Spiritualism naturalism

This 'spiritual naturalism' has an easy resonance and beguiling charm that is salubrious to other "ever-becoming" belief systems, including science. The unadulterated teachings of the planet's greatest master- teachers all overlap and affirm nature and each other, reciprocally.

Proof of any faith, science or belief system, however denominated, is always in its pudding--in its works! "Prove me now herewith said the Lord of Host..." Malachi 3:10. Such verifiable "proof" is all around us, inside of us, and it is, indeed, that which produced us, and that which sustains us! Amen!

PHARAOH MERNEPTAH AND ISRAEL

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Merneptah_Stele

'CANAAN' IS AFRICAN, BEING AN EGYPTIAN POSSESSION FROM WHICH 'ISRAEL' WAS EXPELLED, BEING DEFEATED BY PHARAOH MERNEPTAH. THIS MENTION OF 'ISRAEL' ON MERNEPTAH'S STELE, IS ITS FIRST WRITTEN REFERENCE IN RECORDED HISTORY, PREDATING THE BIBLE'S MENTION BY OVER 1,000 YEARS. HISTORY AND SCIENCE EMPOWER, INFORM, ENABLE!

Mark Twain: America's Paradoxical Prophet

MARK TWAIN, nee Samuel L. Clemons, of Missouri, California, New York, Connecticut and the world, is a great American paradox. Some abhor him. Others adore him. Among these two camps, there are sub-camps: Some who have read him. Some who have not. Among those who have read some parts of his vast corpus of novels, short stories, articles, sketches, essays, letters and speeches from the 1860's until his death in 1910, there are still more camps: those who prefer the early writings--the majority--and those who prefer the later writings--the minority.

I have put on "the whole armour" of Mark Twain, loving both his sunrise and his sunset and his noon day in between. Read him for yourself, then decide; rather, than to rely upon the asserverations of those who have read, at best, a tiny piece of his labor and who yet declaim learnedly upon the whole!

Racism is paralogical and probably pathological

Antenor Firmin, The Equality of the Human Races, pp.296, “Egypt and Civilization” (University of Illinois Press, Champlain: 1885, 2002).

“We have heard it all. I shall not respond to the inept argument according to which Blacks who have shown superior abilities did so only under the influence of Whites whose frequentation is presumably indispensable to their mental development. This is no more than a paralogical argument, whereby a common fact is turned into a special rule. The truth is that backwards people need to come into contact with more advanced people in order to progress. But there is no reason to imagine this has anything to do with ethnicity. Even if the terms were reversed, that is, even if the backward people were Caucasian and the advanced were Ethiopian, the general truth would not change. The ancient Greeks learned science from Egyptian sources, but no one has ever considered them innately inferior to the Theban priests who taught them. So when Europeans deduce such strange rules from a number of facts, they look at things only from today's perspective. But does not elementary logic dictate that, before we make any sort of generalization, we must review every aspect of a phenomenon which occurred at various times and in various places?”

Since this excerpt was posted here, I have had occasion to encounter "THE PATHOLOGY OF RACIAL PREJUDICE" by preeminent sociologist, Dr. E. Franklin Frazier that establishes that entrenched racism is indeed "pathological," as I had earlier adumbrated. Here's the link: http://www.unz.org/Pub/Forum-1927jun-00856

RESPIRATION

Exhaling after inhaling is not regression. It is the essential converse of respiration, of life. Neither is stepping back before leaping forward retrogression. It is preparation for advancement.

'SEEING' OURSELVES IN OTHERS

ORIGINS: FOURTEEN BILLION YEARS OF COSMIC EVOLUTION, by Neil deGrasse Tyson and Donald Goldsmith,pp.116-117 (W.W. Norton & Co., NY, London:2004)

“The most deeply resonant of all the galaxy images that we may ever see, a view of the entire Milky Way taken from outside it, will stir our hearts and minds, just as soon as we manage to send a camera several hundred thousand light-years above or below the central plane of our galaxy. Today, when our most far-flung space probes have traveled a billionth of that distance, this goal may seem unattainable, and indeed even a probe that could reach nearly the speed of light would require a long wait—far longer than the current span of recorded history—to yield the desired result. For the time being, astronomers must continue to map the Milky Way from inside, sketching the galactic forest by delineating its stellar and nebular trees. These efforts reveal that our galaxy closely resembles our closest large neighbor, the great spiral galaxy in Andromeda. Conveniently located about 2.4 million light-years away, the Andromeda galaxy has provided a wealth of information about the basic structural patterns of spiral galaxies, as well as about different types of stars and their evolution...On a clear night far from city lights, a keen-eyed observer who knows where to look can spot the fuzzy outline of the Andromeda galaxy—the most distant object visible to the unaided eye, shining with light that left on its journey while our ancestors roamed the gorges of Africa in search of roots and berries.”

