[MD] Back to the last static latch

[khaled Alkotob]

Platt

You bring up some valid points but fail to see their cause. I wish I had
the mastery of the language to answer you properly, I'll leave that to
Arlo.

Here are a few points:

1. You keep quoting Lila. Personally I think Pirsig should have quit at
ZMM while he was still ahead. He started Lila with good intentions
then......

2. Fundamentalism, Islam Judaism or Christianity comes about not as a
response to eternal influences but rather as a response to internal ones.
Muslim fundamentalism is not in response to the west but rather modern
Islam that is trying to emerge in the East. Fundamental Christianity in
the US is a knee jerk reaction to The Deism of the founding fathers of
this country and the constitution itself.
( recommended reading here is Karen Armstrong's 1) the History of God 2)
the battle for God.

3. As to the latest topic Du Jour, immigration, a lot has to be done. As
to the audacity of going to a demonstration brandishing the flag of
another country. Well the simplest way to put it is that the worth of
being an American has been devalued in the eyes of the citizens and the
eyes of the world.
I am not saying it's right. Hey if you love that flag and that country so
much why don't you go back there? that's my attitude. But the fact that
we have lost our moral compass due to our own shortsightedness is the
encouragement we are giving others to challenge us on our own soil.

yes you can say that Bin Ladden has paved the way for those foreign flags
to be waived in our faces on our soil.

Have a good day

Khaled



On Sat, 08 Apr 2006 17:25:09 -0400 "Platt Holden" <pholden at davtv.com>
writes:
> To All:
> 
> Leniency for the lawlessness in France and on the borders of the 
> U.S. 
> are symptomatic of a breakdown of the social order in West, not to 
> mention the inability of the civilized world to mount a coordinated 
> defense against aggression from fundamentalist factions in the 
> Middle 
> East.
> 
> Pirsig blames this sad state of affairs on a "twentieth century 
> collapse of morals," brought about by an objective, scientific view 
> that has had a lethal defect:
> 
> "The defect is that subject-object science has no provision for 
> morals. 
> Subject-object science is only concerned with facts. Morals have no 
> objective reality. You can look through a microscope or telescope or 
> 
> oscilloscope for the rest of your life and you will never find a 
> single 
> moral. There aren't any there. They are all in your head. They exist 
> 
> only in your imagination." (Lila, 22)
> 
> In effect, the reigning SOM mindset says of everyone that "no matter 
> 
> how hard he tried, no matter how hard he worked, his whole life is 
> that 
> of an animal that lives and thinks like any other animal. He could 
> invent moral goals for himself, but they are just artificial 
> inventions." (Lila, 22)
> 
> With morality up for grabs by any individual or group who wishes to 
> invent them, it's little wonder than French students riot over the 
> lack 
> of a guaranteed job, Congress considers granting amnesty to law 
> breakers, and a majority in the West can’t agree to impose sanctions 
> on 
> a nation  that defines itself as a deadly enemy. 
> 
> In the absence of a moral framework, the watchword among 
> intellectuals 
> today is "tolerance" of all things, great and small. The result? 
> Pirsig 
> explains:
> 
> "It was like watching the spider waiting while the wasp gets ready 
> to 
> attack it. The spider can leave any time to save its life but it 
> doesn't do so. It just waits there, paralyzed by some internal 
> pattern 
> of responses that make it unable to recognize its own danger. The 
> wasp 
> plants its eggs in the spiders body and the spider lives on while 
> the 
> wasp larvae slowly eat it and destroy it.
> 
> "Phaedrus thought that a Metaphysics of Quality could be a 
> replacement 
> for the paralyzing intellectual system that is allowing all this 
> destruction to go unchecked. The paralysis of America is a paralysis 
> of 
> moral patterns. Morals can't function normally because morals have 
> been 
> declared intellectually illegal by the subject-object metaphysics 
> that 
> dominates present social thought. These subject-object patterns were 
> 
> never designed for the job of governing society. They're not doing 
> it. 
> When they're put in the position of controlling society, of setting 
> moral standards and declaring values, and when they then declare 
> that 
> there are no values and no morals, the result isn't progress. The 
> result is social catastrophe." (Lila, 24)
> 
> With social catastrophe becoming increasingly evident, it was not 
> surprising to read the following headline in my local paper:
> 
> "College campuses see religious resurgence," followed by the 
> subhead, 
> "Oxford theologian Alister McGrath stresses that education affects 
> both 
> head and heart and this it is unwise to create two zones on campus - 
> on 
> spiritual and one academic." (A plea to return to campuses of the 
> Victorian era when there was no split between the spiritual and 
> academic zones.)
> 
> Among other things in the subsequent article was this observation:
> 
> "These days, even the most skeptical of scholars admit that 
> traditional 
> forms of religion are on the rise and that millions of spiritually 
> hungry students are questioning the chilling, strictly rational 
> creeds 
> of secular modernity. Faith is making a comeback and the high 
> priests 
> of mainstream academia cannot understand why."
> 
> They cannot understand why because they haven't read "Lila" 
> 
> "The end of the twentieth century in America seems to be an 
> intellectual, social, arid economic rust-belt, a whole society that 
> has 
> given up on Dynamic improvement and is slowly trying to slip back to 
> 
> Victorianism, the last static ratchet-latch." (Lila, 24)
> 
> "Faith of our fathers (is) living still, in spite of dungeon, fire 
> and 
> sword," and in spite of -- or because of -- the spiritual wasteland 
> of  
> scientific materialism that views you and me as no more than 
> animals.
> 
> What did you expect?
> 
> Platt
>