07-12-2022, 10:09 AM
The only cheat that I can see in Maslow's hierarchy of needs is that religious bliss can make all fear and pain irrelevant.
I've seen plenty of people in end-of-life situations in the last ten years or so after seeing rather little. Assurance that one is going to the Good Place makes the congestive heart failure, lupus, vascular breakdown, or terminal cancer seem all the less horrible.
One Saturday night I was visiting my father, and I knew that would be his last time in This World. I wanted the services of a clergyman, and I would have accepted anything. I had to do that job myself. I read two psalms -- the typical 23 and the less typical 33 (with which I am familiar in the form of a Bach motet). Maybe I was excessively dramatic, as his roommate thought I was over the top... well, it was my father, and I am not a trained clergyman!
...Nature, and especially laws of mathematics and physics and the logical dialectic define what reality is. We defy such at severe risk to our own safety, prosperity, health, freedom, and credibility. The sun is far greater than we are, and without it we would either never have existed or would be in a lifeless, frozen segment of the Universe. Earth is great and so is its gravitation; without the gravitation we would be floating around in space having suffocated for the lack of oxygen. The biosphere is far greater than us, for without it we could never eat. We adapt to natural reality or we die. An embezzler cannot get away with some 'alternative arithmetic' that shows that what he filched either never existed or was not filched.
Stupid people defy nature and put themselves and others at grave risk. Smart people know the rules.
I've seen plenty of people in end-of-life situations in the last ten years or so after seeing rather little. Assurance that one is going to the Good Place makes the congestive heart failure, lupus, vascular breakdown, or terminal cancer seem all the less horrible.
One Saturday night I was visiting my father, and I knew that would be his last time in This World. I wanted the services of a clergyman, and I would have accepted anything. I had to do that job myself. I read two psalms -- the typical 23 and the less typical 33 (with which I am familiar in the form of a Bach motet). Maybe I was excessively dramatic, as his roommate thought I was over the top... well, it was my father, and I am not a trained clergyman!
...Nature, and especially laws of mathematics and physics and the logical dialectic define what reality is. We defy such at severe risk to our own safety, prosperity, health, freedom, and credibility. The sun is far greater than we are, and without it we would either never have existed or would be in a lifeless, frozen segment of the Universe. Earth is great and so is its gravitation; without the gravitation we would be floating around in space having suffocated for the lack of oxygen. The biosphere is far greater than us, for without it we could never eat. We adapt to natural reality or we die. An embezzler cannot get away with some 'alternative arithmetic' that shows that what he filched either never existed or was not filched.
Stupid people defy nature and put themselves and others at grave risk. Smart people know the rules.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.