Couldn’t settle on an idea earlier in the day.  I decided to just read.  Sometime another’s words give birth to my own.

To be human is not a given.  It’s an achievement, a task of a life time, worthwhile but imperfectly accomplished.  Old Heraclitus once observed that the majority never awaken to their opportunity/responsibility to surpass their given state of mind and heart….

…many are bad and few good.  For the best men choose one thing above all — immortal glory among mortals; but the masses stuff themselves like cattle.

That is a tragic factual observation; something to be taken into account without illusion, an occasion for compassion for our troubled species.

The frenetic shilling of expensive goods by the admen on TV is apt to the point.  The visuals suggest that virile sizzle, eternal youth, comes with the lease of a brand of  automobile.  The advertisement makes it seem so simple, a sure thing.  Never mind that after three years you will have to return the vehicle and you must observe the mileage restrictions or pay for your oversight.  Are you then eternally young or simply three years older?  Not that you intentionally reflected upon that offer.  But you did sign on to the lease.  To say it again compassion is a positive response to the ease with which we are betrayed by our desires, seduced by an impossible offer.

Perhaps our belief in G/god is the most universal of all beliefs which we have in common.  The widest of latitude must be granted here since in the nature of the matter, what we mean to mean by the term “God” is beyond proof.  (Many things subject to proof lie within the purview of language, — and thus hardly qualify as  Being itself, which is more extensive than all of our languages)  Even those of us who have irregular, non traditional beliefs, to the extent of a frank confession of atheism, behave as if we believe.  Here are some words from Slavoj Zizek which intrigue me:

The difference between “God-is-unconscious”
and “God-is-the-unconscious”
is the difference between Lacan and Jung:
between the materialist thesis of our beliefs which,
although we are unaware of it, persist
in our material practices,
where we ACT AS IF we believe,
and the spiritualist-obscurantist notion
of the divine dimension that
dwells deep in our unconscious.

While, in the first case, the unconscious
is a lie constitutive of our identity,
In the second case,
It is our “inner truth.”
What then is the proper atheist stance?

Not a continuous desperate struggle
against theism, of course –
but also not a simple indifference to belief.
That is to say, what if,
in a kind of negation of negation,
true atheism should return to belief (faith?)
asserting it without reference to god –
only atheists can truly believe,
the only true belief is the belief
without any support
in the authority of some presupposed
figure of the “big Other.”

excerpt from Excursions into Philosophy by Slavoj Zizek

I have no idea of how this makes sense, or if it should make sense.  Somehow it makes sense.