[MD] gav'n'me

[John Carl]

  All places of worship are symbols
       of the One Beloved.
  Bow your head when you see a temple,
        and salute when you see a mosque.
  When the flowers of the church, mosque and
        temple gather together,
   Spring will blossom forth
        in Your garden, O Lord.
            Darshan Singh


Man, there's so much to reply to and think about, I'm glad I'm going to see
my girls for the weekend and thus won't have to face the burden of guilt for
pouring more words down y'all's throats.

I lurked for long whiles here;  times back; I'd be tempted to chime in with
gav and say how much I agreed with him.  But I'd check myself because how
quality is that?  Just chirping away, I agree.... I agree... I agree....
 applauses galore...

get's boring, it does.

I hate being boring.

Marsha:  Marsha hates Christian Religion and the Bible, had it crammed down
her throat too much already, and sees it as the bane of humanity's
existence.

Marsha, if I could kindly direct your attention to the Revelation of Christ
to John, His favorite disciple, on the island of Patmos, at the end of
John's life, you'd see that He agrees with you completely and so do I.

Religion in America has become the seat of the devil.  Those who despise it
are doing God's will.  Those who love it are doing Satan's.  That's my story
and I'm sticking too it.

Till somebody comes up with a better one, that is.

I discovered Deep Ecology at Sierra College under George Sessions in 1981,
Rocklin Campus, but that's redundant because the Nevada County Campus hadn't
even been dreamt yet.  Neither had the success of the pro football team, SF
49ers but that was the first year they used the Rocklin Campus AND the first
year they went to the super bowl.  It would have been cool, I guess, to say
that I hung around practices and watched the young rookie Joe Montana huddle
with the unknown new coach, Bill Walsh, and try and figure out what they
were saying to one another, but it wouldn't be true.  I paid no attention at
all.  I was diverted by philosophy.

Always had been, which is probably why Sessions took to me.  I probably
stood out prominently in the usual mix of californicatin' jr. college
jock-heads and I got a lot of attention from George in his Logic class.  I
mostly just listened, having as my main experience the cloisters of SdA
boarding school where  philosophical speculation about the nature of
existence wasn't much encouraged, if even allowed.

He noticed me enough to  recommended me to take his "special" course -
something he offered out of the goodness of his heart and the dreams of his
soul, even though he couldn't get enough students to attend to make it pay
his salary:  " Rationality, Mysticism and the Environment ";  even today
just the title sends shivers up my spine.  It was where I turned away from
dreams of becoming a lawyer, to dreams of becoming a hippy.

Also where I was introduced to a little pink paperback with a wrench on it.
 Something about Zen... and The monkey wrench gang was also assigned, the
Blessed Abbey found.

George Sessions was obviously into fixing things.

 I became a convert then, to a way of thinking that put me where I am today
- an immense success.  I aimed at being a hippy, and here I am.

I was introduced to a lot of books and readings that most people never heard
of, Theodore Roszak, Murray Bookchin, Earnest Callenbach, Gary Snyder,
Fritjof Capra...

David Eherenfeld.

Eherenfeld, David.  The Arrogance of Humanism, New Yourk: Oxford, 1978.

Humanism is the "religion of humanity", a supreme belief in our ability to
rearrange the world of Nature and engineer our own future any way we see
fit.  Ehrenfeld, and ecologist, dissects the false assumptions of humanism
and the dangerous actions taken by the technocratic elite.  He calls for a
union of emotion and reason and in his concluding chapter, "Beyond
Humanism," he makes tentative suggestions for "enduring somehow the
unavoidable sadness."


It was reading Eherenfeld for Logic class that did more than anything to
confirm the rightness of Deep Ecology - the fact that we derive who we are
from a natural matrix rather than a virtual one.  Or we should, anyway.

That Nature is our source of values;  therefore applying our values to Her
was a serious error in philosophical thinking.  And a religious blasphemy,
in any religion.

 Anthropocentrism and the Environmental movement was George's main thesis.
 Pirsig points this out, but doesn't dwell adequately, imo, but Royce makes
it his theme.  The individual is the product of the community.  The
community includes all of evolutionary creation.

And if you, like Marsha, think "evolutionary creation" is a contradiction in
terms, then you're thinking too narrowly.  Gotta expand a little sometimes.


Like gav.

My hero.

And here is where we can all meet, as gav my hero points out.  The basic
ethics of life are found in man's natural relations with Nature.  The fact
that man can have unnatural relations with Nature is an interesting
philosophical point, to be debated for some time, I'm sure.

But the fact that he oughtn't, should be agreed upon by all:

Christian and Atheist

Muslim and Jew,

Buddhist and Hindu

Rastafarian too.