I have a church, the united socialist Eudaimonist church of Loud-T.
I hold service everyday, all-the-time: listening to music, seeing people smiling, smiling back, saying hello to the random guy, loving the taste of fresh fruits, enjoying the southing hum of her heartbeat!
Eudaimonism is an Idea in ethics. The word eudaimonism comes from the Greek word for happiness (eudaimonia), and refers to any conception of ethics that puts human happiness and the complete life of the individual at the center of ethical concern. Humanism comes close. Aristotle is the model eudaimonist, and really the founder of eudaimonism. By contrast, note that existentialism rejects happiness as a bourgeois fantasy, and that even Stoicism and Epicureanism really turn their backs on eudaimonism since they don't advocate individual fulfillment but only the lack of emotion or pain.
(http://eudaimonism.com/)
Music, people smiling,
Eudaimonism DOES NOT EQUAL TO Utilitarianism: THE END DOES NOT ALWAYS JUSTIFY THE MEANS.
Utilitarianism is the idea that the moral worth of an action is determined solely by its contribution to overall utility: that is, its contribution to happiness or pleasure as summed among all persons. It is thus a form of consequentialism, meaning that the moral worth of an action is determined by its outcome: put simply, the ends justify the means. Utility, the good to be maximised, has been defined by various thinkers as happiness or pleasure (versus sadness or pain), although preference utilitarians like Peter Singer define it as the satisfaction of preferences. It may be described as a life stance, with happiness or pleasure being of ultimate importance.
Originally described by the phrase "the greatest good for the greatest number", it eventually dropped as too problematic "the greatest number” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utilitarianism
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I like your religion. I like mine, too. Hell, I like most religions, when they are not shoved down my throat or promoted by religious nuts who think THEIR faith is the ONLY faith, and the rest of us are going to burn in their concept of Hell for not worshipping the Divine the same way they do.
This country was founded by people seeking freedom from the tyranny of religious oppression, and look at what we've turned into? If I choose to play Ani DiFranco while burning strawberry incense and dancing around a statue of Eve Ensler in nothing but a top hat and a feather boa, and I call that worship, who the hell is anyone else to tell me otherwise? No one.
*sigh* We'll never learn.
where to a sing-up.
You would make a great religious leader, you are so charismatic.
Learning should be one of the practices.
Mazel Tov!
Obama is science friendly : Stem Cell, Climate Change etc...... & your big-boss is on his science advisory panel.
Climate change and energy As I wrote last month, Obama's plan for dealing with the climate challenge includes a cap-and-trade system to provide financial incentives for cutting carbon emissions. The long-range goal would be to get an 80 percent reduction from 1990 levels by 2050. By that time, Obama would be 89 years old and well into senior-statesman mode, if he's still around. The trick will be to make a credible start toward that target during his administration, in the midst of massive economic problems.
Energy policy is joined at the hip with climate concerns: Obama has proposed spending $150 billion over the next 10 years to develop alternative energy sources, including solar, wind and biofuels. Nuclear power and expanded offshore oil drilling are also factors in Obama's energy equation - but not as much as they would have been if John McCain had won instead.
Stem cells On the biomedical front, change is most likely to come first in embryonic stem-cell research. Obama has made clear that he would open the door wider for federal support of embryonic studies - and his victory came as music to the ears of stem cell researchers like Clayton Smith, who moved from the United States to Canada five years ago.
The Vancouver Sun quoted Smith as telling attendees at a stem cell conference that he was "literally in tears" over Obama's election, "and I may even choke up even talking about it."
"Watching the election last night was a singular event, like watching the Berlin Wall fall," said Smith, who now heads a lab at the B.C. Cancer Agency's Terry Fox Laboratory.
No more war on science The most immediate policy change will be to put far more emphasis on scientific integrity in the White House, and far less emphasis on political ideology. Chris Mooney, author of "The Republican War on Science," declared that the war has ended, and science has won.
Newsweek's Sharon Begley also hailed the end of the Bush administration's "poisonous science policies" - which reached their low point two years ago when NASA felt the heat not only over climate claims but over big-bang theory as well.
A month ago, Obama sent a letter to the leaders of the National Academies vowing that he would take scientific integrity seriously, even if the verdict runs counter to his own views. He said he'd issue an executive order "establishing clear guidelines for the review and release of publicly sponsored research, guaranteeing that results are released in a timely manner and are not distorted by ideological biases."
"In addition, I will also strengthen protections for 'whistleblowers' who report on any government attempts to distort or ignore scientific research," he wrote. "And I will establish clear guidelines for selecting and vetting members of science and technology advisory committees for the White House and government agencies on the basis of merit."
