thinkforpleasure.com

_____I’ve had two complaints about my use of logic.  See the first comment for one, but the other was directly verbal, and, in a sense, was right.

_____Logic requires three points: IF and IF, THEN.  I realized that I had concatenated the two IFs’.

_____Logically speaking, IF our scientists tested indigenous peoples consistently for their understanding of the existence of god, (and the scientists always inadvertently did), and IF these indigenous peoples consistently demonstrated an understanding of the existence of god, (and the indigenous peoples always did), THEN we must understand the existence of god.  It seems to me pretty cut and dried.

_____This does, however, not mean that any particular understanding of god is right.  It is and will always be impossible for humanity to understand what god is.  As scientists, we only need to understand that god exists, and we can leave what god consists of to the religionists.

_____Many many years ago Isaac Newton observed an apple falling to the ground. Being an independent and free thinker, he thought about it. He concluded that he did not know what caused the apple to fall, but that in the circumstance of anything being unsupported, that thing would fall until it struck something that would support it. He called that phenomenon gravity.
_____We still do not know what causes it, but the circumstantial evidence that it exists and interacts with the universe is so great that science accepts it as a universal force and continues to call it gravity. We will probably never know exactly what it is that causes that effect, but we cannot deny the effect.

_____Perhaps I am the first person to notice that in the 400 years that our scientists have been investigating indigenous peoples, in every circumstance they have discovered that these peoples, each having survived forever with no contact with other peoples, consistantly have described knowledge of some sort of invisible, superior, ethereal being. Their descriptions have been consistantly in line with our understanding of god.

_____We do not know what that force is any more than we know what the force of gravity is, but we cannot deny the existence of it, and, since virtually everyone throughout our world has believed this force interacts with the universe, we cannot deny that either. We can call that force nature, or manitou, or any other name we want, but god is really the most fitting one.

_____ This does not mean that we have to believe in the god of the bible, but we can if we want, just as we can believe in the god of the native americans or a god of india. Those are all philosophies, guesses, any of which could be right. They are all something we can choose, because god, like gravity, is unknowable in essence. The only religious philosophy we, as scientists, cannot accept is atheism.

_____As members of the scientific community, we have no need to concern ourselves with religious philosophy. It is simply necessary that we accept the existence of god as we accept the existence of gravity.

_____There are various happenings in one’s early life that may “cause” homosexuality.  I don’t want to discuss that but to present an idea that just hit my head.

_____ The first trimester of pregnancy is when the body developes it’s physical, feeling way of life.  All of the mother’s feelimgs go directly to and permeate the embryo.

_____ Ideally these feelings are fully diverse, including the physical love of a partner, but in some cases the mother may have had a sexual experience only at conception.  In that case the resultant human being would not have the innate knowledge of sex with a partner at all, and may be driven to a same sex partner through trust.

_____ This needs some more thought.  I could easily be entirely wrong.

_____Jesus was immaculately conceived and treated as god throughout his life. He died at thirty-four. Mohammed became immaculate in his early thirties and was treated as god thereafter. Obviously Mohammed is a continuation of the work of Jesus.

_____One other similarity between Jesus and Mohammed.  Neither one of them could read or write, so no-one knows what they said.

_____Let’s put this into perspective. The mohammedans moved into southern europe around the 700’s. They were smarter than the christians, and they excelled.

_____The christians became afraid, and they declared war on the mohammedans around the year 800. This war is still going on.

_____That is the perspective.

_____The farm was almost pure bliss. The only punishment was a spoonful of tabasco sauce, and I was only punished once. They had a plowhorse and they told me I could ride it if I could catch it. I caught it once and led it to a fence I could climb to reach it’s back, and I got on. It was so wide my legs just laid across it’s back, but if I bounced my heels it would walk, and I felt like a king.

_____Every morning before sunrise I performed my chore of milking the cow. I got very good at it, even spraying the cat in the face from about three feet. Afterward I would haul the bucket full of milk to the kitchen where one of the ladies strained it through cheesecloth to pitchers, giving the first one to me. I carried it to the table, poured myself a glass of fresh milk still warm from the cow, and started to prepare my breakfast from the greatest assortment of food I had ever seen.

_____There was fried chicken, ham, bacon, sausage, fried eggs, scrambled eggs, pancakes, buiscuits, and cornbread, and, wonder of wonders, I could help myself to all I wanted. I had never known the concept. I had always been given food, and when it was gone, hungry or not, I was done. Here, for the first time, I could eat ’til I was full. I sometimes wonder if that was when I developed the gargantuan appitite I’ve had since. After breakfast we were free to wander and play, except on Saturdays, when I did my job.

_____After breakfast on Saturdays we went to the slaughterhouse in town. Another boy and I rode in the back of a slat-sided truck, standing on the slats and looking over the roof of the cab to and from the town. It was cleanup day at the slaughterhouse, and my job was to kick a weeks worth of coagulated chicken blood down a drain. It was six inches deep, and I removed my shoes & socks, rolled my pants up, and walked around the room, slowly driving the blood down a six inch drain in the middle of the floor. When I was done someone would hose my legs and the floor clean and my job was through for the week.

_____One Saturday on the way home I saw a pond and mentioned something about it. The boy asked if I wanted to go fishing. I said yes, and we went the next morning. He carried a ball of string and two fishooks. When we got to the pond he cut us each a branch for a pole and three short sticks, one for a bobber and two for the stringer. We tied string to everything, he dug up a worm for bait, and we fished. I caught three fish, he caught one, but my third catch was a pickerel, and it cut through the string with it’s teeth, causing it and my second to get away. We took our two fish home and the ladies fried them for our dinner.

