Personal Black Holes

Disclaimer:
This is my first attempt to use the new version of Dragonspeak version 11.0 on this blog.  If there appears to be some level of frustration in my style or content, this may be the reason!  :-)

It occurred to me in reading about the story of Joseph in Genesis that faith in God is not passed on from generation to de/generation.  Joseph's brothers appeared to be suffering from a lack of purpose or boredom.  They did manage to get in trouble and embarrass or endanger their father on a number of occasions.  They certainly had no sense of mission.

It would appear that only Joseph maintained the faith of his 3 progenitors.  In fact if anything he went beyond both Jacob and Isaac and hence was promoted to a position of messianic proportions.

The family traditions were of no value to him once he had been sold into slavery; in fact, his first son by his first Egyptian wife was named Manasseh, which is very much like the word for  "Forget."
In fact he said: "It is because God has made me forget all my trouble and all my fathers household."

Troubles indeed!

This is the basic problem of materialism, which is the only thing we inherit from our childhood in the context of what Flannery O'Connor called, "practical atheism."

To be childish generally exhibits cruelty, and selfishness, not kindness or considering others except to gain more for ourselves.  To be infantile takes this many degrees further.

All this in the pursuit of the same kind of happiness that one experiences after a fine meal.

If this continues, as it often does, one comes to routinely exalt unhappiness, witness persecution as entertainment, and to accept or love  injustices even to the point of exalting criminality. Irony replaces justice as the ultimate goal.  Entertainment value is one of the few values to survive and quickly becomes an absolute, as we see in the West.  Neil Postman points this out quite well especially in regards to television news.

This is generally true of late-term civilizations and family progression by entropy.

I don't think anyone can argue honestly that mankind does not base its solutions to its problems on selfishness, so-called enlightened self-interest. Which is different from infantilism only by degree and by the amount of denial involved.  This is reinforced by the defense mechanisms of intellectualization and rationalization, as I have mentioned several times before.

This of course makes death necessary--I cannot imagine colonizing the entire universe with powerful infants.

Even biologically we seem to be mostly in darkness.  The apples of our eyes turn out to be actually dual vortices that suck in light while 99% of our bodies remain in darkness much more absolute than the darkest night.  There is always the fantasy–possibility that we can give out light, like Superman or Moses, but the eye and the ear are "hunter-gatherers."  We generally resort to artificial light which gives us more light to work with, that is to suck in more energy but above all more information.  How we organize this information is equally important as to how we organize this energy.

It is impossible for man to "shine," except in the sense that the moon does. The "apple" is always black even in the brightest light. While we are experts at combustion and by it we subsist, it generally only produces heat and chemicals and breakdown products thereof.  Like the princple of information theory,there has to be not just disorganized energy but actual information input from the outside in order to generate secondary information that is of any value to the organism.

The lesser from the greater, as far as physics goes.

We do utilize various shields from the greater; some of these are physical/normal limitations; but many are chosen. Men's traditions, for example, shield us from our own physical selfishness and so we play a part in creating and sustaining them--and pity the person who lodges or creates too far afield from them... he may be persecuted of course--but more likely he will find himself beyond the pale of the common understandings and compromises by which culture operates.  One may observe, as many have, that cultural understandings take precedence over "raw truth" in almost all instances.  That reminds me of the conclusion of "The War Prayer" in which the Messenger is dismissed because "What he said made no sense." Thus the result is UNstudied ignorance.

And materialism.  Whenever you hear the word "spiritual," in contemporary usage be alert that the usage is only to exalt the speaker him or herself --because we have maxed out the word "gusto!" So what else is left, eh?

Do we not know that or routines and acceptance of the lot of others and the implied impotency of "God," are two of the meanest  and oldest and most fragile threads in the universe?  And that they break every time; and in short order.  We do not need the clip joint of the Fates.