DIRT BETWEEN THEIR TOES

Tuesday, October 6, 2009

 

DIRT BETWEEN THEIR TOES

By Larry Delano Coleman, Esq.

 

Back in Howard Law School in the 1970’s, I remember opining that the best way to reform the younger generation of black youth was to make it possible for them to get some “dirt between their toes.”

 

By that I meant to expose them to rural life, and to get them out of the cities, away from viral influences which distort their development, which undermine their values, and which alienate them from nature, from God and from themselves.

 

At that time, I did not have any scientific evidence, only personal experience, and anecdotal testimony, to support this assertion. 

 

Now, in a study published in the journal, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 35, No. 10, 1315-1329 (2009), http://psp.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/35/10/1315, my latent intuitions have been confirmed.  In four studies involving 370 people, those immersed in nature were more “prosocial.”

 

“Antisocial,” as opposed to “prosocial” is what threatens to overwhelm them, now.  Crass materialism promoted through media and society combine with low self-esteem, poverty, and hooliganism to mold them.  “Hooliganism,”  by the way, comes from a family of Irish people who lived in South London’s slums in the 19^th century, named “Hooligan,” who were notorious thieves, thugs, and street fighters, who ran in gangs.  One writer states of them:

 

The home of the Hooligan is, as I have implied, within a stone's throw of Lambeth Walk. Law breakers exist in other quarters of London: Drury Lane will furnish forth a small army of pick-pockets, Soho breeds parasites, and the basher of toffs flourishes in the Kingsland Road. But in and about Lambeth Walk we have a colony, compact and easily handled, of sturdy young villains, who start with a grievance against society, and are determined to get their own back. That is their own phrase, their own view. Life has little to give them but what they take. Honest work, if it can be obtained, will bring in but a few shillings a week; and what is that compared to the glorious possibility of nicking a red 'un?  http://www.victorianlondon.org/publications7/hooligan-02.htm

The September 27, 2009, beating death of Derrion Albert, a sophomore honor roll student at Christian Fenger Academy High School, in Chicago, Illinois, by rival gangs of young, black hooligans underscores and illustrates the point.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/27/beating-death-of-derrien_n_301319.html

Such a loss!  Such a waste!  Such a tragedy!

 

While rustication, country-living, rural life is not necessarily a panacea for current ills, Henry David Thoreau, the author of Walden’s Pond was right.  People exposed to nature are enriched by the experience.  http://thoreau.eserver.org/walden00.html. 

 

Dr. George Washington Carver’s whole life was lent to the proof of the axiom that nature is a reflection of the divine. He often stated “"I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting system, through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in.” http://www.facebook.com/pages/George-Washington-Carver/60725680708.  The inventor of the science of chemurgy also stated, "I never have to grope for methods. The method is revealed at the moment I am inspired to create something new…without God to draw aside the curtain, I would be helpless."

 

Job 12:7-10 is also instructive: “But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee; and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee: Or speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee: and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee. Who knoweth not in all these that the hand of the Lord hath wrought this? In whose hand is the soul of every living thing, and the breath of all mankind.”

 

John Calhoun’s famous National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) experiments with rats in the 1950’s suggest, and have been broadly interpreted to mean, that density is a variable in human pathology.  http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/economicHistory/pdf/FACTSPDF/2308Ramadams.pdf.  But, density alone is not the answer.  Poverty, inequality, identity crises, and a breakdown in community value transmission stratagems all play a part in an individual’s decisions.

 

Sometimes, an individual’s decisions are made for him by others or by circumstances beyond an individual’s control.  The child soldiers in Africa are very much akin to the “Sistah soldiers” (and brothers) of certain youthful Africans in America. A similar format for remediation may likewise be in order.  http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/economicHistory/pdf/FACTSPDF/2308Ramadams.pdf.

 

“Dirt between their toes,” then advocates and encourages a return to nature and an appreciation of nature as a spiritual healing modality http://journeyofhearts.org/healing/nature2.html, for every one, especially for urban African American youth.

 

More broadly, however, this essay, “Dirt between their toes,” encourages the communion with not only nature, but with the God behind, and the creator of, nature and us, from whom estrangement and isolation is the fomenter of all calamities and the greatest of all tragedies, individually and collectively.

 

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