Great article about Nietzsche and Mysticism - and Visual Paradoxes!

instead of just posting the entire article here on my blog, ive decided to just put the link up and let yall go read it, hope you enjoy it as much as i did, here it is

this is also really, really cool as well, thanks zhaneen! your awesome!

.

Great Blogs

these are all the blogs I read, they are totally awesome, if for nothing other than the fact that they are all the blogs i read. Enjoy!


http://www.noxturne.blogspot.com/

http://www.futuresize8.blogspot.com/

http://www.cefitzgerald.com/

http://isaacnewton.livejournal.com/

http://www.saliu.com/

.

This is what I think about this issue

So, wikipedia is like my new best friend, they have a lot of good stuff on there, right now, i am reading this and ultimately, this is what I think about this issue, emphasis mine:

John Esposito in response to the charge laid against Islam in West as a violent religion states: "There has always been violence within the Muslim history just as violence has occurred within all religious communities. Also, the problem is not only the issue of political and economical reasons and grievances, but also the fact that when we try to deal with the other (whoever the other is) we seek a way to objectify and even to demonize. What we now have is often a double standard (truly we are both looking in a mirror starting back at us, that is how the universe is structured, Indra's Net, remember?) That is people will look at the Qur'an and they will take scripture out of context. That doesn't mean that the Qur'an doesn't say that legitimate violence is okay, i.e to defend yourself against those who attack you. Or they will look at Muslim history and see that there had been Muslims who have used the notion of Jihad to justify their own imperialism and they will equate that with the religion of Islam, something that they often don't do when they are dealing with Christianity or other religions."

some other good links i found i listed right here , i definitely want to buy this book!

9/11 Truth.Com - Excerpt from Gary Sick's "October Surprise, America’s Hostages in Iran and the Election of Ronald Reagan"

Why don't more citizens accept the possibility that powerful people within the halls of power are capable of "crimes that make the laws tremble"? Here are some profound comments on the subject from former National Security Council member Gary Sick. He was speaking about the sociopolitical situation in the 1980s with respect to the Iran-Contra scandal and the October Surprise, but he may just have easily been talking about today's sociopolitical climate. If anything, the climate today is more hostile to truth-telling.

From pages 226 - 228:

"We are accustomed to the petty scandals of Washington politics: A candidate for high office is a lush or a compulsive womanizer; an official lies to cover up an embarrassing policy failure. These are misdeeds on a human scale, and those miscreants who are unfortunate enough or careless enough to get caught are pilloried and punished by the press and their peers in periodic cleansings. We regard such rituals with a certain satisfaction, evidence of our democracy at work.

There is another category of offenses, described by the French poet Andre Chenier as “les crimes puissants qui font trembler les lois,” crimes so great that they make the laws themselves tremble. We know what to do with someone caught misappropriating funds, but when confronted with evidence of a systematic attempt to undermine the political system itself, we recoil in a general failure of imagination and nerve.

We understand the motives of a thief, even if we despise them. But few of us have ever been exposed to the seductions of power on a grand scale and we are unlikely to have given serious thought to the rewards of political supremacy, much less to how it might be achieved. We know that groups and individuals covet immense power for personal or ideological reasons, but we suppose that those ambitions usually will be pursued within the confines of the laws and values of our society and democratic political system. If not, we assume we will recognize the transgressions early enough to protect ourselves.

Those who operate politically beyond the law, if they are deft and determined, benefit from our often false sense of confidence. There is a natural presumption, even among the politically sophisticated, that ”no one would do such a thing.” Most observers are predisposed toward disbelief, and therefore may be willing to disregard evidence and to construct alternative explanations for events that seem too distasteful to believe. This all-too-human propensity provides a margin of safety for what would otherwise be regarded as immensely risky undertakings.

Illegitimate political covert actions are attempts to alter the disposition of power. Since all of politics involves organized contention over the disposition of power, winners can be expected to maintain that they were only playing the game, while those who complain about their opponents’ methods are likely to be dismissed as sore losers. Even if suspicions arise, the charges are potentially so grave that most individuals will be reluctant to give public credence to allegations in the absence of irrefutable evidence. The need to produce a ”smoking gun” has become a precondition for responsible reporting of political grand larceny. The participants on political covert actions understand this and take pains to cover their tracks, so the chance of turning up incontrovertible Documentation of wrongdoing – such as the White House tapes in the Watergate scandal – is slim.

This leads to a journalistic dilemma. In the absence of indisputable evidence, the mainstream media – themselves large commercial institutions with close ties to the political and economic establishment – are hesitant to declare themselves on matters of great political gravity. The so-called alternative media are less reluctant, but they are too easily dismissed as irresponsible. By the time the mainstream media are willing to lend their names and reputations to a story of political covert action, the principal elements of the story have almost always been reported long before in the alternative media, where they were studiously ignored.

When the Iran-Contra scandal exploded in 1986, both Congress and the media pulled up short. Neither had the stomach for the kind of national trauma that would have resulted from articles of impeachment being delivered against a popular President in who was his last two years in office. So, when it could not be proven conclusively that the President saw the “smoking gun” in the case – a copy of a memo to Reagan reporting in matter-of-fact terms that proceeds of Iranian arms sales were being diverted to the Nicaraguan contras – the nation seemed to utter a collective sigh of relief. (The original memo, bearing the signatures of those who had seen it, had been deliberately destroyed.) The laws trembled at the prospect of a political trial that could shatter the compact of trust between rulers and ruled, a compact that was the foundation upon which the laws themselves rested. The lesson seemed to be that accountability declines as the magnitude of the offense and the power of those charged increase.

The ultimate dilemma, which Chenier captured so perfectly in his comment on the revolutionary politics of eighteenth-century France, is the effect of very high stakes. A run-of-the-mill political scandal can safely be exposed without affecting anyone other than the culprits and their immediate circle. A covert political coup, however, like the one engineered by Casey in 1980, challenges the legitimacy of the political order; it deliberately exploits weaknesses in the political immune system and risks infecting the entire organism of state and society…"

Tragic Existence Vs. Non-Existence: A Perennial Debate

Wanted to put this up for a while now, first the quote that inspired it

'Smith would perhaps deny this, claiming that within the inanimate type of world there is no best possible inanimate world and within the animate type of world there is no best possible animate world, but that God is moraly obligated to choose a world from teh latter type over the former type. But it is not obvious why this is so, since we can imagine innumerably many worlds of the former type which would exceed in goodness worlds of the latter type (for example, inanimate worlds og great beatury compared wtih animate worlds filled with unredeemed and gratuitous evil).'

page 263, Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology, William Lane Craig is responding to Quentin Smith, but I hear Nietzsche vs. Grace in my ear, whatever that means, that's all i'm gonna say for now, I'll add more to this later

Basically, the question is this: is existence in the worst possible hell better than non-existence? Or is non-existence better than the worst possible existence?