Getting good advice Obama has also vowed to raise the status of the White House science adviser by making him or her a cabinet-level assistant to the president as well as head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. The last science adviser to have that status was Neal Lane, who served as science adviser in the final years of the Clinton administration. (President Bush's science adviser, John Marburger, is director of the OSTP but not an assistant to the president.)
Lane told me today that the sooner a new science adviser is named, the better.
"The early appointment of an adviser on science and technology is an extremely important thing to do," he said, "because science and technology tie in so much to other issues, and many of the other presidential appointments will benefit from having the advice of the science adviser."
Based on the kinds of responses I'm getting to my phone calls, it sounds as if some of the Obama campaign's science advisers are already in transition mode. No one is talking. However, Nobel-winning cancer researcher Harold Varmus would have to be on the list of prospects for the top science job, by virtue of the fact that he's heading the campaign's scientific advisory group.
Other campaign advisers with previous experience in the White House and in the scientific community include:
-1. Henry Kelly, who was an assistant director for technology in the Clinton administration and is now president of the Federation of American Scientists.
-1. Gilbert Omenn, a physician and professor at the University of Michigan and former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Omenn served in the OSTP under President Carter.
Tom Kalil, special assistant to the chancellor for science and technology at the University of California at Berkeley. Kalil was President Clinton's deputy assistant for technology and economic policy, and served as Hillary Clinton's stand-in at a surrogate science debate during the primary campaign.
Comment from Montaigne: Marx had written about the preconditions for human happiness in the Grundrisse. which most so-called Marxists have never heard of and which, if the Stalins and Maos and Pol Pots ever knew about, they would have tried to suppress. After discussing how capitalist social relations lead to the dramatic development of the forces of production such that the time necessary for people in industrialized nations to produce what they need minimally to maintain themselves decreases, Marx points out that the labor above and beyond this requirement, that is surplus labor, is not appropriated as disposable time by the worker to develop his/her capacity for enjoying life, but remains at the command of the capitalist who valorizes this surplus labor as profit, which the capitalist then uses to reinvest or for his own private consumption. Under capitalism human freedom is conflated with free competition and freedom from all constraints on the capitalist to maneuver in the marketplace. He writes "...it is the theft of others labor time upon which wealth depends today." With our sophisticated technology "it should no longer be an question of reducing the necessary labor time to create surplus labor, but of reducing the necessary labor of society to a minimum. The counterpart of this reduction is that all members of society can develop their education in the arts, sciences, etc. thanks to the free time and means available to all...the non-labor of the few will have ceased to be a condition for the development of the general powers of the human mind." Leon Trotsky did a beautiful riff on this theme when he wrote: "Capitalism has outlived itself as a world system. It has ceased to fulfill its essential function, the raising of the level of human power and human wealth....Only the socialist organization of production and distribution can assure humanity- all humanity- of a decent standard of life and at the same time give it the precious feeling of freedom....freedom in two senses- first of all people will no longer be compelled to devote the greater part of their lives to physical toil. Second, they will no longer be dependent on the laws of the market, that is on the blind obscure forces that work behind their back." He further writes that "The present world crisis testifies in especially tragic fashion how the human being, who dives to the bottom of the ocean, who converses on invisible waves with the Antipodes, how this proud and daring ruler of nature, remains a slave to the blind forces of the market economy....It is true that humanity has more than once brought forth giants of thought and action who tower over their contemporaries like summits in a chain of mountains...But why are they so rare. Above all, because almost without exception, they came out of the upper and middle classes. Apart from rare exceptions, the sparks of genius in the suppressed depths of the people are choked before they can burst into flame. But also because the process of creating, developing, and educating a human being have been and remain essentially a matter of chance, not illuminated by theory and practice, not subjected to consciousness and will...Psychoanalysis...has lifted the cover of the well which is poetically called the soul. And what has been revealed? Our conscious thought is only a small part of the work of the dark, psychic forces...Once he is done with the anarchic forces of his own society, man (forgive Trotsky the characteristic way people of his time referred to all humanity) will set to work on himself with the pestle and retort of the chemist....Socialism will mean a leap from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom in this sense also, that the man of today with all his contradictions and lack of harmony, will open the road for a new and happier race."
Compare the vision of this giant, a leader of his country thrown up by a revolution, thrown out by a counter revolution with that of the puny leadership of the Democratic Party, who are sworn first and foremost to be the protectors and apologists of a fundamentally exploitative system. Their palliatives won't cure the rot of our society but merely mask it and buy more time for the creatures who pull their strings.
please come to "my" forum and post
http://forums.delphiforums.com/amuseme/start
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