_____Another Saturday from over the truck cab I spotted a patch of watermelons.  I must have said something about wanting them because he said for me to meet him after bedtime outside.  I did, and we slipped away to the patch.  He picked a melon and we attacked, gorging ourselves with the sweet heart.  We were probably on our third melon when I heard a loud noise (a screendoor slamming open,) and a voice screaming “Get out of my watermelon patch!” As I looked up to see a silhouette in front of a bright light I heard an explosion and saw the middle of the silhouette light up as I heard pellets hitting the leaves around me.  Without discussion we hightailed it out of there.  That may be why I had to drink tabasco sauce.

_____I would’ve liked to stay there forever, but we moved again.

_____When my father joined the army, we could no longer afford a place to live, or a mother who could stay home and care for us. Foster homes abounded during the war, and the cheapest of them, the only ones we could afford, were abysmal. Mom came to visit on Saturdays and we’d tell her of our misery, and she’d change homes as soon as she could.

_____One place had about a dozen children. We all slept on blankets on the floor of the second floor hallway. We had to all sleep on our left side, tight against the child in front of us, with blankets spread over the lot.

_____When she got us out of that one, the next locked us in an empty chicken coop, just floors and chickenwire windows, no toys. They’d feed us lunch and take us out for dinner and bed. We were sent to a one-room school where I saw a boy with no shoes in class. I liked the school.

_____Then we got lucky. We were sent to a working chicken farm somewhere around Norfolk, Virginia. We had the freedom of the farmyard, I had a chore I loved, and a job of work I didn’t mind at all. I had some exciting times there.

_____My first active memory is from when we lived on L street in S.E. Washington D.C. My father worked at the Navy Yard, and we were renting an apartment next to a vacant lot. I was three. My older sister, (she was four,) and I would walk to the corner to meet our father on his way home from work. One day I had climbed the stone wall surrounding the corner yard, and my father told me to jump into his arms. He said he’d catch me, my sister said jump, and i did. He did catch me, but I was carrying a little giraffe, and one of his legs broke off.

_____World war II had begun, and an army anti-aircraft gun encampment appeared on the vacant lot, with our building as one perimeter. My mother was young and very pretty, so the soldiers spent a lot of time below our kitchen window, talking to her. One day she handed me through the window to them and they let me run around the camp.

_____They had an observation tower that was probably forty feet high, and they let me climb it. I had never seen further than across the street or down the block, and I was amazed. I could see a bridge, a river, and a whole town on the other side. Years later I learned it was the Sousa bridge, the Anacostia river, and Anacostia itself I saw.

_____I remember that whole time with a sense of happiness. Then my father joined the army.

_____On Earth there are three known moments of environmental change that brought on evolutionary change: the pre-Cambrian explosion of life, the Permian extinction of life, and the K/T boundary crisis of life.
_____According to our geologists, Earth’s environment became suitable for life around 400 million years ago, prior to the “Cambrian” geologic period. According to paleontologists, there was an “explosion of life” that began shortly after that, a period of constant change that lasted some 50 million years before settling down to a more or less changeless period where fossils remained the same over periods of time.
_____Some of those creatures are still the same today. The shark comes to mind, its carcass now a good match for fossil sharks 300 million years old. _____Things stayed settled down until something as yet undetermined happened about 260 million years ago and there was a period of 40 million years or so of rapid change until, settling down again, there were land animals, mammals, dinosaurs and the like, and the fossil record began demonstrating no change once again. We call that the Permian extinction.
_____Then, about 65 m.y.a., a sudden crisis, (at the boundary of two geologic ages, hence the K/T designation), this one thought to be the result of a monster asteroid crash, caused maybe 30 m.y. of fossil change and no more dinosaurs. The world was pretty much as we see it today, horses, elephants, platipii and pandas, except no human beings. A more or less “localized” disaster was our downfall, or uprising, depending on your outlook.
_____Sometime around 20 to 25 m.y.a. The Rocky Mountains rose overnight the many thousands of feet from the plains to their present height. At around that same time, the four major deserts of the world came into being almost overnight.
_____That the mountains altered the wind currents of the world would seem pretty obvious. That those altered currents resulted in no rain where there had been ample rain is also pretty obvious from the results. This would cause the trees to die in two years, creating desert.
_____In one of those sudden deserts, we, still in our previous evolutionary iteration, found ourselves thrown out of a veritable paradise in which we had lived happily for more than twenty million years. This would explain the story of some form of “garden of Eden” seems to be alive in various civilizations.
_____The theory of universal evolution says that our species would have, at that point, begun to evolve so as to return to the previous state of satisfaction. Evolution seems to take less time with each iteration. _____Our problem was that physical evolution was not sufficient to allow us to return to what can only be described today as a “life of leisure”, no need to work to survive, and we were forced to evolve intellectually.
_____Needless to say human beings are still evolving. Around seven thousand years ago, as part of the process of evolution, human beings became aware of the fact that we, as can all of life, could think. The goal of intellectual awareness was and is to esconce humanity once again in the Garden of Eden, to provide the race satisfaction, but the specieal need was immediately misunderstood as a personal drive for satisfaction.
_____This misunderstanding, greed misplacing specieal need, along with it’s concomitant insistance of the male “possessing” the female, effectively stopped evolution, while leaving the species unsatisfied. All the woes of the world can be traced to those misunderstandings, and the history of the world since then is but a repetition of war, greed and suffering, which, so long as we continue our ways and keep our females imprisoned, will be our way of life.
_____We don’t need to provide meals at the Ritz, condos, or ivy league educations, but beans, elementary education, health care and protection from the environment at no expense will see the problems of the world go away. We’ll still work, human beings enjoy work, the world will pretty much go on as it is but without war or entrenched poverty, and none of us will “have” to work