altruistic ways. They react to danger, not out of loyalty to the endangered being, but from some ethical nature. Their reaction requires thought, some level of planning, free will to execute the plan, and the cognitive ability to adapt the plan to achieve a goal.
I can use my dog as an example. He does not like to see animals or people fight. In the dog park, if two dogs face off he will run fast as he can to get in between them and use just enough force to prevent the fight. This has so far only required physical presence and a dominant behavior. He has never attacked any being. He uses minimal action to achieve a goal of his own making…. not rage or fury, but minimal means to achieve the goal.
If dogs and other animals show compassion, altruism, thought, planning, ethics, free will … what is left for us to explain with our big brains?
Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness (2012)
The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states. Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors. Consequently, the weight of evidence indicates that humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. Non-human animals, including all mammals and birds, and many other creatures, including octopuses, also possess these neurological substrates.
Whatever consciousness is, humans are not alone in possessing it.
If I’m right, whatever thoughts are, humans are not alone in possessing them.
If I’m right, whatever morality is, humans are not alone in possessing it.
There are many more videos of animals exhibiting ethical behavior that requires thought and planning etc.
So what is it then that we do with this big brain we have? It would appear that pre-modern humans were conscious and intelligent beings, with ethics and free will. .. the very things which we think make us special. We do not attribute animals with a soul nor think they have some external cause making it look like they think thoughts at all, yet they do think and plan and choose to execute, and modify the plan during execution, to achieve a chosen goal. This flies in the face of Sam Harris’ statements about we humans having no free will. It flies in the face of those claiming ethics come from a deity. It flies in the face of those thinking humans are a special species regarding cognition.
I suggest here that whatever is true for humans regarding consciousness and cognition must also be true for the animal world. The thought that we have a controlling soul is hubris in this light. Deductively then, we can reason that cognition and consciousness is an emergent property of the animal brain.
Do you have any thoughts on this? I would love to know them.
No, this is not an award. It’s not a game show. It’s not a brain exercise game.
It’s just a challenge that I present to you, dear readers.
The Thinker
We all know how to think. Many of us have some idea of what we think a thought is. I’m wanting to hear from a variety of folk about how this challenge turned out for them. Your participation is most appreciated.
We think of many things. We imagine many things. We solve problems every day.
The Challenge:
Think of something that is in NO WAY related to anything that you know about, have read about, have heard about, have seen etc. This thought has to be something completely unrelated to anything that has every happened in your life or lifetime. It can in no way be related to any of your memories.
